ActiveCampaign vs Marketo

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Our analysts compared ActiveCampaign vs Marketo based on data from our 400+ point analysis of Marketing Automation Software, user reviews and our own crowdsourced data from our free software selection platform.

Marketo Software Tool

Product Basics

ActiveCampaign provides cloud-based marketing services, with robust capabilities ranging from automation and reporting to lead scoring and contact segmentation. It’s ideal for businesses of any size, as it offers a flexible, device-agnostic deployment model. It also functions as a marketing-oriented CRM with different integrations and exporting options to assist sales.

It provides machine learning that can be used on data including phone calls, emails and sales. Machine learning enables predicting win probability and using predictive sending. Customers can also take advantage of a consultant directory with certified consultants from different countries.
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Marketo Engage offers a cloud-based marketing platform for companies to manage and monitor customer relationships. Its integrated modules include marketing automation, social marketing, email marketing, lead nurturing, budget management, analytics, sales insight and website personalization.

It’s designed to serve both B2B and B2C environments. There’s also an active marketers’ community named the Marketo Marketing Nation in which marketers around the globe share their knowledge, ideas and best practices.
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$9 Monthly
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Tailored to your specific needs
$895 Monthly
Get a free price quote
Tailored to your specific needs
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Windows
Mac
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Android
Chromebook
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Android
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Cloud
On-Premise
Mobile
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On-Premise
Mobile

Product Assistance

Documentation
In Person
Live Online
Videos
Webinars
Documentation
In Person
Live Online
Videos
Webinars
Email
Phone
Chat
FAQ
Forum
Knowledge Base
24/7 Live Support
Email
Phone
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FAQ
Forum
Knowledge Base
24/7 Live Support

Product Insights

  • Take Back Your Time: Save time from otherwise arduous tasks with a robust suite of features including email automation, contact exportation and automatic campaign driving. 
  • Save Money: Reduce costs with an application that has a full suite of tools and features, helping cover all technological bases for less. 
  • Qualify Leads: Automated email delivery, blog scheduling and social media monitoring features help turn reluctant or uninformed leads into brand advocates. 
  • Assist Sales: Built to nurture leads to close, the system makes the sales team’s job much easier. 
  • Message Targets at Pivotal Stages: Schedule messages to target leads at crucial stages in the buyer’s journey. Offers numerous ways to contact and engage users. 
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  • Web Forms: Generate complete customer profiles via social form fills and progressive forms that can recognize known website visitors. Also, ask new questions to visitors. 
  • AI-Powered Content Suggestions: Automatically present relevant content across multiple channels using machine learning and predictive analytics, which identifies top-performing content. Choose content recommendations from the website assets such as videos, e-books, case studies and blog posts. 
  • Marketo Sales Connect: Connect sales and marketing with a single workflow for automated and personalized inbound and outbound engagements. 
  • Better Focus: Sales reps can prioritize and close deals by accessing real-time insights about customers from both sales and marketing touchpoints. 
  • Team Coordination: Plan, coordinate and share marketing activities through a centralized calendar. This simplifies scheduling individual components of a single campaign or coordinating activities across teams. 
  • Campaign Control: Build and modify marketing campaigns directly in the calendar with simple drag-and-drop functionality. 
  • Data Tracking: Track goals and progress with calendar HD, using rotating calendar views and custom background images. 
  • Customer Segmentation: The built-in Audience Hub tool automatically updates members in each segment as their behaviors or demographics change. 
  • AI-Powered Account Profiling: Uses AI-based best-fit indicators for converting into ABM filters to personalize and deploy ABM campaigns by activating the target account list. Also provides predictive customer profile models, custom model tuning and recommendations based on predictive scoring. 
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  • Dynamic Content: Keep content fresh and personalized by automatically changing email content depending on where a lead is in the buyer’s journey. 
  • Email Marketing: A robust and fully-featured suite offers broadcasting, triggered and targeted emails, funnels, and robust integrations with popular social media and e-commerce platforms. Also offers: 
    • Drag-and-Drop Builder: Create and automate campaigns with ease. 
    • Scheduled Emails: Enables scheduling emails for specific dates and times. 
    • Email Autoresponders: Enables sending welcome emails, starting a welcome series or delivering lead magnets automatically. 
  • Segmentation: Target specific groups within the contacts list to be more personal in emails and engage people with the right information. 
  • CRM: Notify the sales team, update deals, create tasks and nurture leads automatically. Scores leads, passes off highly-qualified targets to sales and integrates with popular email providers. 
  • Advanced Reporting: Offers custom reporting features, including custom KPIs, sales reporting, tag counting and robust segmentation. Gives insights into email performance. Split testing can also be used to get email opens, clicks and buys. 
  • Fast Training: Schedule one-on-one appointments with the company’s customer service team to help teams get up to speed with training. A series of robust webinars and user docs are available. 
  • Migration Services: Receive assistance migrating from another marketing automation product. Services include contact list and tag import, form recreation, workflow recreation, and email template recreation. 
  • Powerful Integrations: Integrates with PayPal, Stripe, Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Facebook, Google Analytics and more than 250 other apps including payment processors, membership websites and e-commerce stores. 
  • Audience Segmentation: Allows personalized messages by adding tags to segments. Tags can be based on purchase history, geographic location, time since last purchased, personal interests and more. 
  • Geo-Tracking: Automatically capture a contact’s location for geo-targeted email marketing campaigns. 
  • Site Tracking: Pulls data in from other websites to assist in tracking the customer’s activity. 
  • Social Sharing: Gives insights into performance on social platforms and enables greater audience engagement. 
  • Split Testing: Try different email subject lines, body copy and more to increase and optimize campaign conversion rates. Add up to five variations for a single campaign. 
  • SMS Marketing: Automate SMS marketing to send notifications and campaigns such as appointment reminders, flash sale notifications and more. 
  • Conversation Features: Provides: 
    •  Live chat to facilitate capturing leads and creating contacts from the website. Includes customizable auto reply, custom branding, contact creation and triggered automations. 
    •  A unified inbox to connect conversations with customers. 
  • Predictive Sending: Automate emails using machine learning algorithms. It ranks the hours in a day based on a contact’s open time and uses these recommendations to schedule an optimal send time. 
  • Contact and Lead Scoring: Sends notifications when leads are getting hot, with automatically triggered email notifications and task assignments based on lead score changes. Helps follow up with deals that are most likely to close. 
  • Win Probabilities: Calculates the conversion chance for a specific lead, giving foresight into lead behavior. 
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  • Search Engine Optimization: Compares keyword rankings of competitors, provides recommendations for new keywords for higher ranking web pages, and discovers inbound link opportunities based on targeted keywords and competitors’ links. 
  • CRM Integration: Offers native integrations for Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics 365 applications to provide a bi-directional data sync that auto-updates every five minutes. Also facilitates custom-configured integrations for various CRM platforms such as NetSuite, Oracle, SAP Sales Cloud and SugarCRM. 
  • Lead Scoring: Rank customers by assigning positive and negative scores based on demographics or their likelihood to exhibit certain behaviors, such as making a new purchase, being open to cross-sell offers and more. 
  • Email Marketing: Supports both batch and real-time triggered emails. Helps: 
    • Create personalized campaigns for mobile, web, ads and more using a visual editor and responsive templates.
    • Personalize content based on inferred information from website visitors, such as company, country, zip code and city, helping segment and localize content.
    • Use browsing behavior to identify product interest for target accounts.
  • Mobile Marketing: 
    • Helps connect with customers on the go, track inputs from different marketing channels and respond via mobile apps.
    • Sends push notifications and in-app messages, and incorporates beacon and geo-fencing technology to send location-relevant messages to customers.
    • Visual dashboards measure overall performance by opens, installs and session duration across multiple apps.
  • Social Media Marketing: Facilitates running social polls, sweepstakes and referral campaigns with built-in social share buttons and shareable videos. Integrates social metrics into marketing reports to help measure the impact of social activity on conversions and revenue. 
  • Digital Ad Campaigns: Connects with Facebook, Google, LinkedIn and other advertising platforms, and targets customers with relevant ad campaigns. 
  • Analytics and Reporting: Automatically connect data from different sources into a unified platform. Enables: 
    • Mapping and measuring a customer journey at every stage through shareable, prebuilt dashboards and ad-hoc reporting tools.
    • Designing custom models with the help of AI.
    • Leveraging a suite of attribution models.
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Product Ranking

#2

among all
Marketing Automation Software

#6

among all
Marketing Automation Software

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Analyst Rating Summary

86
82
57
64
93
99
83
75
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Lead Management
Lead Nurturing
Email Campaign Management
Platform Capabilities
Campaign Management
Lead Nurturing
Campaign Management
Dashboard and Reporting
Lead Management
Email Campaign Management

Analyst Ratings for Functional Requirements Customize This Data Customize This Data

ActiveCampaign
Marketo
+ Add Product + Add Product
AI-Based Capabilities Campaign Management Compliance And Data Security Dashboard And Reporting Email Campaign Management Lead Generation Lead Management Lead Nurturing Mobile Capabilities Platform Capabilities Social Media Campaign Management Text Campaign Management 57 93 83 81 95 75 100 100 62 95 88 76 64 99 75 94 88 68 90 100 78 81 88 43 0 25 50 75 100
57%
0%
43%
43%
0%
57%
93%
0%
7%
100%
0%
0%
83%
0%
17%
67%
0%
33%
82%
0%
18%
91%
0%
9%
95%
0%
5%
85%
0%
15%
57%
0%
43%
57%
0%
43%
100%
0%
0%
90%
0%
10%
100%
0%
0%
100%
0%
0%
60%
0%
40%
70%
0%
30%
91%
0%
9%
82%
0%
18%
75%
0%
25%
88%
0%
12%
71%
0%
29%
0%
0%
100%

Analyst Ratings for Technical Requirements Customize This Data Customize This Data

81%
0%
19%
63%
0%
37%

User Sentiment Summary

Excellent User Sentiment 6420 reviews
Great User Sentiment 4522 reviews
92%
of users recommend this product

ActiveCampaign has a 'excellent' User Satisfaction Rating of 92% when considering 6420 user reviews from 3 recognized software review sites.

81%
of users recommend this product

Marketo has a 'great' User Satisfaction Rating of 81% when considering 4522 user reviews from 3 recognized software review sites.

4.6 (5328)
4.1 (2125)
4.6 (800)
4.2 (582)
4.5 (292)
4.0 (1815)

Awards

SelectHub research analysts have evaluated ActiveCampaign and concluded it earns best-in-class honors for Lead Management. ActiveCampaign stands above the rest by achieving an ‘Excellent’ rating as a User Favorite.

User Favorite Award
Lead Management Award

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Synopsis of User Ratings and Reviews

User-Friendly: Everyone referencing this aspect states the software is easy to use.
Automation: It helps run customer and lead campaigns, triggered automatically based on set specifications, note 98% of reviewers referring to this feature.
Customer Support: The support team is easy to reach and very responsive, according to 93% of reviewers talking about this aspect.
Functionalities: Every user mentioning features states the system offers robust capabilities including client onboarding, lead funnels, newsletters, contact tracking and more.
Email Campaigns: In the view of 85% of reviews about this feature, it’s easy to send weekly emails, replicate earlier emails and develop templates for other uses.
Integration: Connecting with Zapier and other platforms makes it easy to transfer leads, according to 88% of reviewers referencing integration.
Help Resource: Everyone mentioning training reports there are helpful tutorials and webinars.
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Lead Management: The ability to route and categorize leads based on requirements is helpful for staying on top of customers inputs, in the view of 60% of users talking about lead management.
Customizable: All reviews on this aspect agree that the system is highly customizable and offers email templates that can be created as per requirements.
Automation: Marketing and sales automation make it easy to use and eliminate manual entry, according to 83% of users who reviewed this feature.
Reporting: Provides custom reports that fit the user requirement and are insightful, say 75% of users referencing reporting.
Integrations: Integrations for websites, event platforms, survey platforms, mobile apps and more, along with two-way integration with CRM systems, aid functionality, according to 75% of users mentioning integrations.
Customer Support: The training is great and customer support is responsive, according to 66% of reviews on this topic.
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Learning Curve: According to 77% of reviewers talking about training, it’s tough and time consuming to learn the platform.
Glitches: Every user mentioning this aspect notes it can be glitchy at times and quite slow to load during peak business hours.
Interface: The interface is slow and not very intuitive, according to 62% of reviewers referencing this aspect.
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Not User-Friendly: The functionality is cumbersome and pages take time to load, in the experience of 60% of users who reviewed the usability.
Dashboard: Campaign dashboards are outdated and the design needs an upgrade, according to 75% of users specifying this feature.
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ActiveCampaign provides cloud-based marketing services to businesses of any size. It’s easy to use and offers a wide range of features, along with robust automation and campaigning capabilities. The system integrates with all major platforms. Most users also find the customer support team as well as the training materials to be helpful. However, it takes time to learn the intricate features thoroughly. Reviews also state the system suffers from glitches and the interface could be more user-friendly. Businesses that need a system that caters to CRM as well as marketing needs, and that have the ability to leverage its complex functionality effectively, should consider this as a solid choice.

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As a part of the Adobe Experience Cloud, Marketo Engage supports both demand and account-based marketing strategies that work in sync with marketing and sales. It offers a range of features that help businesses operations. Notable features that users call out include custom reports, automation tools and lead management. It’s highly customizable and can integrate with a wide range of business systems. Users also appreciate the robust customer service. Some limitations include an inconvenient mobile app, outdated user interface for campaign dashboards and cumbersome functionality. Overall, businesses looking to automate their sales and marketing efforts will find the system has a lot to offer.

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