Businesses are evolving and so are their needs. With changing times, your business needs to adapt to various advancements — one of them being automation. Marketing automation software is a necessity for businesses to eliminate mundane tasks, increase productivity and achieve better ROI. Popular solutions like Eloqua, Pardot and Marketo may be top-of-the-line programs, but there are several strong competitors you should consider. Looking at alternatives helps understand a range of similar products and their features against your marketing requirements. We put together a list Eloqua, Pardot, and Marketo competitors to help you do just that.

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Importance of Marketing Automation

Based on a study by EConsultancy, more than half of B2B businesses have already implemented marketing automation and 37% state they plan to implement it. Additional research has found that 90% of agencies found it beneficial to implement marketing automation strategies and businesses have seen a 77% rise in conversion after adopting automation.

It’s easy to see why. Marketing automation facilitates consistency in communication, drives one-on-one cross-channel campaigns and delivers a satisfying customer experience. Other than that, it helps provide the right content, to the right audience, at the right time. This helps nurture their trust in the brand.

The primary purpose of automation software is to cut down on the most repetitive tasks and utilize the time saved for strategy, planning and implementation to produce better results.

Top Competitors

The following competitors are considered the top alternatives to Marketo, Pardot, and Eloqua:

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HubSpot Marketing Hub

HubSpot Marketing Hub is a cloud-based platform that caters to both B2B and B2C businesses. It makes use of inbound marketing with integrated features to increase traffic, capture and convert prospects into leads, and then track, nurture and analyze them. It serves industries from all segments such as software, technology, accounting, construction, retail, real estate and more.

Hubspot offers a traffic analytics filter to understand the source of traffic.

Top Benefits

• Real-Time Workflow Visualization: A drag-and-drop workflow editor assists you in designing and executing visual workflows in real time.
• Partitioning: You can separate all your marketing assets based on team and provide everyone with access to the appropriate content.
• Email Templates: Create email templates, automatically personalized subject lines and content for recipients. You can run A/B tests to improve open rates and click throughs. It also enables designing CTAs, analyzing visitor clicks on CTAs and measuring performance to optimize click-through rates.
• Personalization: By tracking lead behavior, you can send personalized emails, content and offers based on their interest.
• Alerts and Notifications: Configure alerts and notifications within a dashboard to send notifications based on action taken. There’s an option to add tasks to HubSpot CRM or Salesforce and send alerts to the sales team about the contacts they should follow up with.

Primary Features

• Workflows: This feature lets you set up webhooks, score leads, define lead rotation to sales and manage bulk data updates. You can use advanced segmentation based on the logic to determine workflow enrollment and then personalize emails for each recipient using details from the contact database.
• Analytics: Gain access to marketing analytics that can break down reports based on databases to create contact- or company-level properties for discovering key data trends. It lets you track website actions and understand customer behavior as well as evaluate traffic on websites by drilling into reports.
• Email Marketing: Dozens of triggers, conditions and actions let you send relevant emails to customers and automate email campaigns that help nurture prospects and convert them to leads. A drag-and-drop interface simplifies the process of building emails.
• Salesforce Integration: This capability provides a bi-directional sync with Salesforce to track opened emails, CTA clicks and form submissions. You can then use the synced data to score leads or create segmented lists within the dashboard.
• Ads Management: Track advertising ROI from Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Google, all from a unified dashboard.

Free trial: No

Free plan: No. However, it offers free marketing tools that help convert website visitors into leads.

Limitations

• Cannot add external landing pages for campaigns.
• No self-hosted option.
• Doesn’t support workflow chat transcripts.

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ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign is a CX automation platform that offers various features such as CRM capabilities, email marketing, communications, machine learning, campaign triggers, personalization and more.

It helps manage contact lists, track customer behavior and measure campaign performance, facilitating customer engagement tracking. This lets you connect with customers and help them by answering questions, providing suitable product recommendations and gathering feedback. The software is available in six languages and caters well to small and midsize businesses.

Get a view of contacts and their activities, all on one dashboard.

Top Benefits

• Mobile CRM: Android and iOS mobile apps let you manage and create deals, track, assign tasks and manage accounts on the go. You can search, check, update and add, call and create email contacts as well.
• Goal Tracking: You can set specific goal actions, see goal performance at every stage of the sales funnel and create segmentation for contacts to take appropriate actions.
• Migration Services: ActiveCampaign helps migrate automation workflows, emails, forms and contacts from other platforms to the dashboard, free of cost.
• Automation Map: You get a visual representation of automation connections and can see the status of automated accounts. It also provides performance reports of each automation to help adjust strategies by updating existing ones or planning for new automation.
• Customer Attribution: This lets you identify trends, create attribution reports and measure the effectiveness of touchpoints. You can optimize ad spend, use industry-standard UTM parameters to track visitor sources and customize follow-up with leads based on their behavior using data attribution.

Primary Features

• Custom Forms: Create sign-up forms to collect email addresses that can be used for segmentation and triggering automation.
• Machine Learning: Win probability prediction shows deals that are likely to close and is configurable to weigh factors based on what matters for your pipeline. Predictive Sending can send emails automatically, and the tool also provides analysis of sendings and provides recommendations to schedule emails that need to be sent at an appropriate time.
• Website Tracking: This feature shows which products, services and information website visitors are interested in. Taking this data, you can group contacts and trigger an automatic follow-up based on their activities.
• Event Tracking: You can measure things like video views, button clicks, orders, logins and prospects’ behaviors on the app, membership site, website and the online portal. The feature lets you create automated campaigns and segments for event tracking, view full individual history of contacts and send personalized campaigns and follow-ups. Snippets of ActiveCampaign code also help enable event tracking.
• Split Testing: Split automation action allows you to test one automation workflow against another. You can best A/B tests on conversion rate, email opens, wait times, message content and other factors.

Free trial: 14 days. It allows access to full API and integrations but does not allow instant autoresponders to be sent when using the API.

Free plan: No

Limitations

• The mobile app doesn’t manage campaigns.
• The landing page editor has limited capabilities.
• Doesn’t use a built-in search engine optimization tool to rank and compare keywords.

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Sendinblue

Sendinblue is a cloud-based software that offers email marketing, automated campaign management, Facebook Ads and SMS messages — all in one suite. It allows you to create mobile-responsive designs and offers contact management capabilities. It includes reports for open rates, click-throughs and more and allows exporting results in Excel, PDF and heat maps.

It supports industries of all sizes. Additionally, it provides plugins and APIs to integrate with other business applications, content management and e-commerce tools. Customer support is available via email, chat and phone in six different languages.

Filter and view statistical data as per requirements.

Top Benefits

• Transactional SMS: With this, you can automate notifications and send important information such as order confirmation, shipping updates and more via text messages. Transactional SMS can be sent automatically with no length limitations based on factors such as predetermined conditions, specific events or actions of contacts.
• Segmentation Engine: Manage contacts by dividing and regrouping them into new lists for relevant sending. Grouping is based on socio-demographic information or behavioral criteria.
• Template Library: A dedicated template library offers 70+ prebuilt responsive email templates that can be edited with a drag-and-drop interface.
• Custom Webhooks and Chatbots: Create custom webhooks for notifications and integrate emails with other tools. You can personalize the chatbot using custom colors, business names, logos and more.
• Opt-In Services: This feature helps you comply with GDPR guidelines by sending different types of emails and provides an option to add double opt-in confirmation.

Primary Features

• Sendinblue Chat Inbox: Communicate with leads and customers in real time directly through this feature. Gain access to visitor interest directly in the chat, based on which page of the website they are on. It includes workflows and lets you assign conversations to different agents to optimize response times.
• Transactional Email Editor: The drag-and-drop editor includes text blocks, images, buttons and other design elements. It also has a WYSIWYG rich text editor. And for design professionals that want more control, there’s an HTML interface for creating templates.
• Contact Segmentation: Segment contacts based on socio-demographic information such as gender preference, place of residence, employment and more. Segmentation can also consider behavioral criteria such as clicks and visits to specific elements or pages of the site, information about past purchases, and email engagement.
• Form Builder: This feature uses a drag-and-drop tool with elements like custom text input fields, radio buttons, dropdown lists and more for email list segmentation. You can add forms to websites, link to emails and social media profiles, or as a widget in your CMS using a plugin.
• Retargeting Audience: This feature lets you define rules to create a retargeted audience for ads. You can retarget based on who comes to the website, a specific page or actions taken – such as visiting the checkout page without making a purchase. Other capabilities include setting ad parameters and tracking performance, retargeting a specific list of contacts directly, and using contact lists to find new people with similar interests using Facebook’s lookalike audience feature.

Free trial: No

Free plan: Yes, with up to 300 emails per day and unlimited contacts.

Limitations

• Doesn’t allow sending text in test emails.
• Doesn’t use a built-in SEO tool to rank and compare keywords.
• Doesn’t provide direct native integration with Salesforce without plugins.

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Klaviyo

Klaviyo is a cloud-based platform that fits well for all sizes of e-commerce businesses. It offers features such as audience segmentation, performance reporting, website tracking, A/B testing, personalization, workflow automation, Facebook ads, automated list imports, email newsletters, push notifications and more.

It plays well with e-commerce platforms via integration with Shopify, Shopify Plus, BigCommerce and Magento. Additionally, it can automatically follow company branding in the built-in workflows and default templates.

It supports email campaign customization based on metrics such as purchasing and viewing history, along with past customer interaction with emails. You can directly import contacts from Mailchimp, Campaign Monitor, ExactTarget, Constant Contact and more. A reporting dashboard measures performance metrics such as refund requests, visitor activity and revenue generated through email marketing and advertising campaigns.

Newsletters and emails can be customized as per brand requirements with the help of a custom template feature.

Top Benefits

• Activity Feeds: Real-time activity feeds show who recently completed each action. You can view recent orders, track down refund requests, look up visitors on the website and check order fulfillment statuses, all on one dashboard.
• Facebook Ads Integration: Connect with Facebook to automatically import audience segments and convert them into Facebook Custom Audiences to create targeted advertising campaigns.
• Customer-Level Predictions: Automatically predict lifetime value, churn risk, gender, next purchase date and more. Using these insights lets you create targeted segments, send timely messages and perform detailed customer analysis.
• VIP Segment: If you want to run a rewards program or know the most valuable customers based on the number of purchases or money spent with a defined time limit, this is a handy feature. You can even sync it to a Facebook Custom Audience and then build a lookalike audience, which helps advertise to new people with similar interests.
• Custom Integration: Developers can access open APIs to build custom integrations. JavaScript and server-side APIs help track people on the website, events and their actions. Other APIs cover areas such as metrics, profiles, lists, campaigns and templates.

Primary Features

• Email Triggering: This feature offers customized, automated email flows or rules, and real-time behavioral data can trigger email automation.
• Tags: A tagging system allows you to label campaigns, flows, lists and segments, which you can then sort into tag groups and use in automation for segmentation.
• Product Feeds: Generate personalized product recommendations in an email automatically based on the email recipient’s purchase history. Product feeds pull product information from an e-commerce integration and display that information in an email template. You can use this in flow or campaign emails through the drag-and-drop feature.
• Smart Sending: This feature limits the number of emails or SMS messages a contact can receive from them in a given period. When an email or SMS has Smart Sending enabled, Klaviyo automatically checks to see if that recipient has received an email or SMS from within their account’s Smart Sending period before it gets sent.
• UTM Tracking: Klaviyo lets you automatically add Urchin Tracking Method (UTM) parameters while creating a campaign or a flow to add links for seeing the results in Google Analytics. You can include additional custom UTM parameters to view the source, medium and specific content customers are engaging with.

Free trial: No

Free plan: The free tier offers 500 emails and up to 250 contacts.

Limitations

• Doesn’t have lead scoring capabilities.
• Doesn’t have a native Android mobile app.
• Sends requests for a single manual opt-in once the software is upgraded.

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SharpSpring

SharpSpring is a cloud-based sales and marketing automation platform that fits well for all sizes of businesses across various industries such as advertising, insurance, engineering, telecommunications and more. It helps build automation rules to send dynamic content and targeted emails based on audience interests.

It offers various capabilities such as behavior-based email, campaign tracking, dynamic landing pages, a blog builder, anonymous visitor ID, a form builder, reporting and analytics, social media management, integrations and more. Lead nurturing and scoring tools help track page visits, demographics and visitor engagement. The VisitorID feature further helps identify anonymous site visitors by looking up their IP addresses, site views and other details such as name and contact information.

Access all customer details on one single dashboard.

Top Benefits

• Document Storage: With a cloud CDN (content delivery network), you can store documents for future reference.
• Buyer Personas: You can create and store buyer personas using a customizable template. That makes them readily available for marketing initiatives and helps you personalize experiences by delivering the right content to customers.
• RSS Email Syndication: Automatically email blog posts to a list of followers at daily, weekly or monthly intervals. It lets you customize business updates with thumbnail images, titles, dates and other dynamic content.
• Social Notes: This feature helps drive internal team collaboration using social avatars, “Mark as Read” tags and a clear conversation timeline.
• CMS Compatibility: SharpSpring supports all major content management systems such as WordPress, Drupal, ExpressionEngine, Joomla and more for easy content creation and distribution.

Primary Features

• Behavioral-Based Email Tracking: Gain complete activity of visitors through email clicks including page visits, form fills, webinar sign-ups and white paper downloads from email campaigns.
• Customer Segmentation: This feature includes lists that automatically update as contacts based on various parameters such as location, visited pricing pages, interest in a specific set of products and more. A field in web forms lets you map preset buyer personas and related questions to help convert prospects. You can use form responses for customer segmentation to follow up with personalized information.
• Real-Time Alerts: Automated workflows can trigger notifications through email and messages for situations like sales made, a high-quality lead created or when a prospect is in their buyer’s journey.
• Social Listening: A social media management platform provides tools to find and filter conversations on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn by using hashtags, keywords and more. This lets you solve customer queries, capture interactions, identify prospects and more. You can also use it to run affiliate programs that promote services or products to existing customers.
• Open API: An open API that is platform agnostic is available for developers to build custom integrations with third-party software. SharpSpring also supports programming languages such as Java, Ruby, Perl, PHP, Python and more.

Free trial: They offer a 7-day, 14-day and 30-day trial.

Free plan: No. SharpSpring does provide custom plans designed for marketing agencies and enterprises.

Limitations

• Doesn’t provide a native text messaging feature.
• Doesn’t offer Instagram posting.
• Lacks sales intelligence.

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Software Selection

Now that we’ve been through the best Eloqua, Pardot and Marketo alternatives, you may be wondering how to make the right choice for your business. While comparing products and understanding their features is helpful, here are five more ways to identify which software suits your needs:

1. Identify Your Marketing Needs

To start, you need to know your business’s marketing and sales efforts based on factors such as company size, areas that need improvement, manual efforts, productivity of your teams and more. Identifying your marketing needs will help you pick the right features for your business. Comparing features can then help you decide which software will be a good fit.

2. Decide on a Budget

Budget plays an important role in every business decision. The same goes for picking software. Knowing what you’re willing to spend beforehand can narrow your choices significantly. You can then compare the features offered against the price and pick the one that fits your budget and your needs. Some solutions work well for small to medium businesses and others are more suitable to large companies.

3. Read More

Gaining more information about the solutions you’re considering always helps. Read through their offerings and reviews to understand what they have to offer and what their pros and cons are. Reading about the product will help you identify if that software encompasses all your business requirements. Visit our marketing automation software directory for a detailed breakdown of the products in this article and dozens more.

4. Check Customer Support

Customer support is an integral part of purchasing any software. They’re the first in line to help you through your product queries or issues. It’s a good idea to check details about the customer support to understand how you will be able to reach them and how quickly your issues would be resolved.

5. Take a Demo

Most products offer a free demo, which can be helpful in understanding how the software functions and if what it offers is what you are looking for. Some of them even offer a free trial and plans that let you test the functionality and see how it can be useful to automate your marketing efforts.

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In Conclusion

Usage of marketing automation has become a common business practice and is increasing by the day. Picking a solution that matches your needs is no easy task, but vital. The right software can help streamline, automate and measure marketing efforts to save time, boost productivity and increase ROI.

We hope this look at the top Eloqua, Pardot and Marketo competitors has given you more clarity. To dig deeper and see how dozens of solutions stack up, get our free comparison report. You can also learn the cost of top solutions by downloading our marketing automation pricing guide.

Marketing automation software is an investment worth making today. Do it right, and you’ll reap the rewards.

Which of these Eloqua, Marketo and Pardot competitors caught your eye? What are you looking for in a marketing automation platform? Let us know in the comments!