ActiveCampaign Vs Hubspot: Title Bout

Why We Switched from Hubspot to ActiveCampaign

Chimps and humans share 98% of the same DNA. But that 2% makes all the difference! A lot of times that’s how I feel about marketing automation platforms. They’re all pretty much the same...until that last 2% that solves your company’s primary and unique marketing challenge--or it doesn’t. Here’s a case in point that caused us to switch our client from Hubspot to ActiveCampaign.

Our new client had prepaid a very expensive annual account with HubSpot prior to hiring us. So we tried to make it work. Over the years, my company has been in the partner programs of many marketing automation platforms, including Hubspot, so we were not unfamiliar with it.

Almost immediately we bumped up against four significant issues for which the cure was worse than the disease, leading to a heart-to-heart conversation with our client about the impact Hubspot’s weaknesses would have on his business over a long period of time.

Here’s our story of what we found and how we worked with the Hubspot success team to develop workarounds. Software is constantly in development, and it’s possible these features have now changed. But our client is a start-up, and we had to have software that worked today; he couldn’t afford to wait.

No Tagging in Hubspot

ActiveCampaign offers a wide range of features that cater to the needs of businesses looking to streamline their marketing efforts. With customizable automation workflows, advanced features like dynamic content and custom fields, and the ability to create detailed reports, ActiveCampaign provides a comprehensive marketing automation platform.

One key advantage of ActiveCampaign is its pricing models, which are more affordable compared to Hubspot. With pricing plans starting at just $9 per month, ActiveCampaign offers a cost-effective solution for businesses of all sizes. Additionally, ActiveCampaign offers a 14-day free trial, allowing users to test out the platform before committing to a subscription.

In terms of customer journeys and sales teams, ActiveCampaign excels in providing marketing tools for creating personalized customer journeys and automating sales processes. The platform allows users to create custom email templates, manage content

HubSpot does not have the ability to tag contacts. In ActiveCampaign, you control what to tag and when. In Hubspot we had to create separate custom fields every time we wanted to tag which was, in our case, frequently. It made an unwieldy mess of the database.

There’s no such thing as “too many tags” in ActiveCampaign. But there is such a thing as “too many custom fields” when you strive for good database design, especially when planning to use many conditions for automations.

Automations

Our sales funnel required several “check-in points” that looked for changes in values or field info. For example, one stage checked to see if a salesperson followed up on a new lead or if there was a new customer. Both of those answers triggered different responses.

In ActiveCampaign, we write “IF statements” to see if a field changes. Then the statement splits into a YES or NO statement. After adding a value or an action for each answer, the statement merges back together and continues on the automation.

In Hubspot, there was no way to re-merge these IF/THEN statements once they were split. They were split forever. We had to create another automation, then move the split lists to the new automation.

But we had 10 - 15 different statements throughout one automation! That meant we had to create 10 - 15 separate “sub-automations” for every IF/THEN statement! Besides creating hours of extra work, it multiplied the number of automations we had to manage and troubleshoot. Hubspot’s reaction to our incredulity was, “So?”

Lead Scoring/Reporting Features

In ActiveCampaign, you can set up lead scoring so that every time a contact opens, clicks, or visits a website (or any other action), they earn points. In Hubspot, a lead score could be added only once. So, for example, when a contact clicked on a link in an email multiple times, their score would be applied on the first click, but never again.

A standout feature of ActiveCampaign is that if a contact forwards an email to 20 different people, and they open it, that contact’s lead score grows. Even though we wouldn’t know who on that forwarded list opened it, we consider that engagement and we trigger an email notification to the sales rep to follow up--as many times as it takes to close the sale.

In Hubspot, the only way to see this extra activity was to go into the reports manually for each individual email. But there still was no way to trigger a notification--or anything else--based on that activity.

Round-Robin Conferencing

Our client, an SAAS developer, needed round-robin lead distribution. HubSpot and Zoom have this feature, which assigns a Zoom conference ID to each meeting. But our client has multiple users and Hubspot used the same meeting ID for every meeting it set.

So if two or more prospects picked the same meeting time, instead of assigning different sales reps to different meetings, everyone ended up on the same meeting ID. This Hubspot integration made the Zoom feature completely useless. We ended up getting a third-party app to handle the round-robin requirement. Of course, once we switched from Hubspot to ActiveCampaign, this feature was still handled by the third-party solution--but ActiveCampaign doesn’t advertise this as one of its internal features.

Success Team

Our client paid for a premium Hubspot account and so was assigned an onboarding specialist who met with us at a standing weekly meeting time for 9 weeks. A success team is supposed to help you set up complicated automations that tech support doesn’t have time to do.

But what if you have a question in the middle of the week, and your onboarding specialist, busy with other standing client meetings, isn’t available? You email. Then wait. Sometimes up to several days to get a response--just like with every other software support department!

Does ActiveCampaign technical support drop everything when they receive your support ticket? No. But we don’t pay them thousands of dollars in onboarding fees, either.

Additionally, tech support didn't know our client’s individualized needs like our onboarding specialist did--that was the point of having a Hubspot onboarding specialist. But not only was our specialist not keen on helping us find workarounds for the above issues, he was unsupportive of our brainstorming from experience we had from working with so many marketing automation platforms.

He insisted we just do the extra automations and field customization because “that’s the way it’s done.” It was this linear “my way or the highway” attitude that finally prompted us to seriously consider switching from Hubspot to ActiveCampaign.

After discussing the pros and cons of switching with our client, he agreed with our assessment, and we told our specialist to cancel our account--we were leaving Hubspot.

That's when things got ugly. Our specialist reacted unprofessionally, refused any more discussion, even cut us off mid-sentence. He said we were unreasonable. We must have triggered Hubspot’s “off-boarding” process at that point, because he finally escalated our case.

We started all over again with Hubspot’s second tier support, actively trying again to resolve our concerns. Finally, after about two weeks of testing and researching, they concurred that the Hubspot automations we were trying to run wouldn’t work. We again requested to cancel our contract and receive a refund on the unused part of our client’s plan.

By this point we had invested nearly a month of unproductive time, and our client’s product launch window was closing. We started our migration to ActiveCampaign. But Hubspot wasn’t through escalating our case to upper management. Suddenly, they could fix all of our challenges. They were researching how, and would get back to us.

Whether they could or couldn’t didn’t matter to us at that point. But our poor client had to jump through hoops to get out of his contract. At least four more people were brought in to “save the account.” During this time, they never presented any alternative solutions to us or reasons to stay. And, ultimately, there was no solution because the problem couldn’t be fixed because of the way Hubspot software was written.

Migration To ActiveCampaign

When we migrated to ActiveCampaign, we could recreate the automation as originally designed. We could tag prospects as originally designed. We did have to re-set up all the automations and templates, but that went fairly quickly. The round-robin third-party plugin for meetings was kept “as is” except now meetings went into ActiveCampaign.

And because no software is perfect, we did run into one problem that Hubspot did right compared to ActiveCampaign: Our client liked the Outlook email plugin to track their sent and received messages in each contact record. Even with IMAP integration, the client didn’t like that the contact had to have a Deal in order to record an email. As a start-up, they didn't have deals on most of their contacts.

To fix this problem, we set them up with Zoho CRM for email tracking and a two-way sync to ActiveCampaign for the marketing. Even though it’s not ideal to have multiple programs, it turned out to be the least amount of workaround. Each platform performed the part it was best at.

It’s been nearly a year now on our “perfect” marketing automation system. We still have our client (which we did worry about losing during the drama phase of this transition). And the best news was 1) we were able to help our client get his partial refund and 2) his monthly subscription went from $2,600/month on Hubspot to $500/month on ActiveCampaign. He also pays less than $200/month for Zoho CRM and the plugins we still need to run his automations and track his emails.

The takeaway from this experience is: Always make sure to do a thorough discovery with new clients to truly understand their sales and marketing processes. (And make clients let you pick out the best software solutions for those processes...but that may be a pipe dream!)

In this case, discovery wasn’t possible because the client made the software-buying decision before he hired us. But because of our familiarity with so many platforms and because we knew ActiveCampaign’s capabilities well, we were able to bail out of a bad long-term solution early on. Is Hubspot a bad solution? No; it’s a great solution for the right companies. But it was that last 2% that made all the difference.

Conclusion

One key advantage of ActiveCampaign over Hubspot is the wide range of advanced features it offers. From automation workflows to dynamic content and custom fields, ActiveCampaign’s powerful features and extensive marketing automation tools provide a comprehensive marketing automation platform that can cater to a variety of needs. This versatility allows for more personalized and targeted marketing efforts, ultimately leading to better results.

Additionally, ActiveCampaign's pricing models are more flexible and cost-effective compared to Hubspot.

Another key benefit of ActiveCampaign is its user-friendly interface and ease of use. While Hubspot can be complex and overwhelming for some users, ActiveCampaign offers a more intuitive platform that is easy to navigate and understand. This makes it easier for businesses to set up and manage their marketing campaigns without the need for extensive training or technical knowledge.

ActiveCampaign also excels in providing excellent customer support so that you can make informed decisions regarding your business. The team at ActiveCampaign is known for their responsiveness and willingness to help customers troubleshoot any issues they may encounter. This level of support can be invaluable, especially for businesses that rely heavily on their marketing automation software to drive sales and engagement.

Overall, while Hubspot may be a solid choice for some companies, ActiveCampaign offers a more robust and cost-effective solution for businesses looking to take their marketing efforts to the next level.

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