Choosing the right CRM can transform how you attract, engage, and delight customers, but with so many options on the market, it’s hard to know which platform truly delivers.

HubSpot is often seen as one of the premier choices for growing B2B businesses thanks to its all-in-one suites, intuitive interface, and powerful automation tools.

But how does it stack up against ActiveCampaign?

In this comparison, we’ll break down the key differences between HubSpot and ActiveCampaign, looking at everything from features and flexibility to pricing to technical details, such as integrations, which will help you decide which platform fits your business best.

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A slight caveat before we get into the meat of this article - we’re a HubSpot Solutions Partner. We’re well-versed in working with the platform, and we think it’s a brilliant fit for most B2B businesses. However, we would never recommend it if it doesn’t fit your specific business requirements.

Throughout this article, we will give an impartial comparison between HubSpot and ActiveCampaign to help you make the correct decision for your circumstance.

1. Ease of Use and Onboarding

Starting with HubSpot, there are numerous ways to get onboarded and started within the system. You can start with:

A DIY implementation - This requires you to set it up yourself. If you need support, then steal our HubSpot Implementation playbook to give you a head start.
HubSpot’s Onboarding Programme - HubSpot offers an onboarding product which helps you set up the essentials within your portal.
Partner-led Onboarding - This is where you employ an agency to help you get set up on the platform, working with outsourced experts to mould your processes around your portal.

Either one of the three is effective in getting you started and helping you set up your portal in the correct way. And once you’re set up, you can take advantage of the numerous products that HubSpot offers.

Whilst, like all other CRMs, there may be an initial learning curve, HubSpot's user-friendly design supports businesses in effectively leveraging the platform's capabilities to drive growth and improve customer engagement. One user on G2 commented by saying:

Hubspot is very helpful, offering a robust way to learn and manage service, sales, and marketing. Its built-in help resources and user-friendly tools have made it much easier to understand and implement key business strategies.

With its wide array of tools and features across its three tiers, Starter, Professional and Enterprise (including a stripped-back, free version too), HubSpot is known for combining sales, marketing, service, operations and, most recently, eCommerce functionality within its suite. This makes it ideal for those B2B businesses looking to scale their business without the investment into a wide tech stack that needs external integrations to merge with your CRM

Conversely, ActiveCampaign is best known for its advanced marketing automation capabilities, whilst also including a lightweight CRM aimed at helping businesses unify email marketing, customer management, and sales tracking - similar to HubSpot’s Marketing Hub.

Onboarding starts with a structured walkthrough and access to a knowledge base filled with videos and help articles. This gives you a hands-on approach as to how you want your CRM setup in a way that’s best suited to your business’s needs.

For teams that are already familiar with email automation or contact segmentation, the learning curve is manageable. However, for businesses new to CRM or automation workflows, the first steps can feel more involved, as one reviewer on G2 put it:

The learning curve is a bit steep. There's a lot you can do, but it’s not always easy to know where to start without some trial and error.

2. Customisation and Flexibility

HubSpot’s flexibility is one of the key reasons businesses continue to scale with - and use - the platform. With the ability to create custom properties, objects, workflows, and dashboards, teams can shape the system around their exact processes rather than adapting their processes to fit the tool.

Whether it’s segmenting contacts with bespoke criteria, building out tailored sales pipelines, or automating marketing workflows based on specific behaviours, HubSpot’s customisation options and flexibility enable users to design a system that mirrors their real-world operations. As one G2 reviewer puts it:

Adapt quickly with a flexible system that allows you to architect your business exactly as it appears in the real world... without months of custom dev work.

This level of adaptability means that even as your business evolves, HubSpot evolves with you, without the need for expensive development work or third-party tools

On the other side of the coin, ActiveCampaign is renowned for its marketing ecosystem, which includes robust automation capabilities and offers a suite of tools that allow businesses to tailor their marketing and sales processes. ses.

Users can create custom fields, design intricate automation workflows, and segment contacts based on various criteria. This flexibility enables businesses to deliver personalised experiences to their customer

A reviewer on G2 highlighted this adaptability:

The automations are very easy to set up and modify. There are so many more things you can automate than are obvious at first glance.

However, with regards to a CRM, ActiveCampaign is relatively lightweight. Its focus and USP are marketing and sales operations and automation throughout the customer journey. In comparison to other CRM systems, this is a drawback as alternatives, like HubSpot, have substantial CRM functionality enabling businesses to tailor it to their existing processes.

3. Features and Product Ecosystem

This will be no surprise, but HubSpot’s main standout strength is its unified system across all business departments.

From marketing automation and sales pipelines to customer service, CMS, and operations, every tool is designed to work together on a single platform. This native integration removes the friction of jumping between disconnected systems and gives teams a clearer, shared view of the customer journey. It also connects up to your CRM, which enables your users to have a single-view of the customer.

What really sets HubSpot apart, though, is the balance between depth and usability.

Each Hub is feature-rich in its own right, with a level of practicality that you would usually assume to be reserved for specialist, independent tools. Having all these tools under a single umbrella enables businesses to take advantage without the need to patch together a load of third-party apps. As one reviewer puts it:

HubSpot is more than just a CRM – it's an ecosystem of powerful tools that seamlessly integrate to help you grow.

As we’ve said throughout, ActiveCampaign is first and foremost a marketing automation platform with strong CRM functionality layered in. Its core strengths lie in email marketing, automated customer journeys, contact segmentation, and behavioural triggers.

That being said, the platform includes CRM features such as deal tracking, task assignment, lead scoring, and pipeline views, as well as marketing tools like A/B testing, landing pages, forms, and SMS campaigns. These features are tightly integrated, giving users a single environment for managing the customer journey from awareness to conversion.

However, once again, ActiveCampaign’s ecosystem is narrower than that of full-suite CRM platforms. It lacks deeper native modules for customer service, CMS, or operations management of other popular CRM systems.

4. Pricing

This is where HubSpot can get tricky, as it’s not exactly a cheap option if you want all the bells and whistles.

HubSpot offers a free CRM option, but only allows you to store up to 1,000 non-marketing contacts within this tier. From there, if you want the customer platform (which is the bundle which encompasses all ‘Hubs’), it comes priced at:

Starter: £45 per month (£41 per month if you want to pay £492 on an annual basis)
Professional: £1,932 per month (£1,738 per month if you want to pay £20,856 on an annual basis)
Enterprise: £5,151 per month

However, what HubSpot does allow you to do is scale your tiers as you grow and adopt new features within ALL tiers if you choose the customer platform option. However, if you don’t you can also pick and choose what tier of each suite and make your own, personalised bundle - something that other CRM providers don’t often allow.

ActiveCampaign is a comparatively cheaper option for businesses looking to get started with a CRM system as well as a fully functional marketing platform to help you scale.

Unlike HubSpot, ActiveCampaign doesn’t offer a freemium model, instead opting for the following packages:

Starter - £13 per month
Plus - £42 per month
Professional - £67 per month
Enterprise - £123 per month

Despite the much cheaper price point, you do get some limited functionality with each tier. Whereas most popular CRM systems offer subscriptions on a per-user basis, like HubSpot is deploying now, ActiveCampaign tiers the number of users that can be on the system depending on the tier you choose.

This is as follows:

Starter - 1 User
Plus - 1 User
Professional - 3 Users
Enterprise - 5 Users

5. Integration and Extensibility

The final comparison point is regarding integrations and how easy it is to connect multiple apps to the CRM.

Firstly, HubSpot offers an extensive integrations ecosystem, featuring over 1,500 native integrations through its App Marketplace. This allows users to connect their CRM with a wide array of tools, including, for example, QuickBooks, Microsoft Teams, LinkedIn Sales Navigator and other ERP & CRM tools.

This connectivity ensures that data flows smoothly between platforms, including HubSpot’s CRM, which reduces manual input and enhances operational efficiency. A Capterra user highlighted the value of HubSpot’s integration abilities by saying:

The integrations of HubSpot are unmatched, big reason they charge big is those ecosystem integrations.

This flexibility ensures that, as your business evolves and introduces more systems into your tech stack, HubSpot can adapt with you without needing substantial change.

Similarly to HubSpot, ActiveCampaign offers a robust ecosystem of integrations, boasting over 950 native and third-party app connections across categories like CRM, e-commerce, customer support, and analytics.

Its open API and App Studio enable developers to build custom apps and workflows, making it a flexible choice for businesses seeking tailored solutions. This enables the flexibility that ActiveCampaign offers to help businesses tailor their marketing operations to the system.

The platform supports various integration types, including native integrations, deep data integrations, and third-party tools like Zapier. This flexibility allows businesses to connect ActiveCampaign with tools such as Salesforce, Shopify, WordPress, and Slack, facilitating data flow and automation across systems. As one reviewer remarked:

ActiveCampaign's integrations are extensive, and the API is well-documented, allowing for custom solutions when needed.

In Summary...

Choosing the right CRM comes down to your team’s needs, technical capabilities, and growth ambitions. While ActiveCampaign may offer strong features in certain areas, HubSpot stands out for its ease of use, unified ecosystem, and scalability, particularly for growing B2B businesses.

If you're leaning towards HubSpot and want to get implementation right from day one, download our 5 Stages of HubSpot Implementation guide. It walks you through each phase of a successful rollout, helping you avoid common pitfalls and maximise ROI from the get-go.