5 Marketo alternatives you should consider in 2023

Phil Fernandez, David Morandi, and Jon Miller founded Marketo in 2006. The purpose was to create an enterprise solution company tailored for the need of a marketing expert.

The platform’s primary emphasis is on account-based marketing, including email, mobile, social media, digital ads, web management and analytics. Marketo helps B2B and B2C marketers implement automated and personalized marketing campaigns across multiple channels to nurture and convert leads.

When it comes to the most popular solutions in the market, Marketo is the one. However, that doesn’t deny the fact that there are alternative marketing automation tools which are suitable for marketers looking for all-in-one, and even easier to use solutions.

In this blog, we will list out 5 Marketo alternatives that are worth considering in 2023 to help you choose the best tool.

1. VBOUT
2. HubSpot
3. Salesforce Pardot
4. Act-on
5. SharpSpring

VBOUT is an adaptive marketing automation platform and one of the suitable alternatives to Marketo. The platform provides many tools and features to help business owners and marketing professionals centralize and automate their tasks smartly and straightforwardly. VBOUT is suitable for any business size and doesn’t require consultancy or extensive training.

VBOUT is ranked as one of the top marketing automation platforms according to G2 Crowd.

VBOUT allows you to import and manage unlimited contacts. With drag and drop functionality, to easily automate ready-made templates for your email campaign in minutes.

The platform allows “high volume senders” to reduce spam by chunk sending, which allows a breakdown of their target lists into smaller subsets to mitigate their sending risk. It will enable them to monitor the performance of their campaign and pause or resume it as they see fit.

Beyond the unsubscribe button, VBOUT has given the option for contacts to update their communication preferences by choosing which lists they wish to subscribe to and the ones they want opted-out.

VBOUT’s automation builder allows you to create different targeted messages such as emails, SMS and browser push notifications.

VBOUT has provided the “add/remove contact tag” which enables you to add a contact to a specific automation workflow once it gets a particular tag and removes it to complete the automation. This capability enhances and personalizes the experience for your targeted customers.

Aside from the different functionalities that ecommerce businesses can tap into, the platform has recently provided a dynamic product renewal trigger, where you can launch product renewal reminders, for thousands of products, dynamically and without the need to create thousands of rules and templates. This can be done using one automation and one email template.

Another feature is the ability to create a new task to assign to team members if a user reached a specific stage throughout the journey but didn’t complete a particular action so that they can follow up with him/her.

VBOUT lets you manage all your social media channels in one place, from composing and editing scheduled posts on the fly or using mass posting to reach a broader audience and custom posting to publish your social media on a regular repeated basis.

Social listening is another powerful feature which allows you to monitor your brand and industry mentions across Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.

VBOUT has drag and drop, ready-made templates to help create your landing pages in minutes or build your own from scratch.

A useful feature that adds value to your landing pages is dynamic content as it allows you to provide a better-personalized experience for your leads and boost conversions.

There’s also the option to use URL parameters, which makes the user’s personalization experience much easier. For example, each landing page link can show the contact details such as his first name, last name and company.

VBOUT’s analytics feature enables you to customize multiple dashboards and monitor the performance of all your marketing channels in one place. You can measure your email marketing, automation, social media, lead scoring, goals and landing pages metrics which help you determine what needs to be improved.

For reporting, you’re allowed to schedule your reports or share them with your clients or other team members via a public URL.

VBOUT has flexible pricing, meaning that it adapts to your needs. Unlike other platforms, they only charge for the number of emails so you can manage unlimited contacts at your leisure.

Below are an example of VBOUT’s different pricing modules:

• Basic plan: $100/month – Unlimited contacts based on 5000 emails/month – Including all features – Month-to-Month
• Intermediate plan: $200/month – Unlimited contacts based on 10K emails/month – Including all features – Month-to-Month
• Advanced plan: $600/month – Unlimited contacts based on 100K emails/month – Including all features – Month-to-Month

VBOUT’s onboarding provides personalized training from one of their experts to help you set up your account to get your marketing automation up and running quickly. You will get six 1-hour training sessions on how to use each area of the platform. They also provide tutorials, educational resources and help sections to complement your continued success.

The onboarding & setup start is optional at $3500 and is negotiated based on the size and scope of your organization.

HubSpot is another alternative to Marketo, and a robust inbound marketing automation system which offers different features and capabilities. Its platform includes marketing, sales, marketing, customer service and CRM software.

Based on G2 Crowd, the platform consistently ranks amongst the top 10 marketing automation platforms.

HubSpot allows you to import and manage a specific number of contacts. You can easily create emails using their drag and drop editor.

An impressive insight for their email marketing tool is the option to schedule email campaigns based on time zones not only regular scheduling.

Another great feature is the “Optimization Panel’ which allows you to get a checklist of suggestions on how to improve your email’s content, deliverability and send time.

HubSpot’s visual automation builder allows you to build targeted workflows quickly.

Beyond email, you can automate a variety of tasks by setting up automation workflows that automatically score leads, assign members to the sales team and more!

Moreover, there’s the internal team notification which permits you to notify your team members when a lead performs a specific action.

Aside from managing multiple social media profiles in one place, composing and scheduling posts, HubSpot’s social media has suggestions for you about the best time you should publish a social media post to show your content to your followers at the appropriate time.

You can connect their social media with their blog so each time a new blog post is launched, the post will be automatically shared to your social media channels.

With HubSpot’s easy-to-use landing page builder, you create your landing page in minutes without the need for a developer or designer.

Their inbox preview allows you to check how your page looks across different devices before publishing it.

They have dynamic blocks which allow you to show dynamic content based on the visitor’s location and behavior.

Their landing page analytics let you identify the most effective pages and receive customized SEO recommendations to better optimize your pages.

HubSpot’s analytics allows you to customize your dashboards, track the metrics of all your marketing initiatives in one place and share insights with the rest of your team.

Moreover, you can analyze your website traffic performance by identifying which pages are getting the most sessions, leads and customers.

HubSpot has different pricing modules, ranging from starter, professional to enterprise level. Pricing varies according to the number of contacts that you want to manage.

Below are HubSpot’s different pricing modules, taking both the professional and enterprise plans:

• Basic plan: $1025/month – 7000 contacts – Excluding some features – Billed annually
• Intermediate plan: $1249/month – 12K contacts – Excluding some features – Billed annually
• Advanced plan: $4450/month – 100K contacts – Including all features – Billed annually (higher plans are also available).

HubSpot’s onboarding consists of an implementation specialist who assists you with technical setup and guides you on how to integrate your existing CRM or other systems with the platform.

The onboarding fee ranges between $3000 and $6000.

Pardot is a B2B marketing automation platform that’s suitable for any business size. The platform is powered by AI and built on Salesforce, the world’s number one CRM. Pardot helps sales and marketing generate and nurture high quality leads, close deals and boost ROI.

Pardot ranks in the top 10 best marketing automation software, based on G2 Crowd.

Pardot has an intuitive email builder that allows you to create a variety of templates.

They have customized lead capture forms and progressive profiling which allows you to obtain more data over time.

To optimize your sending and maximize deliverability, Pardot has spam filter check-ups to detect if your email address or IP is blacklisted or not.

As for lead management, you can visualize your leads interactions which makes it easier for the sales team to classify them.

They also have artificial intelligence “Einstein Lead Scoring”, which provides the marketing and sales with all the required information they need in order to qualify the leads and close deals. As prospects engage with emails, website and content, the sales team get real-time notifications that permit them to reach out to the right lead at the appropriate time and continue the conversation using pre-approved emails sent from within Salesforce.

With Pardot, you can build personalized automations based on the leads’ behaviors.

Pardot integrates with third party platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn which allows you to connect with each other. By using this connector, you will be able to publish or schedule posts to be released on any of these platforms via Pardot.

What mainly characterizes their social media management is the ability to track the activity of each prospect in order to determine if you should make any potential tweaks to your messaging. This makes it more possible to engage with them the right way at the right time. In addition, you have the ability to score their social engagement.

With Pardot’s powerful landing page builder, you can create your landing pages using drag-and-drop functionality. No need for coding experience.

You can take advantage of multivariate testing to determine the top performing landing pages and find out which ones need improvement to maximize your conversion goals.

Pardot’s B2B marketing analytics allow you to combine all your sales and marketing data in one place.

You can customize your dashboard by dragging and dropping widgets and embedding them on any page in your CRM. You can also visualize your entire funnel and run reports from the first day.

Furthermore, it allows you to get a complete and unified view of all your data by connecting third party data.

Another good thing is the ability to access the analytics on mobile which enables you to measure actionable metrics on the go and share them with your team.

Their multi-touch attribution dashboard lets you determine the top performing channels that are driving you traffic and conversions.

Pardot’s pricing depends on the features chosen.

Below are Pardot’s different pricing plans:

• Basic plan: Growth plan – $1250/mo – Up to 10K contacts – Basic Features – Billed annually.

• Intermediate plan: Plus plan – $2500/mo – Max 10K contacts – Excluding few features – Billed annually

• Advanced plan (Most popular): Advanced marketing automation, AI and analytics – $4000/mo – Max 10K contacts – Including all features – Billed annually

Pardot’s onboarding consists of technical setup, configuration assistance and CRM and data integration.

Their onboarding costs $3000.

Act-On is a marketing automation platform that provides email marketing, automation, social media, landing pages and analytics.

The platform also allows businesses to integrate with a CRM tool that enables them to get a holistic view of their customer relationships and engagement levels.

Act-On has ranked as one of the top marketing automation platforms according to G2 Crowd.

Act-On has an adaptive email sending feature which allows you to deliver the most appropriate message to each of your customers at the right time by using your past engagement data.

Another essential feature is transactional sending which allows you to trigger purchase confirmations, system notifications, quarterly reports and more.

Also, for easy data compliance, you can use their EU local sending option to make sure your emails are being sent from European mail servers.

Act-On allows you to nurture your leads throughout their journey and convert them into customers using behavioral-based triggered messages.

You’re able to target your users with different types of triggered email campaigns such as confirmation messages, event messages, shopping cart abandonment and personal messages like birthdays and holidays.

In addition, their automated data management tools facilitate the prediction of future customer behaviors in order for you to enhance your marketing automation performance in real-time.

In addition to creating and scheduling posts on different social media channels, and measuring your performance metrics, Act-On has a built-in social media content curation engine, which helps you suggest the most recommended content based on your audience’s engagement with your posts.

With Act-On, you can create, test and publish landing pages in minutes using their pre-designed templates.

They have progressive profiling, which enables you to collect new information with new fields that adapt based on your users’ past data to help avoid collecting duplicate information.

Act-on has tracking for your anonymous visitors whose purpose is to create a file for each prospect and improve your connection with them. You can also be notified each time a user visits one of your landing pages so you will be able to identify their needs and respond in real-time.

They are also characterized by their SEO audit tool, which permits you to evaluate your pages performance trends and keywords strategies, as well as the pages that are driving traffic and determine when the content needs to be updated in order to improve your SEO score.

Act-On allows you to take advantage of a variety of analytics features that you can use to optimize your marketing campaigns and deliver better results.

You can also integrate with Google Adwords to track the performance of your paid ads without going back and forth between both tools.

Act-On has two different pricing modules: professional and enterprise.

The pricing changes depending on the number of contacts for each of the plans mentioned below.

Below are Act-On’s different pricing plans:

• Basic plan: $1100 – Up to 5000 contacts – Not including all features – Billed monthly.
• Intermediate plan: $1400 – Up to 10K contacts – Including all features – Billed monthly
• Advanced plan: $3300 – Up to 100K contacts – Including all features – Billed monthly

Act-On has a fast-track onboarding fee, starting from $500 to $3000.

SharpSpring is a full blown marketing automation platform that helps businesses capture leads and optimize their return on investment

The platform provides email marketing, automation, social media, CRM, landing pages, analytics, and is suitable for small to mid-sized companies and digital agencies.

According to G2 Crowd, SharpSpring currently ranks amongst the top 10 social media platforms.

SharpSpring has a variety of pre-built email templates that allows you to build your own in minutes or create from scratch using their drag and drop template designer.

With no need for coding, you can choose from their intuitive interface to create personalized emails based on what you know about your contacts.

What’s also good about SharpSpring is the capability of tracking the detailed behaviour of a recipient, after he clicks through from an email (i.e., every page visit, form submission, webinar signup, whitepaper download, etc…)

SharpSpring allows you to create powerful automation workflows that nurture your prospects throughout their journey and convert them into customers.

The platform gives you the ability to send targeted messages to your abandoned cart shoppers and turn them into buyers.

Their template builder has an option to create different buyer personas for your business and use dynamic emails and landing pages that fit each one to deliver personalized content that converts.

Sharpspring allows you to manage unlimited social media profiles in one place. You can publish a social media post across unlimited accounts.

You also have the ability to qualify leads based on their engagement with your social activities (likes, retweets and shares).

Another great feature is the ability to trigger automation workflows based on your follower’s social activities and turn their interactions into hot leads or sales.

SharpSpring’s landing page builder has an easy-to-use interface, which allows you to build landing pages in minutes without the need for a developer.

They have dynamic content which allows you to personalize your landing page content based on your users, their preferences and behaviors.

With SharpSpring, you can design pages that are responsive across desktops, tablets and mobile devices with the ability to hide some content blocks from showing on mobile for better simplification and conversion optimization.

You can track how your visitors interact with your pages and respond with personalized messages accordingly. This helps you optimize your sales funnel.

SharpSpring’s marketing analytics enables you to track different KPIs for all your channels and website conversions without the need to create funnels from the first interaction of your visitor’s journey through to the final sale.

Another exciting feature is the ability to integrate Google Adwords, which allows you to monitor your search engine marketing performance in one place.

As for lead’s interaction, you can track each of their activities to create a custom automation to engage with them at a critical point in their buying process.

Last but not least, is the option to add group tags to your campaigns.

SharpSpring’s pricing consists of 3 different pricing modules. The first module is composed of three plans that vary according to the number of contacts. The second and third modules are for agencies and enterprises.

Below are SharpSpring’s different pricing plans:

• Basic plan: $449/mo – 2500 contacts – Including all features
• Intermediate plan: $999/mo – 10K contacts – Including all features
• Advanced plan: $1449/mo – 20K contacts – Including all features

SharpSpring’s onboarding package costs $2448. The team provides intensive support during the first 60 days to help you succeed.

If you’re looking for the best Marketo competitor, we hope that any of these 5 tools is a good fit and properly aligns with your marketing strategy. 

Finding the BEST platform doesn’t necessarily apply to all businesses and agencies. One platform may be suitable for a company but not the right fit for another one. Ultimately, it depends on your pain points, objectives and budget requirements.