Best Marketing Automation Software in 2026

Marketing Hub is the marketing product of HubSpot, the Boston-based CRM company founded in 2006 by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah. HubSpot reports 306,000 customers and more than 9,000 employees. Marketing Hub combines e-mail, forms and workflow automation on the same contact database as HubSpot's sales and service products, which is its main advantage over standalone tools.

Automation depth depends heavily on edition. Starter, priced from US$7 per seat a month (the page also lists US$20 without clear labelling), includes 1,000 marketing contacts but only basic e-mail automation with a single automated action. Professional, at US$890 a month (US$800 on the best-value annual option), includes three core seats, 2,000 marketing contacts and up to 300 workflows, and carries a one-time US$3,000 onboarding fee. Enterprise, at US$3,600 a month, includes five seats, 10,000 marketing contacts, up to 1,000 workflows, behavioural events and predictive lead scoring, with a US$7,000 onboarding fee.

The jump from Starter to Professional is the steepest in this list, and pricing scales with marketing contacts, so costs rise quickly for large databases. For companies already using HubSpot CRM, the integration usually outweighs these costs.

Account Engagement, formerly known as Pardot, is Salesforce's B2B marketing automation product for lead nurturing, scoring and campaign management tied to Salesforce CRM. In 2026 Salesforce sells it in "+" editions bundled with its Marketing Cloud Next platform and Agentforce AI features.

Published list prices, per organisation per month on annual contracts, are US$1,250 for Growth+ (with Agentforce campaign creation and lead nurturing and scoring), US$2,750 for Plus+ (adding AI-powered scoring and B2B marketing analytics), US$4,400 for Advanced+ (adding business units and a dedicated IP address) and US$15,000 for Premium+ (adding predictive analytics and Premier Success support). The feature table shows 10,000 contacts on the first three editions and 75,000 on Premium+, and a dedicated IP as a US$500-a-month add-on; Salesforce notes that prices are informational and subject to change.

Salesforce's broader Marketing Cloud Next editions cost US$1,500 (Growth) and US$3,250 (Advanced) per organisation a month, with add-ons such as Personalization at US$8,000 and Marketing Intelligence at US$10,000. The main limitation is cost and complexity: all products require annual contracts, and full value depends on a Salesforce CRM deployment.

ActiveCampaign is a Chicago-based e-mail marketing and automation platform founded in 2003 by Jason VandeBoom, who remains chief executive. It reports customers in more than 170 countries; its about page gives the customer count as both more than 180,000 and more than 150,000.

Automation is ActiveCampaign's core: every plan includes multi-step automations, more than 950 automation recipes, multiple triggers, e-commerce automation and an AI-assisted automation builder. Plans differ in automation limits and channels. Starter allows five actions per automation, e-mail only and one user; Plus adds unlimited actions, cross-channel marketing and sales automation; Pro (three users) and Enterprise (five users) add A/B testing of automations, and Enterprise adds an automations map.

The pricing page reviewed in November 2026 displayed placeholders rather than amounts for the 1,000-contact tier, stating only that plans are billed yearly, so prices are not given here. A 14-day trial requires no card. ActiveCampaign suits small and mid-sized businesses that want sophisticated automation without an enterprise contract; its limitation is that advanced features such as automation A/B testing sit on the upper plans.

Klaviyo, founded in 2012, is a marketing automation platform for online retailers that describes itself as "the B2C CRM". It reported revenue of US$387 million for the third quarter of 2026, up 25% year on year, and more than 211,000 customers.

Klaviyo's strength is its data model built around e-commerce events from Shopify, WooCommerce and more than 400 integrated apps, used to trigger flows such as abandoned-cart and post-purchase sequences. Its free plan covers up to 250 active profiles and 500 e-mails a month but excludes campaigns, flows, segmentation and A/B testing. The Email plan costs US$20 a month at 500 profiles with 5,000 e-mails, and the Marketing plan US$25 a month, both including US$5 of mobile messaging, with SMS and MMS as add-ons. A Custom plan above 150,000 profiles adds volume pricing, data-warehouse sync, SSO and enterprise compliance.

Klaviyo lists SOC, ISO 27001, ISO 27017, PCI DSS, CCPA and GDPR compliance. The limitation is cost at scale: pricing rises with active profiles, and the page reviewed showed prices only at the 500-profile tier.

Mailchimp was founded in Atlanta in 2001 by Ben Chestnut and Dan Kurzius as a side project of their web-design agency, Rocket Science Group, and was acquired by Intuit in 2021. It is among the most widely used e-mail marketing tools for small businesses.

Its automation is delivered through customer journeys, which Mailchimp calls marketing automation flows. The free plan excludes them; Essentials allows journeys of up to four steps; and Standard and Premium allow up to 200 flows. At the 500-contact tier, the page reviewed showed introductory prices of US$13 a month for Essentials, US$20 for Standard and US$350 for Premium, each 50% off for twelve months, without stating the subsequent price. The free plan allows one seat, one audience and 500 e-mails a month (250 a day), and sending pauses when limits are exceeded.

Mailchimp's advantages are ease of use, templates and integrations with small-business software including Intuit's own. Its automation is less flexible than ActiveCampaign's or HubSpot's at higher complexity, and the gap between Standard and Premium pricing is large. The free-plan contact limit is described inconsistently on the page (250 and under 500).

Braze is a customer-engagement platform used by large consumer brands for cross-channel messaging and journey orchestration across e-mail, push notifications, SMS, MMS, RCS, WhatsApp, KakaoTalk, LINE and in-app messages. It is oriented towards app-centric and digital consumer businesses rather than B2B lead management.

Braze sells four editions. Go provides core features for early-stage growth teams; Select adds orchestration, enhanced security and user provisioning; Pro adds predictive AI, AI-personalised recommendations and message prioritisation; and Enterprise adds enterprise-grade orchestration, infrastructure, governance and advanced experimentation through the BrazeAI Agent Console. Every edition includes BrazeAI tools, the Braze Data Platform, journey orchestration and 2FA, SAML/SSO and granular permissions.

Pricing is not published. It is based on monthly active users (people who record a session in a calendar month), a stored-profile allowance per MAU, and a pool of action credits shared across channels, with different actions costing different credits (for example one credit for an SMS and five for a WhatsApp message). Support and services are part of the contract, and Braze offers no free plan, though trials and start-up programmes exist. The site shows SOC and ISO 27001 certification logos and 24x7 support.

Customer.io is a messaging-automation platform used mainly by software and app companies to send behaviour-triggered e-mail, push and in-app messages based on product data. It reports more than 11,000 brands using the platform.

Unlike many tools, Customer.io publishes a full price ladder in US dollars. Essentials starts at US$100 a month for 5,000 profiles and one million e-mails, rising to US$145 for 10,000 profiles, US$235 for 20,000, US$325 for 30,000, US$415 for 40,000 and from US$505 for 50,000, with extra profiles at US$0.009 each and extra e-mails at US$0.12 per thousand. Essentials includes the visual workflow builder and two object types for modelling accounts or other entities. Premium, from US$1,000 a month billed yearly, adds ten object types, higher AI-agent limits, a native Salesforce integration and 90-day onboarding, with HIPAA compliance as an add-on; Enterprise adds dedicated infrastructure and audit logging.

Data can be stored in US or EU data centres at no extra charge, and web push is free on every plan. Companies that have raised under US$10 million can receive a year free through its start-up programme. Customer.io assumes access to product event data and technical set-up, making it less suitable for marketers without developer support.

Zoho Marketing Automation is the automation product of Zoho Corporation, integrated with Zoho CRM and the wider Zoho suite. It covers e-mail, landing pages, pop-ups, WhatsApp marketing, social campaigns, lead scoring and multi-step journeys.

Plans are Standard, Professional and Enterprise, priced by contacts with visitor limits set as a multiple of the contact count. At the 1,000-contact tier, Standard includes ten users, 2,000 tracked visitors, basic segmentation and basic journeys with templates; Professional includes 15 users, 5,000 visitors, lead scoring and tags, advanced segmentation, advanced journeys with reports and path tracing, A/B testing, landing pages and e-commerce marketing; and Enterprise includes 25 users, 10,000 visitors, lead attribution, complete journeys with X-RAY tracing, custom roles, webhooks and product recommendations. All plans include unlimited e-mails, free onboarding and one-to-one technical support.

There is no permanent free plan; a 14-day trial with all features requires no card. The pricing page reviewed showed a 25% saving for annual billing but did not display amounts, so none are given here. The generous user counts and unlimited e-mail make it economical for teams already on Zoho, but integrations outside the Zoho ecosystem are narrower (40-plus apps on Standard).

Act-On is a B2B marketing automation platform focused on lead nurturing and scoring for mid-sized companies. Its distinguishing commercial feature is pricing based on active contacts, meaning contacts e-mailed in a given month, rather than total database size.

The Professional plan starts at US$900 a month on an annual contract and includes automated engagement programmes, website and landing-page visitor tracking, visitor, prospect and customer scoring, behavioural and demographic lists, targeted e-mail, landing pages and forms, templates, an open API with Zapier and Cazoomi integrations, analytics dashboards, AI predictive lead scoring and AI audience insights. Enterprise, quoted individually, adds native CRM integrations with Salesforce, SugarCRM, NetSuite and Microsoft Dynamics, a Data Studio for reporting and BI integration, and account-based marketing. Add-ons include SMS marketing, transactional e-mail, an AI web agent and advanced analytics.

Act-On claims active-contact pricing saves 30–50%, without giving a basis. The model benefits companies with large, mostly dormant databases. A notable limitation is that native CRM integration is reserved for Enterprise, unless purchased as a paid add-on on Professional.

Keap combines CRM, marketing automation, sales pipeline, invoicing and payments for small service businesses. It is now branded "Keap, A Thryv, Inc. Brand" following its acquisition by Thryv.

Keap offers a library of prebuilt automations across marketing, sales, service and operations, such as lead nurture, abandoned-cart and review-request sequences, along with pipeline automation, task management, billing automation, lead scoring and automation history. AI content and automation assistants are included.

Pricing starts at US$320 a month on monthly billing or US$3,195 a year on annual billing, with two user licences included and extra users at US$39 a month each; contact tiers are priced on a sliding scale. A required implementation package is part of the offer, though its price is not listed, and annual contracts carry a US$299 early-termination fee. Text marketing is available only in the US, in tiers from US$24 to US$279 a month. The free trial excludes payment processing and texting and limits e-mail to 25 messages. Keap's all-in-one scope suits owner-operated businesses, but its entry price is high relative to e-mail-first tools.

GetResponse is an e-mail marketing and automation platform that also offers landing pages, webinars and course-creation tools. Its pricing page reviewed for this list displayed prices in euros.

At 1,000 contacts, Starter costs €16 a month (€13.12 billed yearly) and allows one custom automation workflow; Marketer costs €54 (€44.28 yearly) and Creator €62 (€50.84 yearly), both with unlimited workflows; and Enterprise is quoted individually, with a 30-day pilot programme by demo. The visual workflow builder supports conditions, actions and filters for behavioural automation, and higher plans add e-commerce automation and webinar features.

A 14-day trial requires no card; during the trial users can create unlimited workflows but cannot use the dynamic segment filter. After the trial, accounts can continue on a free version of GetResponse, whose limits the page does not specify. GetResponse is good value for small businesses needing unlimited workflows below €60 a month, but it lacks the CRM depth of HubSpot or Keap and the e-commerce data model of Klaviyo.

Omnisend is an e-commerce marketing automation platform positioned as a lower-cost alternative to Klaviyo, offering e-mail, SMS, MMS and web push with pre-built e-commerce workflows and more than 335 integrations.

The free plan includes 250 contacts, 500 e-mails and 500 web-push notifications a month, pre-built workflows and A/B testing. Standard, shown at US$11.20 a month when three months are prepaid (30% off), includes 500 contacts, 6,000 e-mails a month and custom workflows; Pro, shown at US$41.30 a month on the same basis, includes 2,500 contacts, unlimited e-mail under fair use and SMS automation, with SMS from US$0.007 per message for high-volume US sending and five AI agents. Custom plans are available above 150,000 active profiles.

Omnisend provides 24/7 live chat and e-mail support on every plan, including Free, and free migration in about five days. It claims to be up to 35% cheaper than Klaviyo based on its own comparison of May 2026 standard rates, and cites an average of US$79 in e-commerce revenue per US$1 spent from internal analysis; both are vendor claims. The headline prices assume prepayment, and the regular monthly rate is not shown directly.