Finding the right marketing automation platform for your business can be tricky at best and a nightmare of choices at worst. Every day there seems to be a new automation platform promising better leads, more customers and an easier interface.

However, which of those automation platforms are attracting the most customers, and more importantly, why? After all, the cream often rises to the top, and there’s always some wisdom in the majority vote.

This blog post will take a look at the three most popular marketing automation platforms available and examine some the most important features and differences they offer.

The most popular automation platforms

According to iDatalabs, the marketing automation platforms that attract the most customers are the following:

• HubSpot: approximately 17.03% of the market share
• Marketo: approximately 8.84% of the market share
• Adobe Marketing Cloud: approximately 6.71% of the market share

As you may have expected, HubSpot is the undisputed global leader when it comes to user interaction through social media and followers. Using Twitter as an example, HubSpot has 136,510 followers, followed by Marketo with only 38,333 followers.

Taking the above into consideration, we have decided to examine HubSpot, Marketo and Adobe's features and what they offer the user.

Features of the top 3 marketing automation platforms

To judge each marketing automation platform, we’ve taken a look at 3 major, but general points that would factor into how effective it is as a solution.

These points are the following:

• Pricing
• Features
• User Feedback
• Target Market

Pricing

Pricing is always an important consideration for marketing automation software. As a complex asset to any marketing team, automation platforms often don’t come cheap, and any serious business has to weigh in their return on investment when considering automation.

HubSpot

HubSpot as a product offers a lot more than just marketing automation if you have the capital. However, for the purposes of this post, we will take into account their plans which include the Marketing Hub, which offers marketing automation.

Pricing for the Marketing Hub start from free use to Enterprise, however, it’s important to note that true marketing automation only starts from the Professional plan and beyond. Each plan includes 1,000 contacts, but can be scaled up all the way to 50,000 contacts for $50 per additional 1,000 users.

• Free CRM Plan: free—great CRM, very limited marketing tools, no automation
• Starter Plan: $50 per month—limited automation, includes email marketing
• Professional Plan: $800 per month—includes automation
• Enterprise Plan: $3,200 per month—includes complete marketing platform
• Growth Suite: $ 4,200 per month—includes Sales, Marketing and Services hubs

Marketo

Marketo offers 3 plans with a set amount of contacts allowed on each plan being the main point of difference, as well as the amount of features. However, even the basic plan offers great marketing automation tools. The Pro and Premier Plans offer sales tools, API integrations and opportunity influence modelers.

• Basic Plan: $895 per month
• Pro Plan: $1,799 per month
• Elite Plan: $3,195 per month

Adobe Marketing Cloud

While Adobe doesn’t explicitly cite their pricing, third party sources and websites have suggested that it can cost between an average of $450,000 and up to $2 million. Officially, Adobe quotes on a per customer basis.

Features

Features are the primary reason for investing in automation software in the first place, so naturally they’re important when comparing marketing automation software. Many automation platforms offer different pricing and lock additional features behind paywalls, therefore, for the purposes of this post we'll take a look at the primary features of the basic offering that includes marketing automation.

HubSpot

The HubSpot Marketing Hub features vary greatly according to the plan you select. However, a user on the Professional Plan gains access to:

• Contact management
• Ad management (including social media, SEO and adwords)
• Email marketing
• SEO and content strategy
• Dynamic landing pages
• A/B testing
• Reporting
• Video hosting
• Marketing automation

Marketo

The key features of Marketo include:

• Marketing Automation
• Account-Based Marketing
• Email Engagement
• Mobile Communication
• Social Integration
• Digital Ads
• Web Interaction
• Marketing Analytics
• Predictive Content

Adobe Marketing Cloud

Adobe's primary feature set includes the following:

• Email marketing
• Mobile marketing
• Dynamic web content
• Predictive analytics
• Bi-directional CRM syncing
• Split testing
• Sales reports
• Social CRM
• Mobile app
• Real-time sales alerts
• Targeting and segmentation
• Campaign management
• Lead management
• Marketing measurement
• Sales and marketing alignment
• Mobile app
• Marketing automation

User feedback

User feedback is vital because it often reveals some of the flaws in an automation offering. User feedback often gives insight into accessibility, ease of use and even the practical effectiveness of the solution.

HubSpot

HubSpot has attained a 4.3 rating on G2 Crowd Ratings and a 4.5 Capterra user rating.

Users who gave a thumbs up to HubSpot enjoyed the ease of use, convenience and clean interface the marketing automation platform provided. They also appreciated how every tool they needed was in once place and easily accessible.

Negative reviews for HubSpot noted the comparatively high price, the lack of features that are only available behind the higher paid plans, the third-party integration implementation and the lackluster reporting features.

Marketo

Marketo holds a 4 / 5 star rating on both Capterra and G2 Crowd Ratings.

Users who gave a positive review of Marketo said that the marketing automation platform does well for scaling marketing efforts and supports a lot of in-demand features. They also praised Marketo's ability to support different campaigns and improve relationships with their leads.

The majority of negative reviews focused on the lackluster customer support. They also highlighted the fact that advanced features can be very expensive.

Adobe Marketing Cloud

Adobe Marketing Cloud has a 8/10 rating on TrustRadius and a 4 star rating on G2 Crowd Ratings.

Users of Adobe that left a positive review noted that Marketing Cloud offers the reliability, consistency and quality of any Adobe product. They also praised the sheer amount of features that are easy to use and the large amount of templates available.

Negative reviews of Adobe focused on how extremely expensive the platform is and the training required to achieve advanced results.

Target market

The audience that each marketing automation platform targets are one of the considerations you must acknowledge before deciding on a solution. It indicates what future features they may develop and who their current support structure caters for.

HubSpot

73% of HubSpot’s current user base identify as owners of small to medium sized businesses (1-25 employees) with hands stretched across all aspects of operations. They seek basic content marketing tools to drive brand awareness and generate new leads. 25% of their user base consists of large, international marketing firms.

With this as well as their pricing structure and social media presence in mind, one can assume that HubSpot caters mostly for growing businesses and offers some tools for large multinational companies.

Marketo

According to iDatalabs, of all the companies that are using Marketo, a majority (62%) are small ( 1–25 employees), 19% are large (25–50 employees ) and 10% are medium-sized (25–50 employees).

Marketo has stated that they aim to assist smaller businesses to achieve more.

Adobe Marketing Cloud

Since only certain large enterprise customers receive an account manager and the evidence pointing to an expensive, yet well-rounded, solution, one can presume that Adobe's target market are large global enterprises.

Find the best solution for you

While popularity does have something to say about marketing automation platforms and their users, the best solution for you may be something more niche to your market, industry and customers.

Demodia is a marketing consultancy that has helped many businesses around the world improve their marketing and find the right marketing tools specifically for their customers. Demodia would like to help you find your ideal marketing automation solution that works for your best interests. Contact us today and discover how we can help you find the best solution for your business.