15 Marketo Alternatives for Better Marketing Efficiency

You will be surprised that 75% of businesses use marketing automation software. They use it not because it is some mere trend but because it is the need of the hour! Marketing automation constitutes a significant part of marketing. Businesses use marketing automation tools to streamline their sales and marketing processes. These tools nurture leads, help optimise marketing, and deliver personalised experiences through dynamic content. Marketing automation tools often include integrated customer relationship management features to enhance marketing efforts.

However, despite the popularity of Marketo, many companies are looking for alternatives. Why? Some businesses need different features, more customization, or better pricing. Others want advanced marketing automation tools that have features not available in Marketo.

The purpose of this blog is to explore the top 10 alternatives of Marketo. These alternatives aim to enhance your marketing efficiency. We intend to discover the alternatives best suited for sales and marketing teams.

Let’s get started!

About Marketo

Marketo is a marketing automation platform. It has been leading the way for marketing and sales teams to streamline their operations. It serves various industries and medium to large businesses that want to automate and measure their marketing.

Marketo Features:

• Lead Management: Marketo is great at capturing and nurturing leads, making converting prospects into customers easy.
• Customer Relationships: It helps customer interaction strategies and provides tools to deepen engagement and loyalty.
• Features for Businesses: Marketo has features like email marketing, campaign management, and analytics to help businesses drive their marketing.

Marketo Limitations

Marketo is powerful but not perfect. Here are some of the limitations:

1) Complex Pricing

• For medium to small-sized businesses, Marketo’s cost becomes a hurdle. It starts from $900 per month. This price becomes a major limitation for companies running on budget constraints.
• It is also important to note that Marketo provides multiple payment plans. This is confusing and makes it difficult to determine the best option for a business’s needs.  

2) Complicated Setup

• Setting up Marketo is time-consuming and requires great expertise from IT or marketing automation specialists.
• The complexity of Marketo is confusing and leads to unnecessary downtime. Thus, it becomes challenging for businesses to get started with the platform quickly.

3) Poor Customer Service

• Marketo comes with inconsistent and unreliable customer service. This can be a point of frustration for users.
• The reason for this inconsistent customer support is the company’s rapid growth. It thus became a hurdle for Marketo to keep up with their customers.

4) Difficulty of Use

• Another challenge of Marketo is its non-intuitive design. The mechanism of Marketo is not user-friendly or intuitive. This slows down new users and their productivity.
• Marketo’s interface also consists of contra-intuitive limitations and bugs. This deviates from the user experience. As a result, companies invest time and resources into training and onboarding.

Why Alternatives?

So, we can say that the search for a Marketo alternative is driven by the following:

• Cost: Businesses look for more affordable solutions that still have robust marketing automation.
• Simpler UI: Companies look for tools that are easy to use but powerful enough to manage complex campaigns.
• Scalability and Features: As businesses grow they may need features that adapt more to their growing operations, something Marketo doesn’t fully support.

In short, while Marketo is great for many, the evolving needs of businesses mean alternatives are not only needed but necessary for those who want to optimize their marketing without compromise.

Have a look at 15 Marketo Competitors:

1. CrmOne

CrmOne is a marketing automation platform that helps manage customer data and deepen customer engagement. It integrates multiple marketing channels to give users a seamless experience managing customer relationships.

Key Features

• Email Marketing Tools: CrmOne has powerful tools to create personalized email marketing campaigns and reach customers meaningfully. Its automation feature sends targeted email campaigns at the right time to maximize engagement.
• SMS Marketing: Direct communication with customers through timely and personalized messages to increase the immediacy of customer interactions and engagement rates.
• Social Media Management: CrmOne manages posting schedules, engagement, and content analysis across multiple social media platforms to streamline digital presence and consistency.
• Campaign Management: The platform allows cross-channel marketing strategies and integrates email marketing, SMS marketing, and social media to create multi-channel customer experiences. It has tools to develop and monitor targeted marketing campaigns and cohesive messaging across all channels.
• CrmOne’s features help businesses optimize marketing strategies by leveraging advanced tools like A/B testing and automation.

Price: The basic plan, with core features, starts at $50 monthly. Advanced plans with extended automation and analytics tools start at $150 per month.

Best for: SMBs looking for a robust solution to optimize marketing and create multi-channel marketing campaigns.

Pros:

• Multi-channel marketing
• Task automation for various campaign types.

Cons:

• Higher tier pricing is restrictive for startups
• It requires training to use all features.

2. Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Salesforce Marketing Cloud has marketing tools and is famous for deep integration with CRM to manage customer data.

Key Features:

• Targeted Marketing Campaigns: Uses customer data to orchestrate marketing strategies across multiple channels.
• Advertising Platforms: Integrates with significant ad platforms to run and track real-time campaigns.
• Landing Pages: Creates dynamic landing pages to capture leads and boost campaigns.

Price Starts at $400 per month, increases with features and scale.

Best for: Enterprise that needs a full-blown system to support multi-channel customer experiences and deep data integration.

Pros:

• Deep integration with Salesforce CRM
• Advanced analytics for marketing insights.

Cons:

• Expensive
• Complexity may overwhelm smaller teams.

Read More: Top 10 Salesforce Alternatives for Your Businesses in 2024

3. HubSpot

HubSpot leads in inbound marketing tools, sales, and customer service. The platform engages and delights customers.

Key Features:

• Email Marketing: Hubspot comes with advanced-level email marketing tools. These tools design and deploy automated and personalized email marketing campaigns to various customer segments.
• Social Media Automation: Another feature of Hubspot is that it handles social media with tools. These tools schedule, monitor, and analyze across multiple platforms.
• Analytics Tools: The platform features advanced analytics. This feature measures marketing performance to refine and optimize.

Price Free to start; premium plans from $50 per month for more advanced marketing tools.

Best for: SMBs looking for scalable marketing solutions to grow and manage customer base.

Pros:

• Full feature set across marketing channels
• Good customer support.

Cons:

• Price increases with features
• Some tools have a steep learning curve.

Read More: Top 10 Best HubSpot Alternatives to Consider for Your Business

4. Renderforest

Renderforest is all about visual content and has tools to create videos, graphics, and websites, which are essential for modern marketing.

Key Features:

• Video Marketing Tools: Can create videos that boost marketing campaigns and engage customers better.
• Landing Page Builder: Create landing pages in minutes optimized for conversion to achieve overall campaign goals.
• Social Media Integration: Publishes directly to social media to manage online presence and reach a bigger audience.

Price: Free plan; more features are available for $9.99 monthly.

Best for Businesses that focus on content marketing and need powerful yet easy-to-use tools for creating and managing visual content.

Pros:

• User-friendly
• Affordable for Start-ups.

Cons:

• More focused on content creation than full marketing automation.
• Lack of evolution

5. Brevo

Bravo has a simple and efficient way for digital marketing to manage campaigns and content.

Key Features

• Automated Email Campaigns: The most prominent feature of Brevo is that it simplifies email marketing campaigns with a drag-and-drop interface.
• Social Media Management: Another feature is that it easily blends social media posting and scheduling into one dashboard. This helps in managing online interactions.
• Analytics Tools: Brevo features basic analytics to measure campaign performance and adjust on the fly.

Price: Starts at $20 per month, perfect for small businesses and startups.

Best for: Startups and small businesses looking for a simple solution to get started with digital marketing without the complexity of more prominent platforms.

Pros:

• User-friendly
• Cost-effective for small scale.

Cons:

• Limited in advanced features that bigger or more techy businesses may need.
• Pricing increases as you move to high-tier plans

6. Moosend

Moosend is known for its powerful and affordable email marketing tool for running marketing campaigns.

Key Features

Email Marketing Automation: Has advanced automation capabilities to design and run personalized email marketing campaigns.

• Subscription Forms: Build and manage email lists with customizable forms that integrate with websites and campaigns.
• Analytics Tools: Has detailed reporting to track engagement and adjust marketing strategies based on data.

Price: Free for basic features; paid plans from $8 per month for advanced automation and analytics.

Best for: Small to medium e-commerce businesses that focus on email as their primary marketing channel.

Pros:

• Affordable with excellent email automation
• User-friendly with simple interfaces.

Cons:

• Primarily for email marketing only
• No multi-channel integration

7. Dotdigital

Dotdigital is a cross-channel marketing platform that excels in automating and personalizing communications across email, SMS, and social media.

Key Features:

• E-commerce Integration: Integrates with e-commerce platforms to use customer data for targeted communications.
• Campaign Management Tools: Create and manage complex marketing campaigns that engage customers across multiple touchpoints.
• Analytics Tools: Measures campaign performance to refine and improve engagement.

Price: From $250 per month to access all basic multi-channel marketing features.

Best for: Medium to big businesses, primarily e-commerce, looking for a scalable solution to engage with customers.

Pros:

• Multi-channel capabilities
• Deep e-commerce integration

Cons:

• Higher starting price
• May be complex for smaller teams

8. Emarsys

Emarsys is a marketing automation leader for e-commerce, with Emarsys e-commerce-focused tools to drive personalized shopping and customer loyalty.

Key Features:

• Advanced Segmentation: Uses customer data to create personalized marketing messages and offers.
• Automation Workflows: Automates marketing processes with powerful tools to send the right content to each customer.
• Multi-Channel Campaigns: Runs campaigns across email, social media, and the web to create cohesive customer experiences.

Price: Custom pricing based on services and scale the business requires, from around $800 per month.

Best for: Big retail and e-commerce businesses that need a robust platform to manage complex customer interactions across multiple channels.

Pros:

• Very advanced personalization and automation
• Availability of multi-channel support

Cons:

• Custom pricing can be costly
• Setup and ongoing management are required

9. Act-On

Act-On is a flexible marketing automation platform to help businesses align marketing and sales to improve lead management and conversion.

Key Features:

• Marketing Automation: A suite of tools to automate marketing campaigns across channels.
• Lead Management: Lead capture, scoring, and nurturing to optimize sales conversions.
• Social Media Automation: Content scheduling and interaction tracking across social media to boost online engagement.

Price: From $900 per month for mid-sized to big businesses that need full marketing functionality.

Best for: Mid-sized and big businesses needing tools to manage complex data-driven marketing campaigns.

Pros:

• Full feature set for all digital marketing
• Great for sales and marketing alignment

Cons:

• Higher prices may be out of reach for smaller businesses
• Complex features have a steep learning curve

10. Mailchimp

Mailchimp is a user-friendly marketing platform famous for its email marketing tools and wide integrations. Small- to medium-sized businesses love Mailchimp for these features.

Key Features:

• Email Campaigns: A prominent feature of Mailchimp is that it creates, sends, and tracks email marketing templates. These templates are customizable with automation options.
• Landing Pages: Mailchimp features Easy-to-use tools. These tools create landing pages for lead gen and campaign support.
• Social Media Campaigns: Integrates with social media to share content and coordinate campaigns for cross-channel marketing.

Price: Free plan for basic needs; paid plans from $9.99 per month for growing businesses.

Best for: Small to medium-sized businesses looking for a simple, flexible platform to start or grow their digital marketing.

Pros:

• Very accessible with a full free plan
• It also has strong email marketing and campaign support

Cons:

• Features like automation and integrations, require paid plans
• These features may scale less well for bigger businesses

Read More: Top 24 Mailchimp Alternative to Consider in 2025 (Free and Paid)

11. Klaviyo

Klaviyo is a well-known customer engagement platform. It comes with powerful automation and personalization to boost sales. It is said to be a perfect choice for e-commerce businesses.

Key Features:

• Automated Nurturing Programs: Klaviyo features automation workflows. This feature guides customers through a personalized buying journey.
• SMS Marketing Features: The platform also offers advanced-level SMS marketing. This feature is also essential as it targets and personalizes messages for customers.
• Dynamic Content: Uses customer behavior data to create dynamic, personalized content to boost engagement and conversion.

Price: Free up to 250 contacts; paid plans from $20 per month and up based on contacts and messages sent.

Best for E-commerce businesses to integrate marketing automation with their online store.

Pros:

• Integrates well with e-commerce platforms
• Offers lots of automation and personalization

Cons:

• Pricing can get expensive with a large contact list
• It may require a learning curve to get the most out of it

12. Pardot by Salesforce

Pardot is a product by Salesforce. The platform improves B2B marketing with sales automation and campaign creation.

Key Features:

• Lead Management: One of the prominent features of Paradot is that it is Intelligent when it comes to lead scoring. It is also efficient in nurturing, which streamlines marketing.
• Email Marketing: The platform comes with various email marketing tools. These tools help create automated workflows and personalized email campaigns.
• Dedicated Account Manager: Paradot provides high-tier plans. It also comes with a dedicated manager to help you optimize your marketing.

Price: Paradot’s ‘growth plan’ offers $1,250 per month. Extra features come with Plus ($2,500 per month) and Advanced ($4,000 per month) plans.

Best for: It is suitable for medium to big businesses. It is most for B2B that needs deep integration with Salesforce CRM and advanced marketing features.

Pros:

• Integrates well with Salesforce
• Advanced customer support systems

Cons:

• Expensive pricing plans
• It has a complex system for smaller teams

Read More: Top 10 Best Pardot Alternatives For 2025

13. Sendinblue

Sendinblue is another alternative to Marketo. This platform is a combination of email marketing, SMS marketing, and automation workflows.

Key Features:

• Campaign Creation: Design, send, and optimize email and SMS campaigns with a drag-and-drop editor.
• Web Push Notifications: Add customer touchpoints with timely web notifications.
• Customer-Centric Personalization: Personalize campaigns and communications based on user behavior and preferences.

Price: The free plan includes 300 emails daily. The paid plans are $25 monthly for Lite and $65 for Premium.

Best for: It is suitable for medium-sized businesses. This is because they are always looking for an all-in-one marketing solution to manage multiple types of campaigns. Hence, Sendinblue has become their ideal alternative.

Pros:

• Affordable and feature-rich
• It is user-friendly

Cons:

• Some advanced features are only available in higher plans
• The web push notifications are not as deep as those on larger platforms

14. Oracle Eloqua

Oracle Eloqua is a high-end customer engagement platform for big enterprises focused on complex automation workflows and multi-faceted campaign management.

Key Features:

• Sales Automation: Integrates advanced sales and marketing automation to streamline marketing and boost lead conversion.
• Automated Nurturing Programs: Designs and executes detailed programs that track customer interactions and automate follow-ups.
• Dynamic Content and Personalization: Delivers highly targeted content that adapts to user interactions to boost customer-centric personalization.

Price: Oracle Eloqua’s pricing starts at around $2,000 per month and scales to enterprise needs.

Best for: Big organizations that need a marketing automation solution to manage global marketing strategies.

Pros and Cons

Pros:

• Generously offers features like customization and automation
• It integrates well with other Oracle products

Cons:

• It is expensive
• It may require a dedicated team to manage and optimize its features.

15. ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign is known for its email marketing, sales automation, and CRM. It is an all-in-one platform that will help you grow your customer relationships.

Key Features:

• Create Automated Workflows: ActiveCampaign creates complex workflows for you to automate the entire customer journey.
• SMS Marketing: Another feature is that it uses SMS as a channel in multi-channel campaigns. This is done to reach customers in a targeted and personalized way.
• Customer Support Systems: The platform provides training and onboarding. This feature is prominent as it helps you get the most out of the platform.

Price: The ‘lite plan’ of ActiveCampaign offers $15 per month

• $70 per month is for the ‘Plus plan.’
• $159 per month for the ‘professional plan’
• and $279 per month for the ‘enterprise plan.’

Pros:

• Highly customizable with many marketing tools; excellent customer support.

Cons:

• Interface can be confusing;
• Some features are only available in higher plans.

Read More: 13 Best ActiveCampaign Alternatives: Features, Pros, and Cons

Conclusion

In this journey, we understood that opting for the right marketing automation tool is extremely crucial. It is significant for any company looking to optimize its customer journey and marketing operations. The right marketing tool automates and integrates with other marketing tools to get valuable insights.

We all know that every business functions differently. Moreover, there is no one-size-fits-all in marketing automation. Therefore, it becomes essential for you to assess every option carefully. It would help if you oversaw how it fits your business size, industry, and sales team. You get the most out of your investment when you evaluate all these criteria. Not only this, this will make your marketing efforts more efficient and effective.

Please get in touch with us if you want to dig deeper into these options or need more personalized advice. Testing each tool, taking advantage of free trials, and seeking professional help will help you find the right marketing automation platform for your business.