HubSpot Alternatives: 3 Established Options

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Looking for HubSpot alternatives? You are in the right place. Although HubSpot is awesome, you’ll find reasons as to why it might not be the right fit for your business.

HubSpot has long been the numero uno when it comes to Inbound marketing software.

But HubSpot is not for everyone. If you are looking for HubSpot alternatives, you should read this now.

When you say, “all-in-one marketing software”, you already know a few things right off the bat:

  1. It’s software, so why does it cost as much as a premium sedan?
  2. If it’s easy to use, why an Onboarding fee?
  3. When you buy Hubspot, is Inbound marketing way easier than it should be?

The answer? No one knows. By the time you know, you’d have ended up spending for an entire year of Hubspot’s mandatory annual pricing.

If you are using HubSpot and WooCommerce, however, here’s how you make them work together.

A while ago, I wrote on Hubspot and what I thought about it. I’ve worked (and I still do) with the Hubspot platform while I work with clients.

There are a few things that are awesome about Hubspot, if you forget Hubspot’s ridiculously expensive price tag for a moment:

  • It’s a company that birthed Inbound marketing.
  • Hubspot provides you with absolutely everything for Inbound marketing you need within a single platform without you having to spend on at least 17 other services, apps, and tools to make Inbound marketing work.
  • You get Hubspot CMS, Hubspot CRM, landing pages, Website Builder platform, marketing automation, lead generation, lead nurturing, email marketing, lead analytics, social management, website analytics, and more.

Now, let’s get to the price tag: Honestly, Hubspot is expensive for a small business.

You can go on all day about how you should think of Hubspot as an investment and how it’ll pay off over the long term, but it’s still expensive.

Hubspot is only software. It’s not like you are going to get blogging, content marketing, lead magnets, email automation, and every other piece of content written for purposes of marketing done for you.

Because, all that writing? You’d have to do it yourself or hire a full-stack agency or content marketers to write for you.

Hubspot won’t do any magic for you. The work involved with digital marketing? There’s just no escaping that.

For a fraction of the price of Hubspot’s software, you could get a full-stack agency to do complete digital marketing for you, even if you decide to tape 200 different platforms, plugins, SaaS Apps, and services together.

HubSpot CMS Vs WordPress CMS

While Hubspot’s CMS does work, and for some people it might even be easier to use than WordPress, you just can’t beat the sheer versatility of WordPress. No, you just can’t.

Of course, there are better CMS solutions out there but you’d rather just stick to the ease of use, availability, security, dependability, and popularity of WordPress.

Using WordPress gives you incredible Choice:

  • You can host your WordPress website with any hosting provider. Choose the best of the hosting in the world thanks to the likes of Kinsta, Flywheel, WPEngine, and others.
  • You could use any email list building tool, social proof tool, sales funnels, and other popular marketing tools such as ConvertPro and OptinMonster. Each of those tools gives you unlimited potential to design and test your creatives the way you see fit.
  • You have the freedom to switch tools, apps, and hosting providers when you want to. You are not stuck with any one company, you see?

If you had to drop Hubspot or cancel your plan, what would you do with all the content you’d worked to build upon Hubspot?

That’s something to think about (see more below)

Hubspot CRM Vs Other CRMs

Yes, Hubspot’s CRM is certainly an amazing tool to work with.

But then, it’s a way for them to get you into their ecosystem of tools and services. There are certainly better CRM systems that work great for small businesses such as PipeDrive, and many others.

Heck, you could hack Trello or Asana (project management systems) or even Gmail to make them work like CRM systems.

Hubspot Analytics

It’s true that Hubspot will make it all look like how all your Inbound marketing efforts are finally leading towards leads generated and sales.

In a single dashboard view, you can see how your inbound marketing efforts are working to get you the results you seek.

But with a little effort, you could make Google analytics do that too (Goals, anyone?).

You also have other tools to complete your Google Analytics such as MonsterInsights, Mouseflow, DataBox, HotJar, Mixpanel, and GoSquared.

You could mix and match. Play and experiment.

Do your own thing, you see?

Hubspot’s Limited Contacts

Hubspot’s pricing is set up in a way that it increases as your business grows.

For simplicity’s sake, let’s just assume that “growth” for Hubspot relates to the number of active leads within your Hubspot lead database.

I find that severely limiting for a growing business.


I want to spend as little as possible while I make more in terms of revenue and profit.

I don’t want to spend more as my business grows, at least not for something like Software — the costs for which can remain more or less predictable and costs much less. Plus, I want the flexibility to drop a tool or two from my marketing stack when I want to. Or switch hosting if I wanted to.

Why am I expected to pay a bomb and stay married to it this way?

Hubspot Mandatory Onboarding Fee

Hubspot charges a ridiculous $3000 one-time for an onboarding fee, and I find that funny.

If HubSpot is so complicated that it requires a $3000 onboarding fee to help clients understand “How Hubspot Works”, then a small business shouldn’t even be playing with this toy.

No business can afford to work with tools and software that have a steep learning curve (Infusionsoft also demands an onboarding fee that I don’t like and I am not a big fan of).

No, I don’t have $3000 lying around just to learn how the software works. I should have had the privilege of learning it myself.

Hubspot is so confident about its platform that it even published a blatant workaround or a slew of alternatives to using Hubspot. They call it FrankenSpot.

I don’t think adding up the price for all those tools and software will come to a whopping $52,000 or more per year.

No way.

It’s ok to use WordPress for your Inbound marketing needs. It’s fine to tape together X, Y, or Z disparate systems, platforms, plugins, tools, and SaaS apps to make your marketing work. It’s alright to spend on 10 different services or tools.

I don’t see a big problem with duct tape marketing. I certainly don’t see a problem with “not spending on Hubspot”.

Also, read Ryan Masuga’s experience with Hubspot in detail:

Masuga’s Expensive Mistake: Our Expensive Hubspot Experiment — Part 1

Masuga’s Expensive Mistake: Our Expensive Hubspot Experiment — Part 2

HubSpot Alternatives You Should Try

Alternatives for HubSpot don’t include individual, standalone tools that do one thing well. 

HubSpot has a CRM system, landing pages, email marketing tools, LiveChat, and a lot more.

Replacing HubSpot with 17 other software tools is not the goal. As such, here are some top alternatives for HubSpot: 

WordPress + Stacks

The obvious alternative to HubSpot is the mighty self-hosted WordPress, of course. Start with premium managed hosting such as Kinsta, WPEngine, FlyWheel, 10Web, or Pressidium. 

Launch your site and then use third-party tools, marketing automation software, payment plugins, and deploy WordPress eCommerce to bring in the functionality you need. 

There’s nothing you can’t do without WordPress. It’s just that you’d need to work with various software tools, plugins, and platforms to replicate the functionality that all-in-one inbound marketing software provides for you.

Here are a few tips to build an all-in-one marketing system with WordPress: 

  • Choose themes from GeneratePress, Astra, or StudioPress themes (comes included with FlyWheel and WPEngine hosting) 
  • Create forms of any kind with WPForms. 
  • Pick from a choice of standalone CRM options such as SalesForce, Zoho CRM, PipeDrive, Nimble, and many others. Chris Hawkins of Zapier has a good list of top CRM Systems you could use. 
  • Use WooCommerce (integrates with most of the above tools as well) for payments. You can use Stripe and Payment and these work with WooCommerce. 

Depending on your business, mix and match your choices to establish a platform on WordPress to make things work. 

OntraPort

OntraPort — just like HubSpot — is an all-in-one sales and marketing platform to help you grow your business. 

Here’s what OntraPort provides: 

  • Sales + CRM (along with unified task history, smart pipelines, segmenting & organizing contacts, lead scoring, and lead routing) 
  • Marketing automation (campaign management, email marketing, SMS messaging, email deliverability, Facebook custom audiences, tracking, and attribution) 
  • Pages & Forms ( building landing pages with a drag-and-drop editor and create forms with a form builder) 
  • Create membership sites and integrate with WordPress. 
  • Accept payments (including offline transactions, payment recovery, referral tracking, and more) 
  • Grow your business with Upsells and order bumps. 

Besides, Ontraport has amazing support (including a community-driven Facebook group), set-up guides, easy start-up wizards, and more. 

OntraPort Pricing: For all of the above, start with $79 per month, going all the way up to $497 per month (for enterprise plan). 

Keap (earlier Infusionsoft)

Keap (was called Infusionsoft earlier) is another comprehensive all-in-one inbound marketing software with sales, marketing, CRM, and several other features you can use to grow your business. 

Keap does a lot of things. In summary, here’s what it provides: 

  • Sales and marketing automation
  • A comprehensive and capable CRM system 
  • Sales Pipeline management
  • Email marketing & SMS messaging 
  • Payments and eCommerce 
  • Keap Business Line (a comprehensive SMS, calls, text feature). 
  • Ability to take appointments and manage them 
  • Quotes and Invoices 
  • B2B marketing capabilities 
  • Reporting & analytics

Keap Pricing: 

Keap has three plans Life, pro, and Max. Keap starts at $40 per month and goes up to $100 per month (for 1 user and up to 500 contacts). 

Which of these HubSpot alternatives will you opt for? 

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