The best marketing automation software

Forget Dunkin'—the world runs on automation.

Well, at least marketing teams with tons of assets to manage and campaigns to run. If the marketing agency I work for didn't automate some of our more tedious tasks, we'd waste a lot of time doing things that software could take off our hands.

There are tons of marketing tools out there that enable you to build automated workflows, but some shine above the rest. After some extensive testing, here are my seven choices for the best marketing automation software.

The 8 best marketing automation software

• Brevo for an affordable all-in-one solution

• HubSpot for a premium all-in-one solution

• Omnisend for small businesses on a budget

• ActiveCampaign for comprehensive AI

• Klaviyo for user-friendliness

• Customer.io for powerful workflow automations

• Ortto for modular automations

• Mailchimp for automating email marketing

What makes the best marketing automation tool?

If your reaction to the term "marketing automation tool" is confusion (and perhaps an eye roll), that's natural. It's a really broad term, and while all tools under this umbrella offer automation tools for some type of marketing, everyone seems to have their own understanding of what it means. So let's define it first.

Here are the criteria I stayed laser-focused on to determine which apps qualified as "marketing automation software" and which ones went above and beyond in the category:

• Automation capabilities. Every platform I tested (and hence every platform that made this list) automates at least two of the following marketing mediums: email, SMS/text, digital ads, and social media. The more mediums the app automates, the better it ranks here. I paid especially close attention to each app's workflow builders, testing how intuitive it was to automate tasks that apply to the customer journey.

• Integrations and functionality. You probably rely on a handful of different tools to execute the monster that is "marketing" at your organization—systems for customer relationship management (CRM), content management, pipeline management, and more. Marketing automation software that integrates with these tools (or, better yet, have them built in) reduce workflow complications as you get all your tools to work together.

• Price to value. Frankly, I was shocked by how much these kinds of apps can vary in price—they range from "free forever!" to the ominous "custom pricing, but never less than $1,000 per user per month." I'm being a little hyperbolic, but if you're a small-to-medium-sized business, a value/price comparison matters.

• Ease of use. A learning curve is natural, but being bombarded with a million "how do you…" and "this isn't working" messages from employees three months into using a tool doesn't have to be. Great marketing automation tools have excellent customer support or are so easy to use that you shouldn't even need to rely on support.

• Reporting and analytics. A marketing platform needs data analytics. If I stumbled upon an app that didn't, it went straight to my "nope" pile. The best platforms offer reports that cover all the metrics a marketing team should pay attention to, as well as customizable and user-friendly dashboards to visualize that data and use it to inform future strategy.

I tested each marketing automation platform by signing up for an account, generating or importing sample data, creating custom automations, generating reports, and exploring the nooks and crannies (sorry) of each app's interface. With the help of the above criteria and my own takeaways from testing tools in this category, I selected eight apps that will help you execute impactful automated marketing campaigns.

The best marketing automation software at a glance

Best marketing automation software for an affordable all-in-one solution

Brevo (Web, iOS, Android)

Brevo pros:

• CRM-meeting scheduler-marketing automation hybrid

• Automates 4+ marketing channels

• Offers a free plan

Brevo cons:

• Relatively simple and inflexible

• Some key functionality is paywalled behind higher tiers

Initially, I wondered if I was impressed by Brevo just because it was the first app I tested and I didn't have anything better to compare it to. But looking back after testing loads of apps, I can honestly say Brevo gives you bang for the buck.

For one, even on its free plan, it automates email, SMS, and WhatsApp—more mediums than some paid marketing software. The app's workflow builder also offers a ton of options, including conditions like delays and A/B splits (splitting contacts 50/50 into two groups), and actions like webhooks and CRM updates (which leads me to my next point).

The platform isn't just a marketing workflow builder—it's also a CRM and meeting scheduling tool. Granted, the CRM is pretty basic and inflexible. It only offers a simple dashboard and sales pipeline and didn't allow me to input much data about leads in my pipeline. If you're just looking for a starter CRM for managing low-complexity deals and contacts (that can't be segmented into distinct leads), it's a decent bonus to the automation features, whereas most CRMs have basic automation sequences but more complex sales funnel capabilities.

That said, the meeting scheduler was awesome. When I created a meeting availability schedule, the platform automatically generated a booking page with a unique URL that people could then use to schedule a time slot on my calendar. These pages are fully editable, complete with customizable profile pics, company logos, colors, URL slugs, and favicons. You can even connect Outlook and Google calendars to sync availability across your apps.

The only real downside for Brevo is its scalability. Users looking to get the most out of its two lower-cost tiers will hit some roadblocks as they grow. Free plans come with a limit of 300 emails per day and have Brevo branding, which Starter requires an extra $9 per month to remove. You'll need to pay up for Business or Enterprise for pretty standard functionality like A/B testing, predictive sending suggestions, advanced click/open reporting, and added marketing channels like Facebook Ads and pop-ups.

With Zapier, you can automate Brevo by connecting other marketing platforms, form builders, and thousands of other tools to Brevo. Learn more about how to automate Brevo, or get started with one of these pre-made workflows.

Brevo price: Offers a free plan; from $8/month, billed annually, for the Starter plan

Best marketing automation software for a premium all-in-one solution

HubSpot Marketing Hub (Web)

HubSpot pros:

• Marketing Hub integrates seamlessly with HubSpot's CRM, CMS, customer service, and other solutions

• Extensive yet very easy to use

HubSpot cons:

• Very expensive

• Only chatflow automations are available at free level

• May need a separate Hub for the automations you want

When it comes to marketing software, HubSpot is the name to beat. The platform has a ton of uses, but its omnichannel automation offering requires an upgrade to Marketing Hub Professional. Heads up—it's really expensive, and therefore probably not the best option for startups and small businesses.

For Free and Starter plan users, you do technically get some marketing automation in the form of HubSpot's Chatflows. This is basically just a fancy name for custom chatbots, which isn't nothing, especially for a potentially free plan. Meanwhile, Sequence automations (read: scheduled outreach campaigns) are only available for Sales Hub Professional and Service Hub Professional users, and automated surveys are only available for Service Hub Professional users.

Despite the app's depth and complexity, HubSpot certainly invests in user experience. When I started testing its workflow feature, I was greeted by one of the best demos I've ever encountered. It showed me exactly how to build out a workflow to qualify a lead and send them through a pipeline using an interactive, animated example.

HubSpot's workflow builder is also really powerful. It offers a large set of categorized actions, including internal and external communication, ads management, APIs with lots of other apps, and even enrollment in another workflow. It also makes it easy to classify leads and send the right leads to the right people.

The platform also offers stellar analytics for campaigns. You can generate custom reports, pull insights into dashboards, and customize those dashboards however you like using drag-and-drop.

HubSpot offers *deep breath* 1,600 native integrations. But in the event that these integrations don't enable you to automate everything you hoped, you can use Zapier to automate HubSpot, saving HubSpot form submissions to your favorite spreadsheet app or adding HubSpot contacts to another email marketing platform, among other options. Learn more about how to automate HubSpot with Zapier, or get started with one of these pre-made workflows.

HubSpot price: From $800/month, billed annually, for Marketing Hub Professional

Best marketing automation software for small businesses on a budget

Omnisend (Web)

Omnisend pros:

• Excellent support; offers an entire academy of resources for learning how to use the app

• Free plan comes with extensive (and often advanced) features

Omnisend cons:

• Narrowly focused on eCommerce

Brevo's free plan is impressive, but the app is pretty simple. Omnisend, on the other hand, enables significantly more flexibility, and its free plan provides access to many features that other apps would consider premium.

I wasn't able to test many of Omnisend's features firsthand because you need to connect a live eCommerce site (which I don't have) for it to function properly. But based on what I was able to test, plus pre-recorded demos and other online resources, I was able to get a feel for the platform.

Omnisend automates email, push notifications, and SMS, allowing you to choose from a large selection of pre-built categorized workflows that span the customer journey, or build your own custom ones. The workflow builder is intuitive—just drag and drop conditions and actions wherever you want them.

The platform's marketing features also impressed me. It offers creative, professional, and fully customizable email templates with a user-friendly editor, A/B testing for your emails, and even an AI assistant to help you write them. You even get unlimited access to advanced features like segmentation, forms, and customer profiles even at the free level.

As the cherry on top, Omnisend offers 24/7 email and live chat support with its free plan, in addition to Omnisend Academy—an extensive library of well-produced demos and courses to help you get the most out of the app.

Its 130+ native integrations aside, Omnisend integrates with Zapier, so you can do things like automatically import subscribers from your favorite website builder or lead generation platform. Learn more about how to automate Omnisend, or start with one of these Zap templates.

Omnisend price: Offers a free plan; from $16/month for the Standard plan

Best marketing automation software for comprehensive AI

ActiveCampaign (Web, iOS, Android)

ActiveCampaign pros:

• Huge library of multilingual workflow automations

• AI functionality for email content generation, predictive email sending, and automation building

ActiveCampaign cons:

• Doesn't offer templates for form creation

• May be overkill for basic users

• Predictive AI sending is limited to two highest tiers

Most marketing automation software offers a jumping-off point for workflows via pre-built automations, but ActiveCampaign goes several steps further. First, its pre-built automation library is massive, covering industry-specific workflows as well as both internal and external communications like deal win updates and re-engagement campaigns.

Unlike any other app I tested, it also offers workflows in Portuguese, French, Italian, German, and Spanish. So if your organization markets to a global audience, ActiveCampaign has you covered.

Drawbacks to ActiveCampagin are few and far between—it's solid software with lots of features and a pretty fair pricing model. As a true CRM, similar to HubSpot, it's got quite a bit of functionality beyond marketing process automations that bridge sales functionality, so it's possible it'll have more features than you need as you scale up its tiers. 

No matter what you use ActiveCampaign for, its AI tools have become a huge perk. Like many other workflow products these days, it's got incorporated generative AI (starting at the Plus tier) to help you compose, summarize, and revise messages, plus AI-powered predictive sending (available only at the Pro tier, which is a bit high compared to some competitors). On the flip side, it also offers AI-powered automation building at all plan levels, which is pretty impressive. Using ActiveCampaign's chatbot, all you've got to do is describe the workflow you want to build, and it'll do the rest.

Thanks to ActiveCampaign's Zapier integration, you can automate tasks like updating contacts based on activity in your appointment scheduling platform or payment processing system. Learn more about how to automate ActiveCampaign, or get started with one of these pre-made workflows.

ActiveCampaign price: From $15/month, billed annually, for the Starter plan

Best marketing automation software for user-friendliness

Klaviyo (Web, iOS, Android)

Klaviyo pros:

• Large library of high-quality, customizable templates

• Good price-to-value

Klaviyo cons:

• Relatively few workflow options

• Somewhat eCommerce-focused

If there's one app on this list that wins the "drag-and-drop" award, it's Klaviyo. Nearly everything, from workflows to dashboards to forms, can all be created and customized by dragging elements around wherever you want them to go. At least in my experience, this flexibility lends to a really positive user experience.

The interface is also very clean—not incredibly feature-rich like HubSpot, but also not overly simple or lacking in any tools I'd want in marketing automation software.

The platform also provides several jumping-off points for workflows—use a pre-built option to prevent lost sales, nurture subscribers, build customer loyalty, remind customers to purchase, encourage repeat purchases, update customers on their order status, and more.

While it's plenty useful for just about any marketing workflow need, eCommerce users will probably get the most bang for their buck with Klaviyo. Account creation prompts a Shopify integration, with multiple other eCommerce platform options as alternatives. You can still create everything from forms to workflows to reports for non-eCommerce-specific needs, so I wouldn't necessarily count it off if you're, say, a SaaS company. But eCommerce users will have extra love for incorporating their campaigns and workflows into their sales sites.

Zapier is among Klaviyo's more than 300 integrations. Pair Klaviyo with Zapier to do things like create subscribers from website form submissions or add contacts to your customer list in your favorite PPC platform. Read more about how to automate Klaviyo, or try one of the following pre-built templates.

Klaviyo price: Offers a free plan; from $20/month for the Email plan

Best marketing automation software for powerful workflow automations

Customer.io (Web)

Customer.io pros:

• Automates a wide variety of marketing channels

• Customizable—you can use as much or as little code as you'd like to customize messages, and you can use Liquid to personalize messages

• Custom object creator helps customize automations

Customer.io cons:

• Relatively expensive

A lot of marketing apps market themselves as automation-centric when really they're just simple CRMs with relatively weak automation features. But Customer.io is unabashedly a marketing automation point solution, and it fulfills this use case very well.

I could automate email, SMS, Slack, push notifications to apps, Twilio, and more—covering the most marketing channels of any app I tested. The workflow builder allows you to create webhooks, multi-split branches for customer journeys, and more. I also found this workflow builder very easy to use, allowing you to drag and drop actions and triggers into your builder and even save workflow templates.

To help users create the most bespoke automations possible, just about every feature on Customer.io's dashboard can be integrated into workflows. You can build newsletters and messaging campaigns within its intuitive CMS or create high-performing, brand-specific emails using its transactional messaging API. You can add the usual CRM elements like people, audience segments, and imported data fields or create your own custom objects like events, classes, and accounts that fit right into your automated workflows.

Another feature of the app that impressed me was its A/B testing capabilities—you can simultaneously test up to eight variations of a newsletter to identify exactly what's working and what isn't.

Customer.io also integrates with Zapier, allowing you to automatically capture leads from sources like landing pages and social media. Learn more about how to automate Customer.io, or get started with one of these pre-made workflows.

Customer.io price: From $100/month for the Essentials plan

Best marketing automation software for integrated AI

Ortto (Web)

Ortto pros:

• Extensive user activity tracking and reporting

• User-friendly and offers accessible support

• New capture widget allows you to automate tons of lead acquisition approaches

Ortto cons:

• Expensive

Ortto was among the most fun premium marketing automation solutions I tested. Automating SMS and email campaigns via Journeys is user-friendly and takes place on a colorful and whimsical interface. This workflow builder also comes with revision history, so if you make a mistake, you can go back in time to restore a previous version of your Journey. 

The most impressive part of Ortto, however, is its reporting and analytics. The platform tracks nearly every user behavior. Specifically, it comes equipped with over 60 preset activities like email opens, reactions to widgets, and trial terminations, and even allows you to create your own custom "activities" to track. You can even pick from a bunch of new capture widgets or create your own from scratch so you can work modular lead-capture approaches into your automated workflows.

These workflows are highly detailed. You can set customer touchpoints on highly specific (or, equally usefully, highly general) touchpoints like new trial activations by user plan, setup wizard completion, and journey completion. Ortto has also been working AI into its mix with extremely useful generative AI tools and insights. For example, you can see in real time what your subject line's open rate likelihood is based on predictive Ortto analytics. If it's not so promising, it'll suggest alternatives Ortto's proprietary AI has crafted to be even more effective.

You can then use the app's Reports tab to analyze customer engagement, revenue attribution, and even the best time to send a message. You can also create custom dashboards using drag-and-drop (my favorite) that reflect progress toward shared goals.

Try connecting Ortto with Zapier to do things like automating data imports from your spreadsheet apps and automatically creating records for subscribers in your other marketing platforms. Here are a few pre-made workflows to get you started.

Ortto price: From $509/month for the Professional plan

Best marketing automation software for email

Mailchimp (Web, iOS, Android)

Mailchimp pros:

• Functional free plan

• Can be used to create, manage, and automate multiple content formats

• Integrates with other apps for automating email across customer acquisition channels

Mailchimp cons:

• Pricing scales by number of contacts

• Can be just as expensive as CRMs with similar automation tools

You might think of Mailchimp purely as a basic email newsletter platform, but it checks all the boxes to be considered marketing automation software. While its focus is still decidedly on email marketing, it's also got the automation chops, content management tools, reporting capabilities, and lead tracking features to approach light-use CRM-style functionality.

Even at the free level, users can access Mailchimp's Classic Automation Builder. The shiny new Customer Journey Builder is available at the Essentials tier, offering perks like recommended automations and the ability to integrate data from third-party apps. Multi-step automations only open up at the Standard tier, which does put a pretty noticeable handcuff on sequence complexity for the two lowest tiers.

The Customer Journey Builder itself is really intuitive (though not drag-and-drop). Just click the touchpoints to open up actions like sending new emails and texts, scheduling messages, initiating Google Analytics tracking, adjusting tags, and changing acquisition channels. You can even integrate other apps in your sales funnel like Shopify and Facebook ads to grow your trigger conditions and start new customer journeys at the point of sale or ad engagement. 

Mailchimp is clearly invested in becoming a more general-purpose automation tool. You can even use the platform to build websites, create digital assets with an AI creation wizard (more on that in our Mailchimp vs. ConvertKit post), manage creative assets, and design forms and surveys. 

As a general-purpose marketing tool, Mailchimp still isn't as modular as higher-end marketing automation tools. It still pretty clearly leans toward email automation, and many of its automation triggers are dedicated to messaging. But there's a usefulness in its relative simplicity. It's easy to pick up and start using, is perfectly designed to make lead management more actionable with messaging campaigns, and integrates with many of the top marketing tools to grow its functionality. 

To do even more with Mailchimp, integrate it with Zapier, so you can automate all your email marketing tasks. Learn more about automating Mailchimp with Zapier, or try one of these pre-built workflows.

Mailchimp pricing: Free for up to 500 contacts; scales by number of contacts starting at $13/month for Essentials

Building a marketing campaign machine

When choosing marketing automation software, it's ok to be picky. This will be your go-to tool for your marketing campaigns, ensuring they successfully generate and nurture leads without requiring your team's constant involvement. Once set up, it should do the heavy lifting for you so that you can focus on higher-level strategy.

But even powerful tools like these need some love from other software your business uses, whether that be a separate CRM, customer service solution, CMS, what have you. If your favorite marketing automation tool doesn't natively integrate with these, Zapier can help you connect these tools to fully automate your marketing process.

Related reading:

• Email marketing ideas to use for your next campaign

• The best digital marketing tools

• Free marketing calendar templates to boost your strategy

• HubSpot vs. Pardot: Which is best?

• HubSpot vs. Marketo: Which should you use?

• The best campaign management software

• What is workflow orchestration? And how to get started

• What is revenue operations (RevOps)?

• Marketo vs. Pardot: Which is best?

This article was originally published in April 2022 by Chris Hawkins and has also had contributions from Bryce Emley. The most recent update was in July 2024.