You can read more about HubSpot vs Marketo here: https://www.sixandflow.com/marketing-...

If you’re in the upper end of the SME market or Enterprise space and considering a marketing automation platform, it’s highly likely you’ve got it narrowed down to one of two alternatives: HubSpot & Marketo.

It’s a difficult choice as it’s a large investment financially and in the people hours you’ll need to roll it out.

Both HubSpot and Marketo are well known in the space and both have their strengths.

We are an unashamed HubSpot partner. We love the tool but we do work with clients across a multitude of platforms, including Marketo.

But, hand on heart, we definitely have some bias here.

Until recently, there was a fairly clear line between HubSpot and Marketo.

HubSpot played well in the Enterprise space - but it’s core strengths were always in the SME market.

If you needed complexity at scale, then Marketo was probably the right call for you.

One of the differences I’ve always found interesting is the positioning of both HubSpot and Marketo.

HubSpot, with the multiple hubs across marketing, sales and service has always felt like a more intrinsic approach to business growth. It’s also more aligned with my views on how growth should be fostered. Everything aligned and feeding into each other.

Marketo on the flip side is very much focussed on marketing and reliant on other platforms within the business (such as Salesforce or Dynamics). That’s great for customisation but doesn’t help with the overall learning curve and team adoption.

What has been interesting to see over the last 12-months is a renewed focus from HubSpot on catering for the Enterprise market.
It started heavily with the sales side and now we’re seeing more and more enterprise-level features roll out across the marketing tools.

Things like partitioning, revenue attribution and ABM tools.

What’s great is we now have some real feature parity at the enterprise level between HubSpot and Marketo.

If you look at G2 (a third-party review site) HubSpot is cleaning up on Enterprise awards. Things like best usability, results and support.

For me, user adoption is a key part of rolling out any SaaS platform.

HubSpot has always been the easier of the two platforms to use and having a combined toolset means there’s less for people to learn.

Conversely, Marketo is only part of the puzzle. To be truly useful, you need to couple it with something like Dynamics or Salesforce - which is double the adoption. Twice the learning curve. And an increase in cost.

Having a single, easy to use platform that spans your business enables you to spend less time on managing those systems and more time focussed on activity that will impact your bottom line. The actual marketing stuff.

While HubSpot’s early days were focussed on the SME market, that actually plays very, very well for its Enterprise offering.

HubSpot’s market share is roughly 23%. Marketo’s is closer to 3%. When you’re thinking about employing people to use the platform - it’s far more likely they’re going to have experience with HubSpot.

It’s also important to look at the trajectory of both companies.

If you’re choosing a partner, or a SaaS platform that you’re hoping will form the backbone of your growth over the next 5-10 years - you want to make sure you’re aligned.

HubSpot still has the original founders in play. Both Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah are heavily involved, still leading the business and passionate about growing the company and creating an ecosystem that is centred around a ‘platform’ mentality.

At HubSpot partner day, it was very clear that the focus is on R&D. Which is exciting to see and important to know if you’re about to back a single horse.

Compare that to Marketo - both the Co-Founders left last year and the new CEO left only a few months ago. While that doesn’t necessarily say there’s turbulence in the company, it does say to me there’s a state of flux.

For me, the landscape has definitely shifted.

There are still areas that each platform edges out the other, but as a whole, with feature parity, usability, company trajectory and overall market share all playing in HubSpot hands, I know where I’d make my platform bet.

You can read more about HubSpot vs Marketo here: https://www.sixandflow.com/marketing-...