We Tested 10 Best Marketing Automation Platforms — Here's What's Actually Worth It

Marketing automation software helps businesses automate repetitive marketing tasks like email campaigns, lead nurturing, social media posting, and ad management. These platforms use triggers, conditions, and actions to create automated workflows that deliver the right message to the right person at the right time — without manual intervention for each interaction.

Pricing varies widely based on features, contact volume, and whether you need multi-channel capabilities. Under the hood, most platforms use contact-based pricing tiers that scale as your list grows. Budget-friendly options like Brevo start at $9/mo with unlimited contacts (they charge by email volume instead), while ActiveCampaign starts at $15/mo for 1,000 contacts on its Starter plan. Mailchimp Essentials begins at $13/mo for 500 contacts. Mid-range platforms like GetResponse offer automation features from $59/mo. Enterprise solutions command significantly higher budgets: HubSpot Marketing Hub Professional starts at $800/mo for 2,000 contacts, Marketo Engage uses custom pricing starting around $895/mo, and Pardot (Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement) begins at $1,250/mo. Several platforms offer free plans with limited features — HubSpot, Mailchimp, Brevo, Klaviyo (up to 250 contacts), and GetResponse (up to 500 contacts). One important consideration: watch for per-contact cost scaling. For example, HubSpot at 10,000 contacts on its Starter plan can reach approximately $390/mo, while Mailchimp at the same volume costs around $100/mo on Essentials.

For small businesses in 2026, the right platform depends on your technical resources and automation complexity needs. Mailchimp remains the easiest entry point — its drag-and-drop Customer Journey Builder and AI Creative Assistant make it accessible for non-technical teams, with a free plan covering up to 500 contacts. Brevo offers the best value proposition with unlimited contacts on every plan (pricing is based on email volume starting at $9/mo), plus built-in SMS, WhatsApp, and live chat. If you need more sophisticated automation workflows with conditional logic, branching, and lead scoring, ActiveCampaign delivers enterprise-grade automation starting at just $15/mo — and with their 2025 launch of Active Intelligence (AI-powered campaign generation and optimization), the gap between ActiveCampaign and pricier enterprise tools has narrowed further. For e-commerce small businesses on Shopify, Klaviyo is the standout choice with a free plan for up to 250 contacts and revenue-focused analytics built specifically for online stores. GetResponse is worth considering if you want an all-in-one solution bundling email, automation, webinars, and landing pages from $19/mo.

Email marketing focuses on sending campaigns (newsletters, promotions, announcements) to subscriber lists. Marketing automation goes further by creating multi-step, triggered workflows that respond to user behavior across multiple channels. For example, marketing automation can send an email when someone visits a pricing page, follow up with an SMS if they don't open it, adjust their lead score based on engagement, and notify your sales team when they reach a threshold — all automatically.

The integration architecture between your marketing automation and CRM is one of the most critical technical decisions you will make. Several platforms now include built-in CRMs that eliminate the need for a separate tool: HubSpot offers the most comprehensive native CRM with deal pipelines, custom objects, and multi-touch attribution baked in. ActiveCampaign includes a capable CRM with AI-assisted deal prioritization and sales automation — particularly strong for small to mid-size sales teams. Brevo provides a lightweight CRM suitable for basic contact and pipeline management. For Salesforce-native organizations, Pardot (Marketing Cloud Account Engagement) delivers the tightest bi-directional CRM sync available — prospect data, engagement history, and Einstein AI scoring flow seamlessly between both systems. Platforms without built-in CRM — such as Klaviyo, Customer.io, and Drip — require integration with an external CRM. The good news is that most modern platforms support native integrations with Salesforce, Pipedrive, and HubSpot CRM (which has a robust free tier). Customer.io also integrates natively with modern data stacks like Segment, Snowflake, and BigQuery for teams using a CDP approach. The key requirement is ensuring real-time, bi-directional data flow so your sales team sees marketing engagement data and your automation workflows can trigger based on CRM pipeline changes.