10 Best Marketing Automation Software of 2026

ActiveCampaign is the value pick for teams that want serious automation without HubSpot's seat pricing. Starter costs $15 per month billed yearly for 1,000 contacts and already includes multi-step marketing automation, AI-powered automation and campaign builders and more than 250 email templates. The plans that matter for this list sit higher up. Plus at $49 adds cross-channel marketing, landing pages and access to the Enhanced CRM add-on with pipelines and sales engagement. Pro at $79 adds attribution and conversion tracking, predictive sending and conditional content, with three user seats. Enterprise at $145 adds custom objects and premium CRM integrations like Salesforce. That structure means a team running Salesforce or wanting proper campaign attribution will pay well above the headline price. For a small team using ActiveCampaign as both its automation tool and its light CRM, the cost stays reasonable as the list grows.

HubSpot Marketing Hub is the strongest fit for the brief of this list because the CRM is not an integration, it is the same database. Lead scores can be built on fit, engagement or both, inactive leads lose points through score decay, and the score appears on the contact record a sales rep opens. HubSpot also offers AI-assisted engagement scoring that studies leads that converted and suggests scoring rules. Nurture work runs through AI-powered emails and a Nurture Agent that rewrites each email for the contact receiving it. Reporting covers dashboards, multi-touch attribution and customer path analytics. The catch is cost at scale. Starter lists at $20 per seat per month, with a limited-time $10 price for new customers, while Professional starts at $100 per seat and Enterprise at $175. Budget for the tier your scoring and reporting needs actually require before you commit.

Brevo is the cheapest serious route into marketing automation on this list. The Free plan stores up to 100,000 contacts, sends 300 emails a day and includes multi-channel automation for up to 2,000 contacts, plus free sales features. Starter begins at $9 per month, and Standard, from $18 per month, is the plan most teams on this list will want: automation for unlimited contacts, A/B testing, AI send time optimization and advanced reports. The gap is lead scoring. Contact scoring, AI segmentation and the analytics studio with dashboards sit on Professional, which starts at $499 per month, a large jump from Standard. Brevo's own CRM comes through sales packages that are add-ons on paid plans. For a small team that needs nurture sequences and campaign reports now and scoring later, Brevo is hard to beat on price.

Zoho Marketing Automation is the natural choice for a company that already runs Zoho CRM, and it holds up well on its own merits. Standard covers basic workflows, signup forms, website behavior tracking and SMS, social and WhatsApp marketing, with 10 users and unlimited emails. Professional is where this list's angle is met: complete contact management with scoring, tags and life cycle stages, an advanced workflow builder with reports, contact path tracing, landing pages and email A/B testing, for 15 users. Enterprise adds lead attribution, X-RAY tracing in workflows and webhooks for 25 users. Every plan includes 1,000,000 non-marketing contacts, which helps teams that store many CRM records they do not email. The editor and reports feel less polished than HubSpot's, and attribution waits for the top plan. We could not confirm a USD price from our location, so check the pricing page for your contact count.

Ortto is the most interesting option on this list for SaaS teams that already run Salesforce. Its scoring tools let you build custom scores from demographic, firmographic and behavioral data, including product-qualified lead scores built from signups, trials and in-app actions. Scores degrade automatically over a half-life period, so old activity stops inflating a lead's rating. Scores can start workflows, assign leads or create audiences, and the Salesforce integration syncs actions, objects and activities both ways, with round-robin lead assignment and Slack or email notifications when a lead is assigned. Channels include email, SMS, push, in-app messages and live chat. The weak point for buyers is price transparency: Ortto's pricing page was not available when we checked, so you will need a quote. Teams outside SaaS may find its product-usage focus less useful than a general marketing suite.

Klaviyo earns its place for B2C brands, though it answers a different question than the B2B tools above it. Its data model is the customer profile, fed by store and app activity, and its reports focus on revenue: built-in dashboards, campaign performance metrics and revenue attribution for campaigns. Flows handle nurture work such as abandoned cart and post-purchase messages, and Composer, Klaviyo's AI layer, can analyze performance, schedule recurring tasks and create campaigns and flows. A helpdesk shares the same profile between service and marketing. The free plan covers 250 active profiles and 500 email sends a month, and paid email plans start at $20 per month. What Klaviyo lacks for this list is the classic B2B kit: lead scoring tied to a sales CRM and handoff to reps. Pick it if your buyers check out online, not if they book demos.

Account Engagement is the obvious pick for B2B companies whose sales team already lives in Salesforce. Every edition includes Marketing Cloud Next, and the entry Growth+ edition covers lead nurturing and scoring with Agentforce campaign creation. Plus+ adds AI-powered scoring, account-based marketing and B2B Marketing Analytics. Advanced+ adds business units and a dedicated IP address, and Premium+ includes all capabilities with Premier Success support. The price is the barrier. Growth+ costs $1,250 per org per month billed annually, Plus+ $2,750, Advanced+ $4,400 and Premium+ $15,000, and every monthly product requires an annual contract. Ease of use scores low because getting value usually takes a Salesforce admin or partner to set up fields, scoring rules and sync. For a company already paying for Sales Cloud and wanting marketing data on the same objects, those costs are easier to justify.

Marketo Engage has the most complete feature set on this list, and the steepest climb to use it. Every package, from Growth to Ultimate, includes a lead and account database, native CRM integration with Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics and Veeva, campaign automation, intelligent cross-channel nurturing, and scoring, routing and alerts. Higher packages add attribution and ROI dashboards, predictive content, target account management and predictive audiences, and Ultimate includes Marketo Measure for premium attribution and advanced analytics of customer paths. Adobe publishes no prices; every package says Get pricing, so you will be negotiating a contract. Growth allows 10 users and 20,000 API calls a day, higher packages 25 users and 50,000 calls. Marketo rewards teams with dedicated marketing operations staff who will build scoring models and attribution properly. For smaller teams the setup effort and quote-only pricing are hard to justify.

Mailchimp is the easiest tool here for a small business that has outgrown one-off newsletters, but it is the weakest fit for this list's angle. The Standard plan, which Mailchimp offers on a 14-day trial, adds enhanced automations, generative AI features, custom-coded templates, customizable popup forms and insights into audience growth and conversion funnels. Free and Essentials plans sit below it and Premium above. What it does not offer is the B2B kit: CRM-linked lead scoring, sales handoff and pipeline reporting that HubSpot, ActiveCampaign and Zoho provide. Pricing is set by contact count, overages apply when contact or send limits are exceeded, and the page we fetched showed promotional figures that we could not tie to a single clean USD quote, so we left the price pending. Pick Mailchimp for simple, reliable nurture emails, not for scoring leads for a sales team.

Customer.io is built for lifecycle and product marketers rather than B2B lead management, which is why it sits last on this list despite a capable feature set. Essentials starts at $100 per month billed monthly for 5,000 profiles and includes 1 million emails a month, a visual workflow builder, cross-channel campaign automation, send-time optimization, API-triggered broadcasts and custom objects with two object types. Push, in-app messages, WhatsApp and webhooks are included, and an AI Agent handles core tasks. Premium starts at $1,000 per month billed yearly and adds custom volumes, 10 object types and HIPAA compliance. The trade-off is that you get the most out of Customer.io only when developers send it event data, and it has no sales CRM or classic lead scoring for handing leads to reps. Startups that raised under $10M can apply for 12 months free.