If you're a small business, you may be happy to do your marketing in-house as cheaply as possible. However, as you grow, you will probably discover it becomes more challenging to do your marketing "on the cheap." Marketing can be highly time-consuming and challenging if you don't have the resources to have a sizable marketing team. Therefore, it doesn't take long before busy business owners and executives discover that paying for a few marketing automation platforms and tools can make life considerably more manageable.
Although the phrase "marketing automation platform" suggests something large and expensive, it doesn't necessarily have to be so. There are many different marketing types and channels, and you will find marketing automation platforms and tools to assist you with virtually any of these. You can find relatively cheap marketing tools to help you with just one channel, making them usable for even the smallest businesses. And you usually don't have to pay large sums up-front. Most modern marketing automation platforms use a SaaS model, with the software hosted in the cloud, and you subscribe to the software for a monthly fee. You generally don't have to pay to purchase the software outright.
Some of the most common types of marketing automation platforms include:
- All-in-one marketing automation platforms
- Email marketing automation
- Social media marketing automation
- Customer journey automation
- Advertising automation
- Referral marketing automation
- Pricing automation
Of course, you will also find products that will combine more than one of these automation types without being full-fledged all-in-one marketing automation platforms.
In this post, we look at a selection of quality marketing automation platforms. However, we haven't included specialist social media marketing platforms as we have written extensively about them previously, including our recently updated roundup on the Best Social Media Marketing Platforms.
Top Marketing Automation Platforms
1. Campaigner

Price: Pricing starts at $59 per month, which includes 5,000 marketing contacts. You have the option to increase to 25,000 contacts for $170 per month or 100,000 contacts for $649 per month.
Campaigner is one of the top email marketing platforms on the market, and for good reason. It is packed with features and tools that emphasize content personalization and sender reputation protection. Plus, since the platform is web-based, you just need an internet connection and an up-to-date browser to access it and get started with your campaigns, and you can do so from anywhere in the world.
Read More2. Brevo (formerly Sendinblue)

Price: Plans from $0 (for 300 emails/day) – $65/mo (for 20,000 emails/mo), plus a custom Enterprise plan for those with advanced needs. Prices for paid plans vary by monthly email volume.
Brevo is an all-in-one marketing automation platform with tools to help your email marketing, SMS marketing, chat, inbox, CRM, transactional email, signup forms, landing pages, and Facebook ads. However, full marketing automation is only available to users on its Premium and Enterprise plans.
Read More3. Omnisend

Price: Plans from $0 (250 contacts / 500 emails/mo) – $350/mo (20,000 contacts / unlimited emails). Can buy additional SMS credits.
Omnisend is an all-in-one eCommerce marketing platform designed to help you drive sales impact with powerful, eCommerce-tailored email and SMS marketing. It incorporates powerful automation workflows combining email and SMS. It includes a library of templates to make it easy to create professional, stunning emails without any coding. In addition, you can easily customize the emails to fit your brand, add products and dynamic discount codes and save them as presets for your subsequent campaigns.
Read More4. ActiveCampaign

Price: ActiveCampaign provides four pricing plans: Starter at $8/month (50% off for the first 3 months), Plus at $49/month, Pro at $79/month, and Enterprise at $145/month, each offering progressively more features and support.
ActiveCampaign lets you automate anything regardless of the size of your business. It automates email campaigns, 1:1 outreach and customer support, customer nurturing and engagement, and more. Its platform is specifically designed to make complex automation easy and seamless, enabling you to do more while working less.
Read More5. Trellis

Price: Trellis offers four pricing plans, tied to the annual revenue. Entrepreneur at $299/month, Growth at $999/month, and Professional at $1,499/month, all with additional sales tier fees. For businesses with annual revenue exceeding $10M, there’s a “Custom” option, and you’re advised to contact for specific pricing.
Trellis emerges as a robust marketing automation solution, notably excelling in the competitive domain of Walmart and Amazon eCommerce advertising. Recognizing the immense scope of online marketplaces, Trellis bestows eCommerce brands with the precision of actionable shopper analytics combined with paramount advertising automation capabilities.
Read More6. Convertkit

Price: Plan prices depend on how many email subscribers you have. They range from $0 (for up to 1,000 subscribers) to $2,599 (for Creator Pro with 400,000 subscribers). Larger creators can contact ConvertKit for custom prices. Automated funnels and sequences are only available on the Creator and Creator Pro plans. You can get two months free for annual payment.
ConvertKit offers a marketing platform targeting creators. It provides tools to help you grow your audience, foster your community, and earn a living online. It targets musicians, authors, podcasters, and coaches.
Read More7. Keap

Price: Plans from $79/mo (500 contacts) to $249/mo (2,500 contacts), with higher prices for firms with greater numbers of contacts. Discounts of up to 20% for annual payment. 14-day free trial.
Keap is the new incarnation of market leader Infusionsoft. It provides tools to assist with CRM, email, text messaging, landing pages, payments, etc. It emphasizes its sales and marketing automation which helps you capture and convert leads more efficiently, follow up and get paid faster, and consolidate your tools into one place.
Read More8. Mailchimp

Price: Various plans across Mailchimp’s Marketing Platform, Websites/Commerce, and Transactional Email. The Marketing Platform plans range from $0 (for up to 2,000 contacts, 10,000/mo email sends) to $500/mo (for 10,000 contacts, 150,000/mo email sends). Can have additional contacts and email sends for higher fees.
Mailchimp gained its reputation as an email marketing platform, offering a generous free plan for small businesses and beginning marketers. It has dramatically expanded its offerings since then, however. As a result, it is now a full-scale marketing platform.
You can now create emails, ads, landing pages, and more from within Mailchimp. In addition, its platform includes built-in audience management, creative tools, automation features, and more.
Read More9. GetResponse

Price: Plans from $0 (500 contacts and one landing page) to $119/mo (1,000 contacts, unlimited automations, 5 team members, and eCommerce features), with higher prices for firms with greater numbers of contacts. Discounts for 12-month and 24-month payments. 30-day free trial.
GetResponse is a powerful, simplified tool to help you send emails, create pages, and automate your marketing. It can help you with email marketing and has a website builder, marketing automation, and conversion funnels.
Read More10. Freshmarketer

Price: Plans range from $0 (100 marketing contacts) to $479 (10,000 marketing contacts), with prices increasing for additional marketing contacts). Other features are added to each of the three paid plans. There are also optional add-ons for conversion rate optimization, additional bot sessions, and a messaging agent.
Freshmarketer is part of the Freshworks range of products. You can use it to personalize your marketing with simple, powerful automation. It assists you in increasing multichannel engagement across email, SMS, WhatsApp, and chat.
Read More11. Emercury

Price: Plans range from $64/mo to $1400/mo for up to 2 million contacts. Custom plans apply if you have more significant needs.
Emercury is primarily an email marketing platform that marketers can use to create campaigns to reach, convert, and retain their customers. You can start your campaign with a specific lead behavior, which allows you to build a highly customizable response for almost any situation in your marketing.
Read More12. HubSpot

Price (For HubSpot Marketing): Plans range from $50/mo (1,000 marketing contacts) to $3,200/mo (10,000 marketing contacts). You can purchase additional marketing contacts on all plans. In addition, you can gain access to HubSpot Marketing features in the CRM Suite, which adds other HubSpot products. There is also a free plan.
HubSpot offers a single platform for marketing, sales CRM, customer service, CMS, and operations software. You can pick and choose which HubSpot tools you want.
Read More13. Marketo

Price: There are four plans, ranging from Jumpstart (core marketing email, segmentation, automation, and measurement) to Ultimate (the most complete and powerful experience, automation with premium attribution). Pricing differs based on your database size. You will need to contact their sales team for a custom quote.
Adobe Marketo Engage is now part of the Adobe Experience Cloud. It focuses on marketing automation, email marketing, lead management, and revenue attribution. It claims to be the world’s largest marketing automation platform that gets measurable results and keeps customers engaged and coming back.
Read More14. EngageBay

Price: Plans from $0 (500 Contacts) to $99.99/mo (unlimited contacts) – discounts for biennial or annual payment.
Engagebay describes itself as all-in-one CRM software. However, you can tailor your plans just to cover Marketing tools or CRM & Sales Bay tools. You need the Growth or Pro plans (of the All-in-one or Marketing options) to access specific marketing automation tools, although you gain access to Sales Automation with the Growth or Pro plans of the CRM & Sales Bay option.
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