Marketing automation software is improving the way marketers strategize and implement their marketing campaigns.
With 80 percent of marketing automation users seeing an increase in the number of leads, and 77 percent seeing an increase in conversions, the benefits are undeniable. (Invesp)
Marketing automation software reduces the time spent on marketing tasks by automating processes such as email marketing, lead generation and sales engagement. Marketing automation improves close rates with timely and relevant engagement, and measures campaigns to optimize, justify and prioritize initiatives. Marketing automation software also acts as a central database for all marketers to collaborate, facilitating seamless CRM software integration.
The products listed above span two categories on G2. Categories sampled include marketing automation software and email marketing software. These products alone have more than 14,800 validated user reviews on G2 as of March 6, 2019. They only represent a small portion of the more than 240 marketing automation offerings listed on our platform. Whenever possible, the products are ranked by user satisfaction score from an in-depth analysis of the best marketing automation software.
The list we’ve outlined below includes our top email marketing and marketing automation software with free offerings. They may only support one user or one project, but they’re truly free offerings. Scaling, however, will often require full investment.
For each product we provide:
For products with G2 verified user reviews, we have included:
Product reviews and G2 star ratings were updated as of March 14, 2019
Product Name: HubSpot
G2 Star Rating: 4.4 out of 5.0 stars
Total Number of Reviews: 3,620
HubSpot offers a variety of tools that are completely free for businesses. These tools include CRM and marketing, sales, and service hubs. These all include basic versions that are completely free.
HubSpot helps track and measure marketing and sales analytics that can help your marketing and sales teams with cold calls, email blasting, traditional advertising, and outbound and inbound marketing.
Image courtesy of HubSpot
“Marketing automation is the primary purpose of my HubSpot use. HubSpot has been critical in enabling my clients to create emails quickly, sort email list effectively, and manage workflows comfortably. The free CRM alone offers many benefits, but the additional marketing, sales, and service tools enable companies of all sizes to increase their marketing efforts without the need for constant updates and individual emails.”
— HubSpot review by Casey H
“Sometimes, when there is a problem with the platform or some tools on it, the help center isn't so fast to reply or give answers. Ticket solving could really be better and faster. It has also been challenging to compare the different results between Google Analytics and HubSpot. Often, the results for campaigns or visits vary and it is a bit confusing.”
— HubSpot review by Ana B.
“If you are considering it for a startup company or small business, you should look no further: This is the best solution out there! I have tested 10-plus similar solutions and none of them came close to this one when it comes to features and integration options.”
— HubSpot review by Jens S.
Product Name: Drip
G2 Crowd Star Rating: 4.4 out of 5.0 stars
Total Number of Reviews:221
Drip offers a full set of email and multichannel automated marketing tools. Its free marketing automation tool includes email builders, automation workflows and mass email marketing campaigns.
In addition to tools for marketing automation, Drip also offers personalization and tracking tools that help marketers bring more relevant content to their audiences.
Image courtesy of Drip
“Drip does automation very well. It is one of the reasons I switched to using it from my previous email service, which only had basic automation tasks. With Drip, the automation workflows are shown visually, so it is much easier to see how your conditional statements will affect the different parts of your campaign. Drip also integrates with a lot of third-party solutions, which makes it easier for me to take my user data and apply it to other tools and services to make the customer experience even better. You can also do very complex conditional statements within your email messages. Finally, I like that everything is based around tagging, so your users can be given various tags, which are the most flexible way to segment your list.”
— Drip review by Chad F.
“Sometimes it's hard to navigate between different parts of the app, and it can be a bit slow to use because most changes involve a full page reload to refresh stuff. Not really a big deal, as it's not an app you need to spend long periods of time in. Once you find your way around the various parts, it's not a problem at all.”
— Drip review by Cam L.
“If you need simple workflows, ease of integrating with your website and a simple tool that does advanced automation, Drip will be your friend!”
— Drip review by Justine P.
Product Name: Mailchimp
G2 Star Rating: 4.3 out of 5.0 stars
Total Number of Reviews: 10,317
Mailchimp is an email marketing automation tool that offers users a free version of its platform. The free version allows users to test the waters with email campaigns and a full set of marketing automation tools.
Mailchimp’s marketing automation tools help users reach their customers with product recommendations, welcome emails, order notifications and product follow-up. This boosts both sales and customer engagement. If you're new to Mailchimp, the interface may seem a little overwhelming at first. In that case, you can take a look at some alternatives.
Image courtesy of Mailchimp
“I love your automation, since we can have a list of contacts to send a series of emails periodically, and follow the purchases and clicks, so they automatically send similar emails automatically to help us sell many more products. We can also do market studies, knowing what our clients like the most with a single glance at the statistics given by Mailchimp.”
— Mailchimp review by Marian C.
“The platform limits A/B testing to three variations, which limits the amount of testing that can be done on an individual campaign. I also wish the segment builder allowed you to insert more than five dimensions per segment so I could set up better regional segments to target users based on weather patterns, regional subcultures, etc.”
— Mailchimp review by Trevor A.
Probably the best starter email automation platform you can play around with if you're just starting out.”
— Mailchimp review by Ryan K.
Product Name: Zoho Campaigns
G2 Star Rating: 4.2 out of 5.0 stars
Total Number of Reviews: 232
Zoho Campaigns is another marketing automation software that helps users with their email marketing campaigns. Its forever free plan allows users to send up to 12,000 emails a month up to 2,000 subscribers. This is a great offering for users who want to see the benefits of marketing automation before diving in and committing to a paid pricing plan.
One of the great tools that it offers is a workflow tool that helps with enhanced audience targeting and personalization. With this tool you can segment mailing lists based on the information you have about your contacts, and engaging them with relevant content.
Image courtesy of Zoho Campaigns
“Zoho Campaigns is an email marketing software for small- to midsize businesses to automate entire marketing process — from managing your email campaigns to maintaining your mailing lists. Thanks to the integration with Zoho CRM, you will have the right info when you need it. Engage with your customers anywhere with social campaigns on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.”
— Zoho Campaigns review by Raghu N.
“Some of the automation (workflows) are not as intuitive for a beginner (like me). Would like to see more examples in the resource library of how certain types of automated campaigns are built.”
—Zoho Campaigns review by Brian C.
“If you would like to double or triple the results on your email campaigns, Zoho is the best tool. The segmentation based on the behaviour of your database and workflow automation is unique in the market.
“The geolocation tracker is incredible, too. You can see where people are when they open your emails, helping you to see if your database is targeted to the location you want and which locations are more active.”
— Zoho Campaigns review by Mili P.
Product Name: SendinBlue
G2 Star Rating: 4.3 out of 5.0 stars
Total Number of Reviews: 341
Image courtesy of SendinBlue
SendinBlue is a great marketing automation software for users that are just getting started in marketing automation. Its free plan allows up to 300 emails per day and phone and email support to help you get started.
Similar to Zoho Campaigns, SendinBlue allows users to build automation workflows that are customizable based on the use case. Users can automated lead generation, email marketing,and much more.
“I love how easy it is to get started with SendinBlue and that I could easily delete contacts from my list when adding test contacts via the API. The Automation features are really powerful and the visual builder makes it dead easy for anyone to understand and make changes. Support is also pretty good. Highly recommended.”
— SendinBlue review by Arpit C.
“Platform doesn’t have features like A/B testing, and reports could be more robust. For example, it could have email heat maps. Also, it doesn't have integrations with the most important CRMs, which makes it difficult to know the real performance of the campaigns. Using the API may be tricky and will always require programming knowledge. The alternative that they provide is difficult to customize and not always work as expected. Those forms don't integrate well with CRMs.”
— SendinBlue review by Esteban V.
“If you need a robust free email tool with a great email layout builder and automation, this is for you. SendinBlue makes it incredibly easy to get started with email marketing, especially if you're an indie artist or writer trying to get started with your personal brand.”
— SendinBlue review by a user in mental health care
Product Name: SendPulse
G2 Star Rating: 4.7 out of 5.0 stars
Total Number of Reviews: 68
SendPulse is a great marketing automation software for email marketers. Its free version gives users up to 2,500 subscribers and allows for A/B testing on your email marketing campaigns. Users can upgrade to have multiple automation channels, such as automated SMS and web push notifications.
Image courtesy of SendPulse
"The ease of the interface — I love the formatting created for me but love the flexibility to change what I need to make my emails relevant to my customers.”
— SendPulse review by Administrator in Music
“Similar to other mailing list managers, the cost can escalate as soon as your list grows. This is a general problem and not exclusive to SendPulse.”
— SendPulse review by Jeffrey T.
“Spend the time to learn Automations. It won't take long and makes the product very powerful.”
— SendPulse review by Darren B.
Product Name: Vbout
G2 Star Rating: 4.8 out of 5.0 stars
Total Number of Reviews: 65
VBOUT is a great marketing automation software for users that want more than just email automation. Aside from automation tools, VBOUT also offers A/B testing, lead management, email marketing, social media management and automation analytics. All of these features are included in the free 14-day trial option.
Image courtesy of Vbout
“The software is incredibly powerful for the price. VBout is bringing high-end marketing automation to the masses with their latest release. It's easy to use, but complex automations can be made and sorting through the logic workflows doesn't take long to grasp. When you need help, their support team is on it in a jiffy. I've been in the internet marketing space for over 22 years, and I have NEVER come across support like the VBout team. Every company can take a page from their playbook!”
— VBout review by Joe M.
“Features such as webhooks lack a customization freedom that email automation and landing page builders enjoy. However, that's one small dislike in a sea of likes.”
— VBout review by Roman M.
“Excellent way to get into marketing automation with a robust software and a team that is not only knowledgeable, but there when you need support to achieve your goals.”
— VBout review by Stela N.
Product Name: Mautic
G2 Star Rating: 3.9 out of 5.0 stars
Total number of reviews: 25
Mautic is an open-source marketing automation software. It has a self-hosted software on its website which is completely free to use and comes with features such as 5,000 contacts and 1,000 emails per day.
Mautic’s open-source marketing automation gives users the capability to customize workflows based on their needs. Their goal is simple: “You can finally use a marketing automation platform the way your business runs instead of changing your business to fit a piece of software.”
Image courtesy of Mautic
“The software has everything you need to make full marketing automation. You can create contacts, segment them, create landing pages, forms, email campaigns and so on. The campaign builder is very good and intuitive. I saw in Mautic a real player in the competitive world of marketing automation providers.”
— Mautic review by Mario D.
“As open-source solution, it takes some time to figure out the little tricks to set up and update Mautic. I myself have some technical knowledge about web development, so this is not an issue. For other marketing people this could be a challenge. Of course they can use the cloud version. Documentation is an area to improve for Mautic, especially for new features.”
— Mautic review by Max T.
“If you are looking for feature rich-marketing automation at very affordable cost, Mautic is a best option to go with. You can easily automate lead generation.”
— Mautic review by an administrator in computer software
Whether you’re mapping out your next email campaign or producing captivating web content, marketing automation software can help you along the way.
Before committing to a specific marketing automation software, make sure to evaluate your business needs and take advantage of some free automation tools in order to see what works best.
Ready to learn more? Check out our article on email marketing best practices to elevate your next campaign.
* Please note: Reviews may have been edited for spelling and grammar.
**Editor's note: This post was updated on May 14, 2019.
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