Best Marketing Automation Systems review sites

There are many Marketing Automation Systems available, according Scott Brinker Marketing Technology Landscape 2016 there are more than 220. And this figure is steadily increasing. Daily we see new entrants! Some are very exciting focusing more on bots, AI and messenger. In this article I want to discuss which review sites are the best and how they can help you to find the best Marketing Automation Platform.

Review sites with most Marketing Automation Systems

Analyzing various review sites for B2B software I found the following 5 having the most reviews for Marketing Automation Systems. Of all the 5 review sites, Gartner owns 2, Capterra and GetApp. In the following table you can see the 5 review directories that hold the most information about Marketing Automation Software:

Both Capterra and GetApp have even more vendors than Scott Brinker mentioned in his report. Reviewing their vendors we understand that their definition of Marketing Automation is broader than how we typically define it in the market.

G2Crowd :

G2Crowd provides a good overview of 107 Marketing Automation Systems, including features and pricing groups. They also offer special reports like the Top 10 Marketing Automation Software e.g. for Small Business with a spider diagram. The best overview graph I consider Market Presence vs. Satisfaction, which is a good starting point for any evaluation.

Capterra

Capterra is a great review site for making a first decision based on features and product rating. They also offer special reports like the Top 20 most popular, which is based on 40% customers, 40% users and 20% social.

trustradius

The review site trustradius makes it easy to compare capabilities side-by-side. Maybe the best of this review site is a long report covering many specialists opinion. It is a very complete report and probably the best free report (login needed) about Marketing Automation Systems. It includes Top 10 and Trustmaps for different company sizes :

The thing I do not like so much is the research frequency as the second axe. Are researches on trustradius really representing the market?

GetApp

GetApp is most advanced for search features and comparing the software. It even includes geography, pricing models, industries and integrations.  With only two clicks, GetApp provides a list with recommended Marketing Automation Systems. However, the data in there is not 100% correct, e.g. MailChimp is great in A/B testing but does not provide web analytics!

SelectHub

Selecthub offers another approach,  focusing more on supporting and documenting the decision. It provides less open information for self service. They have a well-defined process to make the decision transparent and have built-in best practices. They offer a leaderboard featuring best in class software, top solutions and market leaders.

Marketing Automation review dashboard: stars and number of reviews

Taking the time to gather information from the 5 review directories you can see that a reasonable amount of the information is no longer current, e.g. Hubspot A/B testing is no longer limited to enterprise level only. Even the review directories have not been always updated yet. We think that an overview with the number of reviews and the average stars is of general interest. This combination lets you know how many users already have reviewed the systems and how satisfied they were. Also we can see which review directory has most reviews.

Best Marketing Automation review sites overview includes Hubspot, Marketo, Pardot, Act-On, Infusionsoft, SharpSpring and ActiveCampaign.  More to follow in the future. Make sure you sign up on the form below.

 

What is the best Marketing Automation Software

In my opinion it always depends on the requirements and the team who works with a software. With the 5 platforms and the stars given in over 10’000 reviews the best rating has first ActiveCampaign and second Hubspot. Both can be run by a single person, which is not the case for Marketo and Oracle Eloqua.

Who is doing reviews?

Since I already use 10 Marketing Automation systems I was also sometimes asked by vendors to make reviews. It would be important to know which systems pushed their users for reviews and how much they paid.
In smaller companies, it might be easier to get reviews than in large enterprises where a boss might not be very happy if a review is not positive. This makes me wonder if a small company solutions and enterprise solutions should be compared in the same overview at all. The same for B2B and B2C.

What do we learn from review sites information?

Every review site has its strong points. Depending on the actual customer needs one or the other might be helpful to make a better decision. E.g. when features are searched GetApp is the best choice, if pricing details need to be compared G2Crowd is an excellent source.

Looking at single reviews we find many interesting details, which should be reviewed by a Marketing Automation expert, before the purchase.

Importance of reviews: Critical comment

Since the market is very dynamic and most Marketing Automation Platform  vendors continously invest in new features and improve existing ones, many reviews are no longer valid at the time buyers are making their decision. Also, each company has different business needs and priorities. However, reviews are indeed a great source of information, but it needs to be judged for the specific evaluation case. Also, it needs to be checked if the information on these websites are correct. Therefore, it is worthwhile to contact a Marketing Automation expert to verify the choice of the software.

Updated market overview

We continue to make the Marketing Automation review dashboard better and provide an updated report on our website:
www.marketingautomationcomparison.org/report

 

If you want to learn more about me, my website for the DACH region is www.marketingautomation.tech

(sorry, only in German)