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Independent comparison · Built from published vendor pricing · August 2026

The best marketing automation platform: five compared, one clear answer per row

GetResponse, ActiveCampaign, HubSpot, Keap and EngageBay — the five platforms whose workflows react to more than the inbox. Priced at your contact count, settled row by row, with every unpublished number marked. Just need email campaigns? That's the other aisle.

Already know which one? Tap it to personalize the page — or tap a few to narrow the table to just those.

Every price read from the vendor's own pricing page — 12 Aug 2026 for GetResponse & HubSpot, 23 Aug 2026 for ActiveCampaign, Keap & EngageBay · We may earn a commission if you sign up through a link on this page
The verdict, up front

There is no single best automation platform — there's a best one for how your business runs. GetResponse owns automation-without-a-CRM, ActiveCampaign owns workflow depth, HubSpot owns revenue attribution at scale, Keap owns the lead-to-cash loop, and EngageBay owns the bootstrap budget. The tally below comes straight from the table's own rows — and if all you need is email campaigns, none of these five is the answer: that's the email comparison.

Answer five questions, get a straight answer

Twenty seconds, no email required. We'll show our reasoning — and then highlight your match everywhere it appears as you read the rest of the page.

Question 1 of 5

The short answer

There isn't one winner here — there are five, each for a different kind of buyer. Find yourself in one of these and you can stop reading.

Side by side, with a clear pick

Twenty rows, and we name a better pick on each one — including the rows where the honest answer is "it's a tie" or "this isn't comparable". Untick a platform to narrow the table; everything else on the page stays put.

This only filters the table columns — the rest of the page keeps all five.

Every figure was read from the vendor's own pricing or feature page — GetResponse and HubSpot on 12 August 2026, ActiveCampaign, Keap and EngageBay on 23 August 2026. The "Better pick" column is an editorial judgement, and where a row can't be fairly compared we say so rather than inventing one.

What it actually costs at your list size

Every plan from all five, priced at the same subscriber count. This is where most comparison sites go wrong — they put Kit at 1,000 next to AWeber at 500 and declare a winner.

1,000 subscribers
1001,0005,00010,00050,000100K200K+

Find your fit

Skip the table. Find the line that sounds like you.

Latest from the platforms we track

Pricing and features in this category move constantly, and most comparison pages never get updated. Here's what has actually changed at each platform, and when.

The detail behind each pick

Plan ladders, what's gated where, and the thing each vendor's marketing page doesn't lead with.

Common questions

How we compare

Every figure on this page traces back to a vendor's own pricing page. Here's how we put it together.

01

Vendor pricing pages first

Every price here was read off the vendor's own published tier table, not a third-party review. Where a vendor doesn't publish a figure, we say so instead of interpolating and presenting a guess as fact.

02

Matched tiers, not matched names

"Entry plan" means something different at each vendor. We compare by capability — the cheapest plan with unlimited automations, say — because that's the comparison that changes a decision.

03

Ties are allowed to be ties

We name a better pick on every row, but several genuinely end in a draw and a few aren't comparable at all. Manufacturing one would devalue the rows where the difference is real.

Pricing last read from vendor sites 12–23 August 2026 · Spotted a change? Tell us and we'll update it

Still deciding?

Three of the five have a free plan — GetResponse to 500 contacts, HubSpot's free CRM for 2 users, EngageBay's free suite to 250 contacts — and ActiveCampaign and Keap run trials. Finding your fit costs nothing but an afternoon.