HubSpot vs ConvertKit
Trying to choose between HubSpot vs ConvertKit as your email marketing software? Here's when to choose each tool – and the pros and cons to know about.
HubSpot
- 3.4/5 on TrustPilot
- 4.5/5 on Capterra
- 4.4/5 on G2
A CRM platform that offers email marketing, content management, marketing automation, and customer service capabilities.
Pricing
Marketing tools only start at $18 a month for 1,000 marketing contacts
Key features
- Email automation, reporting, etc.
- Landing pages and forms
- Marketing automation
- Website builder and hosting
- CRM platform
- B2B commerce tools
- Customer service software
- Sales and operations software
- Integrations with various services
Support
24/7 support via email and chat on paid plans, phone support on professional and Enterprise plans. Community support only on the Free plan.
ConvertKit
- 4.7/5 on GetApp
- 4.7/5 on Capterra
- 2/5 on TrustPilot
ConvertKit is a tool for marketing automation and monetization for independent creators.
Pricing
- Email marketing automation
- Landing pages
- Sign-up forms
- Analytics
- A/B testing
- Tools for content monetization
Key features
- Email marketing automation
- Landing pages
- Sign-up forms
- Analytics
- A/B testing
- Tools for content monetization
Support
Community support for all users, email and chat support for paid users
HubSpot was founded by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah in 2006. Headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
ConvertKit was founded in 2013 and is based in Idaho, the US. It was created by Nathan Barry, a blogger and creator who needed a better way to promote his books and courses.
The software may seem complex and even overwhelming. However, newcomers get service demos and tutorials for a smooth start. Overall, the interface is user-friendly and approachable.
Not beginner-friendly, since you need to code while creating emails.
Medium to big e-commerce companies that want an integrated software package with marketing, CRM, customer service, and website hosting all in one.
Bloggers, coaches, course creators, writers, and everyone who makes content for living.
A free plan for 2,000 email sends per month. Available email templates and features are limited. No customer support, only the access to HubSpot Community.
The forever free plan includes the contact list of up to 1,000 subscribers and the following features:
- Unlimited landing pages
- Unlimited forms
- Unlimited “broadcasts”, or one-off email campaigns, sent right away or scheduled
- Audience tagging and segmentation
- Selling digital products & subscriptions
- Community support
- Free recommendations
Billed monthly:
- Starter: $20 for up to 1,000 marketing contacts
- Professional: $890 for up to 2,000 marketing contacts (the starting price is $3,890 with a mandatory paid onboarding)
- Enterprise: $3,600 for up to 10,000 marketing contacts (the starting price is $6,000 with a mandatory paid onboarding)
Other pricing features:
- Users are only billed for their “marketing” contacts (actively in use) and can have many more inactive contacts
- Even if a user cancels the subscriptions, they will be billed for the rest of their commitment period duration
Dynamic pricing depends on the size of your contact list and the features of interest.
Creator: $9–1,916/month billed yearly for 300–400,000 subscribers. Includes all the free features plus:
- Live chat & email support
- Paid recommendations
- Free migration from another tool
- Automated email sequences
- Visual automation builders
- Third-party integrations
- One additional team member
Creator Pro: $25–2,166/month billed yearly for 300–400,000 subscribers. Includes all the Creator features plus:
- Newsletter referral system
- Subscriber scoring
- Advanced reporting
- Service demo for new users
- Technical support is available on paid plans only
- Access to the HubSpot Community on the Free plan
- Chat and email support on all paid plans
- Phone support only on Professional and Enterprise plans
- Mandatory paid assisted onboarding on Professional and Enterprise plans
- Advanced and Premier additional onboarding options
- Customer training
- Various courses with certifications
- HubSpot user groups
Community support:
- The internal forum where you can ask questions and receive answers from ConvertKit support specialists and other platform users
- Available even on the free plan
Email and live chat support:
- Available for Creator users
- Priority support via email and live chat available for Creator Pro users
ConvertKit also provides a knowledge base and a YouTube channel with tutorials. The platform also runs online workshops for newbies in marketing.
- Email automation
- Dynamic list segmentation based on various criteria
- Email reputation reporting and tracking
- Custom reporting dashboards
- Integrations with popular services
- Drag-and-drop email builder and pre-made templates
- Landing pages
- Live chat with website visitors
- A CRM app for iOS and Android
- Email builder
- Email marketing automation
- Landing pages
- Sign-up forms
- Tools for selling digital products and paid subscriptions
- List segmentation
- Lead scoring
- A/B testing
- Reporting and analytics
- Internal referral systems for creators to earn off putting links in your newsletter or paying to get promoted by other creators
15+ email templates
Only 5 email templates on the free plan
Templates for:
- Welcome messages
- Sales
- Newsletter
- Event invitations
- Announcements
- Ebook emails
25 email templates made for content creators by content creators, includes templates for:
- Newsletters
- Content promotion
- Product sales pitch
- Waitlist
The templates are sourced from other users and you can create and share your own.
ConvertKit also offers 50+ landing page templates not specified by purpose.
1,495 integrations including WordPress, Zapier, Canva, Facebook, Salesforce, Shopify, Stripe, and more.
120 integrations with third-party apps for:
- Memberships and courses
- Analytics
- Lead capture
- E-commerce
- Giveaways
- Quizzes
- Workflows
- Webinar
- Affiliate management
- CRM
- Scheduling
- Email verification
ConvertKit also supports Zapier for even more integrations and provides users with the API docs for custom integrations.
- Website
- A mobile app for iOS and Android to manage the CRM
- Chrome extension for Gmail or G Suite
- Office 365 add-in and desktop add-in for Office 365
- No installable solution.
- Web app only
English
Chinese (traditional)
Danish
Dutch
Finnish
French
German
Italian
Polish
Portuguese (Brazil)
Spanish
Swedish
English
Many pre-built automations (called workflows) triggered by:
- Contacts
- Companies
- Deals
- Tickets (for support purposes)
- Quotes
- Conversations
- Feedback submissions
10+ visual automation templates for starting a paid newsletter, releasing a new podcast, crowdfunding for a music album, and other tasks that professional content creators might face.
- An all-in-one solution for e-commerce businesses: email marketing, CRM, CMS, and more
- 1,482 integrations
- Thorough onboarding and courses
- A strong global community
- Ability to store many contacts for free
- Good platform for content creators
- Great deliverability
- Supports paid newsletters and has a “tip jar” functionality for free donations from subscribers
- A flexible tagging and segmentation system for targeted campaigns
- Steep prices
- Complicated feature system may cause additional spendings
- Overwhelming amount of functions
- Support isn’t accessible enough
- Email templates aren’t sophisticated
- Very basic reporting
- Expensive compared to other email marketing tools
- Not great for midsize and large businesses
- No drag-and-drop builder which makes it harder to design emails from scratch
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Anything above Starter gets very expensive and requires you to pay a high onboarding fee. In the case of the HubSpot Marketing Professional plan, this is $3,000 on top of the $890/month.
Surprisingly, HubSpot’s templates aren’t quite what you’d expect from such a popular, modern tool. I’d like to see some more design options for email and landing pages.
Pros: HubSpot is a good solution for organizations at their early steps. It provides all the necessary tools for website management and marketing activities. The contacts' management is good too.
Cons: It doesn't go in-depth on anything. For everything that HubSpot does there is a platform that does it better. But we would need many different tools so we stay with all in one but shallow approach (for now). It is also very expensive for what it is.
It has everything you need to grow your business, including direct integrations with tools specifically designed to make your life easier like course, webinar, blog, and lead magnet plugins.
If you’ve got a stable business and over 1,000 subscribers, you’ll reap all of the benefits of the world’s most streamlined email autoresponder tool at a price that won’t break the bank and is silly easy to use.
The set-up process is tedious with Wordpress websites. We were not happy so we canceled, so instead of letting the current paid period last the software deactivated the account immediately and blocked us out of the software. We could not export our subscribers nor our content.
*This information is current as of 01/20/2025. While we regularly update our articles, it`s possible that this article may not contain some of the latest information.
