HubSpot vs Marketo: Breaking It Down

A growing number of companies are making the switch from Marketo to HubSpot. What’s driving this shift?

When I first started using Marketo, it was positioned as the go-to solution for mid-sized to enterprise-level businesses, while HubSpot catered primarily to small businesses. Over time, HubSpot has expanded its capabilities significantly, supporting businesses of all sizes with continuous updates and a user-friendly approach. 

Meanwhile, Marketo remains a powerful tool for complex marketing operations, though some may argue that its innovation has slowed since Adobe’s acquisition.

I was a hardcore Marketo fan until I started using HubSpot and saw its full potential. This article addresses why I’ve grown to like HubSpot more while also addressing some limitations that I’ve encountered with the clients we’ve worked with and my approach on the workarounds between HubSpot vs Marketo.

HubSpot’s Key Features for RevOps

User-Friendly and Easy to Adopt

HubSpot is built for simplicity and designed for ease of use. Its intuitive interface allows marketing, sales, and operations teams to get up and running quickly without the need for extensive technical training. Unlike Marketo, which often requires dedicated marketing operations specialists, HubSpot is accessible to teams of all skill levels. This reduces downtime and speeds up time to value.

All-in-One Platform

HubSpot is a true all-in-one platform, offering hubs for Marketing, Sales, Service, Content, Operations, and Commerce. This holistic approach makes it a powerful choice for scaling RevOps and driving organizational alignment. With a unified ecosystem, users can seamlessly track automations, workflows, and performance metrics, gaining clear visibility into how everything connects.

Reporting

HubSpot provides clean, easy-to-use reports and reporting dashboards that help teams make data-driven decisions without relying on complex analytical tools.

Business Impact

When adopting new systems, the ultimate goal should be to have a single source of truth for everything happening within the business. HubSpot’s all-in-one approach gives teams full visibility across marketing, sales, and operations, enabling faster, more informed decision-making. This is especially crucial in RevOps, where scaling and maintaining organizational alignment are key to success.

Marketo’s Key Features for RevOps

Deep Salesforce Integration

Marketo provides a stronger, more customizable integration with Salesforce. It allows businesses to have greater ownership of automation and requires tighter alignment between marketing and sales teams.

Better Campaign Alignment

Marketo Programs sync directly with Salesforce Campaigns, ensuring seamless data flow between the two platforms. For businesses using Salesforce reporting as their source of truth, this integration maintains consistency in reporting and strengthens sales-marketing collaboration.

More Flexible Workflows

Marketo’s automation capabilities go deeper than HubSpot’s, offering greater flexibility for intricate marketing campaigns and operational workflows.

Scalable Templating and Cloning

Marketo tokens and program cloning capabilities make it easy to scale and templatize operations. They allow teams to build global assets that can be reused across campaigns reducing redundancy and the effort needed to launch new marketing initiatives. This also allows for consistent execution across different regions or business units.

Business Impact

As companies scale, creativity and agility are key to staying competitive. Marketo’s ability to templatize and automate marketing programs enables teams to execute faster and more efficiently at scale.

HubSpot Limitations and Workarounds

Salesforce Integration Limitations

While HubSpot does integrate with Salesforce, it’s not as robust or customizable as Marketo’s integration. 

When working with Salesforce lead and contact objects, it’s important to ensure that API names are consistent across the fields mapped to HubSpot as this is necessary for seamless data transfer during the conversion of leads to contacts to ensure that any updates made to the contact records in Salesforce are reflected back in HubSpot.

No Native Campaign Sync with SFDC

Unlike Marketo, HubSpot doesn’t have a native campaign sync with Salesforce, which can create reporting gaps for businesses heavily reliant on Salesforce. This lack of integration can lead to fragmented data, making it more challenging to track performance accurately and align sales and marketing efforts effectively. 

To bridge this gap, we would have to rely on Salesforce automation to bring campaign information onto the lead/contact record. While this requires some setup, it effectively ensures that critical campaign data is captured, helping maintain alignment between sales and marketing efforts.

Lead Lifecycle and Lead Scoring Constraints

HubSpot’s Lead Lifecycle Model doesn’t allow regression between stages, which can limit flexibility in managing leads as they evolve. Additionally, its rigid scoring model prevents resetting the score to zero, potentially skewing lead quality assessments and hindering accurate decision-making.

By leveraging custom fields and incorporating tracking statuses within lifecycle stages, we can create a more adaptable lifecycle model while gaining deeper insight into a customer’s buyer journey. For instance, if a prospect is initially marketing-qualified but is closed-lost at the opportunity stage, a contact status field can still be used to track re-engagement while also capturing the last lifecycle stage they were in. Similarly, for prospects in the nurture stage, the contact status enables marketing teams to personalize contact based on where the prospect truly is in their journey. I’ve included a couple of visuals I created below to demonstrate this approach.

Final Thoughts on HubSpot vs. Marketo

HubSpot has evolved with the industry and continues to enhance its support for businesses of all sizes. While enterprise-level businesses may be large, their processes may not be mature enough to fully adopt Marketo. Given this, my recommendation is to:

Start with HubSpot: For a growing business, HubSpot offers a solid foundation that is easy to adopt, manage, and scale as your needs evolve.

Document Everything: Thorough documentation of processes and workarounds will make any future transition to Marketo or another platform much smoother.

Only Convert to Marketo When Ready: Once a company reaches the level of complexity that demands Marketo’s advanced automation and Salesforce integration, transitioning will make sense but only when the necessary internal resources are in place to support the shift. Reach out if you need expert advice.