Marketing automation software compared: how to choose for B2B

In brief: “Marketing automation” covers three families of tools, from emailing with automatic follow-ups to enterprise suites on annual contracts. For a B2B SME, the right choice depends less on the feature list than on contact tiers, paid onboarding and how well automated sends get delivered.

Comparisons of marketing automation software tend to look very much alike. Ten tools, one profile each, HubSpot for large accounts, Brevo for value for money, and a conclusion urging you to “define your needs clearly”. None of it is wrong. But these articles line up products that don’t play in the same league, and the question that really settles things, what you will have paid and sent after a year, stays out of sight.

This comparison starts from the other end. First what the term actually covers, then what the pricing pages say, and above all what they leave out. Prices and limits were checked on 6 November 2026, on the vendors’ official pages.

Three families of tools behind the same word

Today the term covers very different products. Mixing them up is like comparing a saloon car and a lorry on fuel consumption alone.

Emailing platforms with built-in automation. Mailchimp, Brevo, ActiveCampaign and Ediware start from sending campaigns and add automatic follow-ups, sequences triggered by a sign-up, and conditions based on behaviour. Here, automation serves emailing. It is the most accessible family, and the one that covers most of what an SME needs.

B2B marketing automation suites. HubSpot Marketing Hub, Plezi, Webmecanik and Zoho Marketing Automation build everything around the prospect’s journey: forms, scoring, landing pages, CRM sync, sometimes social media. Email is just one channel among several. More complete, and slower to set up.

Enterprise suites. Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement, formerly Pardot, and Adobe Marketo Engage are aimed at structured marketing teams with an implementation partner, an administrator and an annual budget. Their power is real. So is the cost of getting in.

If you are still torn between a plain sending tool and a platform that automates, our marketing automation guide explains how a workflow runs and when making the switch starts to pay off.

The main software compared in 2026

The table below sets out what vendors publish on their pricing pages. Where a price is not public or could not be read, it is marked as such rather than copied from a third-party comparison: the figures circulating for Plezi or Marketo contradict each other from one site to the next.

Two things stand out. First, six tools out of ten bill by number of contacts. Second, the further up the range you go, the less the advertised price resembles the price you actually pay.

What the product page doesn’t tell you

Contact tiers drive the bill

A subscription priced by contact tier looks reasonable on the day you sign up. Then the database grows. A trade show, an imported prospecting list, a successful data-collection campaign, and you move up a tier without having sent a single extra message.

With automation, the effect gets worse. A workflow only makes sense if contacts stay in the database long enough to go through it, including those who never open. You end up paying for dormant addresses, or deleting them to stay under the threshold. Billing by volume sent, with unlimited contacts, removes that dilemma: you pay for what goes out, not for what sits idle.

Onboarding and annual commitment

HubSpot lists its Professional plan at $800 a month with an annual commitment, $890 billed monthly. But the same page imposes a $3,000 onboarding fee, paid once and left out of the monthly price. At Salesforce, the pricing page spells it out: every monthly product requires an annual contract.

That isn’t unreasonable. These tools need proper configuration, and onboarding avoids accounts that are opened and then abandoned. But for an SME, the first year costs considerably more than twelve monthly instalments, and you commit before you have launched a single workflow.

The step limit on entry plans

This is the least visible trap. Mailchimp limits its Essentials plan to four steps per flow, ActiveCampaign its Starter plan to five actions per automation. Four steps means a welcome email, a delay, a follow-up and a condition. Nothing more.

There’s nothing shocking about that for getting started. The problem is when you discover the limit: halfway through building your nurturing sequence, at the point where upgrading becomes unavoidable.

What a B2B SME really needs

Product pages list dozens of features. In practice, four mechanisms cover most of what a B2B sales team expects from its tool.

Following up on a specific link deserves a closer look. A prospecting campaign often presents several offers. Following up with every clicker means half of them hear about the wrong subject. Following up only with those who clicked offer B, with a message about offer B, is already behavioural personalisation, with no scoring and no CRM.

Lead scoring, two-way CRM sync and multichannel journeys with twenty branches all have their uses. They assume a team to feed them and a sales process that is already formalised. Without those, they remain boxes ticked on a quotation. Besides, these are often the features that justify moving to the higher plan, and rarely the ones you use in the first year.

Deliverability, the criterion comparisons forget

An automated workflow sends continuously, without anyone rereading each send. If it targets inactive addresses or follows up too often, it erodes the sender’s reputation day after day. And unlike a failed campaign, nothing flags it straight away.

Since February 2024, Google has required every sender of 5,000 or more messages a day to Gmail to keep a complaint rate below 0.3% in Postmaster Tools and to offer one-click unsubscribe on marketing messages. Your workflows count towards that total just as your campaigns do. An automation tool should therefore add the one-click unsubscribe header to every automated send, and give you the means to track how your complaints evolve.

The other question is the IP address. On a shared IP, your follow-ups travel alongside other customers’ sends, and their reputation rubs off on yours. Comparisons treat deliverability as a score out of five. Ask the vendor instead whether your sends go out from IPs reserved for you, and what it does when an automated campaign starts to bounce.

The open-tracking pixel, the regulatory blind spot of 2026

On 12 March 2026, the CNIL, the French data protection authority, adopted its recommendation on tracking pixels in emails. It makes the recipient’s prior consent a condition for analysing open rates when that analysis is used to personalise content or adjust sending frequency. Only measurement for deliverability purposes, strictly limited, is exempt.

The text is explicit: this regime is separate from the one governing the send itself. B2B prospecting based on legitimate interest remains lawful without prior consent, but the pixel feeding a workflow conditioned on opens does require consent.

For choosing software, the consequence is direct. A workflow built on opens relies on a signal you are no longer always allowed to read. A workflow built on clicks, or on joining a list, has no such problem. Check that the tool can switch off the pixel or manage the consent attached to it. What changes is set out in detail in our article on the CNIL recommendation on tracking pixels.

Which software for which profile

For the first row, the most common among our customers, emailing software with automation usually covers the need without the costs of a suite. That is the choice we made with Ediware marketing automation: follow-up rules for openers, clickers or those who clicked a specific link, workflows triggered by joining a list, and billing by volume sent, with no commitment.

Testing marketing automation software in two weeks

A sales demo shows what the tool can do. It doesn’t tell you what you will do with it. The safest approach is still to build two real automations yourself before you sign.

The first: a follow-up to the clickers of an existing campaign, with an exclusion list. The second: a three-email sequence triggered by a form on your website. If you manage both on your own in half a day, the tool is within your reach. If you need a consultant for the second, you know what the rest will cost.

Along the way, note three things: the step limit you ran into, the contact tier you will land in two years from now, and how quickly support replies when you get stuck on a setting. Those, far more than the number of features, are what will make the difference after a year.