Marketo Alternative

Comparison with Marketo

Marketo is useful to large enterprise businesses, and is certainly one of the most popular marketing automation platforms available. Agile CRM has been growing in popularity and is now a more popular choice for small and medium businesses (SMBs).

Both Marketo and Agile CRM offer extensive functionality for the modern marketer. Let's compare the two to see how they perform in a variety of categories.

Email Marketing

While both Marketo and Agile CRM offer robust email marketing features, Agile includes link personalization, which means better data for you and your team. Agile CRM's HTML editor includes a wide range of pre-designed email templates and makes it easy to build your own custom templates. One thing in particular that sets Agile CRM apart in the email marketing category is the ability to leverage all forms of media in emails and templates—for example, Agile offers video emails, something not offered by Marketo. Because of this, Agile CRM is growing in popularity as a solid Marketo alternative to fulfil the needs of SMBs.

Marketing Automation

Agile CRM provides for extensive marketing automation, with wide-ranging features that offer modern businesses best-in-class automation. Agile's marketing automation features include auto responders, multi-step campaigns, and a powerfully intuitive drag-and-drop campaign building tool.

Marketo provides automated lead scoring & automated campaign triggering—something that Agile CRM offers out of the box—only in its high-end enterprise versions. It also lacks many other features that are included with every Agile CRM account. Just another reason why Agile CRM is growing in popularity.

Web Engagement

Agile CRM provides personalized web popups that let you better engage web visitors. In this way, Agile gives users the ability to determine which popup appears, depending on the past behavior or lead score of that visitor. Popups can be simple calls-to-action or even web forms to capture new leads.

Popups certainly increase lead engagement and boost lead conversion. Unfortunately, Marketo doesn't offer web popups to increase web engagement.

Analytics & Alerts

Users can track their marketing campaign performance with Agile CRM's advanced email and link tracking options. These help you understand prospective customers and automate the campaign workflow. It also provides page view notifications and web visitor tracking to help you understand your leads' interests. Marketo doesn't provide email tracking alerts or page notifications.

Marketo does offer an add-on module that provides revenue cycle analytics, but to get that you’re likely talking about an investment of thousands of dollars annually. Agile CRM offers a free version that provides all alerts and analytics for no charge at all. You can get added marketing automation features with Agile CRM’s starter package, which starts at $8.99/month, reinforcing its attractiveness and popularity for small businesses.

API

Marketo offers its API in SOAP and REST. Agile CRM does too. However, Agile also makes its API available in a number of additional programming languages. Agile's extensive front- and back-end API in REST, Javascript, Java, .Net and PHP gives users complete control over their data, while Marketo users are a little more restricted.

Integrations

Agile CRM provides many integrations with third-party applications. For example, you can place, receive, record and analyze telephone calls directly from the CRM using Agile's VoIP and Twilio calling integrations. Also, it allows you to build your own custom widgets using Agile's API. Agile CRM offers free two-way email synchronization with Google Apps and IMAP.

Marketo doesn't provide email synchronization or telephony integrations. This is what makes Agile CRM a worthy Marketo alternative, particularly for small businesses looking to receive maximum return on their technology investment.

Payments

Agile CRM supports both invoicing and subscription-based payments using third-party plugins like FreshBooks for invoicing and Stripe for subscription-based payments. Plus, the platform is constantly adding new integrations to support payments.

Marketo doesn't offer options for businesses to take or receive payments.

Sales and Support

Marketo is a marketing automation platform and users invest in it for that reason alone. They often purchase additional software to manage their sales and customer support functions, resulting in an increasingly large price point. Plus, this means users must keep their data in multiple systems and struggle with avoiding overlap.

Agile CRM—being an all-in-one CRM—provides automation for the entire customer journey. Market to them, then sell to them, then support them as your customers. Agile CRM provides all of that for a fraction of the cost. When it comes to sales enablement and your need for customer support, there really is no comparing the two systems—one has those capabilities and the other does not.