HubSpot vs Salesforce Marketing Cloud: Pricing and Fit

This is not a like-for-like fight. HubSpot sells one Marketing Hub in four editions on a shared customer platform with Sales Hub, Service Hub, Content Hub, Data Hub and Revenue Hub. Salesforce sells a family of marketing products under the Marketing Cloud name, each priced per org, with add-ons for personalization, analytics and loyalty. Most of the decision comes down to which CRM your company lives in and how much contract and setup you can take on.

The short answer

• Choose HubSpot for small and mid-size teams, B2B or B2C, that want to start cheap, launch fast and keep marketing and sales data in one HubSpot CRM.
• Choose Salesforce Marketing Cloud Next or Engagement for companies already on Salesforce CRM, or brands that need high-volume email and mobile messaging across many brands or business units.
• Choose Account Engagement if you are a B2B team on Salesforce CRM whose priority is lead nurturing, scoring and sales alignment.

What Salesforce Marketing Cloud means now

"Salesforce Marketing Cloud" now covers several products, and salesforce.com names them this way:

• Marketing Cloud Next: Salesforce's agentic marketing platform, built natively on the Salesforce platform with Data 360 and Agentforce at its core. It is sold as Growth Edition and Advanced Edition.
• Marketing Cloud Engagement: the enterprise platform for email, SMS, push notifications and cross-channel journeys, known for Journey Builder, Content Builder and Automation Studio. Salesforce calls it the evolution of the ExactTarget platform and says there are no end-of-life or end-of-sale plans for it.
• Marketing Cloud Account Engagement: the B2B marketing automation product. Salesforce says Pardot is the legacy product name for it and that they are the same product.

Existing customers reach Marketing Cloud Next by renewing into a "+" edition of their current product (Engagement+, Account Engagement+, Personalization+ or Intelligence+), which Salesforce says works alongside what they already use. New customers can start with Growth or Advanced Edition directly. In this comparison, "Salesforce Marketing Cloud" means Marketing Cloud Next and Engagement unless we say otherwise.

HubSpot vs Salesforce Marketing Cloud at a glance

Pricing and plans

HubSpot Marketing Hub pricing (as of October 2026)

HubSpot's Marketing Hub page lists four editions in USD, shown as monthly prices billed monthly: Free ($0, up to two users, 2,000 email sends a month with HubSpot branding), Starter ($20 per seat a month, 500 HubSpot Credits a month), Professional ($890 a month with 3 core seats and 3,000 credits) and Enterprise ($3,600 a month with 5 core seats and 5,000 credits). HubSpot's product catalog lists 1,000 marketing contacts on Starter, 2,000 on Professional and 10,000 on Enterprise; non-marketing contacts are free up to 15 million total. Extra marketing contacts are sold in tiers, and on Professional each additional block of 5,000 starts at $250 a month. Email send limits are 5x, 10x and 20x your marketing contact tier per month. Professional and Enterprise require a one-time onboarding fee, and extra credits cost $10 a month per 1,000.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud pricing (as of October 2026)

Salesforce's Marketing Cloud pricing page shows prices in USD by default, and Marketing Cloud editions are priced per org per month, billed annually. Marketing Cloud Next Growth Edition is $1,500 and Advanced Edition is $3,250. Marketing Cloud Engagement+ comes in Pro+ ($2,000, includes Growth, 2.5M email messages, 15K contacts), Corporate+ ($5,500, includes Advanced, 10M email messages, 1M mobile app messages, 45K contacts) and Enterprise+ ($30,000, includes Advanced, 150M email messages, 10M mobile app messages, 500K contacts). Account Engagement+ runs from $1,250 (Growth+) through $2,750 (Plus+) and $4,400 (Advanced+) to $15,000 (Premium+), with 10,000 contacts on the first three and 75,000 on Premium+, and Salesforce notes that all per-month products require an annual contract.

Usage-based charges sit on top. SMS and WhatsApp start at $2 per 1,000 credits (SMS also needs setup and a lease code purchase), extra email sends are $2 per 1,000 credits, Agentforce interactions use Flex Credits at $500 per 100k requests, Data 360 Profiles start at $240 per 1,000 profiles, and each extra business unit is $2,500 a month. Add-ons include Salesforce Personalization ($8,000), Marketing Intelligence ($10,000) and Loyalty Management ($20,000) per org per month, billed annually. The Premier Success Plan costs 30% of net license fees. For very small teams, Salesforce Starter, a CRM suite with email marketing, starts at $25 per user a month (transaction fees apply). Salesforce also says marketing capabilities come at no cost inside Sales and Service Enterprise Edition or higher through Salesforce Foundations, via your account executive.

Channels

Email is the core of both. HubSpot includes forms, landing pages and live chat from the free plan up, ad management on every paid edition, and social media publishing, A/B testing and a WhatsApp integration (up to 1,000 messages a month) on Professional and Enterprise. SMS for marketers is a paid add-on for Professional and Enterprise, for US customers only, sent from US-based numbers to US and Canada (+1) numbers. Salesforce Marketing Cloud Next includes email, forms and landing pages on both editions; SMS and WhatsApp are add-ons, and mobile app messaging is included only in Advanced Edition. Marketing Cloud Engagement covers email, SMS, push notifications and cross-channel journeys, and Engagement+ editions include set volumes of email and mobile app messages. For other platforms that cover these channels, see our Salesforce Marketing Cloud alternatives roundup.

Automation and journeys

HubSpot's Starter edition allows up to 10 automated actions on forms and emails. Professional and Enterprise add unlimited actions plus omni-channel marketing automation: visual workflows across email, social, ads, your website and chat, with up to 300 workflows on Professional and up to 1,000 on Enterprise, where workflows can also use behavioral events. Lead scoring allows 5 scores on Professional and 50 on Enterprise.

In Marketing Cloud Next, automated customer journeys run on Salesforce Flow and can include outreach from sales and service teams. Growth Edition includes automated journeys, people scoring and opportunity influence reporting; Advanced Edition adds predictive scoring, predictive engagement frequency and path experiments for testing journeys. Engagement customers keep Journey Builder and Automation Studio, and Salesforce says existing Journey Builder journeys can be used within Flow.

Data, CRM and integrations

HubSpot keeps marketing, sales and service data in one CRM. Enterprise adds custom objects, customer journey analytics and multi-touch revenue attribution, and the Marketplace lists more than 2,000 integrations. If your sales team is on Salesforce, the HubSpot-Salesforce integration (Professional and Enterprise) syncs contacts, companies, deals and activities, and Enterprise can sync Salesforce custom objects one way into HubSpot.

Salesforce's pitch is the reverse: Marketing Cloud Next is built on the same platform as Sales Cloud and Service Cloud, so marketing works on the same records. Unified Engagement History Dashboards (5 licenses on Growth, 10 on Advanced) show reps how leads and accounts engaged with marketing. For systems without built-in connectors, Salesforce points to MuleSoft, integration partners or apps on AgentExchange. For a deeper look at B2B tools that sit on top of a CRM, see our marketing automation software guide.

AI features

HubSpot runs its AI agents on HubSpot Credits. Professional and Enterprise include Customer Agent, Content Agent (beta), Campaign Agent (beta) and Marketing Studio (beta), and every paid edition includes Agent Builder for custom agents. The product page also lists a Prospecting Agent and a Nurture Agent that rewrites nurture emails for each contact.

Both Marketing Cloud Next editions include Agentforce Campaigns, which build a campaign, brief and email from one prompt, plus AI segment creation and AI drafts of email and SMS copy. Advanced Edition adds conversational email, which hands replies to service agents, and unified conversations for SMS and WhatsApp. Salesforce also markets a Campaign Agent that creates channel-ready content and optimizes sends. Agentforce usage is billed through Flex Credits.

Limits of each

• HubSpot: automation, lead scoring, A/B testing, the Salesforce integration and the AI agents mostly start at Professional, a big step from $20 a seat to $890 a month plus onboarding.
• HubSpot: costs grow with seats, marketing contacts and credits, and SMS is a US-only paid add-on.
• Salesforce: no free edition on the Marketing Cloud pricing page, pricing is per org and billed annually, and usage such as SMS, WhatsApp, extra email and Agentforce requests is charged on top.
• Salesforce: the product family (Next, Engagement, Account Engagement, plus "+" editions) takes time to map to your needs, and mobile app messaging and path experiments need Advanced Edition.

Which should you choose

If you are choosing a CRM and a marketing tool at the same time, HubSpot is usually the simpler start: you can begin free, see prices on the page and add Sales Hub later. If your company already pays for Salesforce Sales Cloud or Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud Next keeps marketing on the same records and avoids a sync between two CRMs. Large consumer brands with heavy email and app messaging should price Engagement+, and B2B teams on Salesforce whose main job is lead nurturing should price Account Engagement+ alongside Marketing Cloud Next. HubSpot can still work for a Salesforce shop through its integration, but you then run two databases.

Alternatives worth a look

Compare HubSpot with Marketo or Klaviyo, see Braze vs Salesforce Marketing Cloud for mobile-first teams, or browse our lists of HubSpot Marketing Hub alternatives and Pardot alternatives.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Salesforce Marketing Cloud more expensive than HubSpot?
Not at every tier. HubSpot starts lower, with a free plan and Starter at $20 per seat a month, while the cheapest Marketing Cloud edition, Marketing Cloud Next Growth Edition, is $1,500 per org a month, billed annually. Higher up, HubSpot Professional is $890 a month and Enterprise $3,600 a month, against $3,250 for Marketing Cloud Next Advanced Edition and $2,000 to $30,000 for Marketing Cloud Engagement+ editions, as of October 2026. Both add costs on top: HubSpot charges a required one-time onboarding fee on Professional and Enterprise plus contact tiers, and Salesforce bills SMS, WhatsApp, extra email and Agentforce usage through credits.

What is the difference between Marketing Cloud Next, Marketing Cloud Engagement and Account Engagement?
Salesforce describes Marketing Cloud Next as its agentic marketing platform built natively on the Salesforce platform, sold in Growth and Advanced editions. Marketing Cloud Engagement is its enterprise platform for email, SMS, push and cross-channel journeys (Journey Builder, Content Builder, Automation Studio) and the evolution of ExactTarget. Marketing Cloud Account Engagement is its B2B marketing automation product; Pardot is the legacy name for it.

Can HubSpot Marketing Hub work with Salesforce CRM?
Yes. The HubSpot-Salesforce integration is available with Marketing Hub Professional and Enterprise and syncs contacts, companies, deals, activities and other supported data. Enterprise adds one-way sync of Salesforce custom objects into HubSpot custom objects.

Does HubSpot or Salesforce have a free trial?
HubSpot offers a free Marketing Hub plan for up to two users and a 14-day free trial of its marketing tools. Salesforce offers free trials of its Starter Suite and Pro Suite CRM bundles, and says marketing capabilities are available at no cost inside Sales and Service Enterprise Edition or higher through Salesforce Foundations, via your account executive.