HubSpot vs ActiveCampaign vs Klaviyo: marketing automation pricing, and where HubSpot stops being reasonable

Eighteen times. That's the multiple between ActiveCampaign's Plus tier, $49/month, and HubSpot's Professional tier, $890/month — the plan where HubSpot's automation actually becomes meaningful rather than a checkbox feature. That gap is the single most important number in this comparison, and most head-to-head reviews bury it in favor of comparing entry-level plans that don't reflect what teams actually end up paying.

ActiveCampaign's tiers run Starter $15, Plus $49, Pro $79, Enterprise $145, all at the 1,000-contact level — and it's consistently the most cost-efficient option at nearly every contact-list size, which is why service businesses and SMBs default to it. What you're not getting for that price is HubSpot's full CRM-plus-CMS-plus-everything ecosystem — ActiveCampaign does automation and email exceptionally well and doesn't try to be a whole company's operating system.

Klaviyo plays a different game entirely: it's built specifically for e-commerce, particularly Shopify stores, and prices by contact volume rather than feature tier — starting around $20/month and climbing to $700–900/month at 100,000 contacts for email alone. If you're not running an online store, Klaviyo's pricing model and feature set are both built around a job you don't have.

| | Entry price | Real cost where automation matters |
|---|---|---|
| ActiveCampaign | $15/mo | Plus, $49/mo |
| Klaviyo | ~$20/mo | ~$700–900/mo at 100K contacts |
| HubSpot | free CRM | Professional, $890/mo |

HubSpot's counterargument to all of this is real, to be clear: it's genuinely the most complete all-in-one platform — CRM, marketing, sales, service, CMS — and for a company that wants one system of record instead of five integrated tools, that consolidation has value beyond the sticker price. But if what you actually need is good email automation and a clean contact database, paying $890/month to get it as a side effect of a much bigger platform is the expensive way to solve a cheap problem.