Software reviews site TrustRadius today released a comprehensive buying guide to the industry’s leading marketing automation platforms. The guide is based on 400 reviews and 10,000 individual product comparisons from software users, ranking the best platforms for each market segment (small, mid-size and enterprise clients.)
All the platforms are placed on TrustRadius’ TrustMaps, which illustrate the leaders in each market segment, as well as how focused each platform is on providing solutions for that client base. In this way, customers can evaluate which marketing automation platform is best suited for them, based on their size.
“There are very few products which are truly one-size-fits-all. A small business has radically different requirements than those of a billion-dollar enterprise,” says Vinay Bhagat, CEO of TrustRadius. “Our TrustMap is a first of its kind analysis to provide software buyers with a pragmatic approach to identify the best-fit solutions based on market segment fit and user satisfaction.”
For small businesses (less than 50 employees,) the platforms with the best reviews were:
- HubSpot (4.8 out of 5 average Small Business rating, 69% average segment focus)
- Act-On (4.7 average Small Business rating, 53% segment focus)
Bhagat says HubSpot, InfusionSoft and Act-On all have the potential to be stand-alone public companies, but it’s quite possible one or more will become acquisition targets by a larger enterprise who is focused on the SMB/middle-market.
For mid-sized companies (51-500 employees,) the top rated platforms were:
- Marketo (4.2 average Mid-Size company rating, 60% segment focus)
- Pardot (4.0 average Mid-Size company rating, 58% segment focus)
In this space, it’s not Exact Target, but Salesforce’s other platform Pardot that gets the high marks. Bhagat says Exact target will remain B2C focused while Salesforce will push to make Pardot’s features more robust so that it’s able to get more of the large B2B enterprises business.
And for large enterprises, the clear leader was Eloqua (4.4 average Enterprise rating and 59% segment focus) with a strong showing by Pardot and Marketo.
The study has some revealing insights, especially in the enterprise solutions space.It shows that platforms such as Adobe’s Neolane and IBM’s Unica aren’t as highly rated by users compared to some of the less obvious platforms in the enterprise space such as HubSpot and Act-On (which is used mostly internally at the enterprise level). It also highlights that the real battle may not be between the big, integrated digital marketing clouds (like Adobe and Oracle), but between them and open-stack platforms such as Marketo, which is aggressively moving into the enterprise space with its most recent integrations, and scoring higher ratings than the more enterprise focused Adobe and IBM solutions.
