Report:

Magic Quadrant for B2B Marketing Automation Platforms

Top Vendor Products for B2B Marketing Automation Platforms in 2024

• Adobe
• Creatio
• HubSpot
• Microsoft
• Oracle
• Salesforce

B2B Marketing Automation Platforms Vendor Product Comparisons 2024

• Adobe - Leader
  

  Pros:

  • Product flexibility and extensibility: Marketo Engage's product capabilities, packaging and pricing are intended to address diverse customer needs, ranging from small businesses to large, complex enterprises. Its extensible data model with custom objects and activities allow users to bring a variety of data sources into the product.
  • B2B marketing vision: Adobe demonstrates a strong grasp of the needs of B2B marketing teams for orchestrating complex, multistakeholder buying journeys through partnership with sales. Its vision for Adobe Journey Optimizer B2B Edition is to help users manage buying group roles and orchestrate journeys for buying groups in target accounts.
  • Integrations: Marketo Engage offers native CRM/SFA integrations with Salesforce Sales Cloud and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales as part of its base offering. Through Sales Insight, an add-on module, Salesforce and Microsoft sales users can access relevant marketing data about specific leads and accounts to support prioritization and engagement personalization.

  Cons:

  • Pricing visibility: Adobe is the only Leader in this market that does not offer online pricing for its B2B MAP product. Similarly, granular line-item pricing wasn't disclosed in proposals reviewed by Gartner experts. This pricing opaqueness may frustrate prospective customers that seek to understand cost implications and communicate them to business partners when evaluating an Adobe purchase or renewal.
  • Product interdependencies: While the product operates as a stand-alone B2B MAP, Adobe's enterprise strategy emphasizes the extension of its value through add-ons and additional products. For example, Adobe Journey Optimizer B2B Edition is designed for clients who also have Marketo Engage and Real-Time CDP B2B Edition, two separate products.
  • Inconsistent UI: For some functionality, Marketo Engage's user interface remains dated, as Adobe continues its work to make the look and feel of the product match that of the broader Adobe Experience Platform. From a Leader in this market, customers should expect a consistent UI that can enable relatively easy use and adoption.


• Creatio - Leader
  

  Pros:

  • User experience: Marketing Creatio's composable, no-code platform allows clients to assemble product components and apps, as well as customize UI/user experience, such that the solution aligns with the distinct business requirements of marketing users. Creatio Copilot's natural language assistance prompts make it easier for marketers to execute common activities.
  • Pricing model: Creatio's flat pricing structure, with no consumption model plus availability of components, makes the platform cost-competitive with high value. It offers users full automation features in every package, which users can expand with additional modules.
  • Lead workflow design: Creatio Copilot suggests the best channel for preferred communications, recommends a next action or task, and suggests branching logic users can add in customer journey design. AI-embedded intelligence empowers marketers to easily integrate data-based decisions into lead workflows.

  Cons:

  • Partner support and network: Creatio depends on third-party partners for nearly all implementations, providing services to help safeguard successful implementation for some accounts. Despite this approach, its range of partners for industry and geographic reach, as well as implementation support, is relatively limited when compared with other Leaders in this Magic Quadrant.
  • Global market visibility: Creatio has achieved success in expanding its presence in North America, but other Leaders have a more expansive presence in the region. Creatio's footprint in Latin America and Asia/Pacific remains small. Prospective clients should assess whether local teams have sufficient access to direct or indirect support to address any regional needs.
  • Measurement and reporting: Although Marketing Creatio offers standard reporting capabilities that enable users to track campaign, channel and pipeline performance, the product lacks advanced capabilities in customer journey analytics and offers undifferentiated attribution analytics.


• HubSpot - Leader
  

  Pros:

  • Significant addition of AI capabilities: HubSpot's expanded AI across its platform simplifies tasks and improves marketing efficiency. These AI capabilities include a content assistant to generate and modify copy, images and tone; a blog post generator; translations; and a chat assistant that combines OpenAI's ChatGPT with HubSpot CRM data and out-of-the-box job templates.
  • Market responsiveness: HubSpot demonstrates agile product development by collecting and applying customer feedback. This approach has resulted in product enhancements like a revamped call-to-action (CTA) builder (with templates) that allows marketing users to quickly customize the CTA experience, as well as functionality for reusable workflow elements, allowing users to quickly apply previously created workflow actions.
  • More native channel publishing: HubSpot excels in its native ability to create and publish content across multiple channels, such as social media and blogs. Its dedicated ad tool allows users to select the audience by channel, create the ads and measure performance.

  Cons:

  • Emerging large enterprise presence: HubSpot's heritage is in the SMB market, and today, large enterprises make up a very small portion of its customer base. As such, HubSpot has fewer stories of successful implementation among large enterprise customers when compared with many other Leaders. Prospective clients in large organizations should be prepared to test and validate complex use cases or desired customizations during the evaluation process.
  • Unclear package pricing: HubSpot pricing can confuse prospective buyers, with different product versions featuring different numbers of users and contacts. Prices vary for add-on users and add-on hubs. A recent pricing change gives core users access to the base customer platform and other purchased hubs, while some marketing tools are free. The web pricing tool does not instill confidence that the correct selections were made.
  • Segmentation: Marketing Hub can create segments based on expected data, such as contacts, accounts, deals or any custom object, but reaches its limit at 2,000 active and 2,000 static lists. Enterprise users may run out of list space quickly if third-party integrations automatically create lists on a regular basis.


• Microsoft - Leader
  

  Pros:

  • Continued GenAI innovation: Dynamics 365 Customer Insights offers advanced GenAI capabilities for end-to-end cross-channel campaign execution. Its capabilities include content asset creation and edits; automatic brand profile extraction; automatic image recommendations and tagging; and built-in support for natural language prompts for journey creation, audience selection and channel selection.
  • Customer data unification: Microsoft's new offering aligns customer data across marketing, sales and service functions, and can translate that data into marketing execution. All Microsoft Dynamics products are built on the same data platform, enabling better data connectivity across business applications.
  • Regional support and partnerships: Dynamics 365 Customer Insights offers worldwide support in 42 languages, direct sales and support presence in the Americas, EMEA and Asia/Pacific; a global network of 7,000+ resellers; and 350+ distributors and channel partners.

  Cons:

  • Usability: Some Gartner clients and Peer Insights reviewers report that the platform is not intuitive enough for nontechnical marketing users. For example, developing custom dashboards often requires technical expertise. Other vendors have more drag-and-drop functionality, while Microsoft uses integrations with a separate product in its suite, Data Fabric, to enhance reporting usability.
  • Peer community: An active peer community provides a space for extensive user support, feedback and collaboration. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights offers an open peer community for user collaboration, but its user base is relatively small when compared with other vendors, and issues like spam and unanswered questions impact its effectiveness.
  • Third-party CRM/SFA integrations: Dynamics 365 Customer Insights is primarily designed as a marketing automation solution to be used in tandem with Dynamics 365 Sales. It can integrate with Salesforce Sales Cloud; however, Salesforce Sales Cloud users may not achieve the same marketing and sales alignment benefits as Dynamics 365 Sales users. Most other Leaders offer a broader range of third-party CRM/SFA integrations.


• Oracle - Leader
  

  Pros:

  • Interface enhancements: Oracle has improved Eloqua's interface and tools, including search, contacts, accounts, campaign settings and email group setup. It plans to enhance Eloqua's social platform, CRM platform and other integrations to make it more like a consumer-friendly app that is easier for new users to fully utilize.
  • Customer listening and feedback: Oracle collects customer feedback through surveys, user testing, interviews, advisory boards and sales' interactions with customers. Platform users can access a user community that enables collaboration with other users and instruction from product experts. Marketers can provide feedback, which can then be translated to Eloqua's product roadmap, and access advice from their peers.
  • Guided Campaigns enhancements: Oracle has enhanced its Guided Campaigns tool by adding new use cases, including events and multistep nurture campaigns, giving frontline marketers more options and reducing the burden on power users. Oracle plans to expand its Guided Campaigns tool into targeted account selling and extend it into customer reference stories and social ads.

  Cons:

  • GenAI vision and roadmap: Oracle focuses on delivering AI-driven productivity gains, but its GenAI roadmap is less complete than peer vendors. It plans to add audience segmentation and content recommendation features, but lacks planned features that other vendors have in production or already released, like prompt-driven journey design. Prospective buyers should consider whether Oracle's GenAI roadmap meets their present and future GenAI needs.
  • Integration-dependent capabilities: Oracle requires integration with Oracle Unity Customer Data Platform or Oracle Fusion Data Intelligence Platform for some functionalities (e.g., predictive lead scoring, predictive account scoring, many predictive next best action features and advanced customer journey analytics). Prospective buyers need to buy a suite of separate products to use features that come prepackaged by some other providers.
  • Package pricing: Gartner's cost-of-ownership analysis and Peer Insights indicate Eloqua is expensive when compared with peer vendor products. Eloqua's pricing and product packaging details are only listed in Oracle's Marketing Cloud global price list — not on its webpage. Prospective buyers should carefully review Oracle's price list and ensure they are only purchasing the configuration and add-ons they need.


• Salesforce - Leader
  

  Pros:

  • Innovative platform capabilities: Salesforce's AI-based approach supports the need for data-based campaign designs and intelligence, coupled with on-target creative assistance. Its overall product strategy supports complex B2B marketing needs (e.g., addressing a buying committee with customization and data insights).
  • Market responsiveness: Salesforce facilitates value creation for customers and enables users to work more effectively in their roles by advancing product functionality with API enhancements and improvements to Einstein AI, its assistant for content creation or workflow improvements.
  • Lead workflow design: Marketing Cloud Account Engagement offers an intuitive interface to help users create multistep leads/journey workflows, including a journey testing/simulation feature to help predict success. Additionally, leads can be routed via traditional "round robin," geography or sales team's level of expertise, or capacity.

  Cons:

  • Platform-centric vision: Capitalizing on Marketing Cloud Account Engagement's product vision depends on potentially costly investments in Salesforce Sales Cloud (its SFA platform) and Salesforce Data Cloud (its CDP). The product is designed as a B2B MAP specifically for Salesforce Sales Cloud users and doesn't natively integrate with other CRM/SFA platforms. Many planned releases on the Marketing Cloud Account Engagement roadmap depend on clients also having Salesforce Data Cloud, such as some features related to personalization and GenAI.
  • Sales execution: Some Gartner clients with primarily B2B-oriented business requirements report that Salesforce sales team members recommended Marketing Cloud Engagement (Salesforce's multichannel marketing hub product, intended primarily for B2C use cases) rather than Marketing Cloud Account Engagement. Prospective customers should do their due diligence, including using online and third-party resources, to identify which solution best addresses their use cases.
  • Account qualification: Marketing Cloud Account Engagement can score accounts based on completed actions and offers machine-learning-based scoring. However, scores cannot be modified based on product usage, which can limit marketers in retention campaigns.


• Act-On Software - Niche Player
  

  Pros:

  • Focused product vision: While all other vendors in this market balance MAP investments with investments in other marketing, CRM and/or other business products, Act-On's resources are dedicated to improving and extending the value of its MAP solution. It is focused on maintaining usability, and applies this approach to recent AI investments that make it easier to conduct activities like segmentation and reporting.
  • Email marketing: Act-On's Adaptive Sending feature analyzes cross-channel contact behavior to identify when a contact is most engaged with a brand to recommend the optimal email outreach time. It also offers a generative AI (GenAI) email development tool, allowing users to quickly create email content based on intended marketing objective, desired tone and preferred length.
  • Ease of reporting: Act-On's new advanced analytics package enables marketing users to quickly create custom reports, see performance insights (using natural language searches) and identify anomalies in marketing performance.

  Cons:

  • Business viability: Act-On is one of the smallest vendors in this Magic Quadrant, and it competes with very large vendors with more resources to invest in innovation, attracting/retaining top talent and withstanding future macroeconomic disruptions. It also has the lowest Glassdoor rating among vendors in this Magic Quadrant at the time of this analysis, suggesting lower employee satisfaction.
  • Regional footprint: Act-On's direct sales and support presence is limited to the U.S. and the U.K., and it lacks an indirect sales presence in Asia/Pacific and many regions in continental Europe. Organizations with marketing teams based outside of the U.S. and the U.K. should assess the extent to which they require region-specific support and evaluate Act-On's ability to support those regions accordingly.
  • Integrations: Act-On offers free, native integrations with many third-party CRM/sales force automation (SFA) vendors; however, it does not offer the same breadth of native integrations with other types of marketing technology vendors. Additional effort is required to create custom integrations, often through partnership with integration platform as a service (iPaaS) vendors at added cost.


• BUSINESSNEXT - Niche Player
  

  Pros:

  • AI commitment: BUSINESSNEXT's generative pretrained transformer (GPT) functionality is a prompt-based assistant with a conversational interface that identifies improvement opportunities by automatically scouring campaign analytics. Its continued investment in no-code AI tools will enable personalized content, including language translation and page design layouts via natural language commands, simplifying campaign creation steps for marketers.
  • Market responsiveness: BUSINESSNEXT demonstrates an approach centered on listening and applying customer feedback, which may be a factor driving its high revenue retention rate. For example, BUSINESSNEXT is making strides in adopting GenAI functionality, but it has adopted a targeted approach to addressing the needs of its customer segments with out-of-the-box AI models designed for high-priority industries.
  • Customizable AI: Users can build customized machine learning models with menu-driven field choices to assign model weights based on unique business needs and insights. This focus on customization enables users to configure solution elements like lead workflow designs or next-best-action intelligence.

  Cons:

  • Industry concentration: CRMNEXT's product capabilities, expertise and market positioning are strongly linked to credit unions, banking and insurance industries. Prospective clients in other market segments should confirm the vendor can support the required use cases in their industries.
  • Regional footprint: Concentrated in the Asia/Pacific region, BUSINESSNEXT's limited presence and visibility in North America, and especially Latin America and Eastern Europe, means it does not offer comparable local resources and support that Leaders in this market offer. Potential customers must assess their local support needs when considering the market presence of BUSINESSNEXT as a provider.
  • Testing campaigns: Marketers seeking to leverage CRMNEXT's multichannel marketing capabilities to amplify campaign content across SMS, WhatsApp, social media and email may struggle with testing campaigns. In particular, CRMNEXT has a limited UI to support email marketing A/B testing, which may lead to extra effort to manage email tests.


• Freshworks - Niche Player
  

  Pros:

  • Product roadmap: Freshworks' roadmap showcases a clear and well-defined path for product evolution and market parity. The company is actively investing in AI-based journey orchestration, query-based segmentation and AI suggestions to enhance marketing campaigns through next best actions.
  • Market dynamics and customer feedback: Freshworks demonstrates its agility in accommodating customer and market dynamics through iterative product development and a focus on AI. Its targeting, personalization and journey orchestration capabilities enable a faster time to market and the ability to pivot more nimbly, ensuring efficient fulfillment of customers' needs.
  • Strategic focus of Freddy AI: Freshworks continues to build on and improve Freddy AI, adding features such as campaign creation, audience customization, send-time optimization, journey creation and optimization, and predictive segmentation. By refining and expanding Freddy AI, Freshworks aims to provide businesses with powerful tools to drive their marketing efforts and achieve better results.

  Cons:

  • Limited B2B integrations: Available third-party platform integrations primarily cater to B2C users, such as Shopify and WooCommerce, which may be less beneficial for B2B users. Additionally, the integrations with other CRM systems are quite restricted and not bidirectional.
  • Lack of differentiated offerings: Freshworks currently lacks any significant product differentiation points that set it apart from other providers in the market. Recent added capabilities focus on maintaining parity with other vendors.
  • Scalability: Freshworks primarily focuses on small marketing teams, which results in a lack of certain capabilities, such as revenue attribution and bidirectional third-party CRM integrations, which are often necessary to support the needs of large, complex marketing organizations. Consequently, the platform is somewhat limiting for teams rapidly advancing in marketing automation usage and sophistication.


• LeadSquared - Niche Player
  

  Pros:

  • Combined solution model: LeadSquared provides customers with a combined marketing and sales solution beyond just an MAP. These complementary products support inbound lead management, SFA, sales performance and field marketing. Most of its customers are large enterprises, but this integrated approach is comparable to how other vendors primarily serve SMBs.
  • Customer-requested capabilities: LeadSquared has expanded its MAP product feature set based on user feedback to include a chatbot to automate initial customer communication, a conversational inbox to centralize customer conversations and a tool for field marketing. These requested features allow users to streamline interactions with their customers.
  • Account profile management: An individual lead or contact is automatically added to the account profile page in LeadSquared, where information about all leads or contacts in that account is aggregated. Users can also associate a lead with an account when manually entering a new lead or contact. Users can further enrich account profiles with third-party data.

  Cons:

  • Lack of AI: LeadSquared's B2B MAP does not include any AI or GenAI features. GenAI functionality is promised on its roadmap, so prospective clients will need to set appropriate expectations with their teams of future delivery of these features.
  • No published pricing: LeadSquared publishes its package configuration on its website, but buyers are unable to determine pricing without talking to a sales rep. This arrangement creates a challenge for buyers that don't know if the MAP solution meets their budget, especially when they have other product add-ons or solutions to consider.
  • Limited additional channels: LeadSquared focuses on email, landing pages and, more recently, chat. Social media is on the roadmap, but the product currently lacks the ability to engage customers with organic or paid content. The solution does offer retargeting advertising on Facebook and Google, and additional social media capabilities are available through its partner network.


• SugarCRM - Niche Player
  

  Pros:

  • CRM suite for midmarket organizations: SugarCRM changed its go-to-market strategy to emphasize the fully integrated suite, rather than its stand-alone solution as a tool that connects with third-party CRM systems. This strategy aims to better support SMB and midmarket customers with a system built as an integrated solution for marketing and sales.
  • Stability and response time: SugarCRM offers an operationally solid platform, demonstrated by exceeding its guaranteed uptime SLA of cloud availability to customers. This reliability is mirrored by its customer support case activity and response time, which achieves 97% against its SLA.
  • Intuitive lead and account workflows: SugarCRM provides an easy-to-use canvas for marketers to build journeys for leads and accounts. The no-code interface includes clickable icons for users to specify actions and connect to contact and company data stored in the CRM/SFA platform.

  Cons:

  • Status quo roadmap: SugarCRM's recent product enhancements, including the integration of its recently acquired intelligence platform, and improvements planned into 2025, are undifferentiated and too focused on driving the suite's value proposition, rather than on enhancing MAP-specific capabilities. Prospective buyers should evaluate available features to determine if this solution meets their current and future needs.
  • Market responsiveness: Based on its own customer data, SugarCRM has focused on improving product quality versus adding new features trending in the market. For example, many marketers already expect GenAI in their MAPs, but SugarCRM does not expect to provide GenAI in its platform until 2025, even though it has been in development for more than two years.
  • Limited email marketing capabilities: SugarCRM offers the basic building blocks of email marketing, including prebuilt layouts and templates, a drag-and-drop interface, dynamic content and subject lines. However, it lacks more advanced features, including send-time optimization and content generation using GenAI.


• Zoho - Challenger
  

  Pros:

  • Value proposition for SMBs: Zoho offers price-competitive solutions for SMBs, while accommodating more sophisticated marketing capabilities as they mature. In addition, it offers an attractive low-entry price for those new to the technology.
  • Flexible product packages and pricing: Zoho allows customers to purchase Zoho CRM Plus as a package, configure a bundle with specific tiers for different app packages or buy individual modules. B2B marketers can work within their marketing budgets to configure a solution and expand capabilities as their marketing technology (martech) budget increases.
  • MAP-native social media posting: B2B marketers can use Zoho's social media module to post content to Facebook, Instagram, X and LinkedIn natively from Zoho CRM Plus. Marketers can also easily schedule posts, use GenAI to generate posts and predict reach without leaving the platform. This module enables more efficient multichannel campaign management.

  Cons:

  • GenAI offerings: Zoho was an early GenAI adopter, but Zoho CRM Plus does not currently include or plan to integrate a natural language customer journey builder in the next 12 months. Prospective buyers that want to use this feature may consider other B2B MAP providers.
  • Limited lead-journey automation tools: Zoho CRM Plus lacks next best channel recommendations or other automated lead-journey functions that help B2B marketers scale their campaigns. B2B marketers can personalize journey orchestration on Zoho CRM Plus with a manual process.
  • Integration limitations: Zoho CRM Plus lacks native bidirectional integration with many other CRM platforms and lacks native ABM integrations, which prospective buyers may adopt as their business grows. It offers B2B marketers an extensive ecosystem, but it requires a number of third-party integrations if customers wish to use it with other CRM/SFA or ABM platforms.

Reference

• Gartner, Magic Quadrant for B2B Marketing Automation Platforms, 23 September 2024, ID G00803111

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