HubSpot vs Marketo: one of them will not tell you the price

Every other page on this site puts two sets of published figures side by side. This one cannot, and the reason is the most useful thing on it.

What happened, precisely

On 24 September 2026, Switchyard attempted to read Adobe's Marketo Engage pricing page at business.adobe.com. The request did not return. A second attempt through a different fetcher timed out as well.

So this page prints no Marketo price, no plan name taken from a directory, and no "starts from" figure inferred from a reseller. Where this site cannot read something at the source, it says so. Anything else would be a number with a citation-shaped hole in it, which is the single easiest way for a page like this to be confidently wrong.

Why that is itself the comparison

The distinction between these two products, for a buyer, is not a feature list. It is that one of them is a self-serve purchase with published numbers and the other is an enterprise sale with a quote.

HubSpot's Sales Hub page prints its ladder in public: Starter at $20 a seat a month at list, shown at $7 under a limited-time new-customer banner whose renewal rate HubSpot does not publish; Professional at $100 a seat a month at list with a required, one-time Professional Onboarding of $1,500; Enterprise at $150 a seat with a required, one-time Enterprise Onboarding of $3,500. HubSpot's free tools cover, in its own words, up to two users and 1,000 contacts.

Those numbers are checkable by anyone, today, without talking to a salesperson. That is a real property of a product, it affects how you can plan, and this site can verify it. The other side of this comparison is a conversation, and a conversation is not something a web page can read.

What a quote-only purchase changes about a migration

Three things, none of which depend on knowing the price.

You cannot budget the move before you start it. Every other page on this site ends with an arithmetic comparison — this seat against that seat, this one-off fee against none. A quote-only product means the financial half of the decision is unavailable until you are already in a sales process.

The exit terms are in the contract, not on the page. With a self-serve product, the export documentation is public and you can read what leaving looks like before you arrive. Switchyard's entire method depends on that being possible. With a negotiated agreement, data-portability terms are a clause, and clauses are negotiable — which is good news if you know to ask and bad news if you do not.

The comparison happens on someone else's timetable. A published price can be compared at midnight in a spreadsheet. A quote arrives after a discovery call, by which point the alternatives have gone cold.

The part this site can tell you

The HubSpot half, in full, because it is published.

Getting data out of HubSpot is straightforward: records export from each object's list view with their current property values and associations, up to 300 exports in a rolling 24 hours. Activity history is a separate job — HubSpot's own article points to per-contact exports, activity reports or the engagements API for calls and notes. Export download links expire after 30 days.

Getting data into HubSpot is the least constrained of anything here: 1,048,576 rows per file on a paid plan, 512 MB, ten million rows a day, and 500,000 rows a day even on the free tools. Its importer will create emails, meetings, notes and tasks but not update them, so one clean pass beats iterating.

If you are weighing HubSpot against a marketing-automation platform rather than a CRM, the closest published comparison this site has is ActiveCampaign against HubSpot, which contrasts per-contact pricing with per-seat pricing using figures from both vendors' own pages.

What to ask if you are in the Marketo conversation anyway

Three questions, phrased so the answers are useful later.

1. What is the per-year cost at our database size, including the first year's onboarding or implementation, in writing? The published equivalents on this site are HubSpot's $1,500 and $3,500 required onboarding fees; ask what the analogous line is.
2. What is the documented export route, and how often can it be run? This is the question that separates a two-week exit from a two-month one. Salesforce publishes the answer for its own product; ask for the equivalent in writing.
3. What is the renewal price, not the first-year price? The pattern this site sees repeatedly — HubSpot's struck-through Starter rate, EngageBay's headline two-year rate — is that the number on display is the best one available and the renewal is the one nobody publishes.

The structural point, beyond these two products

This is not really an argument about Marketo. It is about a divide that runs through the whole software market, and it is worth naming because it changes how you should shop.

Self-serve products compete on published numbers. Their pricing pages are adversarial documents — every trick this site has catalogued lives on one, from struck-through prices under limited-time banners to headline rates that turn out to be two-year commitments. But they are readable, comparable and datable, and a buyer with an afternoon can hold four of them side by side.

Quote-only products compete on relationships. The number you get depends on your size, your timing, your quarter and how well you negotiate, which means there is no such thing as the price and a comparison page that prints one is fiction. That is not a criticism; enterprise software has always worked this way. It is a reason a site built on reading public pages has nothing to offer about it, and should say so rather than pretending.

Why this site is strict about it

It would have been easy to fill this page. Marketo package names and "starting from" figures are widely republished, and a page that repeated them would look more complete than this one.

It would also have been a page whose central claim — here is what this costs — rested on somebody else's reading of a document, at an unknown date, with no way for a reader to check it. This site has already found two vendors whose own pages contradict themselves at the moment of reading: EngageBay's headline price is its two-year rate under a tab labelled Monthly that captions itself "paid yearly", and HubSpot's displayed Starter price is a limited-time offer whose renewal rate is not published anywhere. Both were caught by reading the page. Neither would have been caught by repeating a summary.

So the rule holds even when it makes a page thin. A short, accurate page and a note about what is missing is a better artefact than a long one built on borrowed figures.

One more reason to care about the published half

There is a practical reason to prefer a vendor that publishes, beyond the convenience of comparison. A published price is a commitment you can point at later. A quoted one is a position in a negotiation, and the position moves — at renewal, when your headcount changes, when the account manager does.

The same logic applies to export terms, which is the part this site cares most about. Documentation that is public on the day you arrive is documentation you can hold up on the day you leave.

The rest of the field

Every CRM on this site that does publish its numbers is compared in one table on the HubSpot alternatives page, with prices at both billing terms, free tiers and import ceilings in the same columns. That comparison took an afternoon to assemble because the figures were public. This page is short for exactly the opposite reason.