GetResponse vs HubSpot Marketing Hub
An independent, review-free comparison compiled by the SaaSTracker editorial team. Both products are profiled in full, and neither can pay for placement here.
The short answer
Both sides assessedGetResponse compared with HubSpot Marketing Hub
HubSpot Starter has almost no automation and Professional costs $800 a month plus a $3,000 onboarding fee, which is where GetResponse Marketer at around $59 delivers unlimited workflows, tagging, and scoring. HubSpot wins decisively on CRM depth, attribution reporting, and its 1,500-app marketplace. If you have a sales team and need attribution, HubSpot. If you need automation on a small budget with no onboarding fee, GetResponse.
HubSpot Marketing Hub compared with GetResponse
GetResponse starts at $19 a month with no onboarding fee and gives unlimited automation workflows on its $59 Marketer tier, which is where HubSpot would charge $800. HubSpot has vastly better CRM integration, attribution, and ecosystem. If your requirement is nurture email with real automation on a small budget, GetResponse wins outright; if it is marketing operations for a company with a sales team, HubSpot does things GetResponse cannot.
Choose GetResponse if
Small businesses, creators, coaches, and small ecommerce operators who want serious list-driven email automation with unlimited sends, plus landing pages, funnels, webinars, and course tools in one subscription, at a price bracketed by list size rather than by seat.
Choose HubSpot Marketing Hub if
Small and mid-sized businesses with a content-and-forms funnel who want marketing, sales, and service on one contact database, and who can either live inside Starter's limits at $20 a seat or genuinely justify Professional at $800 a month plus $3,000 onboarding.
Side by side
13 attributes| Attribute | GetResponse | HubSpot Marketing Hub |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Automation | Automation |
| Starting price | $19 per month at 1,000 contacts (Starter) (free plan available) | $0 (free tools), then $20 per seat per month (Starter) (free plan available) |
| Pricing model | Subscription bracketed by contact list size across 1,000, 2,500, 5,000, 10,000, 25,000, 50,000, and 100,000 contacts, with unlimited monthly sends and included user seats. Two billing periods, monthly or twelve-month prepay at an 18 percent discount. | Tiered subscription combining per-seat pricing with a marketing-contact meter, plus a mandatory one-time onboarding fee on Professional and Enterprise. |
| Free plan | A free account persists after the 14-day trial with the GetResponse badge on messages, landing pages capped at 1,000 unique visitors a month, webinars limited to 10 people, unlimited courses for up to 250 students, and restricted marketing automation. | Free marketing tools include forms, email marketing with HubSpot branding, live chat, ad management, and the full free CRM for up to two users. |
| Free trial | 14 days with full access to premium features and no credit card required. | 14-day trials are offered on paid tiers; the free plan itself does not expire. |
| Best for | Small businesses, creators, coaches, and small ecommerce operators who want serious list-driven email automation with unlimited sends, plus landing pages, funnels, webinars, and course tools in one subscription, at a price bracketed by list size rather than by seat. | Small and mid-sized businesses with a content-and-forms funnel who want marketing, sales, and service on one contact database, and who can either live inside Starter's limits at $20 a seat or genuinely justify Professional at $800 a month plus $3,000 onboarding. |
| Setup time | A few hours to import a list, authenticate a domain, and send a first campaign. A week to migrate existing autoresponders and rebuild two or three workflows properly. | A day for Starter, including domain connection, forms, and a first email. Four to eight weeks for a serious Professional implementation, which is why the $3,000 onboarding fee exists and is charged. |
| Learning curve | Low to moderate. The email side is immediately familiar, and the workflow canvas is one of the more approachable in the category. The main friction is the breadth: webinars, funnels, courses, and the website builder each have their own logic, and new users often wander through modules they will never use. | Moderate. The interface is well designed and HubSpot Academy is genuinely excellent, but the platform is large, and the interaction between lifecycle stages, lists, workflows, and marketing-contact status confuses almost every new administrator for the first month. |
| Platforms | Web application, iOS and Android apps, REST API, Hosted landing pages, funnels, websites, and webinar rooms | Web application, iOS and Android apps, REST APIs and private apps, Hosted landing pages, forms, and blog, Browser extensions for email tracking |
| Compliance | GDPR with EU-based processing, CAN-SPAM compliant unsubscribe handling, Double opt-in and consent field tooling, ISO 27001 certified operations | SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, GDPR tooling including consent and data subject requests, CCPA support, HIPAA-enabled configurations on certain enterprise arrangements |
| Founded | 1998 | 2006 |
| Headquarters | Gdansk, Poland | Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States |
| Ownership | Bootstrapped and founder-run | Publicly traded (NYSE: HUBS) |
Strengths and limitations
GetResponse
Strengths
- Unlimited monthly email sends on every paid plan, with list size as the only meter, which removes the send-volume anxiety that shapes behaviour on metered competitors.
- User seats are included rather than charged, so a five-person team pays the same as a solo operator on the Marketer plan.
- Native webinars, course creation, paid newsletters, and a website builder mean the Creator plan genuinely replaces three or four separate subscriptions.
- Twenty-eight years of deliverability operations and a long-standing European compliance posture, from a vendor that has never had to cut corners for an investor timeline.
Limitations
- No product event stream, no real-time recomputing segments, and no warehouse or reverse ETL connector, which rules it out for product-led SaaS lifecycle messaging.
- The Starter plan's one-workflow limit makes the advertised $19 entry price misleading for anyone shopping for automation.
- No sales CRM worth the name: contact management exists but there are no pipelines, deals, or sales activity tracking.
- Pricing localises by region and the vendor does not publish a single canonical currency table, so cross-border buyers have to check their own figure.
HubSpot Marketing Hub
Strengths
- The shared CRM database across marketing, sales, service, and content is the platform's genuine structural advantage and the reason workflows can act on deals and tickets without an integration.
- Reporting and multi-touch attribution are the best in this category by some distance, and they are the honest justification for Professional pricing.
- The largest integration ecosystem in the category, with more than 1,500 marketplace apps and a serious developer platform.
- The free tier and Starter are legitimately good, self-serve, and carry no onboarding fee, so evaluation costs nothing but time.
Limitations
- The Starter-to-Professional cliff is a forty-fold price increase with nothing in between, and it catches almost every growing small business.
- Mandatory onboarding fees of $3,000 on Professional and $7,000 on Enterprise are real money and are frequently omitted from vendor comparisons.
- Custom behavioural events are gated to Enterprise, which makes HubSpot structurally unsuitable as the lifecycle engine for a product-led SaaS company at any sane price.
- Crossing marketing-contact blocks bills immediately, which turns routine list operations into billing events and requires ongoing discipline.
Pricing compared
GetResponse
Subscription bracketed by contact list size across 1,000, 2,500, 5,000, 10,000, 25,000, 50,000, and 100,000 contacts, with unlimited monthly sends and included user seats. Two billing periods, monthly or twelve-month prepay at an 18 percent discount.
- Starter$19
- Marketer$59
- Creator$69
- EnterpriseCustom
Modelled at 5,000 contacts, Marketer sits in the low hundreds per month with unlimited sends, five users, unlimited workflows, tagging, scoring, cart recovery, funnels, and web push. Nothing else in this category bundles that at that price without either a per-seat multiplier or a send meter. At 50,000 contacts the bill climbs but still compares favourably against HubSpot Professional with contact blocks or EngageBay Pro across multiple seats. The Creator plan at ten dollars above Marketer, including a webinar platform and a course host, is the single best-value line item in the small-business marketing tool market. The counterweight is architectural rather than commercial: you are buying a very good list-driven platform, and no amount of value changes the fact that it cannot act on product events.
HubSpot Marketing Hub
Tiered subscription combining per-seat pricing with a marketing-contact meter, plus a mandatory one-time onboarding fee on Professional and Enterprise.
- Free$0
- Starter$20
- Professional$890
- Enterprise$3,600
Starter is good value and Professional is a genuine decision. At 5,000 marketing contacts, Starter with two seats plus four extra contact blocks lands around $240 a month but gives you almost no automation, while Professional lands near $950 a month in year one before the $3,000 onboarding fee, so call it $1,200 a month across the first twelve months. At 50,000 marketing contacts, Professional runs into the low thousands per month once contact blocks are added. Against EngageBay at roughly $240 a month for the same list size, or GetResponse at a few hundred, HubSpot has to justify a five to ten times premium. Sometimes it can: the attribution reporting, the shared CRM, and the 1,500-app marketplace are real and no cheaper tool matches them. Often it cannot, particularly for a SaaS team that will hit the behavioural-events ceiling and need a second tool anyway.
Editorial verdict on each
GetResponse
GetResponse is the most quietly sensible platform in this category. Twenty-eight years old, bootstrapped, founder-run, EU-hosted, with unlimited sends, included seats, and a genuinely capable list-driven automation builder for around $59 a month at a thousand contacts. The Creator plan bundling native webinars, a course builder, and paid newsletters for ten dollars more than Marketer is the best value on offer to anyone monetising an audience. Two caveats decide whether it is right for you. The $19 Starter plan allows exactly one automation workflow, so the honest entry price is the Marketer tier. And the architecture is list-driven with no product event stream, no real-time segment engine, and no warehouse sync, which permanently rules it out as the lifecycle engine for a product-led SaaS company. Within its shape, it is excellent and underrated. Outside it, no discount helps.
Read the full GetResponse profileHubSpot Marketing Hub
Category LeaderHubSpot Marketing Hub is the safe answer and, at Starter, a genuinely good cheap one. The shared CRM, the attribution reporting, the ecosystem, and the training are real advantages no smaller vendor matches, and the free tier means evaluating costs nothing. The problem is the middle of the product line: Starter has almost no automation, Professional costs $800 a month plus a mandatory $3,000 onboarding fee, and there is nothing between them. For a SaaS company the second problem is worse, because in-product behavioural events sit behind a $3,600-a-month Enterprise tier, so HubSpot cannot be your lifecycle engine at any price a small company should pay. Use the free CRM and Starter for as long as they hold. When you outgrow them, price Professional honestly against EngageBay, GetResponse, and Ortto, and if your triggers are product events, buy a purpose-built tool instead and let HubSpot be the CRM.
Read the full HubSpot Marketing Hub profileGetResponse profile last reviewed 2026-08-22; HubSpot Marketing Hub last reviewed 2026-08-22. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.