With more than 10 years in business, SharpSpring is a leading growth marketing platform for small to mid-sized online businesses.
However, after being acquired by Constant Contact, one of the original email marketing pioneers, in 2021, innovation and new features dropped off.
If you are looking for an alternative, we’re taking a closer look at some of the top SharpSpring alternatives for agencies and consultants.
- HighLevel
- Zoho CRM
- Salesforce Sales Cloud
- HubSpot Marketing Hub
- Chili Piper
- Ortto
- Mailchimp
- HighLevel: The Real Opportunity For Digital Agencies
1. HighLevel
Unlike SharpSpring which caters to all kinds of businesses, HighLevel is built specifically for agencies.
Just like in SharpSpring, HighLevel customers have access to a CRM, drag-and-drop email campaigns, lead capture forms, automated workflows, and detailed reporting features. Both platforms can also be white-labeled.
However, while SharpSpring customers need to buy and integrate many third-party apps, HighLevel is truly an all-in-one marketing automation platform. You don’t need to integrate with dozens of apps for things like 2-way SMS communication, membership sites, call tracking, scheduling links, social media marketing, or review management.
Given all of the features you get, the pricing for HighLevel is simpler and also lower than SharpSpring and starts at $97 per month.
Best for: Agencies and consultants
2. Zoho CRM
Zoho CRM enables sales and marketing teams to develop tailored campaigns with advanced customer segmentation that allow users to group customers beyond simple region and lead source.
Leads can also be sorted through level of responsiveness, so rather than waste time and effort on potential customers who fail to reply to marketing initiatives, teams can engage with customers through the most effective channels and with the most optimal message for a conversion.
Arguably, Zoho’s best feature is the sheer number of integrations that span from social media to Google Ads, which allow marketers to view which campaigns, ads, and keywords work best at generating new leads across the omnichannel landscape.
They also have a mobile app that lets reps’ and marketers keep their finger on the pulse of lead generation from anywhere in the world with an internet connection.
Pricing starts at $14 per month
Best for: Small businesses
3. Salesforce Sales Cloud
Salesforce Sales Cloud is touted as one of the most powerful and customizable product suites.
In addition to the highly personalized interface, Salesforce Sales Cloud has basic features like lead management, contact management, and sales pipeline reports to advanced features that assists businesses with strategic planning.
Pricing starts at $25 per user per month. However, as Salesforce is designed to be 100% customizable, most companies will end up needing to spend $100,000 or more to migrate and make the software their own.
Best for: Enterprise Companies
4. HubSpot Marketing Hub
HubSpot Marketing Hub is ideal for marketers and sales leaders who want to centralize their efforts onto a scalable online marketing platform that is simpler to use than Salesforce.
The HubSpot Marketing Hub is home to email, content marketing, and marketing automation tools that allow for nurture campaigns, blog publishing and search engine optimization directly within the platform, as well as a basic landing page builder, social media management, lead scoring, and ad tracking capabilities.
The system remains highly flexible to enable marketing and sales teams to coordinate across departments for maximum impact. For instance, business operations, digital marketers, and salespeople can pull reports to understand the customer journey and see the most effective campaigns and marketing channels for driving revenue growth.
While HubSpot has a free CRM, pricing for HubSpot Marketing Cloud starts at $800.
Best for: VC-Funded Tech Startups & Medium Sized Businesses
5. Chili Piper
Chili Piper excels at helping high-growth revenue teams at tech companies secure more inbound leads, increase conversions, and streamline sales call scheduling.
They enable marketers and sales leaders to book with prospects the moment they express interest in a meeting, so no leads slip through the cracks.
By allowing one-click booking directly from web forms, Chili Piper automates the inbound process. Sophisticated routing rules then automatically qualify and assign prospects to the best-suited representative in real time, and high-priority leads can book with an account owner instantly.
To ensure maximum impact from inbound leads, Chili Piper powers automated reminders and scheduling for prospects and automatically logs all meetings in the company’s CRM. All meeting details are also time-stamped to help reduce the amount of time prospects spend in the pipeline.
Pricing starts at $15 per month per user. However, similar to Salesforce, you can expect to shell out more money for migration and customization.
Best for: High-Growth Revenue Teams at Tech Companies
6. Ortto
Ortto, formerly Autopilot, enables sales and marketing teams to organize a myriad of business intelligence (BI) details into personalized user journeys. The Ortto customer data platform (CDP) integrates metrics from your CRM, Google analytics, ad platforms, and more to provide a unified view of each customer, from demographics and user location to pertinent behavioral data.
Once compiled on the Ortto CDP, various BI data points are arranged to create advanced customer segments that encompass multiple sales channels. Ortto organizes customer activity across eCommerce stores, social media websites, and natural listing ads for a multichannel marketing strategy.
Sales and marketing leaders specifically turn to Ortto to leverage these multi-channel consumer journeys for personalized marketing activities. For instance, they can create automated marketing campaigns for each segment to deliver more customer value.
Pricing starts at $99 per month.
Best for: Startups
7. Mailchimp
Admittedly, Mailchimp is one of the better known Constant Contact alternatives. Just like Constant Contact, Mailchimp was one of the pioneers of email marketing when it was founded in 2001. The platform empowers service businesses to create, send, and automate the right message to the right person at the right time. Be it through email, social media, social targeting ads, or push notifications to website visitors.
By analyzing the data from the half a billion emails sent through Mailchimp daily, the platform continuously provides small business owners with informative, personalized recommendations for better targeting and automations.
Mailchimp is also home to dozens of email templates that make creating and sending professional-looking emails not just intuitive, but incredibly fast.
Mailchimp is the only company in this list that has a true free plan. Paid plans start at $18 per month.
Best For: Non-Tech-Savvy Service Businesses
HighLevel: The Real Opportunity For Digital Agencies
The bottom line is that SharpSpring is an excellent choice if you are a small to mid-sized business looking for email marketing, CRM, and marketing automation features. And you want the flexibility of being able to customize and integrate it with all of your other third-party apps.
In contrast, HighLevel is a true, all-in-one platform built specifically for agencies. You don’t need to spend thousands of dollars on additional third-party apps and then inevitably worry about having to sync all of these tools together.
This means agencies can use our software to do everything from building landing pages and email marketing campaigns to managing their sales process, creating marketing automation workflows, setting up 2-way call-tracking, and more.
In addition, SharpSpring is significantly cheaper than HubSpot and Salesforce, it is much more expensive than HighLevel. For instance, SharpSpring’s lowest tier plan begins at $449 per month for 1,000 contacts. This price includes unlimited users, unlimited support, and a full set of features. If you need more contacts, you can move up to the next plan for $999 per month. This includes the same support, features, and unlimited users but has 10,000 contacts instead of 1,000.
In contrast, HighLevel’s agency unlimited plan is $297 per month and doesn’t have any limits on the number of accounts/contacts or users.
For example, Bo Ray switched from SharpSpring to HighLevel and said,
“I switched from SharpSpring a couple of months ago because they didn’t seem too interested in setting up a text solution, and my clients were asking for it. That and I needed to use 3 different software platforms (SharpSpring, CallRail, and a review platform), costing me well over $2,000 a month total for what HighLevel did.”
Plus, the best part is you get unlimited accounts at $297/per month, so you can spin up new client accounts in minutes, and you won’t be charged extra for it.
If you are an agency and are ready to try an all-in-one SharpSpring alternative you can get started with a 14-day free trial of HighLevel here. 👇
