| Functionality | 6 <p>Customer.io focuses on delivering functionality that enhance customer engagement through highly personalised, data-driven messaging across multiple channels. It offers excellent, granular segmentation and flexible automation workflows across a wide range of channels. However, this means that compared to other Marketing Automation Platforms, Customer.io lacks some common functionality, e.g. creating landing pages, websites and signup forms.</p> | 10 <p>HubSpot offers all functionality that most companies will need, including functionality required by the largest/ most sophisticated companies. Has all the marketing functionality in one place - emails, SMS, Whatsapp, ads, website, landing pages, socials etc.</p><p><br></p><p>Ability to create highly sophisticated automation workflows across the entire customer lifecycle & create very granular segments - allows you to create hyper personalised outreach at the exact right moment in time.</p> |
| Ease of Use | 2 <p>Customer.io is designed for technical, data-driven teams.The emphasis on technical integrations and real-time data makes it more complex than many other marketing automation tools. To fully unlock Customer.io's power, you'll nede the technical expertise to manage data integrations, create advanced workflows, set up custom events and more.</p> | 5 <p>HubSpot is so packed with features and customisation options that it will take an average SMB employee a few days to learn how to navigate the platform.</p><p><br></p><p>For example, to create a email segment/ , there are literally hundreds of filters you can choose from, which can feel rather overwhelming. And even if you only plan on using Marketing Hub, you have access to other products in the suite - operations/ sales/ content etc, which can feel excessive.</p><p><br></p><p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">But once you're past the initial learning curve, most key processes are generally quite intuitive.</span></p> |
| Look and feel | 5 <p>We find Customer.io's interface visually acceptable, but largely just functional. The design's not fully responsive i.e. text escapes containers when browser window is shrunk. We also found page loads to be rather slow (e.g. 3-5 seconds), which quickly becomes painful.</p> | 5 <p>We find HubSpot's interface to be tired and overwhelming compared to the newer MAPs on the market. There is often an overwhelming amount of actions you can take on a single screen, which makes it difficult to locate key information at times.</p> |
| Customisability | 8 <p>Customer.io offers a high level of customisability in allowing you to tailor messaging campaigns extensively based on any data you bring in. You can create complex workflows with conditional logic, customize messages using dynamic content, and design personalized customer journeys based on detailed segmentation. However, note that this level of customisability can only be unlocked with technical expertise. Without code, Customer.io only offers a average/ below average level of customisability, especially in designing client-facing emails.</p> | 9 <p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Hubspot allows you to create very sophisticated & hyper personalised marketing automation workflows with conditional logic, branching, triggers and connection to third party platforms. You're also able to segment based on any thing your heart desires, and you can even create custom events with code.</span></p><p><br></p><p>On top of this, you can customise most things client facing. There's an extremely sophisticated editor and personalisation options, especially with its website builder. You can always bring custom code for the ultimate style customisation.Custom fields are also supported.</p><p><br></p><p>Finally, there's the ability to create rather advanced custom reports and dashboards.</p> |
| Ease of Setup | 2 <p>Given that Customer.io's focus on data-driven campaigns, there's a steep learning curve when it comes to setup.</p><p><br></p><p>In particular, basic setup can take more than an hour, and fully customising data panels and real-time data can take weeks.</p> | 2 <p>HubSpot Marketing Hub offers a self-serve free trial, but basic setup takes more than an hour to complete. Given that HubSpot is a relatively complex ecosystem of marketing and sales functions, it takes a while to navigate through the various customisation and segmentation options. We'd also expect that fully customising HubSpot would take extensive research or speaking to the customer support team.</p> |
| Customer Support | 7 <p>For personalised Q&A, you can submit a support request via Customer.io's platform (after getting past a somewhat unhelpful AI chatbot). We found the support team to be quick to reply (within 2 business hours), helpful and friendly. Their help centre is also of decent quality, with detailed guides and video walkthroughs.</p> | 6 <p>HubSpot's support team responds via live chat/ email in less than 3 minutes, 24/7.</p><p><br></p><p>That said, you don't get access to their phone/ video support, unless you pay for Professional/ Enterprise plans, and now if you're signed up to their discounted startup plan. We also find their support sometimes frustratingly bureaucratic - you can only speak with the assigned representative in your territory.</p> |
| Integratability | 9 <p>Customer.io excels in integratability, providing robust options to connect with various data sources and tools. It has excellent integrations with all of the most popular data sources and third-party applications, such as analytics, sales and content management tools. It also has a comprehensive APIs that supports custom integrations, allowing you to easily bring in real-time data from your own databases, data warehouses, websites, and applications.</p> | 10 <p>HubSpot offers native integrations with the overwhelming majority of 3rd part products a company will want to connect your MAP with, plus an ever-growing marketplace of more than 350 free and paid-for apps. The chances are that if you need a particular integration and HubSpot don't have it, it will unlikely be provided by a competitive product.</p> |
| Ease of Migration | 9 <p>Key data (e.g. users, objects) can be easily exported to CSV format via self-serve. Customer.io is also designed to facilitate export customer data to most reasonably relevant third party tools e.g. data warehouse, analytics tools, CRMs via its API and pre-built integrations.</p> | 8 <p>HubSpot allows users to export key data data via self-serve. Export of most other data are also available via API or on request.</p> |
