Marketo vs HubSpot

Leads, contacts, companies and accounts: how each tool stores them

Marketo keeps one person database. When Salesforce is connected, leads and contacts sync into it and accounts sync down as companies. Adobe's account sync documentation is blunt about the limits: the flow is one way, from Salesforce to Marketo; changing an account field on a contact in Marketo changes it for every contact in that account inside Marketo but never reaches Salesforce, and the next Salesforce edit overwrites it. A contact can belong to only one account, accounts are mostly not creatable from Marketo, and the exception, the Convert Person flow step, creates a contact, an account and an opportunity together and is described by Adobe as having a very limited use case.

HubSpot's model starts from the opposite end. Contacts, companies and deals are native objects, and the marketing contacts billing article adds a status on top: marketing contacts are the ones you email and advertise to and they count toward your tier, while non-marketing contacts are free to store. That status is a lever and a trap at once. It lets a large dormant database cost nothing, but an import or a form can flip people to marketing and push the account into the next tier, which HubSpot says cannot be prevented once the limit is exceeded. Super Admins can set a maximum number of marketing contacts to stop that.

For custom data, Marketo's custom objects link to either a person or a company. The docs warn that a company-linked object is associated to only one person record unless companies come from the CRM or are created through the API, and that custom objects cannot be restored once deleted. Adobe's pricing page shows 10 objects and 2M records on Select, Prime and Ultimate and a dollar-sign icon on Growth.

• A mid-market team with one flat hierarchy (company, then person) can live with either model; the person database is simpler to reason about in HubSpot because there is one CRM, not two.
• A team with parent and child accounts, regional ownership or opportunity-level reporting that sales already maintains in Salesforce gets more value from Marketo's one-way account feed, because the account record stays with sales.
• If your sales team lives in a CRM other than Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics or Veeva, Marketo's native sync does not apply, and you should ask Adobe how that CRM would connect before shortlisting it.

Lead and account scoring in practice

Marketo's person scoring is a program you build. Adobe's scoring model tutorial walks through three exercises: list the behaviors that signal intent (pricing page visit, demo request form, webinar registration), list the ones that signal none (no interaction in 90 days, careers page visit, unsubscribe), then set a sales handoff threshold and give each action points relative to it. In its sample, a demo request form is worth +50 against a handoff threshold of 50, a white paper download +5, a tradeshow visit +15 and 90 quiet days -10. Demographic scoring is a second exercise using industry, company, department and role, and the person score is the sum. For multi-region setups it suggests one central scoring program plus a local copy with the configurable parts, keeping point values in tokens, deciding which attributes score once (industry) and which score every time (attending a webinar), and testing the Smart Campaign by submitting your own demo form.

HubSpot's lead scoring tool keeps the same ideas in a point-and-click editor under Marketing > Lead Scoring. You choose the object (contacts for Marketing Hub only, companies for Marketing Hub or Sales Hub, deals for Sales Hub only), then a fit score from properties, an engagement score from events, or a combined score. Event groups can have their own point cap, and the score limit can run from -100 to 100 up to -10,000 to 10,000. HubSpot adds that the types and number of scores you can create depend on your subscription, and building contact scores with AI requires Marketing Hub Enterprise.

Account-level scoring is where the gap shows. In Marketo, Adobe's account score page describes aggregating lead scores into an account score, for example an Account Web Engagement Score equal to the SUM of a Lead Web Engagement Score, and you can define several account scores from different person scores. In HubSpot a company score is its own score with its own criteria, which is flexible but means you decide whether it should reflect the people underneath it.

Salesforce sync rules, side by side

Marketo's Salesforce sync overview says the sync runs, pauses five minutes, then runs again, that the first sync can take hours or days because it copies the whole Salesforce database, and that afterward each cycle only moves changed data. Leads, contacts and Salesforce campaigns sync both ways. Per the lead sync page, when both sides change at once Marketo wins, Salesforce validation rules are respected (a failed record is logged in the lead's activity log), and only fields visible to the Salesforce sync user move. Accounts are one-way: if an account has more than 5,000 contacts and a field changes in Salesforce, the change syncs down but is not logged as an activity on those contacts.

HubSpot's rules live on each property mapping. The field mapping guide offers four choices: Prefer Salesforce unless blank (HubSpot writes only into an empty Salesforce field), Always use Salesforce, Two-way (the most recent value wins), and Don't sync. There is a limit of 500 field mappings per object, mappings created later do not retroactively sync old values, and the first sync of a mapped field uses the current Salesforce value as its baseline, which can overwrite a newer HubSpot value. Owners sync only when name and email match an active Salesforce user. HubSpot's sync trigger article adds that it also checks for new or changed information roughly every 15 minutes.

Companies need an explicit switch. HubSpot's Salesforce accounts article says company sync must be on before you import accounts or no company records are created, and that a Salesforce account with a similar name does not guarantee a match to an existing company. Matching uses the Account ID on a synced contact or, with the new company sync, an exact match on the deduplication field. That is stricter than many teams expect and is the first place to look when duplicate companies appear.

• Marketo's sync is easier to explain in one sentence (leads and contacts both ways, everything else down only, Marketo wins ties), which helps when an audit asks who can overwrite what.
• HubSpot's per-field rules are more precise for a messy CRM, because a field like industry can be Always use Salesforce while a field like lead source stays two-way.
• Neither tool removes the need for a field-ownership list written before the connection is turned on.

ABM features you can use on day one

Marketo's account-based layer is Target Account Management. Adobe's TAM overview calls it available as an add-on to a Marketo subscription that you request from your sales rep, while the Marketo pricing page lists Target Account Management as a feature row with a dollar-sign icon on Growth and Select and a check on Prime and Ultimate. Treat the two statements together as a reason to get the TAM line item written into the quote. What you get is account lists (static or dynamic from CRM Account Views), lead-to-account matching that Adobe says happens in near real time, and account scores summed from person scores.

HubSpot's ABM setup guide creates a Target account checkbox, a three-tier ideal customer profile property and a buying role property (decision maker, budget holder, blocker, champion, influencer), builds contact segments in an Account Based Advertising folder, and can send a company segment to a LinkedIn matched audience if LinkedIn Ads is connected. The catch is on the sales side: viewing the Account overview needs a Sales Hub Professional or Enterprise seat. HubSpot's ABM is lighter than Marketo's on aggregation and heavier on usability for the account executive.

If your ABM program also buys display advertising or a dedicated intent feed, that layer usually comes from a specialist vendor such as the ones compared on our Demandbase vs Terminus page, and Marketo or HubSpot then receives the account signals through an integration while remaining the place where email, scoring and handoff run.

Admin effort: what each tool asks of your operations team

Marketo's Salesforce setup is a three-step job in Adobe's documentation: add Marketo fields to Salesforce, create a Salesforce user for Marketo, connect the two. After that the ongoing work is governance. Adobe documents sync status, backlog metrics and error pages, a sync user whose field access limits what moves, scoring programs with tokens, custom objects imported by CSV and then by API, and API and user ceilings that depend on the package (10 users and 20k calls a day on Growth, 25 users and 50k calls on the others). That is a system built for an operations person to own, and our judgment is that a team without one should either hire for it or choose the tool whose defaults need less tuning.

HubSpot's admin work shifts to billing and permissions. Someone has to own the marketing contact status of every import and form, the maximum-contacts cap, the update date (the first day of each month on yearly subscriptions, the renewal date each month on monthly ones), the mapping list for Salesforce if you use it, and the seat types that decide who can use ABM and scoring features. None of that is exotic, but it is a recurring monthly chore, not a one-time setup.

Worked cost examples with the arithmetic

Five sales seats, one year, both products from one vendor. Marketing Hub Professional is $800 a month on the Marketing Hub pricing page. Over twelve months that is $800 x 12 = $9,600. Sales Hub Professional is $90 per seat per month, so five seats come to $90 x 5 x 12 = $5,400. The Sales Hub pricing page is also where the required one-time onboarding fee appears. That fee is $1,500 for Professional. The total is $9,600 + $5,400 + $1,500 = $16,500 at headline prices, before any marketing contact tier change.

Five sales seats, Marketo plus Salesforce Core. The Salesforce Sales Cloud pricing page lists Core at $195 per user per month billed annually. Five seats come to $195 x 5 x 12 = $11,700 before any Adobe quote. The two stacks break even when the Adobe quote equals $16,500 - $11,700 = $4,800 a year. If Adobe quotes more than that for your database, the first stack is cheaper at five seats on list prices. If you already pay for the CRM, the $11,700 drops out and the comparison is just Adobe's quote against $16,500.

Ten sales seats. Marketing Hub plus Sales Hub comes to $9,600 + ($90 x 10 x 12 = $10,800) + $1,500 = $21,900. Ten Core seats alone come to $195 x 10 x 12 = $23,400, which is already $1,500 above the whole first stack before any Adobe quote. The CRM seat price, not the marketing license, becomes the biggest line as the sales team grows.

Enterprise marketing. Marketing Hub Enterprise is $3,600 a month, which is $3,600 x 12 = $43,200 over a year. Ten Sales Hub Enterprise seats at $150 per seat per month add $150 x 10 x 12 = $18,000, and the Sales Hub page lists a required onboarding fee of $3,500. These are headline prices: the Marketing Hub page says pricing is per seat and the plans sit on contact tiers, so ask for the actual tier before treating $43,200 as a quote. Adobe publishes no equivalent, so ask for a Prime and an Ultimate quote on identical users and database size.

Moving from Marketo to HubSpot

1. Export a field inventory from Marketo: every custom field, the scoring fields, lifecycle fields and the fields mapped to Salesforce. Decide for each whether it becomes a HubSpot property, a score, or nothing.
2. If Salesforce stays, connect it with the HubSpot-Salesforce integration instead of using Smart Transfer for the CRM objects; HubSpot's Smart Transfer article says it is a one-time, one-way migration tool and points Salesforce users to the integration.
3. If Marketo holds people who do not live in a CRM, run Smart Transfer, which is limited to Super Admins and walks through an audit, a portal preparation step, a record sync and an optional one-time transfer of the rest. HubSpot's supported apps page lists three Marketo objects (contacts, email templates and users) plus lists as one-time data, so companies, programs and Smart Campaigns need a different route. A Data Hub subscription is required to transfer custom field mappings.
4. Transfer email templates with Smart Transfer for email templates, which recreates Marketo HTML templates with AI; review and test each one before sending.
5. Rebuild scoring in the lead scoring tool: map demographic scores to fit scores, behavior scores to engagement scores and the person score to a combined score, then compare the first week of MQL volume with Marketo's.
6. Rebuild Smart Campaigns as workflows, and rebuild forms and landing pages in HubSpot. Smart Transfer's Marketo object list does not include them, so schedule that work by hand and import companies from a CSV or from Salesforce.
7. Before the first import, set a maximum number of marketing contacts and decide which segments should start as non-marketing, to avoid an unplanned tier upgrade.
8. Run both systems in parallel for one nurture cycle. HubSpot's Marketo data sync listing advertises two-way sync with default field mappings and historical syncing, and notes it requires a Marketo subscription.

Moving from HubSpot to Marketo

1. Decide where the CRM data goes first. Marketo's pricing page lists native sync with Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics and Veeva only, so HubSpot's deals, companies and owners need a home before any marketing record moves.
2. Export contacts and companies from HubSpot with Record IDs and each contact's marketing status, and keep the unsubscribe and opt-out lists separate so no one is re-mailed.
3. Create the target fields in Marketo and import a pilot list. Adobe's import tutorial says CSV files must be UTF-8, UTF-16, Shift-JIS or EUC-JP and under 100MB.
4. For large loads use the bulk lead import API: files under 10 MB, two jobs processed at a time, ten in the queue. Use the externalCompanyId field to link people to companies.
5. Rebuild each HubSpot workflow as a Smart Campaign, and rebuild scoring as a scoring program with tokens before you turn on lead routing.
6. Turn on the Salesforce sync only after the field-ownership list is agreed; Adobe notes that the first sync can take hours or days and that Marketo wins a simultaneous edit on a lead.
7. If you need account lists, ask Adobe for the Target Account Management line in writing before you design the program around it.