It’s the late 2020s. It would be very surprising if any businesses or creators out there were managing their marketing strategy entirely manually. And the data supports that view: HubSpot’s State of Marketing 2026 reported that 95% of enterprise marketing teams and 78% of mid-market organizations now use at least one marketing automation platform.

Part of the reason for this is that automation is built into almost every marketing tool out there today, from project management platforms to email marketing tools to chat marketing software like Manychat.

If you’re looking for your next marketing automation tool, you’re probably wondering: which ones are worth the money, and which ones are just hype? Below, we'll cover the different types of marketing automation tools, how to pick one without spiraling, and 15 tools worth your attention.

TL; DR

• Marketing automation tools handle repetitive tasks (things like email sequences, DM replies, lead scoring, ad retargeting) so you can focus on the work that actually needs a human brain.
• The best tool depends on your channels, budget, and business size. There's no single winner for everyone.
• Most tools offer a free plan or a trial, so you can test before you commit. This guide includes a list of 15 popular options to start your search.

How to Choose a Marketing Automation Tool

Let’s start with the truth: there’s no single best marketing automation tool on the market. The best tool for you will depend on your channels, goals, budget, and team. Use these steps to narrow down your options before you commit.

1. Define what you want to automate first. Start with one specific job, such as sending a welcome email, replying to Instagram comments, recovering abandoned carts, or routing leads to your sales team. If you try to automate everything at once, you’ll have a harder time figuring out what you actually need.
2. Start with your channels. Choose a tool that supports the places where your customers already interact with your business. If your leads live in Instagram DMs, a conversational marketing platform may be a better fit than a traditional email tool. If most of your customer journey happens through email and your website, prioritize lifecycle automation and CRM integrations.
3. Build a shortlist. Pick three to five tools that support your primary use case, then compare them based on the features you actually need. Don’t choose based on the longest feature list; choose based on whether the platform can handle your first automation and the next few you have planned.
4. Be honest about your budget and team size. A solo creator and a 20-person marketing team need very different things. Enterprise features you’ll never use aren’t a bargain, and a cheap tool can become expensive if it requires extra software, developer help, or manual work.
5. Calculate the real cost. Look beyond the advertised starting price. Depending on the platform, your bill may depend on contacts, email sends, users, channels, SMS messages, integrations, add-ons, onboarding, or ad spend. Calculate what the tool would cost today and what it might cost if your list or team grows over the next 12 months.
6. Check the setup requirements. No-code builders can make implementation easier, but they don’t eliminate the need for planning, integrations, testing, or ongoing maintenance. Find out whether you can build the workflows yourself, or whether you’ll need a developer or agency to connect your tools and manage more advanced automations.
7. Test the tool with a real workflow. Use a free plan or trial to build one automation that resembles what you’ll actually use. Test the trigger, branching logic, personalization, integrations, notifications, analytics, and human handoff — not just how nice the demo looks.
8. Review integrations, reporting, and data ownership. Make sure the platform can connect to key systems, like your store, CRM, website, and email list. Check whether integrations sync in one or both directions, how quickly data updates, and whether you can export your contacts and reporting. Then confirm that the platform can show whether your automation is generating the result you care about, such as leads, sales, bookings, or time saved.

15 Marketing Automation Tools Worth Your Time

Marketing automation can mean anything from an Instagram comment trigger to a six-month B2B lead-nurture program. Because of that, we grouped tools by their primary use case so you can quickly find the right fit. 

Social media management and publishing tools

These tools automate publishing, engagement, and social reporting. 

1. Hootsuite

Hootsuite brings social scheduling, publishing, inbox management, analytics, listening, AI content tools, and best-time recommendations into one dashboard. It’s designed for teams managing multiple social accounts rather than for building email or CRM workflows. 

• Best for: Teams managing multiple social accounts.
• Pricing: Hootsuite doesn’t offer a free plan, but it does offer a 14-day trial. Standard starts at $99 per user/month when billed annually. 

2. Sprout Social

Sprout Social combines social publishing, engagement, inbox management, analytics, optimal send times, and monitoring tools. Its higher tiers add more collaboration, reporting, and profile-management features.

• Best for: Social teams that need scheduling and reporting.
• Pricing: Sprout Social doesn’t offer a free plan, but does offer a 30-day trial. Essentials starts at $99 per seat/month, or $79 per seat/month annually, for up to five social profiles. 

3. Buffer

Buffer is a social publishing tool that supports scheduling across Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube Shorts, and other platforms. It also offers social analytics, an AI assistant, community inbox features, optimal timing, and a link-in-bio page.

• Best for: Creators and small teams that need social scheduling support.
• Pricing: Buffer’s free plan supports up to three channels and 10 scheduled posts per channel per month. Essentials starts at $6 per channel per month.

Email and customer lifecycle automation tools

These tools automate email, SMS, and other customer communications based on actions such as signups, purchases, website visits, and engagement.

Bonus: Manychat integrates with some of these tools. If you want to learn how to use Manychat to collect emails to send to your lifecycle platform, check out The Creator's Guide to Collecting Emails from Instagram.

4. Mailchimp

Mailchimp is an approachable, email-first automation platform with forms, landing pages, segmentation, triggered emails, and marketing automation flows. It’s easier to start with than a full CRM, although advanced branching and longer workflows are reserved for higher tiers.

• Best for: Small businesses starting with email automation.
• Pricing: Mailchimp’s free plan works for up to 250 contacts. Essentials starts at $13/month and includes a 14-day trial.

5. ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign combines email, SMS, WhatsApp, CRM data, site tracking, and visual automations. You can trigger follow-ups based on page visits, email engagement, purchases, and other contact activity. It’s powerful for lifecycle marketing, but there’s more to learn than with simpler email platforms. Lead scoring and some CRM capabilities depend on the plan or add-ons. 

• Best for: SMBs that need behavior-based lifecycle automation.
• Pricing: ActiveCampaign offers a 14-day free trial; Starter begins at $15/month for up to 1,000 contacts.

6. Klaviyo

Klaviyo was built for e-commerce businesses. Its email and SMS automations can use purchase history, browsing behavior, product data, order value, and abandoned carts to create highly targeted flows.

Klaviyo integrates with Shopify, WooCommerce, and other e-commerce platforms to automatically sync product and order data. Predictive features such as customer lifetime value and expected next-order date require enough historical customer data to generate reliable predictions. 

• Best for: E-commerce brands tying automated messaging to revenue.
• Pricing: Klaviyo’s free plan works for up to 250 active profiles and 500 emails per month. Paid pricing is based on active profiles and messaging channels, so the exact starting price depends on your contact list size.
  

7. Brevo

Brevo lets users manage email, transactional messaging, CRM features, and additional channels such as SMS and WhatsApp, all in one platform. Its pricing can work well for businesses with large lists that don’t send frequently, because its plans are based on email volume.

Notably, Brevo’s advanced automation features are not included at every tier. Starter begins with email and basic segmentation, while Standard adds unlimited multi-step workflows, A/B testing, and web or event tracking.

• Best for: Budget-conscious businesses that need email and transactional messaging.
• Pricing: Brevo offers a free plan. Starter begins at $9/month for 5,000 email sends; Standard starts at $18/month and adds more advanced automation.

8. Omnisend

Omnisend is built for e-commerce stores that want ready-made lifecycle automations. Its templates cover welcome series, cart abandonment, browse abandonment, post-purchase follow-ups, and re-engagement. Like Klaviyo, Omnisend integrates with Shopify and BigCommerce to connect purchase history and customer segments to your workflows.

Email, SMS, and push messaging are available, although limits and credits vary by plan. 

• Best for: E-commerce stores that need to launch prebuilt workflows quickly.
• Pricing: Omnisend’s free plan works for up to 250 contacts and 500 emails per month. Standard starts at $16/month for 500 contacts and 6,000 emails.

9.GetResponse

GetResponse combines email marketing, forms, landing pages, conversion funnels, and automation. Higher plans add features such as e-commerce tools, webinars, courses, and paid newsletters, so webinar functionality shouldn’t be presented as part of every plan.

• Best for: Solopreneurs combining email, landing pages, and funnels.
• Pricing: Free plan for up to 500 contacts and 2,500 newsletters per month. Paid plans include a 14-day premium trial, with Starter beginning at $19/month for up to 1,000 subscribers.

Advertising and retargeting automation tools

These tools automate paid campaigns by helping businesses find audiences, serve ads across channels, retarget interested visitors, and measure campaign performance.

10. AdRoll

AdRoll is a retargeting and cross-channel advertising platform, not a general marketing automation suite. It uses first-party data to build audiences and display, native, video, connected-TV, and social campaigns across channels such as Meta, Instagram, TikTok, and Pinterest.

Its AI bidding and attribution tools help advertisers optimize campaigns and understand which touchpoints contributed to conversions. 

• Best for: E-commerce brands focused on retargeting and display advertising.
• Pricing: Self-service Ads has no platform subscription fee, but you still pay for ad spend. Pricing is pay-as-you-go with dynamic CPM; attribution, social ads, and managed services may cost extra. 

Honorary mentions

These platforms aren’t full marketing automation suites, but their advertising tools can automate important parts of the paid-social funnel, and they’re native options, which makes them extra convenient to use.

• Meta Business Suite/Meta Ads Manager: Meta Business Suite lets businesses manage their Facebook and Instagram presence, create ads, and review performance in one place. For more advanced campaign objectives, targeting, placements, budgets, and reporting, businesses can use Meta Ads Manager.
  
• TikTok Ads Manager: Similarly, for businesses on TikTok, TikTok Ads Manager can help them create, target, launch, optimize, and measure TikTok ad campaigns.

Conversational marketing automation tools

These tools automate conversations with potential customers through DMs, chatbots, and messaging apps, helping businesses capture leads, answer questions, and guide people toward a purchase.

1. Manychat

Manychat is a social automation tool that automates conversations across Instagram, TikTok, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Telegram, SMS, and email. Manychat offers templates and Quick Automations for Instagram, including comment-to-DM automations that send links, answer questions, and collect contact information inside the conversation.

Manychat also offers a Flow Builder feature that lets you create custom no-code nurture flows. 

• Best for: Creators and e-commerce brands turning comments and DMs into leads.
• Pricing: Manychat’s free plan works for up to 25 Active Contacts. Essentials starts at $14/month when paid annually. Channel access varies by plan.

Learn more about Manychat’s pricing: Pricing Info from Free to Pro. 

2. Chatfuel

Chatfuel works similarly to Manychat; it offers Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp automation, with tools for auto-replying to comments and messages, answering FAQs, capturing and qualifying leads, and handing conversations off to a human.

Chatfuel also has a visual flow builder, shared inbox, contact segmentation, and AI features, making it particularly useful for Instagram- and WhatsApp-first businesses.

• Best for: Instagram and WhatsApp chatbot automation.
• Pricing: Chatfuel doesn’t offer a free plan. Its Business plan starts at $20/month when billed monthly. 

See how Manychat compares to Chatfuel and other alternatives: Manychat vs. The Competition: How We Stack Up to Other Automation Tools. 

CRM and multipurpose marketing automation tools

These platforms combine marketing automation with CRM data, lead management, sales workflows, reporting, and other tools for managing the customer journey.

1. HubSpot

HubSpot combines CRM data, lead capture, email, forms, landing pages, reporting, ads, and workflow automation. Its free CRM and marketing tools are useful for getting started, but advanced automation is limited by plan, and costs increase as your marketing-contact count grows.

• Best for: Growing businesses that want CRM and marketing automation together.
• Pricing: HubSpot’s free tools are available for up to 1,000 marketing contacts. Marketing Hub Starter begins at $20 per seat/month, or $7 per seat/month with the annual offer. 

2. Salesforce

Salesforce is a CRM ecosystem with automation tools for sales, marketing, and customer service. Depending on the product and setup, businesses can use it to automate lead routing, sales follow-ups, email and SMS campaigns, customer journeys, lead nurturing, reporting, and internal workflows.

There are many versions of Salesforce. Sales Cloud manages sales processes; Marketing Cloud supports multichannel campaigns; Account Engagement handles B2B lead nurturing and scoring, and Salesforce Flow connects records and triggers custom processes across the platform. Newer Agentforce tools also add AI-powered automation and customer interactions. 

• Best for: Larger businesses with complex customer journeys.
• Pricing: Varies by product, edition, users, and contract. Account Engagement starts at $1,250 per organization/month, billed annually; many Salesforce products use annual contracts.

3. LeadSquared

LeadSquared is a CRM with marketing automation for high-volume lead businesses. It captures leads from websites, ads, social media, email, phone calls, events, and imports, then supports segmentation, lead routing, scoring, and email, SMS, and WhatsApp workflows.

It is more sales-oriented and industry-specific than a general email platform, making it a stronger fit for sectors such as education, healthcare, financial services, and real estate. 

• Best for: High-volume sales organizations.
• Pricing: Custom pricing; request a quote or demo.

Does Marketing Automation Actually Pay Off?

Generally, yes, if you use it right. While automation alone won’t boost your bottom line, it pays off in ways such as:

• Time savings: Automating your welcome sequence, FAQ replies, and follow-up nudges can give you back hours every week. 
• Faster communication: Leads go cold fast, and automated follow-ups fire while someone still remembers who you are.
• Improved lead quality: If you automate right, you can capture data as you go, like which link someone clicked or the question they asked you. You can learn about leads from analyzing that data, then use it to personalize future communications. 

Start reaping these benefits. Pick a tool that supports a channel where your customers actually are, send one automation live, and let the tool prove itself before you expand into more expensive features or plan options.

BTW, if you’re building a business on Instagram, Facebook, or TikTok, it'll be a lot easier if you sign up for Manychat.

Ready? Sign up for Manychat

Frequently asked questions

1. What is a marketing automation tool?

A marketing automation tool is software that handles repetitive marketing tasks — like sending emails, replying to DMs, scoring leads, or retargeting ads — automatically based on triggers and rules you set. You build the logic once, and the tool runs it every time the trigger fires.

2. How much do marketing automation tools cost?

Pricing ranges from free — most tools offer a free tier or trial — to $1,000+ per month for enterprise platforms, with most small-business tools landing between $15 and $70 per month. Watch how pricing scales with the number of contacts or emails you send, since that's usually what drives your bill up.

3. Do I need marketing automation if I'm a small business?

Yes. Small businesses often benefit the most, because automation replaces the team members you can't yet afford — handling lead follow-ups, email sequences, and DM replies around the clock without adding headcount.