Everyone can add a feature.
The question is what it costs to add an industry.
Feature checklists all look the same after the second page, because any platform can ship any single feature. The difference that survives three years is structural — and it decides whether your industry ever gets modelled properly, or stays a contact record with extra fields on it.
Three ways to sell an industry.
What a vertical costs the vendor to build is what determines what it costs you to use — in price, in depth, and in how long you wait for yours.
A generic model with templates on top
One contact object for everybody. An industry ships as a template pack, a field set and some pre-written copy.
Cheap for the vendor to add, which is why there are so many. It never gets deeper than the fields you already had — a listing stays a contact with extra properties, and every report you build has to know that.
A separate product per industry
Real depth, genuinely modelled. Each industry is its own product with its own team, its own contract and its own licence.
Expensive for the vendor, so it is expensive for you. Depth is bought by multiplying the product line, which is why the list is short, the price is high, and integrating two of them is a project.
One OS, models added to it
Identity, permissions, isolation, residency, audit, sending and analytics are the platform. A Vertical Data Model adds its own objects, endpoints, command center and AI surfaces on top, and activates on a brand in one row.
The next VDM does not re-implement the platform, so adding one is bounded work rather than a new product. That is the whole reason the catalogue can keep growing instead of forking.
Every capability, including the ones we lose.
Competitor pricing is from each vendor’s public pricing page, last checked August 2026. Feature availability reflects what ships in the box — not add-ons, partner integrations or paid implementation. Where our own answer is qualified by a plan gate or a staged rollout, the qualifier is in the cell rather than in a footnote.
Where each of them is the better buy.
Every comparison page claims to be even-handed and then isn’t, which is why nobody believes any of them. Here is the case for the competitor, written well enough to act on. If one of these describes you, buy theirs — a customer who should have bought something else churns in a year anyway.
HubSpot
The ecosystem is the product. Thousands of marketplace apps, an enormous partner network, and documentation and training that genuinely have no equal here. If your team is small, non-technical and needs an answer to every question on day one, that ecosystem is worth real money.
Salesforce
If you already run Salesforce CRM, your procurement, your security review and your admin team are all pointed at it. Adding Marketing Cloud is a line item; adding us is a vendor onboarding. That is a legitimate reason to stay, and configurability at the very top end still goes further than ours.
Marketo
Mature enterprise B2B demand generation — lead lifecycle, scoring models and multi-touch attribution refined over more than a decade. For a long, complex, committee-driven B2B sale, that depth is real and we do not match it.
ActiveCampaign · Mailchimp
If what you need is email to a list, they are cheaper and simpler, and you should buy one of them. Our architecture only starts paying for itself when an industry object, multiple brands, or data residency actually matter to you.
Four commercial differences, not feature bullets.
These are the ones that change the invoice rather than the demo. Competitor figures last checked August 2026 against published pricing.
Onboarding fees
HubSpot charges a mandatory onboarding fee — $3,000 on Professional, $7,000 on Enterprise. Salesforce implementations are typically delivered by a partner at $25K–$100K. Ours is zero on every plan, because the product is meant to be set up by the people who will use it.
Seats, not per-seat
HubSpot Enterprise includes 5 seats and bills roughly $75/month for each one after that; Salesforce and ActiveCampaign price per user throughout. Our Enterprise plan includes 100 seats, so adding the person who only ever reads a dashboard costs nothing and you stop rationing logins.
Volume at the tier you land on
HubSpot Professional is $800/month for 2,000 marketing contacts, and caps sends at ten times the contact tier — 20,000 a month. Startup Seed is $299/month for 20,000 contacts and 100,000 sends. Ten times the contacts and five times the sends, for a bit over a third of the price. Compare the tier you would actually land on, not the headline entry price: that is where the gap is widest.
Where their ratio beats ours
Worth knowing before you do your own maths: HubSpot allows more sends per contact than we do — ten times the contact tier on Professional and twenty on Enterprise, against a flat five across every one of our plans. If you hold a small list and mail it constantly, that ratio may suit you better. We win on absolute volume per dollar, not on sends per contact, and it is a more useful comparison if you know which one you are buying.
AI you are not metered on
HubSpot, Mailchimp and Klaviyo meter AI in credits: hit the cap, pay more or wait. We use your own key — OpenAI or Anthropic, including Azure OpenAI — so you pay your model vendor directly at their rate and there is no line on our invoice for it. Enterprise buyers can route through a provider their compliance team already approved.
See it for yourself in 14 days, free.
No credit card, no setup fee. Contact and campaign import from HubSpot, Salesforce, Marketo, ActiveCampaign and Mailchimp is assisted rather than automatic — most teams are running inside a few days, and we would rather say that than promise fifteen minutes and spend your first week apologising.