Act-On is an adaptive marketing platform designed to drive personal and purposeful multi-channel marketing. Its foci are inbound and outbound marketing, for enabling a tighter alignment with sales and turning data into actionable insights.
$900
per month (starts at 2,500 active contacts)
Hootsuite
Score 8.2 out of 10
N/A
Hootsuite is a social media management platform for building brand awareness, engaging with customers, and driving business results. Users can schedule posts across multiple social networks (including Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and YouTube ), manage organic and paid social content together, keep track of customer conversations, integrate with over 200+ applications, and gain actionable real-time insights from social media to make critical business decisions from…
$1,188
per year 1 User, 10 Social accounts
Pricing
Act-On Software
Hootsuite
Editions & Modules
Professional
$900
per month (starts at 2,500 active contacts)
Enterprise
$2,000
per month ( starts at 2,500 active contacts)
Professional
$99
per month (billed annually) 1 User, 10 Social accounts
Team
$249
per month (billed annually) 3 Users, 20 Social accounts
Enterprise
Custom Pricing
per year
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Act-On
Hootsuite
Free Trial
No
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
Required
Optional
Additional Details
The Professional package starts at 2,500 active contacts, 3 marketing users, 50 sales users and 30,000 API calls per day. The Enterprise package starts at 2,500 active contacts, 6 marketing users, 100 sales users and 30,000 API calls per day. Annual contract required.
Hootsuite allows me to add a month's worth of content to all of our social media platforms at one time. My problem with Act-On is it would not connect our accounts and when it did it would not use the company account. It would only use my personal account. Hootsuite also gives …
Act-On does all that other vendors like HubSpot and Marketo promise. With Act-On it is much easier to get started and to be productive. Compared with HubSpot, Marketo and other important vendors, Act-On's pricing and support are big differentiators. Because Act-On wants to be a …
I used Eloqua in my previous role and while it was a great tool I found it very cumbersome and difficult to work with. It's interface was old and it was actually quite a task to get many terms created, designed and aligned as I liked within that tool. Also, the costs for the …
Verified User
Director
Chose Act-On Software
Hubspot was our other consideration, but Act-On was better for small businesses.
Verified User
Director
Chose Act-On Software
Hubspot.
Hubspot is generally more expensive but barriers to entry are higher, even beyond pricing. Training costs, for example, are much higher.
Act-On simplifies the creation of landing pages, web forms, email campaigns, and other types of marketing automation. Designing a customer journey using the workflow builder (a nurturing flow) is possible. It is used in various ways and in a variety of contexts. Tactical's knowledgeable support team helped us unlock Act-On's potential for complex integrations and marketing campaigns. In some areas, it would be beneficial to improve functionality.
Hootsuite is a great tool and we prefer it to some of the others out there. The only negative is the price point and the fact that it keeps going up with no regard to the small non-profits that have been using it for years. After mentioning that the system is great and the fact that we can integrate and customize the posting for each social media site without having to be jumping from one system to the other makes it ideal for a small team doing multiple projects or things at the same time.
Scheduling of content. The ease of use for Hootsuite's planner abilities is top of the industry. It is simple and effective in posting content to different channels and accounts.
Analytics are superior on Hootsuite. Their custom reports allow you to view very specific KPI's that you can adjust for each channel or account. The reports are also exportable to be used for others in the company.
Inbox management. The inbox manager is superior to any in the industry. Hootsuite allows you to tag certain phrases or keywords to better filter messages based on importance or topic.
The designer tools, especially for emails, were often difficult to use. The formatting of the text would be all over the place and change / refuse to change at random. Moving boxes around was shifty and sometimes nearly impossible. It just wasn't customizeable enough. No "undo" functionality either.
The only way to collect information expansively over time (there's a term Act-On uses for it, I can't recall) where it adds questions to the form each time a user fills it out, is if the person were to fill out the same form multiple times. I know this does happen for some websites/resources, but as a company that wanted to collect new information each time someone filled out any form, regardless of the resource or the URL, that was simply not an option, and that doesn't really make a lot of sense. I know it's not really possible to track someone but if they filled out the first part of the form and then it added new questions to answer, and then they submitted and got through the gating, that would actually be helpful.
There was no "trash can" of sorts in case you deleted something by mistake. This could be so stress-inducing if it was a major project. My coworker did this once, contacted Act-On, they couldn't even recover it.
The ability to tag people or companies across all the social platforms (instagram and Linkedin)
If you're scheduling a post that is going out across all your social channels it would be good to be able to bulk move them if you have to post them on a new date instead of having to do it manually one by one
It's my single biggest asset in my current role. With limited resources, its enabled Anachron to punch well above our weight marketing wise and although we're still at the beginning of our journey I know the system can scale with us
At this time we are satisfied that Hootsuite offers the most of what we are looking for at the most reasonable price point. As the social media landscape and monitoring/scheduling software changes, so do our needs. We re-evaluate our tools semi-annually or as new tools emerge onto the market. If we find at any point that we aren't gaining an advantage, then we are open to switching products.
It's good, but not quite brilliant. Some parts of the interface are still a bit outdated. The product has been evolving very fast, though, and I believe in a few months it will be up there with the best of them, interface wise as well.
Hootsuite is probably the easiest to use social media scheduler of all the ones that I've used. It's been easy to teach clients how to use the software themselves and it can be accessed easily on anyone's phone through their mobile app. Highly recommend for anyone that wants a software that is easy to learn!
I have always found them quick to respond to my query by web inquiry. In those instances when I call, I have always reached help quickly. They are conscientious and skilled in discussing my concern and finding a solution to my problem. Other tech organizations should use Act-On as a model for top-notch customer service.
Any outages are communicated in advance and have not been a problem. We let our clients know based on communications from HootSuite. Since we operate 24/7 with multiple shifts, planned outages can interfere with our operations, but we can always work around it.
Hootsuite makes passing on articles from the web very easy- when it works! I have had a number of gliches with Chrome where it does not open properly and the solution (after some toing and froing with support) was to uninstall and reinstall. The support staff are always very helpful (which is great!) but the gliches..... well, they suck when you are already busy!
Since we start using Act-on for ourselves and our clients, we have been supported very well. Often we need to integrate with legacy systems and we find the support team on our side during the whole endeavor. Always asking if they can help us further, always willing to do a better job. The support of Act-On is one of the main differentiators
I can manage all of my accounts on one site! It's absolutely amazing! The dashboard is helpful to see how you are doing as well. Still getting to understand the analytics and may need to reach out for help on this
Act-On had a lot of resources, and their staff was great at answering any questions I had to make sure we got started on the right foot. Looking back, I would have preferred some additional training sessions since we didn't have any previous experience with Marketing Automation and best practices.
The online training is decent; however, it takes a lot more time to search for answers to my questions. Having a training session with a live person was much more effective as they were able to quickly address the business needs I have.
What impressed me most is that Act-On showed full committment in making our implementation successful, even when it required additional support from their team. This gave me a lot of warm and fuzzy feelings. Most other software software vendors are not anywhere close to being this responsive and effective
• Combination of vendor and internal. The vendor bumped up our account to the Enterprise version (quite simple and easy) and then set up our organization and team structure. We then had to log in and set up team members and assign members to social media accounts. This was pretty easy to do as they have a great user interface. We simply had to drag and drop people into the correct team giving them access to specific social media accounts.
Act-On is easier to use than Marketo, but not as visually appealing and user-friendly as HubSpot. It's much better than Pardot, as Pardot feel clunky every step of the way. SharpSpring is comparable because of its price point but surpasses Act-On in its tools and intuitive interface. We selected Act-On because of the pricing model and thought all things would be close to parity with other options. It depends on the team you have. If you have developers and a marketing team that knows some html/css, you can get by with Act-On.
Hootsuite's free account was sufficient for use on behalf of our client. When they restructured their pricing model and eliminated free and affordable subscriptions suitable for a small business, we found that Zoho Social was an excellent replacement. The interface was simpler and the pricing was affordable and suitable for a small business.
With the Automated Series, we were able to put in place campaigns that generated revenue that took no time to continue running once set up. This was a positive feature allowing employees to work on another project while the campaign ran on their own.
For our organization, all ROI was on time saved and efficiency: for creating posts, for scheduling and publishing, for interacting with users, and for analyzing performances. It all comes in one place and this makes a very huge difference in your workflows. We would say that Hootsuite went beyond our expectations on this front, for example with the dynamics UTMs and the media library. Saving time was the main reason why we wanted to purchase the platform and it did not disappoint at all.
The ROI in time was also fast to get. The learning curse is very short and this is also an important element. Benefiting from the platform did not take long to be experienced.
