All businesses run on sales—and customer relationship management (CRM) is at the heart of it all.
CRM includes sourcing new leads and managing customer data, then using that to run targeted marketing campaigns to move those customers through your sales pipeline.
If you’re a business owner just starting out, you may be able to manage this with a simple spreadsheet. But as your business grows, you’d do well to upgrade to marketing automation software.
Task automation software takes care of routine work for you—in this case, your CRM process—leaving you more time to focus on what’s really important: coming up with strategies to grow your business. 📈
Keap is a popular marketing tool—and there are also many Keap alternatives on the market today.
Let’s look at what Keap can do for you and then compare it to the CRM software offered by other providers. Then you can decide which CRM platform will best take your business to the next level.
What Is Keap (Infusionsoft)?
Keap is a sales and marketing automation platform designed to help businesses grow. Formerly known as Infusionsoft, Keap offers CRM, as well as marketing and sales automation, plus a payment platform.
Their flagship product which was once called Infusionsoft is now known as Keap Max Classic. It’s aimed at e-commerce businesses with sales teams that need a sophisticated marketing automation solution.
Keap enables lead capture using built-in landing pages and simplifies contact management with advanced segmentation. It keeps leads engaged, moving them through the customer journey using personalized SMS marketing and email marketing campaigns. 📤
Once the customer is ready to buy, Keap automatically invoices them and makes it easy for them to pay via integrations with your existing payment tools. Throughout the sales process, the reporting features help you track and monitor exactly what’s happening so you can fine-tune where necessary.
Keap does a great job, but it’s not the only option. There are some strong Keap competitors out there to use as a marketing automation platform or a customer relationship management solution.
What to look for in marketing automation software
When you’re in the market for a CRM for your service business or retail outlet, there are specific features to focus on. Most CRM software offers some combination of the following sales automation features and functionality:
- Lead generation through custom landing pages
- Contact management so you’re always on top of your database, making marketing and customer support easy 🙋♀️
- Lead scoring to help you maximize the chances of a sale
- CRM templates that align with your pipeline management process, ensuring that follow-up communication is always relevant
- SMS messaging capability and email automation with customizable email templates
- Social media publishing tools to quickly get your message out there
- Project management tools that help you seamlessly fit your marketing tasks into your workflow
- Advanced reporting features to help you evaluate the effectiveness of your marketing and sales teams’ process
Whether you’re looking for CRM for a startup or enterprise marketing software for a large established business, you’ll need at least some, if not all, of those sales CRM features to manage customer relationships and much more.
10 Best Keap Alternatives in 2024
If you’re concerned that Keap may not be able to match your business needs, your small business’s budget, or your plans to scale, we’re here to help. Here are the best Keap alternatives available today.
1. ClickUp
ClickUp is a SaaS solution that goes way beyond marketing automation and project management software—although it does that brilliantly, too. This Keap competitor combines CRM and project management, automating both your sales process and task management, as well as easing every other part of your workflow.
ClickUp CRM keeps track of all your clients, shows you exactly where they are in the pipeline and manages your engagement with them. Track average deal sizes, customer lifetime value, how far you are from your target revenue, and many other useful statistics that support decision-making.
ClickUp’s AI functionality helps you sell faster and more effectively. From just a few keywords, you can write anything you please—content briefs, blog posts, or promotional emails. Summarize client meeting notes or other lengthy documents, identify important action items for follow-up, and so much more. 📝
To make your life even easier, ClickUp offers an extensive range of integrations with all your favorite work tools, either natively or via Zapier. Run your email campaign using Microsoft Outlook, Gmail, or Mailchimp.
Publish your social media posts straight to Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter. Hold meetings on Zoom or Microsoft Teams, and work seamlessly with other marketing tools like Salesforce or HubSpot.
ClickUp best features
- Manage all your client data using a handy ClickUp CRM template for effective lead management
- See your accounts in the way you prefer, whether that’s as a List, Table, or Kanban Board
- Reorganize your view in seconds with drag-and-drop functionality
- Communicate with customers and coworkers directly from a central email hub within the ClickUp platform
- Link documents and tasks to specific customers so you have all the data you need at your fingertips
- Control access to data with permissions you can manage
- Collaborate on marketing projects in real-time with your team
- Access the cloud-based system from anywhere, including on Android or iOS devices
ClickUp limitations
- The project management mobile app is still not quite up to the level of the desktop version
- Although the system is highly intuitive, with so many features and customization options, it can be slightly overwhelming to start with
ClickUp pricing
- Free Forever
- Unlimited: $7/month per user
- Business: $12/month per user
- Enterprise: Contact for pricing
- ClickUp AI: $5 per Workspace member per month
ClickUp ratings and reviews
- G2: 4.7/5 (8,700+ reviews)
- Capterra: 4.7/5 (3,800+ reviews)
2. HubSpot
This Keap alternative is aimed at startups and small businesses looking to save money on their CRM by using a free plan. It’s also good for large enterprise marketing departments managing thousands of contacts.
The HubSpot CRM software solution has a central database that underlies all its core products, including marketing, sales, operations, content management, commerce, and customer service. This ensures that the correct information is always available, whether you’re tracking leads, working your sales pipeline, or providing customer support.
The free plan gives you basic tools to generate and segment leads, and then follow up with them via email. You can also post on social media and monitor your analytics in its CRM software.
The Starter and Professional plans allow for more branding and segmenting options and more emails per month. They also give you other features like a payment platform, multiple currencies, and custom reports.
The Enterprise plan offers the most flexibility and control of your sales processes and contact management efforts.
HubSpot best features
- Use the drag-and-drop page builder to create landing pages that capture leads
- Segment leads and prospects according to their sources
- Automate tasks like writing content, plus identify useful insights from your customer data using the built-in AI
- Streamline your customer relationships and potential customer interactions with live chat and chatbots
HubSpot limitations
- While the free version is a good start, if your business grows substantially, you’ll soon need to switch to a paid version of this marketing automation and email marketing solution
- The higher-level pricing plans quickly become a lot more expensive
HubSpot pricing
- Free: Free
- Starter: $18/month for 1,000 marketing contacts
- Professional: $800/month for 2,000 marketing contacts
- Enterprise: $3,600/month for 10,000 marketing contacts
HubSpot ratings and reviews
- G2: 4.4/5 (10,300+ reviews)
- Capterra: 4.5/5 (3,800+ reviews)
3. ActiveCampaign
ActiveCampaign offers CRM software, sales and marketing automation, email marketing, and customer support.
This Keap competitor helps you create landing pages and forms to capture lead details and track interactions with your site. The system automatically follows up with an email and notifies your sales team if the visitor is interested in finding out more.
You can also monitor deals in the pipeline and automatically nurture leads until they make their sales decision. 🎉
The automations map (only available from the Professional package upwards) shows you the entire customer lifecycle across all your channels. Then, if you spot any problems, it allows you to update your automation to be more effective.
ActiveCampaign best features
- Automate emails, SMS messages, and social media posts
- Allocate engagement scores to your leads and set notifications to follow up on important dates
- Monitor the performance of your sales team and your pipeline
- Integrate with more than 900 other software solutions, like Slack, Zapier, WordPress, and Shopify
ActiveCampaign limitations
- It’s not a completely self-contained CRM system, as it focuses more on sales than on marketing
- It’s good value to get started, but as your sales team grows, you’ll probably need to upgrade your package
- No true project management features if you need that in your process
ActiveCampaign pricing
- Plus: $19/month per user
- Professional: $49/month per user
- Enterprise: Contact for pricing
ActiveCampaign ratings and reviews
- G2: 4.5/5 (10,300+ reviews)
- Capterra: 4.6/5 (2,200+ reviews)
4. Ontraport
Ontraport is a Keap alternative that offers many of the same features. Aimed at midsize to large businesses, its marketing automation solution helps you automate your sales and marketing processes.
Use the simple drag-and-drop functionality to create beautiful, personalized web pages and forms designed to capture leads. Then set up order forms using high-converting templates.
All leads captured are added to your CRM database, and visits to your website pages and any orders placed are also logged.
If you use WordPress, you can embed Ontraport into your WordPress site. The secure payment platform connects to multiple gateways and allows you to offer payment plans, manage subscriptions, and more. 💸
Ontraport best features
- Create up to four versions of your web pages for A/B testing
- Automatically track your lead sources so you can optimize lead management
- See a visual representation of your pipeline so you can quickly identify hot leads
- Easily scale up when you’re ready—each successive pricing plan offers more advanced features
Ontraport limitations
- Pricing plans start with only 500 contacts, and if you have more than that, you’ll need to pay extra
- It’s not the simplest platform, and the initial learning curve can be quite steep
- Lacks some project management, email marketing, and social media marketing features
Ontraport pricing
- Free Trial: 14 days
- Basic: Starts at $24/month for up to three users
- Plus: Starts at $83/month for up to 10 users
- Pro: Starts at $124/month for unlimited users
- Enterprise: Starts at $249/month for unlimited users
Ontraport ratings and reviews
- G2: 4.5/5 (200+ reviews)
- Capterra: 4.2/5 (80+ reviews)
5. Freshsales
Freshsales is a sales CRM with automation features. It helps you automatically assign leads and tasks to your sales team, create reminders, and send emails, so you can focus on your main job of selling more.
Freshsales also makes it simple to produce documents—like contracts, quotes, and invoices—that need to be error-free. The Freshsales AI, known as Freddy, does lead scoring for you so you can easily follow up with high-intent leads.
This pipeline management tool also makes recommendations to improve your sales strategy so you can close more deals.🤝
Freshsales best features
- Quickly create personalized emails using drag-and-drop functionality
- Give your customer service team access to one unified source of information so they can better support customers
- Use Freshsales on the go via an iOS or Android mobile app
- Integrate with multiple useful platforms like WooCommerce, Big Commerce, Asana, and Mailchimp
Freshsales limitations
- Freddy isn’t available on the free plan, and the more AI you want to use, the more you’ll need to pay for higher plans
- The system can be slow if you’re working with large data sets, especially on mobile apps
Freshsales pricing
- Free: Free for up to three users
- Growth: $15/month per user
- Pro: $39/month per user
- Enterprise: $69/month per user
Freshsales ratings and reviews
- G2: 4.5/5 (1,000+ reviews)
- Capterra: 4.5/5 (590+ reviews)
6. Zoho CRM
This Keap alternative is part of the wider Zoho suite of business tools. The marketing automation and sales pipeline management tool helps you capture and segment leads, track deals, and engage with customers through multiple channels.
Make your day even more productive by automating customer journeys, campaigns, and workflows, as well as assignments, validations, and escalations. 🙌
Ask the AI (called Zia)for predictions and the next steps for your leads—based on their customer profiles—to help you close the deal. Advanced analytics allow you to set up customized dashboards and reports to give you the insights you’re looking for.
Zoho CRM best features
- The user interface is intuitive and responsive, making it easy to use
- Interact with your customers via email, chat, or multiple social media channels
- Once you sign up, Zoho CRM can be implemented very quickly
- Zoho CRM integrates with over 800 apps, including Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace
Zoho CRM limitations
- The extensive range of features can take time and practice to get comfortable with
- Some users would like more customization options to better match the needs of their business
Zoho CRM pricing
- Standard: $14/month per user
- Professional: $23/month per user
- Enterprise: $40/month per user
- Ultimate: $52/month per user
Zoho CRM ratings and reviews
- G2: 4.0/5 (2,400+ reviews)
- Capterra: 4.3/5 (6,300+ reviews)
7. Pipedrive
Designed by salespeople, Pipedrive is excellent for lead management. It helps you set up the stages of your pipeline—either from scratch or using one of their templates—then import or add your existing deals. Then, use the customizable web forms to capture more leads directly from your website.
AI technology plus helpful analytics identify sales opportunities to help you focus efforts where there’s the highest chance of closing the deal. Then you can schedule automatic reminders for your next steps to make sure you keep moving your leads through the pipeline. Each successive plan level gives you more automation and customization. 💪
Pipedrive best features
- Update your deals by dragging and dropping them in your handy visual sales pipeline
- Personalize your communication, using segmentation and filters to create targeted lists
- See your full contact history plus any notes for each of your leads
- Customize your reports to show details about your leads, sales, and revenue generated
Pipedrive limitations
- Although it offers some marketing features, this Keap competitor is mainly designed for sales
- It’s aimed at smaller businesses, so if you want to scale up or need more complex features, it may not work for you
Pipedrive pricing
- Essential: $14.90/month per user
- Advanced: $27.90/month per user
- Professional: $49.90/month per user
- Power: $64.90/month per user
- Enterprise: $99.00/month per user
Pipedrive ratings and reviews
- G2: 4.2/5 (1,600+ reviews)
- Capterra: 4.5/5 (2,800+ reviews)
8. Nimble
Nimble is a CRM aimed at solopreneurs, salespeople, and business teams. Designed to enhance relationship building, this Keap alternative gathers business and social data using social profile matching.
Create new contact records or update existing ones directly from your Outlook, Gmail, or LinkedIn inbox, social media, or anywhere else online. You can also automate workflows across departments, use templates to save time, and track group emails so you know exactly who opened your emails or clicked a link—and when they did it. 📫
Nimble best features
- Combine customer data from multiple sources into one unified contact
- Segment leads so you can nurture each type in the most appropriate way
- Set activity reminders to follow up with leads or complete other tasks
- Manage all your activities from a customer and sales dashboard
Nimble limitations
- There’s only one pricing plan, which allows 25,000 contact records, but you need to pay extra for upgraded features like finding contact data online or sending and tracking personalized group messages
- Some users find managing and merging duplicate contacts more difficult than it should be
Nimble pricing
- $24.90/month per user
Nimble ratings and reviews
- G2: 4.5/5 (1,000+ reviews)
- Capterra: 4.4/5 (1,800+ reviews)
9. Salesforce
Salesforce CRM has been around for a while. Its Customer 360 product is a complete marketing automation software solution, making it a viable Keap alternative. With a central CRM acting as a single source of truth, it gives your staff all the information they need to provide excellent customer service.
Gather data about customers and their behavior from multiple sources and analyze it. Use those insights to manage your pipeline and close deals. Stay on top of your tasks and communicate and collaborate with all your internal and external stakeholders via Slack, which is now part of the Salesforce universe.
The Sales Cloud plans are priced according to their increasing functionality, with automation and AI only being available on the higher plans. 🤖
As a bonus for those who are environmentally conscious, Salesforce is carbon neutral.
Salesforce best features
- See all your interactions with a customer at a glance, along with timelines and real-time insights
- Use Einstein—the Salesforce AI—to automate your workflows, increasing productivity
- Work from anywhere on any device because Salesforce is cloud-based
- Integrate with thousands of other partner apps and services
Salesforce limitations
- Salesforce is aimed more at enterprise organizations so may not be affordable for smaller businesses
- Although there is a free trial available, there’s no free plan, so eventually you’ll need to pay for it
Salesforce pricing
- Free Trial: 30 days
- Starter: $25/month per user
- Professional: $80/month per user
- Enterprise: $165/month per user
- Unlimited: $330/month per user
Salesforce ratings and reviews
- G2: 4.3/5 (18,200+ reviews) for Salesforce Sales Cloud
- Capterra: 4.4/5 (17,800+ reviews)
10. Agile CRM
This Keap competitor has sales, marketing, and help desk functionality. It’s aimed at larger businesses that also need operations and project management features.
Build landing pages to capture leads, and score those leads so you spend your time on the right prospects. Then track your deals to move them through the sales pipeline.
Optimize your email marketing with A/B testing and email tracking, and easily post to social media as part of your marketing strategy. There’s also help desk software, which helps you manage ticketing and service-level agreements, among other things. 🎧
Agile CRM best features
- Manage and score your leads, and schedule appointments from the system
- Drag and drop to create timelines for your sales and marketing projects
- Access your customer data in real time from your mobile app, wherever you are
- Agile CRM integrates with multiple third-party providers, like Zendesk, Shopify, Stripe, and Freshbooks
Agile CRM limitations
- Some users feel the email functionality could be improved
- The customer service isn’t always the best, especially if you want to cancel your contract
Agile CRM pricing
- Free: Free for up to 10 users
- Starter: $8.99/month per user
- Regular: $29.99/month per user
- Enterprise: $47.99/month per user
Agile CRM ratings and reviews
- G2: 4.0/5 (340+ reviews)
- Capterra: 4.1/5 (480+ reviews)
Boost Customer Engagement and Close Deals With the Best Keap Alternatives
Customer relationship management systems have evolved exponentially since the days when they simply stored customer details. They now also offer tools to source new leads, manage your pipeline, automate sales and marketing tasks, and provide powerful insights that help you close deals. 🎯
Keap is an effective marketing automation software solution, but there are other platforms available that work just as well, if not better. One of the best CRM platforms to consider is ClickUp.
ClickUp is a one-stop shop when it comes to managing all aspects of your sales and marketing. With a powerful CRM that keeps track of all your clients and deals, AI that automates many mundane tasks, and a huge range of integrations, it’s hard to beat.
Sign up for free with ClickUp today to save time, create more engagement with your customers, and close those deals.