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HubSpot vs Percolate
March 12, 2025 | Author: Sandeep Sharma
62★
HubSpot offers a full stack of software for marketing, sales, and customer service, with a completely free CRM at its core. They’re powerful alone — but even better when used together.
2★
Percolate is The System of Record for Marketing, a complete web and mobile software platform to manage all your marketing in one place. Percolate is the only software designed for your brand. Our platform encodes the strategic and visual elements of your marketing, including target audiences, channels, business objectives, and identity guidelines to make everything you do more efficient and inspired.
HubSpot and Percolate are, in many ways, the same thing. They both exist to make marketing teams feel like they have some semblance of control over the chaos that is content creation. Both let you plan campaigns, schedule content and measure performance with the kind of reassuring numbers that make bosses nod sagely. They are also designed to ensure no one in a marketing department ever again has the excuse of "I didn’t see that email." In short, they do what all good software does: they organize things you didn't realize needed organizing until you saw a dashboard telling you how badly you were doing.
HubSpot, however, takes a slightly different approach. Born in 2006 in the United States (which, coincidentally, is also where inbound marketing was born because HubSpot said so), it believes marketing is all about attracting customers like a particularly charismatic black hole. It provides CRM, lead generation, SEO tools and a free plan because nothing gets people hooked quite like something that starts off free. It is particularly fond of small businesses and startups, who, in turn, are particularly fond of not having to sell their souls (immediately) to afford it.
Percolate, by contrast, arrived later, in 2011, also from the United States, but with a mission to make big brands feel like they are in control of their vast, sprawling content empires. It specializes in keeping marketing teams synchronized across multiple time zones, making sure every piece of content is precisely on-brand and that no rogue social media manager posts an off-color joke at 2 a.m. It integrates beautifully with asset libraries and digital governance tools, ensuring that even the most chaotic global campaign remains neatly in its assigned folder. It was eventually acquired by Seismic, presumably because the universe abhors a vacuum and large software companies abhor the existence of independent platforms.
See also: Top 10 Social Media Management tools
HubSpot, however, takes a slightly different approach. Born in 2006 in the United States (which, coincidentally, is also where inbound marketing was born because HubSpot said so), it believes marketing is all about attracting customers like a particularly charismatic black hole. It provides CRM, lead generation, SEO tools and a free plan because nothing gets people hooked quite like something that starts off free. It is particularly fond of small businesses and startups, who, in turn, are particularly fond of not having to sell their souls (immediately) to afford it.
Percolate, by contrast, arrived later, in 2011, also from the United States, but with a mission to make big brands feel like they are in control of their vast, sprawling content empires. It specializes in keeping marketing teams synchronized across multiple time zones, making sure every piece of content is precisely on-brand and that no rogue social media manager posts an off-color joke at 2 a.m. It integrates beautifully with asset libraries and digital governance tools, ensuring that even the most chaotic global campaign remains neatly in its assigned folder. It was eventually acquired by Seismic, presumably because the universe abhors a vacuum and large software companies abhor the existence of independent platforms.
See also: Top 10 Social Media Management tools
