You’ve decided to market your brand and improve your online presence, and everything seems to be going according to plan. 

You’ve drafted the campaign strategy and gotten approval from stakeholders. 

However, you can’t decide on the right platforms to use. 

With thousands of digital marketing apps claiming to be your secret weapon, picking the right options can be challenging. 

How do you even know which is genuine and which has nothing to offer?

We’ve curated 10 of the best digital marketing software and discussed their pros and cons to take your campaigns to the next level.  

So let’s begin by first introducing you to them.

Disclaimer: The information below is accurate as of January 15, 2025.

Digital marketing platforms: comparison table (with features & pricing)

Choosing the right digital marketing platform is like shopping for the perfect tool—you want to know all the features and costs before making a decision. 

Here’s a list of all the tools in this guide to give you the lowdown on their features and pricing. 😉

Of course, your short trip to the store doesn’t always stop at just looking, especially if it’s a new product 

You’ll want to know what exactly it can offer you.

Keep scrolling to see a brief description of what these tools can do.

Best digital marketing platforms by use case

Imagine you're in the store, not just eyeing prices, but seeking out each product's unique benefits or use cases. Here’s what we've found:

• Ceros – Best no-code platform for building interactive experiences. 
• HubSpot – Best CRM software to help small business owners scale their business.
• Mailchimp – Best automated email marketing software.
• Google Ads – Best advertising tool for promoting your brand online. 
• Google Analytics – Best tracking platform to better understand your audience.
• Canva – Best template-based design tool. 
• SendPulse – Best multi-channel automation marketing tool. 
• Upfluence – Best influencer discovery and management software.
• Grammarly – Best software for checking grammatical errors. 
• Brevo – Best tool to launch marketing campaigns via email, SMS, and WhatsApp.
• Wix – Best AI-powered tool for building websites.

Now that you’re familiar with these tools’ stand-out functions, you’re ready to learn more about what precisely they offer. Starting with yours truly…Ceros.

1. Ceros

Creating engaging content is the glue that holds your digital marketing campaign together. 

Whether you intend to run social media marketing, email marketing, or paid ads, high-quality content is how you capture people’s attention.

But considering the number of brands on this journey with you, capturing attention is just the beginning.

And if you can't hold their attention, you need Ceros.

Ceros is a digital platform where you can build interactive content and user experiences. In other words, it helps produce the kind of content that can charm your audience and hold their attention. 

That’s exactly what Allen Matkins, a law firm, experienced. Their web and digital content were basic at the time so it was difficult to capture their audience’s attention let alone get them to engage with it.  

But that all changed when they started using Ceros to produce interactive content. Their content not only attracted people but enticed them to engage and increase their dwell time. 

In the past, this content type was mostly produced by programmers. But now, Ceros has bridged the gap. With tools like Studio, you can build interactive experiences that drive sales and engagement from templates. 

The only thing you need to do? Find a template matching the content you want to create and edit it. 

And you won’t have to do the heavy lifting alone. You can invite teammates to collaborate on projects, saving you time and streamlining the creation process.

Ceros features

You’ve seen what Ceros can do but don’t know where to begin. Which tools or features can you even use to get started? Find some of them below: 

• Customizable templates to inspire creativity and help you get started. 
• Copy and paste tool for adding external content to the platform. 
• Site analytics to measure how well the content performs on your site.
• Asset library where you can save digital design assets and reuse them when creating an experience on Ceros.

Ceros pricing

We want you to experience what Ceros can help you accomplish before we talk about pricing, so feel free to request a demo with Ceros.

Ceros pros

Pros:

• It’s easy to use. 
• Supports team collaboration as multiple people can leave comments on content and @mention team mates when they’re needed.
• Helps speed up the content production process with pre-made templates.

2. HubSpot

Let’s say you’re a small business planning to scale operations and make big moves to take your business to the next level, but you’re unsure how to begin. 

HubSpot is an effective all-in-one tool that can help kickstart your journey. It’s a customer relationship management (CRM) software with one objective in mind: growing your business. 

Image Source: HubSpot

HubSpot has several standalone tools all committed to the cause:

• Marketing hub for generating leads and automating your marketing. 
• Sales hub to help you monitor and close deals and identify quality leads to focus on.
• Service hub to assist your existing customer support system and improve retention. 
• Content hub for creating and managing content for your marketing campaigns. 
• Operations, where you can organize and streamline ops. 
• Commerce hub to help you request and receive payments from clients. 

You can use them alone or together. Essentially, you get a tool for different phases of your business. For example, you can: 

• Log sales activities with automated call tracking and logging to identify what’s working as seen with Sandler, the sales development organization.
• Segment the audience based on their previous engagement, ensuring new content reaches the right audience. 
• Find what content drives conversion by running A/B tests with different content created on HubSpot like Rock Content did. And more!

With different use cases like these, you can focus on brainstorming new ideas to help scale and strengthen customer relationships.

HubSpot features

Here are some of HubSpot’s key features:

• Ad management lets you add accounts from supported ad networks and track which ads generate customers.
• AI website generator for designing single-page sites from prompts, helping you save time.
• Leads & prospecting software to get informed when a lead visits your site so you can follow up. 
• Content remix to repurpose high-quality content for new channels. 

HubSpot pricing

You can use HubSpot for free if your team has five users or less. Anything more than that, you’ll need one of their paid plans starting at $15 per seat, per month. 

HubSpot pros and cons

Pros:

• Integrates well with several third-party tools. 
• Offers a resource center with information users may require.
• Features an intuitive dashboard to monitor your workflow.

Cons:

• It’s got an expensive pricing system. 
• It has a bit of a learning curve.
• It’s only available online.

3. Mailchimp

Email marketing is one of the most effective digital marketing strategies. 

In a survey of over a thousand small business owners, 64% said it’s how they reach customers. 87% of them in a different survey said it’s essential to their business success. 

But to tap into success like those business owners, you need email marketing tools. 

And one of the best out there is MailChimp.

Image Source: MailChimp

MailChimp is an email marketing tool that provides everything needed to launch an email campaign from start to finish. 

One user, Laura, said:

“It is simple to redirect and create emails to send them to categories and set a specific schedule for them to be sent. 

It also recommends when it is best to send emails to a certain class based on preliminary results. It is easy to see the difference between the most successful emails and those that are not, as the former can be easily viewed within the dashboard with open and click-through rates.”

Overall, MailChimp can help: 

• Build landing pages. 
• Target and segment your audience list based on customer lifetime value.
• Design email newsletter templates.
• Set up email automation so you can convert leads faster. 
• Run A/B testing to know what’s working.

Heck, MailChimp also lets you launch social media campaigns too. You can create social content, catalog the team’s assets, design a content calendar, and more.

MailChimp features

Here’s a few of them: 

• Content optimizer to see how your emails compare to the competition and get suggestions to improve layout, copy, or designs. 
• Creative AI assistant for creating custom visuals. 
• Reporting & analysis to monitor campaign performance and sales. 
• Predictive demographics to help you understand your customers and create relatable content. 

MailChimp pricing

MailChimp has a free plan and a paid version starting at $13 per month. 

MailChimp pros and cons

Pros:

• Connects easily with other platforms. 
• Has an intuitive interface. 

Cons:

• Free version has limited features. 
• Cost increases as your email list gets bigger. 

4. Google Ads

Ever seen those display ads that pop up while browsing a web page or the search ads that always take the first spot on Google?

That’s Google Ads doing its thing. It’s an advertising tool that allows you to promote your businesses and smash your marketing goals with precision.

The Google Ads team says: “It gives you different ways to be seen online.”

Image Source: Google Ads

Given that this is from one of the most popular tools in the world, imagine the brand awareness you’d get. 

That’s probably what one user, Raksha experienced when he called it the best performance marketing platform. 

He said, “The best thing I like about Google ads is that it ensures my campaign gets to the targeted audience by using its algorithm. I can choose my location target and use relevant keywords.”

Raksha’s experience validates Google Ads’ claim of giving you multiple ways to be seen with keywords and audience targeting as some of the options available.   

Overall, Google Ads helps you get:

• Quality leads and improved conversions. 
• Increased online sales. 
• More offline traffic.
• Increased reach and engagement.

You can also monitor conversions and optimize your ad campaign for improved return on investment. 

Google Ads features

As a business owner, you can use this tool to raise awareness or drive traffic by targeting customers with your ads. But if you’re going to take advantage of all Google Ads benefits, you’ll need the features below to get started:

• Keyword research to find related terms for your campaign. 
• Insights page to identify trends in your industry, provide info about your ad creatives, monitor campaign performance, and offer improvement tips.
• Experiments page to test changes to your campaign and ensure they’re performing well. 
• Performance Max to help you run ads across the various Google channels. 

Google Ads pricing

Google Ads doesn’t offer a per-month or per-user pricing structure like many of the tools on this list. Instead, it uses a pay-per-click (PPC) system and the cost depends on several factors, including industry, trends, ad rank, ad network, keywords, bids, and campaign targeting.

Based on a survey by WebFX, it costs between $100 to $1,000 per month. 

Google Ads pros and cons

Pros:

• Offers different features to launch a marketing campaign.
• Lets you maximize your budget.
• You can edit campaigns offline.

Cons:

• It has a steep learning curve.
• It might take a while to get results if you’re in a competitive industry.
• Traffic ends once your budget is depleted.

5. Google Analytics

You’ve just launched a marketing campaign but want to see how well it’s doing. 

What type of people are interacting with it? What exactly are they engaging with? Where are they coming from?

Google Analytics can provide the answers you’re looking for. 

Image Source: Google Analytics

Think of it as a private investigator that helps you uncover essential insights about your audience’s customer journey. 

But for this PI to work, you’ll need to place a tiny piece of code AKA Google Analytics’ tracking tag as a form of payment. With that, the PI gets to work, collecting data such as page views, traffic source, dwell time, navigation paths, and more to help optimize the content and make it more impactful

Another service this PI offers is improving your return on investment (ROI). It does this by identifying touchpoints where customers spend the most time e.g. the site’s blog. After highlighting them, you can redirect more resources there so people can take the required actions that lead to conversions without leaving the touchpoints.   

Isha, a marketing specialist, captured what Google Analytics can do in her review. 

She said,  “I am using Google Analytics very often to check the organic traffic on my website. It helps me understand my website performance by sharing metrics such as the number of visitors, traffic sources, user behavior, engagement rate, conversion rate, etc. 

By analyzing these metrics, I can focus on creating more engaging content for my visitors. Also, the best part of this tool is the feature of generating custom reports which is very helpful to track the business success.”

Google Analytics features

Want to have a similar experience to Isha’s? You know, get detailed reports on your site’s performance? Here are features to make that happen:

• Real-time reporting to help monitor top-performing pages, where they’re from, and track traffic.
• Audience analysis so you can better understand who your audience is including their age and interests using browsing behavior. 
• Conversion tracking to monitor user actions like signups, downloads, or purchases, and calculate your ROI. 
• Cohort analysis to examine how groups of users behave so you can improve user retention and return visits. 

Google Analytics pricing

Google Analytics is a free tool anyone can use to track their site’s performance. 

If you run a large enterprise with complex analytics needs, there’s a premium version available at $50K per year. 

Google Analytics pros and cons

Pros:

• Interacts well with tools in the Google suite. 
• Allows you to set objectives to monitor your business’s progress.

Cons:

• Takes a while for users to understand how the platform works. 
• It can be slow when loading data reports.

6. Canva

Let’s say you want to create a social media post that needs to go out ASAP. 

Canva is a design tool that makes that task a walk in the park. 

Image Source: Canva

It can help you create any kind of design whether or not you have any design skills. 

How?

By offering design templates for every single media asset you can think of from LinkedIn banners to YouTube thumbnails, TikTok videos, e-flyers, CVs, and more. 

Canva has you covered on the design front. 

You only have to edit the template to suit your preferences and get the designs ASAP. No more chasing down designers to produce simple visuals.

Canva features

Canva offers features such as:

• Magic Studio, Canva’s AI tool for generating copy, images, and editing images using prompts. 
• Brand kit lets you add brand logos, color styles, and fonts to ensure brand consistency.
• Photo editing to enhance the quality of your photos.
• Photo to video for converting images to videos to produce captivating visuals. 

Canva pricing

Canva is free to use with limited access to certain key features. Paid plans starting at $12 per month. 

Canva pros and cons

Pros:

• Offers a huge template library.
• It has an intuitive interface. 
• Supports team collaboration as multiple users can edit and share feedback in real-time.

Cons:

• Requires an internet connection for it to work. 
• Limited advanced design features for pro designers. 
• Its free version has limited text options, background colors, and design elements.

7. SendPulse

What does SendPulse really do for your business? Let's hear directly from Artem, a small business owner who's seen impressive results:

“I've had such a positive experience using SendPulse for my email marketing campaigns. The features and tools they provide have greatly improved my campaign's performance and engagement rates. 

The automated email series feature allowed me to set up a series of personalized emails for new subscribers, resulting in significant growth in conversions.”

So, is SendPulse just an email marketing tool? Well, yes and no.

Image Source: SendPulse

SendPulse is a platform that helps automate your marketing campaigns across different channels and provides everything you’ll need to launch a campaign. 

With this tool, you can: 

• Build pop-ups and landing pages to get leads. 
• Engage customers with ease via emails, SMS, etc.
• Create offers for new leads when they’re added to your customer relation management (CRM) tool.
• Build online courses. 

SendPulse features

SendPulse provides a unified platform for interacting with customers across different touchpoints. Here are some features to make that happen:

• Prebuilt email templates to help you launch email campaigns and close deals in the customer’s inbox. 
• A/B testing to identify the most effective email content and send times that would leave a positive impact on your audience.
• Reports and analytics to evaluate the results of your campaign. 
• Chatbot builder to create chatbots that can automatically engage users on different platforms.  

SendPulse pricing

With a subscriber list of 500, you can use SendPulse for free. If you have over 500 subs, you’ll have to opt for a paid subscription starting at $8 per month. 

SendPulse pros and cons

Pros:

• Supports marketing on multiple platforms.
• Provides detailed analytics (open rates, new subscribers, unsubscribers, etc.). 

Cons:

• It has a learning curve for new users.
• It has limited features on the mobile app.

8. Upfluence

Thinking of adding influencer marketing to your digital campaign?

That’s where Upfluence shines. 

It’s a platform that enables you to run and monitor brand-creator marketing campaigns from start to finish. With Upfluence, you can also launch affiliate marketing and user-generated content (UGC) campaigns.

Image Source: Upfluence

Here’s how it works: 

• Find influencers and affiliates for the campaign on Upfluence’s creator database using different filters to streamline your search. 
• Reach out to shortlisted creators and negotiate payment and the project with them.
• Start receiving influencer-generated content to review and publish.

One unique feature Upfluence offers is helping you discover creators who are existing customers so less time is spent trying to convince them. 

With Upfluence, you can also build a workflow to guide how the campaign will run so you can monitor its progress every step of the way. 

In a nutshell, Upfluence is for finding influencers, paying them, getting content, and monitoring performance. 

Upfluence features

Here are Upfluence’s features:

• Influencer database where you can find and hire influencers. 
• Influencer payments to simplify how you pay creator and affiliate commissions. 
• Social listening tool to send notifications when someone mentions your brand on any social media platform.
• Campaign analytics for measuring your campaign’s performance.

Upfluence pricing

While Upfluence has some free tools available like the audit tool and engagement checker, its pricing structure is only available on demand. 

Upfluence pros and cons

Pros:

• Managing campaigns is easy to do on Upfluence. 
• It has an extensive integration network with ecommerce platforms.  

Cons:

• Navigating the platform can be challenging for newbies.
• Pricing is only available on request.

9. Grammarly

Grammarly is a popular tool for correcting grammatical errors. 

It helps improve your written content, whether it’s a long copy like this article or a short message to a team member on Slack. Grammarly ensures your text is clear and easy to understand. 

Image Source: Grammarly

Tim, a Grammarly user, described it this way:

“Grammarly is very useful in catching silly errors, analyzing tone, and providing a second set of eyes on anything you're writing. You can't always ask a coworker, spouse, etc., but Grammarly is always there. It's easy to accept or reject any suggested correction.”

Unlike most of the tools on this list, Grammarly can work anywhere. 

Sending an email? It’ll be right there with you in Gmail. 

Commenting on Monday or Asana? It’ll suggest alternative ways to make your sentences sound happy, clear, and confident. 

You can even copy and paste your text to the Grammarly platform and let it provide suggestions. 

Grammarly features

Grammarly offers different features to improve your content and make it error-free. Here are some of them:

• Grammar checker to keep your content free from errors, typos, and wrong fluency tone and punctuation.
• Plagiarism checker to confirm your content is original and unique. 
• AI writing tool to generate text for your emails, articles, and more.
• Style guide to ensure the content created by your team is consistent across all channels.

Grammarly pricing

Grammarly has a free version and paid options starting at $30 per month. 

Grammarly pros and cons

Pros:

• Easy to use.
• Integrates with different platforms. 
• Offers a free forever version.

Cons:

• Makes mistakes occasionally. 
• Suggested edits are sometimes not the best. 
• Its free version has limited features for checking errors.
• Google Docs integration can be glitchy.

10. Brevo

Email marketing is what Brevo, formerly SendInBlue, is known for. 

One user was asked what they liked about this tool and they responded:

“With [the] Brevo email marketing tool, we easily target contacts based on their engagement level with advanced segmentation, which eventually helped us to reach the right audience.” 

Simply put, it saves you from the guesswork of endless trial and error by ensuring your content gets in front of people who need it.

Image Source: Brevo

And that’s just the beginning! This marketing automation platform helps simplify your marketing effort with tools for sales, customer support, and messaging.

With its sales product, you can manage contacts by centralizing them in one place, allowing you to track prospects at each stage of the marketing funnel.

It allows you to launch marketing campaigns to increase conversions across channels like email, WhatsApp, and SMS, engaging your audience where they’re most active. 

Plus, you can automate repetitive tasks like following up with clients using Brevo’s automation editor. You set a trigger e.g. prospects visit their cart and action e.g. display new offers as pop-ups. This way, you can drive conversion and still have time for other important tasks. 

Brevo features

Here are some stand-out features:

• Landing page templates for building one-pagers to help you generate leads.
• Sales reports to help monitor marketing team performance and sales revenue. 
• Live chat so you can assist clients in real time on your site. 
• Forms for growing email lists and managing requests from your audience.

Brevo pricing

Brevo is free if you’re sending 300 or less emails per day. Its starter plan costs $9 per month and gives you up to 5000 emails monthly.

Brevo pros and cons

Pros:

• Features an email template library.
• Use a prebuilt workflow or create your own.

Cons:

• Filtering contacts can be a challenge.
• Limited marketing channels when launching a campaign.

11. Wix

Wix is an AI platform for building websites. 

Image Source: Wix

You know the way you chat with ChatGPT using text prompts and it responds?

Wix is like that but in this case, the output you get is a website. It asks you a few questions about the kind of site you have in mind, goes into work mode, and generates the site for you. 

Then, you can edit it by changing the web copy and images. Alternatively, choose one of their 900+ available templates and edit it to fit your needs. 

See what small business owner and Wix user Cathy had to say about it:

“I've designed about two dozen websites for clients using Wix. Very easy to use. The templates are excellent. New features are cutting edge. 

Customer service is a bit more difficult to reach, but once you've got them, they are top-notch. The shop app is more than adequate. Follow-up features and automation are more than adequate.” 

Wix features

Its major features include: 

• Landing page builder for designing one-pagers to increase organic website traffic. 
• AI-generated text to produce copy for your site. 
• Content management system (CMS) for storing and managing your site’s content in one place. 
• Domain transfer to move a domain you got from a different service to Wix. 

Wix pricing

New users have access to a 14-day free trial. For their paid plans, budget a minimum of $17 per month depending on the amount of storage space and collaborators needed. 

Wix pros and cons

Pros:

• Easy-to-use tool. 
• Cost-effective for small businesses.
• Supports multiple languages.

Cons:

• Reporting and analytics are only available on the advanced plan.
• Impossible to switch templates after you go live.
• Wix websites with heavy media can experience slow loading times. 

***

Alright, we’re at the end of this guide.  And now for you, it’s decision time.

Over to you!

You’ve gotten to the ‘Which one do I go for?’ question. 

And trust us, we’ve been there. 

You want to list your campaign goals and pick a tool that can make them happen. 

If you want to grab people’s attention or change their perception of your brand, Ceros will be the best tool for you. 

It’s a digital platform designed for creating and managing interactive content. Yup, the kind that is known to spark engagement with your audience, lead generation, and conversions.

So if those are goals you aim to achieve with your campaign, schedule a free demo with Ceros to see how it works.