Methodology
A ranking is only worth reading if you can reconstruct it and disagree with it. Here are the five criteria, how each is scored, and the commercial relationship behind this site.
Ownership and money, stated plainly
The Marketing Automator is published by the team that builds ChattyPage. ChattyPage appears in our rankings and currently sits first on the comparison page.
We take no payment, affiliate commission or placement fee from any vendor listed on this site, including ChattyPage. There are no sponsored entries. No vendor sees a ranking before it is published, and no vendor can request a change to one.
What you should do with that: read our scoring criteria below, decide whether they match how you would weight the decision, and discount our number one accordingly if they do not. We have published ChattyPage's weaknesses in its own entry, including the lowest ceiling score on the list.
Each is scored from 0 to 10. The overall score is the plain average of the five, with no weighting, so you can re-weight it yourself.
Does the tool produce finished marketing, or does it distribute marketing you produced elsewhere?
10 generates publishable pages, articles, social sets and print. 6 includes landing page or site builders you fill in yourself. 3 ships templates and an editor. 0 sends only what you paste in.
How much does the AI decide, as opposed to autocomplete?
10 chooses structure, writes the content and produces a finished result from a brief. 7 predicts behaviour and optimises journeys on its own. 4 rewrites copy and suggests subject lines. 0 no AI beyond send time optimisation.
From signing up to something a customer could actually see, with no external help.
10 under an hour. 7 the same day. 5 a week, with data import. 2 requires an implementation partner or a mandatory onboarding programme.
Can you predict next year's invoice from this year's pricing page?
10 every tier published, meter obvious, no mandatory fees. 6 published tiers with steep brackets. 4 published price plus a mandatory onboarding fee. 0 quote only.
How far can this tool take you before you have to migrate?
10 serves an enterprise with a large database and complex governance. 7 serves a scaling company comfortably. 5 covers one function well and needs a partner tool. 2 outgrown within a year by most teams.
Segmentation, A/B testing, deliverability tooling and integration catalogues have converged. Scoring them separates nothing and rewards the vendor with the longest changelog.
Aggregate ratings on the big review platforms correlate with how aggressively a vendor solicits reviews, not with the product. We do not import them.
Inbox placement depends far more on your list hygiene and sending reputation than on the platform. Published vendor figures are not comparable across tools.
It varies by tier, region and time of year more than it varies by vendor. We mention it in an entry when it is genuinely notable, but we do not put a number on it.
Prices come from each vendor's own published pricing page, checked on the review date shown at the top of each comparison. Where a vendor publishes no price, we say so and label third party estimates as estimates. Where a figure is a range that depends on contact count, we give the specific tiers we verified rather than interpolating.
If something here is wrong, tell us and we will correct it and date the correction. Contact details are on the about page.