Hey Skeggs,

I'm hoping a few users will respond, but I'll give you my best assessment (as a HubSpot employee) of the differences between Marketo and HubSpot.

Major distinguishing points:

• Marketo is strong as a marketing automation tool and has made that it's primary focus.  HubSpot has marketing automation within its platform but is more of an integrated full-funnel solution that has lead generation tools in addition to lead nuturing and marketing automation.  So if you just want marketing automation and don't want anything else, Marketo might be a better fit.  If you want to grow your list in addition to nurturing it,  I'd look at HubSpot. Here's a listing of all the tools: http://www.hubspot.com/products

• HubSpot's goal in marketing automation was to strip away as much of the complexity as possible and focus in on the core functionality that makes marketing automation effective.  For us that means smart-lists and behavior driven communications as well as using workflows to change the status of a lead and pass along only marketing qualified leads to your sales team.  Because we've focused on making marketing automation straightforward, there may be some highly specialized functionality that Marketo has that HubSpot doesn't. Honestly, the best thing to do would be to make a list of what you need your marketing automation to do and present that list to both companies.   We'll tell you if there's anything that falls outside of our core product, but in our experience there's not much.

That's my general outlook on it.  Again, I'm hoping a user hops in here to give another assessment, but I didn't want you to go empty handed. If you do want to talk with someone about your specific needs at HubSpot you can always call or request a demo here: http://www.hubspot.com/products/demo/

Here are some 3rd party reviews:

Gleanster:  http://www.gleanster.com/reports/reports/marketing-automation

Brainsell: http://landing.brainsell.net/pages/HubspotVsMarketo.html