2025 Top Demandbase Competitors

You can't have a conversation about account-based marketing (ABM) platforms without Demandbase coming up. It's one of the two industry giants in the space. The platform also comes with an enormous bill. Is it worth it?

What is Account Based Marketing?

Account-based marketing (ABM) is a way businesses focus on a small group of important accounts instead of trying to reach everyone. They figure out which customers are the most valuable and then create special plans just for them. ABM helps marketing and sales teams work together to make sure their messages and offers match what those customers really need. By paying attention to the right people, companies can build better relationships, make bigger sales faster, and get more out of their efforts.  

Top 3 Tactics of Account-Based Marketing (ABM)

1) Intent Data

Intent data is information that shows which businesses are actively looking for products or services similar to yours. It helps companies understand what potential customers are interested in based on their online behavior, like searches, downloads, or content views.

By using intent data, businesses can identify high-value accounts that are already considering solutions in their industry. This allows for precise targeting and helps teams focus their efforts on accounts most likely to convert, saving time and resources.

2) Omni-channel Marketing

Omni-channel marketing involves reaching key accounts through multiple channels, like email, social media, online ads, and even direct mail, to create a cohesive and consistent message. This tactic ensures that potential buyers encounter your brand in the spaces they frequent, boosting engagement and reinforcing your value. By tailoring content for each channel while maintaining a unified approach, businesses can increase the chances of building trust and recognition with target accounts.

3) Contacting Multiple Leads

Reaching out to more than one decision-maker or stakeholder within a target account is essential in ABM. Larger organizations often have multiple people involved in purchasing decisions, from managers to executives. Contacting multiple leads ensures your message reaches everyone in the decision-making chain, increasing the likelihood of success. This tactic not only broadens your influence within the account but also helps uncover various needs and concerns, allowing you to craft more effective solutions and pitches.

These three tactics—leveraging intent data, implementing omni-channel strategies, and networking with multiple leads—form the backbone of a strong ABM strategy. Together, they help businesses focus on the right accounts, deliver impactful messages, and maximize their chances of closing deals.

Why Sales and Marketing Teams Are Moving Away from Demandbase

Despite its reputation as a great platform, many sales and marketing teams are reevaluating their use of Demandbase and opting for competitors. Several key factors contribute to this shift, with cost, data limitations, and user frustrations topping the list.

1) Crazy High Costs

One of the most cited reasons for leaving Demandbase is the steep price point. You can't touch the platform without having multiple 6-figures in budget ready to spend. While the platform offers a robust set of ABM tools, many organizations feel the costs far outweigh the benefits, especially for businesses on tighter budgets.

The expense of maintaining a Demandbase subscription can be prohibitive, often leaving teams to question whether they’re receiving sufficient return on investment. High costs are particularly challenging for companies trying to scale their ABM strategies, as they may find their budgets stretched too thin to accommodate additional tools or tactics they need to supplement their efforts.

2) Switching to Person-Level Intent Data

Another major concern is the platform’s primary focus on company-level intent data, which can feel restricting for teams that need deeper, person-level insights. While company-level data helps organizations identify businesses that may be in-market for their products or services, it lacks precision when it comes to targeting individual decision-makers within those companies.

The absence of detailed, person-specific data can leave sales and marketing teams struggling to tailor personalized outreach strategies, ultimately slowing down the sales process. Many users feel that without this granularity, they miss opportunities to better understand key players driving purchase decisions within target accounts.

3) Complexity and Lack of Flexibility

User-friendliness and adaptability play significant roles in the success of any platform, and some teams find Demandbase’s interface and workflows overly complex. Depending heavily on consistent internal expertise or specialized training, the platform can be difficult to fully utilize. It's suggested you have a dedicated revenue operations or similar team that can operate the platform.

This learning curve can delay implementation and ROI for teams eager to see quick wins from their ABM campaigns. Additionally, some users feel that the platform’s rigidity in how data is managed and how campaigns are structured limits the flexibility needed to innovate or adapt to changing marketing strategies.

4) Increased Expectations for Personalization

While company-level data may highlight businesses that display interest or fit a certain profile, it often fails to pinpoint the key players within those organizations—the actual decision-makers who influence and control purchasing actions. Without this granular data, marketing teams are left guessing who they need to engage and how to position their messaging effectively, leading to generic and less impactful outreach. This misalignment can create a ripple effect, making communications feel impersonal or irrelevant to recipients, which can erode trust and reduce conversion rates.

For many organizations, the gap between knowing a company is interested and knowing who to contact within that company can represent a significant lost opportunity. The inability to identify roles, responsibilities, or pain points of individual stakeholders limits the ability to tailor outreach strategies. Personalized touches—such as addressing unique challenges, aligning solutions to specific responsibilities, or crafting proposals that meet the goals of individual stakeholders—become far more difficult to execute. This not only affects how quickly trust is built with potential buyers but can also extend the sales cycle or derail opportunities altogether.

5) Costly Add-Ons and Limited Scalability

For teams looking to scale, Demandbase’s reliance on additional modules or upgrades for specialized functions drives costs even higher. This piecemeal pricing structure creates an uneven experience—users may feel as though they need to constantly invest in more features to keep up with their goals. The platform’s scalability can also pose issues for organizations managing rapid growth, as they may quickly hit the limits of what their subscription covers, leading to additional decision-making and costs.

These challenges collectively paint a picture of why sales and marketing teams are leaving Demandbase. While it remains a capable platform with a range of tools, the noticeable gaps in affordability, precision, and usability have pushed organizations to explore other options that align more closely with their specific needs and goals.

Sales Teams are Looking for Something New

Sales and marketing teams are increasingly moving away from Demandbase in favor of platforms built to meet the evolving demands of modern ABM strategies. The shift is driven by key features like person-level intent data, person-level web identification, hyper-personalization, seamless integrations, and cost-effective scalability—capabilities that address some of the most pressing gaps in Demandbase’s offerings.

1) Person-Level Intent Data

While Demandbase focuses on company-level intent, businesses now require a more refined approach. Person-level intent data reveals not only that a company may be in the market for a solution but also uncovers who within the business is showing active interest and engagement. This data enables marketers and sales teams to directly target decision-makers or influencers, ensuring outreach is relevant and impactful.

By identifying individuals browsing specific content, attending relevant events, or engaging with similar solutions, organizations can craft tailored messaging that resonates with the right people, greatly improving conversion rates and saving time.

2) Person-Level Web Identification

Knowing who visits your website can be a game-changer for ABM strategies. Platforms offering person-level web identification give teams unprecedented insight into which individuals are actively researching their solutions. This level of detail allows companies to build precise engagement strategies, nurturing visitors in real-time with offers, content, or follow-ups aligned with their interests.

Demandbase’s lack of person-level tracking often leaves users in the dark, limiting opportunities to capitalize on active interest at its peak. Teams are now gravitating toward solutions that solve this problem by providing actionable, individual-level insights that drive stronger engagement and faster deal progression.

3) Hyper-Personalization

The modern buyer expects tailored experiences throughout their purchasing journey, from initial attraction to contract signing. Platforms emphasizing hyper-personalization empower organizations to deliver unique content and outreach to individual stakeholders, ensuring communications feel relevant and timely.

By contrast, Demandbase’s broader targeting approach can lead to overly generic messages, making it harder to distinguish the brand in competitive markets. Tools with hyper-personalization capabilities allow teams to go beyond simply addressing pain points—they deliver personalized recommendations, design targeted campaigns, and build meaningful relationships that increase trust and shorten sales cycles.

4) Seamless Growth Stack Integrations

For sales and marketing teams, a disconnected tech stack can create frustrating inefficiencies and gaps in performance. New platforms excel in offering robust integrations with tools such as CRMs, marketing automation systems, and analytics dashboards that form the backbone of a team’s growth stack. These integrations enable seamless data flow, ensuring consistency, accuracy, and precision in campaigns.

Companies leaving Demandbase often cite its limitations in syncing flawlessly with existing tools, creating bottlenecks and extra work. Platforms designed with integration in mind grant users the ability to manage all aspects of ABM from a unified ecosystem, streamlining processes and improving productivity.

5) Scalability Without Excessive Costs

One of the most significant pain points driving the move from Demandbase is its pricing structure, which many find prohibitively expensive—especially for scaling organizations. Teams often mention the frustration of hitting feature limits or needing to add costly modules to accommodate growth. Emerging platforms offer a refreshing alternative, combining essential functionality with scalability at a fraction of the cost.

These solutions allow businesses to grow their ABM strategies without facing constant budgeting dilemmas or sacrifices in performance. Teams value platforms that balance powerful capabilities with affordability, enabling them to reallocate resources toward further innovation and impact.

Next-iteration of Account based Marketing Platforms

By adopting platforms that prioritize person-level insights, hyper-personalized engagement, smooth integrations, and flexible scalability, sales and marketing teams are achieving better alignment with the demands of modern buyers.  

These features address critical weaknesses in traditional tools like Demandbase, positioning forward-thinking organizations for greater efficiency, deeper connections, and higher ROI. The shift reflects a broader industry trend to prioritize precision, personalization, and practicality in ABM strategies.

Top 3 Demandbase Alternatives

With companies leaving Demandbase, 6Sense, and related platforms, the question is... where are they going? We'll go through each competitor sales teams are switching to.

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1) Identity Matrix

Identity Matrix is an upcoming AI sales and marketing intelligence platform that is eating away at Demandbase's market share every month. It specializes in person-level identification, analytics,  multi-touch attribution, and real-time contact info, enabling businesses to identify high-intent leads and optimize their customer journey. The platform integrates seamlessly with popular tools in the sales and marketing tech stack, offering scalability and cost-effectiveness.

Capabilities

• Person-Level Identification: Identifies 70% of anonymous U.S. web visitors down to the person, providing detailed profiles of individuals rather than just company-level data.
• High-Intent Lead Identification: Detects in-market leads before competitors by analyzing behavior and intent signals.
• Customer Journey Analytics: Tracks and visualizes the entire customer journey, helping businesses optimize touchpoints for their ideal customer profiles (ICPs).
• Multi-Touch Attribution: Measures the impact of every touchpoint in the buyer's journey, ensuring accurate attribution of revenue sources.
• Web Traffic Quality Analysis: Evaluates the quality of website traffic to determine how much aligns with the ICP.
• Contact Information: Provides verified personal and professional contact details, including mobile numbers, for effective outreach.
• Seamless Integrations: Connects with over 7,000 apps via Zapier and integrates directly with tools like Salesforce, HubSpot, Slack, Clay, and Apollo. Need a new, seamless CRM integration? The company will build one for you.
• Scalability: Offers cost-effective solutions that scale with business growth without requiring expensive add-ons.
• Hyper-Personalization: Enables tailored outreach by providing granular insights into individual visitors' behaviors and preferences.

Implementation

Implementing Identity Matrix to maximize your account based marketing efforts takes less than 10 minutes.

1. Publish the platform's pixel on your site
2. Set up lead scoring
3. Integrate your platforms with a few clicks

That's it. From there, send your sales teams real-time, verified contact data on auto-pilot, collect sales intelligence, and launch your account based advertising across as many channels as you see fit.

Costs

Identity Matrix is a cost-effective platform that does not charge by number of seats or company size. Instead, there are tiers based on the amount of US web traffic you have.

• Startup Edition: $149 for up to 1,500 visitors
• Pro Edition: $849 for up to 10,000 visitors
• Plus Edition: $1,799 for up to $25,000 visitors
• Enterprise: Custom pricing for every situation

TL;DR - Identity Matrix

You should compare Identity Matrix to alternatives; however, what makes it stand out is the level of AI actionable insights, comprehensive database, user friendly interface, and the ability to optimize marketing channels and outreach efforts on the fly.

2) Apollo

Apollo.io is a household name at this point. It originally started as a platform to get accurate contact information with its extensive database, data enrichment, and conduct cold outreach. However, in recent years, it has become an ABM tool by integrating intent data (company-level), sync CRM data, and prioritize leads based on user-defined workflows.

Apollo enables users to accelerate sales workflows dramatically, but has received critical feedback on data accuracy and email bounce rates as of late.

Capabilities

• Lead Generation: Access a database of over 270 million contacts and 35 million companies for targeted prospecting.
• Sales Engagement: Automate multi-step outreach sequences, including emails, calls, and LinkedIn tasks.
• AI-Powered Personalization: Use Apollo AI to craft hyper-personalized emails based on buyer signals.
• CRM Integration: Bidirectional sync with major CRMs like HubSpot and Salesforce for seamless data management.
• Task Management: Organize and track tasks such as calls, emails, and LinkedIn connections.
• Sales Dialer: Make, receive, and log calls directly within the platform.
• Lead Alerts: Get real-time notifications for new lead signals via Slack, email, or Apollo’s control center.
• Automation Templates: Deploy pre-built automation templates to streamline workflows.
• Email Tracking: Monitor email opens and clicks to gauge engagement.
• Analytics and Reporting: Access insights to optimize outreach strategies and track performance.
• Integrations: Connect with tools like Slack, Zapier, and more for enhanced functionality.  

Implementation

Implementing Apollo as a full-on account based marketing system does take time. Plan on a few weeks to do the following:

1. Put the tracking script on your website
2. Integrate email accounts
3. Set up workflows
4. Create complex lead scoring
5. Integrate with your CRM and other tools
6. Sync prospects with your ad platforms
7. Set up company-level intent data analysis

Costs

The good news about Apollo.io is that it is very cost-effective. You can start on a per-user basis for $99 per month. However, the number of mobile credits you get is very limited and only has an accuracy rate of 60-65%.

If you'd like to get unlimited credits and really scale for a large team, you will need to upgrade to an enterprise plan, which typically starts at $6,000 per year for a single user.

TL;DR Apollo

Apollo is a very good contact database; however, it lacks the email deliverability it once had. It's cost-effective for sales teams, but will not be a great marketing automation platform without a vast amount of time and money put into integrations.

3) ZoomInfo

ZoomInfo, in recent years, has rebranded itself to be a full GTM suite. You might know it as a very large contact database (that typically outperforms Apollo in data quality), but it has become much more than that.

ZoomInfo, unlike Apollo, has marketing capabilities to a certain extent. There are limitations to this, but features outperform Apollo. The catch? It's incredibly expensive and out of reach for small and mid-market businesses in most cases. It's primarily an enterprise tool.

Capabilities

• Data Accuracy: Access reliable contact and company data with industry-leading precision.
• Advanced Company Insights: Target decision-makers through detailed contact and company profiles.
• Sales Prospecting: Identify high-value leads with advanced filters and real-time updates.
• Market Intelligence: Gain competitive insights to craft smarter business strategies.
• Buyer Intent Data: Reach accounts actively researching solutions like yours.
• CRM and Platform Integrations: Seamlessly connect ZoomInfo with popular tools like Salesforce and HubSpot.
• Automated Lead Enrichment: Keep your database current with continuously updated and verified data.
• Recruiting Support: Discover top talent with detailed professional and employment information.
• ZoomInfo Engage: Scale personalized outreach to boost prospect engagement and conversions.

Implementation

Implementation of ZoomInfo does take time, but has a very similar sequence as Apollo. The key issues are going to be integrating with ad networks, identifying person-level intent and web identification, etc. You will need additional tools, like Identity Matrix, for this.

1. Put the tracking script on your website
2. Integrate email accounts
3. Set up workflows
4. Set up auto-enrichment of CRM leads
5. Create complex lead scoring
6. Integrate with your CRM and other tools
7. Sync prospects with your ad platforms
8. Set up company-level intent data analysis

Costs

Think of ZoomInfo as Apollo on steroids; however, that comes at a cost. ZoomInfo starts at $10,000 per year for extremely small teams. The list price is $16,000 but most mid-market and enterprise organizations are going to be multiple 6-figures.

TL;DR ZoomInfo

ZoomInfo is a great sales platform with a few marketing capabilities. It has been known for it's contact data; however, they are slowly spreading into the marketing arena with features like form enrichment, Co-Pilot, etc.

Quick Summary

Of course, everyone's needs are unique. However, there are some clear differences between the platforms that can help make your decision. Not sure what's right for you? We've picked three platforms described above that are leaders in their niche within ABM.

Want a one-sentence summary? Here you go:

Category: Person-Level Lead Intelligence & Identification

Winner: Identity Matrix

While there are other tools in this space, Identity Matrix identifies 3-5x more web visitors and provides more of a marketing and sales intelligence platform than any other tool. Fill your sales pipeline with potential customers that are already in-market and high-intent, plus they're familiar with your platform.

Integrate with your favorite tools, ad platforms, understand traffic quality, and more. If you want to narrow down your account based marketing to target accounts engaged with your brand, Identity Matrix is the way to go.

Category: Outbound Outreach & Contact Database

Winner: Apollo

Apollo has made a name for itself with very reasonable pricing for it's relatively accurate contact database and outreach system. It's great for building custom workflows and complex sequences that sales professionals tend to love.

It's more of an outbound system than marketing by all metrics, but it's great for allowing sales teams to scale outreach and improve sales outcomes.

Category: Sales Outreach & Lead Enrichment

Winner: ZoomInfo

ZoomInfo is great for account identification and helps you gather accurate contact information. It's not meant to launch marketing campaigns, but it does help with automatic lead enrichment with it's seamless integration with CRM systems.

While very expensive, ZoomInfo helps you enrich vast databases and provides a significant advantage to companies split between inbound and outbound efforts.

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