Gartner Put Out a Marketing Automation Ranking — But Here's the One Thing You Really Need to Look At

A few days ago, a B2B marketing director came to see me. The moment he sat down, he sighed.

He said his company had doubled its leads this year, yet sales was still starving for more. His marketing team was working until ten every night — email, landing pages, events, SCRM, you name it, they did it.

"So tell me — what am I doing wrong?"

I didn't rush to answer. I asked him one question back:

Have you been treating your marketing department as a funnel — or as a workshop?

What do I mean?

What Exactly Is "Marketing Automation"?

The moment most people hear "automation," here's the picture in their head: a robot sending emails for me, a robot filtering leads for me, a robot building my reports for me.

Wrong.

If it were that simple, an Excel file and two VLOOKUPs would have solved this a long time ago. So where's the real trouble? It's here: your leads are fluid, your customer journey is non-linear, and your team is sliced up by department.

Gartner once put a definition on this category of tools. Let me put it in plain terms —

A B2B marketing automation platform is, at scale, a class of software that helps you actually run "demand generation" end to end.

Run what, exactly? Capture leads, judge their quality, nurture them, orchestrate across channels, and finally hand the qualified names — steadily and reliably — over to sales.

In plain language, it's not an email-sending machine. It's a pipeline that lets marketing's effort land precisely inside the sales funnel.

That is the lifeblood of this category of tools.

So, Who's on the Gartner List?

There's a review ranking for B2B marketing automation platforms on Gartner Peer Insights. I flipped through it — 59 products, with ratings and review counts scattered all over the place.

Here's the interesting part: at the top of "peers most willing to recommend," it's not the old legacy giants you'd expect.

It's Creatio Marketing, Zoho CRM, and HubSpot Marketing Hub.

If you slice it by company annual revenue, the $50M–$100M tier looks almost identical — Creatio, HubSpot, Zoho. And in North America, Act-On gets lifted up too.

Let me show you a few numbers worth remembering. These aren't about "is the rating high or not" — they're about "how many people are actually using it, and would they recommend it after using it."

• HubSpot Marketing Hub, 4.4 rating, 2,214 reviews. Way out in front on review volume, a clear outlier at the top. In other words, the most people use it — and on average, they don't regret it.
• Zoho CRM, 4.3, 848 reviews.
• Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement, 4.2, 708 reviews.
• Adobe Marketo Engage, 4.4, 620 reviews.
• Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, 4.3, 316 reviews.
• Oracle Eloqua, 4.4, 256 reviews.

Notice one thing.

Marketo, Eloqua, HubSpot — their ratings are bunched tight, all between 4.2 and 4.4. But the review counts are an order of magnitude apart. HubSpot's 4.4 is voted up by over two thousand people. Oracle Eloqua's 4.4 is voted up by just over two hundred. Those two "4.4s" don't carry the same weight.

Think about it — isn't that right?

The One at the Top Isn't the Big Heavyweight

Scrolling further down, I noticed something.

Creatio Marketing, 4.7. Mekari Qontak, 4.8. Brevo, 4.6.

Their scores are all higher than HubSpot's.

But the review counts? Creatio 60, Mekari 40, Brevo 36.

What does that tell me?

The "score" on a ranking is a mean — but what you really need to look at is the denominator. When the denominator is too small, that "mean" is a luxury-boutique rating: everyone who walks in loves it, but nobody who's never walked in has any idea. In enterprise selection, sample size is itself a form of information.

A niche tool with a high score suits teams that already know exactly what they want. A popular tool with a high score is the road most people should take.

Don't let the dazzle of "4.8" fool your eyes.

That "Must-Have Features" Checklist

In that same category page, Gartner also casually listed five must-have features for B2B MAPs. I pulled them out, because this is the one thing that won't lie to you during selection.

Ratings can be gamed, recommendation scores can be worked — but must-have features are the floor. If the floor isn't even laid, the prettiest ceiling in the world is useless.

The five are:

1. Measure the effect of every touchpoint, and use dashboards to make ROI clear. A tool that can't explain ROI is the same as not buying one.
2. Graphical, multi-step journey orchestration that non-technical people can drag together. Drip campaigns, customer onboarding — these can't be things IT has to write code for.
3. Sync contacts and account data into one unified customer profile. Data scattered across five systems is the same as no data.
4. Lead scoring that judges quality by behavior and profile. Not everyone who fills out a form is worth a salesperson's first phone call.
5. Cross-channel orchestration, with email and landing pages at a minimum supported natively. For other channels, fill the gaps with integrations.

You see — none of these five are "cool." Every one of them is floor.

The real value of a tool isn't in how pretty it can make a report. It's in whether it can let your marketing team, like a band playing in rhythm, move a lead all the way from "knows you" to "signs the contract."

So, How Should You Use This List?

When that marketing director left, I sent him the list. But I added one line —

The list isn't an answer. It's a list of questions.

Look at the denominator first, then the mean. Ask first "does my team right now lack a floor or a ceiling," then look at the ratings. Think through your own lead volume, your sales headcount, your IT capacity — and only then go flip through those 59 products.

Otherwise, you'll spend 300,000 on a 4.8-rated tool, then fail to use it well — barely tapping the full power of even the email feature.

A tool won't think through your strategy for you. It will only take the strategy you've already thought through — and amplify it, accelerate it, run it end to end.

And most people don't lose because they lack a tool. They lose because they haven't thought it through.

When you're selecting — think it through first, then place the order.