When it comes to account-based marketing software solutions, few come to mind as often as 6sense.
Their account intelligence data is best-in-class, and they’ve got an ecosystem of complementary features to support enterprise-level ABM plays.
They're the current leader in the space.
But good things don’t come cheap,.
For companies who don’t have the budget or need for the complexity that the 6sense platform offers, we wanted to list a few solid alternatives people typically consider.
We’re going to look at 9 nine of them in this guide to help you run an ABM playbook.
A Quick 101 Class On Account-Based Marketing (ABM)
All of the tools we will discuss here are aimed at teams running account-based marketing plays, but a few come at it from different angles.
So, before we dive into our nine 6sense competitors, it's a smart idea to take a quick step back and understand the ABM software landscape as a whole.
Account-Based Marketing In A Nutshell
Account-based marketing is a practice that’s been around for a few years now. Demandbase (the first competitor on our list) was an early proponent of the term and approach.
The idea is that before you run any sales or marketing playbooks, you first develop a list of highly qualified, high-value accounts you’d like to target.
You determine your ICP (ideal company profile), research companies that fit it, and build out your data around that so you can create highly personalized and super-targeted outreach based on the stage of the account's buyer journey.
This is in contrast to the typical funnel, which sees marketers targeting “ideal customers” more broadly, capturing leads and nurturing them, then passing them on to the sales team to qualify, present, and close.
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ABM is more costly from a CAC perspective and is usually reserved for targeting high-ticket enterprise organizations, where the deal size is large enough to justify a huge CAC.
The Role Of Software In Account-Based Marketing
As the account-based approach developed legs, two software needs emerged:
- Marketing and advertising - A solution for orchestrating marketing activities like personalized advertising.
- Sales intelligence data - Firmographic data on target companies, buying committee identification, and purchase intent signals.
The companies on this list of 6sense competitors basically came up on one of these two paths.
Brands like Demandbase and Terminus built their names on ad-based marketing workflows, whereas the likes of ZoomInfo and Clearbit built best-in-class data platforms to enable sales teams.
This division worked well in the 2010s when budgets for SaaS were huge, and software buyers favored best-in-class over all-in-one. The tide has changed from a SaaS buying perspective, however. Pursestrings are tightening, and buyers are looking to consolidate spending.
Couple this with the fact that ABM is now an established playbook (rather than a niche approach), and you’re seeing the two lanes merge into singular solutions.
Moreover, contact data has become commoditized, so the companies that took this route are looking for ways to continue growing net revenue retention (NRR) in a saturated market.
That’s why we’re seeing companies like ZoomInfo expand its feature set through strategic acquisitions, such as its purchase of Clickagy to add intent signaling to its offering.
The Issue With Account-Based Marketing Software Today
Account-based marketing software has become incredibly sophisticated.
Solutions like 6sense, Demandbase, and ZoomInfo all offer one-stop-shop solutions with best-in-class contact data as well as powerful sales and marketing orchestration.
Naturally, these companies have shifted upmarket in terms of sales targeting, taking advantage of increased demand:
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Of course, this means that pricing has followed suit. Take Drift, which pre-2021 was specifically targeting SMBs, now costs at least $30k annually.
Today’s ABM suites, then, are largely out of reach of small businesses and even some mid-market organizations.
They’re also incredibly complex, which is perfect for enterprise companies with large sales forces who are ready to run. But they’re often overkill for SMBs who just need to start walking first.
For that, some powerful AI-driven solutions have begun to emerge, offering a “crawl then walk” approach with a price tag to suit.
Warmly, for example, combines best-in-class data and de-anonymization and intent signals from sources like 6sense and Bombora with automated personalized action, helping you scale an AI SDR army without emptying the GTM warchest.
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. We’ll blow our own horn a little later (head here if you want to hear our sweet tunes now).
For now, let’s dig into the 6sense competitors.
9 6sense Alternatives Worth Shortlisting
1. Demandbase - Best For Identifying Buying Groups
Demandbase is one of the longest-standing ABM platforms around.
While they didn’t quite coin the term, they were certainly one of the first go-to-market tools rallying around the idea of account-based selling and marketing.
Now that everyone else has jumped on the ABM train, they’ve shifted messaging to be around ABX (account-based experience), which places a greater emphasis on long-term relationships with customers and the broader revenue team (sales, marketing, customer success).
As their CMO, Jon Miller, puts it:
“It's more than a marketing tool; it's a business decision tool. You can use the data to make real-time decisions on your marketing and your sales processes.”
Why Consider Demandbase As An Alternative To 6sense?
At the high level, what Demandbase is trying to accomplish is fairly similar to 6sense’s mission:
Identify ideal accounts > enrich with firmographic data and buying intent signals > execute account-based playbooks via ads, sales outreach, etc.
They have a couple of standout features, though:
- Buying Group AI: Demandbase finds the buying committee of contacts with AI so you can focus your attention on just them and allocate remaining resources elsewhere. Contact data is automatically synced to your CRM.
- B2B ad capabilities: Demandbase has a demand-side platform (DSP) with some powerful people-based advertising tools to help GTM teams supplement sales outreach with personalized ads (social as well as display ads). When combined with the Buying Group AI feature, Demandbase can prioritize and target demand unit members using specific identifiers like names and emails.
Where Demandbase Falls Short
Demandbase, like 6sense (and most other ABM tools), serves the higher end of the market with real budget to deploy.
For example, an important feature is Demandbase’s B2B advertising, something that most smaller SMBs don’t even engage in.
It’s also quite expensive in and of itself, and while it does allow you to pick and choose modules from an “a la carte” menu, you’re looking at at least six figures to build out a full ABM motion.
Demandbase Pricing
Demandbase sets prices individually for each company, which is pretty much how things are done for software solutions in this category.
2. ZoomInfo - Best For An All-In-One Solution
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ZoomInfo offers a neatly organized suite of software platforms for GTM teams, spanning:
- Marketing
- Sales
- Operations
- HR
Why Consider ZoomInfo As An Alternative To 6sense?
ZoomInfo came up on the back of their best-in-class contact and company data.
That’s the core of their product offering, and they’ve developed into a GTM suite from there (mostly through acquisitions) as a way of expanding their offering and driving up ACV.
Standout features include:
- A decent chatbot with solid “if/then” workflows
- Conversation intelligence (think Gong)
- A demand-side platform for running ABM ads
The biggest win with ZoomInfo here is that you can start out with just one module, and then when you decide to include another GTM-related product, you can just buy from the same supplier, avoiding the need to stitch together multiple tools.
For instance, you might start out with their SalesOS for things like contact data and sales automation. Then, as your ABM motion grows, you might integrate the MarketingOS to pick up advertising and chat features.
Where ZoomInfo Falls Short
Other than pricing (which is, again, prohibitive to most SMBs), there are a couple of small drawbacks to using ZoomInfo as a 6sense competitor.
Unlike Hubspot, which built all their offerings internally and had few integrations, a large chunk of their ZoomInfo's set beyond contact data came through acquisitions, as they’ve trained to keep increasing ACV.
As such, these acquisitions will need more time to bake in for the data to be fully integrated across all their systems, and since they don’t really have a “core focus,” they have begun to lose ground on being the expert at any one thing.
Their chat feature isn't quite as integrated into Salesforce as Qualified's or as AI-focused as Drift's or Warmly's. This stems from trying to cover too much surface area simultaneously via acquisition.
ZoomInfo Pricing
Like Demandbase, you have to speak with a sales rep to get any kind of pricing info.
You’re looking at ~$40k to get up to speed with workflows alone, however.
3. Terminus - Best For Marketing Use Cases
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Terminus can, for the most part, be thrown into the same bucket as 6sense and Demandbase as far as what they’re trying to achieve.
They, too, are an account-based GTM platform, specifically targeting the higher end of the market with large budgets to deploy.
Why Consider Terminus As An Alternative To 6sense?
Where Terminus differs from other solutions is that they’re mostly focused on the marketing use case.
Features like targeted advertising, customized website experiences, and automated chatbots are all driven by a combination of first and third-party data.
Being so focused on marketing activities, their ad offering is pretty strong, with support for display advertising, retargeting, social media ads, and even audio advertising.
You can even include ads in your outbound emails with personalized dynamic signatures.
Where Terminus Falls Short
Whenever a platform focuses on one specific use case, the obvious drawback is that it becomes less suitable for others.
As such, most of where Terminus fails to stack up against competitors like 6sense and Demandbase is around the sales use case:
- The sales workflows aren’t as robust as the likes of ZoomInfo or 6sense
- The chatbot is more automated (like Drift) vs./ a human experience (like Warmly or Qualified)
- Some sales engagement stuff exists, but the solution still feels like it doesn't close the loop between ABM and ABS (account-based selling) in the same way that competitors do
Terminus Pricing
While Terminus doesn’t outwardly advertise pricing, we’ve heard anecdotally that they cost a little less than 6sense (though, of course, they are less fully featured).
4. Drift - Best For High-Volume Chat Plays
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While Demandbase, ZoomInfo, and Terminus are the main 6sense competitors from the perspective of feature overlap, there are a number of other tools around that take a slightly different approach and are still suitable for use within an ABM motion.
Drift is the quintessential automated website chatbot (or conversational marketing tool).
Why Consider Drift As An Alternative To 6sense?
Drift is designed for high-volume traffic websites (so enterprise-facing) that can convert a percentage of visitors to leads using automated chat plays.
At this, it excels.
It has started leaning into AI-powered bots (though there are other more advanced Drift alternatives for that) and some sales-focused features like the automated booking of meetings and personalized videos that can be sent via email, chat, and LinkedIn.
These features are useful but not Drift’s main use case.
Where Drift Falls Short
Drift is clearly less fully featured than many of the other 6sense competitors mentioned here. A few drawbacks include:
- Was a bit late to CRM integrations (initially took the stand-alone approach)
- No human involvement (its a high-volume, low-touch play)
- Reactive rather than proactive chat
Drift Pricing
Drift isn’t cheap, with plans starting at $30k a year and increasingly quickly from there for more advanced feature sets.
5. Clearbit - Best For Developer-Heavy GTM Teams
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Clearbit is another slightly different alternative to 6sense.
While it does offer some sales and marketing-related playbooks, it's much more focused on high-quality sales intelligence.
Side note: Clearbit was recently acquired by HubSpot, which promises to be a powerful partnership (and aligns Clearbit’s data focus with HubSpot’s playbooks).
Why Consider Clearbit As An Alternative To 6sense?
Clearbit is a best-in-class data and intelligence platform.
Standout features here include:
- Deanonymizing site traffic and then enriching it with excellent B2B data
- Strong integrations with Salesforce and HubSpot
- Buying committee identification (a tool they call Prospector)
- A robust API for custom integrations
That last point is really the big idea with Clearbit. It's built with developer-focused GTM teams in mind.
You buy Clearbit not as a tool for sales engagement or running ABM playbooks. You buy it for best-in-class sales intelligence and hook it up to your other engagement and CRM tools to line up orchestration.
Where Clearbit Falls Short
The obvious drawback with Clearbit is that it doesn't come with any strong out-of-the-box playbooks to execute sales workflows.
If you don’t have a developer-focused GTM team, Clearbit isn’t for you.
That said, the HubSpot acquisition may change all of that, so stay tuned to see what happens in the coming months and years.
Clearbit Pricing
Clearbit has a free plan and a paid option (no pricing information available online).
You can also buy API credits, which aligns nicely with Clearbit’s idea of servicing teams who want to stitch together their tech stacks using best-in-class solutions.
6. Bombora - Best For Larger Partnership Deals
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Bombora, like 6sense and Demandbase, is a 3rd party intent data provider (though it lacks the ABM playbook features that these options offer)
However, whereas those competitors might use bidstream data (data passed from ad exchanges to targeting platforms), Bombora has a proprietary data set based on a collection of over 5,000 B2B websites.
Read more about bidstream vs. Bombora’s data here.
Why Consider Bombora As An Alternative To 6sense?
The big upside of Bombora is that, as a result of their exclusive partnership agreements, their data is very unique.
Bombora’s intent data comes from the use of natural language processing to read and evaluate the content of pages that a potential buyer is on rather than only their engagement with ad placements.
This results in fewer false positives, which is a typical complaint with other third-party data providers.
With platforms like ZoomInfo, 6sense, and Demandbase, you’re likely to be getting bidstream data. By supplementing this with Bombora’s exclusive partnership data, you can improve intent signaling and build more time-relevant and personalized outreach campaigns.
Where Bombora Falls Short
You’ll note that we mentioned supplementing (not replacing) data from 6sense, Demandbase, or ZoomInfo with Bombora’s data.
That’s because Bombora is strictly a data licensor. They don’t have any workflow capabilities on top of that data, like most other 6sense competitors do.
To use Bombora, you’d need to layer them into your sales/marketing workflow and make sure the data is fully integrated so you can properly execute an ABM strategy.
For this reason, they don’t actually do a lot of direct business.
More commonly, Bombora sells its intent data to companies with platforms that can use this information to run an ABM playbook (Bombora is one of Warmly’s data sources, for instance).
This also means that they’re quite expensive if you try to work with them directly.
Bombora Pricing
Given that Bombora generally does larger partnership deals, it should be unsurprising that there is no publicly available pricing information.
7. Qualified - Best For Integrating With Salesforce
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Qualified is all about turning website traffic into leads, primarily using live and automated chat tools.
Why Consider Qualified As An Alternative To 6sense?
Think of Qualified as a human-led version of Drift.
Like Drift, the idea is to use website chat to engage and convert visitors into leaders. But while Qualified does have some automation functionality, the focus is really on having a live human being engage with the customer.
It uses a feature called Signals to reveal your hottest accounts (using AI-predicted purchase intent), so reps can determine which leads to communicate with most urgently.
This communication can include live chat, audio, or even video, giving sales reps the flexibility to drive up engagement levels depending on the need, urgency, and intent demonstrated by the prospect.
The other thing that stands out with Qualified’s offering is its Salesforce integration.
The team at Qualified are all ex-Salesforce, meaning they’ve got some solid connections there, and have used this to build a best-in-class, native integration with Salesforce. If you’re deeply embedded in the Salesforce architecture, Qualified is a clear winner.
Where Qualified Falls Short
A couple of drawbacks we should mention include:
- Only suitable for Salesforce users (no integration with other CRMs)
- Pretty costly and requires a lot of setup and maintenance
- The focus on live human interaction requires a significant amount of internal resources
For these reasons, Qualified is, like most of the 6sense alternatives discussed here, not generally suitable for SMB customers.
Qualified Pricing
The basic plan comes in at $42k a year, with the $72k plan adding more customization and stronger Salesforce connectivity.
8. RollWorks - Best For HubSpot Users And Advertisers
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RollWorks is basically the ABM features of 6sense/Terminus, but for the SMB.
These guys have some impressive advertising functionality. Actually, that's where they came from.
RollWorks initially focused on creating an excellent experience for the advertising marketer before bolting on some of the sales-focused functionality we see in the platform today.
Why Consider RollWorks As An Alternative To 6sense?
It’s pretty tough to find a 6sense competitor where pricing is a pro, but RollWorks is actually super affordable, with plans starting at just $975 a month.
Like Terminus, RollWorks is more focused on the marketing use case than the sales use case.
They’re considered the ABM platform of choice for HubSpot CRM users and have tied their growth to HubSpot, claiming they have 150% more HubSpot integrations than its closest ABM competitor.
They also have a pretty good Salesforce integration, meaning if you're using one of these two major platforms, you can run sales playbooks there and use RollWorks to drive the advertising/marketing side of your account-based motion.
RollWorks’ standout feature (which it does super well) is Journey Stages. This allows you to see your total addressable market and identify what stage each account is at so you know where to focus your marketing and sales resources.
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This isn’t a particularly unique feature in the ABM space, but it's generally reserved for enterprise-facing tools with enterprise price tags.
Where RollWorks Falls Short
One area where RollWorks is less capable is in the sales use case.
It's great at identifying hot accounts and serving them up ads, but it doesn’t have the B2B contact database that other platforms do, so you can’t use this to identify buying committees.
RollWorks isn’t trying to be an all-in-one solution like 6sense and other alternatives. This is reflected in the platform’s pricing and huge range of integrations.
What this does mean, of course, is that you’ll need to buy a bunch of other tools and stitch them all together to develop a full ABM suite.
Though some may see this as an upside, as it means you can crawl > walk > run.
RollWorks Pricing
Pricing for RollWorks starts at $975 per month for their Standard plan (they also have Professional and Ultimate tiers available with more advanced functionality.)
9. Warmly - Best For SMBs
Warmly is a 6sense partner. We work with 6sense's commercial team to help service the SMB, since they are primarily focused on the enterprise.
There aren’t a whole lot of 6sense competitors that are suitable for the SMB market from both a pricing perspective and a feature set standpoint.
Warmly's account-based orchestration and chat features combined with 6sense's de-anonymization data is trying to be one such solution, though.
Notice we said account-based orchestration, not marketing.
That’s because we believe that the future of account-based marketing requires a breakdown of traditional data siloes and the integration of artificial intelligence to deliver speed, coverage, and consistency.
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How does Warmly and 6sense work better together?
Warmly and 6sense are complementary solutions.
6sense's account-based marketing capabilities drive high-intent target accounts to your website.
For example, you can purchase their ABM platform and Predictive Tier to sync with your CRM, evaluate closed won opportunities, and segment your TAM by consideration, awareness, decision, and purchase stages. Then you can send targeted ads to accounts in the consideration and awareness stage to move them further down the funnel.
Warmly comes in when the target accounts visit the site.
Warmly's AI chat starts a conversation with these high-intent accounts and alerts a sales rep via Slack or Microsoft Teams when they're ready for a human conversation. Warmly can then auto-discover and auto-sequence the buying committee of hot accounts who have engaged with the site but not filled out a form.
This drives more relevant traffic back to the site, which increases Warmly's ability to accelerate conversion across the funnel.
Source: Warmly.ai
Why Consider Warmly To Competitors of 6sense?
Warmly takes a different approach to the other 6sense competitors we’ve discussed so far.
Using generative AI to automate personalized sales outreach, we help you achieve the perfect balance between a human-led and AI-driven motion.
Best-in-class enrichment, de-anonymization, and intent data from 6sense, Bombora, Clearbit, and PeopleDataLabs is combined with intent signals from the tools in your tech stack (Apollo, Outreach, Hubspot, etc.) to trigger AI-driven outreach when the timing is right.
The goal here is to help SMBs achieve scale and speed to lead.
We know that 35-50% of sales go to the company that responds first, but most small businesses don’t have the internal resources to respond quickly enough, meaning many deals are lost to larger competitors.
Warmly helps you capture high-intent, high-urgency leads. Our AI platform runs your entire workflow—from intent being triggered to outreach being fired—until it's the right time for a rep to get involved.
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Dive deeper: Warmly: The Account Based Orchestration Platform.
Why Warmly Might Not Be A Good Fit For You
As we’ve already discussed, Warmly is built exclusively to help the SMB and lower middle markets achieve speed and scale.
We’re a great alternative for smaller companies who don’t have the budget for 6sense and the kind of human-led motion a GTM tool like that requires.
This does mean, though, that some of our features and integrations aren’t fully ready for enterprise-grade companies.
Warmly Pricing
Warmly offers 3 different plans:
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Our most basic paid plan comes in at $850 a month, billed annually.
For those of you who want to dig in right away, without having to speak to a salesperson, we also offer a pretty decent free option.
Get started for free here.
Why Consider An Alternative To 6sense?
Its tough to make the case that 6sense isn’t a fantastic tool for ABM-based teams.
They’ve got the best contact and intent data in the game (We use 6sense data internally to power our own GTM), and the platform is packed with great features to align sales and product marketing.
As Metadata.io puts it:
“6sense’s buyer intent data and predictive modeling are awesome. It helps sales teams prioritize accounts based on stages in the buyer journey.”
Product marketers can directly input messaging into the Sales Intelligence tool to empower AEs and BDRs with talk tracks that align with product marketing. Sales reps have visibility on what marketing has already done so they can move the conversation forward naturally.
Plus, there’s a really cool and unique feature called Conversational Email, which uses generative AI to handle low-risk customer communications.
In 2023, it was named a leader in the Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Account-Based Marketing Platforms for the third year running, joined only by Demandbase.
However, no tool is perfect, and you might not decide to invest in 6sense in a couple of situations.
You don’t have the budget
One of the great things about 6sense having such an extensive offering is that you can pick and choose different feature models to customize your plan.
However, certain modules need to be bought before others. To get to a point where you have full end-to-end orchestration (with features like the aforementioned conversational email function), you might be spending around $100k+ a year.
You need a chat ABM solution, not an enterprise-level feature set
You may have set up your own account-based marketing program and want to convert more quality accounts you're driving to your site.
You might want a chat solution that seamlessly integrates with your ABM program.
Qualified or Drift (for the enterprise) and Warmly (for SMBs) are good options here.
These solutions combine website engagement data with a 360 view of the account to enable intelligent conversations and lead routing for target accounts that visit the website.
Build An AI SDR Army With Warmly
6sense is one of the best solutions around. This is particularly true if you’ve got the budget, salesforce, and established playbooks to run a human-led account-based marketing motion.
Sometimes 6sense is not within reach from a budget standpoint. Even if it were, most small businesses don’t have the internal capability or resources to take advantage of 6sense’s enterprise-facing feature set.
You need to walk before you can run.
With Warmly's, you can start the "walk" phase of your ABM program and start seeing ROI in 20 minutes in just three easy steps:
- Add a code snippet to the site
- One-click authenticates your existing systems (Hubspot, Outreach, Apollo, Slack, LinkedIn, etc.)
- Input your ICP company profiles and personas
You’ll immediately start improving conversion rates by revealing who is on your site, enriching that traffic with best-in-class data, syncing that data back to your CRM, and automating personalized outreach to the hottest accounts via email, LinkedIn, and chat.
Discover how Kandji booked 2 qualified meetings just 8 minutes after going live with Warmly.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is 9 6sense Competitors You're Probably Looking At (2023)?
9 6sense Competitors You're Probably Looking At (2023) refers to the concepts and strategies covered in this article. Understanding these fundamentals helps B2B teams improve their sales and marketing effectiveness.
Why is 9 6sense Competitors You're Probably Looking At (2023) important?
This matters because it directly impacts pipeline generation and revenue. Teams that master these concepts see better results from their go-to-market efforts.
How can I implement this?
Start with the strategies outlined above. For B2B teams, combining these tactics with tools like Warmly—which identifies website visitors and automates engagement—can accelerate results.
What tools help with 9 6sense Competitors You're Probably Looking At (2023)?
Several tools can help, depending on your specific needs. Warmly is particularly useful for identifying high-intent website visitors and engaging them before they leave your site.
What are the best practices for 9 6sense Competitors You're Probably Looking At (2023)?
Key best practices are covered throughout this article. Focus on the fundamentals first, measure your results, and iterate based on data rather than assumptions.