Demandbase vs. 6sense: Which is Better for ABM?18 min read

In this guide, I have compared Demandbase vs. 6sense across features, data and identity, advertising and LinkedIn activation, integrations, pricing and total cost of ownership, implementation, analytics, and fit by company size and motion.

I have tried to answer what most buyers actually need to decide, and have also suggested a third lighter alternative for LinkedIn ABM (ZenABM), and where it might make more sense than these enterprise tools.

Demandbase vs. 6sense: Quick summary

In case you don’t have 15 minutes, here are the key differences between Demandbase and 6sense, especially in terms of features, pricing, and positioning.

• Choose 6sense if your priority is predictive analytics, buying stage scoring, sales intelligence, and cross-channel orchestration that keeps SDRs and AEs aligned with marketing. It is a sales intelligence platform that suits account-based programs that rely on AI-driven insights.
• Choose Demandbase if your ABM program is media-heavy and you want a native B2B DSP for programmatic, clean audience management, daily LinkedIn audience sync, and web personalization under one roof. Demandbase also positions itself as the only pipeline AI platform for account-based GTM strategies.
• Both platforms offer an enterprise plan as their higher-tier, customizable option suitable for larger organizations. Pricing details are not publicly disclosed and must be obtained via custom quotes. Expect a mix of platform licenses, services, and media. Plan for smooth data flow across your current stack and marketing automation platforms.
• Realistic budgets often land in mid-five figures to six figures per year based on scope.
• These choices affect ABM outcomes for marketing and sales teams and the broader marketing and sales efforts that support the pipeline.
• Here’s a table showing their contrasts:

Dimension	Demandbase	6sense
Core positioning	Full-stack ABM with native B2B DSP, audience and orchestration, buying committees, and web personalization. Demandbase positions itself as the only pipeline AI platform for account-based GTM strategies.	Revenue AI for GTM with predictive buying stage and fit, segments, orchestration, and sales intelligence
Advertising backbone	Native B2B DSP for open internet reach and retargeting	Activation via The Trade Desk for display, video, and CTV
LinkedIn activation	Audience destinations and daily sync to Campaign Manager, plus campaign reporting sync	Build and sync segments that align with LinkedIn and programmatic plans
Sales workflow depth	Solid, with buying group views and alerts	Deeper out of the box with Sales Intelligence and prospecting tools
Typical fit	Mid-market and enterprise with meaningful media budgets and multi-channel ABM	Mid-market and enterprise that want predictive-led orchestration across revenue teams
Pricing style	Enterprise plan, custom quotes, annual contracts are common. Pricing not publicly disclosed.	Enterprise plan, custom quotes, annual and multi-year terms are common. Pricing not publicly disclosed.

• A Third Alternative: If your motion is LinkedIn first and you want company-level engagement, CRM write back, ABM stage tracking, and revenue dashboards without the overhead of a full suite, consider a lighter stack anchored by ZenABM (starting at just $59/month) and scale up later. This is often the pragmatic marketing platform path for lean account-based teams.

Demandbase overview

Demandbase is an enterprise ABM platform built as a central hub for account selection, activation, and measurement. As a pipeline AI platform, Demandbase unifies data and automates account-based strategies to help go-to-market teams maximize revenue and reduce waste.

It includes a native B2B DSP for programmatic, plus multi-channel ad support across display, video, CTV, and social, with cenabling multi-channel engagement to reach prospects across various channels. Controls for account and people-based targeting, buying groups, AI-driven bidding, and account-level frequency capping are included.

The ad stack sits alongside TAL building methods such as CSV upload, web visitor deanonymization, and native account intelligence that factors firmographics, technographics, and intent.

Reporting surfaces account-level engagement, and an ad creative library streamlines asset reuse.

On the data side, Demandbase emphasizes identity through IP-to-account resolution and curated B2B inventory, and it layers predictive scoring and a Pipeline Predict signal to prioritize outreach, supporting predictive marketing to identify high-value accounts and enable targeted strategies.

Integrations cover major CRMs, MAPs, analytics, ad platforms, and sales tools so audiences and insights flow across your tech stack.

6sense overview

6sense is a B2B ABM platform that centers on AI-powered revenue intelligence and website visitor deanonymization.

As a pipeline AI platform, 6sense empowers go-to-market teams to automate growth, unify data, and execute account-based strategies effectively.

It supports multi-channel advertising and precise targeting, automates dynamic audience segments, and uses a proprietary Company Graph to map anonymous traffic to accounts.

Multi-channel engagement enables coordinated outreach to prospects across various communication channels, optimizing engagement and conversion.

Predictive scoring and segmentation combine first-, second-, and third-party intent to produce buying stage and fit signals, whichleveraging predictive marketing to identify high-value accounts and predict purchasing readiness. These insights feed sales orchestration, next-best actions, and prospecting across CRM data and 6sense’s database.

The platform also includes attribution dashboards, sourced and influenced models, and AI-driven forecasting that connect account engagement to pipeline goals.

Teams can run display, video, and CTV, coordinate social and search, and extend intelligence into sales tools and a Chrome extension. 6sense integrates with CRM solutions like Microsoft Dynamics to enhance data sharing, streamline workflows, and improve team collaboration for greater sales effectiveness.

It is geared to mid to large enterprises that can invest in the breadth of features and associated operational lift.

Differentiating key features

Let’’s have a closer look at the key differences between Demandbase and 6sense by examining each platform’’s almost-unique offerings.

Demandbase One highlights

Demandbase has the following almost-unique highlights:

• Intent and account engagement heatmaps: Demandbase visualizes different accounts’ qualitative and quantitative engagement and intent across both first and third-party sources into heatmaps that enrich intent signals for ABM campaigns.

• Native B2B DSP: Built for account-targeted programmatic ABM. You get control over frequency, creative sequencing, and stage-based delivery without stitching together generic DSP logic.

• Audience management and destinations: Create, govern, and syndicate audiences to channels, including a clean path to LinkedIn. FDemandbase helps identify and engage target audiences for ABM campaigns, resulting in fewer CSV juggles and more reliable segments.
• Buying committees and account identification: Link people to accounts and visualize decision-making units so campaign strategy lines up with real-world committees. This supports accurate account identification for complex buying committees.
• Web personalization: Dynamic content for target accounts, tied back to buying stages and ad journeys.

6sense highlights

While most platforms offer features like predictive analytics, sales intelligence, and flexible segmentation, 6sense stands out for the depth of its predictive analytics and sales intelligence capabilities. 6sense offers the following almost-unique features (at least in comparison to Demandbase):

• Predictive analytics: Buying stage and fit scores power segments, alerts, and prioritization. Useful for planning outreach waves by the likelihood of progress while you predict buyer intent with machine learning and AI-driven insights.

• Segments and orchestration: Rules-based logic that keeps lists fresh for both campaigns and sales plays, including intent data segments for ABM outreach.
• Sales intelligence: Prospecting, alerts, and an actionable layer of insights and data that reps can use without living inside a marketing tool. The product is positioned as a sales intelligence platform for revenue teams.

• Trade Desk activation: Extend reach across display, video, native, and CTV with segments that match what sales is seeing.

Bottom line: Demandbase leans into activation and media scale with strong ABM plumbing. 6sense leans into predictive and revenue alignment with a capable activation layer. Both can run sophisticated ABM programs if your GTM basics are not a mess.

Account-based advertising and LinkedIn go-to-market activation

Demandbase gives you a native B2B DSP that handles reach outside walled gardens.

For LinkedIn, you can sync audiences daily and pull campaign reporting back into your ABM view.

This keeps journeys aligned when you are running social for precision and programmatic for efficient scale.

6sense extends segments to The Trade Desk, which suits teams that want a single predictive brain feeding both LinkedIn and open internet reach.

If your brand invests in video and CTV, or if you want to run retargeting across exchanges, this is an easy way to keep logic consistent.

Data sources, identity, and match

Both platforms blend first-party engagement with partner data like intent, technographics, and firmographics. Each uses intent data along with first-party signals to score and segment accounts.

The mechanics are similar.

Each supports lead to account matching, unifies identity, and groups contacts into buying committees. Evaluate identity resolution quality and how it supports ABM decision-making.

What matters is not the marketing diagram.

What matters is your match rate for the accounts and regions you target, and how reliably that graph writes back to CRM so sales is not chasing ghosts.

• Test match rates against a real target account list with realistic traffic, not a cherry-picked sample, and confirm precise account identification is stable.
• Ask for cookieless reach options for programmatic and measure how that affects frequency and cost.
• Confirm data freshness and how deprecation or partner changes are handled without breaking your reports. Some data sets may require manual verification to ensure accuracy, especially if updates are infrequent or lists are static.

Integrations and workflows

These are the types of integrations and workflows possible with both the tools:

CRMs and MAPs

Both support Salesforce and, HubSpot, and Microsoft Dynamics, along with major MAPs and marketing automation platforms. Push only the fields RevOps can own and maintain. Keep naming consistent with your data dictionary to avoid reconciliation fights and ensure seamless data flow across the current stack.

Advertising destinations

Demandbase provides LinkedIn audience destinations and campaign reporting sync so your ABM platform reflects what actually ran. 6sense provides Trade Desk activation plus LinkedIn coordination from segments.

Sales tools

6sense’s sales intelligence is deeper out of the box – 6sense analyzes billions of intent signals across multiple touchpoints to provide actionable insights.

Demandbase’s buying committee lens and alerts are solid for teams that already have a strong sales infrastructure and do not want to switch prospecting tools. For sales and marketing teams that want one view, 6sense positions itself in the category for sales intelligence with AI-driven insights layered on top of data.

You can learn more about their integrations on their own site here:

• Demandbase official docs
• 6sense’s integrations page

Pricing, TCO, and contracts

There is no public, static price card for either platform.

Both are priced by quote.

Expect a core license, add-ons, data credits, and seat packs.

Expect services that can be vendor-provided or agency-led.

If you run programmatic, expect media budgets through the native DSP or The Trade Desk.

If you are LinkedIn heavy, that budget sits outside the platform license but still needs to be modeled in your ROI math.

6sense pricing snapshot

6sense gives a free Sales Intelligence tier with a credits model that supports light prospecting and alerts – handy for testing workflows before a paid rollout.

It’s paid tiers sold by quote.

Observed ranges on platforms like Vendr commonly land in mid-five figures to low six figures per year, depending on scope and term, and the median price stands at $62,843.

Large enterprise rollouts can be higher.

Demandbase pricing snapshot

Demandbase provides custom quotes aligned to modules and media strategy, and nothing is directly stated on their own site.

As per third-party sources, small packages can start in the lower bands, mid-market often lands in the middle, and large enterprises with multi-region activation can reach six figures.

Vendr, for instance, keeps the median 6sense pricing at $54,250.

Pros and cons

Fit by company size and motion

SMB and lower mid-market teams often find both Demandbase and 6sense overkill unless they have a dedicated RevOps owner and a media budget that justifies programmatic, so a LinkedIn-first-stack with a strong analytics layer is usually smarter – something a tool like ZenABM can help you with.

 

In the mid-market, both platforms can work:

• Pick 6sense if you want predictive alignment for sales and marketing,
• and choose Demandbase if you plan meaningful programmatic spend and want a native DSP.
• At the enterprise level, either can scale, and the decision usually comes down to your media mix and how much you want a sales intelligence layer inside the same platform.

Demandbase or 6sense: Which is better for your ABM strategy?

While both Demandbase and 6sense are enterprise ABM platforms for account-based marketing, they have their differences, and you should choose while considering these pointers:

Choose Demandbase if

• Your ABM plan includes significant programmatic reach in addition to LinkedIn. The native B2B DSP centralizes targeting, pacing, and frequency by account stage, while social handles thought leadership and remarketing for ABM journeys.
• You want to keep audiences consistent across channels with minimal copy-paste, including daily LinkedIn sync. Web personalization and buying committee analytics help you stitch journeys together and maintain ABM consistency.
• Marketing owns activation, and you want audience management, orchestration, and measurement in one platform, so you are not juggling five tools to move an account from unaware to SQL.

Choose 6sense if

• You need predictive buying stage, fit, and intent wired into segments, alerts, and plays. This is useful when sales development depends on clear signals instead of spray-and-pray sequences and when you want to gauge buyer intent with intent data, not guesswork.
• You prefer Trade Desk-based activation for display, video, and CTV, while still coordinating LinkedIn audiences from the same segments with ABM rules.
• You want a credible sales intelligence layer that helps reps prioritize accounts, find contacts, and time outreach based on stage movement, not just inbound form fills. Many teams evaluate 6sense against others in the category for sales intelligence.

ZenABM as a LinkedIn-first lean account-based marketing alternative

Here’s how ZenABM can support a lean ABM strategy on LinkedIn:

Company-level engagement tracking per campaign using LinkedIn’s official API

ZenABM pulls company-level LinkedIn ad engagement data (impressions, clicks, and engagements) and ad spend for each of your LinkedIn ad campaigns:

Engagement-based lead scoring and ABM stage tracking

Apart from giving you raw engagement data of each company with each campaign, ZenABM sums up the historic and current engagement rate of all companies across all your ad campaigns to give you a lead score – a score telling you how aware or engaged a company is with your overall brand and campaign.

Plus, based on these engagements and your CRM data, ZenABM assigns an ABM stage to each account.

The best part? The engagement thresholds for these ABM stages are customizable at the user’s end:

Automated BDR assignment

We just saw that ZenABM tracks the ABM stage of each account based on engagement and CRM data.

To add more convenience for your sales team, ZenABM assigns hot accounts (accounts that have reached the interested stage) to your BDRs in your CRM:

So, your BDR outreach is immediate to hot accounts without manual daily look ups and manual alerts to your BDRs in, say, Slack.

Two-way CRM integration

While your run ABM on LinkedIn, your marketing team will live in ZenABM and MAPs, but sales team prefer their comfort zone – the CRM.

Well, for bridging the gap and eliminating manual data downloads and uploads, ZenABM automatically pushes all engagement data for accounts as company properties to your CRM:

And as for the other way of this two-way CRM integration, ZenABM matches engaged companies to the deals in your CRM and pulls the deal value of each company.

Plug-and-play ABM analytics and ROI attribution dashboards

ZenABM, empowered with its company-matching and deal-value-pulling feature, provides you with ready-made ABM analytics and ROI attribution dashboards.

• You can see the ad performance at all levels, including ABM campaigns, LinkedIn campaign groups, and individual LinkedIn ad campaigns:
• Plus, as it has both the deal value and the ad spend for each company and campaign, it calculates revenue metrics, campaign effectiveness metrics like ROAS, pipeline per dollar spent etc. and also shows you the pipeline graphically:

Intent-data based ABM

Demandbase and 6sense rely on third-party sources like Bombora to find the qualitative intent data for themes like the pain point, the feature, or the offer that the prospect is interested in.

They do this by tracking the keywords being searched by accounts‘ members.

But I suggest a better way: stop paying for third-party data and embed qualitative intent in your ads themselves, which you are already paying for anyway.

For instance, if you have a product management SaaS, make different ad campaigns for different intents like product analytics, onboarding, session recording, all-in-one, etc.

Something like this:

Then, tag each campaign with intent in ZenABM, and ZenABM will tell you the qualitative intent of each company:

It will also group all companies with similar intent together for your convenience:

Plus, ZenABM will also push intent as company property to your CRM:

So, now your BDRs won’t just know the hot accounts, but also what to talk about with the accounts during the outreach.

Funnel-Leak Analysis

ZenABM clearly maps out the number of companies in each stage – from initial to final stages- and also how they move. This helps you find where the friction is.

For instance, if a lot of companies are moving from ‘aware’ to ‘interested’ but don’t move out of ‘interested’, you know where the friction is and can act accordingly.

Final verdict

Pick Demandbase when your plan relies on programmatic plus LinkedIn, and you want a native B2B DSP with audience orchestration, buying committees, and web personalization that ties journeys together for account-based marketing.

Pick 6sense when predictive buying stage and fit are the backbone of your GTM, and when sales intelligence, segments, and Trade Desk activation will help you scale outreach with timing that does not annoy buyers. If you are early in account-based maturity, begin with LinkedIn and add layers later. Platforms like 6sense use AI to predict which accounts are likely to convert. So, if predictive ABM is your forte, go for it.

If your reality is LinkedIn-heavy and you value clarity over complexity, a LinkedIn-first stack anchored by ZenABM can deliver clean LinkedIn-ad company engagement, CRM properties, ABM stages, and revenue dashboards now.

You can always graduate to a fuller suite later once the basics are humming. This path keeps predictive analytics and intent data in reach without unnecessary bloat.
So, give ZenABM a try for free now or book a demo to know more!

FAQs

Is there a free plan?

6sense offers a free sales intelligence space with limited credits.

Demandbase does not list a free ABM suite plan.

Can I run LinkedIn ads directly from the platform?

Both support LinkedIn audience workflows.

Demandbase provides audience destinations with daily sync and campaign reporting integration. 6sense lets you coordinate LinkedIn from segments while using The Trade Desk for the open internet.

How do they handle programmatic outside LinkedIn?

Demandbase uses a native B2B DSP.

6sense activates through The Trade Desk integration.

What drives the price up or down?

Modules, data credits, audience size, seats, and term length.

Media budgets for programmatic are separate. Services can add up if you need heavy onboarding and custom modeling.

What breaks the time to value?

Bad CRM hygiene, unclear ICP, no agreement on stage definitions, and trying to launch every channel at once.

Start focused, verify signal quality, then scale.