It’s a never-ending battle in the world of CRM softwares: Salesforce vs HubSpot. Both are talented at providing an awesome customer-journey customer experience, but which provides more value to businesses as a whole.
Even though there are numerous CRM solutions available, HubSpot and Salesforce are constantly regarded as the top CRM platforms. Both platforms provide huge sales teams with a reliable solution that can expand the business. However, when you consider the foundations upon which these systems were constructed and how that foundation affects their usability and acceptance, the contrasts begin to become apparent. Salesforce vs HubSpot CRM, which one to choose? You may choose the best CRM for expanding your business by using the information on this page to help you grasp the difference between the two.
HubSpot provides more capabilities for sales and marketing than Salesforce, particularly for small businesses, as its specialized Hubs provide more functions at a premium but fair cost. Salesforce outperforms HubSpot in terms of customer service since it provides more avenues for communication. Your best option given Salesforce’s wide range of pricing options is to request a quote so you can estimate the cost to your company.
In this blog post, we break down the platforms and figure out which is best for you! So let’s dive deep into Salesforce vs HubSpot CRM.
The HubSpot Platform
Let’s begin by examining what HubSpot is. In simpler terms, HubSpot is a Customer Relationship Management tool (CRM) that controls not just your contacts but also your sales, pipeline, digital marketing, and lead nurturing. It is referred to as a “business growth management platform.”
It is composed of many tools and “hubs” that can be purchased separately or all at once. There are even freemium solutions that you can download and use right out of the box, just to further muddle the waters here. These are all great options, but the one you choose will depend on your company’s needs.
Before we get into the Salesforce vs HubSpot CRM debate, let’s look at both CRMs and their advantages.
The HubSpot CRM
HubSpot CRM is a cloud-based platform that uses sales, service, marketing, and content management software to help to expand businesses develop more effectively. Your front office teams will have access to a single source of truth that will enable them to improve client connections and service. Because HubSpot was created internally using a single code base, your team will find it simpler to adopt and use it.
HubSpot’s core competency is its CRM platform, which helps you track leads and customers at various stages of their journey. Live chat, dynamic lists, forms for lead collection, email marketing, and other capabilities are all included in HubSpot’s CRM, which is truly free.
2014 saw HubSpot introduce its free CRM. The top inbound marketing software is now one of its best. More than 30,000 businesses across 90 nations have embraced it. It is significantly superior to other CRM software thanks to the features and advantages of HubSpot CRM. Growing small, medium-sized, and large firms are continually aided by it.
Having a single customer view that tracks their affiliation with the relevant company, colleagues, activities, correspondence, list membership and participation, website activity, and more is possible with proper migration and population. One of HubSpot’s strongest points is the platform’s ability to integrate this single customer view.
HubSpot relies heavily on forms to enable data collection from your website, social media network, or landing page into the CRMA. HubSpot account can help you collect and store a wide variety of information about your prospects and customers, such as their website usage patterns and contact information, as well as a history of interactions between you and them.
However, HubSpot doesn’t become truly intriguing until you incorporate one or more of the premium capabilities, or “hubs,” according to your requirements.
Important HubSpot Sales Rep Features
- A deals dashboard that you customize to see your full sales funnel
- Monitoring of emails, scheduling of meetings, live chat, and prospect tracking
- Email templates with Gmail and Outlook integration make it simple to email and engage with leads.
- Features like email notifications, business analytics, and pipeline management will help you keep track of all of your leads.
- Automated tracking and updating of sales and client deals
- An integrated activity stream with alerts sent as soon as a lead opens an email, clicks on a link or downloads a crucial document
- Keeping up to one million contact and business records
- The capability of the HubSpot CRM to record sales calls, send emails, plan activities, and assign tasks
- To make the process of reviving cold leads easier, automatic posting of emails, recorded calls, and sales notes to a contact’s specific timeline are used.
Benefits of HubSpot CRM
- Free of Charge
HubSpot CRM is free. Access to its free marketing, sales, customer support, and CRM tools is made available. The HubSpot free version’s main characteristics are listed below:
- The free trial for HubSpot never ends.
- Its unrestricted free version is available to the entire crew of the organization.
- Your deals may be tracked, analyzed, and stored using HubSpot’s free CRM.
- It can store a million contacts.
- An intuitive and user-friendly tool
The free CRM from HubSpot is rather straightforward, and you may use its functions in a basic way. Its user-friendly design makes it simple to set up and use. It’s simple to make contacts, close sales, log tasks, amend reports, and many other things.
- Integrates marketing, customer service, and sales
A potent tool for teamwork is the marketing CRM from HubSpot. All of the contact information is gathered in one location. Every team member can see this information. Consequently, it provides two options:
- Teams will find it simpler to communicate with customers and access their data, interactions, and activity.
- Customers, though, won’t have to speak with every member of the team. because you are viewed by them as a single entity.
- Integrates with your sales and marketing processes
This platform connects your sales and marketing processes no matter where they happen. Whether you communicate via phone chat, your website, social media accounts, or your email provider.
- Efficient and adaptable tool
Your business process may be easily streamlined, examined, and expanded with HubSpot CRM. It automates several processes that the sales, marketing, and customer service teams carry out. Users can close deals with less effort because of it. It makes it simple to increase your eCommerce store’s productivity.
HubSpot Pricing
There are numerous software suites available with various cost tiers on both the HubSpot and Salesforce pricing platforms. For instance, there are three price tiers for HubSpot Sales Hub, with monthly prices starting at $45 and going as high as $1,200.
The monthly cost of the HubSpot Marketing Hub is $45; premium plans are $800 and $3,200, respectively. The cheapest plan is typically quite light, and any major operation will inevitably need to upgrade to a more expensive premium plan sooner or later.
Salesforce
Salesforce offers cloud computing services and web-based applications primarily focusing on Customer Relationship Management (CRM). They specialize in providing Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) to users to assist in managing all business requirements.
Customer success platform Salesforce.com was created to assist users in marketing, selling, servicing, analyzing, and connecting with their customers.
Salesforce gives all the tools needed to manage a business remotely. Users may manage their interactions with consumers, work together and interact with partners and workers, and store their data securely in the cloud using common products and features.
Salesforce offers more than just basic goods and features. This platform enables easy extension beyond out-of-the-box capabilities and allows for customization and personalization of the experience for customers, partners, and workers.
It is a collection of CRM tools that cooperate to improve the productivity and profitability of today’s organizations. They influence a wide range of business operations.
CRM
Customer relationship management is known as CRM. It is a procedure or methodology used to find out more about the wants and habits of customers to forge stronger bonds with them.
With the use of this technology, users may maintain relationships with their clients and keep track of information about all of their interactions. Additionally, it enables teams to interact by email, phone, social media, and other channels as well as to collaborate both internally and outside.
Salesforce Features
- Contact and Account Management
Salesforce’s account and contact management feature offers comprehensive customer data. It comprises each customer’s activity history, correspondence with them, key contacts, etc. To put it simply, it includes all the details pertaining to client communication.
- Opportunity Management
We can use Salesforce to manage every sales deal and stay in touch with the people and data needed to close every contract. Every agreement’s stage is also included, along with the action we should do to win that particular contract.
- Salesforce Engage
We may increase the company’s ability to sell by sharing marketing content with sales using the Salesforce engage tool. To bridge the gap between sales and marketing functions as a bridge. It provides real-time sales alerts based on consumer engagement.
- Sales Collaboration
The Salesforce sales collaboration feature enables the sales team to work together using robust social tools. Finding sales gurus, sharing competitive data with the team, and other strategies can all help a business expand anyplace. The sales teams can collaborate on a variety of sales prospects and monitor success from any location.
- Sales Performance Management
The main classification of sales performance management is compensation management, which differs due to various software tools. As a result, the sales process is executed better every day. It assists the sales team with ongoing feedback and awards and offers metric-based goal setting for the teams.
- Lead supervision
The lead management software solution benefits the company by providing data on the effects of marketing initiatives on the sales pipelines. It is beneficial to spend our attention on the most important and popular deals first.
Salesforce CRM Benefits
- Automation tools
Any firm must have excellent customer relations in order to succeed. After all, a slow response might drive away both current and potential customers to rival businesses. For Salesforce businesses are no longer concerned about slow responses. It is a result of the automation techniques it employs to start live discussions with clients on its website.
- Tools for Data Analytics
Companies may maintain track of past interactions with clients and better understand their needs and expectations by using data analytics solutions. In the end, businesses can create marketing campaigns and strategies to increase interaction on their websites with the use of data analysis tools.
- Analyzing Customer Behavior
Salesforce CRM offers a function called Sales Cloud that enables a business to track customer records, contact information, backgrounds, and other information that can assist a business make useful adjustments to its strategies and plans for better performance.
- Syncing Data
The Salesforce Mobile App enables data syncing so that your company may combine data from many apps in one location. Salesforce CRM’s versatility makes it easier for your business to analyze all the crucial data it needs to be more effective.
- Customer Support
In order to communicate digitally with the company, businesses must offer their customers a means of doing so. Live Agent, a feature of Salesforce’s online chat service, is a fantastic chat box for achieving that objective.
- Omnichannel
Salesforce Service Control is an omnichannel capability that creates a cohesive strategy that offers customers a consistent experience and aids the business in generating leads.
Salesforce vs HubSpot CRM: Which is Better?
HubSpot and Salesforce are at the top of the list when it comes to CRMs, marketing automation, sales analytics, and other categories. Both have complete CRMs, marketing, and sales analytics, and cutting-edge capabilities that can help you sell more, create and track pipelines, and anticipate future sales—all while providing the greatest customer service.
HubSpot and Salesforce are often confused as complicated and expensive sales systems (Salesforce) and inexpensive marketing and sales tools (HubSpot). This is a fair assessment in some instances, but not always.
Both HubSpot and Salesforce offer toolkits for marketing, sales, customer service, and a whole lot more. Both are among the top CRM programmes available. HubSpot is a powerful yet economical alternative on our list of CRM systems for small and medium-sized organizations.
In terms of CRM software, Salesforce is a pioneer. It seeks to be the most important tool in the salesperson’s toolbox and really prioritizes sales and ROI in its pitch. For a detailed description of its features, see our evaluation of Salesforce.
HubSpot pioneered the field of inbound marketing and assists businesses in producing outstanding content that draws in prospective customers. It was formerly the sole piece of technology required by contemporary marketers. HubSpot review has a wealth of information on the current platform.
Let us further take this analysis within the following standard norms,
- Creating, Gathering, and Managing Leads
The Salesforce allows for extensive customization of lead handling and scoring. However, a small firm can quickly generate leads with HubSpot’s content marketing platform.
The main areas of concentration for HubSpot are inbound and content marketing. Additionally, it gives users the choice to publish blogs and whitepapers using HubSpot as their CMS. Customers must pay an additional fee in order to use HubSpot as a CMS.
- Dashboards &Reporting
Salesforce outperforms HubSpot when it comes to forecasting and powerful reporting of sales activity. Users of Salesforce and HubSpot can create dashboard reports that include opportunities based on geographic territory, the best leads for producing profitable deals, etc. To enhance the reporting functionality, Salesforce offers a variety of tools and alternatives. These capabilities make it simple to turn information into visually appealing dashboards.
The only pre-built reports for the various sales activities and pipelines are available in HubSpot’s basic CRM. The HubSpot premium reporting package, if you want to use it, still has a cap of 200 dashboards and offers substantially fewer customization choices than Salesforce.
- Managing Pipelines
Salesforce offers a variety of customization options to set the deal phases for pipeline management. Additionally, it gives you the freedom to add a lead at a later stage in the pipeline.
In contrast, HubSpot allows users to change and add to the sales pipeline stages that are either there or already defined. There is a limit of one pipeline per organization, and the predefined phases are Appointment, Qualified, Presentation Scheduled, Decision Maker, Contract Sent, and Closed Won/Lost. Each transaction stage in Salesforce is linked to a certain document, each deal is tied to a different set of items, and as the deal progresses, automatic actions are carried out.
With the sales cycle, some tasks can also be automated in HubSpot, although it is more difficult to do so with accounting and inventory.
- Support
All customers of Salesforce receive the same level of service. The package includes customer success communities and enables customers to submit online issues or complaints for products, guaranteeing a two-day response time. Its premium subscription offers guaranteed one-hour response times for any urgent issues, 24-7 phone help, and a dedicated support manager.
However, HubSpot CRM also offers customers equivalent basic helpdesk support. Customers that wish to do so may purchase premium support and technical assistance. For any basic product issue, the free users also get the right solution within 24 hours.
- Sales & Marketing
Sales, marketing, and service team functionalities are included in both HubSpot and Salesforce, and different aspects of each function can be combined depending on the needs of the business.
The sales, marketing, and customer care departments are all housed under one roof at HubSpot. Due to the similarity and functionality of the data, reporting, and other individual tools, it improves the consistency of the user experience.
In contrast, Salesforce offers more tools and solutions than HubSpot, but upkeep and use are challenging.
- Scalability
The CRM must expand in accordance with requirements; hence its functionality must be scalable.
One can sign up for HubSpot’s free plan, which includes the fundamental CRM functionalities, and then upgrade these features as their organization expands.
The programme can be scaled and customized indefinitely with Salesforce. It incorporates both the present and future needs of any firm.
- Integration
The fact that HubSpot offers fewer integration options than Salesforce is one of the most frequently voiced comparison issues between the two platforms.
HubSpot continues to develop on connectors, and there are currently 153 tool integrations available, including lead management, e-commerce integration, mobile apps, and data transfer tools. There are more than 500 connectors available in the HubSpot App Marketplace that are simple to set up with other apps like Jira, Slack, etc.
However, Salesforce offers a number of built-in features and app connections that can effectively work together to expand the functionality of the CRM tools. Additionally, it offers a few pre-built applications and components that any developer must incorporate into the system.
Final Thoughts
Salesforce and HubSpot are fierce competitors in the CRM and CRM world, but customers will be confident their products have every bell and whistle a company could need. For marketing, both have a fantastically robust analytics platform to track results and give heavy insight for designing campaigns. Both provide unmatched customer service, which is pivotal for modern business success. With the above features compared, HubSpot is clearly the best option for small- and medium-sized businesses because it offers the most powerful CRM features whilst being the easiest to use
One should use the Salesforce CRM solution if the business is big with plenty of customization and requirements for CRM functionalities in cost-effective ways.
Your goals ultimately determine which CRM is ideal for your company, much like any other business decision. Salesforce vs HubSpot CRM would help you get to a better choice. Salesforce is the best choice for you if you want to build an ecosystem for your entire company on a single platform with lots of customization options. While HubSpot CRM facilitates marketing and sales closed-loop reporting and makes sales reps more efficient.
In case you’re still unsure, feel free to consult our experts at Webuters. By meeting clients’ needs and budgets, we provide time-tested solutions that help businesses succeed.