Hubspot Review (2024): Is It Still the Best CRM Tool for Your Business?

31.07.2024 23:15

eWeek

HubSpot CRM Quick Facts

Our Rating: 4.1/5
Pricing: Free to $150 per user, per month

Key Features:

Free sales and marketing tools
Contact management
Multichannel inbound marketing
Prospecting workspace
Conversation intelligence

HubSpot CRM (Sales Hub) is a cloud-based CRM solution known for its feature-rich free version and a balance of sales and marketing features. The free plan offers contact management tools, a deal pipeline, contact website activity, and conversational bots. Upgrading to HubSpot’s paid tiers allows you to access advanced tools such as workflow automation, custom reporting, forecasting, lead scoring, and more. While HubSpot’s higher tiers can be expensive for solopreneurs and small businesses, a wealth of free tools are available for free plan users, including HubSpot’s latest artificial intelligence capabilities. The company recently introduced an AI-powered content assistant and ChatSpot.ai to help sales reps create more personalized content and more robust workflows.

HubSpot CRM Review: What You Need to Know

Who It’s Best For: Small to midsize businesses looking for affordable and scalable software to manage their inbound marketing and sales processes.

Pros:	Cons:
Free plan for up to 2,500 users Extensive knowledgebase Robust sales and marketing feature set	Premium tiers can be expensive Sales sequences feature can be better Lacks in-depth reporting and analytics

Continue reading to learn more about HubSpot CRM’s pricing, core features, ease of use, and customer support, or skip ahead to see how we scored it across six main categories.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Who Should Use HubSpot CRM?

HubSpot CRM is an industry-leading platform with an impressive user base of over 216,000 companies. HubSpot’s diverse customer group includes businesses of all sizes, from startups venturing into the market to growing businesses to established enterprises seeking to streamline their CRM processes. Primary use cases for HubSpot CRM include the following:

Solopreneurs and CRM Newbies: HubSpot CRM’s robust free-forever plan provides core CRM features and a wealth of templates at no cost, making it ideal for solopreneurs. The platform also offers a user-friendly experience with its drag-and-drop functionality, making it simple to learn and manage without prior CRM experience or in-house technical support.
Startups and SMBs Seeking Affordability: HubSpot CRM is one of the best platforms for startups and SMBs with linear sales processes and fewer needs. Its powerful core features and integration with essential tools offered in its affordable plans make it an ideal option for businesses with limited budgets.
Growing Businesses Wanting a Scalable Platform: Upgrading to Sales Hub’s paid plans is simple, and free trials are also available for its Professional and Enterprise plans. It also offers flexible integrations and supports complex workflows essential to scaling business operations.
Teams Requiring All-in-One Sales and Marketing Solutions: HubSpot is a great sales and marketing tool designed for inbound lead generation and outbound sales prospecting management. Teams can take advantage of HubSpot’s unified platform flush with sales tools and marketing automation features.

Who Shouldn’t Use HubSpot CRM?

HubSpot CRM is a popular choice for many businesses, but it’s not a one-size-fits-all solution. In certain use cases, you might want to explore alternative CRM options:

Companies with Advanced Needs and Limited Resources: While HubSpot CRM offers a free plan with basic CRM features, accessing advanced features often comes at a higher cost. If your business requires sophisticated tools for workflows, analytics, or customization but has a limited budget, alternative CRMs might offer better value.
Teams with Strictly Sales-Focused Operations: HubSpot excels at managing the entire customer lifecycle, offering a hybrid of sales and marketing tools. However, some businesses might prioritize a more sales-centric approach. If your primary focus is pipeline management, lead generation, and opportunity tracking, a sales-forward CRM might offer the features and integration tailored to your team’s needs.
Businesses Relying Heavily on Data-Driven Decisions: HubSpot provides valuable reporting tools, but some businesses require more robust data analytics for decision-making. If your company needs more than just basic reporting features, a CRM with in-depth analytics and data visualization capabilities might be a better fit.
Large Enterprises Requiring Complex Workflows and Customization: HubSpot offers customization options, but intricate business processes might require a CRM with more flexibility. If your business has highly specialized needs or has longer sales processes with complex workflows, consider a highly customizable CRM platform.

If you think HubSpot CRM is not the right fit for your business, jump down to see our list of the best HubSpot CRM alternatives.

HubSpot CRM’s Pricing

HubSpot CRM is popular for its free-for-life version, which offers a balance of sales and marketing tools for up to 2,500 users. The free plan includes contact management features, basic list segmentation, conversational bots, email tracking, and more. As you scale your business, you can upgrade to its Starter plan ($15 per user, per month) for simple automation, conversation routing, and task queues. Midsize businesses can purchase the Professional Tier ($90 per user, per month) for the prospecting workspace, sales sequences, and forecasting.

Larger companies can benefit from all features included in the Professional plan, plus tools like conversation intelligence, predictive lead-scoring, and recurring revenue tracking available in the Enterprise plan ($150 per user, per month). HubSpot Sales Hub’s Professional and Enterprise plans come with a 14-day free trial.

	Free	Starter	Professional	Enterprise
Annual Plan Monthly Rate	Up to 2,500 users	$15 per user, per month	$90 per user, per month	$150 per user, per month
Monthly Plan Monthly Rate	✖	$20 per user, per month	$100 per user, per month	✖
Free Trial	✖	✖	14 days	14 days
Key Features	Contact management, basic email marketing, conversational bots	Conversation routing, repairing tasks and queues, multiple currencies	Prospecting workspace, sales sequences, forecasting	Conversation intelligence, lead form routing, predictive lead scoring
Multiple Sales Pipelines	1 deal pipeline	2 deal pipelines	Up to 15 deal pipelines	Up to 100 deal pipelines
Custom Reporting	✖	✖	Up to 100	Up to 500
AI Tools	✔	✔	✔	✔

HubSpot CRM users can extend the platform’s capabilities by purchasing add-ons ranging from $200 to $1,700 per month. The table below provides a breakdown of popular HubSpot CRM add-ons.

Add-on	Limit	Cost	Plan Offered
Reporting Limit Increase	Up to 300 dashboards and 3,000 additional custom reports	$200 per month	Professional or Enterprise
API Limit Increase	Up to 1,000,000 calls per day	$500	All plans
Workflows Limit Increase	100 workflows	$200	Professional or Enterprise
Company, Deal, Ticket, Marketing Event, and Invoice Record Limit Increase	1,000,000 invoice record volume and up to 50,000,000 standard object records per account	$1,100	Enterprise
CRM Contact Record Limit Increase	1,000,000 contact record volume	$1,700	Enterprise

7 Key Features of HubSpot CRM

HubSpot CRM offers a robust suite of tools designed to streamline sales and marketing processes. With an emphasis on user experience, this platform helps businesses to build and manage stronger customer relationships.

Contact Management

HubSpot CRM provides a centralized hub to create contact records, log sales activities, and view customer interactions. Every HubSpot plan comes with contact management tools, website activity tracking, and integration with Gmail or Outlook to automatically populate your contact records. Users can create up to one million contacts and enrich records using company details from a comprehensive database of over 20 million businesses. Teams can also access deep insights and get context on each contact, including past interactions with your company and conversation histories. Businesses needing advanced contact management features and increased shared inbox limits should upgrade to higher Sales Hub plans.

HubSpot syncs with Gmail or Outlook accounts to automatically log emails within your contact database.

Pipeline Management

HubSpot CRM boasts a user-friendly sales pipeline that allows teams to track and manage deals across the entire customer lifecycle. Free plan subscribers can use a single pipeline, while paid plan users can access up to 100 deal pipelines. Reps can organize and monitor the sales cycle using a visually intuitive dashboard, allowing them to view key sales activities and identify potential bottlenecks. Managers can also gain full visibility into their rep’s individual performance and identify roadblocks that might impact potential revenue through the sales pipeline feature.

HubSpot CRM’s sales dashboard enables users to get total visibility into individual and team performance.

Lead Management

HubSpot CRM is one of the best lead management solutions, with tools for organizing, prioritizing, and engaging leads in one place. The platform’s new prospecting workspace offers a space for reps to manage leads with ease as they progress through deal stages, so they can focus more time on customer interactions. Once a rep reaches out to leads, their status will change, and a deal creation window will open automatically once they’re qualified. While the free plan allows you to access basic list segmentation to easily target your leads, you need to upgrade to higher plans for automatic lead routing (Professional) and predictive lead scoring (Enterprise).

HubSpot enables reps to follow up on leads that require attention, get reminders to send a reply or plan their next step, and update past meeting outcomes.

Sales Sequences

HubSpot CRM’s sales sequences tool allows reps to send a series of targeted, timed email templates to nurture leads over time. This feature also allows you to automatically create tasks, such as reminding reps to follow up on a contact. Reps can automatically remove contacts from the sequence as soon as they respond to an email or confirm a meeting to avoid duplicate tasks. You can also customize your sales sequences and create a delay between steps so you can execute tasks and send emails at the right time.

Reps can use the time picker feature to select the default time when you’ll receive the task reminders.

Multichannel Inbound Marketing

HubSpot provides a comprehensive platform for inbound marketing, allowing teams to attract and engage leads through various channels, including blogs, social media, phone, email, and live chat. HubSpot offers a variety of free templates for content creation, including blog post templates, brand kit generators, and an AI-powered campaign assistant for creating websites and landing pages. Teams can launch marketing campaigns with email templates and features like email scheduling and tracking offered in every HubSpot plan.

Reps can also talk one-on-one with web visitors via live chat or use first-party phone numbers to receive inbound calls or make outbound calls. Additionally, purchasing premium-tier CRM Suite bundles and Marketing Hub plans will also enable you to manage social media accounts on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Pinterest from one central location.

HubSpot’s live chat tool automatically connects chatters to the right people on your team, routes customer inquiries to the services team, and passes leads to the sales team.

Prospecting Workspace

HubSpot’s prospecting workspace empowers sales teams to reach out and manage prospects. Reps can have a singular view of the workspace, allowing you to access your schedule, daily goal tracker, leads, email replies, and outstanding tasks. Teams can access a holistic overview of all prospecting activities, including upcoming and overdue tasks, scheduled meetings, and sequence tasks. You can also focus on one type of task without getting distracted using task queues and measure how far you are along with your goals for the day.

The prospecting workspace allows reps to access task details and a preview of the associated contact record in one place.

AI Capabilities

HubSpot recently launched a public beta version of its AI tools for sales, marketing, customer service, and content management. ChatSpot AI, HubSpot’s conversational AI assistant, helps reps with tasks like prospecting companies, generating content, and analyzing your website’s SEO. This AI chatbot is powered by OpenAI’s database, ChatGPT, and Dall-E, is free to use, and doesn’t require a HubSpot account. ChatSpot AI allows you to create email subject lines, blog post titles, and LinkedIn articles or generate images for your website. You can also use this AI tool for retrieving data about company information, SEO rankings, competitors, news, and more.

HubSpot helps reps create attention-grabbing subject lines and engaging copies to nurture leads and retain customers.

CRM Ease of Use

HubSpot CRM is renowned for its user-friendly platform, allowing users with no prior CRM knowledge to easily understand the platform’s design and features. Users can tailor the CRM to meet their unique demands thanks to its drag-and-drop interface and customizable templates. Sales teams without in-house technical support can access HubSpot’s large knowledge base, vibrant user community, and wealth of online resources if they require extra assistance understanding CRM implementation. With a large selection of free and reasonably priced courses, HubSpot Academy offers consumers a distinct advantage over other CRMs on the market that charge for programs or costly training.

The HubSpot Knowledge Base is a self-service resource that assists users in resolving issues with contact management, automation, account setup, and other topics.

Customer Service

HubSpot CRM provides round-the-clock user assistance for paid-level subscribers. While Professional and Enterprise accounts include additional phone help, Sales Hub Starter users can only get email and in-app assistance. Users with free plans and view-only access are not able to use these support channels, but they can still interact with other users in the HubSpot Community. Subscribers can also get remote onboarding for $1,500 (Professional plan) to $3,500 (Enterprise plan).

Users of both the free and premium plans can access the HubSpot Academy, Knowledge Base, user community, and other resources by visiting the Help Center.

HubSpot CRM Alternatives

While HubSpot is a leading CRM, you should explore other options that might better suit your specific needs.

Freshsales

Freshsales is cloud-based CRM software known for its AI-powered sales tools, user-friendly interface, and affordable plans ranging between $9 and $59 per user per month. Developed by a leading AI company, Freshsales is particularly well-suited for SMBs looking for a platform with a low learning curve, a free plan, and competitive pricing. Meanwhile, scaling businesses and large enterprises will benefit from Freddy AI’s intelligent workflows, integrated contact management tools, and actionable analytics that enable teams to handle sales procedures with ease. However, Freshsales lacks built-in marketing tools, in which case you might consider Zoho CRM.

Reps can rank sales leads using explicit and implicit lead data with Freshsales’ integrated AI lead scoring.

Zoho CRM

Zoho CRM is one of the best AI CRM solutions, offering powerful multichannel marketing features, AI-powered sales tools, and robust customization options. It also offers a free-for-life plan like HubSpot and Freshsales, as well as affordable pricing tiers ranging between $14 and $52 per user, per month. Zoho CRM is especially appropriate for startups and SMBs that require a low-cost CRM, but it’s meant to be versatile for companies of all sizes. Healthcare, finance, manufacturing, and retail are just a few of the businesses that can customize the platform to meet their specific needs. However, Zoho CRM has a steep learning curve, and customizations can be overwhelming for new users. If you’re looking for an easier-to-use CRM with marketing functions, consider Pipedrive.

Zoho CRM users can receive and filter notifications from within the CRM for posts made by leads, prospects, and customers on various social media platforms.

Pipedrive

Pipedrive is a sales-focused CRM that stands out for its user-friendly sales pipelines. Reps can easily visualize deal progress and prioritize tasks with multiple pipelines, tracking tools, and its drag-and-drop interface. Every Pipedrive plan (starting at $14 per user, per month) offers unlimited contact records and basic contact management features, allowing reps to easily communicate with leads and customers. Pipedrive also offers add-ons for organizations that require additional tools like lead management, document management, projects, and drip marketing. However, they might be costly for smaller teams and businesses. Try Freshsales if you’re seeking an easy-to-use CRM with tools integrated for these features.

Pipedrive’s intuitive interface, drop-down menu, and visual Kanban boards make it easier for users to create and manage multiple pipelines.

How I Evaluated HubSpot CRM

In assessing HubSpot CRM, I identified six key categories important for businesses needing a robust sales and marketing platform. I also divided each category into weighted subcategories and assigned an overall score out of five to see how HubSpot CRM performs in the six main categories.

Evaluation Criteria

I placed most emphasis on core features, cost, and ease of use to help users find a cost-effective and user-friendly solution. I then looked into HubSpot CRM’s advanced features, customization and integration, and customer support.

Core Features (25 Percent): A robust CRM should offer fundamental functionalities to manage customer relationships across the entire sales cycle. This category considers HubSpot core CRM tools including contact management, sales pipelines, lead management, and email marketing.
Cost (25 Percent): A CRM’s pricing structure should align with the company’s budget and scaling plans. Here, I looked into HubSpot Sales Hub’s per-user pricing plans, free version, free trial length, and add-ons.
Ease of Use (20 Percent): A user-friendly interface and intuitive navigation are essential for learning and implementing the CRM. For this category, I evaluated HubSpot CRM’s admin dashboard interface, ease of data migration, training and certifications, and knowledge base. I also browsed through real user reviews and ratings across certified online sites.
Advanced Features (10 Percent): As your business grows, your CRM needs to offer sophisticated tools to help expand your operations. I evaluated HubSpot CRM’s advanced features, such as AI capabilities, lead scoring and routing, forecasting, deal analytics, and more.
Customization and Integrations (10 Percent): Every business has a unique process, and a CRM should be flexible to fit specific needs. This category looks into how malleable HubSpot CRM’s features are, including pipelines, deal stages, reports, and filters. I also assessed its third-party integrations for both free and paid apps.
Customer Support (10 Percent): This category considers HubSpot CRM’s support solutions via email, phone, and live chat. I also looked into real user ratings from reputable sites, the user community, and the onboarding process.

Bottom Line: HubSpot CRM Review

HubSpot CRM is a compelling choice for businesses looking for a free platform, minimal learning curve, and user support. Both sales and marketing teams can take advantage of HubSpot’s robust features for tracking deals, nurturing leads, and managing tasks. However, companies needing more robust customization and advanced features might consider alternative CRMs. Beyond trying the platform yourself through a free plan or trial, consider expert and peer advice to get a better picture of whether HubSpot CRM is the right choice for your business.

If you’d like to know more about other CRMs that offer AI tools, see our list of the top AI CRM software for 2024.

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