Hubspot Review

Why We Chose HubSpot CRM as Best CRM for Integrations

HubSpot works especially well with other platforms, going as far as offering multiple integrations with its direct CRM competitors, including Zendesk, Pipedrive, Salesforce, Freshsales, NetSuite and Zoho CRM. While many of these competitive software applications are designed to work with HubSpot’s CMS, it’s still a strong signal of the company’s commitment to providing its customers with the right tools for the job. 

Among the platform’s thousands of applications are popular essentials like Gmail, Google Calendar, WordPress, Outlook, Zapier, Slack, Shopify, Zoom, Google Sheets and Facebook.

Choose from dozens of popular applications and more than 1,800 integrations. Source: HubSpot

Marketers can find an assortment of tools for A/B testing, email marketing, advertising and event management, as well as less common apps for content creation like Canva and Wistia. Salespeople can benefit from tools for predictive dialing, quote management and e-signing. 

Customer service agents can choose between multiple solutions for ticketing, customer feedback management and webinars. Most of the popular and essential business integrations are free to use, but some do require one-time, monthly, annual or pay-as-you-go fees.

What’s more, HubSpot offers a database of trusted partner service providers that can support your complex implementation needs, assist with data migration and deploy custom integrations. These paid services can be particularly helpful for larger companies that require a custom CRM setup. 

Usability

HubSpot CRM has a more user-friendly product interface and experience compared to some of the enterprise-focused CRM suites, like the ones in our Salesforce review and Oracle NetSuite review. As a result, HubSpot is easier to get up and running and start using for basic customer engagement, even for employees who have never used a CRM system before. More than anything, HubSpot’s vast app marketplace, with thousands of integration options, ensures you can merge your CRM with all of the other software applications you rely on to run your business. That includes your previous CRM solution, making the transition much easier for new users. 

In addition, HubSpot’s quick setup guide will help you configure your system to meet your goals, whether that means engaging in outbound marketing activities, managing your sales funnels or building a high-functioning sales platform to ensure you hit the ground running. HubSpot also offers handy visual in-app tours that can help you get familiar with its sections, features and more advanced functionalities to minimize the learning curve. 

HubSpot’s AI can analyze your sales activity and offer recommendations to improve your account setup. Source: HubSpot

When it comes to building fully automated custom workflows and sales sequences that are the heart of a modern CRM platform, HubSpot is fantastic. It allows you to choose one of the existing templates or craft your automations from scratch using the sequences tool. It’s built from populated lists, including automated emails, manual emails, calls and general tasks. While the available templates are limited by your plan, they can get you started in the right direction, helping you tailor each CRM feature to fit your specific goals. 

We also liked how simple it is to build and manage automated workflows for website chats from within the CRM, supporting your customer service and sales teams in their customer engagement and lead generation efforts. We found the navigation to be straightforward and particularly appreciated the option to bookmark your most visited sections for easy access.  

However, what sets HubSpot apart from other CRM solutions is its powerful Breeze AI functionality, which is implemented across the entire suite of products. It greatly accelerates your team’s lead generation, customer engagement and marketing efforts by generating interaction summaries, creating tailored email responses, analyzing customer conversations and populating and fetching customer information. 

By using simple prompts, HubSpot’s AI can also instantly generate reports, visualize data and even build and execute entire workflows, reducing admin work and boosting your team’s productivity. However, some of the top AI features are only available on higher-tier plans.

HubSpot CRM Features

App Marketplace

One of the biggest reasons we think HubSpot is easy to use for new and small businesses alike is the seamless integration with so many popular business tools. Rather than forcing you to adopt a service provider’s technology as a single solution, HubSpot essentially allows you to add your CRM to your existing tech stack. As a result, team members from different departments, who often rely on a unique mix of business applications, won’t see a significant disruption to their routine while moving to a new CRM. 

HubSpot organizes its apps in dozens of categories, serving a wide variety of options for marketing, sales, event management, customer service, productivity and finance. While the platform provides native tools for marketing automation, you’ll also find nearly 20 third-party applications to automate marketing tasks. The same is true for tools for sales analytics and reporting, email marketing and contact management. Rather than trying to substitute your current apps and forcibly become the all-in-one solution, HubSpot aims to support the way you choose to do business. 

Contact Management

While some platforms like Pipedrive are built around sales pipelines, HubSpot is built around contacts. Contacts can be added easily in a variety of ways, including form submission, corporate email addresses, synced apps like Mailchimp or Shopify, chats or pulling them directly from your inbox. HubSpot’s advanced Breeze AI functionality can also scout the web and populate contact details, providing even more context for your next sales meeting or customer outreach. However, this add-on feature comes at an additional cost. 

The contact card offers a comprehensive overview of their personal details and the associated sales activity, so you can see each contact’s communication history, understand their past interactions on your website, and reach out by email or phone to schedule a meeting directly from the contact’s listing. We liked that HubSpot allows you to preview each contact so you can focus on top-level information, rather than getting bogged down in details. While many of the competitors offer similar functionality, HubSpot’s Copilot AI elevates the experience. Copilot AI automatically generates a contact summary with key outputs and allows you to ask any clarifying questions, add a task or draft a fully fledged follow-up email. It does all that and more with a simple, natural-language prompt. You can even ask Copilot to help you prepare for a meeting, and it will analyze contact activity and offer suggestions.

HubSpot allows you to create contacts from your website chat conversations and automatically check for duplicates in your contact list. Source: HubSpot 

Deal Pipeline

Not to be outdone by its sales-focused competition like Pipedrive and Freshsales, HubSpot’s deal pipeline provides everything you need to easily add new deals, assign them to the appropriate people and keep track of the prospects with the highest sales potential. HubSpot’s AI also provides a quick summary for each deal, so you can get an overview of key developments at a glance and evaluate the proposed next steps. It also allows you to create and populate a deal right after you add a new contact or company, reducing the manual data entry.

The drag-and-drop editor makes for easy customization, with plenty of opportunities for automations to trigger administrative tasks, notifications and project assignments. HubSpot also offers predictive lead scoring that can automatically prioritize leads based on thousands of data points that will provide more accurate assessments over time through machine learning. Businesses can also identify the best opportunities with simple sales forecasting to determine the value of a potential deal so you can allocate your resources effectively.

HubSpot allows you to review your available deals at a glance and focus on individual deal stages. Source: HubSpot  

Reporting and Analytics

Many small business owners and employees without “IT” or “SEO” in their job titles have a difficult time setting up reporting tools like Google Analytics with the proper tags to provide accurate and actionable data. In contrast, HubSpot’s analytics and reporting tools — especially when configured with HubSpot’s CMS — make it clear where your new qualified leads are coming from and which ones are most likely to convert. This can help you decide whether to invest more money in top-of-funnel marketing activities like paid search and SEO instead of email marketing. HubSpot’s Copilot AI also makes it easy to generate entire reports and review deal progress with simple prompts, further reducing the manual work. 

As with most of HubSpot’s dashboards, you can begin from a standard template or build your reporting tools from scratch and start sharing them on Slack or email from within the app. On higher-tier plans, users can also access the Sales Workspace that brings together custom, top-level dashboards, and provides an overview of lead and deal details. Sales Workspace also highlights the latest team activities and offers AI-powered recommendations to boost productivity and maximize return on investment (ROI). 

HubSpot users can create custom dashboards with a simple drag and drop. Source: HubSpot

HubSpot Pricing

HubSpot offers plans for individuals, small teams, businesses and enterprises. Adding additional paid users will cost $45 per month on the Professional plan and $75 per month on the Enterprise plan, on top of the monthly subscription costs listed below. 

However, regardless of your chosen tier, all employees with a HubSpot account will have access to the free features in your platform. HubSpot is also one of the few CRMs we’ve reviewed with a totally free version that includes basic CRM functionality. 

HubSpot’s Customer Platform bundles together features from its marketing, sales, customer service, content, operations and commerce hubs. It offers the best value for businesses that want to integrate HubSpot across their functions. You can also create a custom bundle of products or purchase stand-alone software. 

Additional add-on expenses may include a dedicated IP address, custom SSL service, marketing SMS, transactional email, AI business intelligence credits and additional business units. Other features, like ads, reporting, API, workflows, lists, teams, e-signatures and domains, are limited with each plan but can be extended with a monthly fee. 

Setup

Most CRM platforms take anywhere from a couple of weeks to a month to set up and begin using properly, and the same is true for most businesses using HubSpot. However, the app offers a detailed in-app guiding tour and helpful mini-tours for individual views and features. This approach helps you get up and running with the basics within a few days. For smaller businesses, HubSpot also provides a five-day implementation calendar that is built around the seven steps: email integration, creating filters, importing contacts, defining your deal stages, creating a lead ad, integrating your website and inviting your team.  

Larger businesses with thousands of contacts and deal stages can expect to take closer to a month to implement their new system. Advanced and premier onboarding services with multiple online meetings per week are available for $10,000 and $15,000. HubSpot also offers guided onboarding through its Academy resources. 

Customer Service

HubSpot’s customer service options vary quite a bit depending on the plan you select. The free plan does not include any one-on-one technical support; free users will need to make use of the community forums and knowledge base for any troubleshooting. The entry-level paid plan offers email and in-app chat support. To add phone support, you’ll have to upgrade to the Professional or Enterprise plans. 

HubSpot does have a robust, academy-style catalog with dozens of courses and certifications to sharpen your business acumen and teach you how to utilize your CRM to its fullest potential. HubSpot also offers a comprehensive online three-day marketing hub fundamentals course, free sales certifications and in-person private training.

Drawbacks

Most CRM service providers bill by the number of user accounts, but HubSpot uses a single rate regardless of the number of seats required. For many large businesses, this makes HubSpot a more affordable platform. However, there is a big pricing gap between the Starter and the Professional plans, making it more difficult for some smaller businesses to access advanced features and tools. 

Part of the reason HubSpot doesn’t charge based on the number of user accounts is that it does charge based on the number of marketing contacts. The Professional plan includes only 2,000 marketing contacts, with a fee of $250 per month to add an additional 5,000 contacts. For businesses that grow large marketing lists or cast very wide marketing nets, reaching your desired number of contacts can become expensive very quickly. Businesses should also keep a close eye on the current number of their contacts, as they can be automatically upgraded to the next contact tier if the set limit is exceeded. 

We also noticed that single sign-on (SSO) — one of the basic security features offered by many competitors — is only available on the top-tier plan. Larger organizations and businesses that prioritize security should take this into account when choosing their CRM plan.  

Methodology

Our editorial team and contributing writers considered all of the major CRM software providers for review. After performing our initial research into each platform, we selected 13 of the leading CRM solutions available today for small businesses, including Salesforce, monday.com Sales CRM, Freshsales, Zoho, Oracle NetSuite, HubSpot, Pipedrive and Zendesk. After spending many hours participating in live product demos and testing each platform, we identified the best use case for each of the 13 providers to help small business owners and managers choose the best CRM software for their needs. 

We’ve also taken a deeper dive with nine of our top performers, providing greater insight into the features and tools that separate these CRMs from the rest of the competition. HubSpot stands out in a competitive CRM field for its tremendous list of software integrations that help make the platform such a natural fit for numerous use cases and business units, earning it our choice as the best CRM for integrations. 

Overall Value

We recommend HubSpot CRM Suite for …

• Large businesses that can benefit from a pricing structure that’s not based on user seats.
• Any business looking for a single CRM to satisfy the needs of multiple customer-facing departments.
• New businesses that want to launch a website fully integrated with their marketing, sales and customer support tools.

We don’t recommend HubSpot CRM Suite for …

• Small businesses that are operating on a tight budget and are looking for advanced reporting and automation features.
• Any business that doesn’t want to worry about purchasing add-ons to extend the number of times they can use a CRM feature.
• Businesses that prioritize marketing outreach and don’t want to pay extra for additional contacts.

Jeff Hale contributed to this article.