HubSpot vs Other Vendors

What to Look for When Choosing a New CRM

If you’re in the market for a new CRM, marketing automation platform, CMS, or some combination of the three then you know how overwhelming the search can be. With so many directory website listing different platforms in different orders, deciding on the platform that will bring you the most value can seem like a monumental task.

To help you along in this task, there are a few important things you can look for to make your decision a little easier.

Intro to HubSpot

The reason why so many small and medium-sized businesses gravitate towards HubSpot is its exceptional ability to consolidate so many different functions under one system.

A comprehensive all-in-one solution, it provides tools for everything, from lead tracking and deal management to personalized email campaigns, SEO research, and CMS, not to mention a built-in knowledge base for customer service. Moreover, it’s a platform exclusively designed for extraordinary customer experiences. Your sales and marketing teams can finally leverage a single source of truth to craft targeted, personalized experiences for your customers — both existing and potential — and skyrocket your revenue.

Investing in HubSpot entails much more than merely aligning your teams on shared processes and data sources. It demands a quick adaptation to a new suite of applications, comprehensive training of your team members, and a fundamental transformation of how you define and maintain KPIs and other analytics.

Therefore, to make an informed decision, you will need to see how HubSpot stacks up against other similar tools in the marketplace. Here's a brief guide highlighting the relative strengths and weaknesses of HubSpot when compared to other CRMs and similar tools.

HubSpot and Salesforce are regarded as two of the strongest marketing CRMs in the market. If you're considering investing in HubSpot to elevate your marketing efforts, chances are that you're thinking of Salesforce as a point of comparison.

At a glance, Salesforce is quite similar to HubSpot: both CRM platforms offer tools for sales, marketing, customer service, and additional functionalities, all of which serve to facilitate customer engagement and interactivity.

1. Reporting

Salesforce provides several sophisticated tools in the area of sales reporting and forecasting. Many of them are already built into the platform and can be more cost-effective than HubSpot on a per-user basis. However, keep in mind that HubSpot’s dashboards are far more modern and customizable, as its custom report creation feature lets you create reports on the fly and builds them out in real time.

2. Onboarding

In terms of onboarding, Salesforce prefers a hands-off experience, with pop-ups offering to walk you through the process and quick walkthrough as you explore features. They also have a handy help dropdown in the top nav, giving you resources specific to the page you're currently working on.

HubSpot’s onboarding process is far more hands-on, detailed, dynamic, and intuitive, as they provide you with a series of milestones guides as well as a task schedule on what you need to complete to get started. Since the dashboard's layout is also really easy to navigate, you can start using it right out of the box without a huge learning curve.

3. Usability

Salesforce is also a little more challenging to learn because of how it structures the dashboard and its modules:

Rather than just going to a Sales, Marketing, or Contact hub in the nav to find a relevant action, you've got to search for individual tools by name.
You'll need to learn what apps you need to carry out which actions if they don't fall neatly into some of their featured sections.
New users may encounter a considerable amount of friction as certain applications may not be accessible under their subscribed plan.

	HubSpot	Salesforce
List Price*	Professional Plan: $6,000/mo for 50 paid sales seats. Unlimited free users.	Enterprise Plan: $7,500/mo for 50 users
Platform Maintenance	An integrated platform created from a single codebase.	Requires setup and maintenance of connectors for multi-cloud integrations.
Control & Flexibility	Take control of your CRM with ease - no need to hire a dedicated admin. Plus, you can leverage custom objects to architect your CRM in a flexible, intuitive way, even while importing crucial 3rd party data into your CRM.	You will need experienced and well-trained administrators. Salesforce customers usually require consulting agencies, full-time admins, or trained employees to become Salesforce administrators.
Ecosystem	HubSpot's approach to third-party integrations in its App Marketplace mirrors its approach to its own software, emphasizing power, ease-of-use, and quality. The installation and configuration of integrations through the marketplace are made easy, with access to over 500 apps and integrations, including many native integrations developed by HubSpot.	Salesforce's AppExchange offers a vast selection of over 3,400 apps and integrations to expand and customize your CRM quickly.
Scaling & Customization	With HubSpot's flexible data structure, via custom objects specifically, creating implementations is effortless. You can adapt quickly to changing circumstances and remain agile while scaling your business.	Though Salesforce offers extensive customization, complete with nuanced forecasting and reporting dashboards, they will demand additional admin and developer resources, hindering businesses' ability to adapt over time.

*Note: for pricing comparisons, we have selected comparable plans based on available features. Both softwares offer additional plans which have separate pricing.

monday.com is a Work OS that synchronizes people and processes to help teams meet their objectives. It facilitates work processes by consolidating tools, files, and interactions in one place. Through monday.com, users can easily connect with co-workers, clients, and technology to execute their functions faster and more efficiently.

1. Platform

monday.com's CRM capabilities are well-developed, where users can monitor customer data, conversations, and sales opportunities. It has the capability to integrate with other software solutions, so you’ll be able to leverage the tool for a wide range of purposes. According to most users, Monday Sales CRM is visually stunning and a satisfying great tool that assists in the smooth management of internal projects — eliminating the need for any spreadsheets and manual tracking.

Meanwhile, HubSpot is a robust CRM that provides a suite of software products designed to assist companies in enhancing their marketing, sales, and customer service operations. The platform delivers a comprehensive perspective of their customers and facilitates positive interactions across all touchpoints. It’s a more complete solution, with an established user base, offering a myriad of features such as website creation, email marketing, SEO, social media management, and others.

2. Integrations

Though monday.com’s open API enables you to create integrations, HubSpot’s marketplace has hundreds of apps and integrations that you can choose to connect to your HubSpot account — enabling seamless integration with tools that you may already be using, such as Z apier, Salesforce, and Shopify. The apps are organized by different criteria, such as time of release, payment structures, and more, so you can access them with ease.

3. Pricing

monday.com offers a more simplified pricing structure than HubSpot, complete with a free plan that allows users to experiment with its numerous features before committing to a paid plan. However, HubSpot’s extensive plan has exciting functionality that offers far greater value for money. In addition to free tools that help you acclimate to the infrastructure, there is bundled pricing starting at $50 for the starter plan, $1,780 for the professional plan, and $5000 for the enterprise plan.

	HubSpot	Monday Sales CRM
Free Plan	robust features like contact, company, and deal management, task automation, lead capture forms, email tracking, and basic reporting.	2 users + standard features like unlimited boards and documents, two project views, and 500MB storage.
Customer Service	HubSpot delivers support in accordance with your product plan – though it’s key to note that community, email, and chat support are available to all starter, professional, and enterprise subscribers. Phone support can be leveraged by both professional and enterprise users.	Customer service through email and phone support, though there is no chat support. You can fill out a contact form to request support.
Integrations	Robust API for custom integrations. This includes 500 native and third-party integrations, including Salesforce, Shopify, and Slack.	40 integrations, though it does cover popular tools like Dropbox, Slack, Stripe, and Mailchimp.

As a cloud-based CRM solution, Zoho has emerged recently as a strong alternative to HubSpot, tailored to the needs of small and midsize businesses. Its interface encompasses many similar tools to those offered by HubSpot, including sales and marketing automation, customer support and help desk, inventory management, product configuration and reporting, and customer analytics.

However, there are key differences to keep in mind if you’re evaluating what’s better for your business:

1. Platform

HubSpot CRM supports everything from Sales and Marketing to Content Management, Operations & Service. You'll benefit from a unified and consistent user experience, where data, reporting, and individual tools connect well with each other to meet your growth objectives.

With everything operating off a shared database, you can align your data, channels, and teams around a single source of truth, with every interaction seamlessly synced to the contact’s timeline.

Zoho also boasts a handful of sophisticated features to help you take your business to the next level, such as:

sales automation,
customization tools,
comprehensive analytics and intelligence.

In terms of automation, they let you build and execute macros for repetitive tasks as well as write and schedule your own custom functions. 2. Customization

HubSpot can be easily customized to fulfill your complex business needs and can scale aptly without months of custom dev work. Furthermore, you can deploy custom objects to design your CRM in a flexible, practical way for your business, while quickly importing crucial 3rd party data into your CRM.

Similarly, Zoho does provide immense flexibility in CRM structuring, with custom record views, buttons, and links you can embed in your system. However, Zoho has been slower to innovate on integrations and deployment, which may result in compatibility issues with your current applications and require more time than desired for configuration.

3. Analytics

HubSpot's analytics function has been regarded well for its user-friendly interface and ease of adoption, with the platform offering customizable dashboards and reports across multiple channels. It integrates well with other HubSpot tools and provides a multitude of insights to help optimize marketing campaigns and measure the effectiveness of sales and marketing funnels. With a microscopic level of alignment and data, your team can craft compelling experiences for your customers.

Zoho Analytics is a separate tool within Zoho's ecosystem with which you can use to create and visualize reports from multiple datapoints. Similar to HubSpot, you can create custom dashboards and reports and integrate smoothly with other Zoho apps. They also use artificial intelligence to detect anomalies and deviations in your sales trends, giving you an opportunity to course-correct whenever necessary.

	HubSpot	Zoho
Starting Price	$50/mo. includes 2 paid sales seats and unlimited free users.	$69/mo. includes 3 users.
Reporting	Reporting templates you can adjust as per your needs + custom dashboards/reports	Preset reports to choose from, but custom reporting can be tricky to set up.
Marketing Automation	Suite of tools includes email marketing, lead nurturing, social media management, landing page creation, forms, lead scoring, and more	Marketing automation tools focus on email marketing, campaign management, lead nurturing, and lead scoring.

If you’re looking for a scalable all-in-one platform that can grow with you and your team, HubSpot is likely the better fit for you. Zoho does provide more affordable pricing plans depending on the number of users required; therefore, it’s a solid option if you don’t have complex requirements in the way of marketing automation, integration, and user adoption.

Both HubSpot and Adobe Marketo Engage are leaders in the marketing automation space, providing support with various marketing tools and lead management for the customer journey.

1. Platform

The biggest point of difference between HubSpot and Marketo is that the former is a CRM platform that delivers robust contact and sales pipeline management features as well as a full-featured marketing hub, while the latter simply syncs with top CRMs.

Having a single platform for all CRM, sales, and marketing activities can be hugely beneficial to customer happiness and internal alignment - meaning it's beneficial to revenue generation as well.

2. Pricing

HubSpot pricing varies from $45 to $3,200 per month, changing based on available features and the number of marketing contacts managed. Marketo's pricing is only available on-demand but is offered in tiers.

For Enterprise onboarding, HubSpot charges a flat rate of $6,000 (onboarding could also be managed by a HubSpot Partner for a comparable price). Marketo has multiple launch packages that range in price from $6,000 - $19,500.

3. Lead Management

HubSpot Marketing Hub enables organizations to market to and track contacts throughout the entire customer journey from first-time visitors all the way through to customers and beyond through tools like:

Workflow Automation
Marketing Email
Landing Pages
Custom Forms
Professional and Enterprise plans also provide Account-based management and automatic lead rotation tools.

With Marketo, you can not only manage leads but also map out the entire customer journey from initial awareness to revenue capture, though beware that without sales/CRM integration valuable data can be missing. Marketo provides businesses with the flexibility to manage leads at both individual and account levels, making it a good solution for those engaged in Account-Based Marketing.

4. Reporting

HubSpot’s reporting features are unmatched, as all your KPIs are stored in one place - from top-of-the-funnel performance metrics all the way to multi-touch revenue attribution. Plus, as opposed to Marketo, there is no manual integration required.

	HubSpot	Marketo
Lead Management	All-in-one marketing software covering content creation, email, CRM, and automation, set up without a single line of code.	Strong capabilities of marketing automation but requires integrations with CMS, CRM, and other tools. Coding is involved for most integrations.
Analytics	All analytics can be quickly viewed in one place - from top of the funnel KPIs to multi-touch revenue attribution. No need for manual integration.	Robust reporting including high-level engagement analytics and revenue reporting. The dashboards require manual setup.
Account-Based Marketing	Both Sales Hub and Marketing Hub Pro Enterprise offer tools to help locate target accounts, capture key accounts, nurture relationships, communicate across marketing and sales, and measure ABM performance – at no additional cost.	ABM features can be unlocked with a paid add-on, with individual licenses issued to users who require access.

At the end of the day, if you’re in the market for a new CRM that can fulfill several functions within your marketing, sales, and customer service arenas, HubSpot is the better choice. However, if you have custom solutions for a narrower range of uses in marketing automation, Marketo might fit the bill better.

Both Mailchimp and HubSpot offer email marketing automation and workflows, but depending on your business requirements and budget, only one of the tools likely makes more sense for your trajectory.

1. Pricing

It’s worth mentioning right from the beginning that Mailchimp’s platform is cost-effective, with their standard plan beginning at $20/month - making it an optimal option for small businesses and start-ups seeking to scale their email marketing activities.

Though HubSpot’s Professional plan is higher compared to Mailchimp, at $800/month it has the following benefits:

Comes with its own CRM, meaning you can establish detailed email campaigns that give each contact a personalized experience.
Offers if/then logic in your automated campaigns, so you can send each prospect a contextual email based on the interactions they’ve already had with your brand.
Gives the ability to track the quality of those interactions, align with sales activities, and check whether those prospective customers have an open ticket with your support team.

2. User Experience

Mailchimp is a user-friendly platform, featuring a drag and drop email editor as well as custom coded email templates to help you get your campaigns up and running ASAP. Once you upgrade to a paid tier, you’ll be able to use functionality like A/B testing and dynamic send times. You can also access comparative reports so you can begin analyzing data across campaigns and sharing insights with your team.

HubSpot’s email tool has everything Mailchimp offers, with the additional advantage of being embedded within your CRM. This means you can form as many custom properties as you need to deploy across your marketing campaigns. Feel free to add delays and conditional logic to your automation, allowing you to customize your workflows and support your sales and marketing motions beyond email marketing.

3. Deliverability

The technical components of your email campaigns are a significant factor to consider when making a decision. Mailchimp offers powerful deliverability rates of between 96% and 99%, which they continually optimize through various functions like omnivore scans, automated abuse prevention systems, campaign scans, and address analysis.

Similarly, HubSpot also guarantees advanced anti-spam and high deliverability rates. Thanks to a dedicated team that works 24/7 to monitor the rates and screens emails daily, you can be rest assured that your emails are landing in the intended audience’s inboxes, with minimal bounce rates of 10% or less. Similar to MailChimp, HubSpot offers tips and guides on how to improve your content to prevent your campaigns from ending up as spam.

	HubSpot	Mailchimp
Pricing	The pricing for Marketing Hub plans starts from $50/month and can go up to $3,200/month, depending on the desired features and service levels.	Standard plan at $20/month, while additional features and larger lists are about $299/month.
Automation	Automation features that go beyond just email campaigns, such as webhooks, score leads, rotate leads to sales, and even trigger internal notifications. You can also create targeted and multi-stage workflows within your CRMs and automate campaigns without any code.	Advanced marketing automation features, such as personalized campaigns and journeys with conditional logic and branching points. The transaction email feature automatically sends out informational and trigger-based emails using the MailChimp API or SMTP.
Tracking & Reporting	HubSpot tracking codes, unique to each subscriber account, can determine site traffic. It allows the tool to track site trafficking. In terms of reporting and analytics, HubSpot offers dedicated systems across its automation, lead scoring, and deal management functions — providing all critical data through one CRM.	Detailed site and campaign tracking to monitor customer activity on site with extensive metrics on email campaigns.

Overall, while MailChimp does offer features beyond email marketing, they can be limited. For those looking to create, automate, and analyze entire marketing campaigns and lead nurturing, HubSpot more feature-rich Hub is the clear choice.

ActiveCampaign provides a robust set of tools to simplify standard marketing activities like email marketing, marketing automation, landing pages, personalization, and more. Though some of their functionality is considerably like HubSpot, there are some key considerations you should evaluate before going with any one option:

1. Automation

ActiveCampaign's marketing automation tool offers a user-friendly drag-and-drop interface, allowing users to construct basic workflows for automating processes such as email campaigns, segmentation, and contact updates. While it does support automation through APIs, it provides a more limited range of options for triggering workflow enrollments compared to HubSpot.

HubSpot, on the other hand, goes beyond email automation by providing comprehensive contact database management, equal lead distribution among sales teams, and the ability to create automated support tickets. Moreover, HubSpot empowers users to enhance their automation strategies with features like delays and conditional logic, enabling precise customization of workflows to meet specific team requirements.

2. Reporting

HubSpot's web traffic analytics seamlessly integrate website traffic and engagement data with your CRM, allowing you to transform enormous volumes of data into valuable insights about the customer journey. You can dig deeper into web, landing page, and blog page performance across different kinds of attributes, including domains, languages, countries, and other relevant factors. In addition to providing email-specific analytics such as open and click rates, HubSpot offers a granular level of insight by allowing users to delve into individual emails and identify the specific links that generate the highest click-through rates, eliminating the need for external tools like Google Analytics.

ActiveCampaign, for its part, does deliver out-of-the-box reporting as well as a custom report builder. However, you will need to be careful on how these various sources of data are synced, their timing, accuracy, etc., as the platform focuses on fewer features to begin with.

3. Ease of Use

HubSpot boasts an interface characterized by its simplicity and an intuitive design, offering a fluid user experience. Live chat support is readily available to provide timely assistance, ensuring a smooth navigation through the platform. Furthermore, the guided tours allow users to gain a comprehensive understanding of its functionalities and workflows prior to embarking on their journey.

ActiveCampaign offers a highly intuitive interface that allows users to tailor their dashboard to their preferences, adding sections such as tasks, campaigns, and top contacts for a personalized overview. However, due to the plethora of sub-elements in the menu, users may spend additional time navigating and locating specific features. They also lack the ability to add multiple email addresses for the same contact or lead.

HubSpot is a comprehensive platform that offers a wide range of tools for marketing, sales, and customer service, so it’s ideal for you if you’re in the market for an all-in-one solution. ActiveCampaign does primarily focus on email marketing and automation, with cost-effective pricing tiers based on your requirements.

CMS

Content — and the way in which you develop, optimize, measure, and publish it — plays a vital role in your marketing performance. So, what are some considerations you should keep in mind when deciding to invest in a Content Management System (CMS)?

Scalability – can your CMS adapt as your company grows and evolves? Can it handle an increasing number of users and advanced workflows? What about its ability to manage large spikes in traffic? How is it keeping pace with the dynamic technological trends in automation, personalization, artificial intelligence, and machine learning? If your CMS can aptly adapt and incorporate these swift changes into its functional ambit, it can likely support your continued growth.
Reporting — Consider the system’s analytic features – how well are you able to capture, evaluate, and action the insights? Is the data helping you refine your digital content and marketing strategy? How well are you able to decipher the dashboards
Customization — does the CMS in question come with customizable modules or plugins? Do they provide applications out of the box that can be tailored to your unique needs? Are you able to create a unique brand experience for future/existing customers? Having a system with a versatile architecture can allow for complete development freedom, resulting in designs that align seamlessly with your branding.
User Experience — the usability of the system is going to be critical. Can you access all your websites from the same platform, perhaps with a single interface to develop content? Look into the permission levels and see if it allows access to multiple people, even by section. How granular are the permission settings? Are you able to collaborate effectively with other team members through common workflows?

While the fundamental features of a CMS are crucial, other factors such as cost, integrations, security, support, and more, can impact your selection process. To help you make an informed decision, here's a detailed comparison of how HubSpot fares against other CMS platforms in the market:

HubSpot vs WordPress

WordPress is a leading open-source CMS platform that provides content creation tools as well as plugins for additional functionality like sitemaps, SEO, analytics, and more. Here are the crucial points of differentiation between the two technologies:

1. SaaS vs Open Source

As a SaaS product, HubSpot has a monthly recurring cost that you can pay monthly or annually. With this list price, you get access to a wide range of features, including HubSpot’s content tools, premium hosting & security components, regular maintenance and updates, support via chat, phone, and email, and all the elements like email marketing, SEO optimizations, and live chat that come as part of the HubSpot CRM platform.

WordPress’ sticker price is free, but there are necessary, hidden costs to operating a website that add up quickly, such as hosting, security, plugins, and regular maintenance.

2. Content Creation

In addition to crafting effortless digital experiences for your customers, HubSpot scales with you whether you’re a marketer, developer, or IT professional. With its foundation in a cohesive and comprehensive CRM platform, CMS Hub enables you to access all the necessary information to personalize customer interactions. Its blogging and landing page capabilities are just as intuitive, facilitating effortless lead generation and traffic expansion for your enterprise.

Meanwhile, WordPress has been deployed in roughly 30% of all websites. Undoubtedly, the code behind WordPress is very clean and simple, making it easy for search engines to read and index a site’s content. Plus, developers have the ability to create tailored plugins, themes, and templates that can present a distinct character to their websites. Every page, post, and image can be associated with its own meta keywords, description, and title, which enables precise optimization to target search keywords.

3. Security

WordPress’s safeguarding greatly relies upon the choice of web host, coupled with the plugins employed. Users have no choice but to use plugins if they want to keep their site safe. You also must depend on reputable hosting providers to ensure the protection of your WordPress site.

HubSpot provides you with a global CDN, SSL certificate support, and a web application firewall to enhance the security of your site. There’s no need to add additional services to your account, and there are no plugins to install. TLS 1.2 or 1.3 are standard, plus they use end-to-end encryption.

Additionally, here’s a table illustrating pricing and feature distributions across both HubSpot and WordPress:

	HubSpot Free CMS Tools	Wordpress
Core website management tools	Free	Free
Hosting	All service tiers come with premium hosting. You can also easily connect your own domain through the domain manager.	Popular hosting platforms for WordPress like Pantheon have basic plans available for $50/mo, performance plans that go up to $1000/mo, and custom elite plans. The plan you choose will depend on the amount of pages, traffic, and storage you need, among other factors (Source)
Plugins	CMS Hub has over 650 apps and integrations that can be integrated with HubSpot to extend the functionality of your website within the CRM platform.	WordPress has a lot of plugins, over 58,000 to be exact. Installing the 24 most popular ones can cost you between $287.60 and $1338.23 per month.
Support	With CMS Hub's SaaS model, backend maintenance and updates are handled efficiently. Additionally, customers gain access to the extensive HubSpot Academy and community, providing unparalleled support and resources to enhance their website experience.	If you don't have an internal team handling your website maintenance, you will have to bear the costs of hiring someone to perform regular maintenance tasks. The costs associated with maintenance will vary based on the size and complexity of your website, and can range from $100 per month to as much as $4500 per month for a business website.

SO WHY CHOOSE HUBSPOT?

As illustrated by the examples above, HubSpot emerges as the ultimate solution, encompassing every aspect you could possibly desire in software — whether you crave a robust CRM, an intuitive marketing automation powerhouse, or cutting-edge content management tools. You can opt for either the free version or the paid subscription to see how HubSpot delivers it all with unmatched finesse, working its magic across your marketing, sales, and customer service teams.

Not only does it automate manual work (data entry, data sync, and contact data updates) but it facilitates a smooth, effortless buyer experience that immediately demonstrably boosts growth and revenue. The interface is intuitive, user-friendly, and immediately improves synchronicity within your business — giving each department a better understanding of their customers' needs, wants, and interests.

That being said, each organization is different and has unique requirements to consider when making a technology investment. If you’re prioritizing specific functions and specific budgetary considerations, alternative tools, such as the ones listed above, may better align with your needs. However, if you seek to forge a vision for the long haul, choosing HubSpot as your unrivaled sales and marketing platform might just be the ticket.