SoftGist Rating

4.6

Try Today

HubSpot is an all-in-one SaaS platform offering businesses the tools they need to turn prospects into customers. It’s a CRM that removes the divide between marketing and sales.

In our HubSpot review, what we love most about HubSpot is its free CRM hub. Plus, even with the host of highly sophisticated marketing, sales, RevOps, and customer support features, the tool's user-friendly interface is quite easy to navigate.

On the downside, advanced A/B testing features, sales analytics, and custom reporting are locked behind high-end tiers—you need to be a paying customer to make the most of the app. Overall, we give HubSpot a 4.6-star rating. 

Best For

SMBs and large enterprises

Price

Paid plan for the CRM suite starts at $30

Discount

Annual discount

Pros

• Easy-to-use software
• Generous freemium plan
• Extremely versatile platform
• Best inbound marketing tool
• Real-time lead behavior notification
• Offers enterprise CRM features

Cons

• Additional fees for technical support
• Limited A/B testing abilities for lower-tier plans
• Reliance on the HubSpot Ecosystem

Features

4.8

Customer Support

4.6

Ease Of Use

4.5

Value For Money

4.3

What is HubSpot?

HubSpot is a cloud-based Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform that empowers businesses of diverse scales to track and nurture leads. It’s a powerful tool sales and marketing teams use to manage customers’ lifecycles from start to finish.

At its core, HubSpot simplifies tracking outbound and inbound leads, streamlines sales pipeline management through automation, enhances lead and contact management, and boosts sales.

HubSpot’s digital ecosystem is ideal for small and medium businesses (SMBs) as well as large enterprises across multiple industries.

So whether you’re in retail, real estate, construction, or accounting, you can use HubSpot’s CRM to manage contacts, monitor deals, get a real-time view of the sales pipeline, pinpoint high-value leads, and automate your email marketing endeavors.

HubSpot’s products at a glance

Feature Overview for Free Users

HubSpot earned a 4.6-star rating from our review primarily because of the robust catalog of sales, marketing, operations, CMS, and service features the free CRM offers.

Here are some of the free CRM’s standout features:

• The CRM’s ability to hold and manage one million contacts,
• Meeting scheduler
• Email template builder
• Live chat software
• Pipeline management
• AI email writer
• Dashboard and reporting software.

Plus, it integrates seamlessly with HubSpot's lead nurturing and automation tools, creating a streamlined workflow.

So while other CRMs like Salesforce may outperform HubSpot in certain aspects, its comprehensive free plan sets it apart as a powerful, budget-friendly option.

Feature Overview for Paying Users

For advanced users who want to remove HubSpot’s branding and enjoy more robust reports and analytics, you’d have to subscribe to a paid plan amongst its five hubs.

• Marketing
• Sales
• Service
• CMS
• Operations

Choosing a hub gives you access to three price levels: starter, enterprise, and professional. There’s also a CRM suite offering comprehensive packages across hubs.

And in case you have robust CRM needs and can’t find a suitable plan, you can select specific products as add-ons with HubSpot’s “Create a Bundle” option.

HubSpot Review: Pros & Cons

Is HubSpot Right for You?

We recommend HubSpot if:

• You want to monitor customers' lifecycles.
• You’re looking for a robust free plan.
• You want to identify hot and cold leads across touchpoints.
• You want to organize how visitors interact with your website.
• You want a user-friendly CRM that’s easy to learn.
• You’re a non-tech-savvy marketer.
• You want to automate repetitive tasks.

Not recommend HubSpot if:

• You’re a solopreneur with large lists and a small budget.
• You need detailed reporting at a minimal cost.
• You rely heavily on multiple software and cannot afford an all-in-one ecosystem.

Marketing hub

If you want to avoid silos and gather all your marketing data under one roof, look to HubSpot’s marketing hub. It provides all the marketing tools required to run inbound campaigns (i.e., getting customers to refer friends and colleagues to your brand).

HubSpot’s marketing hub offers:

• Embed Forms for collecting customers' data.
• Customizable Landing page and email templates for product launch, update, and sales.
• Live chat for connecting with website visitors.
• And integrations for linking third-party apps.

What we love most about the marketing hub is its drag-and-drop WYSIWYG editor for redesigning email templates.

Plus, the landing pages support progressive profiling, ensuring multiple forms fields don't annoy the stew out of returning consumers.

HubSpot Automation page

Then there's the marketing automation tool for predictive lead scoring—a proprietary AI-based algorithm that calculates scores for leads based on their potential to become a customer.

And for marketing managers who love to see how marketing campaigns are performing across audiences, HubSpot offers a dashboard with Kanban and List views you can customize to track specific business metrics.

Marketing Hub Pricing Plans

The marketing hub offers three plans that vary based on the number of contacts you have.

• The Starter plan starts at $20 monthly and is designed for up to 1,000 marketing contacts.
• The Professional plan, priced at $890 per month, is suitable for businesses with up to 2,000 contacts.
• For larger organizations with up to 10,000 contacts, the Enterprise plan is available at $3,600 per month.

Sales Hub

The sales hub's primary function is to predict the sales cycle—what’s happening and what comes next. It gives users full visibility into the sales process, enabling them to get noticed, sell faster, and smash quarterly goals.

You can use the sales hub to:

• Start conversations.
• Monitor and forecast deals.
• Track payments.
• Connect with consumers in search of trusted brands.
• Gain detailed sales reports and analytics.
• And manage how your sales teams do business with each customer.

Deal’s page (where sales happen)

What we love most about HubSpot’s sales hub is the AI-powered insights users can generate with the conversation intelligence feature.

For one, HubSpot breezily allows free and paying users to track calls. But gaining intuitive insights that can lead to deeper conversations from each call takes work.

That's where the conversation intelligence feature comes in.

It allows you to capture call details and unlock coaching opportunities for clients. Equipping you with all you need to turn customer calls and complaints into downloadable digital products.

Pipeline management is another feature that can help you sell faster and better.

This feature arms you with the battle cards and positioning guides needed to make consumers keep your brand top-of-mind. More like a foolproof roadmap your sales team can use to identify roadblocks.

Sales Hub Pricing Plans

The sales hub offers three-tiered plans based on the number of users.

• The Starter plan is priced at $20 per month and is designed for two users.
• The Professional plan starts at $500 monthly and is suitable for five users.
• The Enterprise plan begins at $1,200 monthly and accommodates up to 10 users.

Service Hub

It's perfectly normal to have customers not wanting to wait in line each time they want an issue resolved.

In fact, most customers love to figure stuff out on their own.

HubSpot service hub smoothens the self-help process. It gives each person using your product the tools and resources they need to solve problems on their own.

Overview of HubSpot tickets feature

Within the service hub, you'll find tools like Tickets for keeping track of customer issues, a customizable customer portal, a knowledge base, and more.

VoIP and Inbound calling is also supported. That's you can call and receive calls using HubSpot. Plus, you can track call analytics and unlock the why behind every customer interaction.

There's also an Omni-channel messaging feature to connect multiple social media platforms and meet customers where they are.

Plus, the HubSpot service hub isn’t only customer-centric. You'll find a handful of features for tracking and boosting employee performance. Amongst the many we reviewed, the team management and shared inbox feature stood out.

Service Hub Plans:

The pricing for Service Hub plans is determined by the number of users, similar to the Sales Hub.

• The Starter plan starts at $20 per month for two users.
• The Professional plan is priced at $500 per month for five users.
• The Enterprise plan is priced at $1,200 per month for ten users.

CMS Hub

If you need a hosting platform or tried and true templates for high-converting websites, HubSpot CMS hub is a one-stop solution.

HubSpot’s content management system (CMS hub) houses all the features needed for website building, SEO optimization, and site performance monitoring.

Setting up a website with HubSpot

The CMS hub is built for marketers, developers, and IT teams. That means the CMS is loaded with multiple features. Here are a few we couldn’t help but notice.

• The drag-and-drop editor builds on the front end. You can visualize the experience you're creating for customers on the go.
• If you don't know coding, there are hundreds of customizable themes to choose from.
• The blog maker fills a need that most SEO tools lack. You can build and optimize your blog without technical expertise or third-party plug-ins.

But the real value of HubSpot is in the fully integrated CRM. It squeezes more juice out of existing visitors. Turning your website into a growth engine for your business.

Robust teams will enjoy the activity logging and partitioning feature for tracking website changes and monitoring usage.

There's also an SEO recommendation feature that suggests changes you can make to your web pages. And for those who easily get lost working alone, you can join the active community right away.

CMS Hub Pricing Plans

The CMS hub offers three pricing tiers, each offering more robust features than the next.

• The Starter plan starts at $25 per month for additional features like URL mappings, multiple currencies, 1:1 technical support, 10 reports per dashboard, etc.
• The Professional plan starts at $400 monthly offering additional features like 30 reports per dashboard, up to 10 team usage, video hosting and management, SEO analytics, etc.
• The Enterprise plan starts at $1200 per month and comes with additional features like web apps, custom objects,code alerts, adaptive testing, etc.

Operations Hub

HubSpot operations hub is the latest add-on to its suite of professional tools.

The hub arms RevOp professionals with the tools they need to reduce or eliminate the time spent on reactive data tasks, allowing them to pay more attention to proactive strategies.

With this HubSpot hub, your team can forgo mundane, repetitive manual processes and focus on work that requires real-human expertise.

HubSpot’s app marketplace

Data sync is one of the stand-out tools in the operation hub.

It eliminates the hassle of switching between apps when importing or exporting data. And unlike regular integrations, data sync supports a two-way system.

For example, integrating a billing app into your CRM transfers data to only your CRM. But with the data sync feature, data movement is possible.

Another astonishing feature attached to the operations hubs is programmable automation, which allows you to execute codes directly within a HubSpot workflow.

The final solid feature we couldn't help but notice in the operation hub is the data quality automation for adding data formatting options to your workflow.

Operations Hub Pricing Plans

Just like the CMS hub, the operations Hub also depends on an as-you-need feature basis. It's not categorized by users or contacts. But it also offers three-tiered plans.

• The Starter plan starts at $20 per month and comes with additional features like permission sets, card and ACH payments, custom filed mappings, etc.
• The Professional plan starts at $800 monthly, offering additional features like programmable automation, deal and company scoring, webhooks, custom reporting, etc.
• The Enterprise plan starts at $2000 per month with additional offerings like advanced data calculation and prep, snowflake data share, datasets, field level permission, etc.

HubSpot CRM Pricing

Let's begin with HubSpot’s free plan.

The CRM platform offers a robust free plan. Simply signing up for HubSpot grants access to free tools across all five hubs. Free users can:

• Track the total deal value per stage on the dashboard.
• Take notes.
• Highlight sales performance.
• Sort leads details from over a hundred fields.
• View deals across visual pipelines.
• Categorize tasks.
• Store up to one million contacts and lots more.

Indeed, the free CRM suite can help small teams hit the ground running.

However, if you run a new or small business and would love to get real value from the sophisticated suite of tools the CRM software offers, go with HubSpot’s CRM suite.

HubSpot’s CRM Suite plans

The starter plan offers all the essential features to promote coordination, insights, and transparency across teams. Pricing starts at $50/mo.

HubSpot’s CRM suite professional plan would be right up the alley of large sales and marketing teams relying extensively on inbound marketing.

Pricing starts at $1335 per month.

And on the off chance you crave something more powerful. A CRM software that can handle an exhaustive lead database, there’s an Enterprise plan for you. Pricing starts at $5000 per month.

Conclusion

Focusing on the data, HubSpot has, over the years, helped thousands of businesses see real results. And in our opinion, the HubSpot CRM tool is a very solid software worth investing in.

But whether or not HubSpot is the right software for your business boils down to three crucial factors;

• Do you need a CRM with a dedicated sales, marketing, service, CMS, and operations hub?
• Can you afford to rely on a single ecosystem to scale day-to-day business activities?
• And are you willing to pay a premium to learn how HubSpot works?

If YES, Try HubSpot for Free Here!

HubSpot Alternatives

But if something still feels off after reading this HubSpot CRM review, here are a few alternatives worth considering. You can learn more in our review of the best HubSpot alternatives.

• Active Campaign

Active Campaign stands out as a solid alternative to HubSpot CRM. It shines with its user-friendly interface and a wide range of templates for sales and marketing. It also offers robust marketing automation features and easily integrates with various content management systems.

The platform is ideal for small to mid-sized businesses and seasoned marketers focusing on email marketing automation.

• Zoho CRM

Zoho CRM works with Zoho’s project management platform to help users build workflows, nurture leads, and organize tasks.

In comparison, HubSpot offers more advanced CRM features. And it is more user-friendly and easy to get started with. To Zoho’s credit, its prices are lower than HubSpot’s.

• Pipedrive

Pipedrive is a multi-dimensional CRM offering sales tools, analytics, integrations, and a suite of other features to manage content, projects, and more.

Paired with HubSpot, Pipedrive is more sales-centric. Unlike HubSpot, which can be many things to different people, Pipedrive focuses on helping the sales team scale. On the good side, Pipedrive is a more economical option.

Frequently Asked Questions

Share This Post

Ada Rivers

Ada Rivers is a senior writer and marketer with a Master’s in Global Marketing. She enjoys helping businesses reach their audience. In her free time, she likes hiking, cooking, and practicing yoga.