HubSpot Vs Salesforce: Which CRM is best for your business?

HubSpot and Salesforce are two of the most recognised customer relationship management (CRM) platforms on the market today. They both offer robust solutions to streamline your marketing automation, sales efforts and client interactions to increase profitability. 

Let’s face it, when deciding which platform to choose or whether to migrate from one CRM to the other, it can become a pretty daunting exercise. Choosing the right CRM can feel overwhelming, especially when balancing costs, features, and ease of use. With HubSpot’s new pricing model launching in March 2024, it’s more important than ever to have up-to-date information to guide your decision. 

In this article, we’ll explore 5 key criteria, address why they matter and analyse how HubSpot and Salesforce currently compare in each area.

This HubSpot vs Salesforce comparison will help you discover which CRM is best for your business, covering five key areas:

• User experience
• Features
• Pricing
• Customer support
• Integrations

User Experience – How easy is it to set up, use and customise?

An easy-to-use CRM makes your life easier. A platform that’s straightforward will increase user adoption, efficiency and productivity, reduce errors and require less training. A well-customised platform empowers organisations to capture relevant data, improve proficiency and stay competitive.

Salesforce is a powerful tool with extensive customisation options. However, many users report its interface feels outdated and complex, leading to a steeper learning curve. Setting up Salesforce often requires substantial time and training, especially for larger teams.

Design and interface

HubSpot’s design philosophy, on the other hand, has resulted in an easy-to-navigate and streamlined interface that doesn’t require a large time investment to get familiar with. It also has a much quicker and easier set-up process. Whilst Salesforce historically provided a much more customisable platform, HubSpot isn’t standing still. With recent updates such as custom objects, same object association and a growing app marketplace, HubSpot is very much ‘ahead of the curve’.

AI adoption

Both Salesforce and HubSpot have been driving forward innovation with AI features in all areas, resulting in increased time efficiencies and enhanced productivity. Salesforces’ AI tool, Einstein, is particularly well-received for its insightful, predictive analytics, whilst HubSpot’s ChatSpot combines the power of ChatGPT with unique data sources to create a powerful sales and marketing tool.

HubSpot has gone one step further with AI adoption. Their new Breeze CoPilot is an in-app AI companion that assists users with tasks everywhere they work across HubSpot’s products.

User experience

When comparing HubSpot vs Salesforce in terms of user experience, HubSpot comes out as a clear leader. Traditionally, large companies have absorbed the extra resource cost that implementation required in a trade-off for the higher level of customisation and advanced features Salesforce offered. More recently, HubSpot’s increasingly updated level of features and capabilities have seen it gain a share of enterprise-level clients, including high-profile brands such as TrustPilot and WeightWatchers.

When comparing HubSpot CRM vs Salesforce CRM for user experience, HubSpot wins for its accessibility and speed.

Features – How good is the CRM at meeting your requirements?

HubSpot and Salesforce both aim to create a unified, digital workspace for an entire organisation.

HubSpot is made up of several ‘hubs’ or tools that can be bought separately or used together. Historically it has a reputation for strength as a marketing automation tool with excellent built-in email automation and tracking, ads software and marketing analytics. This is strengthened by the inclusion of a content management system that you can host your website in, as one of its hubs.

Salesforce is renowned for its extensive suite of tools for sales reps and customer support agents with versatility to help them manage and track their leads, opportunities, activity and clients, historically making it a more natural choice for businesses with larger sales and support teams. Recently however, HubSpot has introduced well-received updates including a sales prospecting tool and lead object to compare much closer with Salesforce in this area. 

This Salesforce vs HubSpot comparison shows that they both boast strong automation capabilities as well as reporting and analytics functions. HubSpot’s integrated tools, roots in inbound marketing and recently updated sales functionality mean it’s particularly strong in both sales and marketing capabilities, which aligns it well with the core focus of many SMEs. The platform’s minimal and straightforward interface also caters to their requirements for a user-first tool.

Pricing – How much will it cost me?

Because HubSpot and Salesforce offer a vast array of tools for a myriad of purposes, each have complicated product lists. There are different parts to choose from, all with different costs, that can change depending on your size and billing cycle.  

At the time of writing, HubSpot has recently announced an upcoming overhaul to their pricing structure.

Both HubSpot and Salesforce have tiered pricing models, but their structures differ significantly.

HubSpot’s new pricing (effective March 2024)

• Free plan: Includes up to 5 core users.
• Starter: £14 per core seat, unlimited view-only users.
• Professional & enterprise: Scalable plans, starting at £44 per core seat and £85 per paid seat, with unlimited view-only users.

For a concise and comparable overview, refer to the following cost summary tables. These tables outline HubSpot’s current and new pricing vs Salesforce’s pricing, focusing solely on their primary sales, service, and marketing plans. Prices are based on annual upfront payments.

For new customers since 5th March 2024:

• View-only seat: View HubSpot features without edit access.
• Core seats: Edit access to purchased Hubs and connection to HubSpot Smart CRM.
• Sales & service seats: Everything included in a Core Seat plus additional Sales and Service features.

Salesforce Pricing (at the time of writing – December 2024)

HubSpot stands out as one of the few top providers to offer a free quality CRM. Under the new pricing, this is now capped at 5 core users.

Salesforce’s extensive list of features, API functions and customisations are balanced by a matching price tag with per-user plans that can add up quickly.

The recent changes HubSpot has made to its pricing make it more aligned with Salesforces’ existing price per-user model, albeit at a considerably more affordable rate. This will make it easier for consumers to compare apples with apples. Depending on requirements, some will be better off on the new pricing structure and for others, there is a slight increase on the previous pricing structure. For all organisations though, the seat model will increase the importance of defining users’ roles and permission sets within the platform.

The fact that the two platforms are now directly comparable reflects HubSpot’s relentless investment in product development in recent years, with the role of a “younger nephew” firmly behind it. 

On its original pricing plan, the gap between the starter tier and the next tier up (Professional) is a considerable jump, which has been criticised as a barrier to scalability. One of the biggest advantages of the new pricing model is that it removes this barrier with no minimum requirement of seats, making it a promising option for companies looking to scale and grow at pace.

Put simply, Salesforce is a more expensive platform than HubSpot, with elaborate capabilities and pricing primarily aimed at enterprise organisations and above. When comparing HubSpot Marketing Hub vs Salesforce Marketing Cloud, HubSpot is a clear winner in terms of price.

Conversely, whilst HubSpot has traditionally been a market leader for SMEs, its new pricing model demonstrates its increasing comparability to Salesforce at a more affordable rate and with an ability to scale with your business.

Customer support – How easy is it to access support?

Both Salesforce and HubSpot users can receive live support by phone, email or online chat. However, for some Salesforce users, support over the phone comes at an additional cost. The two platforms do rely heavily on partner agency support, like that of Wagada Digital, alongside extensive knowledge bases and community forums. 

Salesforce support includes a vast knowledge base, dedicated customer service teams, and a global presence. Their support is known for its professionalism and reliability.

On the other hand, HubSpot users highlight customer support that’s more accessible with a user-friendly interface, a community forum, and comprehensive documentation. While they may not have the same level of enterprise-focused support as Salesforce, they excel in providing straightforward assistance for businesses looking for ease of use. 

By looking at HubSpot vs Salesforce, it’s clear that both platforms are similar in their performance. With capabilities in enterprise-level support and user-friendly accessibility, both CRMs do customer support effectively.

Integrations – How easy is it to integrate our existing tech stack?

The integration capabilities of your CRM platform is key in maintaining consistent data, creating efficiencies, providing enhanced customer insights, and aligning sales and marketing to make your business more scalable. So, what about the integration capabilities of HubSpot vs Salesforce?

Salesforce boasts a vast marketplace of third-party apps and integrations. Its robust API and customisation options make it an ideal choice for businesses seeking highly tailored integrations to meet their unique needs. Critics, however, point out that many users find the model of extensive add-ons and developments leads to increasing and unnecessarily complex integrations.

Whilst HubSpot offers slightly less integration options vs Salesforce, it still has a sizable and increasingly growing app marketplace. It provides a straightforward and accessible approach to integrations, excelling in providing seamless connections to essential tools for marketing, sales, and customer service.

The round-up

HubSpot and Salesforce stand as formidable competitors. So, which is best – the HubSpot CRM or Salesforce CRM?

Ultimately, the choice between HubSpot and Salesforce depends on your specific business requirements, size, and preferences. Both CRM platforms are continually adapting and evolving to cater to a wide range of businesses.

HubSpot has a background and deserved reputation in marketing automation and simplicity. It also emerges as the leader in user experience and affordability, with its user-friendly interface and quick setup.

Salesforce has a formidable library of integrations and add-ons for even the most complex and elaborate of business structures. Traditionally Salesforce has been touted as excelling in sales and support features for larger teams and high-growth organisations.

And the winner is….

Recent product developments and a new pricing structure demonstrate HubSpot’s comparability in features and functionality, making it an ideal choice for those looking to strengthen and align their sales, marketing and customer service teams and scale at pace.

We may be biased as a platinum HubSpot agency, but we truly believe that HubSpot is suitable for almost every business.

Get started with a free consultation 

Perhaps you are currently using Salesforce or another CRM platform and are considering migrating, or are contemplating HubSpot for the first time.

To help you to find out if HubSpot is right for your business, book your FREE 30m HubSpot consultation with Wagada Digital.

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