Salesforce vs. HubSpot CRM
Salesforce and HubSpot have similar audiences and features, but both aim to provide unique services and different purposes to their customers.
Choosing the best and cost-effective CRM enhances the organization’s business and growth, and similarly, choosing the inefficient CRM may badly impact your business. So, there is always confusion about choosing the best among all the available CRMs to best suit the particular business.
For the CRM choices, Salesforce is the first choice of various organizations, as it provides the world’s #1 CRM platform. But what are the other alternatives or competitors for the best CRM? So the one answer will be HubSpot CRM.
In this topic, we will compare the two highly rated CRM platforms, which are HubSpot and Salesforce CRM, to easily choose the best among them as per the business requirements.
What does Salesforce CRM Offer?
Salesforce CRM aims to provide services to all types of businesses, customizing the solutions as per the business size and requirements. It is a powerful software that can be used by any organization to run and grow their businesses. Salesforce provides various benefits and features; some of them are given below:
- Opportunity Management
- Account Management
- Task Management
- Case Management
- Contract Management
What does HubSpot CRM Offer?
HubSpot provides the suite of marketing and sales tools to help the organizations to manage the sales leads and synchronize the sales teams with the rest of the department.
The HubSpot CRM also automates the various marketing activities and provides lots of other marketing tools compared to other CRMs. CRM has an intuitive sales dashboard that can be followed and understood by the sales team.
The team can see the real-time stats on the dashboard, which helps understand the team’s current position in the sales.
There is also a chat function, where leads can contact with the team and can communicate with each other.
Common Features Comparison between HubSpot CRM and Salesforce CRM
1. User Interface and Setup
HubSpot is easy to use, but it has limited customization and menu options compared to the Salesforce.
Both the Salesforce and HubSpot contain the similar structure and can quickly navigate to the Contacts, Account, leads, and reports with the Menu bar’s help given at the top of the user screen.One can easily get specific contacts, email addresses, phone numbers, and a history of various activities in each CRM platform.
As compared to the HubSpot, Salesforce provides many customization options, such as the new tabs that can be added for items like Quotes, Files, Tasks, and Sales group and various standard tabs.
Salesforce also provides the dedicated account manager and implementations specialist for the customers, but the setup implementation is complicated at the initial level.
On the other side, HubSpot provides easy implementation compared to the Salesforce, as the basic version is free, and there is no need to go through the sales process, initial payments, or contracts.
2. Pricing
The pricing rate of HubSpot CRM is suitable for small size businesses that required the basic CRM features. In contrast, Salesforce is an excellent choice for small to large businesses that required complete functionality or more advanced CRM features.
Both Salesforce and HubSpot have a different pricing model, and the requirement of the businesses can determine the appropriate model.
Salesforce provides its service to the customers on a monthly subscription fee(that is billed annually), based on the number of users that access the platform. Subscription fees are different for each business type and requirement in Salesforce. The more you will pay, the great features you will get.
On the other hand, HubSpot provides its primary CRM platform for free to unlimited users. To add additional features, users can purchase it. Some advanced features of Salesforce, such as reporting and dashboard, need to be purchased separately in the HubSpot.
3. Lead Generation, Capture, and Management
Lead management and scoring can be highly customizable using the Salesforce. Whereas, the small business can easily run with the lead generation via Content Marketing in the HubSpot.
HubSpot Mainly focuses on Inbound and Content marketing. It also provides an option to use the HubSpot as the Content Management System(CMS) to publish the whitepapers and blogs. But, to use the HubSpot as CMS, customers need to pay extra.
In Salesforce to perform such activities, customers need separate services such as Marketo, integrated with the CRM.
Both the CRM contains the primary lead capture feature. This feature allows us to automatically import the customers’ contact information into the system when they make any new inquiry on the website or blog.
Both the CRMs also email the contacts directly via CRM or using the email service app, such as Gmail.
4. Dashboards and Reporting
When it comes to the powerful reporting the sales activities and forecasting, Salesforce is much better than HubSpot.
One of the most useful CRM software functions is reporting and analytics, which analyzes the customer’s data. It is a critical thing for any organization to monitor the sales and forecast how it will be in the future. What is the current stage? What will be the future growth? And many more such questions that can be solved using the CRM software.
Both the Salesforce and HubSpot enable their users to develop the reports on the dashboards, such as opportunities using geographic territory, best lead to provide valuable deals, etc.
In Salesforce, there are multiple features and options are available to edge the reporting functionality. With these features that reports can be easily converted into attractive dashboards.
Whereas, HubSpot’s basic CRM has only the pre-built reports for the various sales activities and pipelines. If you want to take the HubSpot’s premium reporting package, it still has a limit of 200 dashboards and contains significantly fewer customization options compared to the Salesforce.
Both Salesforce and HubSpot provides various useful reports to get started with reporting and dashboards. Still, the Salesforce is far greater than the HubSpot as it also provides various options to view the reporting data on the dashboards such as using Pie charts, Odometers, etc.
In short, if someone wants to focus on the data collection of customers and communication with customers rather than reporting, then HubSpot is a good option. But, if someone needs data analysis to improve sales, Salesforce is the best option.
5. Pipeline Management
For the complex sales processes, the Salesforce is the best option. But for the small business that has a simple sales cycle, the HubSpot CRM is good.
For Pipeline management, Salesforce provides various customization options to configure the deal stages. It also provides the flexibility to add a lead at the later stage of the pipeline.
Whereas, in HubSpot, users can edit and add in already present or preconfigured sales pipeline stages. These preconfigured stages are Appointment, Qualified, Presentation Scheduled, Decision Maker, Contract Sent, Closed Won/Lost, and one pipeline per organization is allowed. It means if the company has one sales process for a product and other sales processes for other products, then HubSpot will not allow it; you need to purchase the add-on or premium HubSpot to get the multiple pipelines. But the premium version also doesn’t contain as many features as Salesforce contains.
In Salesforce, each deal stage is associated with the document, a various number of products are connected with each deal, and automated tasks are performed as the deal moves along.
In HubSpot also, some tasks can be automated with the sales cycle, but it isn’t easy in other functions such as accounting and inventory.
6. Support and Training
Salesforce provides the standard support package to all the customers. The package includes the customer success communities and allows the customer to lodge the product-related complaint or tickets online, ensuring the 2-days response time. Its premium plan provides the 24*7 phone support, one dedicated support manager, and a guaranteed one-hour response for any critical problem.
On the Other hand, HubSpot CRM also provides similar standard helpdesk support to the customers. Customers can also take the premium support and technical; assistance by paying the additional cost. The free users also receive the proper response within 24 hrs for any fundamental product issue.
In short, if someone has less support requirement with the basic CRM functionality, he can go for the HubSpot, else the Salesforce will be the best option.
7. Workflow and documentation
When we talk about Sales finalizations, then approval is the last requirement. In this digitalization also, the signature on the dotted line is still required. Once a sales get finalized, it requires the various number of documents to be approved, signed and returned, and as fast this task gets completed, the faster we can move for the next sales. For such purposes, the Salesforce is the best choice, as it automates this workflow and documentation very easily and stores all the sales-related documents on the cloud storage. Salesforce provides the ability to easily create, customize, and edit the workflows of the sales process.
On the other hand, HubSpot provides superior workflow functionality but on purchase. It provides the primary drag and drop processes, but as compared to salesforce customization, the HubSpot workflow is significantly less. For more than 250MB storage, the user needs to purchase the upgrade.
8. Collaboration between functions(Sales, Support, and Marketing)
The collaboration between different functions such as Sales, Marketing, and Support is crucial for a business to get the best result.
Both the Salesforce and HubSpot contains the Sales, marketing, and service team functionalities, and various features of all the functions can be collaborated as per the business needs.
HubSpot contains its sales, marketing and service suite maintained with the same roof. It enhances the consistent user experience as the data, reporting, and other individual tools are similar and work.
On the other hand, Salesforce provides more products and tools compared to the HubSpot, but maintenance and usability are difficult.
9. Scalability
The CRM needs to be grown as per the requirements; it means the CRM functionality should be scalable.
In HubSpot, one can start with the free plan, including the basic CRM functionalities, and can upgrade these functionalities as the business growth.
In Salesforce, there is no end of the scalability and customization of the software. It includes the current need for the future requirements of any business.
10. Integration
One of the most common comparison complaints between the HubSpot and Salesforce is that HubSpot provides only the limited integration offers compared to the Salesforce.
The HubSpot is still working on the integrations, and it grows till the 153 tool integrations till now, which include tools for data transfer, mobile apps, e-commerce integration, lead management, and many more. The HubSpot’s App Marketplace contains more than 500 integrations that can be easily set up with other apps such as Jira, Slack, etc.
On the other hand, Salesforce provides various app integrations and built-in features that can work together efficiently and increase the CRM tools’ capabilities. It also provides some ready-made apps and components that require any developer to integrate it into the system.
Conclusion:
As per the above feature’s comparison, we can conclude that if the business is small to mid-size, with the basic CRM functionalities and power with the ease of use choose the HubSpot.
If the business is large with lots of customization and CRM functionalities requirements in cost-effective ways, one should choose the Salesforce CRM solution.
Some businesses also need both the HubSpot and Salesforce to set up the integration between different tools.