Tools like HubSpot and Salesforce have revolutionized the way businesses interact with customers. These customer relationship management and marketing automation tools are quickly becoming must-have products for companies that want to compete in the market. Because each of the available tools serves a slightly different market, it can be challenging to decide which one is right for your business. In this series of posts, we'll be comparing HubSpot to some of its top competitors. This post will cover HubSpot vs. Salesforce.
HubSpot is a product by a company of the same name. Or rather, it is a series of products. The core is a customer relationship management, content management, and marketing automation system.
Over the years, the company has expanded the HubSpot brand of software to make life easier for other areas of your business, too. In addition to the base package, they now offer a marketing hub, sales hub, and customer service hub. The base CRM provides the data for all these additional hubs, which will then use that data to create actionable insights to help you grow the respective aspect of your business.
The company was an early innovator of inbound marketing. That, combined with the software's general-purpose nature, makes it popular with businesses of all shapes and sizes.
Salesforce was started back in 1999. It was one of the first SaaS (software as a service) companies and the first to offer customer relationship management. The company has kept pace with changes to the business world.
It offers marketing automation tools and machine learning-powered insights as those technologies became available. Its long history and generalized approach to business marketing tools have made it one of HubSpot's closest competitors, both in content provided and in popularity among users.
Given the similarity between the two, you probably still have no idea which product is better for your business. To help you better compare HubSpot vs. Salesforce, we will break the rest of the post into several categories. For each, we'll give a comparison of how the two giants stack up to one another.
All of the hubs available from HubSpot have a free tier. The base CRM is free forever and without limitation, but the various hub add-ons have limitations in their free versions.
Do you want to grow beyond what the free versions offer? Then you can purchase hubs individually or create your own bundle of the ones you want. A bundle of all the hubs comes in three tiers, priced at $50/month, $1,275/month, and $4,200/month, respectively. The HubSpot for Startups program is designed to save you up to 90% off if your business qualifies.
It's a little difficult to compare HubSpot pricing to Salesforce pricing. Salesforce is a monthly fee per user with a number of different add-on options that change the price. At the lowest level, with the fewest features available, the product is $25/month per user up to a maximum of 5 users. On the higher end, it can get up over $300/month per user. There is no free tier for Salesforce. That can make it harder for your business to grow than it is with HubSpot.
Like all good content management systems, the one in HubSpot allows you to build and host your website easily. You can also update the pages within it using simple editing tools. Because of the software's focus on marketing, this includes marketing features such as landing page editors, search engine optimization tools, easy call-to-action creation, and standard CMS tools for editing webpages and hosting a blog.
As another top player in the field, Salesforce is right in line with HubSpot. The product offers a capable content management system. It also has a complete range of tools to help your marketing team get their work done without the technical grind of managing a website getting in their way.
A lot of how easy a product is to use comes from the training material available for it. We'll discuss that in the next section. But, in addition to providing training materials, HubSpot is easy for anyone with little technical knowledge to pick up and use. Because of their desire to reach businesses of all sizes, and the massive amount of feedback they can get from free versions of their tools, HubSpot has developed an intuitive and easy to use platform.
Salesforce is no doubt a very powerful solution, but all of that power comes with a steep learning curve. If you find that your business needs more customizable reports than what are available in HubSpot, and you have someone on staff who can take the time to learn the ins and outs of the software, then Salesforce might be the right choice for you.
HubSpot has worked really hard to create a learning environment that teaches users what they need to know to use the software effectively. Even if you have no experience in inbound marketing, they have video courses to teach you all about that, as well. In addition to online training, the company hosts an annual event called INBOUND. This event keeps marketers updated on changes and help people learn to use the tools better.
Salesforce also has a large set of training resources. But its library is more concerned about the software's technical aspects than it is with a broad overview of inbound marketing.
HubSpot being one of the most popular products in its class means that it has a lot of users. Because of these users, HubSpot has an active and thriving ecosystem where you'll find add-ons. These enhancements can help you integrate with other products or expand the capabilities of the software to better suit your specific use cases.
While HubSpot's app market will likely have everything you need, Salesforce also has a collection of add-ons. Their AppExchange market is the largest collection of third-party and aftermarket add-ons in the SaaS CRM space. If you are looking for an obscure integration or feature set not available on HubSpot, then it may be worth giving Salesforce a try.
A CRM doesn't do you much good if it doesn't provide you with data that you can use to make informed decisions regarding your business. With HubSpot, you'll be able to collate data from all of the hubs that you own into useful reports. They will give you actionable insights and keep you better informed about the health of your business and the state of your customer base.
We've already mentioned how customizable Salesforce's reports are — if you have the knowledge to use the software effectively. One of the factors driving that level of customization is the number of variables that the system tracks. In the HubSpot vs. Salesforce comparison, it gets a slight edge over HubSpot in this area.
When choosing between HubSpot and Salesforce, it largely comes done to needs and budget. HubSpot is the best tool available for any business that wants to start off free and slowly grow into the software. Salesforce takes more upfront investment, both in financial outlay and the time taken to learn the system. If you have any questions about something you've read here, or elsewhere on the blog, feel free to contact us.
Eniture Technology specializes in helping e-Commerce merchants grow by providing useful information, digital marketing services, off-the-shelf apps that solve common problems, and custom programming services. If you're interested in accelerating the growth of your online sales, please contact us. You might also enjoy this free information on the 10 reasons why you should be using HubSpot to grow your e-commerce business.
