HubSpot Vs Salesforce: Which One Is The Best CRM Software?

For any successful business, productivity and sales depend on the service-customer relationship.

Without an effective CRM that manages the leads, draws in more conversion rates, and ensures customer retention, no business can survive successfully.

HubSpot and Salesforce are two of the leading CRM software in the marketing industry. They ensure systematic customer management while engaging, attracting, and pleasing the customers with the services availed.

There exist numerous similarities between the services offered by HubSpot CRM and Salesforce CRM.

However, the important question is between HubSpot vs Salesforce, which is the best CRM software for your business? The answer solely depends upon your business needs, the types of services you offer to clients, and your budget.

Let’s help you decide which software is ideal for your business.

HubSpot vs Salesforce: Direct Comparison

HubSpot and Salesforce have well-known CRM services among software companies. Each CRM system has its own set of robust features to facilitate your business needs.

While HubSpot is a free CRM with a simple user interface and competitive marketing tools, Salesforce has an advanced CRM suite. They bring you more leads and higher conversion rates to manage your customers efficiently.

Following is a rough comparison of the features offered by Salesforce vs HubSpot. Comparing and contrasting these features can help you realize which software best suits your business requirements.

Features	HubSpot	Salesforce
User-Interface	Easy	Difficult
Contact Management	Available	Available
Lead Management	Available	Available
Analytic Reports	Average	Excellent
Customization Availability	Average	Excellent
E-commerce Integrations	Available	Available
Integrated Automations	Available	Available
Sales Forecasting	Available	Available
Reporting	Available	Available
E-mail Marketing	Available	Available
Free-Trial	14-Days	30-Days
Starting Price	Free	$25/Month
Customer Support Availability	24/7	24/7

What Is HubSpot?

HubSpot CRM is a lightweight, affordable CRM that entails marketing automation, sales analytics, reporting tools, and app integrations to allow your business to expand and grow.

Compared to other expensive CRM services in the market, HubSpot CRM carries an easy-to-use, interactive, and powerful platform that helps bring a delightful customer experience.

On its homepage, the company proudly features its success as a marketing hub. They have over seven million monthly visits, 143k customers, over a thousand available integrations, and 150 plus user groups to facilitate HubSpot’s CRM learning.

The service offers several free tools to its customers for sales or CRM, marketing, and CMS.

Under the Marketing tools, you can access email marketing, ad management, landing pages, and forms for free.

Under Sales and CRM services, you can access contact management, team mailing, calling, and Quotes. The customer services include having a shared inbox, email scheduling, live chat, and ticketing options.

A new feature has been recently added to CMS that offers free access to develop web pages, blogs, and basic SEO recommendations to promote your business.

Features

HubSpot CRM includes five prominent services on its website to facilitate various business needs of its customers. These services include Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, Service Hub, CMS Hub, and Operation Hub.

There are also some free tools that you can use to promote your platform without paying any charges.

1. Marketing Hub 

The Marketing Hub of HubSpot CRM helps you attract the right audience to your platform by running inbound marketing campaigns. 

Under this feature, you can also have access to the premium versions of all the free tools offered by HubSpot.

With Marketing Hub, you can:

• Track ROI rate using revenue attribution reporting
• Attract visitors to your site via blogging, social media, and ads
• Convert site visitors into potential customers by adding marketing automation and landing pages to your site
• Add personalized customizations to manage client’s data

2. Sales Hub

Sales Hub provides solutions to the sales teams in forming, managing, and maintaining customer relationships. The feature also helps form a sales pipeline to enhance leads and conversion rates.

Using this HubSpot CRM feature, you can:

• Have access to advance CRM
• Customize reports
• Add email sequencings
• Can track predictive lead scoring
• Add e-signatures
• Can enhance sales automation

3. Customer Service

The customer service feature offered by HubSpot is driven towards helping you connect with your customers at a deeper level, manage your teams, and improve work efficiency. 

Service Hub is easy to use, thanks to its user-friendly interface. You’ll also have full access to HubSpot CRM to help your sales teams deliver authentic customer service.

Using Service Hub, you can:

• Develop a shared inbox with your team
• Increase sales and marketing processes via knowledge-based performance
• Extract customer feedback and customer surveys
• Develop customer portals
• Track service analytics 

4. CMS Hub

Content Management System is a recent initiative launched for HubSpot users. The tool is a flexible feature for marketers, IT teams, and developers to design a personalized experience for their clients.

CMS allows marketers to create and personalize web pages for each visitor. With this feature, you can improve your site SEO, customize pages using the in-built themes, and integrate CRM to track visitors.

With its drag-and-drop editor, you can easily create or update your web pages without needing custom coding.

For developers, CMS is a great tool to develop, modify, and manage web pages easily. Using CMS, you can quickly identify code alerts such as design bugs that can hinder the site’s performance.

Adding interactive functions and dynamic content to the site is also easy.

For IT teams, CMS has made it easy to monitor the site, grant appropriate permissions to the site users, handle web traffic via custom CDN configurations, and track the site’s performance and proxy configurations. 

5. Operations Software

Operations software is another powerful feature by HubSpot that allows the users to sync, curate, or clean customers’ data and automate their business processes. Using operations software, it is easy for small businesses or teams to streamline customer data and customize customer services accordingly.

Using this feature, you can:

• Ensure that your sales and marketing teams are in-sync
• Eliminate time-consuming data cleanups
• Customize your customer data
• Customize team management and permissions
• Integrate third-party apps to your HubSpot CRM

What Is Salesforce?

Salesforce is a cloud-based SaaS that specializes in providing power CRM systems to its customers.

Salesforce CRM is a preferable choice for large enterprises and companies. It includes all the necessary tools with exceptional functionality that a company needs to manage its customers, increase leads, and grow conversions.

From a long list of available tools in Salesforce CRM, sales, marketing, analytics, and eCommerce take the limelight. Salesforce leverage its cloud computing technology to connect you with your customers while allowing you to use sales and marketing tools to reach out to a larger audience.

Salesforce CRM is also considered the fastest growing CRM platform, with over $13 billion of revenue generated in 2019. Their highly active user base, active customer support, and training teams that offer timely assistance drive this software to lead in the mark.

Features

Salesforce CRM is divided into three major categories, each designed per the clients’ needs to offer them affordable packages. These include packages by need, industry, and packages for small businesses.

Each of these packages has its own set of distinct features.

1. Customer 360 with Slack

Customer 360 with Slack is a comprehensive package offered by the company. It includes all the major products and services: marketing, sales, commerce, IT, analytics, and other management services to help you organize your workflow and build customer relationships.

It goes without saying that Customer 360 is a one-in-all platform with specialized features to help you through each step of your customer’s journey.

Not only can you grow your customer relationships, but the Slack-empowered Customer 360 also allows you to manage your employees from any corner of the world. With its innovative Einstein AI integration, you can also hire remote employees.

With every sale, marketing, and management feature available under one platform, Salesforce CRM allows effective and productive data-driven decisions to help you grow your business.

2. Products By Industry

Salesforce offers competitive features across various industries, including financial services, consumer goods, media, higher education, retail, and the manufacturing. 

3. Ideal for Small Businesses 

For small businesses, Salesforce provides basic services at affordable pricing. You can use Salesforce CRM to customize your sales and services, scale your businesses, and get the Salesforce Essentials to improve customer relationships.

HubSpot vs Salesforce: Breaking It Down

Now that you have a basic idea of the services and features offered by Salesforce and HubSpot, let’s dive into a detailed comparison between Salesforce vs HubSpot. This way, you’ll better understand which software best suits your business needs.

HubSpot vs Salesforce Pricing

Comparing the prices of the services offered by the two platforms ensures you pick one that offers great value for your money.

HubSpot

HubSpot is somewhat of a free CRM since it offers several basic tools and services. Within HubSpot, there are different suites available that you can upgrade using the pricing buckets available.

For example, HubSpot Sales Hub comes with three different pricing: $45/month, $450/month, and $1200/month. Similarly, HubSpot Marketing Hub starts at $45/month and goes up to $3200/month.

You can go through the packages and the features offered under each package in detail to analyze which package suits your business needs.

Salesforce 

Compared to HubSpot vs Salesforce marketing cloud, the latter is comparatively expensive. Since Salesforce is aimed toward large businesses and enterprises, you will find several bulk features under individual packages.

The cheapest plan available is for Salesforce Sales Cloud, which starts at $25/month and goes up to $300/month. These packages are mostly billed on an annual basis.

Customer 360, which entails comprehensive tools for all types of business needs, is available at $12,500/month per organization, with its priciest option being $65,000.

Winner: HubSpot

Regarding HubSpot vs Salesforce price points, HubSpot takes the lead since most of its services are free, easy to use, and upgradeable at minimal pricing.

HubSpot CRM vs Salesforce Services

Now, let’s compare the key services offered by each platform.

HubSpot

HubSpot offers its clients four primary services: Sales, Marketing, CMS, and CRM. Three of its major services, Sales, Marketing, and CRM, can be availed for free with limited functionality.

As you upgrade your packages, you can unlock the premium versions of these services, including additional functioning such as automated marketing, CMS, and third-party integrations.

Salesforce

Salesforce CRM comes with robust features in addition to powerful analytical tools that offer competitive features. Like HubSpot, it provides:

• All the major sales and marketing services.
• Customer-management tools.
• Analytical tools to track business growth and customer satisfaction.

Winner: Salesforce

Salesforce takes the lead in terms of its variety of services. From Customer 360 to small business services, Salesforce has all the solutions you need to grow your business.

HubSpot CRM vs Salesforce Customization

How about ensuring that you can customize the features according to your business needs? Let’s check out what each has to offer.

HubSpot 

HubSpot does allow customization of its available features. You can adjust the types of services you need and the focus of your marketing strategies. You also do not need any coding to customize HubSpot’s features.

However, you must upgrade your plan to a premium or higher to enjoy customization capabilities.

Salesforce

With its wide variety of features available in its packages, you can add specific new features to your Salesforce CRM dashboard. You can mix and match your tools to customize them per your need.

That said, you need to have some knowledge of coding to be able to customize Salesforce’s features to your desired need. Still, with its custom coding feature available, you can mold the service however you desire, without any limitations.

Winner: Salesforce

Salesforce is a clear winner in terms of customization of services. You have more flexibility, freedom, and margin to customize its features than HubSpot. 

HubSpot CRM vs Salesforce Ease of Use

A platform’s user-friendliness is essential as it equates to how much time and effort you need to learn its ins and outs. Let’s look at how different Hubspot vs Salesforce is in this feature.

HubSpot

HubSpot has an intuitive user interface that is easy to learn. You do not have to spend hours training to learn using the software. The more you use it, the more you will get the hang of its features.

There are also several HubSpot training rooms and a HubSpot academy available where you can learn to use the platform.

Salesforce

Compared to HubSpot vs Salesforce marketing cloud, the latter has a slightly complicated user interface. Especially for individuals who are new to using CRM, learning Salesforce takes some time and practice.

The good thing about Salesforce is that the company has platforms where you can get online training to use the software.

Winner: HubSpot

Regarding UI and User experience, HubSpot takes the lead since the interface is cleaner and easy to use.

HubSpot CRM vs Salesforce Integration

The more integration the platform you’re using supports, the more you can streamline your business operations.

HubSpot

Hubspot has numerous internally-supported integrations. Using HubSpot, you can integrate your site with several reputed services, including Salesforce, Zapier, WordPress, SurveyMonkey, and Chrome.

Some externally-built integrations are also available.

Salesforce

Salesforce also supports integration so that you can upgrade your CRM.

There are thousands of inbuilt integrations available within the Salesforce ecosystem. The platform also supports a number of externally-built integrations.

Winner: Salesforce

Salesforce takes the lead in terms of the availability of in-built integrations. That said, although HubSpot supports a limited list of integrations, it continuously expands and adds more variety to the list.

HubSpot CRM vs Salesforce Implementation

Comparing this feature is essential because it also affects the ease of use.

HubSpot

HubSpot is easier to implement, especially for small businesses that do not have vast data sets.

The integration cost for HubSpot is also minimal. You can even get started with your sales and marketing services and customer management in no time.

Salesforce

Integration Salesforce is complicated compared to HubSpot. Since Salesforce is meant for large businesses, implementing the service takes time and finance.

Implementing Salesforce to your business can take up to $5000 and several months at its best. 

However, the wait is worth the features and services it offers.

Once it is integrated, you can customize its services as per your needs and grow your business.

Winner: Salesforce

Salesforce is tough to integrate compared to HubSpot. However, it is worth the cost if you wish to grow your business using robust sales, marketing, management, and analytical tools offered by Salesforce.

HubSpot CRM vs Salesforce Support

Seeking assistance, from setup to technical issues, is critical for any business. With enough support, you’ll get provided with an immediate solution.

HubSpot

HubSpot offers different forms of customer support, each of which depends on the type of package that you buy. For example, if you are using the free version of HubSpot, you only get to have community support.

Under the starter package, you can avail of live chat and text support from HubSpot. If you are using upgraded plans like professional or enterprise plans, you can avail all forms of support, from community forums to live chat to text support to phone support.

Salesforce

Hubspot vs Salesforce marketing Cloud support services, the latter is a bit tricky to use. Salesforce has its live call support available, but getting the right agent for your queries is challenging.

Community forums on Salesforce can also guide you with your queries. You can also use the live chat feature, but you need to log into the app to avail of the services.

Winner: HubSpot

HubSpot is a clear winner in terms of having an efficient and responsive customer support service. Although chat and call support is only available with the upgraded versions, it still exceeds the mark compared to Salesforce services.

Final Recount

HubSpot takes the lead in terms of having competent support, ease of accessibility, and pricing. That said, Salesforce is better in terms of its services, customizations, integrations, and implementation.

Pros and Cons

To have a better understanding of the differences between Hubspot vs Salesforce, let’s compare their benefits and drawbacks.

Salesforce vs HubSpot: Which Is the best CRM?

While both HubSpot vs Salesforce is leading CRM services in the industry, Salesforce takes the lead over HubSpot in terms of its performance, customization, and the variety of services and integrations available.

HubSpot offers numerous free tools that can be beneficial to expanding your business and improving your customer relationships. However, if you run a large business that needs in-depth management, Salesforce is the best choice.

With its automated features, you can manage and market your business with greater ease and flexibility than HubSpot.

Frequently Asked Questions

We answered some of the most common questions about CRM, especially Hubspot and Salesforce, for you to learn more about them.

1. Why do I need a CRM for my business?

CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management system, which is a key factor in collecting, organizing, and managing customers’ information.

Having a CRM platform allows the sales team to track buyers’ journeys, realize the buyers’ interest, streamline communication accordingly, and enhance customer experience and data management.

Without a salesforce CRM, you won’t be able to keep up with the lead flow and sort the flooding customer data.

2. Are HubSpot and Salesforce open-source software?

HubSpot and Salesforce are cloud-based CRM platforms. However, these platforms are not open-source software.

If you are looking for some best available options for open-source CRM platforms, you can check out SuiteCRM or Odoo CRM.

3. Can you use Hubspot and Salesforce CRM platforms for real estate business?

Yes. Both HubSpot and Salesforce are compatible with businesses related to real estate.

They have competent customer service tools to facilitate customer management, build relationships with customers, and enhance buyers’ experience.

HubSpot and Salesforce also have the necessary marketing and sales tools to help you maximize lead management and conversions.

4. Does Tesla use Salesforce as its CRM?

Tesla used to have Salesforce as its primary CRM, which the company later replaced in 2020 with a proprietary CRM known as “Tesla Operating System.”

However, before the company shifted to its custom CRM, Salesforce worked as a leading CRM platform for the company to manage its customers and enhance customer-relationship.

5. Is HubSpot easier to use compared to Salesforce?

Yes. HubSpot is really easy to use compared to Salesforce. The minimalistic layout and user-friendly interface can help boost conversion rates and leads.

However, when it comes to Salesforce, the platform has advanced marketing tools, customization features, and CRM tools, making it a competitive software in the market.

6. Will HubSpot takeover Salesforce?

At present, Salesforce CRM is in the lead, given its advanced sales tools, CRM solutions, and automation and marketing features.

However, with the recent developments and integrations made in HubSpot, the software is catching up to Salesforce’s performance and features. It is expected to take the lead in the marketing hub in the coming years.

7. Does Volkswagen use Salesforce?

Yes. Volkswagen is one of the prominent Salesforce users. The company has been Salesforce CRM for the past six years, since 2017.Volkswagen started with Salesforce to replace the unfit-for-purpose CRM with a cloud-based CRM. Since then, Salesforce has become the leading CRM to help the company manage its customers, track the leads, and maximize the conversion rates.