Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software is the backbone of sales and marketing teams, ensuring seamless operations and improved customer engagement.
The revenue for the CRM software market is forecasted to reach US$98.84 billion in 2025, reflecting its growing significance. When it comes to selecting a CRM, two industry leaders stand out: HubSpot and Salesforce.
While Salesforce has long dominated the market, HubSpot has emerged as a powerful alternative, offering ease of use and a comprehensive feature set. But which CRM is right for your business? This guide will compare HubSpot vs. Salesforce to help you make an informed decision.
Why Your Business Needs a CRM
A CRM is crucial for managing leads, tracking customer interactions, and optimizing sales and marketing processes. Without a CRM, businesses struggle to store and analyze customer data effectively. However, choosing the right CRM depends on your business size, budget, and specific needs.
Looking for a CRM Solution for your business, set up a consultation with Rolustech’s experts and we’ll help you lay down the groundwork for future CRM adoption!
HubSpot vs. Salesforce: A Detailed Comparison
While ideally, you’d want a blanket statement pointing towards which CRM, Hubspot or Salesforce, is better for your business, the truth isn’t that simple. It all depends on your requirements. HubSpot and Salesforce are both exceptional platforms that provide users with different types of benefits. Let’s dive in and see what are the most essential features that you need to keep in mind, while trying to decide between the two!
1. Pricing & Affordability
HubSpot Pricing
- HubSpot offers a free CRM with essential tools for small businesses
- Paid plans start at $45/month, with additional marketing, sales, and service features included in higher-tier plans
- No hidden costs for essential functionalities
Salesforce Pricing
- Salesforce’s pricing starts at $25/user/month but can quickly rise to $300/user/month for advanced features.
- Additional costs for add-ons, customizations, and integrations can make it expensive for growing businesses
Rolustech’s Verdict: HubSpot is more budget-friendly, especially for startups and SMBs, while Salesforce caters to enterprises need advanced features. When it comes to the straight-out-of-the-box solution, HubSpot definitely has an advantage over Salesforce thanks to it’s more user-friendly pricing.
2. Setup & User Experience
As the name suggests, the main goal of a CRM is to assist you in organizing and managing all your customer data. Consequently, a CRM should be easy to setup and must offer a smooth and intuitive user experience.
Comparing both HubSpot and Salesforce, it’s clear to see that HubSpot has a significantly easier setup and a more intuitive user experience. That’s not to say that Salesforce offers a worse user experience, no on the contrary it has a lot more options than HubSpot. However, it’s those additional functionalities and integrations that make the setup more challenging.
These differences arise because both these CRMs were designed with different goals in mind. Salesforce is marketed more as an enterprise level solution for larger organizations. These organizations generally require more complex customizations and integrations, which can hinder the setup and user experience.
However, HubSpot offers a much simpler out-of-the-box experience. Even people that aren’t the most tech savvy can setup and start using HubSpot because of it’s simpler nature. It does give up the more complex customizations and integrations, in favor of an easier setup and a more intuitive user experience.
Rolustech’s Verdict: Once again, HubSpot takes the lead on setup and user experience. However, it’s important to remember the overall functionality as well. Given the number of customizations and integrations Salesforce supports, it might be more challenging to setup and offers a slightly more complex user experience, it also offers a much more complete and customizable CRM.
3. Features & Functionality
Salesforce and HubSpot both offer their customers a robust suite of features. With the dizzying number of features available, it can be difficult for those unfamiliar with the platforms to identify which feature is essential, and what actually boils down to some basic marketing jargon.
No need to worry, we’ll highlight all the essential features that’ll help make your final decision much easier.
Marketing Features
When it comes to Marketing, both Salesforce and HubSpot offer a wide host of features that cover; email marketing, social media marketing, and content marketing. However, because HubSpot initially started out as an inbound marketing software, it’s range of marketing functions is much greater than Salesforce. Additionally, to get access to all the marketing features Salesforce has on offer, users might have to pay an additional price for the marketing cloud.
HubSpot on the other hand is much more flexible with a lot of it’s marketing features available on a variety of different plans.
Rolustech’s Verdict: HubSpot has a much more complete and flexible collection of marketing features. While Salesforce also offers a comprehensive suite of marketing features, it’s pricing can often leave a lot of small-scale enterprises priced out of the best features.
Sales Features
With Sales in it’s name, it’s quite obvious that Salesforce is going to offer users a comprehensive list of sales features to help empower the sales team. Thanks to the Einstein AI engine, Salesforce offers predictive lead scoring, opportunity insights, and task automation. It also offers customizable pipelines that feature AI-driven forecasts.
In comparison, HubSpot also offers users with sales features like pipeline management and automation, but their offerings aren’t as robust as the ones Salesforce offers.
Rolustech’s Verdict: Salesforce offers users a host of highly customizable and powerful sales features, with advanced AI capabilities as well. While HubSpot’s sales features are designed to simplify the sales process for SMBs. Salesforce definitely takes the upper hand when it comes to sales features.
Customer Support/ Service Features
Both HubSpot and Salesforce also offer customer support features in their respective Service Hub, and Service Cloud. HubSpot offers ticketing, a knowledge base, live chat, and customer feedback.
On the other hand Salesforce offers omnichannel support, AI-powered solutions, field service, and telephony integration.
Rolustech’s Verdict: While both platforms offer robust customer support features, they’re designed for entirely different purposes. HubSpot is ideal for small teams needing basic ticketing and chatbots. Salesforce excels in large-scale support with omnichannel and AI tools.
Reporting and Analytics
For reporting and analytics, both platforms offer robust capabilities. However, they cater to different users needs and levels of complexity. Here’s a detailed breakdown of their features in this category.
We’ll start off with HubSpot. HubSpot provides users with out-of-the-box dashboards for marketing, sales, and services metrics. Users can also generate custom report through drag-and-drop tools. The analytical tools include traffic, campaign, sales, and service analytics. Additionally, you’ll also get access to a suite of SEO tools as well.
On the other hand Salesforce features highly customizable dashboards that users will have to build. It offers an advanced reporting suite that covers tabular, summary, matrix, and joined reports. The analytical tools on offer are much robust, you’ll get access to Einstein, sales, marketing, and service analytics. Salesforce also offers users a host of data visualization options along with AI-driven insights.
Rolustech’s Verdict: Salesforce offers a much more robust suite of reporting and analytics features with highly customizable dashboards and advanced reporting options. HubSpot on the other hand is more ideal for inbound marketing and sales teams focused on simplicity and ease of use. It’s best to go with Salesforce if you require depth and scalability in reporting and analytics.
4. CRM & Customization
Now that you have an understanding of the different features on offer, let’s look at the CRM platforms and the level of customization they offer.
HubSpot’s CRM is designed with providing a straight out-of-the-box solution that offers users with a simple and intuitive interface. As a result the customization options are a bit limited. That’s not to say that there aren’t any, users can generate custom properties such as basic fields and workflows for their SMB needs.
In comparison, Salesforce is designed to be highly customizable and scalable. You can customize essentially everything in Salesforce, from the layout to different objects, fields, and APIs. The AppExchange also features more than 5,000 apps for extended functionality.
Overall HubSpot is completely simplistic in nature, while Salesforce provides users with enterprise-level customization.
5. Integrations & Ecosystem
A CRM’s overall functionality also depends massively on the integrations it offers and the overall app ecosystem.
While HubSpot initially started out as a simple out-of-the-box CRM, it has expanded significantly from that day. The platform now offers more than a 1000 native integrations and a growing marketplace.
Salesforce on the other hand has a massive app ecosystem in comparison. The Salesforce AppExchange features more than 7000 applications which includes ERP/BI tools.
6. User Experience
HubSpot provides its users with an intuitive and beginner-friendly interface that requires minimal training. Anyone can easily download the platform and get a feel for how the CRM works. Even individuals that’ve got very little prior knowledge will be able to familiarize themselves with the interface and use effectively.
On the other hand, Salesforce is much more robust platform with a steeper learning curve but unparalleled depth when it comes to the user experience. However, you’ll need someone familiar with the platform to help set up the required customization. Once the initial discovery phase is over and your Salesforce instance is completely set up, you’ll be able to use it easily.
Salesforce vs. HubSpot: Which one should you choose?
Now that you have a clear picture of what sets the two platforms apart, let’s take a look at which one is the right choice for your organization.
HubSpot will suit your business if you require an easy-to-use CRM that features built-in marketing tools for your inbound marketing or sales teams. The platform also features a very quick setup that requires minimal technical expertise, any layman can easily figure out the process. Additionally, if your business has a limited budget, then HubSpot is definitely more likely to fit your requirements.
On the other hand, if you need a highly customizable CRM that features advanced analytics with heavy-duty AI integrations, then Salesforce is the right option. If you’re a business with very complex sales processes that require automation, then you’re much better off picking Salesforce over HubSpot. Lastly, you should only opt for Salesforce, if your company has the resources for buying the necessary licenses, organizing training sessions, and customizing the platform to suit your business needs.
Final Thoughts
Both HubSpot and Salesforce offer excellent CRM solutions, but the ideal choice depends entirely on your business requirements. HubSpot is better suited to small and mid-sized businesses that are looking for an affordable, easy-to-use platform. In comparison, Salesforce is better suited to enterprises that require deep customization and AI-driven insights.
As official Salesforce partners and having completed multiple HubSpot implementations for organizations, Rolustech is the ideal choice if you need help picking the right CRM for your business.
Contact us and we’ll help you figure out which CRM is the right fit for your business needs!
