Freshsales and HubSpot CRM have excellent reporting and analytics, customizable pipelines, integrations, and mobile apps. When it comes to workflow, approval automation, and contact scoring, Freshsales has more of the edge. HubSpot, on the other hand, has excellent pipeline management, and its email tracking is available in the free plan, which is only usable if you have a paid plan in Freshsales.
We recommend assessing your specific customer relationship management (CRM) needs first to determine what you need to improve on your lead generation, sales, and overall business operations before comparing Freshsales and HubSpot CRM. In general, we recommend:
- HubSpot CRM: Excellent choice for email marketing and pipeline management
- Freshsales: Best for workflow automation and contact scoring
Freshsales vs HubSpot Compared
 |  | |
|---|---|---|
Our CRM Rating Out of 5 | 4.60 | 4.19 |
Free Trial or Plan | Free plan | Free plan |
Starting Monthly Price* | Free up to 2 users, $15 per user | Free (unlimited users) or $18 (two users) |
Workflow Automation | ✓ | ✓ |
Reporting & Analytics | ✓ | ✓ |
Email Marketing | Two-way email sync and map incoming emails; Create and send customized email marketing campaigns using ready-to-use templates | Advanced email automation, mass email, plus templates and segmentation |
Mobile Application | ✓ | ✓ |
Artificial Intelligence (AI) Tools | Freddy AI provides smart suggestions for tasks, meetings, and deal closure; Custom bots help generate leads and send welcome visitor messages | HubSpot AI Website generator, AI content writer, social caption generator, and AI email writer |
Integrations | API and marketplace integrations available | 1,000+ third-party and native software options |
Ease of Use | Simple to use by first-timers and mid-level users | Great usability for setting up, operating features, and navigating interface |
Customer Support | 24/7 customer service hours, email ticketing system, phone support, and knowledge base resources | 24/7 customer service hours, live chat, email ticketing system, phone support, and knowledge base resources |
*Pricing is based on annual billing on a per user, per month breakdown. This reflects information available at the time of publishing. While we update this information regularly, we encourage our readers to check current Freshsales CRM pricing and HubSpot CRM pricing to stay up-to-date.
Best Alternatives to Freshsales & HubSpot
If you are unsure what to choose between Freshsales and HubSpot, you might want to consider checking other providers that you can compare them with.
 |  |  |  | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Best For | Best all-in-one CRM solution for revenue management | Best for customizing sales pipelines | Solid option for proposal and deal management | Best for Google integrations |
Starting Price | $14 per user, per month | $10 (3-user minimum requirement) | $24 per user, per month | $23 per user, per month |
Learn More | Read our Zoho CRM review or | Read our monday CRM review or | Read our Pipedrive review or | Read our Copper CRM review or |
Find more options in our lists of recommended best sales apps for small businesses and HubSpot CRM competitors.
Most Affordable: Freshsales CRM
 | | |
|---|---|---|
Our Pricing Rating Out of 5 | 5 | 4 |
Freemium Trial or Plan | ✓ | ✓ |
$15 per user | $18 (two users) | |
$69 per user | $5,000 (10 users) | |
Billing Options | Monthly and annual | Monthly and annual |
Free Trial | 21 days | 14 days |
Freshsales pricing includes free and premium subscriptions with monthly and annual payment plans. The free plan has limited features, so availing the basic plan is highly recommended if you need more CRM capabilities, like lead scoring and deal management. The starting plan costs $15 per month with artificial intelligence (AI)-powered contact scoring, custom sales activities, and sales sequences. These features are used to nurture sales contacts and turn them into paying customers.
Furthermore, Freshsales offers complete advanced features, including workflow automation, marketing automation, auto-profile enrichment, and contact scoring for lead generation and sales data management. However, most of these features are only available in paid plans.
On the other hand, HubSpot offers forever-free foundational CRM tools with a starting paid plan cost of $18 for two users per month. The CRM Suit Starter includes expanded task management, multiple ticketing, deal pipelines, payment processing, and up to 500 minutes per account, per month with mobile calling and caller ID.
However, some small business owners may not find the price favorable because HubSpot offers costlier high-tiered plans, especially when stacked against Freshsales’ pricing scalability. The Professional plan costs $1,600 per month, and the Enterprise plan costs $5,000 per month, both for 10 paid users and paid annually.
Winner: Freshsales wins in the HubSpot vs Freshsales pricing category as it offers more scalable premium plan options at lower prices than HubSpot. Nevertheless, growing small businesses find HubSpot’s software packages and bundled plans just right for their CRM needs.
Best for Artificial Intelligence (AI) Tools: Freshsales
| | |
|---|---|---|
Task Command Functions | ✓ | ✓ |
Chatbot | ✓ | ✓ |
Free AI Tools | ✓ | ✓ |
Performance Recommendations | ✓ | ✕ |
Content Generation | Personalized business emails, articles, social media posts, meta descriptions, single-page website, and customer service responses | Blogs, emails, meta descriptions, single-page website, social media captions, and prospecting templates |
Intelligent Insights | Sales copilot, offers real-time recommendations, risk signals, contact scoring, and deal-specific insights | Lead scoring, marketing metrics, internal sales team performance, forecast, and customer satisfaction levels |
Freshsales introduced Freddy AI, an AI tool powered by OpenAI’s ChatGPT. This AI helps find potential customers and creates personalized emails. The AI’s contact scoring feature can help sales and customer service reps prioritize and personalize customer engagement by deeply understanding customer behavior on an app or website. Freddy AI empowers sales teams by scoring contacts to drive conversions and sales.
HubSpot CRM’s AI-powered tool called ChatSpot helps users dive deep into company data such as locations, technologies, users, and funding rounds. You can use HubSpot’s AI for free across all plans, making it one of the best AI CRMs with its content assistant, smart assistant, and chatbot builder. You can ask questions and automate tasks like generating support tickets, receiving updates, sending email follow-ups, and creating reports and sales prospecting templates.
Freshsales Freddy AI conversation summarizer (Source: Freshsales)
HubSpot ChatSpot AI targeted sales prospecting (Source: ChatSpot)
Winner: Freshsales is the winner in the best in AI tool category. Freddy AI does an excellent job beyond content generation, capable of summarizing customer service correspondence and providing in-depth sales performance insights.
Best for Email Marketing: HubSpot
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|---|---|---|
Mass Emailing | Yes, send emails in bulk and run personalized outbound campaigns with Sales Sequences and Workflows | Yes, with static and dynamic customer segmentation options |
Email Templates | ✓ | ✓ |
A/B Testing | ✕ | ✓ |
Campaign Tracking for Email Results & Return on Investment (ROI) | Yes, track open and click rates of emails sent | Yes, with email health reporting to monitor open rate, click-through rate, unsubscribe rate, and hard bounce rate |
Email correspondence is one of the critical business activities. Email marketing features, like email sequencing and workflow automation, enable sales and marketing teams to nurture leads by sending mass email messages and implementing email campaigns to CRM contacts.
Freshsales allows sales teams to stay focused on selling with its two-way email sync, so existing conversations and calendars are automatically connected. Also, this feature intelligently maps incoming messages to the respective contacts, saving time and boosting productivity. Sales teams can send mass emails and implement personalized outbound campaigns depending on lead activities and behaviors with sales sequences and automated workflows. However, Freshsales only offers A/B testing for landing pages.
Meanwhile, HubSpot’s Starter plan includes email marketing automation features. Its Professional and Enterprise plans, on the other hand, offer omnichannel marketing automation with unlimited actions, but they come with a heftier price. Still, HubSpot remains the best in email marketing because of its customizable sales email templates for mass emailing and A/B test feature for email messages. Plus, it has segmentation capabilities that help create a dynamic list that automatically updates according to contact activities to acquire the right leads.
HubSpot email tracking (Source: HubSpot)
Freshsales email tracking (Source: Freshsales)
Winner: HubSpot’s built-in email marketing features give sales teams comprehensive workflow automation, analytics, and optimization for their campaigns. This CRM has advanced email communication features and built-in, easy-to-use email templates, unlike Freshsales, which requires email integration.
Best Reporting & Analytics Tools: It’s a Tie
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|---|---|---|
Reporting Capabilities | Key performance indicators (KPIs), sales cycle, and velocity reports | Revenue, email campaign results, pipeline health, and activity |
Customization | Customizable dashboards and reports | Custom analytics, reports, and dashboards |
Predictions & Forecasting | Custom prediction builder feature | Custom forecasting, including across team hierarchies |
Scheduled Reporting | ✓ | ✓ |
AI Insights | Freddy AI to generate deal-specific insights, optimize sales activities, and close deals faster | Data enrichment, deduplication, and easy imports |
Reporting and analytics tools are useful in gauging the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns, sales activities, deal insights, etc. Both Freshsales and HubSpot provide excellent reporting and analytics for sales teams to track sales reps’ performance and campaign metrics.
Freshsales offers in-depth sales analytics and ready-to-use report templates, helping teams gain action-oriented sales performance insights and make profitable decisions. With the sales cycle and velocity reports, you can determine the top performers on your team and their corresponding sales territories. Build custom reports on accounts, sales, contacts, leads, and opportunities.
On the other hand, HubSpot also enables you to track high-level email campaigns and sales metrics. You can generate revenue forecasts and evaluate sales performance metrics on customizable dashboards or auto-generated scheduled reports. You can download these reports or automatically send them through email.
HubSpot sales performance dashboard (Source: HubSpot)
Freshsales sales analytics dashboard (Source: Freshsales)
Winner: Both CRMs offer robust sales reporting and analytics tools that are easy to use and accurate, with customizable dashboards. For these qualities, we gave Freshsales and HubSpot equal scores.
Visit Freshsales Visit HubSpot
Best Mobile App: It’s a Tie
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|---|---|---|
Mobile Data Management | Manage contacts, deals, and accounts | Access tasks, deals, CRM records and dashboards |
Mobile Communication & Collaboration Tools | Make phone calls, send emails, and record voice calls; Track and schedule follow-up sales activities; Push notifications and notification cards | Live chat, email, outbound phone calls, and call recording |
Mobile Interface Design | Simple, user-friendly interface, customizable | Clean interface that’s easy to navigate |
Freshsales mobile app enables you to engage email, phone, chat, and third-party communication tools like WhatsApp. Use the app’s check-in feature to keep your sales team informed about scheduled offline lead meetings. You can also personalize the app, like switching languages or getting notifications for critical calls, emails, or appointments.
HubSpot allows users to make calls from their HubSpot-provided phone number. The app comes with a caller ID feature that displays the caller’s contact information and company data. Sales reps receive alerts when tasks are due, a teammate @mentions you, and contacts book a meeting.
HubSpot mobile app (Source: Google Play)
Freshsales mobile app (Source: Google Play)
Winner: Freshsales and HubSpot have impressive mobile CRM capabilities. Both apps are easy to use and have very sales-useful CRM features, like calls, emails, in-depth insights, communication, sales prospecting, and tracking tools.
Visit Freshsales Visit HubSpot
Best Integrations: HubSpot
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|---|---|---|
Third-party Integrations | 17 native app integrations and 21 other integrations | 1,000+ third-party and native software options |
Native Software Tools | Sales, marketing, social, customer service, help desk, content, and revenue management native apps available for enterprise operations | Marketing, Service, and Content Management Hubs available to bundle plus hundreds of native tools |
Freshsales provides all the usual integrations, such as native integrations with Freshdesk and Freshcaller, and third parties like Trello and JustCall, but there aren’t as many as HubSpot. However, the Zapier connection can help with integration. Native app integrations include Freshworks’ software solutions, Google Calendar, Mailchimp, QuickBooks, and Google apps for work. You can also integrate this CRM into Facebook, Trello, and Magneto.
HubSpot has a more robust integrations list because of its marketplace. Therefore, direct app integration is possible, wherein users can use their existing apps without leaving HubSpot. Sales teams can integrate HubSpot into Slack, Mailchimp, Trello, and Facebook.
Freshsales featured apps integrations (Source: Freshsales)
HubSpot robust app integrations (Source: HubSpot)
Winner: HubSpot bags the top spot in the Freshworks vs HubSpot integration category. HubSpot has already established a massive network of app partners, whereas Freshworks, which Freshsales is under, is still in the process of acquiring more app integrations.
Most User-friendly: Freshsales
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|---|---|---|
System Setup | Easy to set up and use | Easy and simple configuration |
Feature Operations | Automatic prompts as an implementation guide and intuitive tools without significant learning curve | Intuitive tools without significant learning curve |
Interface Navigation | Simple, highly intuitive user interface design | Simple, highly intuitive user interface design |
The Freshsales user interface is simple to navigate for beginners and mid-level users. Its intuitive display contains everything you need in the main menu, which includes the Activities Dashboard, Contacts, Deals, Conversations, Reports & Dashboard, and Admin Settings. The automatic prompts pop up to assist a user through the customization process. If you need help on how to use this CRM platform, you can check its knowledge base or set up a complimentary onboarding session.
HubSpot has a clean, modern-looking interface that is user-friendly for those of varying technical expertise. This CRM is easy to set up with easy-to-create data fields, automation building, and pipeline customization options.
HubSpot dashboard (Source: HubSpot)
Freshsales dashboard (Source: Freshsales)
Winner: Both CRMs are notable for user-friendliness and intuitive platform navigation because of their straightforward and easy-to-use interface.
Visit Freshsales Visit HubSpot
Best Customer Support: HubSpot
| | |
|---|---|---|
Online/Self-help Resources | Knowledge base, blog, community forum | Knowledge base, blog, community forum, and certifications through HubSpot Academy |
Phone Support | Available 24/5 across all plans | Available 24/7 for Professional and Enterprise plans only |
Live Chat Support | Available 24/5 across all plans | Available 24/7 on all paid CRM Suite plans |
Email Support | Available 24/5 across all plans | Available 24/7 on all paid CRM Suite plans |
HubSpot has a phone hotline for urgent issues and an email for general queries with a one-day response time. Phone support, however, is only available on Professional and Enterprise plans. Nevertheless, email and chat support are available across all paid plans. HubSpot also has 24/7 customer support and a callback option for multitasking while a support rep investigates your case and an active user community for community-based assistance.
Freshsales users can receive 24/5 customer support via chat, email, and phone across all its plans. Sales teams can use the knowledge base to learn how to use specific functions and best practices. Users can pick any of the 30 topic categories with how-to articles on phone settings, account management, and deal and pipeline management.
HubSpot ticket submission (Source: HubSpot)
Freshsales ticket submission (Source: Freshsales)
Winner: Both CRM systems offer excellent customer support. But HubSpot lands as the winner in this Freshsales vs HubSpot category as it provides a more comprehensive customer support system than Freshsales. Because of it, sales teams can obtain quick answers and resolutions, allowing them to focus more on selling and closing deals.
What Users Say About Freshsales & HubSpot
Both Freshsales and HubSpot are two of the best CRM software for small businesses. Users are happy about their pricing, easy-to-use, functionalities, and overall value. As a result, the public highly favors these CRMs. However, there are industries and specific use cases that prefer one over the other. Below, we compared Freshsales and HubSpot based on review scores from highly respected software review websites:
- G2: 4.4 out of 5 based on 10,943 reviews
- Gartner: 4.4 out of 5 based on 2,080 reviews
- Google Play: 4.5 out of 5 based on 8,190 reviews
- App Store: 4.7 out of 5 based on 9,700 reviews
- G2: 4.5 out of 5 based on 1,110 reviews
- Gartner: 3.9 out of 5 based on 11 reviews
- Google Play: 4.1 out of 5 based on 955 reviews
- App Store: 4.5 out of 5 based on 375 reviews
Freshsales users highlighted the seamless use of this CRM’s workflow automation and contact scoring features. Many users also highlighted the ease of use, ease of admin, and robust CRM Freshsales. However, some users say that the free plan lacks file storage and email marketing features like two-way email sync and bulk emails.
On the other hand, users appreciate the user-friendliness, email marketing, and pipeline-deal management features of HubSpot. The app is easy to use, allowing users to add and manage contacts and clients and interact with website visitors. However, users noticed limited custom fields and no option to acquire extra ones.
How We Evaluated Freshsales vs HubSpot
We thoroughly compared Freshsales and HubSpot by evaluating key product attributes important to small teams and small businesses when choosing a CRM software. We compared their prices, features, user-friendliness, and customer support, and provided our expert score and feedback from actual users.
Below, you’ll find tabs that provide a more comprehensive look at how we conducted our Freshsales vs HubSpot CRM evaluation:
20% of Overall Score
When it comes to assessing HubSpot vs Freshsales CRM pricing, we considered the availability of a free plan and the range of flexible pricing options. Additionally, we determined whether subscribers had the option to make monthly payments or opt for annual billing to save on overall costs.
25% of Overall Score
In the general features section, we assessed fundamental features that are essential in any CRM product, including CRM integration, customizable pipelines, and the availability of a mobile application. Additionally, we assess typical modular features in both Freshsales and HubSpot’s systems, encompassing reporting and analytics tools, mobile app accessibility, and pipeline and deal management.
20% of Overall Score
In this category, we focused on examining tools and modules that are frequently sought after by users and teams who lean toward Freshsales and HubSpot. Notably, features like email tracking and marketing, workflow automation, artificial intelligence, auto-profile enrichment, and contact scoring are areas where both CRMs excel, providing more advanced capabilities compared to alternative CRM solutions.
20% of Overall Score
Comprehensive support and excellent customer service are vital in mitigating potential user issues and ensuring positive outcomes when utilizing either of these CRM systems. We took into account customer service hours and the accessibility of support channels including phone, live chat, and email. Furthermore, we checked the availability of online knowledge base resources for users, including tutorials, forums, or training modules, to assist them in their CRM experience.
15% of Overall Score
Apart from our direct experience with these software systems, we also conducted an evaluation based on user feedback. These criteria take into account user reviews to gauge platform popularity, user-friendliness, standout features, and the overall value offered at their respective price points. This approach helps us gain valuable insights into customer sentiments.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
What is the best alternative to HubSpot?
Pipedrive, Zoho CRM, and Freshsales are the best HubSpot alternatives. Pipedrive has an exceptional AI sales assistant tool for sales task automation, unlimited sales pipelines, and affordable pricing plans. Zoho CRM and Freshsales offer excellent workflow automation and contact scoring, allowing sales teams to create more effective strategies to win more deals.
Who competes against HubSpot?
Freshsales and Zoho are the top competitors of HubSpot. These CRMs have robust reporting and analytics, pipeline management, integrations, AI, mobile apps, profile enrichment, and automation capabilities. Sales teams can use this guide to compare HubSpot vs Freshworks since Freshsales is a product of Freshworks.
Which is cheaper than HubSpot?
Freshsales is cheaper than HubSpot. Freshsales includes free and premium subscriptions with flexible payment plans monthly or annually. The starting plan of Freshsales is reasonably priced at $15 per month and $69 per user for the highest plan. The basic plan already includes AI-powered contact scoring, custom sales activities, and sales sequences for lead nurturing to convert them into paying customers. On the other hand, the HubSpot basic plan costs $18 and $5,000 for up to 10 users for the Enterprise plan.
Bottom Line
Freshsales and HubSpot are two of the most popular CRMs available due to their robust general and advanced features that suit the varying needs of small businesses. HubSpot CRM has the best email marketing and deal and pipeline management features. This CRM also provides free AI tools for generating templates. On the other hand, Freshsales CRM pricing is more affordable than HubSpot and the best CRM for workflow automation and contact scoring, empowering sales teams to generate more leads and win more deals.
