HubSpot CRM Review: Is It Right for Your Business?
Jess served on the founding team of a successful B2B startup and has used a wide range of sales and marketing tools over the course of her 15-year career. She uses her industry knowledge to deliver the best answers to your questions about sales tools and sales management.
Jill is a writer at Fit Small Business specializing on Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software.
This article is part of a larger series on CRM.
HubSpot CRM
What We Like
- Free plan offers useful email marketing tools, such as email templates and reply tracking
- Unlimited users and contacts
- User-friendly interface
- Can integrate multiple social media accounts
What's Missing
- Free plan lacks access to customer support and is only limited to forums
- Plan upgrades are expensive
- Requires an additional cost for added marketing, sales, and customer service tools
- Some integrations require additional monthly fees
HubSpot Is Recommended For:
HubSpot CRM is an easy-to-use CRM packed with features for sales and marketing. Its free version is suitable for startups and small businesses that do not need advanced tools to handle their leads and contacts. Its paid version under HubSpot CRM’s Sales Hub, on the other hand, can keep up with larger businesses and enterprises, especially those that focus on building their social media presence and nurturing leads.
HubSpot CRM is a customer relationship management (CRM) software that offers business owners a centralized, user-friendly interface to manage customers, understand their behavior, and increase satisfaction and retention rates. It provides email, social media, lead, and pipeline management tools. It is best for businesses that want a free or affordable, feature-rich CRM system.
Who HubSpot CRM Is Best For
- Sales teams that need robust lead management tools: Several of HubSpot CRM’s features, such as lead segmentation, sales activity logs, and sales pipeline reports, work together to streamline the lead management processes. The platform gives you an extensive view of your lead communications, making it one of our top picks for the best lead management software.
- Businesses that use social media to communicate with customers: HubSpot CRM integrates with your accounts on Facebook Ads and Messenger, Twitter, and Instagram. Not only does it give you a platform to easily communicate with your customers, but it also enables you to include social media posts in your marketing campaign and monitor interactions, making it one of our top picks for the best social CRM platforms.
- Users who need robust but affordable email marketing tools: HubSpot CRM features tools for creating email templates and mass emailing—even in its free version. Its email tracking tool notifies you when someone opens and reads your email or clicks a link on it. These functionalities make it one of our top choices for the best CRM for email marketing.
Who HubSpot CRM Is Not a Good Fit For
- Small businesses that require a lot of customer support: HubSpot CRM’s free plan does not include access to its customer support team. Instead, you will have access to the knowledge base and community forums. If customer support is a priority, check out Pipedrive, which provides support through email, phone, and chat. If you want to see the differences between the two, here’s a detailed comparison of HubSpot CRM and Pipedrive.
- Teams that need strong project management tools: HubSpot CRM doesn’t offer a lot of project management tools and is mostly limited to basic task management. If you need robust project management tools, check out Insightly. If you want to see the differences between the two, here’s a comparison between HubSpot CRM and Insightly.
- Real estate brokerages looking for an inexpensive CRM tool: Although HubSpot CRM offers many marketing, sales, operations, and content solutions for real estate professionals, additional features get expensive after the initial Starter plan. For more affordable options, consider Pipedrive as a lower-priced alternative or free real estate CRM.
HubSpot CRM Pricing
HubSpot CRM is well-known for having an excellent free plan. It also has paid pricing plans that range from $45 per month with a minimum of two users to $1,200 per month for 10 users. More users can be added to each plan; it costs $23 to $120 per additional user, depending on the plan chosen.
Plans | Free | Starter | Professional | Enterprise |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Best For | Solo entrepreneurs who need basic email marketing tools | Small to medium businesses that need a simple but affordable lead management system | Medium-sized businesses that are dependent on email marketing activities to expand their customer base | Big and enterprise-level businesses that need sales analytics and predictive tools |
Monthly Pricing ($/Month)* | Free | $50 per month for 2 users | $500 per month for 5 users | N/A |
Annual Pricing ($/Month) | N/A | $45 per month for 2 users | $450 per month for 5 users | $1,200 per month for 10 users |
Cost per Additional User for Monthly Pricing | N/A | $23 per user | $90 per user | N/A |
Cost per Additional User for Monthly Pricing | N/A | $25 per user | $100 per user | $120 per user |
Email Marketing | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
Email Templates | 5 | 5,000 | 5,000 | 5,000 |
Sales Pipelines | 1 | 2 | 5 | 100 |
Sales Analytics | N/A | N/A | N/A | ✔ |
Predictive Lead Scoring | N/A | N/A | N/A | ✔ |
*Monthly pricing lets the users pay on a monthly basis, but HubSpot CRM still requires them to commit to an annual contract.
Free
The Free plan includes team email, email scheduling, and one inbox with five free templates and five canned snippet responses. It allows users to schedule meetings directly from the app and allocates 15 minutes’ worth of calls. It also offers users a one-deal pipeline and a reporting dashboard that includes three dashboards with 10 reports for each.
Starter
The Starter plan includes all the functionalities under the Free plan. Its email features give users access to up to 5,000 templates and snippets. It has eight hours’ worth of calls, two pipelines, and 10 report dashboards with up to 10 reports under each one. It also includes deal stage, task, and lead rotation automation.
Professional
This plan includes everything in the lower tier. It offers advanced features such as 16 hours of calls, up to 100 inboxes, 5,000 templates, and 5,000 snippets. The Professional plan provides up to 15 pipeline deals per account and up to 300 workflows for its deal stage, task, and lead rotation automation feature.
Enterprise
The main additions to the Enterprise plan are 33 hours of calls and up to 100 pipeline deals per account. It is the only plan that offers highly advanced features, including predictive lead scoring, forecasting across team hierarchies, quote-based workflows, recurring revenue tracking, and user roles.
HubSpot CRM Add-ons
All paid plan users have the option to purchase a Starter CRM Suite that starts at $45 per month. It includes marketing, sales, content management, operations, and customer service tools for growing business needs. It is ideal for creating content, generating leads, streamlining lead outreach, and tracking customer communications.
HubSpot CRM Features
HubSpot CRM provides essential features that are fundamental to managing and nurturing customer relationships. These include tools to track leads and deals, monitor pipelines, and forecast sales. Below are some general and standout features that we like best from HubSpot CRM.
General Features
HubSpot CRM’s dashboard provides users with a quick view of the overall health of their sales and marketing activities.
(Source: HubSpot)
- Lead management
- Email scheduling
- Shared inbox
- Meeting scheduling
- Reporting
- Deal stage automation
- Lead rotation automation
- Deal scoring
- Sales forecasting
One of HubSpot CRM’s key features is lead nurturing through email marketing. It allows you to have unlimited users and unlimited contacts, which is useful if you are running a big sales team that handles large volumes of clients. Its extensive third-party software integrations let you manage your accounts from other software that you’re using, including project management, help desk, and analytics.
Below is a breakdown of some of the other features that HubSpot CRM offers:
Lead Management
HubSpot CRM lets you streamline your lead management, routing, and nurturing processes by putting all pertinent information about a contact in a single page. Each contact page gives you an overview of the emails, calls, and meetings associated with a particular contact. It also has a sales activity log that lists your deal opportunities, tickets, attachments, list memberships, and playbooks, so that you have all the information you need when reaching out or making a follow-up.
HubSpot CRM provides all the important information in each lead profile, including personal information and activity history.
(Source: HubSpot)
Email Marketing
HubSpot CRM helps you automatically create and send personalized and professional-looking emails to your mailing list. This feature improves the chances of your contacts engaging with your emails, which can improve the overall conversion rate. It can also help you input relevant email subjects, content, and calls to action based on any information about the contact, such as their sales pipeline stage or list segment.
HubSpot CRM shows you the status of emails sent to contacts, including open and read rates.
(Source: HubSpot)
Pipeline Management
HubSpot CRM enables you to create custom pipelines that fit your own sales processes and provides an overall view of expected revenues. When you create deals that involve saved contacts, all of their details, such as contact information and communication history, are automatically filled into the deal. This automation eliminates the need to enter data manually so you can focus on closing deals with your leads and prospects.
HubSpot CRM has a simple and straightforward pipeline that allows you to see pertinent details of each lead or deal, as well as its total cost. (Source: HubSpot)
Third-party Integrations
HubSpot CRM has integration capabilities with many third-party applications, giving you the ability to synchronize all your customer data into the platform, manage social media accounts and projects, track insight trends, and enhance overall productivity levels.
It integrates with various apps that include ecommerce, analytics, lead generation, sales, helpdesk, social media, and project management.
Some of the most popular integrations include:
- Mailchimp
- Slack
- Facebook Messenger
- Google Workspace
- Microsoft Outlook
- Calendly
- Shopify
- WordPress
- Survey Monkey
- Typeform
- Stripe
- Zoho Analytics
- Live Chat
HubSpot CRM’s has a vast ecosystem of third-party integrations. (Source: HubSpot)
Customer Service
HubSpot CRM offers customer service during official business hours (Eastern time). Support is available through email, in-app chat, and phone. However, the type of support varies depending on the plan purchased. Below are the available customer support touchpoints for each plan:
- Free: None; users can visit community forums and blogs to check out helpful articles
- Starter: Email and in-app chat support only
- Professional: Email and in-app chat support only
- Enterprise: Email, in-app, and chat support
Ease of Use
HubSpot CRM has an intuitive and user-friendly interface, making it an ideal choice for first-time CRM users. Most customer reviews for HubSpot CRM highlight how easy it is to get up to speed with using the software—with very little to no learning curve expected.
HubSpot CRM Alternatives
If HubSpot CRM doesn’t meet your business needs, below are some alternatives that you can consider:
 |  |  | |
Best For | Teams that need a scalable CRM with a feature-rich, in-app telephony | Companies that need visual representations of their sales pipelines | Businesses that want an affordable CRM with excellent analytics tools |
Starting Price | Offers a free plan while paid plans start at $15 per user, per month | Starts at $12.50 per user, per month | Offers a free plan while paid plans start at $14 per user, per month |
What Users Think of HubSpot CRM
Overall, HubSpot CRM has positive reviews, particularly its ease of use, customer support, and automation features. The areas it needs to make up for include the quality of its in-app calls, search functionality (especially for users with high volumes of data stored in the system), and the limited features under its Free plan.
At the time of this publication, HubSpot CRM had the following review scores from popular user review sites:
- G2: 4.3 out of 5 based on 7,195 reviews
- Capterra: 4.5 out of 5 based on 2,824 reviews
- Software Advice: 4.5 out of 2,715 reviews
Below are some of the most prominent review trends we observed:
Users Like | Users Don’t Like |
|---|---|
Easy and intuitive user interface | Limited features under Free plan |
Great customer support | In-app calling doesn’t have a high-quality connection |
Customizable automation features | Data search functionality can be improved |
Bottom Line
HubSpot CRM lets users streamline their email marketing and lead nurturing processes with its automation features and user-friendly interface. For small businesses that need basic, but reliable CRM functionalities and robust email marketing tools, the Free plan is ideal. However, if you’re scaling your business and need advanced CRM tools such as sales forecasting and analytics, we recommend considering HubSpot’s paid version.
