HubSpot vs Salesforce: Which Is Better for You?
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.
This article is part of a larger series on CRM.
HubSpot and Salesforce are popular customer relationship management (CRM) software platforms that serve businesses with excellent lead management and workflow automation features, plus the online certifications users can access. HubSpot, however, stands out for its marketing and content management system (CMS). Salesforce, on the other hand, takes an edge when it comes to advanced analytics tools and its robust mobile application.
When comparing HubSpot vs Salesforce, first evaluate your specific business CRM needs:
- HubSpot: Better option for businesses seeking solid email marketing and CMS features in their CRM
- Salesforce: Excellent choice for larger sales teams who want advanced reporting and analytics tools
Pro tip: Want to see more software solutions that can help your business grow? Check out our picks for the top CRMs for small businesses for insightful comparisons on pricing, features, and overall platform usability.
HubSpot vs Salesforce Compared
 |  | |
|---|---|---|
Starting Price* | Free (unlimited users) to $45 per month (up to two users) | $25 per user, per month |
Ease of Use | Great usability for setting up, operating features, and navigating interface | Easy to set up but tough to navigate interface |
Expert Score | 4.75 out of 5 | 4.38 out of 5 |
Customer Support | 24/7 tier-based email, chat, and phone support on paid plans | Tier-based live chat and phone support with some 24/7 options |
Integrations | 1,000+ third-party and native software options | 2,500+ third-party and native software options |
Mobile Application | Yes | Yes, most capabilities that the web application have |
Reporting & Analytics | ✓ | ✓ |
Workflow Automation | ✓ | ✓ |
Email Marketing | Advanced email automation, mass email, plus templates and segmentation | Mass email and templates |
*Based on annual billing. Monthly billing is also available at higher prices.
Most Affordable: HubSpot
| | |
|---|---|---|
Free Option | Unlimited users | ✕ |
Starting Paid Price* | $45 per month (two users)** | $25 per user, per month |
Enterprise-level Pricing* | $5,000 per month (minimum 10 users)** | $150 (Enterprise) or $300 (Unlimited) per user, monthly |
Billing Options | Monthly and annual | Monthly and annual |
Free Trial | 30 days | 30 days |
*Based on annual billing. Monthly billing is also available at higher prices.
**Pricing is based on product bundle, which includes Sales, Marketing, Service, CMS, and Operations Hubs. Individual Hubs are also available at lower monthly pricing.
HubSpot pricing offers flexible software packages and bundled plans for sales, marketing, operations, customer service, and content management operations. There’s also a free Starter plan for unlimited users that comes with email marketing plus simple ad, blog, lead, and deal management features depending on the subscription. The more premium plans include quotes, payment processing, customer segmentation, and strategic planning features.
Salesforce starts at $25 per user, per month for the Essentials plan, which is built specifically for small teams, with a cap at 10 users. There is no free CRM option, but it has comprehensive features on the Unlimited plan that costs $300 per user, monthly. Another important thing to consider is that many features usually included in regular subscriptions for HubSpot, like quotes and payments, require add-ons for Salesforce. Some of these add-ons include:
- CPQ and billing: To send quotes and prices, the cost is $75 per user on a monthly basis (included on the Professional plan and above).
- Sales Cloud Einstein for artificial intelligence (AI) analysis: $50 per user, per month (included on Enterprise plan and above)
- Sales engagement: Productivity management features with scheduled activity sequencing, work queues and to-do lists, and lead scoring for inside sales teams that cost $75 per user, per month (included in Enterprise plan and above).
- Sales enablement: On-demand gamification features cost $25 per user every month.
Winner: HubSpot wins in the Salesforce vs HubSpot pricing category because it offers a free plan for unlimited users and starts at $45 per month for two users, whereas Salesforce is $50 for two users ($25 per user, per month). HubSpot also has tons of flexibility in designing a subscription package that suits your operational needs or bundling them into a full suite.
Most User-friendly: HubSpot
| |
|---|---|
Intuitive interface, easy-to-use features, and simple setup | Easy setup, but some level of CRM experience is needed to navigate the interface and operate features |
HubSpot is known for its usability ratings and is ranked in our best simple CRM systems guide due to its clean and modern-looking interface and features users of all technical levels can operate with ease. Salesforce, on the other hand, while somewhat easy for new users to set up, design their system, and use the tools, has a steeper learning curve when it comes to interface navigation due to the many button options that can come off as overwhelming.
Winner: Though both CRMs go head-to-head in setting up and operating the system, HubSpot takes the edge because of its considerable intuitiveness in navigating the platform, thanks to its straightforward, user-friendly interface.
Best Customer Support: HubSpot
| | |
|---|---|---|
Online/Self-help Resources | Community forum, knowledge base, blog, and certifications through HubSpot Academy | Trailhead resource with webinars, tutorials, guides, and certification classes |
Phone Support | 24/7 on Professional and Enterprise plans only | Tier-based support times including some 24/7 options |
Live Chat Support | 24/7 on all paid plans | Tier-based support times, including some 24/7 options |
Email Support | 24/7 on all paid plans | N/A |
Both CRM systems have an incredible arsenal of online resources, such as tutorials, documentation, forums, and self-help guides. Each also has certification capabilities for getting various accreditations and badges for completing courses on CRM, sales, marketing, and software development topics through HubSpot Academy or Salesforce Trailhead.
Aside from the online resources, both use tier-based customer support, where you get more options and availability based on the plan you subscribe to. HubSpot, however, offers all channels of communication while Salesforce is restricted to live chat and phone with some 24/7 availability.
Winner: HubSpot wins the customer support section because of the 24/7 availability on all channels and comprehensive online resources, including certification options.
Best Integration Features: Salesforce
| |
|---|---|
1,000+ third-party and native software options | 2,500+ third-party and native software options |
Both HubSpot and Salesforce offer integrations with popular software products such as Trello, Mailchimp, Slack, QuickBooks, and Facebook. Each also provides plenty of native software integration options for project management, finance, content management, and human resource management that can connect with the CRM system.
The big difference in integration capabilities isn’t regarding general-use and popular third-party software. Rather, it’s the industry-specific ones. Salesforce, because of its popularity and size, has worked its way into numerous industry verticals, such as healthcare, financial services, manufacturing, and IT management. As a result, it can integrate with platforms used in those particular businesses, giving it a wider range of use-case scenarios.
For instance, Salesforce integrates with an insurance system called Vlocity Insurance, used to quote and issue policies and manage claims. With this industry-specific integration, data syncs two ways into both systems—letting insurance agencies manage leads and policyholders in one platform.
Salesforce Vlocity insurance integration (Source: Salesforce)
Winner: Each platform has many integration options for third-party and native products. However, because of Salesforce’s ability to expand past general-use applications and into industry-specific ones, it wins this category.
Best Mobile Application: Salesforce
| |
|---|---|
Task, deal, and contact management plus live chat and email communications | Offers most capabilities the web application has |
A mobile application allows teams to use their CRM to manage leads, communicate with contacts, and track opportunities during client-facing activities or at networking events. Both options provide a mobile application but differ in some of their capabilities. For example, HubSpot CRM allows users to create and track tasks, deals, and leads and communicate with contacts by live chat or email.
Alternatively, Salesforce lets you do nearly all web application functions on the mobile app. Users can search and view all types of deals and lead records, message teammates and contacts, pull up reports and dashboards, manage tasks, and organize customer cases. Users can also edit documents, spreadsheets, and presentations from the app and fully customize their entire mobile system with layouts, design, and custom application modules.
Looking for more CRMs with robust mobile apps? Check out our comprehensive guide to the best mobile CRM apps to learn more.
Winner: Salesforce wins in the Salesforce vs HubSpot mobile category due to the wider range of capabilities that nearly mirror the web application offered by the CRM on its mobile application compared to HubSpot.
Email Marketing Features: HubSpot
| | |
|---|---|---|
Mass Emailing | Yes, with static and dynamic customer segmentation options | Yes, with contact target lists |
Email Templates | ✓ | ✓ |
A/B Testing | ✓ | ✓ |
Campaign Tracking for Email Results & Return on Investment (ROI) | Yes, and email health reporting | ✓ |
Email marketing features let sales and marketing teams nurture leads by sending mass email messages and deploying email campaigns to contacts from the CRM. With Salesforce, users can create and store email templates and use them for their email communications. There’s also A/B testing that helps you optimize the content, channel, and contextual factors of an email, such as time sent and target audience.
Similarly, HubSpot also allows teams to create and deploy mass email communications using customizable templates from the CRM platform. In addition, users can A/B test their messages and divide audiences into detailed customer segments, including dynamic lists that auto-update based on contact behavior to get leads with the right content. Lastly, HubSpot provides detailed email campaign analytics with health reports to evaluate a business’ reputation.
Ready to create email templates to store your CRM? Be sure to check out our sales email templates you can download and customize for various sales situations.
Winner: HubSpot’s email features give teams elaborate automation, optimization, and analytics for their campaigns. Because all of the advanced and easy-to-use email communication tools match or outperform Salesforce in each subcriteria, HubSpot wins the email marketing category.
Best Reporting & Analytics Tools: Salesforce
| | |
|---|---|---|
Reporting Capabilities | Revenue, email campaign results, pipeline health, and activity | All data points within the CRM system |
Customization | Custom analytics, reports, and dashboards | Custom reports and dashboards with advanced filtering, bucketing, and history tracking |
Predictions & Forecasting | Custom forecasting including across team hierarchies | Customizable, collaborative, and mobile forecasting with territory dividing |
Scheduled Reporting | ✓ | ✓ |
AI Insights | Data enrichment, deduplication, and easy imports only | (Einstein) Deal and lead scoring, predictive forecasting, and trend insights |
CRM reporting features allow managers to track sales activity such as calls placed, emails sent, and business proposals generated while also helping monitor sales production in revenue or deals closed. It’s also great for monitoring individual, team, and organizational goal progress. There are analytics tools built in or derived through artificial intelligence (AI) by using machine learning to analyze data, which provide insights into trends, predictions, and suggestions.
With HubSpot, in addition to the high-level email campaign metrics offered, teams can view sales activity on an individual or team basis, as well as overall revenue and deal production. They can also develop revenue forecasts and evaluate pipeline health on customizable dashboards, downloadable reports, or scheduled reports (which are auto-generated), and you can automatically send them through email or Slack.
Salesforce is slightly more elaborate when it comes to reporting and analytics. For starters, its AI Einstein tool provides more capabilities than HubSpot, including predictive forecasts, prescriptive analytics, real-time recommendations, and automated discovery of potential opportunities. Salesforce also has fully customized reports that can report any series of data points in the CRM system while conducting advanced filtering and bucketing functions, which will give more structure to data by breaking it into ranges or “buckets.”
Winner: Though HubSpot is an excellent reporting and analytics CRM, Salesforce is one of the most sophisticated CRMs on the market that offers fully customizable data reports and business intelligence features that can’t be topped. Therefore, Salesforce wins the reporting and analytics category.
What Users Say About HubSpot & Salesforce
For the most part, both platforms are popular, and users of HubSpot and Salesforce are happy with their investment in terms of usability, features, and value. Per review scores from popular software evaluation websites, here’s how each CRM is rated:
- G2: 4.4 out of 5 based on 9,425 reviews
- Capterra: 4.5 out of 5 based on 3,408 reviews
- GetApp: 4.5 out of 5 based on 3,402 reviews
- G2: 4.2 out of 5 based on 12,844 reviews
- Capterra: 4.4 out of 5 based on 17,207 reviews
- GetApp: 4.4 out of 5 based on 17,211 reviews
For HubSpot, the main issues reported are the caps on the number of custom fields with no options to purchase additional ones and that the platform doesn’t work well for certain industry groups (such as insurance or real estate) as it’s primarily a general-use CRM. Users do, however, love the email marketing tools and system’s ease of use.
Salesforce customers mostly dislike the user interface design that impacts the user experience and report having trouble with certain features such as automation tools and data processing functions. Its users, however, do like a large number of integration options and the dashboard layout options.
Best Alternatives to HubSpot & Salesforce
While the comparison of HubSpot vs Salesforce is close and both systems are great in their respective ways, there could be a particular feature or product aspect missing that necessitates looking at other options. Here are some of the best alternatives to HubSpot and Salesforce:
 |  |  | |
|---|---|---|---|
Best For | Robust system customization | Built-in project management modules | Deal and pipeline management features |
Starting Price* | Free to $14 per user, per month | Free to $39 per month (up to five users) | $14.90 per user, monthly |
*Based on annual billing. Monthly pricing is also available at higher rates.
How We Evaluated HubSpot vs Salesforce
To compare HubSpot vs Salesforce, we looked at critical product attributes small businesses and sales teams consider when comparing CRM software. In a direct, apples-to-apples comparison, we evaluated pricing, features, usability, customer support, our expert score, and what real users are saying about the products.
30%
Niche-specific Features
20%
Ease of Use
20%
Help & Support
10%
Pricing
10%
General Features
10%
Expert Score
30% of Overall Score
This category looked specifically at tools and modules commonly sought by users and teams that gravitate toward HubSpot and Salesforce. Email marketing, lead management, and workflow automation, for instance, are features that both CRMs are well known for, which can offer very advanced capabilities compared to alternative CRMs.
20% of Overall Score
The CRM solutions were also evaluated on platform usability. This was analyzed in terms of the expertise required to set up an account, the ease of integrating with native or third-party apps, and the skill needed to use CRM features. We also reviewed the overall intuitiveness of navigating the system’s interface.
20% of Overall Score
Extensive support and customer service help prevent poor user experiences and outcomes users may encounter while using any of these CRM systems. Help and support were evaluated in terms of customer service hours and the availability of support via phone, live chat, and email. We also looked at online resources for users to review, like tutorials, forums, or training modules.
10% of Overall Score
Pricing considered free plan availability and various scalable pricing options a user could purchase affordably. We also looked at availability for a subscriber to either pay monthly or save by paying annually.
10% of Overall Score
We looked at overall features we feel are necessities in all CRM products, such as CRM integration options, system customization, and a mobile application. We also evaluated common modular features found within HubSpot and Salesforce’s system, such as reporting and analytics tools and pipeline and deal management.
10% of Overall Score
In addition to firsthand experience with these software systems, we evaluated what users say about each product. These criteria consider how customers feel, based on their reviews, to gain insight into platform popularity, ease of use, standout features, and overall value for the price point.
*Percentages of overall score
Bottom Line
Salesforce and HubSpot are two of the most popular CRMs available due to their robust sales and marketing functionality and wide range of integration options. Despite that, each product stands out for their respective strengths that make it better for certain areas. For instance, HubSpot offers easy-to-use yet elaborate email marketing tools to engage with leads, while Salesforce provides advanced intelligence and analytics useful for decision-making.
