HubSpot Review, Pricing & Features

What is HubSpot?

HubSpot is a fully-featured CRM platform with over 114,000 customers. It offers robust features for lead capture, contact and deal management, workflow automation, and insights reporting. We recommend HubSpot for those who want a fully featured CRM, with high quality marketing tools, that can scale with their business.

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Table of Contents

• What is HubSpot?
• HubSpot Review Summary
• HubSpot Pricing & Cost
• HubSpot Features
  • Lead Capture
  • Contact Management
  • Communication Channels
  • Deal Management
  • Workflow Automation
  • Reporting
  • Integrations
  • Mobile
  • Legal & Security
• HubSpot Customer Support
• HubSpot vs. Competitors
• Is HubSpot Right For You?

HubSpot Review Summary

HubSpot was founded in 2006 by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah. HubSpot’s mission is to help businesses grow better every day through an ecosystem that unites software, education, and community. Today, HubSpot has over 3,000 employees and is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

HubSpot helps marketing, sales, and customer service teams integrate their workflows together. It offers a plethora of tools for lead capture, contact and deal management, workflow automation, and insights reporting. Overall, HubSpot is an advanced, all-in-one solution that is intuitive to use.

Several HubSpot customers have mentioned how useful it is as a centralized system for marketing, sales, and customer service. Robert Soares, founder of Provided.io mentions how HubSpot is great for creating a cadence of communication with customers, especially through its automated workflow and sequences features.

When it comes to pricing, HubSpot is one of the most expensive solutions available, especially if you upgrade your plan. Its most popular and cheapest plan costs $50 per month and its most expensive plan costs $4000 per month. HubSpot is overall a costly solution – we recommend HubSpot to those with a large budget who need high quality marketing features within their CRM.

Overall, HubSpot is an intuitive, advanced CRM solution that is best suited for larger companies with complex workflows. We also recommend it to those who would prefer to use an all-in-one platform and prioritize having in-platform digital marketing tools in their CRM.

HubSpot Pricing & Cost

HubSpot’s pricing ranges from $50 to $4000 per month. You can also save up to 10% if you pay for the annual subscription of the Starter or Professional plan upfront. Hubspot also offers a free trial of its individual products and a free CRM plan.

HubSpot Features

In our review, we will walk through the features offered by HubSpot. We’ll discuss HubSpot’s usability, customer support, and describe the major benefits and drawbacks of the software. We’ll also show real images of the software to give you an idea of what it’s like to use the tool.

Lead Capture

A lead is an individual or organization that has an interest in your services or products. Lead capture references the process of acquiring someone’s information with the goal of converting them into a paying customer. Overall, the more lead capture channels you have, the better you are able to reach a wider audience of potential customers.

HubSpot offers a wide range of lead capture methods among its competitors – including forms, social media, live chat, and email.

Lead Capture Forms

Forms are one of the easiest lead capture methods because they let the leads provide their information themselves. HubSpot offers an in-platform form feature that lets you create a wide variety of forms – including an embedded, standalone page, and pop-up box form. Overall, this feature is easy-to-use.

HubSpot lets you customize your forms with templates and various fields – including name, phone number, email, and social media profile. HubSpot also lets you automatically capture someone as a lead if they submit their email address.

Facebook & LinkedIn Lead Ads

HubSpot offers an integration that lets you create ads on Facebook and LinkedIn and attach forms that can capture someone’s information. This integration is easier to use in HubSpot because you do not need to use Zapier or another third party integration app.

After you’ve created your ad and form, you can set up a basic automation that creates a contact list of those who submit your form. You can also send yourself email notifications when someone becomes a lead from your ads and forms.

Live Chat

HubSpot offers a native live chat feature that lets you add a live chat widget to your website. This feature is very useful – being able to speak to chat visitors in real time gives you a better chance of gaining a lead’s trust and therefore their contact information. Overall, this feature in HubSpot is effective.

When building your live chat widget, you can choose when to capture a visitor’s email. This can be done immediately after a visitor sends the first message or if a team member doesn’t respond after one minute.

Within HubSpot, you can edit someone’s contact details, and create deals and tickets while chatting with them. This helps make sure that you capture all of the relevant information related to a contact.

Email

HubSpot offers a chrome extension that automatically captures information from anyone you’ve been emailing. The information the extension can capture ranges from emails, names, and phone numbers to company names, company locations, and industries.

As shown above, you can choose to add someone as a contact or lead to HubSpot, and further edit their details all within Gmail. You can also add related deals and tasks to a lead within Gmail.

Contact Management

Capturing a lead’s contact information is crucial in converting them into a paying customer. However, the type of information you can record, and how it’s stored and managed will determine the value you gain from your CRM. This is known as contact management.

Contact Profiles

HubSpot lets you create a profile for every lead you’ve captured. The more information you have on a contact, and the more unique a profile, the better the chance you have of converting that contact into a lead.

Overall, HubSpot’s contact profile feature is above average – you can create more robust profiles and perform more actions in HubSpot than in other CRMs like Copper and Pipedrive.

HubSpot lets you include standard contact information like emails, phone numbers, associated deals, and files. You can also create tasks, log calls, create meetings, and send emails to a contact from within their own record.

HubSpot’s contact profile feature also captures someone’s website activity and includes information on how a contact was obtained. You can use this information to better understand which marketing methods are best for recruiting new contacts.

Contact Storage

It’s key that your contacts are stored in an organized manner and are easy to access. Overall, contact storage in HubSpot is robust, but not intimidating to use.

HubSpot lets you segment and create different views of your contacts through a wide variety of filters. This includes filters related to contact activity, deal, sales information, and email information, and website behavior. You can also use HubSpots’s search bar to look up a specific contact and choose how many contacts you wish to view per page.

Contact Activity Feed

HubSpot offers an activity feed for each of your contacts. Tracking a contact’s activity lets you know where they are in the sales process. This lets you know what steps are best to take next in making sure someone is progressing through your sales funnel. Contact activity tracking also reduces the chance of losing a lead.

HubSpot’s contact activity feed feature is robust in terms of the types of activity you can view.

As shown above, you can view contact activity related to communication channels, your team, and actions like form submissions and page views. You can also choose which types of contact activity you want to view. A disadvantage though of HubSpot’s contact activity feature is that you cannot organize contact activity by date or view how long they’ve been inactive.

Communication Channels

One of the key elements in converting your contacts into a paying customer is maintaining consistent communication. With HubSpot, you can communicate with leads through the following channels:

Email Marketing

HubSpot lets you send emails and email campaigns to your contacts. Overall, this feature is intuitive to use and slightly more advanced than email tools in other platforms like Copper and Pipedrive.

HubSpot offers an email template library and lets you add a variety of elements to your emails – including images, buttons, and videos. After you’ve finished editing your emails, you can choose to send them to a customized list of contacts. You can also choose whether to send your emails immediately or on a later date at a specific time.

An advantage of HubSpot’s email feature is that you can include merge fields or personalization tokens. These can pull data from within your CRM, including contact and deal information.

HubSpot also offers email analytics and email health data. For email analytics, HubSpot shows your recipient engagement – open, click, and reply rate – and delivery statistics – delivered, hard bounce, and spam report rate. With this information, you can determine where you need improvement when it comes to your email marketing strategies.

Social Media

HubSpot lets you connect your Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter accounts. This feature is useful because you can directly interact with your social audiences from within HubSpot. This includes creating posts, liking, and commenting. Unfortunately, you cannot send direct messages through HubSpot.

Phone

HubSpot lets you make calls from within your CRM either through your own phone number or through an integration with Twilio. This feature saves you time because you do not have to move back and forth between applications for phone calls.

HubSpot offers an application that lets you take notes during your call. You can also log your calls after they’ve ended and mark whether they were busy, if you left a voicemail, if there was no answer, or if you called the wrong number.

Deal Management

The next stage for a lead is becoming a qualified sales lead. Once this happens, you’ll need an organized system to manage your deals. Effective deal management will provide you with the most up-to-date information and let sales representatives focus their attention on building strong relationships with potential customers.

Pipelines

Pipelines let you visually track the progress of prospective customers through each deal stage. Compared to other pipeline tools, HubSpot is more scalable and works well for businesses with over 50 simultaneous deals.

In Hubspot, you can create multiple pipelines and customize them in a manner that best aligns with your business’s sales funnels. This includes reordering, renaming, and creating unique stages. HubSpot also lets you insert a "win probability" percentage for each stage.

You can further organize your deals with over 35 filters – including filters related to deal activity, information, and revenue. Deals in HubSpot can also be dragged and dropped easily between stages, which makes it easier to update deal statuses.

Task Management

Tasks in a CRM are actions that need to be taken in order to bring a deal to completion. Tasks can be assigned to you or others in your organization. Overall, we recommend HubSpot for task management – it includes key features that make it easier to organize your tasks.

You can customize a task’s title, associate deals, choose its priority level, and include notes. You can also create customized views of your tasks and use filters based on task type, priority level, creation date, and creation source to further organize your tasks.

HubSpot also lets you set reminders for tasks based on a minute to weekly basis or on a custom date and time. Reminders are key because they reduce the chance of losing a potential deal.

Lead Scoring

Lead scoring is when you assign a numerical value to a lead. This number reflects how likely a lead would become a paying customer. Lead scoring also helps your sales representatives spend their time on the most lucrative deals. While HubSpot’s lead scoring feature is effective, it’s less advanced because it does not offer as many scoring criteria as other platforms like Zoho CRM.

HubSpot lets you choose certain criteria that either increase or decrease points from a lead’s score. Your score criteria can be based on contacts, deals, form submissions, email behavior, and ad interactions.

Workflow Automation

Workflow automation is when common tasks are automated through the use of tools, apps, and technology. Workflow automation saves time, and reduces the chance for human error. HubSpot offers sequences and triggered events.

Triggered Events

HubSpot lets you set up rules where events trigger a certain action. For example, you can use automations to send a welcome email to anyone that was recently converted.

Triggered events in HubSpot are best to use if you expect a large number of contacts to move through the flow, instant follow-ups are required, and your contacts are not assigned to a specific salesperson.

Overall, this feature is effective for simple and complex automations and would not be intimidating to use for first time CRM users.

You can use HubSpot to create workflow automations that are contact, company, deal, and ticket based. HubSpot lets you create simple and complex automations – for one trigger you can set multiple actions. This includes actions related to internal and external communications, record and task creation, record reassignment, and list, ads, and property management.

Sequences

Sequences are best for salespeople who want to create follow up email automations where the content is highly targeted towards the potential lead. You can also use sequences to create tasks that remind you to follow up with clients. The goal of email sequences is that they result in replies or booked meetings.

A key difference between sequences and workflows is that sequences only let you manually enroll leads. Therefore, sequences are best for maintaining 1:1 relationships between potential leads and sales representatives.

Reporting

CRM reporting offers key data that helps individuals and businesses make tactical changes and strategic decisions where needed. This includes important insight reports such as deals won and lost, pipeline progression, your sales forecasting, and sales funnel. HubSpot’s reporting feature is overall intuitive to use.

You can create reports containing deal, contact, and sales activities information. You can also choose a wide range of data visualization styles – including bar, line, donut, KPI, area, and pivot table.

HubSpot Integrations

HubSpot offers integrations that expand the functionality of your CRM. They also eliminate the need to toggle back and forth between systems. Some of HubSpot’s key integrations include:

Mobile

HubSpot offers a mobile app for both Apple and Android. A mobile CRM gives you the best chance in ensuring that your customers are getting the best service possible at all times.

HubSpot’s mobile CRM is well-rounded. You can view your upcoming tasks and meetings, contacts, deals, and activity related to emails, forms, and leads. You can also create tasks, and tickets, and manage conversations from within the app.

Legal & Security

Having proper security and data protection is critical for your CRM. Data breaches can harshly affect your company’s reputation and be costly to remedy. HubSpot offers key security features and compliances to make sure your data is secured and protected.

Customer Support

Overall, we found HubSpot’s customer support to be slightly above average. It offers one of the widest ranges of customer support channels and 24/7 support. HubSpot’s live chat customer support is also quick and responsive.

HubSpot articles overall have good readability. They bold important terms and include images with indicators like boxes and arrows that highlight the feature being referenced. However, we did notice that some articles contain large paragraphs with low margin space between each line. This makes the article more difficult to read and takes more time to interpret.

HubSpot vs. Competitors

In terms of platform advancedness, HubSpot is the most similar to Zoho CRM. However, HubSpot is more user-friendly and feature-rich than Zoho CRM. It is also more advanced than platforms like Copper and Pipedrive, and can even be suitable for enterprises like Salesforce.

The top HubSpot competitors are:

Is HubSpot Right For You?

Overall, HubSpot is an intuitive, advanced CRM solution that is best suited for larger companies with complex workflows. We also recommend it to those who would prefer to use an all-in-one platform and prioritize having in-platform digital marketing tools in their CRM.