HubSpot CRM Reviews

Pros

Ease of use. Once I receive a lead by email, its a simple matter of replying using the Hubspot extension and then I can modify it as a contact.

Cons

The call feature uses the computer, I wish it would just transfer to your cell phone.

Pros

The biggest priorities for us when we implemented HubSpot in our company were to be able to realize revenue to marketing activities as well as have a better forecasting method for our sales team.

Cons

The biggest con for us is that we clearly stated we needed to be able to tie revenue back to marketing activities. This function is possible with the platform sold to us; however it is very manual. In order for us to have the automated version that we requested, we would need to pay a significant amount more than we currently are. This was a mistake made on the part of the salesperson and we were offered a discount to enable the feature; however it is still very costly so we are performing this task manually at the moment.

Alternatives Considered

SugarCRM, Pardot, Dynamics 365 and Salesforce Sales Cloud

Reasons for Switching to HubSpot CRM

Price was a large factor. Salesforce and SugarCRM were both excellent contenders and we would have been happy to choose either of them. The biggest factor in our decision was price. The other factor was Salesforce and Sugar have software that is so powerful, we felt the built-in features we would pay for may not be utilized enough to receive an ROI.

Pros

This review relates solely to Hubspot's Sales module, and not the Marketing package. Our small business utilises Hubspot for lead management and conversion tracking - I can't speak to Hubspot's other functionalities in the marketing field. Hubspot's Sales free and growth bundles are great value; offering start-up businesses with the basic tools required for recording correspondence with leads and tracking conversions. However...

Cons

As your business grows you naturally seek out greater efficiencies achieved through CRM automation services (e.g. automated follow-up emails to stay front of mind with prospects) - it's at this point you upgrade to the costly Professional package because the business case stacks up, right?

This is where Hubspot falls over. Everything (I cannot iterate this enough, literally everything) you would logically expect the software to support or enable isn't available. Credit to them, their support function does try to help but they are severally handcuffed by the limitations imposed by backend engineers and software architects. The tech supports can only try to provide convoluted/half baked work around solutions but often these result in additional implications and barriers downstream.

The nail in the coffin for our business was when we tried to setup automated email sequences (a 101), but learnt that you cannot enrol contacts into these processes when sending emails 'from' the shared/team/company email (e.g. [email protected] or [email protected]) - rather, Hubspot requires users to send from their individual email (e.g. [email protected])

Have you ever corresponded with any business via a personalised email address? Whether I'm communicating with the local mechanic or Apple, I never email [SENSITIVE CONTENT] You engage with a shared mailbox e.g. sales or support or [email protected]

It's no brainers like this that force you to question Hubspot's services.

Pros

Hubspot CRM is very simple to learn and get using quickly. For most companies with 1-10 sales people it will have all the tools you need to connect your sales and marketing teams and manage leads, deals and pipelines.

Cons

Lacks some of the force actions of bigger CRMs, and the cost for sales enterprise is getting high.

Alternatives Considered

Zoho CRM and Salesforce Sales Cloud

Reasons for Choosing HubSpot CRM

Integration with marketing automation tool

Switched From

Dynamics 365

Reasons for Switching to HubSpot CRM

Simpler UI, ease of use, integration with Hubspot MA

Pros

Hubspot works really well for us as a notification and sales funnel program. You can automate work flows and have calls dialed immediately one after another so you aren't inputting phone numbers or having to find the next prospect to contact.

Cons

Can be overwhelming for those who are not experienced with a CRM. Because of the many functionalities, sometimes it can be difficult to get exactly where you need to be between contacts/companies. Obviously is not an issue after spending some time with the program.

Alternatives Considered

Outfield and Salesforce Service Cloud

Reasons for Switching to HubSpot CRM

Hubspot was more cost effective and met our specific needs better than the alternatives we considered.

Pros

Easy to setup, minimal skillset needed
Great flexibility to customize our data, forms, email campaigns, etc.
Contact management is much better compared to other CRMs (Salesforce, Freshworks, etc.)

Cons

Free tier/pricing plan is not optimized for startups with minimal revenue.
No email support offered for users in the free tier.

Alternatives Considered

Zendesk

Switched From

Freshservice

Reasons for Switching to HubSpot CRM

Great documentation and onboarding process, was very smooth to get started with. Attractive offers for startups compared to Salesforce/Zendesk.

Pros

I love that I can really customize my screens with the fields that I want, and even create my own fields that suit my business uniquely

Cons

It was HUGE and sometimes hard to find things

Pros

Snippets for my keyboard, very nice marketing automation, sleek interface.

Cons

I didn’t like how expensive it was to add on things that come for free on other software. The import function was clunky, and they only offered 10 customizable fields in the trial so I wasn’t even really up to import my data to try it.

Alternatives Considered

Pipedrive, Agile CRM and monday.com

Pros

I live on HubSpot. So much better than stringing together other tools. It's intuitive and powerful. I've used it at 3 different jobs and loved the experience every time.

Cons

It's a little pricey, but work it for the power.

Pros

HubSpot CRM is a really valuable tool that probably earns you a positive ROI in the first month. It simplifies the sales process and ensures you're in touch with leads at the right time, as well as one message.

Cons

I had some difficulty adjusting the forecasting settings.

Pros

Hubspot is effortless to set up and intuitive to use.
It counts with a vast array of features although it doesn't get overly complicated.
Its B2B library is extensive and you can find plentiful resources to learn about B2B sales and marketing

Cons

I wished its automation and reporting tools were more developed. The workflow feature does provide automation capabilities, however after entering into some depth, it eventually falls short.

Alternatives Considered

Salesforce Sales Cloud

Reasons for Choosing HubSpot CRM

Hubspot was more known. It integrated better with Google suite

Switched From

Zoho CRM

Reasons for Switching to HubSpot CRM

Hubspot was cheaper

Pros

Cost is great, free to get started with a low number of users. It actually delivers high value overall regardless of cost. The system has a wide variety of functionality, yet is well thought out.

The way the deal pipeline is constructed allows for the flexibility in how you can label and name your deal stages and how many you want to create. The drag and drop interface is intuitive, but a little slow.

Fields for individual users were customizable and overall HubSpot allows for a lot of flexibility.

Cons

Managing the deal pipeline can be cumbersome, difficult to read the titles of the deals when there are many of them, and the responsiveness of the platform could be improved a bit. The drag and drop isn't always responsive and can be very slow.

Alternatives Considered

Salesforce Sales Cloud

Reasons for Choosing HubSpot CRM

GoldMine is terrible, antiquated, and unbelievable that my previous company even used it. Something Cloud based is obviously required for so many reasons, and the fields and everything about Goldmine were not flexible.

Switched From

GoldMine Premium Edition

Reasons for Switching to HubSpot CRM

Salesforce is expensive, and HubSpot not only is free but also it has a lot of enterprise level features.

Pros

Easy to import contacts and create lists based on type of contact or type of connection. I like using this feature for organizing my contacts. I also like that I can add other users so that I can see the chronological timeline of all contact points without having to interact with the employee. Able to send emails out to specific lists easily and quickly.

Cons

Challenging to use at first and I had to google a lot to figure out how to use all the features. Issues with importing and not seeing all of the information but was about to troubleshoot on my own. Not super intuitive to start out.

Alternatives Considered

ConvertKit

Reasons for Choosing HubSpot CRM

More features in hubspot to connect with landing pages and emailing.

Switched From

Mailchimp

Pros

Start using free, and scale up as you grow, that is relaxed
HubSpot's sales tools reside in your inbox (Gmail an so on), so you don't have to switch back and forth between different windows and can get your work done faster.

By connecting your email account to HubSpot, you can send and receive emails to and from all your contacts directly in their HubSpot contact record.

Cons

It very well may be seen that the product was brought into the world in the USA. On the off chance that, for instance, leads are consequently moved to Hubspot and the information is enhanced, then, at that point a few names become something different or the designing of the telephone numbers isn't completed effectively. We have essentially deactivated this capacity and make the leads physically or incorporate them by means of structures.

Pros

HubSpot is excellent for small companies, especially if you can get the startup discount for 90% off for your first year. The system has a lot of power and plugs pleasantly into a lot of the coolest, best products (gmail, Slack). The system's Contacts and Companies systems are well-done and extend pleasantly into other parts of the platform.

Cons

HubSpot needs to stop removing features and putting them into new licenses that cost more money. I realize they need to make money but they're turning it into this nickel-and-dime situation that makes the system more complicated. It's starting to feel like a bloated mess like Saleforce. I think someone nimble is going to come in and outdo them if they aren't careful.

Alternatives Considered

Copper, NetSuite CRM, SuiteDash, SugarCRM, Agile CRM and Zoho CRM

Reasons for Choosing HubSpot CRM

HubSpot was cheaper and was more approachable than the customization nightmare that is Salesforce.com.

Switched From

Salesforce Sales Cloud

Reasons for Switching to HubSpot CRM

The feature set was stronger and we were approved for the startup discount.

Pros

I really liked the fact that HubSpot CRM is relatively easy to use. The navigation between its different sections and features is smooth.

The sales pipeline section lets you visualize what's happening at each of your stage pipeline, while sale forecasting shows you how much you'd be making if you were to close X deals.

Plus, there's the smartphone app: an excellent way to keep track of things and carry out tasks even when you're on the go.

Cons

The main con of HubSpot CRM, which is also true to other "freemium" tools, is the fact that certain features are only available in the paid plan(s).

That's not an issue itself but the fact that the paid plans don't cost $10 or so each month but much more than that, may lead a user facing the question 'Do I want to invest that kind of money or should I look for a more inexpensive option?'

Alternatives Considered

Pipedrive

Pros

The email marketing tool is very robust, almost as good as Mailchimp (but falling short in design options). The ability to upload PDFs and other documents brings two benefits: not having to re-edit permalinks when you do file changes and, most important of all, tracking. Hubspot allows you to track document opens, which is useful to measure lead engagement and segment further.

The service ticket is very good and allows and admin to track the team. The CRM app is as good as any other. The Gmail add-on is great for tracking, as is the Outlook plug-in. However, at my time of use, the outlook plugin was only available for Windows.

Customer support was top-notch, too. The few times I had some issues, I had access to a huge library of FAQs sites, and the chat support was quick as well. They do tend to try to upsell you some features while they help you, but it is not too naggy.

Cons

The amount of emails you can send is directly related to how many contacts you have. If you send a lot of them per month, you will need to increase your contact list to twice of what you have, just to be able to send more marketing campaigns. Business who send heavily segmented mails depend on this for dear life.

Alternatives Considered

ActiveCampaign

Reasons for Switching to HubSpot CRM

Recommendation from a Inbound marketing expert.

Pros

Bottom line it can work for a solopreneur all the way to a global enterprise. The ability for it to scale with you as your business grows is a big plus. Don't all CRM's do this? Some do but the difference with HubSpot CRM is it is made simple and built in away that you can use it out of the box without overwhelm but can also scale it to complex scenarios that work for your organization. Many CRM's I personally find are too complex initially and don't enable the user to get the most out of the features they should be using. As my title says "easy, adaptable and scale." HubSpot delivers on these and are the key aspects of what I like the most about the software.

Cons

Let's be clear there is no perfect product out there and they all have their pros and cons. Some of least favorite parts about HubSpot CRM:

- Contacts vs. Company data and not being able to sync information across all properties (I have written many complex workflows to try and solve for this its just a lot of work and you have extra properties that don't make sense to have).
- Not being able to sync data to a dropdown property from a single-text field or vice versa. Here is an example you have an individual that you don't know there Country. You have set up the country property to be a dropdown to use in forms on your site to keep it clean and the naming accurate as you can pull in HubSpot preloaded country list. An individual comes into your database where you don't know the individuals country but based on their domain HubSpot populates their company country. You can cross reference this with the IP country code as well. You can't copy the Company country to the Contact country because they are not the same property type. You go to create a list of contacts from the United States and it becomes a difficult process to keep up to date. The easiest solution is export import which shouldn't be the solution.
- Opt-in and subscriptions for GDPR is a little clunky and could use more work for simplicity

Alternatives Considered

NetSuite CRM, ActiveCampaign, Keap and Salesforce Sales Cloud

Reasons for Choosing HubSpot CRM

Clunky and didn't integrate well with our marketing and sales processes connected to our website.

Switched From

NetSuite

Reasons for Switching to HubSpot CRM

We choose HubSpot for the full ecosystem and scalability. We purchased it as a small company and moved our website, marketing and sales software and CRM to HubSpot to have all the tools integrated effectively. The thing to remember is this might cost more in visible dollars spent but once you start spending significant man hours integrating and connecting more systems the time and resources add up for that.

Pros

Aside from the overall ease of use, I love that HubSpot connects with my Outlook and automatically logs and tracks emails. And that I get notifications on my phone when an email is opened. I can then call that person at that time while I'm on their mind, and my HubSpot app automatically logs the call and gives me a chance to jot a few notes too. Or perhaps they open the email and click the link to my HubSpot meeting scheduler...even better! It's all so blessedly interconnected and automatic!

Cons

I wouldn't say the task manager is bad, but sometimes I wish I had the ability to prioritize tasks..

Alternatives Considered

Zoho CRM and Salesforce Sales Cloud

Reasons for Choosing HubSpot CRM

There are more benefits to using HubSpot, not the least of which is that it's cloud based, so I can use it anywhere on any device. I couldn't do that with ACT!

Switched From

Act!

Reasons for Switching to HubSpot CRM

HubSpot had all the features I was looking for and more! Plus it has a free level that is very generous, and one I tried it, I was hooked!

Pros

To HubSpot's credit, their CRM functions really quickly and its basic features have a very short learning curve -- we onboarded our sales teams in multiple parts, with inside first followed several months later by outside reps. The main CRM we used before HubSpot was Microsoft Dynamics, and we are still significantly based there, but I attribute the positive reception of a new (and dramatic) software shift to HubSpot's ease of use and quick accessibility of prospect information.

Cons

We've run into a similar problem several times due to our industry being so niche (and therefore, the information we collect tends to be highly customized). We have needed to organize and implement quite a few custom fields, which GENERALLY HubSpot's CRM is very good about -- however, there are some significantly important fields that cannot be changed at all, even by HubSpot. We also have had some issues with company associations -- if your prospects work in an industry in which one company can have multiple locations (and the distinction matters), HubSpot's CRM does not lend itself well to that at all.

Alternatives Considered

Marketo Engage and Salesforce Sales Cloud

Reasons for Choosing HubSpot CRM

We were ready to explore a more robust and user-friendly tool, and HubSpot had been recommended to us multiple times.

Switched From

eTrigue DemandCenter

Reasons for Switching to HubSpot CRM

HubSpot was by far the greatest solution for our budget and our time constraints. It was such a huge improvement from our previous software that it's like night and day to us, whereas some of the bigger names in the space like Salesforce and Marketo were much too far out of our acceptable price range.

Pros

Hubspot has a ton of amazing features. From sales to marketing to customer success, it can really support all the key aspects of a growing business. My favourite part other than the great UI/UX is that Hubspot seems to be constantly evolving and they tend to stay about 6-12 months ahead of us on many of the features they release.

Cons

Pricing per contact starts to get pricey if you grow a lot. We have had to "cut down" the size of our database because of all the outbounding we do.

Alternatives Considered

Salesforce Sales Cloud

Reasons for Choosing HubSpot CRM

Hubspot had a more holistic approach to CRM.

Reasons for Switching to HubSpot CRM

It had a great program for startups at the time & we knew it had all the functionality we would eventually grow into.

Pros

Hubspot is absolutely great as a CRM so long as you plan to use another tool for actual deal flow -- if your goal is to track names, contact info, notes, and docs, along with email traffic, Hubspot is perfect.

Hubspot also has about the best import and export capability, and the auto-linking to external domain logos is wonderful -- really great job of minimizing contact updates.

Cons

Like almost every other CRM, Hubspot *lacks* the capability to drag and drop tasks to plan your day or week -- so managing deals is next to impossible and salesforce too expensive.

Pipedrive has some ability to do so, however, only across stages of the deal and not within the stage; if you don't mind shelling out a few dollars, Pipedrive also has better Trello and other integrations, e.g., looking up a contact in Trello to manage the deals.

Alternatives Considered

Pipedrive, Zoho CRM and Salesforce Sales Cloud

Reasons for Choosing HubSpot CRM

we needed to conserve dollars

Switched From

Pipedrive

Reasons for Switching to HubSpot CRM

tracks contact info and email traffic; if Hubspot made it possible to easily drag & drop tasks, would be home run at almost any price point

Pros

Hubspot is an incredible product which incorporates every aspect of sales and marketing and has so many integrations, that your success is unlimited. The CRM is fully customizable, the email marketing application has endless templates, you can import your entire website, do paid media and track all your campaigns and track all of your social media efforts as well. Don't even get me started on the reporting capabilities because they are endless. I want to see all contacts who have opened five web pages, completed a lead form, within the last three months, boom done. Segmentation, lists, snippets, automation, sequences for any process. Can you tell I'm a big fan!

Cons

The biggest problem you will have is getting your team to understand the full depth and functionality of the application. I wish I had more by in from the entire team, which is not the applications fault.

Alternatives Considered

Pardot

Reasons for Choosing HubSpot CRM

To many different applications doing multiple marketing and sales tasks.

Switched From

Mailchimp

Reasons for Switching to HubSpot CRM

Cost, functionality, and familiarity with the product.

Pros

There's tons & tons of features to love about Hubspot. The power of the platform, even the free version of it, is undeniable. Tracking customers, managing issues, following up with loose-ends.. it's all handled seemlessly here and it's so smooth you won't even notice the undoubtedly massive amount of effort that's been put into it. - Hands-down best feature? The issue Ticketing system.

Cons

As i mentioned in the title of my review here, mobility. The biggest issue i've had with Hubspot is the fact that i can't really use it outside the office, unless i pull my desktop and set it up in the back seat of my car.. because that's how bad their mobile app is right now.

That being said, they have a long-running feature-request board that gets tons of comments asking them when they'll update their app to bring more amazing features to mobile, but that hasn't had a reply from them in almost a year now. - The main feature their app needs? The mobile Ticketing system.

Alternatives Considered

Microsoft 365

Reasons for Switching to HubSpot CRM

I was using like the contacts and calendar in 365, and I think we can all agree they're just not made for tracking hundreds of customers.. once you pass a certain point, you need a legit CRM solution, and Hubspot is the first one i came across, and i loved it, untill it tried to take it with me in the field.

Pros

Free.
Great tools that connect with your website, seeing data on what's being viewed.
Deals pipeline.
Forms that connect to your website.
Connects Contacts, Companies, and Deals amazingly.

Cons

Once you get into the paid version, it's spendy, especially if you don't use all the features.
The products section isn't really feature-rich
doesn't work the best with Google, including drive.
Gmail add on isn't good.
The free forms don't give you the option to center your form on your website, so it's off-centered and has the HubSpot badge on it.

Alternatives Considered

Salesforce Sales Cloud

Reasons for Choosing HubSpot CRM

Even though we loved the google integration, Hubspot had more features and was free.

Switched From

Copper

Reasons for Switching to HubSpot CRM

Free. Though we may re-look at them here soon.