HubSpot CRM Review The Pros, Cons And The Hidden Costs

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HubSpot CRM Pricing

The free plan is very generous, and the Starter plans are just about manageable for small businesses, however, the Professional and Enterprise plans are extremely expensive. Making HubSpot not a great solution for scaling. Find out more in our complete pricing guide

Pros and Cons

Is HubSpot CRM the right CRM software for you?

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A More Detailed Look at HubSpot’s Top Features

HubSpot has so many features we could talk about, but here are the top 3 we think you’ll find interesting.

Marketing Automation Software

HubSpot’s automation features are amongst the top players in the industry, helping you to streamline tasks, optimize your performance and achieve better results.

Each of your prospects’ actions can tell you a lot about your current marketing strategy and what your customers are engaging with. But manually tracking this is near impossible. Marketing automation is key to analyzing customer and prospect behavior and delivering the right content at the right time.

Pros:

• Lead-nurturing: HubSpot’s automation features allow you to automate email campaigns and move contacts further down the sales/marketing funnel. You can set up triggers and conditions so you can get the right messages to prospects at exactly the right time.
• Automating everyday tasks: Boost productivity by automating simple, mundane tasks with Workflows, such as sending welcome emails to new customers, automating follow-ups and sending re-engagement emails to cold leads.
• Task reminders: Automated task reminders allow you to follow up with your contacts at the prime time, so you’re less likely to miss a golden opportunity.

Workflow Examples:

Cons:

• Not included in the free plan: As attractive as HubSpot’s free plan is, marketing automation is not included within the free version, and prices can rise quickly depending on the number of contacts you have. Advanced omnichannel marketing automation is only offered at their $800 per month package, with only 1,000 contacts. It’s worth noting that there are other CRM alternatives that will offer automation at a much lower rate, depending on your needs.
• Can get complicated: When getting into automated workflows, some businesses might find they don’t have the knowledge or experience to set this up themselves, as things can get quite complicated. Luckily, though, HubSpot’s academy offers a wide range of resources so you can learn how to maximize advanced features.

HubSpot’s AI Content Writer

In 2024 HubSpot has rolled out updates to correlate with the rise in AI, recently adding the AI Content Assistant to the platform.

We don’t doubt that this software will become a marketer’s best friend in a variety of writing tasks, particularly valuable for creating engaging email campaigns and copy for landing pages in no time.

For example, by simply typing ‘/’ within a marketing email or highlighting existing content, you will be welcomed with options for generating and editing copy, helping you to overcome the dreaded writer’s block when crafting campaigns.

Pros:

• Ideation and content writing: The assistant allows you to brainstorm ideas on a particular topic, write paragraphs and summarize your points. The tool can also help you to summarize long paragraphs and trim down existing content.
• Changing the tone: The AI technology provides you with suggestions for rephrasing and changing the tone of your wording to fit better with your goals: Highlighting a portion of text within an email will bring up options to sound more friendly, entertaining, or professional.
• Click-worthy call-to-actions: We all know that email campaigns generally perform better when they have compelling call-to-actions, and the AI tool can help you to provide just that.
• Social content: On top of an already busy marketer’s workload, scheduling social content for the next month can become a bit of a headache. The AI Social Caption Generator can relieve some of the stress that comes with crafting the perfect social post. What’s great is that it creates copy for your social content directly within HubSpot’s social scheduling tool – simply by pressing the lightning bolt icon when writing your caption.

HubSpot’s AI Content Assistant

Cons:

• Language barriers: The AI assistant may potentially produce inconsistent results in non-English languages. HubSpot is currently working on supporting other languages in the near future, but for now, it is important to carefully review non-English content for accuracy. In fact, we recommend reviewing all AI-generated content.
• Personalization: The content generated isn’t personalized to your specific goals or needs, and is instead based on generic trends.

Live Chat

Customers often want information quickly, especially if they’re on the search for a particular product or service. That’s where live chat software can prove particularly helpful in enhancing the customer journey and building important relationships with prospects.

The live chat software within the HubSpot CRM platform enables businesses to communicate directly with customers and prospects through their website as well as other channels such as Facebook Messenger. The live chat will be in the form of a widget on your website pages so any visitor can start a chat in real-time with someone on your team. Providing customers with answers quickly and efficiently via live chat has been shown to help drive sales, so we’d really recommend setting this up.

HubSpot also allows you to easily create bots that can help you to automate tasks, such as qualifying leads, opening support tickets and allowing customers to book meetings. An example of this is the Concierge Bot – a kind of a receptionist for your website, which can help direct new visitors to the right place. The Qualify Leads bot is another option, which finds out if your leads are qualified before passing them on to a sales rep.

HubSpot’s live chat options 

Pros:

• Integration: Seamlessly integrates with your HubSpot account. The live chat works with a tracking code embedded on your website, so there’s no need to mess about with code. You can also integrate it with third-party apps such as Slack, Teams and Office 365.
• Customization: Personalize your live chat widget to fit with your branding, and if you already have your brand colors set within the platform, HubSpot will apply this for you.
• HubSpot Conversations: Access your inquiries from the live chat in a universal inbox included in HubSpot’s free CRM, which provides a clear view of every customer interaction for the entire team. From there, you can directly respond to inquiries, send emails, make calls, open support tickets and delegate follow-up tasks.
• Out of Office: Set up your office hours so website visitors are aware of when you’re online to chat, with the option to set up email capture so you can respond later on to any chats you may have missed.
• Tailored messaging: The live chat also allows you to set up different chatbots for individual website pages, so you can tailor your messaging and test what works.

Cons:

• Missed conversations: If you don’t provide a route to the end of every conversation path, such as automatically sending an inquiry to your preferred sales person, people can reply without you being notified.
• Limited features: In comparison to alternative chatbot providers, HubSpot’s might feel a little basic. Buttons, free text input, email validation and basic automation are included, but more advanced automation tasks can be limited.
• Lack of AI integration: With a company as huge as HubSpot, you might assume AI would have made its way into HubSpot’s live chat, however the chatbot doesn’t appear to utilize advances in AI or language processing.
• Analytics: There isn’t any way to analyze how your chatbot is performing, due to the lack of analytics in HubSpot Conversations. This is quite a big disadvantage as it reduces your ability to optimize the quality of your chatbot.
• Location targeting: The chatbot doesn’t allow you to target or exclude certain countries or IP addresses, so if your business only provides services in particular countries or regions, this can create complications and extra work for those responding to customer inquiries.

Conclusion

HubSpot dominates the sales and marketing market for a reason: they’re pros at inbound marketing. In other words, they provide potential and existing customers with rich, useful information and, once you’re on board, they delight you with an excellent user experience, which includes a well-designed product, helpful support and a good range of free features.

The fact that the free plan comes with a bit of everything from HubSpot’s Marketing, Sales CRM, Service, Content, Operations and Commerce Hubs, means that sales and marketing teams in small businesses and solopreneurs can do everything from lead capture to contact management for absolutely nothing.

The only catch is that once the time comes to upgrade, you’ll notice a significant jump in costs. But, with 1,000 contacts and unlimited users, you should be able to benefit from HubSpot CRM’s free plan for a little while.

Not sure if HubSpot of the best CRM for you? Sign up for the free trial and take it for a spin.

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HubSpot CRM Alternatives

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A couple of HubSpot alternatives to check out are Pipedrive and ActiveCampaign CRM. The former is made for sales teams, and the latter is a mix of sales and marketing features.

ActiveCampaign is a particularly good choice for those serious about automation and email marketing. For small businesses seeking free CRM with basic marketing features, HubSpot’s Free CRM plan is a solid starting point, but its paid plans can become costly. ActiveCampaign offers more reasonably priced plans, allowing you to pay only for what you need, even on lower-tier plans with advanced features.

Learn more in our ActiveCampaign vs HubSpot comparison video:

EngageBay is also a great option for those looking for a similar offering to HubSpot at a reasonable, scalable price.

Zoho CRM is another alternative, however, we wouldn’t necessarily recommend it over HubSpot because of its overly complicated interface. The advantage of using Zoho CRM is that it’s available in 26 languages, whereas HubSpot is only available in 8. (Read more about Zoho vs HubSpot in our detailed comparison.)

HubSpot is a big Salesforce competitor, see how it compares in our complete guide. you might also want to check it against the other ActiveCampaign alternatives.