HubSpot vs Salesforce: Comparing CRM tools

A powerful customer relationship management tool can go a long way to generate leads, manage customer data, and empower your marketing and sales efforts. HubSpot is ideal for generating and nurturing leads, while Salesforce is great for tracking customer interactions. See which CRM tool will be best for your business by comparing HubSpot’s and Salesforce’s key features, pricing, and pros and cons.

Jump to:

• What is HubSpot?
• What is Salesforce?
• HubSpot vs. Salesforce: Comparison table
• HubSpot and Salesforce pricing
• HubSpot vs. Salesforce: Feature comparison
• HubSpot pros and cons
• Salesforce pros and cons
• Choosing between HubSpot and Salesforce

What is HubSpot?

HubSpot is a cloud-based CRM platform that empowers both marketing and sales efforts for businesses of all sizes. With HubSpot, your teams can optimize inbound marketing strategies and generate more reliable and effective leads to help your business market and sell more easily.

SEE: Integrate Jira with HubSpot to help capture new leads and keep your teams in sync.

HubSpot centralizes all of your digital marketing efforts in a single, cloud-hosted platform, which makes it possible to manage website hosting, blogging, social media, email marketing and more. HubSpot also includes tools for operations and offers HubSpot CMS, a full-blown content management system, so your sales, marketing and operations teams can seamlessly work together.

What is Salesforce?

Salesforce is one of the most widely-used CRM tools on the market, dominating the CRM software market by a considerable margin. The goal of Salesforce is to improve business relationships to help grow your business.

SEE: Discover how Salesforce is using generative AI to power its CRM capabilities.

Salesforce allows companies to nurture relationships with buyers, suppliers, service providers, users and anyone else who does business with your company. Your sales and marketing teams can keep track of all interactions between the company and its customers, including phone calls, emails, SMS, chats and tickets. With Salesforce, your teams are better empowered to standardize the sales process, so they can close deals more quickly.

HubSpot vs. Salesforce: Comparison table

HubSpot and Salesforce pricing

HubSpot CRM pricing

• Free Tools: No cost for various marketing, sales, service, content management system and operations tools.
• Starter: Starts at $30 per month, billed annually, or $50 per month, billed monthly.
• Professional: Starts at $1,600 per month paid up front, billed at $19,201 annually, or $1,781 per month paid monthly.
• Enterprise: Starts at $5,000 per month, billed at $60,000 per year.

For more information on HubSpot pricing, check out its pricing calculator.

Salesforce CRM pricing

• Essentials: $25 per user per month, billed annually.
• Professional: $75 per user per month, billed annually.
• Enterprise: $150 per user per month, billed annually.
• Unlimited: $300 per user per month, billed annually.

HubSpot vs. Salesforce: Feature comparison

Key features of HubSpot

• Automated CRM database for more collaborative efforts between sales and marketing.
• List segmentation, active lists and static lists.
• Landing pages, web pages and blogs.
• Automated workflows.
• Powerful email analytics.
• A/B testing to measure engagement performance of email marketing content (only available to Professional and Enterprise plans).
• Social media integration and management.
• Paid ad tracking.

Key features of Salesforce

• Lightning App Builder for creating Salesforce Lightning pages.
• Out-of-the-box analytics for quick reporting.
• Collaborative forecasts.
• Territory management.
• Marketing automation system.
• Chatter for team communication.
• Mobile apps.
• Steelbrick for high-grown customers to manage Configure-Price-Quote apps.

HubSpot pros and cons

Pros

• User-friendly platform.
• Seven-day free trial.
• Extensive blog to help educate customers.
• All-in-one CRM tool.
• Core software is free.
• Real-time notification of lead behaviors.
• Personalized email sequences for both leads and existing customers.
• Highly customizable.
• Huge library of templates.

Cons

• Requires a 12-month contract.
• Can be costly at scale.
• Limited to one email per contact.
• Charges a graded premium beyond certain numbers of leads.
• Customer support is an add-on.

Salesforce pros and cons

Pros

• Add and remove features as needed.
• Nearly all sales reps understand the platform.
• Highly customizable dashboards.
• Bult-in social media functionality.
• Easy-to-navigate UI.
• Plenty of integrations.
• Salesforce Database helps organize and digitize company sales records.
• Allows for integration with any data source.
• Supports security standards and controls.
• Highly scalable.

Cons

• Expensive.
• Add-ons aren’t free.
• Configuration is complex.
• Steep learning curve throughout.
• Generating reports can be tricky.
• Costly data storage.

Choosing between HubSpot and Salesforce

Both options can get expensive, especially at scale and when added features are needed. The deciding factor, however, is size. If you’re a large, enterprise company, Salesforce is, by far, the best option. Not only is the feature set massive, but you’d be hard-pressed to find a sales or marketing employee who doesn’t know the platform.

On the other hand, HubSpot is a great option for small and midsize businesses and startups who need the power of CRM software but aren’t ready to dole out the cash for the costlier and more complicated Salesforce. Although HubSpot cannot stand up to the features found in Salesforce, it is certainly a worthy solution to help empower your sales and marketing departments to take your business to the next level.