HubSpot Review 2021

Advertiser Disclosure

A satisfied client is a successful business. With so many software solutions claiming to assist businesses deliver excellent customer experiences on their platforms nowadays, it’s critical to choose the appropriate customer relationship management (CRM) tool for your organization’s size and demands. When we use the term CRM, we’re talking about sales, marketing, and customer service teams as well.

This is since excellent CRM software should be able to tell you everything there is to know about your customers, including their interactions with your teams, immediately. In addition to storing client data, CRM software should also be able to assist in the optimization of customer communications, converting existing clients to new products and services, automating processes and workflows, assisting in customer needs fulfillment, and reducing sales cycles.

In this HubSpot review, we’ll discuss popular CRM software HubSpot, go through the benefits and drawbacks of using it, how we came to our rating of the program, different licensing options, and some product information.

What’s on This Page

Hubspot Logo

HubSpot CRM

4.38/5

  • Wide range of functionalities
  • Relatively cheap compared to competitors
  • Intuitive user experience

What is HubSpot?

Founded in 2006 in Massachusetts, HubSpot is the ideal CRM software for small-to-medium-sized businesses that want a relatively cheap tool to help with sales and marketing efforts. It’s an all-in-one software solution that helps you manage your web content, create landing pages, manage social media accounts, and analyze business metrics. Additionally, HubSpot offers features such as outbound and inbound marketing, sales automation, sales pipeline management, email tracking, lead management, and contact management — to name a few!

Remember how we mentioned CRM is not just about customer service, but marketing and sales as well? With HubSpot CRM, you can use its marketing tool to create and manage email templates and see how your emails are doing. You can also use its sales tool to manage contacts, track deals, and manage the sales pipelines. If this is not enough, you can integrate HubSpot CRM with HubSpot Marketing Hub, HubSpot Sales Hub, as well as third-party platforms such as Zoho CRM, Salesforce, and SugarCRM. 

Why use HubSpot?

HubSpot is popular for quite a few reasons. It’s straightforward and easy to set up and use, with plans catering to businesses of different sizes. It offers outstanding email and calendar integration and helps you save time on tedious data entry and management that many CRMs require to get started.

Many companies also love that HubSpot has everything in one place. You can use its central hub to cover all your marketing and sales needs: write blogs, track customer activity, send monthly emails, streamline communication between teams — you name it.

If there’s anything you should know about HubSpot, it’s that they take customer training very seriously. They want you to maximize HubSpot’s potential and therefore have a comprehensive library of webinars that help you understand the process of inbound marketing. You’ll come out of the webinars knowing exactly where to find and how to use different components!

HubSpot also integrates well with other platforms. You can easily add HubSpot’s marketing or sales software to your CRM solution, or upgrade to HubSpot’s premium products. No matter your needs, there’ll always be a solution that works for you.

HubSpot Pros and Cons

Pros

  • Intuitive user experience
  • Easy to import contacts & create contact lists
  • Outstanding email integration features

Cons

  • Pricing can add up with premium features
  • Issues with importing and not seeing all the information
  • No native form functionality to send form submitters to different destinations

How to use HubSpot?

You can use HubSpot to do a bunch of things to engage with your customers. For example, you can write blog posts using HubSpot’s platform and post them online. Potential customers may find your blog posts from their online search and want to learn more. They then sign up for your newsletter to see what your products have to offer. Meanwhile, HubSpot helps you craft emails and tracks all the interaction points, as well as open and click metrics, between you and your customers. When the right time comes, your sales team uses the information on HubSpot to reach out to your customers, persuading them to make a purchase. The customer journey doesn’t end here though; if they ever encounter problems, they can look up help articles that you have published via HubSpot. 

Our Rating Process

We assessed HubSpot CRM based on the criteria below and scored them each out of 5 points to help you in your decision process.

  • Database management: Can you import lists of contacts or create new contacts easily?
  • Lead tracking: Can you track your customer activity and convert them to your products and services? Do you get insights on data such as where these customers originated from, what marketing channels worked best on them, and what their consumer behavior is like?
  • Automatic data logging: Does the software automatically log the phone calls you make, emails you send, and tasks you create for your customers? You shouldn’t have to do these things manually!
  • Workflow automation: Does the software simplify processes for you, or automatically hop on the next task when triggered? For example, when a customer has opened one of your marketing emails but didn’t click on any links or buttons, does the CRM software know to automatically send them a follow-up email?

Now, let’s get to our ratings and the rationale behind them.

Database Management – 4/5

HubSpot CRM makes sure your database stays up to date and that you can easily edit it. Since HubSpot CRM integrates with Gmail and Microsoft Outlook, it can add new contacts as needed or scrape company information from its website automatically.

You can also design your email using the templates HubSpot provides and send the email out on the same platform.

Lead tracking – 4/5

HubSpot automatically imports contact information into the system when a potential lead takes an action. For example, when a potential customer sends your company a message through the company website, HubSpot will make a note and add the customer as a contact on the system. Unlike other tools that require you to use a different service for content marketing needs, HubSpot allows you to publish blogs and whitepapers on the same software to generate inbound leads. These leads will then feed directly into the CRM.

Throughout the customer’s lifecycle, you can also update their status to “unqualified,” “open deal,” or “in progress” — to name a few — to reflect the progress the customer has made.

Automatic data logging – 5/5

HubSpot doesn’t make you waste time on repetitive tasks. When you make phone calls or send emails directly from the software, HubSpot automatically logs these interactions. You can even choose to record the calls for future reference. With these interaction points, HubSpot then analyzes and reports to provide insights such as how long it typically takes for leads to respond, how often they open your emails, and what type of emails they tend to click on most.

Workflow automation – 4.5/5

HubSpot is here to help you save time. Take advantage of HubSpot’s easy-to-set-up automation tool to program workflows that will help you stay in touch with your customers.

You can tell HubSpot what your processes are like by dragging and dropping elements. When A happens, do B. Handy, right?

Package Comparison

Product Details

Starter

Professional

Enterprise

Price per month

$45

$800

$3,200

HubSpot support

Yes

Yes

Yes

Omni-channel marketing automation

No

Yes

Yes

Custom reports

No

Yes

Yes

Removed HubSpot branding

Yes

Yes

Yes

Blog

No

Yes

Yes

Technical / Product Details

Product Details

Specs

Supported Languages

Mainly English. HubSpot currently only offers phone support in English. Call-back, email, and chat support are available in English, French, German, Japanese, Portuguese, and Spanish.

Compatibility

iOS, Android, Mac, Windows

Restricted countries

None. However, you need to use HubSpot’s calling partners to make calls to China and Japan.

Customer support

Available through email, in-app chat, and phone.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is HubSpot a CRM?

You may have seen HubSpot as a marketing or sales tool, but HubSpot also has its own CRM platform. It seamlessly integrates your marketing and sales efforts and provides you a one-stop solution for customer engagement.

What companies use HubSpot?

More than 121,000 customers from more than 120 countries currently use HubSpot. Although small- and medium-sized businesses are the main players who use this platform, large organizations love it as well. Some well-known companies that use HubSpot include Accenture, Soundcloud, ClassPass, Trello, and Suzuki.

Is HubSpot Free?

HubSpot manages to provide a free CRM solution by giving you limited access to its features. If you like the features they offer, you can upgrade to a paid plan.

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