Salesforce vs. HubSpot: 2024 Comparison of Features, Pricing & Integrations

HubSpot and Salesforce are two of the most well-regarded CRM software available today, despite the fact that there are many more. Both systems provide a strong solution that can expand with a company’s sales force. More than their CRM functionalities, their marketing automation, sales analytics, and more all place these two solutions at the top of the best apps list. And there’s a good reason behind it.

In order to help you sell more, establish and monitor pipelines, and estimate future sales, both are equipped with comprehensive customer relationship management systems, marketing and sales analytics, and sophisticated functionality. But when you look at how both platforms were developed and how that foundation adds to ease of use and adoption, you begin to see the contrasts between the two platforms. You can learn about the differences between HubSpot and Salesforce in this article and make an informed decision on which CRM is best for your company.

The rapidly changing customer demands and the continuing effects of the pandemic have forever changed marketing and sales. Collaboration, personalization, and tougher competitions underline the need for the right tools, especially CRM. While there is an increasing need for customer-centricity, only 57% of CRM marketing is customer-centric.

Organizations seem to be more aware of the need for advanced CRM features. This is apparent in the growth of the global CRM market, which is predicted to grow up to $49.6 billion in 2025. This underscores the need for most, if not all, businesses to utilize CRM to build better relationships with their clients.

Even small and growing organizations know the significance of CRM in their day-to-day operations. As a result, more than 91% of businesses with 10 or more employees use some form of CRM solution. By integrating innovative technology, such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and data analytics, CRMs are making it easy for smaller teams to accomplish more, accommodate more customers without sacrificing the quality of service, and even compete with big players.

But, how do you decide between the best solutions in the market? Is HubSpot better than Salesforce? Does Salesforce offer better features than HubSpot? Should you opt for a more specialized solution? Fortunately, this Salesforce vs. HubSpot article will help you compare the features of the two solutions.

Overview of Salesforce and HubSpot

Salesforce

Salesforce is a cloud-based CRM platform that includes apps for sales, support, marketing, and more. Because the company was formed via a series of mergers and acquisitions, your experience may change based on which Salesforce products you’re utilizing. This means Salesforce has a steeper learning curve and may need more personnel or a larger budget to integrate with other systems.

Salesforce CRM

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Large organizations use salesforce because of its more comprehensive reporting features. While the dashboards provided by HubSpot have their advantages, the Salesforce dashboard provides a comprehensive view of your complete pipeline, as well as an estimate of your prospective income and the source of that revenue, based on historical and current data. Salesforce’s contact scoring tools (which look at several customer fit factors to determine a lead’s quality) are recognized to be quite accurate when assessing the likelihood of conversion when paired with a well-trained sales staff.

HubSpot

In addition to being a CRM platform, HubSpot provides sales, service, marketing, and content management tools to help growing companies succeed. Front office staff can improve their interactions with consumers and provide a best-in-class experience, thanks to a single source of truth. Your team will have an easier time adopting and using HubSpot because it was built in-house and on a single code base.

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HubSpot’s plans include more well-rounded marketing tools for businesses that desire an all-in-one sales and marketing platform. In contrast to Salesforce, these functionalities are available as part of pre-packaged products rather than as standalone solutions that must be acquired separately. You can generate and manage PPC advertising from inside HubSpot if you use the service’s pay-per-click ad management. Many firms, particularly those that are just starting out, want the ease of creating advertising campaigns in the same application as their CRM.

Comparison of Salesforce vs. HubSpot

Core Features

Campaign Management

Both solutions come with powerful campaign management functionalities that ensure that you can set up and monitor campaigns easily. Salesforce’s Campaign module provides a collection of capabilities to assist marketing and sales teams in managing, tracking, and evaluating their campaigns. You can link your efforts with the leads and opportunities that are created as a result of Salesforce campaigns. As a consequence of Salesforce campaigns, you will be able to observe if you’ve efficiently spent your cash and monitor which marketing activities had the greatest outcomes.

With HubSpot, you can use different fields to slice and dice your contact lists to reveal precisely the people you want to approach for your campaign and harness the power of the HubSpot CRM. For each campaign, you may enter specific objectives, establish start and finish dates, and designate an owner. Custom naming conventions are a great way to keep track of your campaigns. Tracking URLs, which provide data to HubSpot whenever a visitor visits your site through one of those URLs, makes it simple to assess how efficient your marketing efforts are.

Contact Management

The actual individuals within your software who help you build your company are your contacts, and they form the core of your marketing and sales strategy. Increase your company income and efficiency by using a contact management strategy through your CRM tools.

Salesforce gives you a full picture of your customers, including their activity history, important contacts, customer conversations, and internal account conversations. Each customer account includes extensive information to provide you with a complete picture. It even allows you to pull data from social media content. HubSpot combines powerful features to ensure that you can do everything in the CRM, such as Contacts, Database Management, Lead Nurturing, and Conversion. It comes with functionalities beyond contact management as well, such as email tracking, pipeline management, and much more.

Collect and view all relevant customer information using Salesforce.

Workflow Automation

Automation is one of the buzzwords of the past few years, and rightfully so. Both platforms offer their own versions of sales and marketing automation that allow you to focus on the most important parts of your business. As such, it is important to highlight the Salesforce vs. HubSpot comparison when it comes to automation.

Salesforce’s point-and-click interface makes it simple to create and manage any business process. Automating your sales cycle, from discounts through final approvals, may lead to recurring success. You may automate your business operations and requests for approval. With a drag-and-drop functionality and automated approvals, you can design your procedure and keep transactions going ahead without touching a button.

HubSpot enables you to establish a workflow to automate your marketing, sales, and service operations, therefore increasing the efficiency of your whole team. Configure enrollment criteria to automatically enroll data and perform actions on your contacts, businesses, deals, quotations, and tickets based on the rules you provide. Also available is the ability to perform actions on connected data, such as changing the associated company of an enrolled contact and much more.

HubSpot comes with an easy-to-use automation tool so you can automate manual tasks.

Lead Management

Lead management software is another core functionality that your CRM should not only have but should also do well. After all, attracting, nurturing, and converting leads is the bread and butter of any business. Fortunately, HubSpot and Salesforce both provide powerful lead management functionalities.

Salesforce enables you to keep track of all of the relevant information about your CRM prospects. The detailed activity timeline allows you to view and retrieve the most up-to-date contact details while also learning about best practices and necessary documentation via the use of the Sales Path application. In order to guarantee that leads never slip through the cracks and that the appropriate sales representatives follow up on leads while they’re hot, you may set up automated lead scoring and routing. Managing and tracking campaigns across all platforms, including social media, will be a piece of cake with Salesforce.

HubSpot delivers all of the tools you’ll need to keep track of all of your lead details in a single, centralized database. It comes with more features, including tracking and scoring leads, seeing conversation history, creating segmented lists, streamlining outreach, and much more. When viewing a lead’s profile, it’s simple to see all information about the lead, as well as a chronological timeline of every engagement the lead had with your organization, such as email openings, content downloads, website views, and social media interactions, and so on.

Furthermore, you can conduct sales conversations, send emails, assign tasks, write comprehensive notes, and do other duties without ever leaving HubSpot. Automate the assignment of fresh leads to the appropriate sales representatives, the creation of follow-up tasks, and the addition of new transactions to your pipeline.

Reporting and Analytics

With so much lead and customer information already within your reach, there’s no reason not to leverage the insights that they bring to give you an edge over your competition. Similarly, reporting and analytics provide a snapshot of how your campaigns are performing and how to improve them further.

Salesforce CRM analytics tools keep you up to date with personalized sales forecasting that you can create with ease. All you have to do is drag and drop the fields, filters, groups, and charts that you want, and you’ll receive an instant real-time view of your data. It is simple to keep track of team performance using dashboards and other sales reporting tools. It is also simple to make rapid adjustments to components in order to put more critical information at the forefront of the screen. If you want to keep an eye on your essential business data from anywhere, you may utilize the customer analytics software integrated into our Salesforce mobile application.

With built-in analytics, reports, and dashboards, HubSpot enables you to track and analyze the effectiveness of all of your marketing efforts in one location and at any time. It has everything you need to become a more intelligent data-driven marketer. You can break down any report by the attributes of contacts or companies in your database or CRM to uncover critical patterns in your data over time.

The program also makes it simple to track both the number and quality of traffic that comes to your website, whether as a whole or on a page-by-page basis, using a single tool. Additional data for each of your marketing assets are also available, including website and landing page statistics as well as emails, blog posts, social network accounts, calls-to-action, and other elements of your campaign.

Customize your reports and dashboard using various visual elements in Salesforce.

Integrations

HubSpot and Salesforce, both of which have a thriving app environment, provide fantastic additional capabilities. Both companies provide open APIs and developer tools to assist you in customizing your CRM to your specific needs.

Salesforce’s AppExchange is the world’s biggest and most comprehensive CRM app marketplace, providing a diverse range of solutions for a wide range of needs. Over 3,400 applications and connectors are available on the AppExchange, making it a quick and simple method to expand Salesforce. Some of its most popular apps are DocuSign, LeanData, SUMO Scheduler, and SurveyMonkey.

HubSpot’s App Marketplace approaches third-party integrations in the same way that the company does its own products—by putting a strong emphasis on functionality, ease of use, and quality. In the marketplace, you can find over 500 apps, many of which are native or HubSpot-built integrations. Installing and configuring integrations is straightforward, and you can do it all from one place. The platform works well with popular business solutions such as Gmail, WordPress, Google Apps, MailChimp, and more.

The HubSpot App Marketplace features the most popular business applications so you can integrate the platform into your workflow easily.

Pricing

The price structures of Salesforce vs. HubSpot is the most significant distinction between the two companies. One price structure may be more readily integrated into your company’s financial structure than the other, and this may be the determining factor in your decision.

HubSpot offers a Free package that includes a customer relationship management system, live chat, a landing page builder, customer support tickets, and other features. Its tier-based plans raise the number of users and marketing connections while providing the ability to put on additional and more readily accessible services. HubSpot paid plans start at $50/month for the Starter plan, which includes access to all HubSpot solutions. In addition, the Professional plan now costs $1,780 per month, and the Enterprise plan costs $5,000 per month.

While Salesforce does not provide a free plan or any free services, it does offer a free trial period if you want to try it out for yourself. Per-user payments are available from the company, which is advantageous if you have a small number of employees. A number of high-level services are available as paid add-ons, ranging from a B2B commerce tool that costs $4 per order to a loyalty program costing $30,000 a month. Paid plans for Salesforce begin at $25 per user per month for the Essentials package, which includes sales and support applications. The next plan, which begins at $75 per user per month and includes all of the CRM tools, offers the most value.

Salesforce offers numerous packages for different types and sizes of organizations.

Ease of Use

In the vast majority of scenarios, Salesforce will be simpler to connect with legacy systems, resulting in less time and money spent on the development process. It was designed to support hundreds of custom add-ons, which helps to reduce development costs over time, and  becomes even more beneficial as your business grows.

Alternatively, HubSpot’s lightweight UI is regarded as being easy to use and clean—enabling new users to get up and running with little training. With an elegant user experience that is geared toward the tasks that customers perform on a daily basis, it is easy to use. HubSpot is a popular choice among administrators and end-users alike since it combines robust capabilities with an appealing user interface.

HubSpot features a clean and easy-to-understand interface, which makes it easy to use, even for beginners.

Getting Started

There will be a learning curve with practically any customer relationship management software. Despite this, HubSpot is regarded as being quite simple to use. Those who sign up for the free version get access to an active peer support group, and the HubSpot Academy is a free learning platform that offers classes on a variety of subjects like inbound sales, Instagram marketing, and more. Some courses culminate with certificates, while others are shorter in length.

Salesforce also provides a number of different solutions for onboarding and training users. The Premier and Signature Success Cloud memberships provide access to professional coaching and customized success plans for those who have made the investment. Meanwhile, all Salesforce clients have access to the company’s Help Portal, Trailhead, and Trailblazer Community resources. It is possible to access approximately 1,000 free courses on Trailhead, which is an online learning site that allows users to increase their Salesforce skills.

Salesforce comes with various training, onboarding, and knowledge base options.

Use Cases

HubSpot’s free CRM includes a variety of useful features like email marketing, live chat, reporting, and more. As a result, it is most likely be best suited to small firms that will not be utilizing the program to handle a large number of customer interactions. The more costly memberships often provide additional features, but in many instances, they also allow for increased storage space as a result of the higher price.

Although HubSpot’s Marketing Hub is the most costly of the company’s offerings, Professional and Enterprise users benefit from automated marketing tools that enable them to map out customers’ journeys. If one of the primary reasons you’re looking for CRM software is to automate marketing, HubSpot can be a suitable match for your needs.

Salesforce may be a better alternative for businesses that want a high level of functionality from their CRM services. This company provides a broad range of services to assist you in managing multiple aspects of your organization, including sales, marketing, customer support, ecommerce, analytics, and other related areas of expertise. Additionally, Salesforce may be the best choice for businesses looking to incorporate strong analytics capabilities with their CRM.

It also comes out on top when it comes to customizing options. Not only can you add particular new features to standalone applications, enabling you to mix and match your extra tools, but you also have custom code access, allowing you to alter pretty much whatever you want. Trying to work with a tool on such a large scale may have a significant influence on your productivity.

HubSpot is great for small and growing businesses with its Free plan and affordable pricing.

Salesforce vs. HubSpot: Comparison Table

Salesforce vs. HubSpot—Which Is Better?

It is possible that HubSpot is a better option if you are looking for free or inexpensive CRM software that is relatively simple to use. Meanwhile, if you want to put time and money into a very sophisticated and configurable customer relationship management system, Salesforce may be the best option.

Salesforce outperforms the competition in terms of features. A multitude of tools is available to aid you in managing numerous elements of your company, expanding beyond the pillars of sales, service, and marketing to assist users with ecommerce marketing, mobile applications, analytics, and other aspects of their business. Many major firms with the financial resources to invest in various Salesforce products use it as their primary CRM.

HubSpot, on the other hand, is praised for its user-friendly design. Additionally, its Marketing, Service, Sales, and CMS hubs have all of the capabilities that the majority of small and mid-sized organizations would want. In the majority of circumstances, HubSpot is the more economical of the two options. Among the many useful tools for extremely small businesses offered by HubSpot is its free CRM software, which includes landing pages, tickets, quotations, and other features.

By Louie Andre

B2B & SaaS market analyst and senior writer for FinancesOnline. He is most interested in project management solutions, believing all businesses are a work in progress. From pitch deck to exit strategy, he is no stranger to project business hiccups and essentials. He has been involved in a few internet startups including a digital route planner for a triple A affiliate. His advice to vendors and users alike? "Think of benefits, not features."