HubSpot vs Pipedrive

Both HubSpot and Pipedrive are extremely user-friendly tools, so either one is a strong choice if ease of use is important to you.

The main difference is that HubSpot offers far more scope for customization, complexity and personalization. However, this is unlikely to affect your user experience: more advanced features are gated behind higher price plans, and they are still very user-friendly, even as complexity grows.

With either tool, your main risk of getting into a pickle is through messy contact management rather than the software itself. You can avoid that with clear processes, regular data clean-ups, and smooth contact syncing processes.

Both Pipedrive and HubSpot thrive when it comes to streamlining your sales workflows via automation. They each offer workflow builders and instantly enrich your contact records with wide-ranging data.

But what's the difference between HubSpot and Pipedrive for automation? And how can you choose what you need?

The main differentiator is preferred user experience, or choosing the system that you find most enjoyable to use. Here's a quick intro to both HubSpot and Pipedrive automation to help you find your preference.

HubSpot automation

HubSpot's Workflows feature is the platform's super user-friendly way to automate processes and communication. You can use this tool for all of your organization's workflows, including sales, marketing, and service. Depending on your subscription, workflows can also be:

• Contact-based
• Company-based
• Deal-based
• Ticket-based
• Quote-based

After choosing the goal and enrollment criteria of your workflow, you can use the drag-and-drop editor to choose what happens when certain conditions are met. This can include:

• Sending an email externally or internally
• Setting a contact or company property value
• Adding or removing a contact to a list
• Changing a numerical contact property
• Copying a contact property
• Creating tasks for team members

For the most customized workflows, you can add delays and if/then branches to create exactly the right flow. It's a really powerful automation tool and one of the most intuitive to get started with.

Pipedrive automation

With Pipedrive's Workflow Automation tool, you get an easy-access library of templates to help you save time in your sales team. You could create an activity and send an email every time a deal is added, or move a deal to a new stage every time an activity is marked as done.

When it comes to creating your own personalized workflows, you get a similar view to HubSpot's workflow builder:

You can also trigger your workflows according to People, Organizations, Deals and Activities:

For automations to keep your team on track, you can choose any combination of in-app, email and mobile app push notifications to be reminded of upcoming activities.

Pipedrive also offers a built-in AI-powered sales mentor that offers personalized performance tips, automation recommendations, notifications and report graphs.

How do HubSpot and Pipedrive's reporting suites compare? As with most other areas we've compared in this post, it's about complexity.

Pipedrive reporting

On the main Pipedrive dashboard you get an easy view of how your sales team is performing:

For more data on your pipeline performance, you can also customize your dashboards, view your sales performance by product and create handy insights for conversions and deals over time.

Pipedrive reporting is simple and effective, and for many sales teams it delivers all you need to know without extra fluff and complexity.

HubSpot reporting

On the other hand, HubSpot offers a lot more features, albeit at a much higher max price point. So, if you want that complexity, HubSpot's reporting capability has a much higher ceiling. It's simple to create a range of different reports, customize your go-to dashboards for easy access and draw insights from your complete sales cycle.

If your marketing and service teams are also using HubSpot, you can create incredibly comprehensive dashboards that show performance of the complete buyer's journey, including leads, sales, churns and conversions at every stage.

Though Pipedrive offers a free 14-day trial, it doesn't offer a free-forever plan, so if you have zero budget for your CRM, HubSpot is the best choice for you.

However, when it comes to accessing more features and upgrading to paid plans, the gap quickly widens between HubSpot and Pipedrive.

While HubSpot offers a much wider feature set, it also tends to be much more expensive than Pipedrive if you need more than the free plan.

Pipedrive pricing

Pipedrive's pricing is much more straightforward than HubSpot's, consisting of four core price plans.

The Essentials plan offers a useful starting point at $12.50/user/month, with customizable pipelines, contact and org management, deal management and more.

Pipedrive's workflow automation is gated behind the Advanced plan. Paying $24.90/user/month for this should be a worthwhile investment: it gives you access to all of Pipedrive's automation features excluding team management.

The Advanced plan also opens up contact data enrichment, email syncing, recurring revenue reports and a customizable catalog of your products to make selling easier.

For the most power from Pipedrive, you can opt for one of their top-level plans: either Professional for the full feature set, or Enterprise for custom onboarding and support on top of this.

HubSpot pricing

All HubSpot users start with the free CRM, which of course won't take up any of your budget - it really does does stay free forever.

This also offers some other compelling free features for marketing, sales and service teams:

However, you get even more value when you add paid Hubs to the mix. There are currently Sales, Marketing, Service and CMS Hubs, and each one offers a range of price points.

Sales Hub plans include:

• Starter (from $40/month, paid annually): organize your sales process with deal pipelines, simple automation, quotes, custom properties, reporting dashboards and more.
• Professional (from $400/month): manage your growing team with custom reporting, products, email sequences and more advanced features.
• Enterprise (from $1,200/month): advanced features to scale your marketing team such as recurring revenue tracking and predictive lead scoring.

With the Marketing Hub you can choose from:

• Starter (from $40/month): key functionality to capture, convert, understand and engage leads, from landing pages to list segmentation and email marketing.
• Professional (from $800/month): access marketing automation features, optimize conversion rates with calls-to-action and more, and measure traffic and conversions.
• Enterprise (from $3,200/month): advanced functionality to manage your teams and brands and analyze revenue with full control.

Service Hub includes:

• Starter (from $40/month): access ticketing, a conversations inbox, simple automation and more to start managing customer support.
• Professional (from $320/month): optimize customer experiences with a knowledge base, streamline ops with ticket routing and pipelines, and measure results on a custom dashboard.
• Enterprise (from $1200/month) enables advanced playbooks, goals, and scope to manage multiple teams and businesses.

And CMS Hub, the newest addition to HubSpot, offers everything you need to build and scale a powerful, optimized website that converts. This is offered at Professional (from $240/month) and Enterprise (from $900/month) levels.

With HubSpot, the key thing is to look at what your business needs now and what it will likely need in future. It's worth checking if these are both aligned with your budget.

HubSpot really thrives on two very different use cases:

1. Small businesses and entrepreneurs who need a simple CRM that is free to start with, but has plenty of room to scale in the future.

2. Fast-growing teams that want a reliable and scalable all-in-one platform for their organization, without the complexity of a system such as Salesforce.

Read on for a few examples of when HubSpot is a great choice for your sales teams.

1. A basic CRM is what you need

HubSpot's free CRM is a fantastic starting point for any small business. And for many organizations, it'll tick your boxes for the near future too.

We recommend trying out the HubSpot CRM if your priorities are:

• Managing contacts from all channels with one piece of software.
• Gaining transparency on your sales pipeline and deals.
• Uplevelling your sales strategy with nifty free features, such as website live chat and a meeting scheduling link to pop in your emails.

2. You want something for everyone in your org

Few CRMs have been evolving as quickly as HubSpot in recent years. Contact management is now just one aspect of HubSpot as the platform has expanded to benefit marketers, salespeople, business owners and customer support specialists in a multitude of ways.

HubSpot's free CRM gives you access to basic features for sales, marketing and support teams, but the most valuable features are gated behind paid Hubs available at different tier levels.

For instance, looking at marketing, HubSpot's free CRM includes basic functionality for forms, email marketing, ad management and list segmentation. By subscribing to one of the three tiers of the Marketing Hub, ranging from $40/month to $3200/month, you get access to even more features – many of which are extremely comprehensive, including advanced automation.

HubSpot's "evolved CRM" is a powerful way to manage multiple areas and teams in your business, but it does require a decent budget to reap the full benefits from the paid Hubs as well as the commitment to centralize core processes on one platform.

3. You want to achieve more with fewer tools

Another advantage of HubSpot offering something for everyone is that you can do more with a smaller tech stack.

While you'll still likely need tools for other areas of your business – such as HR, accounting, project management, and billing – HubSpot certainly enables stronger collaboration between your sales, marketing, and service teams.

Pipedrive is an exceptional tool for small businesses as well as larger sales teams that only need to focus on sales. Here are a few use cases of when Pipedrive is an excellent choice.

1. You need to control budget as you scale

You can access all of Pipedrive's features with the Professional plan available from $49.90 per user per month. HubSpot, on the other hand, can easily reach $1,200/month for the Sales Hub Enterprise plan, without any other Hubs or add-ons.

There are pros and cons to both options here: if you want more features, more complexity and more scalability across your entire organization, look at HubSpot more closely.

But if you want simplicity and stricter budget control as you scale your sales team, Pipedrive could be a better fit.

One area where Pipedrive stands out from HubSpot is its comparative lack of limits. All Pipedrive plans offer unlimited contacts, sales pipelines and custom fields, while HubSpot will require more upgrades as you scale your database.

2. You don't need all the bells and whistles

Unlike HubSpot, Pipedrive doesn't try to do everything. And that can be a good thing. For many sales teams, Pipedrive offers exactly what they need – no more, no less.

If you know what your team wants and it matches Pipedrive's feature set, we think it will make a great choice.

3. Your priority is sales pipelines and workflow automation

If what you're looking for is a smooth and effective way of automating your sales pipelines and workflows, Pipedrive will deliver what you need without the bloat.

Although HubSpot offers excellent sales automation, it's accessible at a higher price point than Pipedrive – and with features that you might not really need.

There are some scenarios where it makes sense to use HubSpot and Pipedrive together.