Salesforce vs HubSpot

HubSpot is uniquely dedicated to ease-of-use and simplicity for admins, reps, and managers. This way, you spend less time (and money) getting your CRM system to work the way you want it to. Customers have the freedom to organize and administer their CRM without the need to hire a dedicated admin. Need a more sophisticated approach? Use custom objects to architect your CRM in a flexible, intuitive way for your business, and seamlessly import crucial 3rd party data into your CRM. We made our pricing suitable for businesses without an unlimited budget.

Salesforce implementation and maintenance requires experienced and well-trained administrators. Most Salesforce customers need to bring in a consulting agency (source), hire one or more full-time admins (with an average salary of $77,503 according to Glassdoor), or have current employees become Salesforce administrators.

“HubSpot is a refreshing change from Salesforce and MS Dynamics. The user interface is clean, polished, straightforward, and easy to learn. It is nice to have a place where sales and marketing data and notes can be stored in a seamless way. You also have all the essential tools for accelerating and automating repetitive tasks: email templates, automated outreach sequences, automated meeting scheduling, engagement tracking, and a dependable mobile app. Best of all, HubSpot can be administered in-house without third-party developers or consultants...Less than a year in, we've got buy-in from the entire team and we've armed our sales directors with real data and dashboards to use for managing the growth.” - Brandon Stewart, Marketing Content Manager at Hamilton Company, Biotechnology, Mid-Market (501-1,000 emp.)

“We switched to HubSpot about 3 years ago. Salesforce was just too difficult to make do what we want without pricey consultants, whereas HubSpot was easy and intuitive out of the box...It is so much cheaper and easier to use than Salesforce, which means people actually use it!” - Beth Morgan COO at TrueData, IT & Services, SMB (11- 50 emp.)

HubSpot CRM combines a consumer grade user experience with enterprise power. Sales Hub delivers on contact management, sales analytics, sales automation, pipeline management, and much more. Sales Hub products are trusted by thousands of growing mid-market B2B companies, enterprise brands, and high-growth unicorns to scale with them as they grow.  

Salesforce offers endless customization for businesses that have enough admins and developers to set up complex processes.  They include top-of-the-line contact management, dashboards, analytics, pipeline management, sales automation, forecasting, and much more. You’ll get a wide range of powerful products for businesses of all sizes.

Both HubSpot and Salesforce offer the most powerful, complete tools for sales teams on the market.

“People are often resistant to change … but the difference between Salesforce and HubSpot is night and day. It’s like switching from Windows 95 to the modern era … the sales team can log in to HubSpot and see all the information all in one place … they can conduct their next move, right there, inside of HubSpot, or have that page open when emailing leads. It’s our source of truth for contacts, companies, and deals … Today, sales and marketing are much more aware of what the other side is doing,” says Nathan Innis of Novus. See why Novus switched to HubSpot. 

“HubSpot is powerful...Having all the sales tools and marketing tools in one place is awesome for our sales team....I like segmenting customers by their behavior to map out progress through the buyer's journey. But the biggest thing is that it's a very powerful suite of tools that is easy for our sales reps to take advantage of. We use things like sequences and vidyard all the time. I can customize the CRM to force compliance of our sales process too.” - Mike Wille, CRO at Localfluence, Marketing & Advertising, SMB (11-50 emp.)

"I have used both Salesforce and HubSpot and I can see the best feature out of both platforms is the email sequence feature HubSpot offers. It allows me to set up a sequence of intro and follow up emails and lets me set and forget. The biggest flaw for most people in sales is following up, this lets you set and forget while getting results. I prefer HubSpot over any other CRM that I have used, including Salesforce." - Kyle Parcell, Account Manager at Cybba, IT, Mid-Market (51 -1,000 emp.)

HubSpot doesn't sacrifice power for usability. Customize it to meet your business needs without adding complexity -- and scale up gracefully, without months of custom dev work. HubSpot offers a flexible data structure for your CRM with custom objects, so custom implementations are a breeze. You can stay agile as you scale, adapting easily to whatever the world throws at you.

Salesforce offers endless customization for the most complex organizations. But CRMs that are less integrated get clunky the more users, data, and processes you add. It slows you down just when you need to speed up. This level of customization allows for nuanced forecasting and reporting dashboards. However, these features may require more admin support and developer resources, which can make it difficult for businesses to change and adapt their Salesforce instance over time.

HubSpot and Salesforce both offer powerful software for fast-scaling businesses. As a business evolves, it’s important for your CRM to be able to grow and change with your business needs. With this in mind, having the flexibility and control to customize your CRM is critical. See why and how HubSpot's Global Sales team moved fully off of Salesforce CRM to be 100% on HubSpot CRM Platform.

“Sales Hub is straightforward enough that my sales team (who are newer HubSpot users) can get value out of it easily, and the customization options are flexible enough that I can create really sophisticated, custom campaigns for demand gen... I've also switched my sales team from using Salesforce to using HubSpot almost exclusively because the deal tracking feature is so much easier to use….HubSpot aggregates a feed on each type of record so you can see the complete history of that person, company, or deal - including website visits, email engagement, ad engagement you name it.” - Olivia Watson, Marketing and Business Development Manager  at Sense360, Market Research, SMB (11 - 50 employees)

HubSpot’s App Marketplace takes the same approach to 3rd party integrations as it does its own software – focusing heavily on power, ease-of-use, and quality. Installing and configuring integrations via the marketplace is simple with over 500 apps and integrations, many of which are native (HubSpot-built) integrations.

Salesforce’s AppExchange is the largest and broadest CRM app marketplace, offering a wide variety of options for different requirements. AppExchange is the fast and easy way to extend Salesforce with over 3,400 apps and integrations. 

HubSpot and Salesforce both offer excellent add-on functionality through a robust app ecosystem. Both offer open APIs and developer tools to help you cater your CRM to your company. 

HubSpot is invested in your success from day one. Our world-class support and customer success teams are available to all customers– with phone and email support at no extra charge for Pro and Enterprise customers– and you won’t pay more for it as you grow. HubSpot Academy, consistently ranked as one of the top online learning platforms in the world (source), is also available for free right at your fingertips. 

Salesforce charges 20% of your net contract price for 24/7 premier support, while additional feature access costs 30% of your net contract price. With percentage pricing as you spend more on additional seats and add-on features, you’ll have to pay more for the same support. When choosing a Salesforce support plan, you’ll want to carefully forecast how much your team will need.

"I love that HubSpot has amazing training programs that are free and excellent customer service. It was so easy to get started without any tech gurus or IT expenses. I am a salesman and I set up everything for my team by myself. I looked at doing the same for Salesforce and kept getting bogged down in all of the details. I am sure Salesforce is great but just not easy to get started in. Our sales team is not particularly technical or strong on computer skills so ease of use was paramount to acceptance in implementation.” - Greg Cooper, Sales & Marketing at San Jacinto Environmental Supplies, Wholesale, SMB (11-50 emp.)