HubSpot vs Salesforce is a comparison constantly made to determine which best fits one’s business.
While they are the two most popular CRMs in the world, they are different in quite a few ways. Here’s a comparison between Salesforce Sales Cloud and HubSpot Sales Hub to help you choose the right one for your business.
By the way, we also have added another cost-effective and scalable alternative—LeadSquared—for you to consider.
What is HubSpot Sales Hub?
HubSpot Sales Hub is a powerful sales software that helps businesses close more deals, improve customer relations, and effectively manage their pipeline. Some of HubSpot’s popular features include:
- Call tracking
- Meeting scheduler
- Live chat
Out of their 113,000 clients, some of the noticeable customers are RocketSpace, Search Engine Optimization Inc., and California State University.
HubSpot has a significant mismatch between its sales and marketing features. Here are a few HubSpot alternatives providing a more balanced solution that you should check out.
Next, let’s look at Salesforce’s sales product.
What is Salesforce Sales Cloud?
Built initially as a sales CRM, Salesforce’s flagship product, Sales Cloud, is targeted at enterprise-sized companies who want extensive features for their business. The software accelerates deals with intelligent insights, optimizes outcomes with real-time data, and automates processes to improve efficiency.
Salesforce caters to over 150,000 companies, the majority (62%) of which are US-based businesses. They are most prominent in the professional services industry, which makes up almost 30% of their total clients. Some of their noteworthy clients include Spotify, Amazon Web Services, and Canon (Source).
Want to know who are some of Salesforce’s competitors? Check out this blog on the top Salesforce alternatives to know which CRMs beat it in price, functionality, and ease-of-use.
Before we get into the actual comparison, here is a bonus CRM that provides the best of both worlds.
LeadSquared – An alternative to Salesforce and HubSpot
LeadSquared is a sales execution CRM that is affordable, scalable, and powerful. Today, one of the fastest-growing companies, this software is known for its lead management, customer service, out-of-the-box integrations, and workflow automation.
Although the company is still growing, it already has several noteworthy clients, including Amazon Pay, Zoomcar, Bikes24, and Manipal Hospitals. The CRM has various solutions across several industries, of which education and healthcare are their biggest sectors.
Now that you know a little about the three companies, here is their comparison table. [You can also download the table here: HubSpot vs Salesforce Comparison, so you don’t have to search the table repeatedly while sharing it with your team.]
HubSpot vs Salesforce Comparison Table
HubSpot | Salesforce Sales Cloud | LeadSquared Sales Execution CRM | |
Pricing |
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Free trial availability | Free trial for 14 days | 30-Day free trial | Upon request |
Implementation time | Around 90 days | 35 to 335 days | 5 to 15 days |
Best Features |
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Available on: | |||
Devices | HubSpot can be accessed on PC, tablet, and mobile. | Salesforce can be accessed through PC, tablet, and mobile. | LeadSquared is available on PC and mobile. |
Mobile OS | Supports both Android and iOS. | Supports both Android and iOS. | Supports both Android and iOS. |
Search Engines | Works on Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Edge, and Google. | Works on Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Edge, and Google. | Works on Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Edge, and Google. |
Languages supported | It supports German, English, French, Italian, Japanese, Dutch, Portuguese, and Spanish. | It supports Danish, German, English, Finnish, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Dutch, Norwegian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, and Chinese (Simplified). | It supports English, Hindi, Spanish, Portuguese Brazilian, Vietnamese, and Indonesian. |
Customizations | Highly customizable, you can customize the functionality and build your own features in HubSpot. | Highly customizable, you can customize both the UI and functionality, as well as build custom integrations. | Highly customizable, |
Scalability | Higher packages are provided only to a certain minimum number of users, which many customers tend to avoid. | The pricing for higher packages, that offer a few essential features, is quite steep which may not be feasible for many businesses. | Customers found LeadSquared to be a highly scalable solution at an affordable cost. |
Customer support | Email, in-app chat, and phone support for all packages. | Standard package includes help portal, self-guided and self-service resources. | Self-service resources, help portal, email, tickets, and phone support for all packages. |
User Feedback: | |||
Positives: |
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Negatives: | Sometimes slow due to servers being down. | ||
How to determine the best CRM for your business?
All three CRMs are viable choices. Before finalizing the best one for your business, here are some points for you to provide more clarity on how to choose a CRM. All these points have been taken from our CRM Buyer’s Guide E-book, which is free to download and read!
Ease of use
As your sales team grows, you would like the new members to complete their training and get started as soon as possible. Instead of spending days learning how to use a CRM, you need software that they can pick up with almost no effort. Furthermore, you also have experienced veterans who might not understand technology well. They also need to find it easy to use.
If your software is easy to use, your team can navigate through it quickly and hence gain maximum efficiency. This will boost your productivity significantly.
Customer Support
Ironically, many CRMs don’t provide excellent customer support. Good support is crucial for implementation. You might get confused if your organization has never used a CRM before. Reaching out to the CRM support team, only to be left hanging, is frustrating.
So, how do you find out whether the company provides good customer support or not? The answer is to try it out. Remember to test how:
- Quickly they respond
- They react to customer feedback
- Extensive their self-help documents are
- Easy it is to contact support
These factors can help you decide whether to invest in the CRM or not.
Implementation time
Imagine you book a car, but the waiting period is 4 years! Not only do you lose interest while waiting, but you also feel frustrated when your investment takes ages to start giving you returns. If you think implementing the CRM in your set timeframe is impossible, you can look for alternate options. For the record, cloud-based CRMs usually take 2-6 weeks to implement.
The more delay in implementation, the slower your reps can start learning and using the software to its utmost capabilities. This, in turn, results in more time to reach optimal productivity.
Integrations
Your CRM needs to integrate with your third-party applications seamlessly. You don’t want to switch and use multiple software to do the same things. Integrations allow your business to be flexible while not having to switch to other products just because of one additional CRM software.
Why do you need to integrate your software? Integrations ensure no leads leak through your pipeline and allow you to gain complete business visibility in one place. It will also save time from having to copy data from multiple applications.
Well, there you have it! We hope you found these points helpful to determine the right CRM for your business.
If you want a tailored solution with features that allow your business to run smoothly, then reach out to our experts. They will show you how a CRM can fit your existing business process to scale up productivity!
FAQs
Both CRMs have their own advantages. While HubSpot is more user-friendly and allows developers to create their own solutions, Salesforce beats it in feature extensivity, solving complicated use cases, and sales solutions.
No. Although HubSpot and Salesforce are both cloud-based CRM platforms, the companies are different. They are both separate organizations, that focus on separate aspects of the business. HubSpot is more into marketing, whereas Salesforce focuses more on sales.
While both are all-in-one CRMs, HubSpot is more focused on the marketing side of thing, whereas Salesforce is a better fit to solve sales challenges. HubSpot is also aimed more at medium sized businesses, whereas Salesforce caters to more enterprise-sized companies.
While HubSpot is best known for its marketing features, companies like LeadSquared provide more balanced sales and marketing solutions.
