Hubspot vs Salesforce CRM: Choosing the Right CRM for Your Business

A good relationship with customers is a key element of a successful business. To make that easier, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools were developed. Irrespective of the size of your business, CRM tools are a complete must if you want to further scale your business. 

There are many excellent CRM platforms out there, but out of all of them two names stand out – Salesforce and HubSpot. Without thorough research, choosing between the two can be tough. To spare you the time and effort to do so, we’ve prepared a detailed comparison of the two CRM giants. 

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What is Salesforce?

Salesforce is cloud-based Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software. With Salesforce CRM tools you can build meaningful relationships with your customers and grow revenue at the same time. Salesforce Cloud makes managing customer activity easy. It automatically captures any type of engagement activity so you can be up to date with how customers are responding to what your business has to offer. Salesforce Customer 360 contains all the features and integrations to support and sustain customer relationships across all kinds of industries.

Salesforce’s Key Features:

• Built-in Apps – Salesforce has all the apps you might need built into their platform. In case there is something such as data that you might like to integrate, you can use their integration platform called MuleSoft. They also have Einstein. Einstein is a built-in artificial intelligence (AI) platform that you can use as part of the Salesforce Customer 360 suite. Einstein can help you increase productivity and personalize every customer interaction. 
• Collaboration – with Slack as part of the platform, your team can communicate with ease internally – with team members, or externally – with customers or partners. By managing Salesforce Customer 360 directly from Slack, both efficiency and productivity increase.
• Scalability and Security – being part of Salesforce, Salesforce Customer 360 is fully cloud-based. All Salesforce apps are securely delivered across public clouds by Hyperforce – Salesforce’s next-generation infrastructure architecture. This way your business can benefit from incredible scalability and innovation while maintaining customer compliance requirements.
• Adaptability and Flexibility – depending on your needs as a business, Salesforce can adapt to meet them. Salesforce partners with over 8,700 apps and services to make sure your business doesn’t lack in any aspect. 
• Customer Orientation – essentially what Salesforce wants is for their customers to achieve their goals and succeed. For this reason, they want to make sure you use their platform at maximum value. By using Salesforce, you become part of a huge community.

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What is HubSpot?

HubSpot is a customer platform that provides the necessary features that guarantee productivity and deepen customer relationships. One helpful tool that HubSpot CRM offers for sales strategy improvement is conversation intelligence. This feature allows you to get insight from calls with customers so your team can receive better coaching and learn from common objections for future customer interactions. You can also create surveys to gather feedback from customers which carry valuable insights.

HubSpot’s Key Features:

• Omni-Channel Messaging – with omni-channel messaging, instead of making your customers adapt to you, your business adapts to their preferences. This feature allows your employees to switch seamlessly between email, chat, and Facebook Messenger to connect with customers. By receiving fast responses and solutions to their issues, customers feel seen and valued. 
• Live Chat – HubSpot offers free live chat software. By using this feature, you can connect in real time with the people who visit your website. Customers are automatically connected to the right employee so they can receive answers to their questions as fast as possible. Even more so, without any coding skills, you can create chatbots – this tool is fully integrated with HubSpot.
• Shared Inbox – this feature enables you to collect all messaging tools in one place. HubSpot’s shared inbox offers you free tools so you can integrate conversations from live chat, email, and Facebook Messenger. 
• Conversation Intelligence – with HubSpot’s conversation AI, you can capture customer interactions over the phone. As your business grows, so does the volume of phone calls. Unlike written conversations, valuable insights from calls can be omitted. However, with conversation intelligence, this is no longer an issue. 
• Customer Feedback Surveys – listening to the voice of the customer is the most important part of maintaining a good relationship with your customers. To receive direct feedback from them and to be able to implement suggestions, you can create surveys with HubSpot’s help. You can customize your surveys by choosing from a wide variety of questions, and then send them by email. After this, your team can benefit from valuable insights that lead to growth opportunities.

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Salesforce vs HubSpot

Both Salesforce and HubSpot CRM bring forth powerful features that can help you maintain and further improve the relationship between your business and customers. However, the experience you get from using one platform can be completely different from the other. When deciding which one is a better fit for your company, pricing can play an important role.

• Free Plans – in terms of whether there is a free plan available or not, only HubSpot offers one with a limited number of features. Signing up to HubSpot doesn’t require adding your credit card information and it’s free forever. Even though Salesforce doesn’t offer a free plan, you can watch a demo and, even better, test it out directly by taking advantage of the 30-day free trial.
• Pricing – the subscription plans Salesforce CRM offers five plans that can be billed either monthly or yearly – Starter Suite ($25/month per user), Professional ($80/month per user), Enterprise ($165/month per user), Unlimited ($330/month per user), and Einstein 1 Service ($500/month per user). HubSpot CRM offers three price plans – Starter ($20/month per seat), Professional ($100/month per seat), and Enterprise ($130/month per seat).

Why You Might Prefer Salesforce CRM

• Salesforce CRM offers a higher degree of customization compared to HubSpot
• Salesforce CRM has more options for native integrations than HubSpot
• Your business needs high levels of customization 
• You are part of a large enterprise that can make use of Salesforce’s Cloud advanced features and afford the subscription fees

Why You Might Prefer HubSpot CRM

• HubSpot has a more modern design and an overall better user experience than Salesforce
• HubSpot has better marketing tools compared to Salesforce
• You need just the basic features that are included in the free plan
• You are part of a smaller business or are you at the beginning of starting one

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When choosing a CRM for your business, both Salesforce and Hubspot CRM are great tools. However, each company has different needs and budgets. This is why, giving a direct answer to the question “Which CRM tool is better, Salesforce or HubSpot?” is not possible. Both platforms have pros and cons and are suited for different types of businesses – for larger enterprises Salesforce is a better choice, while for smaller companies HubSpot is a more suited CRM tool. Before committing to any of them we recommend you to take them for a test drive. That is the ultimate deciding factor – and it’s free!

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