Introduction

HubSpot’s feature-rich free version surpasses the performance of many commercial CRMs. The promotion, sales, and customer support departments may all use this modern CRM. Almost every business that wants to improve customer relationship management should give it a thought. To assist you in determining if the platform is appropriate for you, we have put the results of our thorough study and experience in this review.

Brief About HubSpot

You’ve probably heard of HubSpot if you’re reading this blog. But do you understand everything that it has to offer? A whole suite of marketing, sales, and customer care tools for your company is available from HubSpot, a cloud-based provider of software as a service.

Boston-based HubSpot has expanded over the last several years after becoming public in the middle of 2014. Because of this, HubSpot has been able to broaden the range of services it offers while continuing to put its clients and their clients first.

HubSpot Resources

The Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, and Service Hub are the three key tools that HubSpot offers to assist with B2B and B2C marketing initiatives. Although each may be employed alone, their combined strength is greater. Additionally, HubSpot provides a CRM, which comes with every plan for nothing.

PROS

Complete Free Plan:

Out of the hundreds of CRMs we’ve personally seen and evaluated, HubSpot provides the most comprehensive free plan we’ve encountered. On paper, most of the free programs seem fantastic, but they seldom provide the features you want to genuinely enhance client relations. HubSpot, however, operates differently and goes above and above with its free plan.

Flexible Pricing:

Despite the fact that HubSpot’s premium plans might be pricey, there are many options to combine services to acquire what you need for a fair price. You have the option of upgrading several hubs at a reduced price or buying individual hubs. If none of the pre-packaged bundles work for your organization, another choice is a completely unique CRM system with only the components you want.

The synergy that can be completely analyzed:

HubSpot Marketing may be linked to HubSpot CRM or Salesforce to make sure that all customer engagements with your brand are documented and evaluated. You may generate precise and reliable reports and get knowledge about how each of your initiatives is affecting your sales since all relevant data is conveniently gathered in one location.

All three HubSpot solutions are accessible and linkable from everywhere at all times, covering your websites, email providers, social media accounts, phone numbers, and other areas where your important operations are occurring.

Simple to Use:

Despite its complex pricing structure and flexibility, HubSpot’s platform is rational and remarkably easy to use. Even though there are tons of functions available, the creators do an excellent job of making them simple to access. You won’t have any problem navigating even on the free plan.

Outstanding assistance:

HubSpot is rightfully praised for its top-notch customer service. The staff is regularly accessible via the phone, email, or live chat, and they are always informed and kind. Additionally, HubSpot has a vast user network where you can ask for assistance or share your expertise, as well as a ton of manuals and training resources.

Vast library:

HubSpot provides a sizable collection of simple-to-use templates to fulfill any demands for email drip campaigns, case studies, e-books, and website design. This tool saves you a ton of time, in the long run, conceiving from scratch if you have a talented in-house designer. If you don’t already have one on staff, you should definitely recruit one to maximize the library’s potential and prevent it from becoming a subscription feature that goes underutilized.

CONS

Complicated Pricing Tiers:

I am aware that we previously mentioned HubSpot’s flexible pricing, and I still stand with that statement. There is a distinction between flexible pricing and opaque pricing, however. Some people could be absolutely overwhelmed by the abundance of available plans and price alternatives and end up staying with the (clearly limited) free version or switching service providers.

No Customer service on Free Plan:

Although those using the free version have access to the HubSpot community and online knowledge base to help with problems, there are times when you just want to have a conversation with a real live human being. It’s unfortunate that HubSpot doesn’t at least provide live chat to users of the free plan, simply to ensure that they are properly showing their well-known abilities in providing excellent client service.

Easy to Reach Free Plan Limitations:

The fact remains that it is a free option! However, you must take into account the free plan’s restrictions in comparison to the higher-tier possibilities. For instance, the Starter plan offers unlimited email tracking alerts, but the Free plan only allows for 200 per month.

Features

• Dashboards for advanced analytics
• Alerts and easy automated task creation
• Up to 5,000 marketing emails every month
• Access to the user-friendly mobile app by HubSpot
• Capability for retargeting ads
• For sales and support teams, an automatic conversion route
• To improve customer interactions, route live chat discussions to the appropriate salesperson.
• With just one click, you can manage your pipeline and make sure that crucial transactions don’t fall through the cracks.

HubSpot Plans & Pricing

Let’s look at the plans that HubSpot provides for your company. Precisely,  it offers 4 plans, including:

Free Plan

One deal pipeline, one team or division with unlimited members, and up to one million contacts, businesses, deals, or task details are included in each Free plan. The drawback is that there is no phone option; there is just online help. HubSpot makes up for it by providing the following features per user every month:

Calling (max. 15 minutes) (max. 15 minutes)

You have the ability to record short calls and make them immediately from the browser, which makes it easier to monitor calls automatically and retain CRM records.

Five templates:

These templates aid in bringing your team’s communications up to speed. They may also be altered to increase participation in your campaigns.

Notifications (max. 200). (max. 200).:

Your sales teams can stay on top of allocated leads, form submissions, deal mentions, and more thanks to real-time alerts. Web, desktop, and mobile applications may each have their own unique set of alerts.

Five snippets:

Snippets are reusable text excerpts that can be used for both brief email replies and in-person communication.

Five documents:

Your team will get benefit from the ability to upload, share, and monitor up to five documents.

One booking page:

You may organize meetings with other people by integrating the booking page with your Google or Outlook calendar.

You may upgrade to the premium versions if your company expands to the point where these free tools are no longer sufficient. HubSpot does not, however, make it clear what those enhanced versions would set you back. You know, it’s a bit complicated since there are so many various packages and price levels offered.

Consider the scenario when you simply want to utilize HubSpot’s CRM and sales tool. With a 12-month commitment, the beginning price is $45 per month. You could decide later that you’d want to use their marketing resources as well. A Starter plan under this product’s offering has a lead-in charge of $45 per month for a 12-month commitment.

But we’re going to reveal a small secret to you. All HubSpot product offerings would be available to you if you only paid $50 per month for the Starter Growth Suite package (except the CMS Hub).

HubSpot Hubs

HubSpot Marketing Hub:

It is a cutting-edge marketing solution that aids businesses in increasing traffic and conversions via gorgeous landing pages, scalable processes, content editing, and excellent distribution outreach.

Numerous well-known businesses, like Frontify, Monday.com, Trello, and SurveyMonkey, rely on HubSpot’s marketing platform. They often get accolades for excellence from websites like G2.com.

Here are the Marketing Hub plan options that one can check out:

 

• Free Basic Plan — $45 per month

• The professional plan comes at $800 per month

• $3,200 per month for the enterprise plan

HubSpot Sales hub:

It is an intelligent e-commerce platform that provides clients with strong capabilities so they can sell more in less time and easily automate those processes for more effective sales operations.

Your teams will benefit from being able to manage their pipeline more effectively and efficiently, complete more business, forge deeper bonds, and prevent any opportunities from falling through the cracks.

By ensuring that your staff is consistently providing the same, helpful message, you’ll have the chance to forge better relationships with your clients using technologies like email templates, email monitoring, and call recording.

The following is an outline of the tiered price for the sales software, along with the features that are included:

• Free Basic Plan — $45 per month

• $450 per month for professionals

• Monthly cost for the business is $1,200

HubSpot Service Hub:

When your team is up to par and running like a well-oiled machine, it’s time to put the consumer first. When we say “focus on the customer,” we don’t only mean to attract them and turn them into paying customers.

The Free, Starter, and Enterprise rates for the Service Hub stay the same and are fairly comparable to those provided for the Sales Hub. On the other hand, the monthly fee for the Professional pricing plan is $360.

HubSpot CMS Hub:

You’ve probably heard by now that one of the most effective strategies for developing a rapport of trust with your audience and potential customers is to provide interactive and interesting content for them.

You may start to pique your audience’s attention and earn their trust by providing just enough “free” guidance to get them through simple tasks while avoiding giving away too much.

CMS Hub does not come with a free plan for customers. However, the following price levels are now available:

 

• $270 per month for professionals

• $900 for the enterprise plan per month.

Substitutes for HubSpot

Our team discovered a number of CRMs that beat HubSpot after doing extensive testing and our own in-person evaluations. Although we’d contend that it’s still the finest free CRM available, you should look at some of our other top choices as well:

• Monday Sales CRM: Most effective. It costs you $8.00 per month.
• SalesForce: Best for firms with the rapid development is Salesforce. Its starting price is $25.00 per month.
• HubSpot is the greatest free customer relationship management software.
• Zoho CRM: The best CRM for more visibility is Zoho CRM.
• Freshsales Suite: The best sales and marketing automation are found in Freshsales Suite.
• SalesFlare: The best CRM for only concentrating on sales is Salesflare.
• EngageBay: The best all-in-one CRM package for small businesses is EngageBay.
• Streak: The best CRM for using Gmail exclusively is Streak.

Success Stories of HubSpot

Not just B2B lead-generating companies may use HubSpot. HubSpot offers a wealth of tools for eCommerce firms eager to get started with inbound marketing, as we’ve previously said.

American sportswear manufacturer Cutter & Buck is situated in Seattle, Washington (and a Groove Commerce client). They were searching for a more user-friendly and potent solution to satisfy their demands after having trouble with Pardot email marketing.

FAQ’s

Define CRM.

Customer relationship management is known as CRM. It is software that assists companies in planning, managing, and fostering connections with both current and potential clients.

Does my company need a CRM?

You need to communicate with your customers often if you sell anything or provide a service. To manage these interactions and foster connections so that your firm may expand, you might require a CRM. CRMs may aid in the management of leads for company expansion.

HubSpot: Is it the best CRM?

Teams that are new to CRM might benefit greatly from using HubSpot, particularly if they wish to use the platform’s email marketing features. However, before choosing a customer relationship management system, you should also take into account HubSpot’s rivals. Check out our list of the top marketing CRMs on the market right now.

Final Conclusion

HubSpot is a well-known innovator in digital marketing automation solutions, and HubSpot CRM is only one of many products. The free edition of HubSpot CRM comes with a number of HubSpot products and tools from the Marketing Hub™, Sales Hub™, and Service Hub™.

HubSpot CRM is a great option if you want to start using customer relationship management for the first time since it is simple to set up and use. Its technologies were developed especially for small and mid-sized organizations to address the particular problems they face, such as small team sizes and few resources.

However, if you want to use the HubSpot free plan in the beginning then go ahead. It also has enough tools to help you get started. Once you get comfortable, you can add up more premium tools and products.