HubSpot and Salesforce Comparison 2024

HubSpot and Salesforce are like the dynamic duo of sales and marketing CRMs.

Both category leaders, how on earth do you make a choice between them?

Salesforce brings the big guns with its sophisticated tools that are designed with the large enterprise in mind. No surprises that Salesforce is often be referred to as "a hammer to crack a nut" when it comes to smaller businesses.  However, all this power is well and good but comes at a price - a high price tag and a steep learning curve that could rival climbing Mount Everest!!

On the other hand, HubSpot is the friendly neighbour, easy to use and budget-friendly and pretty powerful with a ton of features to rival its competitors.

HubSpot hooks you up with a free plan for all your basic CRM needs, unlike Salesforce which has no free plans.

You can get your hands on the Salesforce platform with a 30-day free trial, while HubSpot offers a 14-day free trial for its paid plans.

Both platforms bring the heat with essential CRM functionalities like sales forecasting, email marketing, and contact and lead management.

HubSpot has taken top place in the G2 awards for the past few years, knocking Salesforce from the top spot. 

Horses for Courses...

So, who is HubSpot best for?

If you're a small or mid size  business looking for a CRM that's easy to use and focused on sales and marketing, HubSpot is certainly the way to go.

The best part? HubSpot offers a user-friendly interface that's perfect for beginners in the CRM world or those with limited technical knowledge. It simplifies tasks like email marketing and lead management right within the platform, making it accessible for teams without specialised training. This is especially beneficial for businesses that prioritise sales and marketing, providing a range of tools in these areas.

For SMBs, HubSpot's ease of use, integration of essential marketing tools, and cost-effectiveness make it a better choice than Salesforce. These features allow smaller businesses to effectively manage customer relationships without requiring extensive resources or technical expertise.

HubSpot streamlines workflows with its flexible automation capabilities, crucial for SMBs with limited staff. The platform's intuitive visual editor for custom workflows enables the creation of sales and service processes without the need for extensive technical knowledge.

Additionally, HubSpot's lead scoring helps prioritise viable leads, essential for SMBs focused on efficient conversions.

With a minimal and straightforward interface, HubSpot meets the needs of SMBs looking for an easy-to-navigate CRM tool, without the extensive training that Salesforce may demand. HubSpot's foundation in inbound marketing makes it particularly strong in sales and marketing tools, aligning well with the primary focus of many SMBs. In comparison, Salesforce, with its extensive customisation and scalability, may offer more than what SMBs actually need.

      72% of Sales Hub Professional and 84% of Enterprise customers display high Sales Hub feature usage.

Who is Salesforce best for?

Salesforce is well-suited for larger enterprises or businesses with intricate CRM needs, especially those in search of extensive customisation and a comprehensive range of features. In contrast to HubSpot, which caters more towards small and medium-sized businesses with its user-friendly interface and integrated marketing tools, Salesforce offers a robust, feature-rich platform capable of handling a diverse array of business processes and requirements.

It should be noted that HubSpot is increasingly evolving into a more robust enterprise solution with impressive developments this year in customer sensitive data and HIPPA compliance.

Salesforce boasts impressive analytics and reporting capabilities, making it a valuable asset for businesses looking to delve deep into their data to steer decision-making. The reporting is notoriously difficult to configure and Salesforce specialists are required to tailor all custom reports. 

Salesforce v HubSpot at a glance

HubSpot began as a nifty marketing tool that blossomed into a full-fledged CRM, whereas Salesforce initially focused on CRM and later expanded to include sales and marketing features.

Today, HubSpot remains the go-to for inbound marketing, while Salesforce is hailed for its sales automation prowess. Despite their origins, both platforms offer a similar array of features: 

Feature comparison chart compiled by Zapier

How to make a decision on which CRM is best for your business??

When deciding between HubSpot and Salesforce, there are numerous feature/function comparisons available to help you understand the differences.

While all these features and functions are informative, they really don’t complete the comparison because the core of the decision rests on the nature of your business.

History matters and a company’s heritage is very useful to help inform you as you make this critical decision.

If you’re in an IP-based business, like software, and your turnover is less than 100m you should choose Hubspot and here’s why....

Salesforce is a platform that over 4000 applications have been written on.  It was born in the era of large centralised systems like SAP and offered what was then a unique value proposition, effectively creating SAAS as an accepted platform.

Back in the day when I was a Director at PwC, we had (just like Accenture)  thousands of skilled Salesforce consultants.  The reason we had them was Salesforce implementations are complex and very resource heavy, resulting in the billing of huge amounts of time to projects.

This leads to an over-reliance on external experts, indefinitely.

Which is what is needed if you’re Fortune 500, complex, global and multi-divisional.

If your business moves physical goods such as manufacturing or distribution, chances are you have a fairly sophisticated billing and inventory requirement being serviced by an ERP.  If that ERP is SAP then chances are, on balance, your scale and complexity could well benefit from the sophistication of Salesforce.

If not, then HubSpot’s Marketing Hub, Sales Hub  and Service Hub are an easy to implement CRM solution.

Over to you!