The Ultimate Guide to
HubSpot Pros and Cons
Is HubSpot the best marketing software for companies
who want to crush it at inbound marketing?
Is HubSpot the best marketing software for companies
who want to crush it at inbound marketing?
Assuming you’re a marketer, not a professional web developer, chances are that you want a website platform that can help you design a great website, keep it updated, and convert leads. HubSpot offers a comprehensive website platform designed specifically for the needs of marketers and more importantly, their customers--not professional web developers who think in code.
HubSpot’s website features are known as their Content Optimization System (COS). This term is close to CMS, or content management system, the technology category that tools like Wordpress, Joomla, and Drupal fit into. Ultimately, all of these options allow you to build and add onto a website, but HubSpot’s focus is on ease-of-use with features like drag-and-drop templates, built-in SEO tools, and automatic responsive design features that scale from desktop to smartphone-sized screens.
Unlike Wordpress and other alternatives to HubSpot, many of the marketing features we’ll delve into below are a seamless part of the HubSpot platform. Since you can’t do “just” a HubSpot website, signing up for HubSpot can enable a full web COS, blog tools, landing page tools, and everything else--analytics, social media integration, contacts. While it’s possible to have a similar experience with other CMS options, it typically involves adding a bunch of free and, more commonly, paid add-on tools and integrations.
From a user’s perspective, here’s what to know about the pros and cons of HubSpot websites.
It’s easy for marketers with no web development background to create highly-customized web pages in HubSpot. Choose between templates that are built to look like your website design, or create a custom page in a drag-and-drop template editor. Once you’ve dragged-and-dropped the structure into place, marketers can simply point-and-click to add copy, photos, calls-to-action (CTAs), forms, and other advanced modules.
Relevant content still matters, but the best brands are heading towards ultra-personalization and dynamic content delivery.
HubSpot was among the first to make it easy for small and medium-sized businesses to offer dynamic web content experiences personalized to their audiences. You can segment and target your website visitors with personalized content with HubSpot's page copy, CTAs, forms, and even HTML. This can include one-to-one greetings that say “Hi, Bob” when a customer lands on your site or forms that are designed to gain more information about your existing leads.
In the last year alone, the frequency at which hackers attempt to break into companies through their websites and web apps has grown 48%, according to Akamai. If your website isn’t secure, it’s a liability that puts your sensitive data at risk.
HubSpot websites are highly-secure and built to protect users against common information security threats like denial of service (DoS) attacks. They staff a 24/7 security team to respond to threats in real-time and surround their technology with a web application firewall (WAF).
Other security features include data-in-transit encryption using advanced protocols and the option to surround your website with an extra security layer with SSL support. HubSpot utilizes multiple data centers to ensure your website doesn’t go down in case of disaster. They’re considered one of the least-risky options in the space, offering a record in the last year of 99.99% availability.
Mobile optimization used to be difficult, and prior to responsive design, websites that were tailored for an iPhone screen didn’t always look right on an Android Note. Responsive design is a newer approach to website optimization, where pages are built to scale according to the size of the screen they’re being viewed on from giant desktop computers to the smallest mobile device. Instead of elements being “smooshed” inward, they adjust, sometimes stacking vertically to ensure the user experience is preserved.
HubSpot is ahead-of-the-curve when it comes to responsive design. Marketers don’t need to create multiple pages for web and mobile, since responsive is built right into the COS. You can even preview on multiple screen sizes before you click publish.
When you’ve gotten your HubSpot website up and completed their onboarding process, you’re ready to hit the ground running and start marketing. In addition to all the technology you need to add website pages, blogs, landing pages, and offers, you’ve got built-in access to marketing automation features for lead management, lead nurturing, social media integration, forms, CTAs, and way more.
Seamless integration makes it easy to deploy all of the rich features in HubSpot’s marketing software, as well as having access to detailed analytics without any coding.
According to a recent Google study, 53% of mobile site visitors will leave a page that takes longer than three seconds to load.
HubSpot is backed by a fast Content Delivery Network (CDN), which is a technical term for the many servers they use in different data centers to power your website services. This CDN offers the advantage of speed to your visitors since their website experience is being served from a location that’s geographically close to them. It also offers security and reliability advantages. If one of the data centers is hit by a natural disaster or equipment failure, the CDN is designed to transition the workload to other servers automatically.
If you have a website, you’re not guaranteed a CDN. It’s far from a standard feature. Tests of how websites powered by HubSpot’s CDN stack up to the average reveal that HubSpot websites are generally twice as speedy as alternatives.
So, you’ve got a question. It happens.
HubSpot offers trained, expert customer support advocates who can help you hack your website. These resources are available 24/7/365. We can vouch for just how amazing their phone support is. You can ALWAYS expect someone on the line who is friendly, knowledgeable, and thorough. There’s also an abundance of free, always-on customer resources including forum posts, answers to FAQ and more.
HubSpot is delivered through a model known as software-as-a-service, or monthly subscription. An entire team of really sharp devs work to improve and upgrade your product continually. You don’t have to worry about downloading updates or security patches since they’re automatically pushed out to users. Major changes and updates are prefaced with announcements and education.
HubSpot isn’t an insurance policy that your website will never be out-of-date, but you can be sure you always have the web tools you need to keep your site in line with user experience expectations. You won't have to add new plugins, patch security flaws, or research emerging best practices for how to manage your web content.
HubSpot is a turnkey solution that’s built for marketers to manage. In other words, with some effort and time reviewing the resources in the HubSpot Academy, you should be able to blog, add landing pages, execute personalized content, and manage your website without any issues.
However, there are certain actions with the HubSpot COS that may require someone with a bit more technical expertise. You may need a certified HubSpot developer or agency to connect your domain name or integrate your CRM. HubSpot offers a robust marketplace of solutions for purchase, but some projects may require custom code, such as building an app from scratch.
This isn’t a con that’s strictly related to HubSpot’s COS. With any major CMS solution, there are likely to be certain actions that are challenging for marketers to handle without the help of an IT pro. HubSpot is, objectively, much easier to use than alternatives like Drupal. However, it’s certainly something to know.
There are ways to get a HubSpot website cheaper and faster using SprocketRocket.
So, you’re in deep with your current CMS, like Joomla or Drupal, and you want to keep the same platform for various reasons. Maybe it’s what your on-staff developers know how to use, and it’s just what you’re used to.
Or maybe you want to use a hybrid approach, where you retain some of the pages through your current CMS, and start adding new pages through HubSpot’s website features.
HubSpot website integration with another CMS is possible. You install a snippet of Javascript tracking code on your current website. With HubSpot you can “skin” your existing website, too, so each new landing page you add to your site through their CMS won’t look different than your current site.
However, the process of integrating HubSpot with your current CMS isn’t always easy or cheap. It depends on how big your current website is and which CMS you’re using--if your current website relies on a CMS that someone at your company designed it could be very hard and expensive.
You also may not like the results of HubSpot integrated with another CMS. Users report that satisfaction may vary, especially if your current CMS isn’t responsive. Integration may slow down your site, and updates and editing could become complex.
However, this isn’t definitive. Many HubSpot users effectively use a mixture of HubSpot and WordPress (what the industry calls "FrankenSpot") with great results and at a price point that’s within budget.
HubSpot offers transparent pricing data online, with five different levels of pricing options. While paid pricing starts at $50 a month and tops out at $2,400 a month, most companies can expect to pay $200-800 depending on features and needs. Most of our clients start out at the $800 a month tier, although we have ways to lower that cost quite a bit. (We share those secrets in our HubSpot Savings Guide).
These costs can scale up as your needs change, too.
Some alternatives to HubSpot pricing are free, in a sense. WordPress is technically free, but there are always trade-offs. With alternatives to HubSpot, you may pay for development, updates, themes, plugins, and integrations. A free website can quickly become just as expensive as a website through HubSpot, depending on whether you’re paying for design and ongoing support.
While a “free” website through a platform that's an alternative to HubSpot is probably not going to be free or even cheap, the fact that HubSpot carries monthly-recurring costs is something to keep in mind and something that could be a con for some prospective users.
HubSpot does not support server-side scripting, such as ASP, ASPX, PHP, ColdFusion, and other languages. It also doesn’t support server-side language modifications such as an htaccess file.
These are terms and concepts that could have an impact on some web developers. Within the context of technology, there’s a “server” that serves pages and a “client” that displays pages in web browsers. Chances are, you only need to use client-side programming.
To be clear, you can customize your HubSpot website to infinity and beyond, including the development of really interactive user features like calculators that rely on underlying servers. It’s definitely possible. However, if you’re a full-blown technology lover who wants to retain total control over both the website and the underlying technology, you may not want to lose out on server-side programming features.
HubSpot’s Marketing Suite is one of the most fully-featured technology options available to marketers. In addition to the web COS features discussed in the last section, the “Marketing Hub” includes:
HubSpot’s been around since 2006 when they coined the term “inbound marketing." They went public in 2014. Since their inception, other software companies have entered the same “all-in-one” web-based marketing software niche. Some HubSpot alternatives that offer extensive marketing features (but not identical features) include Marketo, Eloqua, Pardot, Act-On, and Wishpond.
If you’re thinking about making HubSpot the technological center of your marketing, you’re probably aware of these alternatives and some of your options. However, to understand HubSpot for what it is, here’s what curated reviews from real users and our staff report as the pros and cons of HubSpot’s marketing hub.
When you log into HubSpot, you won’t feel overwhelmed. It is designed to make marketers succeed at inbound. This includes a simple user experience and intuitive organization. When you log in, you’re faced with logically-organized sections including:
Remember back in the early days of marketing, if you’re old enough, when you calculated campaign results and metrics like “lift” after the campaign cycle was completed? Thankfully, that’s not a reality in HubSpot.
HubSpot’s metrics and reports are updated live on your dashboard and reporting tools. You can actively monitor marketing experiments, email campaigns, and new blog posts in real-time, and if necessary, optimize your actions mid-stream.
From the moment you log in, it’s clear that HubSpot is designed for data-based decisions. Inbound marketing involves a lot of different channels and platforms and activities. HubSpot brings them all together and translates your inbound activity into metrics that matter, like visitors, conversion rates, clicks, and leads.
Sales-marketing alignment is important, and it makes everyone more effective. 81% of marketers with a formal service-level agreement and shared goals between marketing and sales think their marketing strategy is effective, according to 2017 HubSpot research. However, it can be hard for organizations to put into practice.
When HubSpot’s marketing suite is used with HubSpot’s product for sales, including the CRM tools or an integrated CRM like Salesforce, it makes some aspects of sales-marketing alignment much easier. You have built-in technological transparency, so there are no questions. Lead processing and routing are automatically taken care of. And the fact you’re in the same suite of products makes it easy to make sure nothing is lost in translation, like a decision to update your marketing-qualified lead criteria that doesn’t make it into your software after a meeting.
HubSpot is committed to helping their customers learn how to be better HubSpot users, and more so, better inbound marketers regardless of whether they’re paid users of HubSpot. They’ve genuinely embraced the inbound model of free education and information-sharing.
You can learn in many different ways through HubSpot’s online resources. The vast majority of their offerings, including certifications, are free:
HubSpot is designed for both B2B and B2C companies, and with the help of a few built-in integration options, even eCommerce.
After you take advantage of the free trial, HubSpot offers a pricing model that ranges from $200-2,400 per month. Most companies pay $200-800 for extensive marketing suite features. While this isn’t free or even cheap by some standards, HubSpot’s cost is surprisingly much lower than alternatives.
Marketo users pay $1,195-$11,995 per month, Pardot is $1,000-$3,000, and Eloqua starts at $2,000 and can exceed $4,000 for complex or custom deployments.
As your organization drives results with HubSpot, you’ll gain an increasingly large database of marketing contacts, or leads generated through your website that are working their way through your sales funnel. HubSpot’s pricing is based on a combination of features and number of contacts, so the monthly fees will increase as your database grows.
In general, depending on your package and features, you can expect to pay between $10 and $100 more every time you win an additional 1,000 contacts.
HubSpot offers an Enterprise edition with really robust features, like centralized website management across multiple sites, predictive lead intelligence, behavioral-based triggers, and more. It’s also used by some huge companies, like Suzuki, First National, Randstad, Shopify, and Care.com.
However, HubSpot isn’t always the right fit for major corp with 50,000 or more employees around the world or many billions in annual revenue. It may not fit your needs if you are trying to balance marketing across dozens of brands in hundreds of countries around the world, a massively complex product catalog with country-specific product codes, or many different regional marketing strategies.
The largest enterprises and companies on the Fortune 100 list are increasingly adopting inbound marketing tactics and technologies for automation and web optimization. However, their needs are often better-served by custom-developed software built in-house, designed for the complex realities of marketing across many different countries, languages, brands, and products.
While HubSpot offers an extensive and quickly-growing list of built-in integrations with products you already use, like GoToWebinar, Salesforce, and SurveyMonkey, not every web app that marketers use is built-in or already available. If you’re thinking of getting on HubSpot, chances are, your apps are already integrated, but it’s definitely smart to check.
The truth is, no "all-in-one" platform is going to have the functionality for every situation. You always work in more than one tool. However, HubSpot does offer all the features most marketers require most often. And, to support innovation, HubSpot offers an open API for developers to build integrations.
HubSpot offers a mobile application for Android and Apple users to extend functionality to your smartphone. From your mobile device, it’s easy to scope out your analytics, reports, and schedule social media content. The web apps are dynamic and constantly getting better, but not every feature that’s available on desktop is currently offered on mobile.
At the time of writing, for example, it isn’t possible to draft an entire blog post on your phone. There’s definitely workarounds for the minimal missing features. HubSpot’s own Ginny Soskey creates content really quickly by using the voice-to-text transcription feature in her Evernote app, and then retrieves the bones of her post on a desktop. And let’s be honest, that sounds a lot more efficient than trying to blog by typing on a smartphone keyboard. However, for the rare smartphone-only workers in the world, it’s definitely something to consider.
Reports are a standard part of HubSpot. Inbound marketing requires real-time data intelligence, and HubSpot’s Marketing Hub makes it easy to automatically access reports on the most common marketing success measures, like website visitors, traffic sources, and leads.
You can also adjust these reports to meet your specific use cases through the extensive, built-in custom reporting capabilities. These can also be directed at users according to their role--your content marketing team can log in and see blog performance data, while your web team sees the results of marketing experiments.
However, if you need highly-customized reports, you may need to purchase HubSpot’s Reporting Add-On, which costs $200 a month. Most standard reports and marketing success metrics are covered in the included features. However, the reporting add-on can be a necessity for companies who want a lot of freedom in creating multi-metric dashboards, flexible data visualization options, or the ability to bring together data from multiple marketing app sources.
HubSpot’s customer relationship management tool (CRM) is free. It’s not just free for the first two weeks you use it; it’s 100% free forever.
When you install HubSpot CRM, you can immediately start using core sales features such as:
HubSpot CRM is unique among equivalent technologies because it offers features and functionality for both marketers and sales. That’s a rarity that makes sense. Marketers can use features such as lead analytics, contact activity, and lead flows to optimize their campaigns.
With HubSpot’s CRM, sales benefit from productivity features for tracking emails, scheduling emails, templates, and more. All the while, everyone benefits from a shared platform which delivers the transparency you need to keep working towards alignment.
This product, like any other technology, isn’t the right fit for everyone. Many organizations with HubSpot’s marketing and website tools use HubSpot with another CRM they’ve invested in customizing and training their people on, like Salesforce or SugarCRM. HubSpot supports this decision by offering built-in integrations with major CRM platforms. You do not need to use HubSpot’s CRM to use HubSpot’s marketing or website tools.
Here’s how to know if HubSpot CRM is right for you.
You don’t need to switch to Google to unlock insights into your leads or companies that you're actively targeting. HubSpot CRM offers a built-in “Find Companies” feature to help you retrieve firmographic and demographic insights about your leads and their employers. These insights can be used to round out your lead profiles.
This in-tool research functionality has obvious benefits for sales, but it’s also an important feature for marketers. By understanding more about your most-engaged leads and customers, you can refine and update your buyer persona profiles, marketing messages, and target your content assets.
It goes without saying, but if you’re using HubSpot’s Marketing Hub, there’s no effort or troubleshooting required to get the CRM connected to your marketing tools. They work together seamlessly, allowing you to achieve a seamless sales cycle as you generate leads, nurture leads, and transfer marketing-qualified leads to the sales team. The CRM is, in fact, the same database that’s used to power the marketing tools.
There are other built-in integrations with tools that your marketing and sales team are already using to communicate internally and with your leads, including Gmail, G Suite, and Outlook.
It’s easy for a sales team member to initiate contact with a sales-ready lead. Accessing their phone number is as easy as clicking on the contact record and clicking once more to place a call.
HubSpot’s Marketing Hub features reveal they’re committed to supporting data-driven sales and marketing. The CRM’s built-in analytics features further support their mission of insight-informed action.
The HubSpot CRM builds on the insights you have in the Marketing Suite, allowing you to drill down on how your best-qualified prospects or leads from your target account list are engaging with your content. Tracking and analytics are in real-time, so marketing knows when to pass leads to sales and sales knows when to initiate contact.
Customizing CRMs is rarely easy. There are entire industries of CRM developers and implementation consultants, who specialize in making complicated tools match a client’s workflows and sales cycle. In other cases, CRMs limit the ways a tool can be customized.
HubSpot CRM doesn’t require professional help to customize, and there are also no limits on how you can change contacts, criteria, tasks, and other features to meet your needs. In general, marketers and sales should be able to make all the customization needed to get this tool off-the-ground.
HubSpot CRM isn’t designed to replace Salesforce or Sugar. In fact, they aren’t trying to do that. They allow you to “stack” their CRM on top of your existing CRM if that’s the deployment that best fits your needs. Modifications in HubSpot don’t impact your existing customization.
This may sound weird, but it’s actually a pretty common choice. Here are some prevalent use cases for companies deploying HubSpot Marketing and CRM, and integrating the CRM with Salesforce or another tool:
Chances are, your sales team lives inside their email account to manage customer communications, internal communications, and other aspects of their communications-heavy job.
HubSpot CRM offers built-in integrations with major email sending platforms, including Gmail and Outlook. Better yet, their tools for sales “live inside” the inbox. Sales doesn’t need to tab back and forth to use HubSpot features, like email scheduling, while marketing gets the peace of mind associated with the fact that sales is on top of the follow-ups needed.
Almost any technology has at least one oversight that can act as a small issue in an otherwise positive user experience. With HubSpot, some sales users report frustration with the fact the click-to-call feature drops if they open a different tab. It’s certainly not a big enough problem to overtake the price tag, but it’s something users should be aware of. Chances are, HubSpot’s development team will address this in an upcoming release.
HubSpot isn’t Salesforce or Microsoft Dynamics. If you’re comparing HubSpot CRM next to another CRM option with a high per-user monthly cost, chances are you’ll recognize that HubSpot offers far fewer features. A few strengths of leading, paid CRM options that are not currently offered as HubSpot features include:
HubSpot CRM hits the basic features you need to manage customer relationships and sales productivity. It excels as a tool for marketing to keep an eye on the sales process in real-time, and you can’t beat how easy it integrates with your marketing tools if you’re already a Marketing Hub user. However, it’s not meant to compete with the leading tools for sophisticated sales management, which is why it can be layered with these technologies.
Analytics and custom reporting in some of the leading sales management tools are pretty sophisticated. It’s easy for sales pros or sales management to assess relatively complex metrics in seconds, like total pipeline revenue volume or potential revenue by stage of the customer journey. You can also use alternatives to HubSpot CRM to build custom business intelligence reports on a per-industry or job title basis.
HubSpot CRM offers real-time intelligence, but not to the extent the reporting and business intelligence features in other tools do. If you need advanced sales reporting and you want to deploy HubSpot, your options are either to stack this CRM with another CRM, or use a tool that’s integrated with HubSpot for advanced reporting like Chartio, ClicData, Grow, or DataHug.
There are some excellent and common use cases for HubSpot CRM. Some common ones may be:
However, there are lots of other use cases where HubSpot CRM isn’t the right answer. If you have a lot of sales support professionals who spend their days reporting and measuring pipeline and lead velocity, you probably won’t be happy with just HubSpot CRM. Same goes if you need professional software support for your CRM, advanced predictive behavioral analytics, or advanced template features for sales productivity.
HubSpot CRM is limited, and it’s probably not the right option for major corporations. However, the value for the price can’t be beaten, and the decision to adopt HubSpot CRM doesn’t mean you need to ditch your investment in Salesforce.com, Microsoft Dynamics, or SugarCRM.
There are a number of reasons why HubSpot may not be right for you. We listed a total of 13 cons across their website, marketing suite, and CRM products. While the company reports they have 31,000 total global using their product, there are a lot of other companies that are happier with another option such as Pardot, Eloqua, Marketo, or Act-on.
For most brands, HubSpot offers all of the features needed to execute sophisticated, multi-channel inbound marketing and real-time experiments, and it is less expensive than most competitors.
If you’re intrigued, we’ve devised a pretty smart way to save 60% on the first year of your HubSpot subscription. If you’re at the $800 a month level, that could mean an annual savings of $5,760! To learn how, download our savings guide here.
