If you're considering switching from Salesforce to a new CRM solution, HubSpot could be an attractive option. While both are powerful platforms, HubSpot offers several advantages, making it an appealing alternative to Salesforce.

Many businesses prefer HubSpot’s user-friendly interface, which requires minimal training to implement. Salesforce's complexity often necessitates having dedicated engineers or an entire team to handle ongoing maintenance and customizations.

Beyond ease of use, the total cost of ownership is an important factor for evaluating CRM systems. HubSpot's streamlined approach can translate to lower management and support costs than Salesforce's more intricate architecture.

Let's compare these powerful platforms side-by-side. We'll examine their core capabilities, pricing models, ease of use, and more to help you make an informed decision.

You should select the best CRM software to streamline operations and deliver exceptional customer experiences. While HubSpot and Salesforce are both highly capable, they take different approaches.

When evaluating HubSpot versus Salesforce, the decision often comes down to the total cost of ownership (TCO). TCO includes implementation, management, maintenance, and training costs.

HubSpot's user-friendly, all-in-one design typically lowers TCO compared to Salesforce, which often requires dedicated IT resources for customizations and third-party integrations.

Consider all lifetime costs, not just software fees, to select the best CRM for your budget and needs.  

Despite HubSpot's powerful capabilities as an all-in-one CRM platform, some persistent myths still create doubts about its abilities compared to other solutions like Salesforce. 

Let's set the record straight by debunking five of the most common HubSpot misconceptions:

Our answer: While Salesforce does provide extensive coding capabilities, HubSpot has robust customization options that can meet the needs of most businesses without the heavy technical skills required.

HubSpot allows low-code, user-friendly tools to customize most core features:

• Build personalized deal pipelines modeling your sales process
• Create custom report dashboards and analytics views
• Tailor CRM data models with custom objects and properties
• Design automated workflows with branching logic
• Develop custom website pages, blogs, and apps in the CMS

For most companies, HubSpot's built-in customization is more than sufficient while still being more approachable than Salesforce's complex coding requirements.

Our answer: Both platforms offer powerful AI capabilities for automating processes, generating insights, and creating content. 

However, HubSpot's AI is more seamlessly woven into its all-in-one suite, making it incredibly easy to leverage across marketing, sales, service, and operations. Some of HubSpot's standout AI features include:

• AI-powered chatbots providing conversational support

• Content generation and optimization across websites, emails, ads

• Predictive lead scoring to prioritize best-fit buyers

• Automated lead routing and deal prioritization

• Forecasting and next-best-action recommendations
  
  

Salesforce's Einstein is an integrated tool within the platform designed to bring advanced AI capabilities to various Salesforce products. 

While Salesforce Einstein offers robust functionality, it often requires more technical integration and may involve additional costs for accessing its full suite of capabilities.

Unlike all the other platforms, HubSpot's AI capabilities are baked into the license, so there are no added AI packages to increase the subscription cost. Users can access HubSpot's AI features without worrying about additional expenses. 

HubSpot's elegant AI implementation makes it easier to use, making it a more straightforward and cost-effective choice for businesses looking for integrated AI functionality without complex integration or extra fees.

Our answer: This myth couldn't be further from the truth. HubSpot has an open architecture with over 500 certified integrations spanning all major business apps categories, such as accounting, sales intelligence, customer support, and more. 

On top of that, HubSpot provides open APIs and developer resources to build custom integrations that sync data between any cloud application. As an implementation partner, Origin 63 can attest to that fact – the only time an implementation is not possible is when the connecting platform has a limited API.

HubSpot's vast integration capabilities ensure it can connect seamlessly with the rest of your technology stack rather than creating silos. Whether leveraging one of HubSpot's turnkey integration options or building a custom connector, the platform is designed to serve as the central hub across your systems.

Our answer: One of the biggest differences between HubSpot and Salesforce reporting is the approach. With Salesforce, creating customized reports often requires writing complex queries and formulas.

This approach adds a lot of technical overhead that can slow down your team. HubSpot takes a completely different visual-first approach that anyone can use—no coding required! 

HubSpot's reporting capabilities are much more powerful than many realize. Its reporting suite provides comprehensive sales analytics, including: 

HubSpot's reporting tool allows you to build reports by simply dragging and dropping. You can then see the data exactly how you want it. There's no need to muddle through spreadsheets or learn a coding language.  

This intuitive, user-friendly method saves time and makes it easy to surface insights quickly. 

Our answer: This myth is outdated and disconnected from HubSpot's current state. The platform has evolved significantly to meet the needs of major enterprises through capabilities like:

• Hierarchical multi-brand account structures and data partitions
• Stringent security certifications spanning SOC 2, ISO 27001, HITRUST
• Granular permissions, controls, and sophisticated audit logging.
• Custom object modeling and robust API for unique requirements
• Enterprise-scale onboarding, training, support, and professional services
  
  

Many of the world's biggest brands, such as Toyota, Trello, and Zapier rely on HubSpot as a secure, scalable platform for their organizations.

While Salesforce remains a powerful and highly customizable solution, HubSpot has closed the gap for enterprises. Its all-in-one suite provides deep capabilities and greater overall ease of use, making it an excellent choice for companies of any size.

Still got questions?

Ready to start with HubSpot?

While Salesforce is a powerful CRM solution, HubSpot delivers an all-in-one platform with unmatched ease of use and cross-functional integration. Some advantages include:

Seamless Integrations Across Hubs

Seamless Integration Across Hubs HubSpot provides a seamlessly integrated suite that combines marketing, sales, service, operations, and CMS capabilities on a single platform. 

This integration allows complete visibility into every customer interaction and enables smooth handoffs across the entire journey.

Tools like Sequences, Playbooks, and unified inboxes foster team collaboration and alignment. Companies gain full context to deliver truly personalized end-to-end experiences.

On the other hand, Salesforce requires stitching together separate clouds and integrating additional third-party tools to get similar capabilities. Its fragmented architecture makes it more difficult to share context.

Enhanced Team Productivity

With all the tools teams need to be built natively into one platform, HubSpot enhances productivity by reducing switching costs and consolidating workflows. From ticketing to automation to knowledge bases, processes are streamlined for efficiency.

HubSpot provides user-friendly visual tools to customize processes, reporting, analytics and more without heavy administration overhead. Salesforce's flexibility often requires technical skills and change management.

Intuitive Interface and User Experience

HubSpot has focused on developing an incredibly intuitive and integrated user experience across all its hubs. Navigation is extremely clean, and features are organized intuitively.

Most functionality can be configured through simple point-and-click tools without complex coding or technical skills required. This allows teams to be productive quickly with a shorter ramp-up.

Salesforce's powerful capabilities come at the cost of a steeper learning curve and more training to master its depth of features spread across different interfaces.

Total Cost of Ownership

Beyond just the software pricing differences, HubSpot provides a significantly lower total cost of ownership compared to Salesforce.

With its all-in-one design and lack of heavy tech administration needs, HubSpot helps companies avoid many of the incremental costs associated with Salesforce.

Ongoing maintenance is a big part of the total cost of ownership. Most teams with Salesforce require at least one, if not an entire team of engineers, to support constant maintenance and updates. This resource cost gets very expensive.

HubSpot's intuitive interface and centralized platform mean minimal ongoing maintenance and engineering needs. This lower resourcing translates to major cost savings over time.

For businesses looking to break down silos and foster alignment across marketing, sales, and service, HubSpot provides a clear advantage. Its intuitive all-in-one platform delivers complete customer visibility and context to all members of your team.  

Salesforce offers deep customization abilities and specialization for complex enterprise sales processes. But HubSpot matches or exceeds its capabilities in many areas—all with a greater emphasis on usability.  

Companies looking for robust yet easily adopted solutions to drive productivity, collaboration, and customer-centric operations will find HubSpot an excellent fit. Its balance of powerful features and elegant simplicity is tough to beat.

Choosing the best CRM platform for your business is a major decision that shouldn't be taken lightly. There are so many different features, pricing models, and weighing capabilities that it can be overwhelming.  

Our experts have worked with businesses across all industries to select and implement the ideal CRM solution to power their sales, marketing, and customer service.  

We’ll take the time to understand your unique processes, requirements, and goals and help you choose the right CRM.

While Salesforce is often viewed as the "safe" choice, don't overlook HubSpot as an equally reliable and scalable option. HubSpot offers a robust set of tools that can seamlessly grow with your business needs. Our team can objectively evaluate if HubSpot is the ideal fit for your organization.

Take the first step today by scheduling a free consultation with our team!