HubSpot vs Salesforce: Comparing CRM tools

HubSpot and Salesforce are both powerful CRM platforms, but they have key differences. See the platforms' features, and figure out which one is best for your business.

A powerful customer relationship management tool can go a long way to generate leads, manage customer data, and empower your marketing and sales efforts. HubSpot is ideal for generating and nurturing leads, while Salesforce is great for tracking customer interactions. See which CRM tool will be best for your business by comparing HubSpot’s and Salesforce’s key features, pricing, and pros and cons.

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HubSpot is a cloud-based CRM platform that empowers both marketing and sales efforts for businesses of all sizes. With HubSpot, your teams can optimize inbound marketing strategies and generate more reliable and effective leads to help your business market and sell more easily.

SEE: Integrate Jira with HubSpot to help capture new leads and keep your teams in sync.

HubSpot centralizes all of your digital marketing efforts in a single, cloud-hosted platform, which makes it possible to manage website hosting, blogging, social media, email marketing and more. HubSpot also includes tools for operations and offers HubSpot CMS, a full-blown content management system, so your sales, marketing and operations teams can seamlessly work together.

Salesforce is one of the most widely-used CRM tools on the market, dominating the CRM software market by a considerable margin. The goal of Salesforce is to improve business relationships to help grow your business.

SEE: Discover how Salesforce is using generative AI to power its CRM capabilities.

Salesforce allows companies to nurture relationships with buyers, suppliers, service providers, users and anyone else who does business with your company. Your sales and marketing teams can keep track of all interactions between the company and its customers, including phone calls, emails, SMS, chats and tickets. With Salesforce, your teams are better empowered to standardize the sales process, so they can close deals more quickly.

For more information on HubSpot pricing, check out its pricing calculator.

Both options can get expensive, especially at scale and when added features are needed. The deciding factor, however, is size. If you’re a large, enterprise company, Salesforce is, by far, the best option. Not only is the feature set massive, but you’d be hard-pressed to find a sales or marketing employee who doesn’t know the platform.

On the other hand, HubSpot is a great option for small and midsize businesses and startups who need the power of CRM software but aren’t ready to dole out the cash for the costlier and more complicated Salesforce. Although HubSpot cannot stand up to the features found in Salesforce, it is certainly a worthy solution to help empower your sales and marketing departments to take your business to the next level.

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Connect your entire company – every team, app, workflow, and data source – on one unified CRM platform. Salesforce brings companies and customers together. The near-endless customization, extendability, and scalability of the Salesforce platform make it a great tool for businesses of all sizes. Over 150,000 companies, both big and small, are growing their businesses with Salesforce.

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Fully-customizable Zoho CRM provides unified solutions for businesses of all types and sizes. Conduct your Sales & Marketing analytics to gain insights using Dashboard views and Automate your daily routines. Customize your CRM theme based on your industry needs using Canvas, Omnichannel communication for streamlined communication between teams and customers, handle customer support from within the platform to improve customer relationships. Get Started with Zoho CRM now!

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HubSpot is an intuitive CRM that makes managing your sales pipeline a breeze. Everything you need to track important metrics, set up time-saving flows and automations, manage clients seamlessly, and grow your business is available in one tidy dashboard. Plans are available for businesses at every stage of growth, starting at 100% free. Start taking the guesswork out of business management today with HubSpot CRM.

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Salesforce gets creative in coaxing workers back into the office

AI Cloud, Einstein GPT Trust Layer coming to Salesforce

Salesforce is the latest company to leverage AI and has announced AI Cloud as a way for its customers to integrate artificial intelligence into most parts of business.

Part of AI Cloud is Einstein, which Salesforce has called the “the world’s first AI for CRM”. The company states that this is already making a trillion decisions every week. How Einstein goes about this is outlined here. The “Trust Layer” part of the Einstein name refers to the protection of customer data even when an AI is handling it. Again Salesforce provides further reading on this matter, pointing to the ethical guidelines for AI and Einstein.

“AI Cloud is a suite of capabilities optimized for delivering trusted, open, and real-time generative experiences across all applications and workflows. AI Cloud’s new Einstein GPT Trust Layer resolves concerns of risks associated with adopting generative AI by enabling customers to meet their enterprise data security and compliance demands, while offering customers the benefits of generative AI. This unique blend of capabilities and security solidifies Salesforce’s position as the #1 AI CRM,” Salesforce writes in a press release.

What caught our eye in this announcement is integration into several platforms such as Slack. We use Slack here at Hypertext as our preferred inter-company communication platform, so we’re excited to see what AI from Salesforce can accomplish for us too.

Now for the big questions: availability and price.

The various parts of of Salesforce’s Cloud AI platform will become available at different times with the Slack AI beta available now. Other elements will be coming this month with more in October and November. Some elements will be in testing phases and general releases will happen later this year leading into early 2024.

“For businesses looking to supercharge revenue and productivity fast, the AI Cloud Starter pack is available for $360,000 annually with the necessary building blocks — Data Cloud, MuleSoft automation, Einstein, Tableau Analytics, Slack, CRM, and a free AI-readiness exam from Salesforce Professional Services,” the press release continues, discussing pricing.

At the time of writing that $360 000 price converts into R6.7 million. That being said this pricing is only provided as an example and may change.

Those interested in the AI arms of Salesforce can learn more about it at the Salesforce World Tour Essentials Johannesburg, which is taking place tomorrow – 14th June – at the Kyalami Grand Prix Circuit.

See our primer story on the event for more information.

The schedule for Salesforce World Tour Essentials includes several sessions focused on AI, including breakout sessions on Slack AI, automation AI, Einstein GPT in customer experiences, the future of AI, AI in sales and much more. We’d say that AI could even be the theme of the event given its presence in so many discussions throughout the day.

Those interested in these topics who can’t make it, don’t fret as Hypertext will be in attendance to report on the best parts. Check back here soon for more.