HubSpot vs Salesforce

HubSpot was founded by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah in 2006. Headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Salesforce, Inc. is a cloud-based software company that was founded in 1999 and is currently headquartered in San Francisco, California. It provides customer relationship management software and applications focused on sales, customer service, marketing automation, e-commerce, analytics, and application development.

The software may seem complex and even overwhelming. However, newcomers get service demos and tutorials for a smooth start. Overall, the interface is user-friendly and approachable.

Most users claim that it takes at least a month to learn working in Salesforce, so it’s not beginner-friendly.

Medium to big e-commerce companies that want an integrated software package with marketing, CRM, customer service, and website hosting all in one.

Large or scaling businesses and sales teams

A free plan for 2,000 email sends per month. Available email templates and features are limited. No customer support, only the access to HubSpot Community.

No free plan, 30-day free trial that includes:

• Preloaded data for learning
• Pre-configured processes, reports, and dashboards
• Online training and live onboarding webinars

Billed monthly:

• Starter: $20 for up to 1,000 marketing contacts
• Professional: $890 for up to 2,000 marketing contacts (the starting price is $3,890 with a mandatory paid onboarding)
• Enterprise: $3,600 for up to 10,000 marketing contacts (the starting price is $6,000 with a mandatory paid onboarding)

Other pricing features:

• Users are only billed for their “marketing” contacts (actively in use) and can have many more inactive contacts
• Even if a user cancels the subscriptions, they will be billed for the rest of their commitment period duration

Salesforce has a very complex pricing system that includes several products. Since we’re only talking about email marketing, here are the pricing plans for the email, mobile, and web marketing package.

Basic: $410/month with unlimited users, billed annually, includes:

• Subscriber profiles
• Drag-and-drop segmentation
• Email and mobile-optimized templates
• Content management and workflows
• A/B testing
• Personalisation tools
• Preference center
• Integration with Salesforce Sales Cloud and Service Cloud
• Reports and dashboards

Pro: $1282/month with unlimited users, billed annually, includes:

• Personalisation Builder
• Automation Studio
• Triggered Communications
• Automated workflow and campaigns
• Web and mobile analytics

Corporate: $3844/month with unlimited users, billed annually, includes:

• Journey Builder
• Mobile SMS and MobilePush
• Multi-channel predictive content
• Advanced reporting

Entreprise: pricing depends on contact and message volume, unlimited users, includes:

• Real-time big data segmentation
• Distributed sending
• Shared content, subscribers, and data
• Locked templates
• Custom roles and permissions
• Business Units

• Service demo for new users
• Technical support is available on paid plans only
• Access to the HubSpot Community on the Free plan
• Chat and email support on all paid plans
• Phone support only on Professional and Enterprise plans
• Mandatory paid assisted onboarding on Professional and Enterprise plans
• Advanced and Premier additional onboarding options
• Customer training
• Various courses with certifications
• HubSpot user groups

All customers regardless of a pricing plan can create a case in Salesforce Help using their Salesforce or Trailblazer accounts. Phone support in English is available 24/7 but support in other languages has limited availability for some regions:

• French Support (Canada) — Monday–Friday, 3:00 AM–11:30 AM EST
• Spanish and Portuguese Support for Latin American countries — Monday–Friday, 8AM–8PM EST
• French, German, Italian, Dutch, Spanish and Portuguese Support for European countries — Monday–Friday, 8AM–4:30PM GMT
• Mandarin and Korean Support for Asian countries — Monday–Friday, 10AM 7PM AEST

In addition to that, Salesforce also provides an extensive knowledge base, a YouTube channel with longform video tutorials, and communities for admins and developers.

• Email automation
• Dynamic list segmentation based on various criteria
• Email reputation reporting and tracking
• Custom reporting dashboards
• Integrations with popular services
• Drag-and-drop email builder and pre-made templates
• Landing pages
• Live chat with website visitors
• A CRM app for iOS and Android

• CRM
• Email marketing automation
• AI-powered list segmentation
• A/B testing
• No-code email template builder
• Analytics in customizable dashboards
• Google Analytics integration
• Integration with third-party data sources for relevant embedded ads

15+ email templates
Only 5 email templates on the free plan

Templates for:

• Welcome messages
• Sales
• Newsletter
• Event invitations
• Announcements
• Ebook emails

• Pre-made templates are empty but offer different layout options.
• Salesforce includes three types of templates: Classic (basically plain text with little customization options), Lightning Experience (allow for images, links, rich text, etc.), and built-in Email Template Builder (your regular marketing email editor).

1,495 integrations including WordPress, Zapier, Canva, Facebook, Salesforce, Shopify, Stripe, and more.

4000+ integrations and apps like other CRM systems, other ESPs (for example, Mailchimp), Slack, Tableau, Zoom, and more. Some of these integrations are free, others are paid for separately or only available for certain pricing plans.

• Website
• A mobile app for iOS and Android to manage the CRM
• Chrome extension for Gmail or G Suite
• Office 365 add-in and desktop add-in for Office 365

• No installable solution.

• Web app
• Desktop app
• Mobile apps for iOS and Android

English Chinese (traditional) Danish Dutch Finnish French German Italian Polish Portuguese (Brazil) Spanish Swedish

Chinese (Simplified) Chinese (Traditional) Danish Dutch Finnish English German Italian Portuguese (Brazil) Russian Spanish Spanish (Mexico) Swedish Thai

Many pre-built automations (called workflows) triggered by:

• Contacts
• Companies
• Deals
• Tickets (for support purposes)
• Quotes
• Conversations
• Feedback submissions

Salesforce offers Automation Studio for automating email journeys which allows users to create complex email sequences with many conditions.

• An all-in-one solution for e-commerce businesses: email marketing, CRM, CMS, and more
• 1,482 integrations
• Thorough onboarding and courses
• A strong global community
• Ability to store many contacts for free

• Great support on onboarding from the vendor
• Sophisticated customer journeys
• Dynamic content in emails
• Integrations with CRMs

• Steep prices
• Complicated feature system may cause additional spendings
• Overwhelming amount of functions
• Support isn’t accessible enough
• Email templates aren’t sophisticated

• Steep learning curve
• Very convoluted pricing system that caused most of the negative reviews on TrustPilot
• Hard to implement and maintain, requires a Salesforce administrator to help
• Very expensive and includes arising additional costs