by Which CRM is the best for your business – HubSpot vs Pipedrive? We introduce the two tools and throw them in the ring corner facing each other.
When you’re looking for a powerful and easy-to-use CRM with advanced features for your sales team, HubSpot and Pipedrive are two of the clear best options on the market.
But what is the difference between them? How do they differ from each other in key areas such as automation and reporting? And in what areas are they similar?
To make your decision easier, here is our in-depth comparison of HubSpot vs Pipedrive. The comparison will help you weigh your options and decide which CRM and sales software is best for you.
Let’s get ready to rumble!
What can HubSpot do?
HubSpot is the stronger all-around platform of the two. It offers a wide palette of different functions for your entire organization.
At the heart of HubSpot is its famous free CRM, which itself gives you plenty of value with its features. But the real power comes from the hubs you can add on top – including Marketing, Sales, Service and CMS.
What is HubSpot Sales Hub?
Sales Hub is an all-in-one sales CRM that includes sales-customized features, engagement software, automations, CPQ tools, and in-depth sales analytics to help teams work more efficiently, save time, and increase revenue.
Sales Hub combines the strongest features with ease of use, resulting in a powerful CRM that empowers the sales team and is easy to use.
What can PipeDrive do?
Pipedrive has a hardcore focus on sales teams. This is supported by their website, where Pipedrive’s principle “designed to keep you selling” is written. And that’s exactly what PipeDrive does – they help you keep selling and they’re good at it!
Pipedrive’s features support exactly what most sales teams need: Powerful functionality to manage leads and customers, measure and track communications, automate sales tasks and use AI, and view sales insights and reports. In addition, they also have a really good mobile app.
Functionalities
Your CRM is the foundation of your sales process. It should keep you organized, increase efficiency, give management a clear sense of how you can increase revenue and scale your growth. Below we show how HubSpot and Pipedrive differ and are similar across some of the most essential CRM functions.
Which is more user-friendly?
Both HubSpot and Pipedrive are extremely user-friendly tools, so both platforms are strong choices if ease of use is important to you.
The biggest difference is that HubSpot offers far more options for customization, complexity and personalization. However, this is unlikely to affect your user experience: the more advanced features are hidden behind the higher price levels (Professional and Enterprise), and they are still very user-friendly, even if the complexity grows.
With both tools, your biggest risk of experiencing challenges is probably if you have a messy process for handling contact data, rather than problems with the software itself. You can avoid this with clear processes, regular data clean-ups and simple contact data synchronization processes.
Automation
Both Pipedrive and HubSpot are in the driver’s seat when it comes to streamlining your sales workflows through automation. They each offer easy-to-use workflow builders and instantly enrich your contact information with rich data.
But what is the difference between HubSpot and Pipedrive when it comes to automation? And how can you choose what you need?
The most important criteria is to go with your preferred user experience or to choose the system that you find most comfortable to use. Here’s a quick introduction to both HubSpot and Pipedrive automation to help you find your winner.
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HubSpot automation
HubSpot’s “Workflow area” is the platform’s super user-friendly way to automate processes and communication. You can use this tool to automate all of your organization’s “workflows”, including sales, marketing and service. Depending on your HubSpot solution, workflows can also be built from:
- Contact data
- Company data
- Agreements/contract data
- Service inquiries
- Tendering
After choosing your goals and criteria to enter your automated workflows, you can use the drag-and-drop editor to choose what happens when certain conditions are met. This may include:
- Send an email externally or internally
- Setting/updating data on a contact or company
- Adding or removing a contact to a list
- Copying contact data
- Creating tasks for team members
For the most customized workflows, you can add delays and if/then branches to create just the right flow. It could be, for example, if contact A has done thing X, then he must be assigned to consultant 1. If the person has done thing Y, then the person is assigned to consultant 2.
It’s a really powerful automation tool and one of the most intuitive to get started with. The automations that can improve your opportunities to increase your sales are only limited by your imagination.
PipeDrive automation
With Pipedrive’s Workflow Automation tool, you get an easily accessible library of templates to help you save time in your sales team. You can create an activity and send an email every time an appointment is added, or move an appointment to a new stage every time an activity is marked as done.
When it comes to creating your own personal workflows, you get a similar view to HubSpot’s workflow builder:
You can also build your workflows based on contacts, companies, agreements and activities:
If you want to set up automations that support your team, you can choose any combination of in-app, email and mobile app push notifications that can remind you of an upcoming activity.
Pipedrive also offers a built-in AI-powered sales mentor that offers personalized performance tips, automation recommendations, notifications and reports.
Reporting and analysis
How can HubSpot and Pipedrive’s reporting solutions compare? As with most other areas we’ve compared in this post, it’s all about complexity.
PipeDrive reporting
On Pipedrive’s main dashboard, you get an easy overview of how your sales team is doing:
To get more data about your Pipedrive’s performance, you can also customize your dashboards, see your sales results by products/services and gain insight into conversions and closed deals over time.
Pipedrive’s reporting is simple and effective, and for most sales teams, it delivers everything you need to know without unnecessary clutter and complexity.
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HubSpot reporting
In the other ring corner, HubSpot offers many more functions – albeit at a much higher maximum price. So if you want that complexity, HubSpot’s reporting tools have many more features and a whole other depth. It’s easy to create a variety of reports, customize your go-to dashboards, gain insights from your complete sales cycle, and build custom reports.
If your marketing and service departments also use HubSpot, you can create incredibly comprehensive dashboards that show your buyer’s entire customer journey, including leads, sales, churns and conversions at every stage of the buying journey. It is obvious if you work with inbound marketing.
Comparison of prices
Although Pipedrive offers a free 14-day trial, it doesn’t offer a free solution forever, so if you have a budget of 0,- for your CRM, HubSpot is the best choice for you.
But when it comes to accessing more features and upgrading to paid solutions, the gap between HubSpot and Pipedrive widens quickly.
While HubSpot offers a much wider set of functions, it is often also much more expensive than Pipedrive – if you need more than the free solution in HubSpot.
PipeDrive’s prices
Pipedrive’s pricing is much more straightforward than HubSpot’s, consisting of four general pricing models.
The “Essentials” plan offers a useful starting point at $14,90/user/month with customizable pipelines, contact and organization management, appointment management and more.
Pipedrive’s workflow automation opens with “The Advanced Plan”. Here you pay $24.90/user/month for this, which should be a good investment: it gives you access to all of Pipedrive’s automation features except team management.
“The Advanced Plan” also opens up contact data enrichment, email synchronization, recurring revenue reports, and a catalog of your products that can be customized to make sales easier.
To get the most value out of Pipedrive, you can choose one of their top solutions: either “Professional” to unlock all the features or “Enterprise” for customized onboarding and support on top of all the features.
HubSpot pricing
All HubSpot users start with the free CRM, which of course doesn’t take up any of your budget – it stays free forever.
This also offers some other essential free features for marketing, sales and service teams:
However, you get even more value when you add paid Hubs to your solution. There are currently sales, marketing, service and CMS hubs, each offering a range of price points.
The Sales Hub plans are available in Starter, Professional and Enterprise:
- Starter (from $45/month, paid annually/2 users): Organize your sales process with deal pipelines, simple automation, quoting, customizable user features, reporting dashboards and more.
- Professional (starting at $450/month, 5 users): manage your growing team with custom reporting, products, automated email and sales sequences, digital signature, lead scoring and more advanced features.
- Enterprise (from $1,200/month, 10 users): advanced features to scale your marketing team, such as recurring revenue tracking and forward-looking lead scoring in addition to a sales playbook.
With Marketing Hub you can choose between:
- Starter (from $45/month): key functionality to capture, convert, understand and engage leads, from landing pages to list segmentation and email marketing.
- Professional (starting at $800/month): Access marketing automation features, optimize conversion rates with calls to action and more, and measure traffic and conversions.
- Enterprise (from $3200/month): advanced functionality to manage your teams and brands and analyze revenue with full control.
Service Hub includes:
- Starter (from $45/month): access to ticketing, a chat inbox, simple automation and more to start managing customer support.
- Professional (from $450/month): optimize customer experiences with a knowledge base, streamline operations with service requests and pipelines, and measure results on a custom dashboard.
- Enterprise (starting at $1200/month) enables advanced playbooks, goals and scope to manage multiple teams and companies.
And CMS Hub, the newest addition to HubSpot, offers everything you need to build and scale a powerful, optimized website that converts. This is offered in three solutions:
- Starter – $23/month
- Professional – $360/month
- Enterprise – $1200/month
With HubSpot, the most important thing is to look at what your business needs now and what it is likely to need in the future. It’s worth checking whether these both fit your budget.
When should you choose HubSpot?
Choose HubSpot if you can be described with one of these 2 situations:
- Small businesses and entrepreneurs who need a simple CRM that’s free to start with but has plenty of room to scale in the future.
- Fast-growing teams who want a reliable and scalable all-in-one platform for their organization, without the complexity of a system like Salesforce.
Read on for a few examples of when HubSpot is a good choice for your sales teams.
What you need is basically a good CRM.
HubSpot’s free CRM is a great starting point for any small business. And for many organizations, it will also tick your boxes in the near future.
We recommend trying HubSpot CRM if your priorities are:
- Managing contacts from all channels with one piece of software.
- Get transparency on your sales pipeline and your deals.
- Expand your sales strategy with smart free features like live chat on the website and a meeting scheduling link to insert into your emails.
You want to gather your organization in a system
Few CRMs have evolved as quickly as HubSpot in recent years. Contact management is now just one aspect of HubSpot, as the platform has expanded to benefit marketers, salespeople, business owners, and customer support specialists in a multitude of ways.
HubSpot’s free CRM gives you access to basic features for sales, marketing, and support teams, but the most valuable features are locked behind paid Hubs that are available at different levels.
Looking at marketing, for example, HubSpot’s free CRM includes basic features for forms, email marketing, ad management, and list segmentation. By subscribing to one of the three levels of Marketing Hub, ranging from $45/month to $3200/month, you get access to even more features – many of which are extremely comprehensive and include advanced automation.
HubSpot’s “Evolved CRM” is a powerful way to manage multiple areas and teams in your business, but it requires a decent budget to reap the full benefits of the paid Hubs, as well as the commitment to centralize core processes on one platform.
You achieve more, but with fewer systems
Another benefit of HubSpot’s offering something for everyone is that you can do more with a smaller arsenal of systems.
While you likely still need tools for other areas of your business—such as HR, accounting, project management, and invoicing—HubSpot certainly enables stronger collaboration between your sales, marketing, and service teams.
When should you choose PipeDrive?
Pipedrive is an exceptional tool for small businesses as well as larger sales teams that need to focus solely on sales. Here are a few examples of when Pipedrive is an excellent choice.
You must control the budget while scaling
You can access all of Pipedrive’s features with the professional subscription, available from $49.90 per month. user per month. HubSpot on the other hand can easily reach $1,200/month for the Sales Hub Enterprise plan without any other Hubs or add-ons.
There are pros and cons to both options here: If you want more features, more complexity, and more scalability across your entire organization, look into HubSpot.
But if you want simplicity and tighter budget control while scaling your sales team, Pipedrive might be a better match.
One area where Pipedrive stands out from HubSpot is its comparative lack of boundaries. All Pipedrive plans offer unlimited contacts, sales pipelines, and custom fields, while HubSpot will require multiple upgrades as you scale your database.
You don’t need anything but the tools for selling
Unlike HubSpot, Pipedrive doesn’t try to do everything. And that can be a good thing. For many sales teams, Pipedrive offers exactly what they need – nothing more, nothing less.
If you know what your team wants and it matches Pipedrive’s wealth of features, it’s probably a good choice.
Your priority is sales pipelines and workflow automation
If what you’re looking for is a smart and efficient way to automate your sales pipelines and workflows, Pipedrive will deliver what you need.
While HubSpot offers excellent sales automation, it’s available at a higher price than Pipedrive—and with features you may not really need.
Can you use HubSpot and PipeDrive together?
There are some scenarios where it makes sense to use HubSpot and Pipedrive together.
For example, your sales team can use Pipedrive to manage their pipeline, while the rest of your organization uses HubSpot to handle all contacts, automate marketing emails, and manage the website, blog, and campaigns.
In this scenario, you can easily integrate HubSpot and Pipedrive. This will give you:
- Sales-ready leads in HubSpot that are automatically sent over to Pipedrive with the right data attached
- Updating data in Pipedrive (such as lead status or information and open deals) will be automatically synced in HubSpot.
The winner: HubSpot vs. PipeDrive – what is the right solution?
It depends 100% on your need. Here’s our breakdown of when to choose Pipedrive or HubSpot:
When to choose Pipedrive?
- You have a limited budget but need to scale
- You don’t need anything but hardcore sales features
- The only priority is sales pipelines and workflow automation
When to choose HubSpot?
- A stable and user-friendly CRM system is really what you need
- You want something that can be used by everyone in your organization
- You will achieve more efficiency by gathering your tools in one platform
