The CRM market is flooded with many automation tools, each promising to surpass expectations and help you eclipse your competitors. The biggest question is, how do you choose the best CRM solution that fits your unique needs?

Today, we’ll focus on a powerhouse in sales and marketing - HubSpot. We’ll look at its features, pros, and cons to help you make an informed decision.

Features

HubSpot was designed with the core intention of helping businesses track and nurture their leads.  Its second-highest functionality is business analytics. Here are a few other features to expect when you implement HubSpot.

Contact Management: This feature allows you to store and manage lead intelligence, contact information, and interactions in one convenient place.

Lead Generation: Use HubSpot’s customizable forms, pop-ups, and lead flows to convert your web visitors.

Email and Live Chat: Create and send professional emails to your lead contact list. You can chat live with customers to nurture leads or provide real-time client support.

Content Management: The CRM allows you to build and maintain your website or blog.

Analytics and Dashboards: You can track the performance of your ad campaigns and create reports and shareable data on dashboards.

Pricing

Hubspot offers three pricing plans.

Free Plan ($0.00)

It comes with the essential features to support your content marketing strategy:

• One lead pipeline
• One team or department 
• Unlimited users
• Upto 1,000,000 contacts, task details, or deals. 
• Five snippets
• booking page
• Calling (maximum 15 minutes)

Sales Hub Starter ($50.00)

This option includes everything in the free plan

• Calling (maximum 8 hours)
• 5,000 snippets, templates, and documents
• Unlimited email and click notifications

Other new features bundled here include:

• Prospect: To view new companies visiting your site and the pages they are viewing most
• Sequences: Automates emailing for leads 

Sales Hub Professional ($800/mo billed at $9,600/yr)

It has everything in the starter plan but adds these features on top:

• Supports teams of up to 10
• 300 automated workflows
• Smart send times
• Up to 15 deal pipelines

Sales Hub Enterprise ($3,600/mo billed at $43,200/yr)

_Includes everything in the professional package, plus

• Single sign-on
• E-signature
• Sales forecasting
• Sales analytics

The Pros

It has a free plan with all the features you need to run a small business.

• Flex pricing to support businesses of all sizes
• It’s easy to use - you won’t need user support.
• You can use Hubspot or integrate it with other business tools and apps. 

The Drawbacks

• It gets expensive quickly- professional and enterprise plans will set you back $800 - $3200 monthly.

• Hubspot works best as an all-in-one tool -if you want to cherry-pick features within Hubspot, you won’t get a big “bang for your buck.”

• Email templates are difficult to modify, especially if you lack CSS know-how. Mailchimp is a better alternative as it has many customizable email templates.

• Reporting features are limited -  you can’t tell how mobile users navigate your page.

Conclusion

HubSpot is arguably one of the best cloud-based CRM tools with many features. However, it has drawbacks, such as inflexible contracts, limited reporting features, and hard-to-modify templates. If your business does not need an integrated tool, you might be better off finding a cheaper alternative.