A quick look at other reviews online really got me intrigued. HubSpot appears to be priced way over its competitors – is this really the case? What makes Hubspot stand out? What makes this marketing automation platform worthwhile? I can’t wait to dig in! Here it is, A HubSpot Review 2023 [Is It Worth All The Money?]

A HubSpot Review

Judging by HubSpot’s product offering, they offer an extensive and comprehensive range of marketing automation tools – and I mean, truly extensive!

A quick glance also showed me how they could have earned the reputation of being “massively over-priced”. This software company has a free offering which, according to their website, offers free marketing tools, free sales tools, free service tools, free CRM tools and free operations tools.  We’ll get into exactly what is on offer with the free version.

Then they have a nifty “Create a Bundle” offer which is priced per product.  $20 per Hub.  So that would be Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, Service Hub, CMS Hub and Operations Hub each @ $20 = $100 per month.  The entry-level pricing offered at HubSpot doesn’t seem to be higher than most, but then, they have cleverly designed the system so that you purchase at the starting price of $100 a month, but then you could end up paying dearly once you add on additional features and increase the size of your list. Perhaps the features on offer at HubSpot are worth every additional dime, we will uncover the truth as we weave our way around their product and service offering.

From what I have seen online, HubSpot is said to own 41.6% of the small business automation software market, which positions them ahead of top brands like Infusionsoft. They must be doing something right – but what is it?

A HubSpot Review – brought to you by Late Bloomer

Great to see you here – thank you for taking the time to visit my site at have a read of my findings when it comes to HubSpot. I have to say that I personally love the way HubSpot has designed its product offering, it looks appealing and cleverly put together. What do I mean by that?

• Well, the name HubSpot with the “splodge” in the “o” looks great, I really enjoy that design.
• Then the way HubSpot breaks its product offering down as follows:
  • Free HubSpot CRM – All your contacts and companies, 100% Free
  • Marketing Hub – All-in-one marketing software, starting at $0/month
  • Sales Hubs – All-in-one sales software, starting at $0.month.
  • Service Hub – All-in-one customer service software, starting at $0/month.

That’s my reaction and opinion at a glance.
According to HubSpot themselves, they are working with 48,000 customers in more than 100 countries – they must be doing something right.

Let’s get into it in more detail.

HubSpot Overview

 

The Good & The Bad

The Good:

Pro #1 The platform is simple to navigate and easy to use

Pro #2 HubSpot offers a beautifully designed product

Pro #2 HubSpot product design team has created an intuitive marketing automation software that makes it very user-friendly for users with no coding experience

Pro #3 14-Day Free Trial

Pro #4 HubSpot offers impressive customer education

Pro #5 HubSpot offers great convenience with every one of the tools you could need being based in one spot.

The Bad:

Con #1 12-month contract required.

Con #2 The basic and PRO Packages do not offer A/B testing. That would require an upgrade to the $2,400/month package.

Con #3 Pricing! Takes a massive leap the minute your requirements and list grow

Con #4 The majority of the tools offer by HubSpot can be found for free elsewhere – just not in one place, and I have not reviewed the others to confirm whether they are superior, inferior or an equivalent offering

Con #5 Support is a paid-for feature

Who is HubSpot For?

HubSpot is tailored for small businesses and has the capacity and capability of offering large corporations everything that they could need in one place.

My understanding is that HubSpot offer low entry pricing for small businesses to get them onto the first rung of the ladder.  After that, the pricing increases exponentially, but so do their product offerings.

HubSpot offer Marketing, Sales and Service solutions all in one place – those we will review in detail a little further along.

According to Wikipedia, HubSpot is a developer and marketer of software products for inbound marketing and sales.

It was founded by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah in 2006.

Its products and services aim to provide tools for social media marketing, content management, web analytics and search engine optimization.

HubSpot Tools & Training

HubSpot offers some amazing tools which they split up into the different hubs:

• Marketing,
• Sales and
• Service

As I said earlier, I believe that the way HubSpot have designed and positioned their product and service offerings is very clever.

Rather than repeat their offerings more than once in this review, I would like to guide you to the Pricing section below where I have listed each and every tool they offer at the different levels.

Here is additional information that is worth noting in the HubSpot offering:

• Workflows: HubSpot workflows are based on lists, these are very easy to create

• Data Management: HubSpot automatically pulls in demographic data, for example your contact’s location and number of employees.

• Contact Collection: HubSpot offers the capability for you to email a contact directly from the Contact Record, they go even further and offer the facility for you to make a Voice-Over IP (VoIP) call if you have committed to and paid for this feature of HubSpot Sales. What I would have done with this integration when I was in a sales role! Not only can you make the call but you can save the call information within the contact record. Plus, you can schedule future interactions with your contacts.

• User-friendly Dashboard: This company have made it extremely easy for users to switch between HubSpot Marketing, CRM and sales – it is a simple click on the dashboard.

• Campaign Management: As a user you have access to each campaign you are running and line of sight for how many contacts are active and your conversion rates too. The Paid Reporting functions allow you to compare campaigns and provides you with an overview of the performance of your marketing strategy

• Email Management: New email creation is extremely easy within the HubSpot system. You have access to more than 2000 free and paid for templates. Not only that, you can start from scratch and make use of your own HTML or use WYSIWYG editor. By the way, here’s a confession for you: I always thought the acronym WYSIWYG was something way over my head, all it means is What You See Is What You Get – lol!

• Social Media Monitoring and Publishing Tools are offered by HubSpot: They are great for sending out a blast to contacts and also for automatic addition of people to lists once they have interacted with your posts. Very cool. I think you will agree that this is an advanced organic social media integration, with the potential to make a social media manager or marketers life way simpler!

• Free and Basic Lead Generation Tool – for those of us who are just getting started with lead collection and planning our strategies, the free and basic lead generation tool is specifically design to assist you with collection and organization of contacts prior to starting your campaigns.

• Facebook Integration – HubSpot has created a tool which auto-captures information and brings it into your HubSpot database. As a HubSpot user, you will be able to create lead capture forms for your business Facebook page which will then automatically be added to your HubSpot database. This tool appears to be unique to HubSpot at the time of writing this review.

• Slack – HubSpot has integrations available to keep customers connected.

HubSpot Best Websites

HubSpot prides itself on offering the best website designs and has written a blog about this too, 27 Of The Best Website Designs to Inspire you, definitely worth a read too.

Included in this blog is their list of the best website designs, best landing pages, the best blogs, and more. They even offer you the opportunity to download “77 Brilliant Examples of Homepages, Blogs & Landing Pages to Inspire You”

Speaking of websites, HubSpot offers a “Website Grader” where you load your URL and receive a report giving you feedback on several areas of your website:

1. Overall
2. Performance (including Page Size, Page Requests, Page Speed, Browser Caching, Page Redirects, Compression, Render blocking
3. Mobile Optimisation
4. SEO
5. Security

This is a great tool they offer, I had this done on my website, the feedback was extremely interesting. Worth having a look-see if you have a site and it’s free!

Training Within HubSpot

HubSpot truly does excel in the training arena, they offer certified training (Globally Recognized Certifications) across 5 key areas:

1. Inbound – Attract leads, engage prospects and delight customers using the inbound methodology
2. social Media – Extend your reach and generate leads with a multi-channel social media strategy
3. Email marketing – Communicate with impact, drive growth and deliver revenue with strategic email.
4. Content Marketing – Fuel your business by creating and promoting remarkable content.
5. Inbound Sales – Get certified. Grow your pipeline. Close more deals. Grow your career.

Plus they offer a ton of courses, not only Certification Courses but also a host of short courses covering everything from writing skills to marketing strategy, YouTube Marketing, and more. Very impressive.

 

HubSpot Free Trial

This is a great offer made by HubSpot and, for me, is an indication of how confident they are about their product. HubSpot not only offers a Free Trial but it is a 30-day Free Trial. I have encountered and taken advantage of free trial offers but this is the first time I have seen one in excess of 7 days.

 

What do you get in your 30 Day HubSpot Free Trial?

As you will see below, HubSpot offers a three-tiered system for you to choose from and whilst there doesn’t appear to be an indication of which tier the Free 30 Day offer is positioned at, here is a list of what is on offer in over the 30 day period:

“Start optimizing your website to get found by more prospects and convert more of them into leads and paying customers“

• The free trial of HubSpot gives you the tools you needs to:
  • Start running easy to use landing pages and call to action A/B tests
  • Get found online by more qualified visitors
  • Convert more visitors into leads
  • Close those leads efficiently
  • Make smart marketing investments

All of this is possible without giving your credit card details too! That is my kind of 30 days, what do you think?

The only caveat I have here is this, during the 30 days you are likely to gain traction and build your list, and that list will be of value to you. I see that there are automatic subscriptions clauses and cancellations clauses within the HubSpot Ts&Cs;, please ensure that you work within these. if you do not give the notice and cancellation as agreed to in the terms, you will not have access to your contacts etc. Ensure that you understand what you agree to.

HubSpot Pricing – Three Tiered Design

Here are the three options offered by HubSpot:

Starter – begins at $50 per month for 1000 contents, basic content creation tool, email marketing platform plus a social media publishing & monitoring tool and basic analytics
Professional – $800 per month (billed per year), access to 1000 contacts, full marketing automation, customer workflows, lead nurturing and A/B testing – plus other features not available on the Starter Plan
Enterprise – $2400 per month (billed per year), access to 10.000 contacts, revenue reporting, custom event automation triggers, company-wide campaign reporting. In addition, you can add HubSpot’s free Sales & CRM tools to move data into the sales and service funnels – this covers very basic needs. Should you require more advanced features, there is the opportunity to pay additional and benefit from HubSpots more advanced Sales and CRM tools.

Features Offered Per Level:

Free Tools & CRM

• Contact management
• Constant website activity
• Companies
• Deals
• Tasking & activities
• Company insights
• Gmail and outlook integration
• HubSpot Connect integrations
• Custom support form fields
• Prospects
• Ticketing
• Pop-up forms
• Native forms
• Ad management
• conversations inbox
• Reporting dashboards
• Email tracking & notifications
• Email templates
• Canned snippets
• Documents
• Calling
• Meeting Scheduling

Free Marketing Tools

• All features of HubSpot CRM
• Forms
• Pop-up forms
• Email marketing (BETA)
• Ad management (BETA)
• List segmentation (BETA)
• Collected forms
• Native forms
• Conversations inbox
• Team email
• Live chat
• conversational bots
• Mobile optimization
• user roles
• Reporting dashboards

Starter

Starts at $50 and includes 1000 contacts

HubSpot CRM plus:

CAPTURE & CONVERT LEADS

• Ad management
• Live chat
• Conversational bots
• Forms
• Pop-up forms

UNDERSTAND YOUR LEADS

• Contact website activity
• list segmentation

ENGAGE YOUR LEADS

• Email marketing
• Ad retargeting

Professional

Starts at $890 per month and includes 1,000 contacts

Professional includes everything in the Starter Package plus the following:

AUTOMATE & PERSONALISE YOUR MARKETING

• Marketing automation
• Smart content

GET FOUND ONLINE

• Blog & content creation tools
• SEO & content strategy
• Social media

OPTIMIZE CONVERSATION RATES

• A/B testing
• Landing pages
• Calls-to-action
• Video hosting & management

MEASURE REVENUE

• Website traffic analytics
• Campaign reporting
• Attribution reporting
• Custom Reporting

Enterprise

Starts at $3200 per month

Enterprise includes all the Professional features plus the following:

MANAGE YOUR TEAMS & BRANDS

• Content partitioning
• Hierarchical teams
• Single sign-on
• Social permissions
• Additional domains
• Email send frequency cap

EXTEND THE PLATFORM

• Calculated properties
• CMS membership

ANALYZE WITH FULL CONTROL

• Custom events & funnels
• Filtered analytics views
• Events API

HubSpot CMS

Starts at $300 per month

All features of HubSpot CRM plus:

• Pop-up forms
• Collected forms
• Native forms
• Phone support
• Ad management
• List segmentation
• Mobile optimization
• Blog & content creation tools
• Calls-to-action
• Landing pages
• Standard SSL certificate
• Smart content
• Dynamic content with HubDB
• Website pages
• Design manager
• Staging environment
• Robust template & module marketplace
• Content analytics views
• SEO & content strategy
• Google Search Console integration
• Custom domains
• 99.99% up time
• Content delivery network
• Security monitoring & threat detection

   

As can be seen from the above, HubSpot offers an extensive range of different products at an extensive range of pricing too. Some pricing is extremely high, especially considering there is so much available for free online.

HubSpot Bad Reviews

I have seen a few bad reviews online, none of them are recent and the ones I saw were written about the pricing and the 12-month contract required, rather than their product offering.

So pricing and the long-terms commitment really are the only issue I have seen when it comes to this platform.

HubSpot CRM Reviews

Out of more than 2000 Reviews online, HubSpot CRM came out with top marks. They scored 4,5 out of 5 for Ease Of Use; functionality; Customer Support and Functionality. The final outcome was that the users with highly likely to recommend HubSpot CRM.

HubSpot Reviews on TrustPilot

HubSpot did not have an easy time of it during 2021 according to the reviews on TrustPilot.

Below is a quick screenshot.  It’s alarming to see they have had 50% bad reviews.  Even if we combine the more positive reviews (Excellent and Great), the percentage is 38%.  Things did not seem to be going well for this company in 2021. 

Added to that, HubSpot have not responded to any of the negative reviews, this too is well worth keeping an eye on.  Either it is a sign that HubSpot customer service really are not at the top of their game, or, for some reason they do not place much value on reviews in Trust Pilot.  

 

HubSpot Overview

My Final Opinion of HubSpot

Wow! I think HubSpot’s product offering is incredible. They offer a very wide range of everything! Seriously, I would have to spend weeks to really evaluate everything they have to offer.

When I first reviewed HubSpot in 2019, my main concern was the cost, hence the title “Is It Worth All The Money?”.  With this update I am inclined to be more wary of the customer service (or apparent lack thereof according to the reviews) and the inflexibility of the contract agreement between HubSpot and their clients.

I don’t want to take too much away from this company because they truly have made huge strides in the technology, tools, and training they offer.

The downsides are their pricing, the contractual inflexibility and, if the reviews are to be believed, poor customer service.

Keep in mind that as your number of contacts grows, so does the price, and as that happens, the more tools you would require for your business – and the price grows with that too. Considering there are so many free alternatives available on the market, in my opinion, the biggest questions are these –

• can you afford to spend time hopping between different platforms and service providers to benefit from the free offerings?
• Is it worth working with different systems, different dashboards etc., to benefit from the free offering?

There are pros and cons no matter which way you look at it. The best decision would have to take into account the budget and the user’s skills level. Hope that makes sense? What do you think? I am very interested to hear your opinion.

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