Hubspot is an exhaustive platform for customer relationship management, marketing, and sales automation. With Hubspot, you can manage customer interactions, send emails regularly, generate unique content, and schedule meetings with prospects. It also helps you create a questionnaire, collect feedback, and develop and maintain websites for our company.
Hub Spot is a customer-centric tool that helps companies do all the functions. Is that without any drawbacks? No.
Restrictions On E-mail Marketing:
When you add more features to the app, charges increase. However, it offers fewer customization options than its competitors. If you plan to do an email marketing campaign, it will be difficult as there is a restriction on the number of emails you can send in HubSpot.
Unfavorable Price Structure:
For small and medium-sized companies, the pricing structure of Hubspot might be burdensome. When they want to use advanced features, this tool may stretch their budget. Some excellent HubSpot alternatives offer services at a much better rate, allowing the company to invest the excess amount in different growth arenas.
Feature Specificity:
Some small companies may not require complex solutions HubSpot features. For example, some startups may require features supporting sales pipeline management, email marketing, or customer relationship management tools. When companies think some hot spot features are complex and others are unused, they search for better options.
Integration Issues:
Hubspot offers various features to businesses. Integration is a feature that customers often find attractive. Sometimes, some companies may feel HubSpot is incompatible with other tools vital for the company’s existence. In such a case, companies look out for alternatives.
HubSpot vs. Its Competitors: What’s the Real Difference?
Engage Bay
It is an excellent integrated marketing, sales, and customer support tool. Engage Bay is a small and medium business friend. In other words, they are specifically designed to cater to the needs of tiny businesses. It helps small businesses to send emails to a large number of people and grow customer base.
Pros:
- Small and medium-sized businesses prefer HubSpot because they are affordable. Budget-conscious customers resort to Engagebay as it offers multiple services at lower prices. Comprehensive functionality at economical rates for important CRM tools makes it stand out.
- Even if you don’t have design skills, Engage Bay helps you make functional landing pages inevitable for expanding your customer base.
- It also facilitates easy ticket management, chat, and the company’s help desk facilities, which in turn help bolster its customer relationships.
Cons:
- Some companies find it difficult to understand and navigate the various functionalities of Engage Bay.
- It doesn’t support integration with other company tools.
Suitable for: SME’s attempting to automate different functions of the company.
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Brevo
Brevo is an E-Mail marketing tool that this SaaS provider offers its customers. It helps the organization with a robust email marketing tool to stay connected with the customers. It assists companies in conducting e-mail marketing campaigns. The design tools of Brevo help create mobile responsive emails for marketing campaigns. It also allows the senders to send tester emails before sending bulk emails. They charge the customers based on the volume of emails and the customers find this tool apt for this reason. Businesses love Brevo due to its budget-friendliness and scalability features.
Pros:
- Easy to handle.
- Budget-friendly platform suitable for small companies.
- Enable checking the sales funnel carefully to explore more potential.
- Facilitate a 360-degree view of unfinished deals to explore more opportunities.
- Schedule meetings easily.
Cons:
- Difficult to understand advanced features.
- Primitive E-Mail templates.
- Less CRM functionality.
This platform fits all pockets, and multiple functions are available at a lower cost. The E-commerce and digital marketing companies benefit from this tool.
Hubspot’s free plan has limitations. It allows the users to send only 2000 emails and allows the companies to store only 15 million contacts. On the contrary, Brevo’s plan enables users to send 9000 emails for free. For 5000 emails, it is only $9. You can use this platform without worrying about the increase in charges as you send more emails when your business grows.
Get Response
Advanced email marketing and the facility to host webinars are the features that attract people to Get Response. You can increase your customer base with Get Response as they assist in making a list of prospective customers, clients, and partners. Thus you can forge a relationship that helps improve the customer base. You can be assured that the emails you send reach the targeted customer.
This email marketing software helps you to add and grow contacts. You can export contacts from various sources too. It helps to create wonderful marketing campaigns with innovative templates. Its conversion funnel assists you in tapping more customers, growing email lists, retaining customers, and selling more products to brand-loyal customers.
Get Response VS. Hubspot:
- Get Response is an e-commerce tool that helps you to sell products online. First, it helps segregate your customers and recommend products of their choice.
- The social ad creator of et Response helps to create functional ads to push your products to the customers. Hubspot doesn’t have that inbuilt facility unlike, Get Response.
- Businesses can use the wonderful webinar platform of Get Response to live stream ongoing webinars on various social media to turn eyeballs in their favor. It allows you to collect feedback from customers by creating polls.
- The pricing of these two platforms is different and could be a deciding factor before making a final decision. Hubspot charges $135 for 2.5k contacts and $396 for 10k contacts. On the flip side, the charges are $22 for 2.5k contacts. For 10k contacts it is $59 per month. Get Response is an affordable and economical option. The full-featured pricing for HubSpot is $2,400 per month. Get Response charges you only $997 for full feature pricing.
Mail Chimp
If you want your email marketing to be strong, don’t look any further. Rely on Mailchimp to improve your sales by sending bulk emails, creating a customer database, send informative emails to inform new offers. It is useful for planning marketing efforts that enable outreach to a larger audience of customers and ultimately influence potential buyers to become actual buyers. Retaining customers often involves storytelling through email and updating them about new products or existing products with enhanced features.
Mail Chimp Vs. Hub Spot:
Mail chimp is no doubt, an excellent marketing tool. But Hub Spot is an all-rounder. In this sense, it provides marketing, sales, and content management to improve your business.
But what makes MailChimp a better alternative to Hub Spot?
- Hub Spot is very costly compared to MailChimp if your business doesn’t need all of the features of Hub Spot. You can choose from three plans mail Chimp. Of course, the premium plan is very costly, but you can always resort to the basic plan if yours is a start-up and don’t want all the features.
- The initial difficulty in learning is more in Hub Spot as it is a comprehensive marketing tool whereas Mail Chimp is excellent for beginners.
- Hub Spot provides only 20 landing pages in the free plan, whereas MailChimp allows you to create unlimited landing pages.
- Advanced automation features are available in Hub Spot. On the contrary, Mailchimp has only basic automation facilities not enough for big companies.
Pros:
- Facilitates E-Commerce services in the platform.
- Small companies find it convenient as it is an economical marketing solution software.
Cons:
- When you go on adding customers to the list, the rate increases.
- There are only a few features in customer relationship management tools.
Keap
Keap is a perfect choice for small businesses since it provides CRM solutions to help them flourish and prosper. It is a perfect alternative to HubSpot because it automates marketing jobs and does client management perfectly. Since it combines sales and marketing functions and lets the organization grow, you can rely on Keap for your business growth needs.
The pricing model of Keat is very effective because it combines marketing and CRM functions. It makes it possible for small organizations to access software that does marketing automation and customer relationship management without extra charge. Drag and drop builder makes marketing and sales automation possible.
The CRM software enables businesses to collect customer data, segregate them, and send customized messages to clients and prospective customers. This software allows you to send direct emails to clients and customers.
Pros:
- Small businesses’ best friends.
- Extensive automation
- Excellent sales and marketing tool.
Cons:
- Big enterprises won’t be interested in this software.
- It doesn’t help in the customization of the software.
Pipedrive
Its flagship feature is sales pipeline management which helps the company for better customer relationship management. It is a wonderful customer relationship management tool seeking to improve company sales.
Cost-effectiveness is the compelling feature Pipedrive offers its customers. It does an exceptional work for the startups and small businesses.
Pros:
- Excellent customizing features along with effective reporting tools.
- It is affordable to small businesses as it is fairly priced.
- It is a sales-focused tool that helps contribute to the overall profit of the company.
You need to understand why you buy the software and its capability to satisfy your needs.
Choose A Platform After Considering The Following Factors:
- Study Each Platform Thoroughly.
Understand their features and after thorough scrutiny finalize one platform that suits perfectly to your software needs. It needs careful consideration of each feature and its ability to facilitate business growth beyond limitations. The platform is easy to use, and the capability to tweak the platform to suit the company’s needs, quality of customer support, and how well the software incorporates into the tools the company already has.
- Trials Before Finalizing the Product:
You need to try out the platform before buying it. You need to check the functionality, and compatibility of the software with the various functions of the organization. These trials help you judge how well the software performs to suit the organization. You can judge whether the software supports your organizational goals and overall organization development.
- Set A Budget:
You ought to decide how much you will spend on the software. Different software costs different prices and there are monthly subscriptions and tiered purchases.
- Security:
Software security is a matter of concern these days. You need to check your data is not compromised after using cheap software.
- Plan For Integration:
When you integrate the new software with your existing tools, you ought to check where it can be incorporated with the existing tools.
- Ease Of Understanding The Software:
It should be convenient for the employees to understand. They are the real ones who have to work on this platform. To keep your integration smooth employees must familiarize themselves.
What NOT To Do When Choosing Software For Your Business?
It lies in critical considerations to inform your software selection decisions. First, never forget the input from key users (stakeholders). Never decide in a bubble or as a subject matter expert. Not consulting key users will lead to poor software selection and poorly designed solutions that don’t meet team needs.
Second, don’t discount scalability. Make certain that your software will grow with your business especially if a potential solution is “cheap” or “free.” Picking a solution that cannot scale will always lead to an expensive upgrade later. Third, don’t rush this process or try to get by without doing homework.
Not doing research, comparing, or skipping features or costs can lead to significant shortcomings. You don’t want to go through the process of evaluating and selecting solutions multiple times or worse, deal with training and supporting a flawed or ineffective solution.
Wrapping Up
In short, choose software that helps you to do business or make a profit. You have to check it takes care of all the marketing activities of the company. Every software has a unique feature that caters to various organizational needs. Software is said to be good if it identifies current needs and provides necessary solutions for future problems. There is one other factor you need to consider, budget. Before buying software do thorough research and finalize your decision based on the one that takes care of the goals.
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