Pipedrive vs Hubspot

In the paragraphs below, we are going to make a head-to-head comparison of Pipedrive vs Hubspot. At a first glance, it appears to be another David-vs-Goliath bout. However, small as it is, Pipedrive has got lots of trumps up its sleeve.

For a start, let’s look at how the two platforms came into being and who founded them. Then, we shall try to elicit who’s Pipedrive for, and who’s Hubspot for. After that, you can read a summary of what each of the two platforms has to offer.

The meat and juice of this post is a detailed comparison of Pipedrive’s and Hubspot’s most popular features. Then, we shall pass our expert judgment as to how easy to use each of the two platforms is and what kind of customer support and training each of them offers.

Pipedrive is the cheaper of the two platforms, but that, too, is only the tip of the iceberg. If you’d like to get some valuable insights into Pipderive’s and Hubspot’s pricing policies, read on!

To paraphrase John Donne, no online marketing platform is an island entire of itself. Therefore, the closing section of this blog sheds light on the integrations and third-party apps that Hubspot and Pipedrive use to make their users’ experience even better.

About Hubspot

Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah founded Hubspot in 2004 in an attempt to put an end to the boring and intrusive marketing methods of that time. Their inspiration for Hubspot came from a small blog that Dharmesh was running at the time and which generated insanely huge traffic for its minute size.

It didn’t take Brian and Dharmesh long to realize that people hate being told what to buy. Instead, they wanted an automated funnel that’d help them make a good choice on their own. They wanted to browse similar items, as well as see relevant upsells and downsells.

Since it became fully operational, Hubspot has always been praised for its systematic approach to CRM (customer relationship management) that allows the user to set up company profiles, contact profiles, and manage the ensuing correspondence.

The Four Pillars of HubSpot’s Success Story

HubSpot is not one, but four different SAAS solutions that we’d like to call the four pillars of its success story. HubSpot is most famous for its free CRM suite that comes with every subscription option. But the real power is in the platform’s different hubs – Marketing, Sales, Service, and CMS. All hubs are also available on HotSpot’s mobile app.

Service Hub

You should choose this mini platform if you are in the CRM and customer support business. For instance, if you have several front office teams in different locations, Hubspot’s Service Hub will help you better coordinate their work. Service Hub’s list of tools Includes live chat, help desk automation, customer database, feedback surveys, reporting, etc.

Sales Hub

This easy-to-use arm of Hubspot is for CRM and sales teams to help them close more deals fast. It will also help your company’s sales team establish a more personal relationship with your leads and customers. Sales Hub’s suite includes profit-oriented CRM features as well as quote-generating and customer-engaging tools.

Marketing Hub

The Marketing Hub helps your business generate a crowd of followers by boosting the traffic to your website. The Marketing Hub has the right templates to let you easily set up and launch properly-scaled inbound marketing campaigns. Marketing Hub’s tool suite offers email marketing tools that will quickly convert website visitors into loyal customers.

CMS Hub

The latest addition to Hubspot’s arsenal is a content management system that helps marketers edit and create landing pages without any coding and provide their customers with a highly-personalized online shopping experience. The pages can also be easily optimized for a mobile view.

By choosing one of the pre-built website templates, they can also create various websites in multiple languages. The analytics tools in this suite will let you analyze the impact of your website and find out content and campaigns are driving the most leads.

All of the above software solutions work incredibly well through the mobile app, making Hubspot the strongest all-rounder on the market with a wide range of features for your business.

About Pipedrive

Pipedrive appeared on the CRM stage in 2010 amid cut-throat competition. However, Pipedrive’s founders Timo Rein and Urmas Purde had spotted a gap in the CRM market and created a CRM solution specially tailored for small businesses.

As soon as they figured out what exactly they wanted, the dynamic duo needed someone to do the heavy lifting for them. So, they teamed up with Martin Henk, Ragnar Sass, and Martin Tajur to create Pipedrive – a conceptually-new CRM platform for small business owners.

What started as a small business platform designed as a CRM tool, has now grown to become the tenth most popular CRM platform. Today, Pipedrive is an excellent solution for small sales-focused companies that provides a stress-free user experience. Pipedrive works great for salespeople, as well as for large sales teams. Pipedrive is designed to keep you selling no matter what.

Who is Hubspot for?

Unlike Pipedrive, Hubspot is for large, mid-size, and small businesses. The platform’s several powerful arms can help businesses in more than one market sector. This eliminates the need for different solutions to serve the different branches of your business.

Hubspot requires minimum technical know-how, so you don’t have to pay for expensive tech teams. Thus, if your company needs an HR tool for its office in Dresden, Germany, an online marketing platform for its office in Manila, and a CRM tool for all of its offices, Hubspot is the solution. Besides, Hubspot provides good HR, accounting, and project management capabilities to further strengthen the collaboration between your marketing teams.

Who is Pipedrive for?

Pipedrive’s experts are always ready to give a helping hand to freelancers, small and mid-size businesses, one-man-enterprises, and non-profits that are on a tight budget. About 100 mid-sized companies like Avocode, Onedot, and Livestorm have integrated Pipedrive as their primary CRM and sales management tool. This proves that the platform is suitable for small businesses as well as larger enterprises.

What Does HubSpot Offer?

HubSpot offers a powerful combination of CRM, marketing automation, customer service, and sales suites. All businesses that migrate to HubSpot instantly fall in love with its free CRM suite it is present on each of the four Hubs mentioned above.

As part of its CRM suite, HubSpot offers powerful multi-channel contact management capabilities. The platform also provides a comprehensive view of all of your sales pipelines and deals, no matter how dynamic the data flows may be. Hubspot’s nifty free features include a live chat on your website and a practical meeting scheduler.

What Does Pipedrive Offer?

Pipedrive’s user interface strictly focuses on CRM and sales pipeline management. Its array of features may not be as comprehensive as Hubspot’s, but every tool that it offers is a gamechanger in its league. Pipedrive offers exceptional sales and CRM tools to small and large businesses alike. Think of Pipedrive as a cheaper alternative to ClickFunnels and Salesforce.

When you are small, every cent matters. So, you can start with Pipedrive and use its limited set of reliable features until your business grows strong enough to migrate to a bigger and more comprehensive platform with better email marketing capabilities.

Pipedrive vs Hubspot: Features

Hubspot Core Tools

With Hubspot, you get four different marketing platforms into one. From customizable views and dashboards to deals and task management, Hubspot can confidently provide comprehensive marketing synchronization for your business.

In the world of CRM, Hubspot can do virtually anything by employing a vast variety of easy-to-use email, phone, and web integrations. If you are planning to sell on social media, HubSpot’s Social media integrations allow you to track your leads and schedule online marketing campaigns, webinars, and other events.

CRM and contact management are Hubspot’s core features, but the platform has can benefit marketers, salespeople, and customer support reps alike. You should not expect too much from HubSpot’s free CRM, though. The suite includes basic features for sales and marketing teams such as email campaign forms, ad management, and contact list segmentation.

If you need advanced marketing automation tools, you should sign up for a higher price point. Hubspot’s pricing policy is really simple: the more features you need, the higher the price that you should be ready to pay.

If you need to set up a landing page for your company, you should go to The CMS Hub where you’ll be able to create landing pages and websites from a wide range of pre-set templates. On the CMS Hub, you can also create 100% SEO-optimized web content.

Pipedrive Core Tools

Pipedrive’s suite delivers exactly what small sales teams need to go about their daily business. The platform’s superpower is in leads and deals management and marketing automation. From your Pipedrive account, you can also keep an eye on your sales team’s communications with your customers.

Pipedrive’s AI Sales Assistant easily automates the most tedious tasks that your salespeople have to perform every day or give you valuable insights into the performance of your business and detailed reports on where exactly you should put more effort. Last but not least, Pipedrive boasts one of the most versatile mobile apps for sales teams.

Pipedrive’s CRM suite offers lead scoring and segmentation, web activity tracking, and generates personalized web content. The sales features include invoice creation, report generation, real-time sales alerts, etc.

Hubspot vs Pipedrive: Automation

When it comes to streamlining the sales workflows of your business via automation, both Pipedrive and HubSpot have a lot to offer. They each boast powerful database builders that regularly enrich your contact records with valuable customer information.

Yet, there is a marked difference between HubSpot and Pipedrive regarding their approach to automation. Before you can choose either of the two platforms, you should know that they offer different user experiences.

HubSpot’s Workflows is the platform’s primary automation and communication feature. You can use Workflows to better organize the work of your sales teams and customer service centers of your organization’s workflows, including sales, marketing, and service. Depending on your subscription, Workflows can be:

  • Company-focused
  • Deal-focused
  • Ticket-focused
  • Quote-focused
  • Contact-focused

Once you’ve chosen the goal and enrollment criteria of each workflow, you can use the drag-and-drop editor to choose what happens when particular conditions are met. Workflows can automatically perform the following tasks:

  • Send inbound or outbound emails
  • Set property values for companies or contacts
  • Add or remove contacts from your database
  • Alter or copy a numerical contact property
  • Generate and assign specific tasks to certain team members

For even more complex workflows, you can add trigger delays and if/then algorithms to achieve the right result. Hubspot provides a powerful and versatile automation tool that is easy to use.

Pipedrive’s Workflow Automation suite features robust although basic capabilities. You can still create a trigger and make the system automatically send a notification when a lead commits to buying an item from your online store or move a deal to a new stage when certain criteria are met.

If you need to set up personalized workflows, you Pipedrive’s workflow builder can segment them according to the following criteria:

  • Organization
  • Deals Closed
  • Completed Activities
  • Leads’ involvement and segmentation

If you need to remind your social media followers of upcoming promotions, Pipedrive’s Automation Assistant can send reminders, email notifications, and mobile app push notifications. Pipedrive’s AI-powered sales mentor easily generates report graphs and detailed pie charts to show you where your sales team needs to put more effort.

Hubspot vs Pipedrive: Reporting and Analytics

Тhe main Pipedrive dashboard offers a detailed insight into how your sales team is doing. Should you need a more detailed analysis of the performance of your sales pipelines, you can always customize your dashboard to view the sales performance by item or by deal closed. Albeit a bit basic, Pipedrive’s reporting tool is simple and easy to use.

HubSpot offers a bigger suite of reporting tools, but at a price to match. They are tailored to cater to the needs of medium and large businesses. In your Hubspot account, you can easily set up many different reports that’ll let you get the bigger picture of the market and understand certain trends. Hubspot constantly analyses your sales and automatically generates complex pie charts that illustrate leads, sales, churns, and conversions.

Pipedrive vs Hubspot: CRM

HubSpot’s user-friendly CRM suite automates the process of report updating and lets you see how your sales team is tracking toward the quota. The neatly-organized dashboard gives you a real-time view of your sales funnel with reports on individual performance, sales activity, and productivity.

There’s no limit on the data you need to store in Hotspot’s free CRM database, and the tool can be used by as many team members as you need. There is room for one million contacts on your list and they can be stored there indefinitely. For more complex CRM and lead management features such as Recurring revenue tracking, Deal stage, task, and lead rotation automation, and Predictive lead scoring, you should sign up for Hubspot’s Pro or Enterprise plans.

Pipedrive’s CRM software allows you to easily segment your contact list by organization or link them to particular deals. Contacts can be easily imported from a spreadsheet or another CRM platform. Pipedrive’s dashboard visualizes your call & chat history, as well as the emails that your sales team has sent to a particular contact.

Pipedrive offers two-way email synchronization that lets you send and receive emails from your work or Pipedrive or Gmail inbox. Alternatively, you can use the Smart Email BCC to synchronize only the email threads you need.

The open-and-click-tracking feature automatically notifies you when the promotional emails you’ve sent from your Pipedrive inbox have been opened. Pipedrive’s email template library allows you to easily choose the best email layout to be sent to a particular lead. The group email option lets you launch targeted email marketing campaigns.

Hubspot vs Pipedrive: Landing Pages

This is probably the only field where Hubspot puts Pipedrive in total submission. For all of its simplicity and user-friendliness, Pipedrive does not seem to offer any landing page building capabilities.

By contrast, the CMS Hub of Hubspot has got a very good drag-and-drop page builder that lets you create attractive landing pages and websites with zero knowledge of coding. The CMS Hub’s editor lets you alter not just the content, but also the entire layout and design of your pages according to the latest market trends.

Whichever template you choose, your page is automatically organized into editable sections, columns, and rows. These are to be filled up with different modules, or blocks of content. Hubspot’s landing page editor may not have the editing power of Leadpages’s website editor, but it still does a good job and eliminates the need for seeking a dedicated solution.

Pipedrive vs Hubspot: Sales Pipelines

Judging by its name, the sales pipeline setup is Pipedrive’s specialty. Its visual funnel dashboard lets you easily arrange deals into pipelines and customize their stages according to your specific sales cycle. Once you set up a sales funnel in your Pipedrive account, you’ll be able to add deals, and separate them by value and win probability. You can even set an expected close date. All deals you add are easily trackable through all stages of the sales process

The deals that are going cold appear on your dashboard in ice blue, so you’ll know to address them first. Pipedrive’s sales funnels have many pros, but there are some cons as well. The platform still does not offer an integrated shopping cart, neither could we spot any checkout features or payment acceptance options. These stages of your sales funnel can be completed with the help of external integrations.

To be able to create multiple sales funnels on Hubspot, you’ll need a Sales Hub Starter, Professional, or Enterprise account. A standard Hubspot sales pipeline includes seven deal stages, but you can add more or reduce their number as per your specific sales cycle.

Compared to Pipedrive’s, Hubspot’s visualization dashboard offers more detailed insights into each stage of your deals. From there, you can also edit the properties of each deal stage as per the progress achieved. Hubspot also relies on third-party checkout tools, shopping carts, and payment processors to help you sell your products.

Hubspot vs Pipedrive: Integrations

One of Hubspot’s main strengths is its dynamic integration ecosystem that includes 700 third-party tools and add-ons. For fast and easy checkout, Hubspot integrates seamlessly with Stripe. This add-on also allows you to collect and process payments in multiple currencies.

If you need more powerful analytics, you should add the powerful Microsoft Dynamics integration into your Hubspot account. If you need to build more forms, you should add Leadformly to your Hubspot account. Finally, Oracle’s Netsuite can connect with your Hubspot account to help you better plan the resources of your business. Use the Salesforce or Sugar CRM integrations with your free Hubspot CRM suite to expand its capabilities for free.

Pipedrive also integrates with Leadformly, Salesforce, Netsuite, Gmail and SugarCRM. We were intrigued to find out that it also pairs with QuickBooks – the world’s number one accounting software package. For easy project management and HR, Pipedrive seamlessly integrates with Slack. If you need some help with invoicing, you can always add Xero to your Pipedrive account.

Hubspot vs Pipedrive: Pricing

Both Pipedrive and Hubspot offer a free 14-day trial. This option is present on each of Hubspot’s Hubs, that is. Unlike Hubspot, Pipedrive does not offer a free-forever plan. This means that if you don’t want to pay for a CRM suite, you should choose Hubspot When it comes to using more features and functions, HubSpot quickly becomes far pricier than Pipedrive.

Hubspot Pricing

The free CRM software is present on the platform’s different hubs (see above). The Sales, Marketing, Service, and CMS Hubs provide different pricing plans. Regardless of your plan, there’s a one-time setup fee of $600. All plans enrich Hubspot’s free CRM software with more features and come with a two-week free trial. Hubspot offers customer support via phone, email, or chat.

Sales Hub

  • Starter – from $45/month (if paid annually)
  • Professional – from $450/mo
  • Enterprise from $1,200/mo

Marketing Hub

  • Starter – from $45/month
  • Professional – from $800/month
  • Enterprise – from $3,200/month

Service Hub

  • Starter – from $45/month
  • Professional – from $360/month
  • Enterprise – from $1200/month

CMS Hub

  • Professional – from $270/month
  • Enterprise – from $900/month

Pipedrive Pricing

Pipedrive’s pricing policy is quite straightforward. Its four price options can be paid annually or monthly. All plans offer a two-week free trial and two optional add-ons. there is no setup fee.

The Essentials Plan costs just $15 per user per month. It includes customizable sales funnels, contact & deal management, and other basic features like email tracking.

The Advanced Plan costs $30 per user per month. It includes a workflow automation suite with plenty of features. It also provides regular revenue reports and a product list that business owners can easily customize.

The Pro Plan costs $59 per user per month and includes advanced deal & contact visibility settings, revenue forecast reports, as well as Pipedrive’s Automatic Caller Assistant that lets you make sales calls directly from your account.

The Enterprise Plan Costs $117.50 and includes premium training and onboarding and 100 automated workflows.

All plans offered by Pipedrive include 24/7 chat support. Both Pipedrive and Hubspot give you a chance to pay extra for more contacts and a more comprehensive feature set. Each plan’ starting price can be adjusted according to the number of contacts you need.

Unless you uncheck the Leadbuster Add-on box before selecting any of Pipedrive’s plans, you’ll add it for $39 per company per month. If you are curious who visits your website, the Web Visitors add-on can help you with that for $49 per month.

Ease of use

Hubspot’s four Hubs are user-friendly, but each has a specific learning curve. On the whole, it takes more time to train your staff to use Hubspot than Pipedrive, whose basic features can be learned very quickly. On the whole, Pipedrive provides a less stressful user experience.

Over time, your team will get used to HubSpot’s multiple customizations and personalized user interface. The advanced tools that come with the pricier plans are also very easy to use. Both Hubspot and Pipedrive offer mobile apps for Android and iOS, but that of Pipedrive has a smaller feature set.

Support& Training

Hubspot has a well-structured Knowledge Base and a blog to help users make the most of its four Hubs. The top plans also include custom training and onboarding options. Pipedrive has developed the Sales Pipeline Academy that includes lots of useful tutorial videos.

On Pipedrive’s official website, you can also read through numerous Case Studies that illustrate other companies’ success stories with Pipedrive. Finally, there’s the Pipedrive Blog, where you can find answers to common questions organized into four categories:

  • Selling and Scaling
  • Sales Improvement
  • Scale-up
  • About Pipedrive

If you’d like to keep up with the latest updates, you can subscribe to Pipedrive’s email newsletter. All of these resources guarantee an enjoyable user experience on one of the best CRM platforms in the world.

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