HubSpot vs. Salesforce: An Expert on When To Choose and When To Integrate
HubSpot and Salesforce are names used almost interchangeably to refer to one of your organization’s most important tools: the CRM platform. CRM is short for “customer relationship management,” and these platforms allow marketers to bring in more leads, salespeople to track those big elusive deals, and customer success reps to retain more customers. HubSpot and Salesforce are two of the most popular options in this space, and many organizations struggle to choose between the two.
And if that wasn’t already enough of a difficult choice, there are situations where just one tool won’t cut it. Salesforce and HubSpot each have a suite of features beyond CRM, meaning they might be more suited to some teams than others. That’s when you need to find a way to integrate the two — or force someone to keep data up to date by going back and forth.
We had a conversation with Simon Jasmin, a Salesforce Architect and Marketing Automation Specialist at Elevatek, with years of experience helping clients put together the right CRM solution. He walked us through some of the key differences between Hubspot and Salesforce, how to pick the right platform, and when integration is a better solution.
Why Salesforce?
“Salesforce was once more of a CRM, but it’s now really a robust platform with a suite of enterprise applications.”
– Simon Jasmin, Salesforce Architect and Marketing Automation Specialist
Salesforce isn’t just a pioneer in the CRM world, it’s one of the first SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) platforms. That staying power has made it a go-to in the CRM space, and it’s often the first name people think of when looking for a platform.
Salesforce Sales Cloud is complex, comprehensive, and integrates natively with tons of tools already used by sales and marketing teams . Salesforce is usually chosen because it’s the gold standard in lead management, sales operations, and turning opportunities into deals.
But over its 25-year history, Salesforce is now known for a wide range of other products too, called modules. These modules allow organizations to cover much more than just the sales team’s needs.
- Service Cloud: This module is designed primarily for service and support teams to manage customer issues directly. Regardless of industry, these teams can use Service Cloud and Salesforce cases to oversee support tickets, incidents, field work and direct communication with clients.
- Marketing Cloud: Marketers can use this module manage their campaigns, optimize customer journeys, build personalized customer profiles, and gain insights from the same data the sales team has access to.
- Commerce Cloud: Built for e-commerce businesses, this Salesforce module handles product catalog management, order fulfillment, and retail ops with templates for digital storefronts and functionality to support headless commerce.
- Community Cloud: If you’ve ever wanted to build a custom community for your organization, whether for internal users or external customers, this module has you covered.
- Low-Code App Development Platform: Developers can use this module to build apps that work with Salesforce to do more with that data.
- Agentforce: First unveiled at Dreamforce ‘24, Agentforce is an AI-driven app designed to support employees and customers with 24/7 AI agents designed to be completely autonomous and heavily customizable.
In short, Salesforce is one of the strongest CRM platforms on the market that’s always expanding its offerings, and can readily expand to support other business functions as well. It can be difficult to implement and roll out, though, meaning it’s usually found in organizations with larger budgets.
Why HubSpot?
“HubSpot’s Marketing Hub is really strong.”
– Simon Jasmin, Salesforce Architect and Marketing Automation Specialist
Well, for one, HubSpot’s CEO coined the term “inbound marketing” back in 2005, and the platform was at the center of significant changes in the way marketers bring in leads. For nearly 20 years, HubSpot has been the name in inbound marketing, and a platform tons of marketers rely on to grow their customer base.
But while HubSpot is known for how it helps marketers build email sequences, generate leads with its form builder, and manage social media campaigns, it’s also a robust sales CRM tool in its own right.
It’s a workspace that keeps sales reps focused on high-return activities, an automation tool for prospecting at scale, a sales pipeline, and a lot more. It might not be as big of a name as Salesforce in sales circles, but it’s a strong choice in its own right.
Organizations that use HubSpot often use it for more than just CRM, leveraging Hubs like:
- Marketing Hub: The original Hub, this allows marketers to generate and nurture leads, manage email campaigns, and analyze the results of their marketing efforts.
- Service Hub: Customer support teams can use this Hub for managing support tickets, building chat bots, tracking overall customer satisfaction, and automating support tasks.
- CMS Hub: Organizations use this Hub to streamline the creation and management of their content, from blog posts to video and web pages.
- Operations Hub: This Hub is usually used in concert with other Hubs to better manage data, optimize workflows, and integrate other tools with HubSpot.
HubSpot is often adopted for its marketing features in most organizations and expanded to sales and customer service teams afterwards. This isn’t always the case however; some sales team prefer Hubspot over Salesforce because it’s easier to implement and usually has a lower price tag.
How to pick between HubSpot and Salesforce
So now that you have a broad understanding of Salesforce and HubSpot, how do you pick between them? Three major differences stood out during our conversation with Simon.
Scale vs. agility
“Because HubSpot is smaller, they’re more agile, so I think they’re bringing new functionalities faster than Salesforce is able to.”
– Simon Jasmin, Salesforce Architect and Marketing Automation Specialist
Do you want a platform you can deploy quickly or one that has massive potential for scaling with your organization? That’s usually the big question most organizations ask to choose between HubSpot and Salesforce. You need significant resources — and sometimes third-party help — to properly implement Salesforce. With HubSpot, you can hit the ground running.
That said, some organizations that start with HubSpot have to migrate over to Salesforce later anyway.
Lead vs lead
“In Salesforce, a lead is a person, like a business card with contact information. In HubSpot, it’s a little different. Contacts have that information, which you can turn into leads. A contact can have multiple leads, say if they’re disqualified at one time and then sign up for a trial of your tool later.”
– Simon Jasmin, Salesforce Architect and Marketing Automation Specialist
Both HubSpot and Salesforce are suites of business solutions that work best together. Having both the Marketing Hub and the Sales Hub in HubSpot, for example, makes it easier for salespeople and marketers to collaborate. Likewise, getting multiple Salesforce modules allows more of your organization to work in the same platform.
Learning the way these different functions interact is almost as important as learning the one tool you’ll use in your role, and both tools do it very differently. Researching these interactions — like how leads work — can help your organization pick the right tool.
The price
Salesforce is primarily an enterprise solution, and it comes with the associated price tag. Even its smaller plans, for individuals and small teams, are generally more expensive than HubSpot’s. Plus, HubSpot offers a free plan for organizations that need a CRM tool now but aren’t sure how much they’re ready to invest.
If you want the more agile tool that costs less, you’ll usually go for HubSpot. But if you want a dedicated enterprise platform and have the budget to match, Salesforce is usually the go-to.
The killer combo: Salesforce Sales Cloud and HubSpot Marketing Hub
“I would say that a really nice duo is having Salesforce as your CRM and HubSpot’s Marketing Hub as your marketing solution. For companies who can afford the Salesforce licenses, I think that’s a really, really interesting tech stack.”
– Simon Jasmin, Salesforce Architect and Marketing Automation Specialist
While some organizations will only pick a single tool for the CRM needs, many will find themselves using both. This is especially true at larger organizations, where, say, multiple sales departments each have their own tool preference. But even if you can standardize tool choice across departments, there are some functions HubSpot can manage better than Salesforce, and vice-versa. You may find yourself relying on HubSpot’s Marketing Hub while using Salesforce Sales Cloud.
That’s why most organizations need a way to integrate both tools.
Built-in integrations
HubSpot offers a built-in integration with Salesforce that won’t require an IT team to deploy. You can leverage data in HubSpot — like what your marketers gather from their campaigns — to inform the work your sales team is doing in Salesforce.
HubSpot’s built-in bi-directional sync allows everything from email opens to form submissions and website activity to become valuable intelligence in Salesforce, leading to more closed deals.
Salesforce also offers built-in integration solutions for HubSpot through Mulesoft Composer, but they can be significantly more difficult to deploy
But are either of these options the best way to integrate these tools?
Integrate HubSpot and Salesforce with Unito
Built-in integrations often share the same flaw: limited depth. They’re convenient, since you don’t need a third-party solution to get data across tool boundaries. But they usually only support some data, not all. That can seriously limit how well you can collaborate between tools.
Enter Unito.
Unito is a 2-way sync integration platform with some of the deepest integrations on the market for tools like HubSpot, Salesforce, Mailchimp, Asana, Jira, and more. Most Unito users don’t have a technical background and get set up in about 12 minutes. If you need an integration for HubSpot and Salesforce, Unito is the best way to get started quickie.
How Cloudwerx automates sales-to-delivery handoffs with Unito
“Absolutely love the two way sync. Hands down the most amazing feature. It allows our pipeline to run seamlessly from Sales to Engineering, while ensuring everyone is on the same page in Salesforce and Jira. Unito’s customer service is absolutely amazing as well. It’s very easy to set up and get everything running. Without Unito, we would have relied on many manual processes and there would be a huge gap between sales and engineering.”
— Caty Hernisey , Services Operations Manager @ Cloudwerx