Pipedrive vs HubSpot: Choosing the Right CRM for Growth

Two thousand, two hundred and eighty five. That’s how many customer relationship management systems (CRMs) are on the market today. Vetting all available options is a pretty daunting—if not impossible— task, let alone identifying which one makes the most sense for you.

What happens if you move forward with the wrong CRM? Or if you fail to plan for challenges and your needs in advance? Your sales, marketing, and operations teams will run into countless headaches related to your site, your sales funnel, and more.

We’re going to compare two major CRMs on the market, Pipedrive vs HubSpot, to give you an overview of some of their pros and cons. Our goal is to give you all the information you need to feel comfortable, and confident in deciding which one works best for you.

Once you have a more sophisticated CRM built, you can even track behavioral data points that can help you optimize your marketing strategies even further. Whether you obtain this information through organic sign-up forms, or you utilize data enrichment platforms like ClearBit or DiscoverOrg, understanding who your customers are will help you determine your buyer persona or ideal customer profile.

You can’t package your product if you don’t know who you’re packaging it for. An effectively utilized CRM will help paint a clear picture of who your ideal customer is.

Most people think only sales or customer success teams care about CRMs. But a well-populated and accurate CRM is a marketer’s best friend. Data-driven decisions are key in the initial stages for any organization, and gathering the right data can help you determine who to sell your product to and how to effectively speak to them.

The more you know your customers, the more personalized you can make their experience, leading to increased engagement and overall customer satisfaction.

While Pipedrive and HubSpot are both great options for organizations at any stage of growth, they’re both designed with certain features and capabilities that cater to different needs. So grab a pen and paper, and get ready to take some notes!

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Key Feature Differences Between Pipedrive and Hubspot

Let’s break down some of the major feature differences between Pipedrive and HubSpot. Both platforms are robust and include a wide variety of features and benefits, but let’s outline the key feature differences, such as pipeline dashboards, social scheduling, and other features that are exclusive to either Pipedrive or HubSpot.

Contact and Lead Management

Both HubSpot and Pipedrive offer contact and lead management, but treat them in very different ways. HubSpot separates Leads, Contacts, and Companies, which can be great for reporting and pipeline purposes, but requires a bit of work to get set up properly.

Pipedrive merges duplicate data and smart contact data that helps pull insights and key information from external websites like LinkedIn to help you get more competitive information on your customers.

Campaign Marketing

HubSpot operates as a content management system, as well as a CRM. This can serve as more of a full scale solution, and can help with more targeted marketing. If you’re planning a full scale go to market launch, you can schedule blog posts, social campaigns, and email sequences at the same time, making it a great option for Marketing teams looking to scale.

While Pipedrive does offer an email feature with analytics, segmentation, and templates, they don’t offer any other marketing functions. Unfortunately this means that your marketing team would operate on another platform, which can create discrepancies in information and lack of data.

Automation

Pipedrive has features like Deal Rotting that automates triggers or workflows based on how long a deal has remained dormant, making it a great feature for Sales teams. It also offers workflows to help automate sales tasks, such as email follow ups, calls, or outreach.

HubSpot offers workflows that can be built to assist with lead scoring, lead routing, nurture campaigns, deal statuses, and more. Because of its nature as both a CRM, and marketing automation platform, HubSpot’s workflow functionality is significantly more robust, and serves as a full scale solution.

Mobile Capabilities

Both HubSpot and Pipedrive have native mobile apps for Android and iOS that makes them both great options for Sales teams who work in the field, or on the go Marketing teams.

When to Choose Pipedrive as Your CRM

Pipedrive is a CRM primarily designed for sales teams. The sales workflow automation, and lead based functionality is designed to make life easier for sales teams. The Pipedrive CRM makes re-engagement campaigns simple and efficient with features like Deal Rotting. Their pricing model is also on the cheaper end of most CRM systems. Pipedrive’s mobile application is also a great option for sales teams who work at trade shows or in the field.

While Pipedrive offers the essentials, it lacks automations, features, and capabilities that can help marketing teams with more than just customer data. This means that your Marketing team would likely have to adopt a separate platform, creating a barrier and silo between sales and marketing. This can lead to division, miscommunication, and lack of clean data, which makes the sales and marketing funnel less efficient.

When to Choose HubSpot as Your CRM

With more features like social scheduling, content management, and email workflows, HubSpot is a CRM designed to be more of a holistic solution for marketing and sales. For growth or marketing teams, HubSpot would be an ideal choice, as it ensures everyone operates in one system, and has access to all the data they need to be successful. It removes the barriers and division that come from working in multiple platforms.

HubSpot offers full scale marketing tools so you can leverage customer data, as well as create go-to-market launches, develop website content, and compare all data points and analytics. Content management in HubSpot also makes it easier to attribute deals or opportunities to specific campaigns.

While HubSpot may be more expensive, it is truly an all-in-one solution designed to scale. As with any Marketing team, marketing solutions should be adopted with scalability in mind, because the cost remains the same while your profit can continue to grow.

Pricing

Pricing plays a huge role in deciding which option makes the most sense for your organization.

Pipedrive plans range from $14.90 to $99 per month. The simplicity of their offering is great for teams who know exactly what they need, and nothing more.

HubSpot offers a free version of their CRM platform, but is custom priced based on additional tools that you require. This ensures that teams can custom build a solution for their organization that has all the features necessary, without having to opt-in to tools they may not need.

Pipedrive vs HubSpot: Sales or Marketing?

Considering Pipedrive vs HubSpot, you have all the information you need to make an informed decision.

Pipedrive is designed to give you what you need and nothing more. Great tool for small to mid sized sales teams that need to be able to document their customer interactions, and move contacts from leads to closed deals

HubSpot is an all-in-one solution that is designed to scale with you, in both Sales and Marketing. Well rounded tool that can help you get customer insights and data, as well as plan an execute campaigns in order to grow even more

Though HubSpot and Pipedrive both have numerous benefits, if you’re looking for a CRM solution that will benefit both your sales team and your marketing team while supporting your overall organizational growth, HubSpot might be the best tool for your business.

Maintaining a hold on customer data, refining your ideal customer profile, and using your data to make key decisions are vital to the success of your business. If you are interested in HubSpot but still need more information to determine whether it’s the best fit for your organization, schedule a chat with our team today!

A Growth Marketer by day, and a dancer, Disney fan, and designer by night. With over 5 years of experience working in Growth, Marvin is passionate about helping others accomplish their goals, and is always happy to lend his expertise or experience where applicable.

5 Min Read

HubSpot

Mar 13, 2023