We recommend Pipedrive over HubSpot, especially if you are a small–medium sized team (under 500 employees). Pipedrive has a superior user experience and is also more affordable in the long-run compared to HubSpot.
Pipedrive is also more of a sales-focused CRM, whereas HubSpot is more of a marketing-focused CRM.
We believe there are better options available in this category, read below to learn what this software does well, and what they could do better. ⤵
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The CRM space is probably the largest software category in the world, just ahead of project management. That said, there's 2 types of CRM categories:
Okay, let me explain. Most software will eventually get to a point where they need to determine if they should tack on the "CRM" category to their product offering. And because a CRM at the end of the day is really just a database, most software will justify "adding it" to their toolset.
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The CRM for small + medium teams (200 or less) that are using Microsoft 365.
Pipedrive is more of a "sales-focused" CRM for small + medium teams (meaning 100 seats or less), and it's pretty good at just that.
It's a huge upgrade from trying to use a spreadsheet like Google Sheets as a CRM or a database like Airtable as a CRM, any yet flexible enough to even build out for some additional internal processes beyond just sales.
Their API is flexible and robust (we enjoy integrating it for teams), and they've been around for a while, so they aren't going anywhere anytime soon. Solid recommendation if your team's tech stack revolves around Microsoft.
While Pipedrive allows you to sync in emails retroactively into the system, it only does it for the past 6 months, whereas competitors like Copper will actually go an entire year back, across everyone on your team, when a new contact is added to the CRM.
If you're using Microsoft 365 though, Pipedrive would be your best bet, as Copper doesn't work with non-Google Workspace/Gmail accounts.
If you're deeply considering Pipedrive as your CRM and your team is using Google Workspace—go check out Copper instead.
If you're heavily a sales-focused company and are using Microsoft Outlook for email, Pipedrive will actually give you one of the best experiences when it comes to a CRM.
While we might in some cases recommend HubSpot if you're a Microsoft shop, we would do so hesitantly as HubSpot gets to 5–figures per year very quickly. And that's a lot of Pipedrive seats!
We might recommend reading the Best CRM Comparison post we made which goes deeper into the positives and negatives of Pipedrive as compared to others.
The marketing automation tool (and CRM) for mid + large teams (200–1,000) who require a robust and all-in-one tool like Salesforce.
If you are considering HubSpot because of price (after hearing things like 50–90% off the first year)—let me stop you right now, you're playing directly into their marketing shtick (you'll see the #1 concern with HubSpot is actually price).
HubSpot was not initially built as a CRM, it was a marketing email automation platform. A powerful (and expensive) one at that—but credit where credit is due. It's just, most companies often need to start with just a CRM to streamline their business operations.
It wasn't until HubSpot realized that acquiring customers for their $20–60k+/yr marketing automation suite was a difficult sell out of the gate, that they decided to built a "free CRM" as a lead magnet (and gateway) to their expensive core product.
So if you're a startup or a team of 20 or less (that will actually be using the CRM day-to-day), we highly recommend looking at a different CRM (we've done a deep-dive on that here). Because after the first year, you will be paying 2-4x more for HubSpot than the competing solutions (even at their proposed "Year 2+ discounts").
Now if your team is quite large and considering Salesforce, we actually do recommend Hubspot in most cases. HubSpot is more user-friendly than Salesforce, and you aren't going to be totally stuck in the expensive enterprise software stack that a tool like Salesforce often requires.
We will also add that we work with HubSpot often, and Copper + Pipedrive have far superior API's to HubSpot (in that we can build the same integration in 1/2 the time), so there is a second-order unseen cost associated to HubSpot.
And finally, there's quite a bit that needs to "go right" in order for emails to automatically log from your team's inbox into HubSpot.
Replies to emails will be logged automatically on the contact's timeline if you have connected your personal email and the following is true:
1. The original email was sent through the CRM or sent from your connected email client with the sales email extension or add-in installed and the Log checkbox selected.
2. The original email was not sent to an email address or domain listed in your Never Log list.
3. The email address is still connected when the reply is received.
4. The reply is sent to an individual's email connected by the user who originally started the thread.
5. The sender of the reply is an existing contact in HubSpot.
(Something that most take for granted when working with a CRM like Copper, where everything just logs automatically with no prerequisites—even if the contact doesn't yet exist in the CRM, it'll go back 1 year through your team's email history and retroactively add those emails)
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