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HubSpot Free vs HubSpot Starter

HubSpot is perhaps the best platform for businesses searching for an effective way to manage customer relationships. With over 10 years of experience, the company has established itself as the best vendor of marketing technology solutions.HubSpot is quite a big deal in inbound marketing, email marketing, marketing automation, analytics, social media campaign management, customer relationship management (CRM), etc.But if you don’t believe us, maybe the thousands of clients worldwide using HubSpot’s powerful, intuitive tools and add-ons to attract, engage and amuse customers will convince you otherwise.That said, this comprehensive guide will help you figure out which HubSpot plan is the best for your business. Is it HubSpot Free or HubSpot Starter?

Read on to learn more…

What Companies Are Best Suited for HubSpot?

In the CRM space, HubSpot CRM outshines other CRM solutions. It is the go-to solution for many small businesses, mid-market businesses, and enterprises. That’s because they can use it across their marketing, sales, customer service, and even operation teams. But don’t take our word for it! You can go online and check out how it stacks up against other reputable CRM platforms, like Salesforce, Salesflare, and more.

HubSpot CRM stands out because it provides its users pricing and packaging offerings that many companies can grow with. Even their free plan delivers more value compared to many paid CRMs plans out there. Besides the free plan, HubSpot offers business paid offerings, including Starter, Professional, and Enterprise plans. Each package comes with robust features and 100s of integrations accessible to B2B or B2C businesses in several industries such as construction, retail, sales, accounting, and more.

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg! The CRM platform allows companies to monitor customer interactions automatically via social media, email, phone calls, and live chat. Also, it stores business contacts in a centralized database which you can customize. Therefore, you can see every detail about your leads from one location.

Another thing, your marketing team will benefit from lead generation and email marketing automation tools and features. Whereas, your sales team will track deals, manage contacts, and monitor the sales pipeline with ease. In addition, HubSpot tools work with HubSpot products and third-party CRM solutions, like Salesforce, SugarCRM, and so on.

So, if you’re searching for the most reliable CRM platform, look no further than HubSpot CRM.

Feature Comparison

Features

Free

Starter

Price

$0

$45

Company Records

Yes

Yes

Contact and Company Insights

Yes

Yes

Contact Management

Yes

Yes

Contact Activity

 

 

Facebook and Instagram Lead Ads

Yes

Yes

Email Scheduling

Yes

Yes

Conversion Bots

Yes

Yes

Meetings

Yes

Yes

Canned Snippets

Yes

Up to 5, 000 snippets

Email Tracking and Notifications

Yes

Unlimited email open and click notifications

Email Templates

Yes

Yes

Companies

Yes

Yes

Gmail and Outlook Integration

Yes

Yes

Ticketing

Yes

Yes

Custom Support Form Fields

Yes

Yes

App Marketplace Integrations

Yes

Yes

Company Insights

Yes

Yes

Tasks & Activities

Yes

Yes

Forms

Yes

Remove HubSpot branding plus additional features

Ad Management

Yes

All available ad types

2 contact and company list audiences

Reporting dashboard

Yes

Yes

Meeting Scheduling

Yes

1,000 personal & team meeting links

Email Marketing

Yes

5X Contact tier email send limit Remove HubSpot branding

Landing Pages

Yes

Remove HubSpot branding

Limited Features

Mobile Optimization

N/A

Content limited to email only

Reporting Dashboard

Yes

10 dashboards, 10 reports per dashboard

User Management

Yes

Yes

Multiple Currencies

N/A

Up to 5 Currencies

1:1 Technical Support

N/A

Email and in-app chat support

Conversion Routing

N/A

Yes

Sales Automation

N/A

Triggers tasks and email notification when deals change stages

Email Templates

Yes

5,000 templates

Facebook Messenger Integrations

Yes

Additional features

24/7 security monitoring & threat detection

N/A

Yes

List Segmentation

N/A

Up to 5 active lists and 1,000 static lists

Pricing Comparison

HubSpot CRM platform comes with five premium products or hubs: Marketing, Sales, Customer Service, CMS, and operations. The products are designed on top of several building blocks consisting of features and tools businesses can access for free.

HubSpot free makes the best offering for startups and small businesses. Since they don’t have a huge budget, the plan’s free service can help them boost their business productivity. Plus, attract more visitors to their sites by establishing a strong customer relationship.

Free HubSpot features serve as the underlying database that powers up every HubSpot product. Below we have listed some of the free services you will enjoy when using HubSpot free:

HubSpot Free Tools

Contact Management

Use this feature to build view and automate various actions with ease and better manage your data and contacts.

Companies

Allow businesses to keep and access records of every company from a single point; their database.

Company Insights

Access details about various companies in your database. This way, your expert sales team can concentrate on selling rather than searching for information. Also, your operation team can focus on making the company run smoothly instead of spending time on third-party data consolidation.

Task and Activities

Store, track, monitor, and report on the various tasks and activities that help your business form strong customer relationships.

Ad Management

Monitor and manage your ad network accounts by linking them to your HubSpot account. Use your HubSpot contact database to create an audience, and track ads that bring you high traffic.

Ad Re-targeting

Allows you to re-target your ads on various social media sites to customers who’ve stopped by your website.

Gmail and Outlook Integration

HubSpot account owners can link their Gmail or Outlook inbox with their accounts. As such, they can send emails from their HubSpot account hassle-free. Plus, they can create a shared team email account and gain access to several powerful tools.

Ticketing

Allows HubSpot account holders to log their customer problems as tickets. The tickets can get allocated to respective team members, arranged, and tracked from a central point.

App Marketplace Integrations

The tool makes it easy for businesses to connect their HubSpot account to 100+ renowned business applications via 3rd party integrations.

Forms

Design forms (pop-up or embedded) to collect customer data for your business needs.

Form Follow-up Emails

The feature allows you to send emails after form submission automatically. As such, your sales team can begin nurturing and converting leads into customers.

Contact Website Activity

Track what a visitor is searching for on your site. Get insights on website page views, sale activity, form submission, and more from one destination.

Calling

Use your HubSpot account’s VOIP to contact customers, record the call and log in contact record automatically for reference.

Conversational Bots

Use bots to direct your customer to the right content or customer support representative.

Email Marketing

Send tested and optimized email in bulk to several devices simultaneously. Use HubSpot’s drag-and-drop editor and customized tokens to create better and converting emails.

These are just a few of the many tools and features startups, small businesses, and mid-market businesses can enjoy at no cost. Others Include:

  • Custom properties
  • Quotes
  • Custom user permission
  • User management
  • 1-to 1 email
  • Slack integration
  • Marketing events object

HubSpot Starter

The HubSpot Stater CRM suite bundle starts at $45 per month and gets billed annually. The plan offers you all the HubSpot products - Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, Service Hub, CMS Hub, and Operations Hub–for a discounted price.

The HubSpot Starter suite is great for small and mid-market businesses that want to develop effective marketers and marketing teams. If you’re just new to the inbound marketing and customer relationship management space, you might love this package. It helps you build momentum in your business as you gain more experience.

Alternatively, you can opt for individual HubSpot Starter hubs or products.

Marketing Hub Starter

HubSpot’s Marketing Hub Starter pricing starts at $18 per month. With the package, you only have to pay for 1,000 contacts you wish to target with your marketing emails and ads. If you need to add more marketing contacts, you will pay an additional $18 per month for 1,000 contacts. The best part is you don’t have to worry about your non-marketing contacts since you can store them for free in your HubSpot CRM.

This entry-level marketing automation software presents your marketing team with everything they need to run a successful inbound marketing campaign. Your team will enjoy all free marketing tools plus:

  • Email Health Insights
  • Multiple currencies
  • 1:1 technical support
  • Payments

Sales Hub Starter

HubSpot’s sales CRM software pricing starts at $18 per month and supports 2 paid users. Plus, it allows you to remove HubSpot branding from your documents, 1-to 1 email, meeting scheduling, and live chat.

The Stater suite comes packed with several tools and features to boost your business productivity, streamline your sales process, and shorten deal cycles with less hassle. Sales Hub Starter is aimed at small sales teams that want to schedule meetings and close more deals with less effort.

Besides free edition tools, your sales team will get access to:

  • Email Templates
  • Goals
  • Conversation routing
  • Sales automation
  • Repeating tasks and task queues
  • Stripe Integrations
  • Calling SDK

With the help of these features, business owners can track their prospects immediately after they’ve visited their site.

Customer Service Hub Starter

Use HubSpot customer service hub to connect with your customers, offer them astonishing experiences on your site, and convert them to your business promoters. You can get the plan at price of $18 per month for 2 paid users, and $9 per month for additional users.

The software will provide your team with popular free tools like live chats, email templates, and ticketing, to connect and support your customers as soon as they visit your website. Other features and tools your customer service team will gain access to include:

  • Multiple ticket pipelines
  • Conversation routing
  • Simple ticket automation

CMS Hub

Content Management Software (CMS) Starter software provides marketers and developers the framework they need to build a solid, professional and successful website. HubSpot starter CMS starts at $23 per month billed annually at $270.

Use the software to update your website, hosting, and even infrastructure without issue. It provides your marketers and developers with enough time to focus on developing an astonishing customer experience and scaling your business.

Your marketers can create, update and optimize website pages with ease. The developers, on the other hand, can code solutions using a variety of free and paid HubSpot tools. With CMS Hub Starter, businesses will enjoy all the free tools, plus:

  • Drag-and-drop editor
  • Website themes
  • SEO recommendations
  • Custom domain security settings
  • Website traffic analytics

Operations Hub Starter

Operations Hub is the newest product in HubSpot’s CRM arsenal. The software brings in new functionality and features that can help businesses optimize their operations and scale. It comes with three key features, including data cleansing, enhanced integrations, and programmable automation.

But don’t be fooled by the simple nature of the software. These three features are powerful and take HubSpot to a whole new level.

HubSpot Operation Hub Starter starts at $18 per month. It’s perfect for startups and small businesses that wish to automate their process and create a problem-free customer experience.

Onboarding and Training

Understanding a new software can be overwhelming. Sometimes you need a little push and support, and that’s where HubSpot’s onboarding comes in. Small businesses, mid-market businesses, and enterprises can enjoy onboarding services personalized to their needs at HubSpot.

HubSpot provides these businesses with onboarding experts who can help their marketing, sales, customer service, and operations teams get acquainted with HubSpot’s tools and features, and grow. Plus, these teams gain access to knowledge base articles and courses to upskill. As a result, businesses can achieve their most important objectives, much faster.

Unfortunately, HubSpot only offers paid onboarding and training services. HubSpot’s onboarding service for HubSpot Starter offering is as follows:

Marketing Hub Onboarding

HubSpot’s onboarding experts will guide your marketing team on how to use HubSpot Marketing software. Your team will learn how to utilize data in the HubSpot account, automate the marketing process and generate leads. If you choose the HubSpot starter plan, you will enjoy several onboarding services, including:

  • How your data lives in HubSpot
  • Capture and convert leads
  • Segmenting data
  • Email marketing
  • Pricing for Marketing Hub Onboarding Starter is $250

Sales Hub Onboarding

Sales Hub Onboarding service from HubSpot allows your sales team to learn about sales processes. Your sales teams will receive actionable technical and strategic guidance to simplify and scale sale operations to close more deals. HubSpot’s onboarding experts will also provide your team with recommendations to better reach your business objectives and grow.

Sales Hub Onboarding Starter costs $250 and comes with several features, including:

  • Productivity tools
  • Customization of the CRM for your sales process
  • Overview of your customer sale process in HubSpot

Service Hub Onboarding

HubSpot understands it’s hard to avoid speed bumps when introducing your customer service teams to a new system. That is true, especially if you’re dealing with a large team. That’s why they offer businesses top-class customer service onboarding and training.

HubSpot experts will help your team set up a help desk, migrate off of other help desk software, and adopt tools to build a proactive customer success company.

If you opt for the Service Hub Onboarding Starter plan, you will need to pay $250. Some of the consultation services you will enjoy include:

  • Setting up intake channels
  • Reporting on productivity and closed tickets
  • Scheduling meetings
  • Creating a customized ticket pipeline

CMS Hub Onboarding

Learn how to use CMS Hub software through HubSpot CMS Onboarding services. HubSpot’s CMS experts will provide your team with guidance on how to publish, analyze, optimize and improve the performance of content. Unfortunately, HubSpot offers no CMS Hub Onboarding services for its Starter offering.

That said, HubSpot’s onboarding service is limited, and the experts only offer recommendations and guidance. That means your business will need the HubSpot professionals to perfume technical configurations, template development, integrations, migration, etc. That’s where No Bounds Digital comes in.

It’s a HubSpot certified agency that will tailor its onboarding and training practice to your business goals and objectives. The company has completed over 100+ HubSpot implementations, meaning they understand what it takes to ensure a fast and effective HubSpot onboarding and training experience.

Migration Options

With HubSpot, users can enjoy a variety of paid migration services that will meet their several business needs. Whether you want a website with a theme that matches your current site and brand or a complete website migration, the HubSpot Migration team will help you.

HubSpot offers its users blog migration, website migration, asset migration, and template setup services. If you have subscribed to HubSpot’s Starter offering, you can take advantage of HubSpot’s tools to import your website or blog content or even site structure into HubSpot. The same applies to HubSpot Marketing Hub Professional, CMS Hub Starter, and Enterprise plans.

Alternatively, you can hire a HubSpot certified agency like No Bounds Digital to handle the migration process. No Bound Digital will take your existing site and recreate it on HubSpot. They will also migrate your web and blog content, templates, files, and much more to help you get up and running, in no time.

Service Experience

Customer support exists for all HubSpot offerings, whether free or enterprise. HubSpot users receive 24/7 customer support through live chat, phone, and emails. HubSpot’s team of customer support representatives are friendly, dedicated, and often reply to questions fast. The best part is, customer support is not charged separately, rather included in the offering you select.

Additionally, HubSpot has a ton of free educational content in form of blogs, courses, comprehensive certificates, and articles to help users learn how to use various tools effectively. Plus, stay ahead as their businesses expand.

Conclusion

Despite having limited features and tools, HubSpot free stacks up well than paid plans offered by other CRM platforms. It stands out because it delivers core functionalities needed by most startups and small businesses. If you’re new to inbound marketing and customer resource management, consider using HubSpot free plan.

HubSpot Starter is more suited for businesses that desire to automate their marketing, sales, customer service, and operations but have a limited budget. The offering presents them with features and tools that help to boost business productivity, improve customer experience and increase revenue. What’s more, they can benefit from all the products offered by the tier without feeling overwhelmed.

So, which plan is the best?

Well, the choice depends on your business size and team. If you’re just starting, HubSpot free will suit you better. Companies with a bit more experience with inbound marketing, analytics, sales, and more, will benefit from using HubSpot Starter or higher tiers.

References

https://legal.hubspot.com/hubspot-product-and-services-catalog

https://app-eu1.hubspot.com/pricing/25144903/operations?products=operations-hub-starter_1&term=annual

https://www.pcmag.com/reviews/hubspot-crm

https://www.impactplus.com/blog/which-hubspot-package-is-right-for-you

https://www.hubspot.com/services/onboarding

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