Pipedrive vs HubSpot CRM: Choose Your Best Option 2023

HubSpot CRM does not offer a free trial for its Sales Hub, but instead has a free-for-life platform that boasts an array of sales and marketing tools. Plus, HubSpot’s free CRM has no seat limits, so it can scale with companies until they’re ready to pay for an upgrade. Speaking of upgrades, it’s easy to level up to one of HubSpot’s premium Sales Hub tiers from within its free CRM – but that can quickly become very expensive, especially for businesses with smaller budgets.

Pipedrive doesn’t have a free-for-life CRM, but it does offer a 14-day trial with every paid plan. Barring HubSpot’s free CRM, Pipedrive is a more economical choice than HubSpot Sales Hub – especially at the enterprise level, as it’s roughly $20 less per user, per month for Pipedrive Enterprise than HubSpot CRM’s equivalent. All Pipedrive subscriptions include access to over 400 app integrations, 24/7 customer support, and the option to pay annually or monthly.

HubSpot CRM is an ideal solution for companies seeking to boost their sales and marketing efforts. It offers a variety of tools related to inbound lead generation, contact management, and email marketing. All HubSpot CRM tiers include up to one million contact records, email templates, shared inboxes, and chat widgets. Premium Sales Hub upgrades will yield access to A/B testing, predictive lead scoring, and recurring revenue tracking.

Pipedrive’s feature set is primarily dedicated to the sales process. HubSpot CRM may have more depth thanks to its shared focus on marketing, but Pipedrive has the edge when it comes to offering unlimited contacts and visual pipelines — both of which are standard with every plan. Other core features include deal and activity reporting plus contact mapping via Google Maps. Higher-tier plans come with advanced security functions and team management tools.

HubSpot CRM is often lauded for its ease of use. A straightforward and intuitive interface makes it possible for even the least tech-savvy person to learn HubSpot CRM in little time. It also helps that HubSpot has an extensive knowledge base, active user community, and excellent customer support to guide users along. HubSpot’s free CRM is regarded as a strong platform in its own right — but some functions are limited, and upgrading to premium plans can be pricey.

Pipedrive has a slight advantage over HubSpot CRM since it offers an even cleaner interface that most sales reps should be able to pick up right away. Users can organize Pipedrive’s visual kanban-style pipelines, interactive dashboards, and shared inboxes through drag-and-drop functionality. This simplistic approach will suit businesses that don’t have the bandwidth for extensive CRM training, but it may turn off organizations that need a beefier platform.

HubSpot CRM includes over 150 report templates as standard with every plan. These range from sales-focused CRM metrics (such as deals created and monthly revenue) to marketing-centric data (like website traffic and interactions by social network). Upgrading to either Sales Hub Professional or Enterprise will unlock access to custom reports and advanced analytics, as well as increase the total number of CRM dashboards users can create.

Pipedrive refers to its reporting as Insights. It only comes with roughly a dozen default report types that are largely concentrated on deal performance, activities, and emails. However, unlike HubSpot CRM, Pipedrive’s higher-tier plans come with unlimited visual dashboards that can support up to 25 CRM reports each, as well as the ability to generate custom Insights.

HubSpot CRM includes automation with every paid Sales Hub plan. Users can set up as many as 1,000 workflow rules for email campaigns, lead routing, contact data enrollment, internal team notifications, and many other tasks. Workflows can be created in HubSpot CRM from scratch using its visual point-and-click interface; however, there are workflow templates available to make automating sales and marketing processes even easier.

Pipedrive, on the other hand, has a visual drag-and-drop interface that allows you to move deals with the option to start workflows from a template or from scratch. While it may not offer as many rules or tasks as HubSpot CRM, Pipedrive is arguably more user-friendly in its approach. One nifty feature is Pipedrive’s estimation of how much time users can save when automating mundane tasks like adding lead data and pinging reps on Slack when a deal progresses.

HubSpot CRM’s mobile app is an extension of its desktop platform but with several extras baked in. HubSpot CRM mobile app features include a business card scanner, caller ID, and access to customer records from anywhere (online or offline). However, the most noteworthy function here is the HubSpot Keyboard, which syncs with a variety of third-party messaging and productivity apps to insert key contact and sales snippets straight from the CRM.

Pipedrive’s mobile app follows the lead of its full-fledged CRM counterpart with a streamlined visual interface that’s easy to navigate. One notable app-exclusive feature is Focus, which provides a general overview of daily schedules and important tasks. The Pipedrive mobile app also integrates with third-party messaging and productivity apps for a more cohesive mobile experience — and it even syncs mobile data to the desktop CRM, both offline and online.

HubSpot CRM is linked to the HubSpot App Marketplace, which is home to over 1,000 app integrations and counting. Categories span sales, marketing, productivity, finance, and customer service. Nearly 50 apps featured on the App Marketplace are available at no cost including integrations like Zoom, Mailchimp, Slack, and WordPress. The HubSpot App Marketplace is accessible across all HubSpot CRM tiers, including HubSpot’s free CRM.

Pipedrive users can scour the Pipedrive Marketplace for third-party integrations. It currently hosts over 400 apps ranging in categories from email marketing and analytics to lead generation and messaging. About one-fourth of those apps are free to download; those include Trello, Asana, Leadfeeder, and Microsoft Teams, among others. There’s even an integration for HubSpot for users who want to imbue Pipedrive with additional marketing automation features.

HubSpot CRM offers free 24/7 live chat and email support to all of its paid Sales Hub subscribers. (Anyone with a Professional or Enterprise plan can also avail of phone support.) As if around-the-clock support weren’t enough, HubSpot’s customer service team is regarded as among the best in the industry. HubSpot’s free CRM does not include any live support options, but users can still access HubSpot’s extensive knowledge base and active community forums.

Pipedrive also has 24/7 live chat and email support available to all of its users. (Phone support is available, too, but only with the Enterprise plan.) To supplement those support channels is a vast knowledge base, a buzzing community forum, and Pipedrive Academy — which features quick courses and in-depth tutorials. Pipedrive’s quality of customer help is viewed favorably overall, although several users lament a lack of timeliness in sufficiently answering queries.