Hubspot VS Zoho CRM

In this article, we introduce you to two market leaders in CRM and marketing automation software: Zoho and Hubspot.

Zoho is among the best CRM software on the market. This tool offers a wide range of features, is easy to use and provides a good overview of the sales pipeline. Most importantly, Zoho CRM is part of a complete ecosystem, Zoho, and offers third-party integrations available through the Zoho Marketplace with the most widely used business applications. This makes it one of the only credible Works OS on the market.

Like Zoho, Hubspot is a comprehensive, all-in-one CRM solution with a strong inbound marketing heritage. This solution offers advanced marketing automation and reporting functions, and can handle large volumes of data.

In this article, we’ll focus mainly on CRM functionalities to compare these two solutions, as these are the most structuring, but both tools offer many other features.

Zoho VS Hubspot at a glance: Summary table

Zoho

Zoho is one of the best commercial CRM software packages on the market. It’s an ultra-complete solution, ideal for SMEs and VSEs looking for a solid tool at an affordable price.

Zoho CRM offers impressive functional depth, thanks in particular to its integration with the other tools in the Zoho suite. If you use other applications, Zoho CRM integrates with all major business applications.

Zoho’s entire graphic charter has recently been redesigned, resulting in a high-quality user experience and a user-friendly interface.

Zoho’s sales automation capabilities are excellent, and the tool is very powerful for creating sales processes.

A free version of the tool is available to allow you to test the main functions, with up to 3 users. Then, for €20/month/user, you start to really exploit the tool’s potential. A more than fair price, given the depth of functionality on offer.

Hubspot

Hubspot offers almost Zoho-like, high-quality functionality, particularly in the areas of marketing automation and reporting, but is more accessible to smaller teams.

The integrations are also very numerous, deep and powerful.

Hubspot is recommended in two cases:

• for small teams looking for a free, quality CRM
• and for fast-growing teams looking for a reliable and powerful all-in-one tool to support their growth.

Hubspot can handle large volumes of data and offers very good marketing automation and reporting features. The tool also provides an excellent overview of your sales pipeline.

Hubspot’s free plan is very generous and perfectly suited to the needs of small teams. On the paid side, the Starter CRM Suite includes Hubspot’s CRM Sales as well as marketing, customer support and content management tools for 50€ / month or 360€ / year.

Hubspot VS Zoho: what customers say

Zoho

• On the whole, users find Zoho a very rich tool, especially for the price, but sometimes a little complicated or approximate.

• Some users are not very satisfied with the user experience and especially with support, which has a very technical relationship with the software and doesn’t really provide good advice.

Hubspot

• The vast majority of Hubspot users appreciate the CRM’s functionalities and, above all, its ease of use. They also emphasize the quality of customer support.

• Some unsatisfied users complain about hidden costs and the sometimes somewhat arbitrary limits set by the software.

Zoho VS Hubspot: functional scope

Management of the sales pipeline & sales tasks

Zoho offers a very simple interface and fairly basic CRM functionalities, but they’re enough to implement good marketing strategies and move your leads through your sales funnel.

Zoho lets you manage your B2B email campaigns, capture leads, take advantage ofB2B prospecting tools, implement lead nurturing strategies, and more. You can visualize all your tasks in a Kanban view.

Over the past year or two, Zoho has made great efforts to make its interface more intuitive, which has improved the user experience and brought it closer to Hubspot. But beware of Hubspot, which looks more accessible, but offers features that are sometimes inaccessible, especially in the case of the Starter and free versions.

And if we look at what really counts, we’re not really sure that it takes fewer clicks on Hubspot than on Zoho for the most common actions: updating a prospect file, calling a lead, following up a customer by e-mail, creating a personalized report, etc.

Hubspot is a highly ergonomic and accessible solution, offering a solid (but not very visual) sales tunnel, which is of particular interest for onboarding and training new sales reps, and for CRM adoption. But Zoho is nowhere near as far away as it was a few years ago, and in everyday use, they have little to envy Hubspot!

Contact management on Zoho & Hubspot

When it comes to managing contacts and prospects, Zoho is more competent than Hubspot. Zoho lets you simply add, import or modify contacts. Zoho offers a chronological view that highlights priority prospects or customers through a highly visual, easy-to-use interface. All your contacts integrate easily with Zoho’s predefined reports and can be synchronized with automated workflows.

Zoho also lets you assign different classification categories to each contact, and attach documents to individual contact sheets.

Hubspot’s contact management capabilities are quite similar to those of Zoho, but with more sorting functions. Hubspot’s contact sheets are not very clear, but they do offer a lot of default fields (135 possible fields for a contact), allowing you to develop fairly advanced automation strategies. Once your contacts are imported, Hubspot automatically records all their activities. You can add up to 1 million contacts and companies.

Lead scoring, marketing automation and sales automation

Zoho’s lead scoring and sales automation features enable you to set up very powerful processes, such as sending automated email sequences, defining lead routing rules or setting up automated email notifications. Zoho also lets you create workflows for each CRM module.

Automation is Hubspot’s strength. The platform offers very effective features thanks to the marketing automation tool and the integrated CMS. Hubspot allows you to create very powerful workflows. For example, when a prospect fills out a form on your website, they receive a series of emails and an appointment for a call with your sales team. You can also run automated campaigns on social networks to generate leads.

HubSpot also features a workflow functionality available in Pro and Enterprise plans to automate your business processes.

In its free version, HubSpot allows you to upload documents up to 250 MB. Free users have access to five shared documents at any one time. If your business requires storage of files larger than 250 MB, you will have to pay. The advantage here is that there is no overall storage limit.

Reporting & Forecasting on Hubspot & on Zoho

For all its plans, Zoho CRM offers standard customer reports and basic sales forecast data. The Zoho Standard plan includes 100 customized reports, while the Professional, Enterprise and Ultimate plans offer an unlimited number of reports. You can plan and enjoy them whenever you like.

Enterprise and Ultimate packages have access to the Zia prediction generator and artificial intelligence (AI) tools, which offer several sales management tools, including predictive models.

Hubspot offers very powerful complex reporting capabilities, especially if you use the entire Hubspot suite. They allow you to trace the entire customer experience thanks to specific tables for each of the sales, marketing and service activities. This is one of the advantages of using an all-in-one CRM.

Hubspot VS Zoho: Integrations & Philosophy

Zoho is very much all-in-one, and its integration with the other tools in the Zoho suite makes it a very powerful solution. If you use other applications, Zoho CRM integrates natively with all major business applications. In all, over 600 integrations are available, including 100 VOiP telephony providers.

Hubspot’s marketplace is also very generous. The solution has succeeded in developing numerous application integrations (over 800), and is one of the commercial CRMs that integrates best with a large number of tools. It is mainly oriented towards content marketing and online marketing.

The applications are divided into categories (marketing, sales, customer service, productivity, finance). The application pages are very detailed, showing key features and pricing in a clear manner. The software also has its own Operations Hub, a place where you can connect applications bidirectionally.

Zoho VS Hubspot: Pricing

To enable you to get the measure of the tool and test its various features, Zoho offers a free version for up to three users, with access to the essentials: lead, account and transaction management.

Zoho offers an ultra-light version of its CRM product: Zoho Bigin. This tool is a small, pipeline-oriented CRM dedicated to small structures. Zoho Bigin is available from €7 / month & per user (invoiced annually). The tool lets you set up up to 5 web forms, integrate your email messaging, and create customized dashboards.

In addition to Zoho Bigin, Zoho CRM offers four paid plans:

• Standard – €20 per user per month. This plan includes the lead scoring features we mentioned, automated scenarios, and the ability to create multiple sales pipelines and customized dashboards.
• Professional – €35 per user per month. This level includes the Sales Signal tool for tracking your prospects’ activity, forms integration and the integrated inventory management solution.
• Enterprise – €50 per user per month. This package integrates Zoho’s AI tool called “Zia”, the multi-user portal as well as the mobile and MDM SDKs.
• Ultimate – €65per user per month, billed annually, which mainly adds Zoho’s advanced business intelligence solution, integrated with the Analytics tools.

Hubspot offers an interesting free plan for small teams or solopreneurs who want to take advantage of the sales features and other CRM tools (marketing or service), but its features are quite limited.

If your needs go beyond sales, you can subscribe to other tools and take advantage of attractive rates. For example, the Starter CRM Suite includes all Hubspot tools (marketing automation, sales CRM, help desk, CMS, and operations), for 50€/month for the Starter version.

• The Professional plan offers, from €441 per month for 5 paying users (€531 for 6 users), up to 100 customized reports, 500 e-mails/user/day, 5,000 e-mail templates, 25 dashboards and 15 sales pipelines.
• The Enterprise plan, starting at €1,180/month for 10 paying users (€1,300/month for 11 users), offers up to 500 custom reports, 300 teams, 50 dashboards, 200 inboxes, 50 dashboards and 50 sales pipelines.

You can find the details of the rates on the dedicated Hubspot page.