When evaluating a new CRM solution, the cost will play a big part in your decision-making. Both HubSpot and Salesforce are transparent about their packages and the cost, but you need to consider the total cost of the solution, including implementation before pulling the trigger with a new system.
This blog walks through the costs of the HubSpot and Salesforce products and onboarding costs and compares the two in an easy-to-understand way. We also point out any traps to watch out for, like which packages have a limited number of users or hidden costs. Let's dive in:
HubSpot has a Marketing Hub, Sales Hub and a Service Hub. Each is available as a standalone product or can be used in conjunction with any other. Each Hub has four tiers: Free, Starter, Professional and Enterprise. Each tier comes with more features and benefits, but Enterprise includes everything a hub has to offer.
HubSpot offers all three Hubs in a Growth Suite which gives you an immediate 25% discount off the price of the three hubs.
Salesforce has three products as well: Sales Cloud, Marketing Cloud and Service Cloud. As with HubSpot, each is available as a standalone option or you can purchase them as a package. The Service and Sales Clouds have four tiers: Essentials, Professional, Enterprise and Unlimited. If you purchase both Service and Sales Cloud, Salesforce offers a pricing package that is also based on the tiers. Marketing Cloud is available in one of four suites with each offering more features than the previous suite.
Salesforce also has additional add-ons to offer like CPQ tools, which you have to purchase in addition as they aren't included in the Sales Cloud, even at the Unlimited tier.
With Salesforce you pay per user for your tier. That means if you take the essentials package you only pay the essentials package price per user that you add to the system. That does also mean that if your organisation takes the Unlimited package, all users you add will cost you the Unlimited license price, whether they use the Unlimited functionality or simply need an overview of the data in Salesforce. The Essentials tier also has a limit to the number of users you can have. If you only need the features that the Essentials package offers you, but you have a sales team of 11, then you have more than the limit of 10 users and Essentials won't work for you. You'll have to upgrade to Professional and pay the increased pricing, even if you won't use the added features.
With HubSpot, you pay for the tier you need and not per user. You can add an unlimited amount of users to HubSpot. The Sales and Service Hubs come with paid sales or service seats that give users who are assigned a paid seat more functionality. That means that you assign your sales team with the paid seats, but you can add other users (like marketing or finance team members, or managers) to your account without having to pay for them to simply see the data. What's the difference? A standard user will be able to see, edit and communicate with all contacts and have access to the deal and ticket boards, as well as reporting and marketing tools. You only pay for your customer-facing teams, with paid seats give them the functionality and automation to manage customer conversation. There is also no limit to the number of users you can add, whether that be free users or paid users (you simply buy more seats). That means you won't be forced to upgrade a tier and pay for functionality you are not going to use, simply because your team is growing past 10 members.
Salesforce currently offers 4 Sales Cloud tiers:
| Lightning Essentials (£20 per user/month billed annually) is suitable for companies with the need for basic CRM functionality (like contact, company and deal management and sales tasks management). |
| Lightning Professional (£60 per user/month billed annually) suits businesses with one sales department and includes lead scoring and forecasting. |
| Lightning Enterprise (£120 per user/month billed annually) is a good option for businesses in need of numerous automated sales-related processes and advanced sales reporting and forecasting. |
| Lightning Unlimited (£240 per user/month billed annually) includes more opportunities for sales automation and unlimited access to 24/7 toll-free support. |
For the additional Salesforce CPQ tools, you pay an additional £60-120 per user/month billed annually,
HubSpot currently offers 4 tiers as well:
| HubSpot CRM (free) is also suitable for companies who need basic CRM functionality (like contact, company and deal management and sales tasks management). |
| Sales Hub Starter (£42 /month billed monthly, quarterly or annually) includes simple automation, quotes and forecasting and reporting. |
| Sales Hub Professional (£410/month billed monthly, quarterly or annually) is a good option for teams who need custom reporting and more advanced automation and quoting tools. |
| Sales Hub Enterprise (£990 /month billed annually) is the most feature-rich tier that includes sales playbooks, custom objects and advanced reporting. |
Even at first glance, you'll see some big differences between the two pricing structures that make it difficult to draw parallels between the two systems and their tiers. HubSpot offers the basic CRM functionality for free, start offering automation functionalities at their lowest tier and all paid tiers have access to 24/7 support.
Just like in Sales Cloud, there are 4 editions available in Service Cloud:
| Lightning Essentials (£20 per user/month billed annually) provides basic customer service features, like omni-channel case routing, and case escalation rules. |
| Lightning Professional (£60 per user/month billed annually) provides more extended functionality with features like the case milestone tracker, computer telephony integration and order management. |
| Lightning Enterprise (£120 per user/month billed annually) includes comprehensive functionality including service process automation, field service and advanced reporting with slight limitations. |
| Lightning Unlimited (£240 per user/month billed annually) provides the richest functionality for customer service needs with access to 24/7 toll-free support, configuration services, and unlimited user training opportunities. |
Similarly, Service Hub also has 4 tiers:
| Free Service Tools (Free) provides the most basic customer service features, like omni-channel ticket management, live chat and a conversations inbox. |
| Service Hub Starter (£42 /month billed monthly, quarterly or annually) provides basic ticket automation, ticket and conversation routing and basic ticketing reporting. |
| Service Hub Professional (£330 /month billed monthly, quarterly or annually) with advanced automation, knowledge base and customer feedback surveys. |
| Service Hub Enterprise (£990 /month billed annually) includes service playbooks, custom objects and advanced reporting functionality. |
Cases and Tickets refer to customer service requests. Again, HubSpot offers 24/7 support to all paid tiers and offer the basic functionality for free.
Salesforce has different packages for different features and each package has between 1 and 4 tiers. Here's a basic overview:
| Email, Mobile, and Web Marketing (starting at £320) is aimed to support your email marketing campaigns and build personalized mobile and web customer journeys. |
| Social Studio (starting from £800 per month) is used for improving content marketing and customer engagement in social media. |
| Advertising Studio (starting from £1,600 per month) is used for targeted advertising, customer segmentation and using customer data to create and manage powerful one-to-one advertising campaigns. |
| B2B Marketing Automation (from £1,000 per month) is a toolkit, which allows automating lead generation, tracking and nurturing. |
HubSpot has all marketing tools in one Hub, with 4 tiers:
| Free Marketing Tools (free) includes email marketing, landing pages and ad management. |
| Marketing Hub Starter (£42 per month) also offers reporting, ad retargeting and list segmentation. |
| Marketing Hub Professional (£729 per month) includes marketing automation, blog, social media management and ABM tools. |
| Marketing Hub Enterprise (£2,624 per month) includes advanced custom reporting, predictive lead scoring, programmable chatbots and custom objects. |
Instead of having to put together multiple options to build your marketing tools, HubSpot offers all marketing tools in one package, with 24/7 support for any paid tier.
Both HubSpot and Salesforce require implementation and onboarding services to get you successfully set up and using the platform. As HubSpot Solution Partners, we at Struto offer onboarding services as well as additional service like data migration. To compare these costs with a Salesforce implementation, we refer to this article by Sciencesoft, a Salesforce partner: Salesforce Pricing: How Much May Salesforce Implementation Cost (scnsoft.com) In this example, they consider a medium-sized company who are looking to implement Salesforce Enterprise or Unlimited for both Sales Cloud and Service Cloud.
Taking average pricing, the following is suggested for Salesforce implementation:
Conversely, let's explore the HubSpot onboarding costs for a medium-sized company who are looking at implementing Sales and Service Hub Enterprise.
That means for a medium sized company to manage their sales and service processes with:
For the first year of Salesforce, the cost would run up to £272,380 compared to £99,300 for HubSpot, dropping to £152,880 for Salesforce and £69,600 for HubSpot for the second year and on.
| Salesforce Unlimited | HubSpot Enterprise | |
| Sales licensing for 32 sales users, 5 executives and 5 marketing users and Service licensing for 7 service users + CPQ tools | £15,680 monthly | £3,800 monthly |
| Onboarding, support and data migration | £94,000 once-off | £9,700 once-off |
| Integrations | £25,500 once-off | £20,000 once-off + £2,000 monthly |
These estimates should give you a better idea of the total cost of a CRM solution and should be used when deciding whether to go with HubSpot or Salesforce. To get more accurate pricing, get in touch with us. You can also review our Guide to Buying HubSpot for tips and tricks to navigating the purchasing process.