HubSpot vs Salesforce: A Comprehensive Comparison for 2025

This article compares HubSpot and Salesforce, two leading cloud-based CRM platforms. It examines their target markets (HubSpot focusing on SMBs, Salesforce on larger enterprises), features (HubSpot emphasizing ease of use and integrated marketing tools, Salesforce offering extensive customization and advanced analytics), pricing models, and recent AI advancements. The article analyzes customer reviews and 2024 updates for both platforms, ultimately advising businesses to choose the platform best suited to their size, budget, and specific needs. Both platforms are highlighted as powerful tools for improving customer relationships and driving growth, but with distinct strengths and weaknesses.

2024-12-18  • 19 min

HubSpot vs Salesforce: A Comprehensive Comparison for 2025

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Two of the leading cloud CRM platforms right now are HubSpot and Salesforce, both offering a wide range of features to help businesses manage their customer interactions, sales, and marketing efforts. In this article we tried to make a comprehensive comparison of HubSpot and Salesforce, examining their target markets, features, pricing, customer reviews, recent updates, and overall strengths and weaknesses.

The Age of AI and AI Agents

The rise of AI and AI agents is transforming the CRM landscape. 2025 is poised to be the year of agents, and HubSpot is well-positioned to capitalize on this trend. Its AI Studio, developed by Resonate, provides a powerful platform for building AI agents that can automate tasks, personalize customer interactions, and improve overall efficiency. HubSpot co-founder Dharmesh Shah is also developing agent.ai, a platform specifically designed for AI agents, further solidifying HubSpot's commitment to this emerging technology.

Shifting Trends in CRM Adoption

While the standard for tech companies before 2022 was often a combination of HubSpot Marketing Hub and Salesforce Sales Cloud, this trend is shifting. Increasingly, mid-size companies are moving to HubSpot for both sales and marketing, thanks to the introduction of numerous enterprise-grade features in recent years. This shift reflects HubSpot's growing capabilities and its ability to meet the needs of larger and more demanding businesses.

Target Market

HubSpot and Salesforce cater to different target markets, although there is some overlap.

HubSpot

HubSpot primarily targets small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) that are new to CRMs or looking for an all-in-one platform with a strong focus on inbound marketing. Its user-friendly interface and affordable pricing make it a good option for businesses with limited resources. HubSpot's marketing tools are particularly well-suited for businesses focused on lead generation and online engagement. HubSpot is particularly focused on reaching millennials and Gen X buyers.

HubSpot can also help address the challenges faced by revenue leaders, such as:

• Finding the most impactful marketing strategies with limited resources.
• Establishing alignment between sales, marketing, and customer success.
• Effectively integrating AI throughout cross-functional departments.

HubSpot has seen impressive growth, with revenue increasing from $883.03 million in 2020 to $2.6 billion in 2024, and its customer base expanding to over 216,000 customers. This indicates a strong market position and high customer satisfaction. Notably, HubSpot has become the de facto standard for marketing in tech companies, with rapidly growing companies like OpenAI utilizing its platform.

Salesforce

Salesforce is a more versatile platform that caters to businesses of all sizes, but it is particularly popular among large enterprises with complex sales processes and extensive customization needs. Salesforce's wide range of features and integrations makes it a good fit for businesses with sophisticated CRM requirements.

Salesforce has a dominant market share in the CRM industry, holding 21.8%, which is more than its four leading competitors combined. In the 2024 fiscal year, Salesforce generated $34.86 billion in revenue. Salesforce India alone surpassed $1 billion in revenue, experiencing 36% growth in the fiscal year ending March 31, 2024.

Features

Both HubSpot and Salesforce offer a comprehensive suite of features, but they differ in their approach and focus. Both platforms offer AI tools, but HubSpot's AI is considered simpler and better integrated into its platform.

HubSpot

HubSpot is known for its user-friendly interface and integrated platform that combines marketing, sales, service, operations, and CMS tools. HubSpot has more well-rounded marketing features for more of its plans. Some of its key features include:

• Marketing Hub: Offers tools for inbound marketing, including email marketing, social media management, content creation, SEO optimization, and marketing automation. HubSpot's email marketing platform is particularly strong, offering features such as personalized campaigns, drag-and-drop design, and customizable templates.
• Sales Hub: Provides features for sales force automation, contact management, deal tracking, pipeline management, and sales forecasting.
• Service Hub: Includes tools for customer support, such as ticketing, live chat, knowledge base, and customer feedback surveys.
• Operations Hub: Offers features for data synchronization, automation, and reporting across different business functions.
• CMS Hub: Provides a content management system for creating and managing website content, landing pages, and blogs.

Salesforce

Salesforce is a highly customizable and scalable platform that caters to businesses of all sizes, with a focus on enterprise-level solutions. Salesforce has an edge when it comes to reporting and customization. Its sales reporting and forecasting features are more readily built into its platform. Salesforce's extensive workflow and automation capabilities are flexible and precise, allowing for better management of teams and marketing campaign structures. Salesforce Einstein AI offers advanced analytics capabilities, such as predictive lead scoring, opportunity insights, and AI-powered forecasting. Its key features include:

• Sales Cloud: Provides tools for sales force automation, lead management, opportunity tracking, and sales forecasting.
• Service Cloud: Offers features for customer service and support, including case management, knowledge base, and omnichannel communication.
• Marketing Cloud: Includes tools for email marketing, marketing automation, social media marketing, and advertising. While Salesforce leads in sales automation, HubSpot shines in marketing automation.
• AppExchange: A marketplace with over 4,000 app integrations, allowing businesses to extend Salesforce's functionality.

Salesforce's modular approach allows businesses to choose the specific functionalities they need and customize them to their requirements.

Pricing

HubSpot and Salesforce have different pricing models, reflecting their target markets and feature sets.

HubSpot

HubSpot offers foundational tools for free for up to 2 users. Paid plans are available for each Hub, with pricing based on the number of users and marketing contacts. As of March 5, 2024, HubSpot moved to a seats-based pricing model for all Hubs and subscription tiers. This change removed seat minimums for Sales Hub and Service Hub and introduced the Core Seat and View-Only Seat.

Salesforce

While Salesforce does offer per-user, per-month subscriptions, it primarily uses annual billing for its Sales Cloud. It offers different editions for each cloud, with varying features and price points.

The costs for Service Cloud are the same as for Sales Cloud. Salesforce can get expensive quickly, especially with add-ons and customization.

Customer Reviews and Case Studies

Both HubSpot and Salesforce have a wealth of customer reviews and case studies available, showcasing their strengths and weaknesses from a user perspective.

HubSpot

HubSpot is consistently praised for its user-friendly interface and ease of use. Users appreciate the comprehensive feature set and the availability of a free CRM. HubSpot's free plan is considered "legit" by users, offering a wide range of features and the ability to add 1 million contacts. However, some users find the pricing to be expensive, especially for larger businesses or those requiring advanced features.

HubSpot provides a variety of case studies showcasing how businesses are using its platform to achieve their goals. Some examples include:

• WeightWatchers: Completely revamped their enterprise sales process with HubSpot, increasing productivity.
• eXp Realty: Communicates seamlessly with 90,000+ agents through HubSpot, improving contact management.
• Sandler: Drives 25% more engagement and 4x sales leads by creating personalized experiences with Breeze.
• Morehouse College: Engages prospective students as a leading voice using Breeze ³⁶.
• Cold Jet: Streamlines manufacturing efficiency and enhances customer engagement with HubSpot's data-driven platform.
• Caxton: Increases web traffic by 65% with HubSpot.
• AirDNA: Sees a 45% drop in churn with the Amplitude App for HubSpot.
• Kaplan Early Learning Company: Streamlines communications to deliver superior customer experience with Breeze.
• Exodus Adventure Travel: Uses a tailored customer journey to drive growth.
• Aerotech: Deepens customer relationships and improves win rate by 66% using Breeze.
• Mediaposte Martech: Consolidates UNTOLD's massive audience data with HubSpot.
• Kuntze: Grows its team 66% with the HubSpot CRM platform.

Salesforce

Salesforce is recognized for its powerful features, customization options, and extensive integrations. Users appreciate its scalability and ability to handle complex sales processes. Salesforce's reporting capabilities are highly regarded, with users describing them as "AMAZING and incredibly comprehensive." However, some users find its interface to be complex and overwhelming, and its pricing can be high, especially with add-ons. Some users have also reported challenges with customer support.

Salesforce also has a number of case studies available, highlighting its impact across various industries. Some examples include:

• Financial services organization: Targets personalized customer experiences with Salesforce, leveraging Marketing Cloud and Data Cloud.
• Hospital system: Made Google Ads HIPAA compliant with Destinations for Data Cloud.
• Supply chain company: Reduced match exceptions by 90% with HealthChain, a supply chain platform built with the power of Salesforce.
• Medical transportation company: Achieved seamless medical transportation with Salesforce Managed Services.
• FPT Software: Improves data quality by 90% with Einstein AI.
• Fisher & Paykel: Elevates service to match the luxury of its products.
• United Tractors: Increases uptime for customers with Field Service.
• Converge ICT: Delivers fast and frictionless service with data and AI-driven operations.
• PRISM+: Reduces booking time by 95% with Salesforce to power expansion.

Major Updates in 2024

Both HubSpot and Salesforce have released major updates in 2024, enhancing their platforms and adding new features.

HubSpot

Some of the notable updates to HubSpot in 2024 include:

• Breeze: HubSpot rebranded its AI tools under the name Breeze, including Copilot and Agents.
• Breeze Intelligence: Introduced data enrichment and buyer intent solutions based on recently acquired Clearbit
• Preference Pages: Allowed for personalized preference pages for each business unit.
• Forms Experience: Reinvented the forms experience with improved customization options.
• Workflows: Enhanced workflow customization capabilities.
• API Limit Increase: Increased API limits for Pro+ customers
• Smart CRM: Added the ability to "freeze" multiple columns in an Index table.
• Marketing Events: Improved the connection between contact lists and marketing events
• Essential Apps: Released curated lists of essential apps for marketers and sales teams
• Podcast Transcripts: Added the ability to use podcast transcripts to suggest titles, descriptions, and artwork
• Memberships Reporting: Enhanced reporting for memberships, including registration completion rates and private content access performance 

Salesforce

Some of the major updates to Salesforce in 2024 include:

• MFA by Default: Enabled multi-factor authentication (MFA) by default for all new and existing production orgs.
• Lightning Web Components (LWC) Enablement: Expanded LWC enablement for record home pages.
• Einstein Search Enabled by Default: Automatically enabled Einstein Search in all Salesforce orgs.
• Dynamic Forms Enhancements: Allowed for including new custom fields on Dynamic Forms-enabled pages.
• Flow Enhancements: Added the ability to check for matching records before creating new ones in flows.
• Account Plans: Introduced account plans with features for viewing opportunity details, creating SWOT analyses, capturing customer needs, and visualizing key stakeholders.
• Sales Cloud Go: Introduced a reimagined setup experience for Sales Cloud.

AI Developments in HubSpot and Salesforce

Both HubSpot and Salesforce are heavily investing in AI to enhance their platforms and provide more intelligent solutions for their customers. Here's a closer look at their recent AI developments:

HubSpot

HubSpot has consolidated its AI tools under the brand name Breeze. This includes existing tools like Content Assistant and ChatSpot.ai, as well as new features like Breeze Intelligence. Breeze Intelligence offers data enrichment and buyer intent solutions, providing valuable insights to sales and marketing teams.

HubSpot is also leveraging AI to improve various aspects of its platform, including:

• Content creation: AI assists in generating content, optimizing it for different audiences, and personalizing it for individual users.
• Sales efficiency: AI helps salespeople research prospects, generate personalized messages, summarize calls, and create follow-ups.
• Marketing automation: AI powers tools like AI Assistants in the conversations inbox, which can summarize conversations and generate text for replies.
• Data enrichment: AI analyzes form data and contact information to assign a Spam Score, ensuring sales teams focus on genuine leads.

HubSpot co-founder Dharmesh Shah is developing agent.ai, a platform specifically designed for building and deploying AI agents. This platform aims to further democratize access to AI and empower businesses to create intelligent agents that can automate tasks and improve customer interactions.

Salesforce

Salesforce has introduced Agentforce, a suite of autonomous AI agents designed to augment employees and handle tasks across various departments, including service, sales, marketing, and commerce. Agentforce leverages the Agentforce Atlas Reasoning Engine to analyze data, make decisions, and complete tasks autonomously.

Key features of Agentforce include:

• Autonomous agents: AI agents can handle tasks like answering customer service inquiries, qualifying sales leads, and optimizing marketing campaigns.
• Scalability: Businesses can scale their workforce on demand with AI agents.
• Low-code tools: Agentforce Studio provides low-code tools for building and customizing AI agents.
• Model Builder: Allows businesses to register, test, and activate AI models and LLMs of their choice across Salesforce

Salesforce also continues to enhance its Einstein AI platform, which offers features like:

• Einstein Copilot: Provides AI assistance for merchants and marketers
• Einstein Personalization: Delivers personalized experiences across various touchpoints
• Predictive analytics: Helps businesses anticipate customer needs and make informed decisions

Strengths and Weaknesses

Both HubSpot and Salesforce have their own strengths and weaknesses, which can influence a business's decision.

HubSpot

Strengths:

• User-friendly interface and ease of use
• Integrated platform with a wide range of features
• Strong focus on inbound marketing
• Affordable pricing, especially for small businesses 
• Extensive free CRM with basic features
• Outstanding support with knowledgeable and friendly staff available via phone, email, or live chat
• Strong capabilities in email marketing, reporting, social media, workflow automation, segmentation, and CRM

Weaknesses:

• Can get expensive for larger businesses or advanced features
• Limited customization options compared to Salesforce
• Annual contracts with no early termination
• The all-encompassing nature of the platform can be a drawback for businesses with specific needs

Salesforce

Strengths:

• Highly customizable and scalable platform
• Extensive features and integrations
• Strong reporting and analytics capabilities
• Large community and ecosystem of partners
• Comprehensive feature set and CRM product catalog

Weaknesses:

• Complex interface and steep learning curve
• Expensive pricing, especially with add-ons
• Customer support can be challenging
• Rapid technological changes may outpace Salesforce's ability to adapt, impacting market relevance.

Which Platform is Better?

The choice between HubSpot and Salesforce depends on the specific needs and priorities of a business. Here's a quick comparison of the two platforms:

HubSpot is a better choice for:

• Small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs)
• Businesses new to CRMs or looking for an easy-to-use platform
• Businesses with a strong focus on inbound marketing
• Businesses with limited budgets

HubSpot offers a superior interface and better-rounded marketing and sales tools at an accessible price point. It's easier to use and has better sales features.

Salesforce is a better choice for:

• Large enterprises with complex sales processes
• Businesses that require extensive customization and integrations
• Businesses with sophisticated reporting and analytics needs
• Businesses with the resources to handle a complex platform

Salesforce is more suitable for larger enterprises due to its extensive customization and advanced reporting capabilities. It offers better customer service features and analytics. Salesforce is the best option for large enterprise companies

When it comes to service needs, Salesforce Service Cloud heavily emphasizes AI to personalize and optimize customer service interactions, whereas HubSpot Service Hub focuses more on ease of use and straightforward CRM integration

It's important to consider the fundamental difference in their approach: HubSpot offers an all-in-one platform, while Salesforce relies on a modular ecosystem where multiple tools must be integrated to build a complete solution

Conclusion

Both HubSpot and Salesforce are powerful CRM platforms that can help businesses improve their customer relationships and drive growth. HubSpot excels in user-friendliness, integrated features, and inbound marketing, making it ideal for SMBs and businesses new to CRMs. Salesforce, on the other hand, offers extensive customization, advanced reporting, and a vast ecosystem of integrations, making it a strong choice for large enterprises with complex needs.

Ultimately, the best platform depends on your specific requirements, budget, and long-term goals. By carefully considering the information presented in this comparison, businesses can make an informed decision and choose the CRM platform that best aligns with their needs and sets them up for success in 2024 and beyond.