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HubSpot vs Zoho Comparison
HubSpot and Zoho are two leading CRM providers for small businesses. Here's how their systems stack up against each other.
Table of Contents
Customer relationship management (CRM) systems give sales and marketing teams the tools and insights they need to generate more leads and close more deals. HubSpot and Zoho, two leading CRM providers, market their platforms to companies based on how their software helps businesses drive higher revenue. We’ll compare these platforms in several key areas — including price, functionality and integrations — to help you achieve CRM success for your business.
HubSpot vs. Zoho Highlights
HubSpot and Zoho are among the best CRM software platforms available, but one may be a better fit for your company than the other. Here’s an overview of how they compare.
Criteria | HubSpot | Zoho |
|---|---|---|
Starting price | $15 per seat per month (billed annually) | $14 per user per month (billed annually) |
Free plan or trial | Free edition for two users | Free edition for three users; 15- or 30-day free trial for paid tiers |
Sales and marketing features | Multichannel marketing, lead management, customer segmentation and pipeline management | Multichannel marketing, lead scoring, data enrichment and lead nurturing |
Reporting and analytics | Sales forecasting, attribution reports, shared dashboards and data visualizations | 40-plus reports, charts and visualizations and precise analysis |
Workflows and automations | Custom general workflows, marketing workflows and ticketing for pre- and post-sale stages | Easy automations, lead collection and distribution and extensive sales and marketing workflows |
Omnichannel communications | Full email client, social media integration and voice-over-internet-protocol and power dialer | Full email client, social media integration, telephony, WhatsApp and short message service (SMS) |
Integrations and apps | 1,700-plus apps, extensions and impressive application programming interface (API) | 2,000-plus apps, unique custom apps and extensive (API) |
Who Is HubSpot For?
HubSpot’s comprehensive CRM platform is ideal for companies seeking better results from their sales and marketing teams. The system is feature-packed and provides the levels of functionality and analytics both teams need to improve their performance when it comes to attracting and converting leads. With its custom automations and 1,700-plus plug-ins, the software is flexible enough to fit the specific needs of your business.
This powerful and sophisticated platform has a simple interface, user-friendly controls and a very shallow learning curve, so your staff will understand how to make the most of the program in no time. HubSpot can help drive sales for any business, but it comes into its own for midsize to large companies with more complex and distributed internal structures.
Read our full review of HubSpot CRM to learn more about the system’s ease of use, customer support and more.
Who Is Zoho For?
Zoho provides a highly adaptable, intuitive CRM with outstanding reporting features, workflow automations and artificial intelligence (AI) integration. While it lacks HubSpot’s breadth of features, the platform is powerful, intuitive and smart enough to help smaller businesses drive more leads and sales from their sales and marketing teams.
Your marketers will love how easy it is to promote your business via social media, email, online advertising and more from a central platform. Meanwhile, your sales team will love how Zoho helps prioritize leads, reduce paperwork and enrich contact data. If you want the system to go beyond its built-in capabilities, there are more than 2,000 integrations to choose from in the vendor’s app store. With the top plan costing $52 per user per month, Zoho is ideal for revenue-chasing small businesses.
Read our full review of Zoho CRM to learn about this platform’s implementation, customer service options and more.
HubSpot vs. Zoho Comparison
Here’s a detailed breakdown of how HubSpot and Zoho compare on pricing, essential CRM features and more.
Pricing
HubSpot
HubSpot offers a robust free plan called Free Tools, designed for individuals and small teams (up to two users). It includes key features for marketing, sales, operations and other essential business functions — just what a new business or sole proprietor might need to get started.
HubSpot also offers several paid plans, which we’ve outlined below. Since HubSpot is a comprehensive platform with multiple versions, we’re keeping things simple by focusing on the pricing for HubSpot’s Customer Platform, which bundles marketing, sales, service, content, operations and commerce tools.
Plan | Price | Features |
|---|---|---|
Starter | $15 per month, per seat (billed annually)
$20 per month, per seat (billed monthly) |
|
Professional | $1,170 per month (for five seats, additional seats start at $45; price reflects an annual commitment paid upfront)
$1,300 per month (for five seats, additional users start at $50 per month; reflects monthly payment with an annual commitment) | Everything in Starter, plus:
|
Enterprise | From $4,300 per month for seven seats; additional seats start at $75 per month | Everything in Professional, plus:
|
Note that you’ll also pay onboarding fees for the Professional and Enterprise tiers, which can range from $1,500 to $8,000, depending on your selected services. Other charges to be aware of include various fees for:
- Additional WhatsApp conversations, transactional emails and API calls.
- HubSpot’s data enrichment service (Breeze Intelligence)
- Additional syncs between HubSpot and ad platforms
- Custom secure socket layers for your website
Zoho
Like HubSpot, Zoho also has a free tier called Zoho CRM Free for up to three users. It provides essential features like contact and deal management, email marketing, standard reports and more.
Paid plans are listed below. Businesses can choose to pay monthly or annually on all tiers.
Plan | Price | Features |
|---|---|---|
Standard | $14 per user, per month (billed annually) $20 per user, per month (billed monthly) |
|
Professional | $35 | Everything in Standard, plus:
|
Enterprise | $40 per user, per month (billed annually) $50 per user, per month (billed monthly) | Everything in Professional, plus:
|
Ultimate | $52 per user, per month (billed annually) $65 per user, per month (billed monthly) | Everything in Enterprise, plus:
|
Zoho’s Standard package is feature-rich and should be more than enough for smaller businesses. If you want more tools, the higher-tier subscriptions are competitive with HubSpot and most other CRMs. The vendor doesn’t charge setup or onboarding fees.
As with HubSpot, many of the third-party apps that add functionality to the Zoho CRM incur additional costs, so bear that in mind when evaluating the bang you’ll get for your buck. There’s a free 15-day trial on all subscriptions except Ultimate, where you get 30 days to put the system through its paces to ensure this is the right solution for your business.
Sales and Marketing Features
HubSpot
- Marketing platform: We like how HubSpot consolidates email, phone, SMS and social media marketing campaigns onto one screen, making it easy to streamline your various marketing activities. You can also access a Google Ads plug-in and SEO strategy tools, which are great for ranking higher in searches.
- Lead management: You get 45 prebuilt, customizable sales and marketing automation guides to help track all customer interactions. The document-sharing tool is also very helpful as it shows when recipients open PDFs and how many times they viewed them.
- Customer segmentation: We gave HubSpot’s customer segmentation functionality a high rating. You can create groups and send them tailored content based on their past interactions, psychographics and demographics. We also like the active list feature, which automatically moves contacts on and off your “hot list” depending on their actions.
- Pipeline management: We were impressed with HubSpot’s pipeline management tools and how granular you can get when customizing sales deal stages. Create, edit and customize pipelines to match your team’s workflows (including setting up rules to control how records move through stages) and automate actions like sending notifications or creating tasks when a stage changes. You can use the same functionality to manage support tickets.
The marketing results dashboard in HubSpot provides insights into your leads. Source: HubSpot
Zoho
- Marketing platform: Like HubSpot, you can launch email, telephone, social media, SMS and Google Ads campaigns from the Zoho CRM dashboard. We found the X (formerly Twitter) listening function impressive for identifying opportunities to engage on social media sites based on triggered keywords.
- Lead scoring: We appreciate Zoho’s intelligent lead scoring system. You assign different levels of importance to variables like job title, industry and location. The system then scores each lead’s quality. You can also set up different lead-scoring metrics for each department or product.
- Data enrichment: We appreciated how Zia, Zoho’s AI assistant, searches the web to populate a lead’s contact details, helping sales representatives better understand prospects. You can enrich prospect data with social media handles, employment history and company information, including business size, employee count and annual revenue. Zia also merges duplicate entries to maintain a clean and accurate database.
- Lead nurturing: The interface for setting up automated email workflows is simple and intuitive, allowing you to tailor nurturing campaigns to match each lead’s needs and interests. The integration of other Zoho tools, like Zoho Campaigns (for email marketing) and Zoho SalesIQ (for live chat and website tracking), is impressive. These features make it easier to chat with leads in real time and send personalized follow-up emails.
Reporting and Analytics
HubSpot
- Sales forecasting: We were pleased with HubSpot’s pipeline management feature, which shows how many deals each sales representative is working on. It also estimates how likely each deal is to close, helping salespeople prioritize their efforts more effectively.
- Attribution reports: Your marketers can uncover which type of content works best by measuring which campaigns drive key actions, such as a website visit or a white paper download.
- Shared dashboards: We like how managers and reps can share their customizable dashboards to collaborate more closely on improving metrics like average deal size, win rates and time to close. Sales and marketing teams can also share dashboards, strengthening cross-team collaboration on future campaigns.
- Data visualizations: HubSpot’s reporting features support an impressive number of chart styles. These include bar graphs, heatmaps and pie charts, which help teams track performance more effectively. You can choose from a wide range of inputs and data groupings to turn into graphics.
Zoho
- Wide range of reports: We were happy to see that Zoho offers over 40 customizable reports tracking a wide variety of sales and marketing metrics. You can also merge multiple reports for deeper insights and quickly turn them into PDFs and other document types for sharing. We think this ability to combine reports will be eye-opening for many businesses, helping them uncover new insights into customer behavior, sales trends and marketing effectiveness.
- Striking charts: Zoho’s graphing and charting tools are excellent and make spotting performance trends much easier. We appreciate the level of control the system provides over everything — from chart colors and types to inputs and benchmarks. We found the pipeline analysis of Google Ads spending particularly effective for understanding campaign performance — more so than most other tools.
- In-depth business analysis: Zoho provides an accurate, 360-degree view of your company. You can run various analytical exercises, including quadrant analysis, anomaly detection, cohort studies, comparative analysis and KPI evaluations, to examine performance metrics, from conversion rate success to movement through the sales funnel.
- Descriptive churn scoring: Zoho CRM’s churn prediction functionality has always been impressive, but we love its recent extension, which provides actionable insights into why customers might leave so you can intervene to try to keep them.
Using the Zia AI assistant, you can create charts in Zoho by asking questions as if you were talking to a chatbot. Source: Zoho
Workflows and Automations
HubSpot
- Easy-to-add automations: We like HubSpot’s intuitive, step-by-step workflow automation tool. Amend one of its customizable templates or build your own workflow from scratch to better manage your contacts, deals and tickets.
- Streamlined marketing workflows: Customize HubSpot’s prebuilt marketing workflows to automate tasks like sending a personalized welcome message, assigning new leads to a specific owner and syncing them with associated contacts and companies in the database.
- Ticketing for after-sales: HubSpot’s attention to after-sales functionality is impressive. It offers a high degree of customization, allowing you to create tickets from incoming messages, update ticket statuses based on email interactions and trigger actions when a ticket reaches a specific stage. Interactions across different contact channels can also initiate these actions, providing greater flexibility.
HubSpot’s intuitive drag-and-drop automation builder lets you develop custom workflows. Source: HubSpot
Zoho
- Adaptable workflows: Zoho lets you easily automate what happens when new leads arrive in your pipeline and when they move to different deal stages. We were pleased to see the ability to program multiple pipelines tailored to different products, services and outcomes. We were also very impressed by Zoho Flow, a Make/Zapier-like tool with 1,300 prebuilt workflows that can seamlessly connect to over 850 other apps like Mailchimp, Slack and Google Drive.
- Lead collection and distribution: We like how Zoho captures prospects’ contact details automatically from emails, web forms and chatbots and puts the information in its database. Based on the lead’s content and criteria, the system can assign it to a specific team or person.
- Marketing automation: Zoho’s marketing automation functionality is one of the most comprehensive we’ve seen in any CRM. It can automate workflows, personalize email sequences and apply lead scoring for prospect prioritization. This works across multiple channels — from events to email campaigns and from pay-per-click ads to web forms — saving time and ensuring no lead slips through the cracks.
Omnichannel Communications
HubSpot
- Email client: We love the fast and intuitive HubSpot CRM email client. It’s accessible directly from your contact list, making it easy for reps and customers to communicate seamlessly. We also liked the program’s shared inbox, which managers and co-workers across different teams can access — a feature that greatly enhances inter- and cross-team collaboration. You can connect the platform to any Outlook, Gmail or SMTP/IMAP email account.
- Multichannel interactions: HubSpot’s range of plug-ins offers excellent telemarketing capabilities, making it a strong choice for outbound campaigns. It also supports making and receiving phone calls, chatbots, SMS and multimedia messaging service texting and private messaging apps like Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp.
- Social media: HubSpot integrates well with Facebook, Instagram, X and other platforms, enabling direct conversations with prospective and existing customers.
Zoho
- Email client: Zoho CRM’s email client is user-friendly, feature-packed and easy to connect to existing Google, Outlook and SMTP/IMAP email addresses. You can also customize a wide selection of professional email templates to match your brand and messaging needs.
- Social media: We like how seamlessly the platform connects to multiple social media channels, allowing your agents to respond instantly to customer requests and questions. Additionally, a built-in social listening tool notifies you if your company or products are mentioned online.
- Multichannel platform: Like HubSpot, Zoho allows you to engage with customers directly through multiple channels within its system, including web chat, video, SMS, phone, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and Telegram.
You can send and receive emails from within the Zoho CRM platform. Source: Zoho
Integrations and Apps
HubSpot
- Large marketplace: Over 1,700 plug-ins are available for the HubSpot CRM, many focused on sales and marketing. Others range from finance and e-commerce tools to customer service and productivity apps.
- Extensions: HubSpot also has a wide range of helpful webhooks and data synchronization training, making it easy to transfer information in and out of the platform and integrate it with other business software.
- Impressive API: We appreciate HubSpot’s extensive API and detailed documentation, which enable tight and precise customizations in key areas like web analytics and automations.
Zoho
- Large marketplace: You can choose from over 2,000 integrations across 13 categories, covering sectors like automotive, tourism, retail, legal and software development.
- Custom apps: We like the wide selection of custom apps in the Zoho marketplace. These apps serve highly specific needs, such as church management, office cash expense management and gym management. Most are free.
- Extensive API: We were impressed by the Zoho API interface and its comprehensive supporting documentation. These resources are valuable for customizing Zoho CRM to fit your company’s unique needs.
HubSpot vs. Zoho Summary
Zoho and HubSpot both have the CRM tools you need to drive revenues, but having reviewed both, we think the right system depends on your business’s size and needs.
HubSpot is best for midsize and large businesses that need advanced sales and marketing tools.
HubSpot CRM’s sales, marketing and team collaboration tools make it the best choice for larger companies. This solution allows marketers to run complex, multichannel, segmented campaigns from one dashboard.
Better still, the collaboration tools allow sales and customer service teams to share their insights, knowledge and experience with marketers. This provides valuable details that help refine messaging, making future campaigns more relevant and engaging. And whatever team an agent is on, they’ll have much more time to be creative and productive thanks to HubSpot’s workflow automations.
Zoho is best for smaller businesses seeking an affordable, feature-rich CRM.
Zoho CRM has all the functionality small businesses need to boost revenues through improved marketing and more successful lead conversions. The omnichannel marketing suite and communications tools within the Zoho platform are intuitive and powerful.
Your marketing team will love the campaign analytics features, and your sales reps can leverage data enrichment and deal-stage tools to close more deals efficiently. Thanks to Zoho’s time-saving and customizable workflow automations, agents will have more time to focus on tasks that require their expertise and attention.
This solution is also competitively priced for small companies.
FAQs