HubSpot vs. Zoho compares two customer relationship management (CRM) platforms that both promise to deliver results to your business.
Insights show that CRM software is the fastest growing market for enterprise software. This is likely because CRM systems can address four sectors of business through one useful tool.
Whether it’s customer service you need, marketing, sales, or commerce, CRM platforms can do it all.
Cloud-based CRM tools have become especially popular, offering software-as-a-service (SaaS) capabilities and increased accessibility as a result.
HubSpot and Zoho cater to these advantages by definition. And while they share similar features to uplift your front-facing team, these platforms differ in regards to how you customize them to meet your business needs.
Thus, this comparison will analyze HubSpot vs. Zoho in six different categories:
- Pricing
- Key Features
- Automation Capabilities
- Ease of Use
- Support
- Data & Security Administration
To learn more about HubSpot vs. Zoho, and how the CRM platforms fare against each other, stay tuned!
What Is HubSpot?
The entirety of the HubSpot platform comprises several sectors towards refining your business, such as HubSpot Sales Hub, HubSpot Marketing Hub, HubSpot Service Hub, and more recently HubSpot Operations Hub.
But HubSpot CRM is a free tool tailored to enhance customer interactions without adding unnecessary complexity to your business operations.
One of HubSpot’s robust features is the ability to connect its CRM tool with the rest of the HubSpot ecosystem.
In effect, you can coordinate your teams effectively and even optimize certain processes with workflow automations.
What Is Zoho?
Zoho is a CRM solution for managing leads and customer relationships. Its user interface (UI) includes tools for sales teams ranging from marketing automation to help desk support.
Product configuration, reporting, and customer analytics are other important features of the platform.
Email marketing is another popular Zoho feature that has become more fleshed out with each passing year. Associated email integration and email insights help this feature thrive.
In practice, Zoho acts as a repository to bring your sales, marketing, and customer support affairs all in one place.
HubSpot vs. Zoho
HubSpot and Zoho are both efficient CRM tools with much to offer. Choosing between them is no small task. Take a look at the following categories below to see where HubSpot and Zoho stand.
1. Pricing
You probably glimpsed a bit earlier that HubSpot sports a free CRM tool. With this plan, dubbed “Free Forever”, you can integrate your CRM external email solutions like Gmail and Outlook, gain the use of some sales tools, and store up to a million contacts.
But of course, there’s a catch. Everything in this plan is limited. You get no more than five email templates, five documents, and one link for scheduling meetings.
From there, prices soar to up to $4000 a month for Enterprise access to HubSpot’s CRM suite. Although costs can fall to $45 a month on a Starter plan with only 1000 contacts.
To get the best out of HubSpot, you will want to use HubSpot Marketing Hub along with its CRM, and this tool doesn’t claim to be free at all.
Zoho, on the other hand, is fairly affordable. While there is a free plan, it is similarly limited and only available for three users or less.
Still, the most expensive Ultimate plan is only $65 a month. This is likely why small businesses tend to flock towards the Zoho CRM.
Winner: None — HubSpot comes equipped with a lot of tools for non-paying users. But Zoho is much cheaper for those who want a full slate of software solutions as part of their CRM package. Your needs will determine how each CRM measures up in this category.
2. Key Features
As it happens, both Zoho and HubSpot or stacked to the brim with the features you’d expect from any CRM worth its salt. Here are the areas where you can rely on HubSpot and Zoho to perform well:
- Contact management
- Lead management
- Sales forecasting
- Email marketing
Both HubSpot and Zoho also share notable integrations for G Suite, Microsoft 365, Zapier, and various social media applications.
Where HubSpot and Zoho differ are with order management, APIs, and where some principal integrations are concerned.
For instance, though there is a HubSpot API for building app integrations, Zoho’s API for its CRM goes so far as to let you create custom fields. On the bright side, HubSpot does have order management, which permits you to track customers’ orders from start to finish. This way you can resolve any issues that arrive as they occur.
HubSpot also has integrations for eCommerce where Zoho is lacking. Though Shopify and Square make up some of the most popular integrations for eCommerce, Zoho only provides support for WooCommerce.
That said, Zoho does have an advantage when it comes to customization. Its sales, marketing, and social media features are more extensive than that of HubSpot.
Zoho can extend workflow and macro suggestions; take voice commands to retrieve critical reports; and streamline extensive data entry processes with custom-built wizards.
Even where HubSpot and Zoho do align, Zoho still takes the bait more often than HubSpot.In contact management, for one, Zoho’s CRM lets you store up to 100,000 no matter your pricing plan.
And with Zoho’s intuitive account management feature, you can store information about the companies you work with, leave notes on contact, and see your interaction history.
Another helpful feature of Zoho called social listening means that you can tell from your CRM if a contact has reached out on social media before.
Though HubSpot has many features to boost your sales, marketing, and customer service segments, HubSpot’s priority has always been to focus on user experience. Thus, many tools are simplified and muted to enhance ease of use.
Although this is a worthwhile strategy, the lack of customization options is ultimately HubSpot’s downfall in this category.
Winner: Zoho — Zoho has more customizability for its features compared to HubSpot.
3. Automation Capabilities
Marketing automation and sales automation are some of the most important assets of any business software. For any CRM system analysis, it’s almost impossible to ignore automation capabilities as a consideration.
HubSpot and Zoho are pretty consistent in terms of sales automation. They both provide sales modules like leads, contacts, accounts, and deals. The ability to log and track tasks, calls, notes, events, and other unique records is not lost for either CRM system.
But advanced features like scoring rules, assignment rules, and currencies are only part of the Zoho CRM platform.
These features are paramount to efficient lead generation. Lead scoring, as an illustration, helps you assess whether a lead is ‘warm’ and ‘cold’, helping you understand how to prioritize further customer interactions.
It’s not that HubSpot doesn’t have these features. They’re just much more costly.
And on any HubSpot plan, you will find that there are no web-to-case forms, auto-responders, or marketing campaigns at HubSpot.
The marketing automation you can use in HubSpot is limited to higher-level plans as part of the Marketing Hub for $800 per month. And this is separate from the HubSpot Sales Hub which at the Professional level starts at $450 a month.
Winner: Zoho — Zoho can get you more features for less money than HubSpot.
See also: HubSpot vs. Marketo – Side-by-Side Comparison
4. Ease of Use
As established, HubSpot has always had a tendency to cater to the various experience levels of its many customers. In fact, as of February 2024, HubSpot’s CRM has helped over 100,000 companies scale.
To meet all these customers where they’re at, HubSpot renders users well-designed, intuitive dashboards to manage their CRM activities.
Implementation is simple, including the set-up itself. And HubSpot’s easily navigable user interface only adds to its simplicity.
HubSpot integrations, especially, are in a league of their own. There are several hundreds of them, connecting your CRM system with relevant third-party applications in record time.
Like the CRM platform, using these integrations is obtusely straightforward. And there’s no doubt this is what many consumers love about HubSpot CRM.
In comparison, Zoho has intuitive navigation features as well, but its UI feels outdated to the common user.
At higher price points, Zoho becomes more complex, and dealing with a complicated CRM system is not exactly a welcome challenge.
Winner: HubSpot — HubSpot is a shoo-in for HubSpot vs. Zoho in the ease of use category.
5. Support
New software means new issues. But you can sleep better at night knowing that the software you choose has reliable customer support for you to fall back on.
HubSpot and Zoho both have active online communities for support and advisement.
To add, Zoho has a far-reaching knowledge base with free ebooks, tutorials, and how-to videos.
Likewise, HubSpot has a free online learning platform. Dubbed, HubSpot Academy, the platform is a worldwide leader for training for inbound marketing professionals.
Zoho provides email, live chat, and phone support free of charge to all paying users. That’s right. Your questions answered are just a dial tone away.
Unfortunately, not the same can be said for HubSpot CRM. Though you have email and in-app support available to you, phone support is behind yet another paywall that you can only access if you are a Professional or Enterprise level customer.
The catch is that most users rate the quality of support at HubSpot to be higher than that of Zoho. HubSpot’s online community is also unparalleled amongst many enterprise software platforms.
Winner: HubSpot — Though quality support comes at a cost, HubSpot is all-around better prepared to handle consumer needs.
6. Data & Security Administration
Security, hands down, is one of the most instinctual concerns of every business. And businesses that work with any type of software, particularly custom software, have extra incentive to keep their security measures air-tight.
That’s why Zoho CRM authorizes two free data backups per month. Any additional backup is $6. You can also de-duplicate your data and import history with Zoho CRM Enterprise and Professional plans.
However, HubSpot falls short here. There are no free backups or additional backups for that matter. Unsurprisingly, there are no de-duplication and import perks either.
Another layer of security to consider is roles and permissions. Zoho leads in this division too. You can plan organization hierarchies and field-level securities into your business system with one of Zoho’s cheaper plans.
Whereas HubSpot does not have these features at all, save for their most expensive plan which will add up to $48,000 annually.
Winner: Zoho — Zoho provides more protection at a lower price than HubSpot.
Conclusion
Zoho and HubSpot are strong contenders for the top CRM of 2024. Both platforms have different advantages and disadvantages that make them unique.
It would be easy enough to simply declare Zoho as the winner of HubSpot vs. Zoho given the above side-by-side comparison.
In reality, choosing a CRM system requires more insight than counting wins and losses. It’s up to you to evaluate your business goals and work with the system that suits your needs best.
If you find that ease of use and integration aptitude is one of your primary needs at the moment, then talk to Trio. Trio has qualified and specialized HubSpot developers that seek to empower businesses like yours. Discover how you can scale your business with HubSpot now!
