Stop asking which CRM is best. Pipedrive or HubSpot isn't really the right question, and making the decision on features alone isn't the right approach, because each of these platforms suits a different type of business.
The decision comes down to your requirements and how your sales and marketing teams actually operate. Pick the wrong one and you pay higher fees, waste setup time, and possibly put your sales team through a painful CRM switch a year or two down the track.
So I brought in Liam, one of the Pipedrive consultants on our team, who has been with MinorCo for three years and has set up both platforms. He knows where each one wins, and where it doesn't.
Note: Pricing mention within the blog may change over time. Please visit the Pipedrive or Hubspot pages for up to date pricing.
The type of business each platform suits
HubSpot is focused on being an all-in-one. It came from being an inbound marketing CRM, so any business that wants multiple teams working in the CRM, with it serving as a single source of truth for more than just the sales team, and with real confidence in key marketing activities, is well suited to HubSpot.
Pipedrive has a much stronger focus as a sales CRM first. The first thing it was designed to do was be a tool for salespeople to manage their deals and opportunities and track follow-up. It does have marketing capabilities, campaigns and website visitor tracking among them, but HubSpot has considerably more of them.
There's a lot under the hood in HubSpot, and as Liam puts it, that's one of the key reasons you'd choose it or ultimately choose something else.
Who ends up regretting HubSpot
If you consider yourself a lean sales team, the CRM is really there to support the sales effort, and you have lower technical competence in the team, then HubSpot is a bit of a Cadillac. There's a lot in there. That could be its greatest benefit to your organisation, or it could be the biggest downfall of choosing it over something better suited as a simpler CRM.
The Pipedrive version of that regret is the mirror image. Pipedrive lends itself really well to being a strong sales CRM, but you may regret it if you want that all-in-one system, if you want to build landing pages or manage ads, and you'd rather do all of that in one place than integrate multiple tools.
What matters underneath both is understanding where you want to go as an organisation. You're not solving this problem for the immediate future. You need to map out what a CRM needs to deliver for you in the longer term and make sure you're choosing the platform that supports that strategy.
Moving CRMs is difficult for multiple reasons. There's the change in practice and the user experience your sales staff go through, and there's the headache of migrating data. It isn't something you want to try and change midway through, which is why mapping out that strategy and making the decision early matters so much.
Is HubSpot a CRM or a marketing platform?
HubSpot came from being a marketing-first CRM, and that's where their competence started. In later years they built out their offering to support what they call other hubs, so there's a Sales Hub, a Service Hub, and others covering the departments that might need to use that single source of truth.
As an organisation scales, or as other teams need access into the same CRM, there's an integrated hub that offers it.
The sales capability in HubSpot has come a long way and it's genuinely well featured now. But it started in the marketing space, and Liam's answer to the question is that it's still a CRM, just an all-under-one-hood kind of product.
There are other products out there that do components of what HubSpot does very well, because they're focused on that one thing specifically, whereas HubSpot is trying to be more of a generalist tool. So there are going to be limitations, and at some point you may need to consider a bolt-on or an external tool with an integration over the all-in-one platform.
I like that framing. A generalist tool with a wider scope of what it can do.
Which one actually helps a salesperson
Pipedrive was designed by its founders around one idea: make it easy for salespeople to use. If it's easy to use, it's more up to date. The key philosophy I always describe with Pipedrive is setting your next action, creating an activity to remind the salesperson when to follow up next or how to move the deal forwards.
Liam's view on how HubSpot compares is that a lot of the functionality in Sales Hub is at parity with what Pipedrive does. It just doesn't feel as easy, and it never feels as fast to do any of the same things.
That applies whether you're configuring how it supports your sales process, going in and modifying deal stages and the automations behind your sales SOP, or just using it daily and checking what activities you have today.
It takes a little bit longer. There are a few more clicks. It doesn't surface the immediate next thing to do on an activity or on a deal in the same way Pipedrive does. The capability is there, but sometimes that capability gets in the way of the most important thing, which is the next action that moves a deal forward and ultimately converts more business.
That matches what we hear from customers, especially those who tried HubSpot first and then came to Pipedrive. The reason they give for switching is almost always the same: they find Pipedrive more intuitive and easier to use, with less friction to make changes and update things.
When integrations stop making sense
So HubSpot does a lot of different things, where Pipedrive has a narrower focus on being a sales CRM. If you want more marketing capability, you add tools around it, the way we do our email marketing through Kit. The obvious question is when Pipedrive plus a stack of extra tools stops making sense, and an all-in-one becomes the better fit.
There's no universal answer, because every organisation is different. Even if you move toward HubSpot because you want the utopia of everything under one hood, it's still never going to deliver everything you need.
If you sell e-commerce you'll need to integrate with Shopify or something like it. If you have an internal ERP, that's another system. There are always going to be other data warehouses that require a level of integration.
The work, then, is mapping out what those systems are likely to be for your organisation as best you can while you're deciding your path forward. If you land somewhere with a huge number of disparate systems and a complex integration journey ahead of you, that's a signal.
Every time you integrate different systems there's room for incomplete data transfers and issues in that transfer. Each of those systems ends up owning some of that single source of truth, because you're no longer in a single system.
You start having to work out that this system is the source of truth for one thing and that system is the source of truth for another, and it becomes quite a muddled repository for all your customer data.
The further you get into that setup, and the more of it you're having to map out, the closer you get to the point where you're better off with a system that incorporates more of it and eliminates some of that mapping.
The counterweight is specialisation. There's a reason we use Kit, because it delivers a specific set of functionality. If there are tools that are genuinely important to your organisation, that helps define the question: is this something HubSpot offers, but not to the level we need?
Once you're replacing that all-in-one functionality with systems that do the job better, the integrated and more disparate solution is potentially the right course after all.
Why we run Pipedrive, Kit and Asana separately
There are trade-offs either way. I often find with tools like HubSpot, or Zoho, where they try to do a lot of things, they end up doing quite a lot of things okay, but not the best.
Something I've mentioned in videos before is that I like choosing the best tool for the job. Of course I'm biased, but I think Pipedrive is the best CRM.
We use Kit for our email marketing and I think it's a great marketing platform. And we use Asana for project management, even though we could use Pipedrive to manage projects, partly because we've been on it a long time and partly because it has more capability than native Pipedrive projects do.
So in my business I've been happy to trade off using multiple tools in order to use what I think is the best for each job. The good news is that integrations keep getting easier. With tools like n8n, Zapier, and AI in the mix, the integration hurdle is hopefully less of an obstacle than it has been in the past.
Liam's caveat on that is worth holding onto. You need to understand your path forward on that integration and who maintains it. Do you rely on external parties to help support it, or do you have good internal competence? You're essentially taking that integration on as technical overhead, and you'll need to support it as the systems change and as your needs change.
Off-the-shelf integrations are the easy case, because they tend to be maintained by the providers. A custom integration gives you far more flexibility to design it around your organisation's needs, but there's an overhead to maintaining it. All of it feeds into which path you take and how much integration and how many disparate systems you're prepared to take on.
Setting it up yourself: which is easier
This one goes both ways for different reasons. HubSpot offers a lot of flexibility in the system, so your ability to think “I want the CRM to do this, I want this automation to move this bit of data around” is well served. You have more configurability in HubSpot.
But that comes with the tiers required on your HubSpot subscription, so there's a cost consideration, and there's the complexity of setting it up.
Coming back to the actual question, if you were starting off with a new CRM and you wanted ease of setup and the flexibility to get up and running, HubSpot is not going to be the most flexible. You've got a lot of work to do before it delivers all that flexibility, even though the headroom might be higher.
With Pipedrive, the time it takes to get to the point where it's delivering value back, where you can maintain your sales process and it's driving real returns for the business, is a lot closer. And the technical hurdle is a lot lower.
How Pipedrive pricing works
Pipedrive is the simpler of the two to work out. You pay a subscription level per user for the features you need, monthly or annually for the better rate, across four subscription levels. The figure you see is the price per user per month.
When I'm recommending Pipedrive I usually suggest at least the Growth plan, so you can sync your email and build automations. Premium is certainly worth considering, especially as you start to need some of the add-ons.
The add-ons are good because you can add extra features only if you need them, which means you're not paying more for things you don't use. Projects is one. Smart Docs for quoting and sending contracts. Campaigns and Web Visitors, which are your marketing elements, obviously not as robust as HubSpot's. And Lead Booster. Some of those add-ons come free with the Premium plan.
So the pricing is easy to calculate. It's the price per user, multiplied by how many people need access, plus any add-ons.
HubSpot pricing, hubs and tiers
HubSpot is not the easiest, and Liam's first caveat is that the pricing configuration changes on a relatively frequent basis, so whatever you see today is a snapshot.
The first thing to get your head around is that there are different hubs. Sales Hub, Service Hub, Marketing Hub, and others. That's the first decision: do I need functionality in that hub, and at what level. Within each hub there are tiers. There's a free option with very limited use that essentially lets you store your data but is difficult to actually work in. Then Starter, then Professional, then Enterprise, each offering more functionality within that hub's discipline.
In Sales Hub there's a noticeable jump between Starter and Professional, where Pipedrive has several options within that same range.
Starter is designed to let people start using HubSpot, start recording their data and get used to it. But you very quickly end up in a position where Professional is the tier that has the functionality you actually want, and you're not going to be on Starter forever. It's very much a land-and-expand tactic. It gets you into the platform, and at some point you're going to have to upgrade.
Which makes understanding what functionality you need, and whether that means the higher subscriptions, the real work. A helpful way to do it is the create bundle tool on HubSpot's pricing page, which is basically a smorgasbord. You go through and pick the hubs you think you'll need.
You might choose to start with just the customer platform, which gives you Starter across all the hubs for roughly the cost of one Starter hub. That's a good place to start, as long as you understand where your growth strategy is heading and plot the projected cost.
If you needed Marketing Starter but wanted comparable functionality to Pipedrive, you'd need automation, and to get automation you'd have to include Sales Professional. Add four seats at Sales Professional and a handful of other hubs at Starter, and even though Starter is cheap per hub, the cost of the overall solution starts creeping up quickly.
There's also crossover between hubs. Sales Pro and Commerce share some of the same features, so you may be able to get the functionality you need through one hub rather than another.
Within each hub you then pick the level. Three seats on Sales Pro for the team that needs advanced sales functionality, Marketing at Starter because your marketing requirements are simpler, Operations at Starter for the same reason. You can mix and mingle.
Two more things to know. If you're doing marketing and need a larger audience, you pay for the number of marketing contacts you hold.
And there are core seats, which give basic CRM functionality so someone can work across the hubs without the higher-level features. A core seat suits an administrative person supporting a sales rep, and it doesn't count toward the Sales Pro seats you're paying for.
It's a minefield, and it's worth having someone who understands what the system delivers help you build the package.
The HubSpot onboarding fee
This is the part that catches people out, and it's why the estimated cost to get started is a different number from the annual fee.
HubSpot is cognisant of whether people actually understand how to use the platform, so there's an onboarding process they require anyone buying Professional to go through, and that onboarding has a cost.
You have two paths. Work with HubSpot directly, where at the time of recording the one-time Professional onboarding fee was listed at AUD 2,160. Or work with a HubSpot partner, who provides their own onboarding, with the cost bundled into working with them.
Either way, you don't just get given the keys once you sign up at the higher tiers, because they want to be sure you can use the platform effectively.
That's a real difference from how we work. Customers approach us for help setting up Pipedrive and we have lots of different options available, where with HubSpot at Professional it's effectively a mandatory fee built into the price.
There's a difference in the character of the two as well. HubSpot's own onboarding is focused specifically on HubSpot functionality and getting you set up and using the platform.
Working with a partner, much like we do at MinorCo for Pipedrive, is more client-centric and more use-case-centric. We want to understand in depth how you need to use the platform, and then have it set up to work best for that.
So if you're considering HubSpot, book a call with their sales team. They can help you work out which level of each module is right for you, maybe more basic on marketing and more on sales, and help with the price per seat.
If you're interested in Pipedrive, we're a Pipedrive reseller, so you can buy your licences through us at a discount off list price, and the pricing is nice and simple.
Who should absolutely not choose HubSpot
If you're a smaller organisation, you're definitely sales focused, and you have limited technical competence in the organisation or at least within the sales team, then adoption is going to be the deciding factor, and under-utilisation of the platform is a real concern.
At the end of the day, if the team aren't using a CRM effectively, if they're not putting the right information in, it becomes unusable. Outdated information, incomplete information, and the less valuable that platform becomes. If you have concerns about adoption, or about your technical competence to maintain the platform, then choosing a more intuitive CRM is one hundred percent the better call.
Conversely, if you have someone who can become the technical expert in the platform and has time to dedicate to it, you have a more technical and maybe more progressive sales team, and you have aspirations for some of the more advanced functionality available in HubSpot, then that's potentially a path forward.
The same question answered from the Pipedrive side gives you the other half. If you're looking for that all-in-one system to do everything, and you don't want the hassle of integrating multiple systems, then HubSpot is going to be a great option for you. The thing that usually brings people toward Pipedrive is that ease of use, and a stronger sales focus.
The question to ask before you decide
The advanced capability in HubSpot can be fantastic, but you have to map out and really understand what you need from the platform.
Liam sees a lot of people invest significantly in HubSpot and then under-utilise it. Through the initial scoping and the package they think they need, they end up taking on a lot of subscription cost and a lot of functionality and overhead they simply don't need.
So the most important part is understanding what you need out of the CRM and where your organisation is going. And then leaning on the advice and expertise of partners for both of these platforms, having a conversation about where you're going, what your needs are, and how each system supports that.
Don't try to solve it by yourself. Work with a partner who understands those systems intimately and can give you advice on the pros and cons for you as an organisation, specifically against your needs.
Conclusion
Neither platform wins in the abstract. HubSpot suits businesses that want multiple teams and marketing under one hood and have the technical capacity to run it. Pipedrive suits sales-focused teams who want the CRM working and delivering quickly.
Watch the full conversation if you want Liam's answers in his own words, including the pricing screen shares for both platforms.
FAQ
Is Pipedrive or HubSpot better? Neither is better in the abstract, because they suit different types of business. HubSpot fits organisations wanting an all-in-one platform with multiple teams and marketing in the same system. Pipedrive fits sales-focused teams who want a CRM that's fast to set up and easy for salespeople to keep up to date.
Is HubSpot a CRM or a marketing platform? It's still a CRM, but it's an all-under-one-hood product. HubSpot came from inbound marketing and later built out its other hubs, including Sales and Service, so it's better described as a generalist platform with a wider scope than a dedicated sales CRM.
Why do businesses regret choosing HubSpot? Usually because they're a lean, sales-focused team with limited technical competence, and the platform has more in it than they can use or maintain. The result is significant subscription cost against functionality they don't need, and under-utilisation of what they bought.
Is there a HubSpot onboarding fee? Yes. HubSpot requires anyone buying a Professional hub to go through an onboarding process, and that onboarding carries a one-time cost. The alternative is working with a HubSpot partner, who provides onboarding as part of their own engagement.
Which is easier to set up yourself, Pipedrive or HubSpot? Pipedrive. HubSpot offers more configurability, but you have a lot of work to do before it delivers that flexibility, and the higher tiers are needed to unlock it. With Pipedrive the time to getting value back is much shorter and the technical hurdle is lower.
Is it better to use one all-in-one platform or several specialist tools? It depends on how many systems you'd end up integrating and who maintains them. No all-in-one delivers everything, so you'll integrate something regardless. If specialist tools genuinely do the job better than the all-in-one's version, a connected stack can be the right call, as long as you can support the technical overhead.