Salesforce Marketing Cloud vs. HubSpot: The Good and the Bad

When it comes to the success of any business, the importance of choosing the right marketing and CRM platform is immense. While multiple options are available in the market, Salesforce Marketing Cloud and HubSpot are two of the top-rated CRM platforms out there.

Although both platforms offer sales teams a powerful solution that can scale with growth, there are several differences between them in terms of how both platforms are built, their ease of use, and their adoption.

This post aims to compare Salesforce Marketing Cloud vs. HubSpot to help you make the best pick for your business and its unique needs.

What is Salesforce Marketing Cloud?

Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC) is a powerful marketing platform with capabilities to support several facets of marketing.

This includes dynamic customer journeys, multi-channel campaign execution, pre and post-campaign analytics, social media engagement, audience building and segmentation, advertising, and a data management platform.

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SFMC has different components, which are known as Studios and Builders, as discussed below:

• Studios – Studios in SFMC are used to manage and engage with different communication channels. This includes Social Studio, Email Studio, and Mobile Studio.
• Builders – Builders in SFMC are used to manage data, content, as well as customer journeys. They are often used by Studios but don’t necessarily have to be (e.g., Analytics Builder).

Overall, Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a feature-rich platform with multiple capabilities across marketing domains, as listed below:

• Email and marketing automation
• Customer engagement in real-time
• Social media engagement
• Mobile (SMS) messaging and push notifications
• Customer marketing analytics

What is Hubspot CRM?

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HubSpot CRM is a well-known customer relationship management platform that helps organizations (irrespective of their size) track and nurtures their sales leads conveniently.

It offers a range of features, including outbound and inbound marketing, sales pipeline management, sales automation, customer relations management, email tracking, lead management, and more.

The HubSpot inbound marketing platform combines marketing automation, content marketing, and social media analytics for marketing teams of all sizes to help them grow organic traffic, convert leads and track customers, all in one place.

HubSpot Marketing Hub is ideal as:

• Robust customer relationship management
• Supports various platforms
• Perfect for all business sizes

Salesforce Marketing Cloud vs. HubSpot: A Detailed Comparison

Here is a detailed comparison of Salesforce Marketing Cloud vs. HubSpot:

Differences	Salesforce Marketing Cloud	Hubspot CRM
Features	A/B Testing, drip campaigns, dynamic content, event-triggered actions, mobile optimized emails, list management, reporting/analytics, Image library, and landing pages/web forms.	A/B Testing, auto-responders, customer surveys, drip campaigns, image library, mobile-optimized emails, reporting/analytics, template management, WYSIWYG editor, and subscriber management.
Best for	1-1000+ users Best for companies of all sizes and all industries.	1-200 users More than 100,000 users in over 120 countries use HubSpot’s CRM to attract, engage, and delight their customers.
Pros	“Encourages cross-team communications. Great support from the vendor and strong community of users and third-party integrators.” “Easy to understand for novices and navigate and comes with useful automated marketing features that make reaching a large audience seamlessly easy.” “Quite helpful in managing customer journeys, sending and preparing emails, and getting good reporting.”	“Great amount of details and marketing capabilities. HubSpot has some of the best integrations.” “Helps track, monitor, and create the best content for growing business.” “Range of features that are quite easy to use. Great support to learn how to take good advantage of all the features.”
Cons	Gartner– “Overall, the system is not as user-friendly as one would hope. There are pieces of key information not found immediately and require sifting through different menus and several levels deep into another area of the software to find, such as error reporting on why specific emails failed to send.” Capterra– “Does not have integration with Microsoft ads, so tracking the performance of search ads in Bing is difficult. Most landing page templates are ugly and hard to configure.”	Capterra– “Does not have integration with Microsoft ads, so tracking the performance of search ads in Bing is difficult. Most landing page templates are ugly and hard to configure.” G2– “There is a limitation of the number of reports in the reporting dashboard, which disappoints some users who want to have multiple reports in the reporting dashboard, which is not cutting edge over its competitors.”
Deployment and support	Deployment – Cloud, SaaS, Web-Based Mobile – Android Mobile – iPhone Mobile – iPad Support – Email/Help Desk FAQs/Forum Knowledge Base Phone Support 24/7 (Live Rep) Chat	Deployment – Cloud, SaaS, Web-Based Support – Email/Help Desk FAQs/Forum Knowledge Base Phone Support 24/7 (Live Rep) Chat
Pricing	Starting from $4800 Pricing Model: Not provided by the vendor Both Free Trial and Free Versions are not available. Salesforce Marketing Cloud edges out HubSpot here for their overall pricing packages. This is largely because even the cheapest versions of Salesforce get you more functionality than those of HubSpot. Further, there are more subdivided packages with Salesforce, so you can pay for only the tools you need.	Starting from $50/Per Month Pricing Model: Flat Rate Both Free Trial and Free Versions are available.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud vs. HubSpot: Which Is Better?

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Salesforce Marketing Cloud offers an extensive range of features that makes it a top CRM. However, owing to its somewhat complex infrastructure and relatively high cost, it isn’t for everyone.

The platform is most suitable for mid-sized to large-sized businesses that require a robust tool for managing their sales and marketing leads.

HubSpot, on the contrary, is a more user-friendly CRM that is affordable for businesses of every shape and size due to its limited-feature free plan. Paid plans of Hubspot come with feature upgrades that can manage most customer relationship management needs.

How to choose between HubSpot Marketing Hub vs. Salesforce Marketing Cloud, then?

While both platforms are great, each has its own downsides. To make an informed decision, it is best to see a demo of both tools, talk to people that have experience with them, and decide after thoroughly comparing all the aspects in terms of features and functionality.

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