Business is built on solid relationships. And while soft skills lift a respectable part of the weight, how and when you interact with your customers can be the difference between closed won or closed lost. A good CRM will help you keep track of every touchpoint, every client need, and every deal moving through the pipeline.

HubSpot and Pipedrive are two of the most popular CRM platforms. I've used HubSpot a bit in the past, and I've tested Pipedrive multiple times for freelance projects. This year, I dove back into each app, and here I'll compare Pipedrive and HubSpot to help you understand their feature sets—and which will fit your organization like a glove. 

Pipedrive vs. HubSpot at a glance

The gist of the matter is that HubSpot is a huge all-in-one app with a CRM at its core, while Pipedrive focuses on the tools that sales teams need to succeed. Keep reading for more details on my experiences with the apps.

HubSpot offers tools for sales, marketing, content management, customer service, operations, and commerce

HubSpot is more than a great CRM. It's a base of operations filled with tools to help you tackle plenty of business problems. These features are grouped into Hubs, so I'll use those to walk through the entire set.

Sales Hub. In addition to everything standard in a CRM, such as contact management and deal tracking, HubSpot includes its own meeting scheduler à la Calendly and a section to create your sales playbooks.

Marketing Hub. There's email marketing—both regular and automated campaigns—with easy visual builders to let you customize templates. Connect your social media and analytics accounts to post directly from HubSpot and see how your ads are performing. You can even run and track entire marketing campaigns from the platform, letting you attribute sales and data to each of them, improving your visibility over the results.

CMS Hub. Translation: create your own beautiful website and start a blog there, all on a custom domain. Then, you can add new posts directly from HubSpot, optimize SEO, and create landing pages for special offers.

Service Hub. Customers having trouble? Create a customer portal where they can engage with your support team. Is there a hot issue affecting lots of people? Set up a knowledge base article to answer all the pressing questions without overwhelming your reps. At the end of the interaction, send out a feedback survey to see how you can improve.

Operations Hub. Organize, clean, and sync your data across multiple sources, as you build an accurate single source of truth. With that out of the way, you can program advanced workflow automation, connect HubSpot to your other apps, and manage your team's permissions.

Commerce Hub. This feature pack lets you create invoices and payment links to support B2B sales, making the process of billing much simpler and better for your clients. Note: this is not eCommerce.

The HubSpot product teams seem to be constantly asking themselves, "what can we build into the platform to empower our users?" The answers to that question keep expanding the feature set, making it seem more and more like an all-in-one tool. If you and your team are suffering from tool fatigue—that feeling of having to use 14 tabs on 10 different apps to get things done—then HubSpot is in your corner.

Pipedrive does more than CRM/sales, but not quite on the level of HubSpot. Here are some of the add-ons available on Pipedrive:

• LeadBooster adds live chat and chatbots to your website, while also introducing prospecting and other lead generation features.

• Web Visitors identifies who's browsing your website and which company they belong to. Once you have that data, your sales team can spark a conversation from a warmer starting point.

• Campaigns introduces email marketing features to Pipedrive.

• Smart Docs helps you with quotes, automated document generation, and eSignatures.

• Projects adds project management features to the platform (it's not advertised on the pricing page yet, but it's available in the app).

It's a strong, respectable list. Where HubSpot covers different departments and specializations, Pipedrive seems to be laser-focused on the sales team's toolkit—and that's what we'll be talking about next.

Pipedrive specializes in empowering sales teams

Any software company can build a CRM—that doesn't mean that any CRM will solve your specific challenges. Pipedrive positions itself as being an app created by salespeople, for salespeople, prioritizing little details that go a long way in simplifying your 9 to 5.

The sales pipeline is very intuitive. The layout is clean, without messy buttons and controls, helping you focus on your work. That doesn't mean you can't tweak settings—you can add other pipelines, customize stages, set probabilities and rotting rules—but those are out of the way.

Instead of packing a lot of information into each deal card, you have the name, assignee, value, and a dynamic icon that lets you know the current state of the deal: Are there activities scheduled? If yes, are they in the future? Overdue? With just a glance at the screen, you can tell where things stand without having to click to see more.

Adding new contacts is quick with a simple form. If you're adding a duplicate, Pipedrive notifies you to help keep your database clean. And when you open the contact page, the color contrast separates positive and negative information with much more clarity. You can also keep track of the contact timeline, showing a visual graph of calls, deals, and emails you've exchanged with each person. It all gives you a good sense of whether it's time to give space or invest more in the relationship.

The devil is in the details, and that's where Pipedrive really shines. All these little things may seem insignificant alone, but added together, they help things run smoother, with less distraction and fewer mistakes.

Now, don't get me wrong: HubSpot is also solid as far as supporting sales teams goes. It's a top-tier CRM platform. But by comparison, the sales pipeline isn't as intuitive, and the muted color scheme of the user interface, despite being easy on the eyes, lacks some sharpness when popping out the most critical information at a glance. The contact page is detailed and complete, but it feels a little cluttered by comparison, too.

Sure, just measuring user interfaces may be nitpicking. But there's more to this specialization argument: the fact remains that HubSpot covers a wide range of use cases, increasing the overall learning curve and platform complexity. It's growing in many directions at the same time. Pipedrive, on the other hand, focuses on fewer circumstances, pays attention to details, and may turn out to be easier to adopt in the end.

HubSpot has wider integration and automation options

For a platform with so many features, it makes sense that HubSpot would want to help users automate tasks to save time and reduce errors. HubSpot integrates natively with over 800 apps, and even has its own Operations Hub: a place where you can connect apps bi-directionally, so any data generated both on HubSpot and out is updated everywhere, keeping it true wherever it is.

Operations Hub is also the first step to leveraging business intelligence (BI) features. By plugging your databases and analytics into BI platforms, you'll gain deep insights into how to improve internal processes, engage with customers, and develop new products or services. HubSpot already offers some BI features, but will happily integrate with any enterprise-grade platform you have in mind.

In the unlikely case you don't find your apps on HubSpot's integration list, you can use Zapier to bring it to the fold. For example, you can add new Facebook Lead Ads leads as a HubSpot form submission, or even bring your Google Contacts into HubSpot.

There are two main ways to set up an automation in HubSpot. The first one is with sequences. You can set up a sequence of touchpoints across channels, so you can deliver the exact customer experience you want at scale. For example, you can set up a combination of automated emails, calls, and sales team notifications to onboard new customers.

The other way to automate is with workflows. This method comes with a learning curve, but you'll be amazed by what you can do when you reach the top. There are straightforward things you can set up, such as when a prospect fills out a form on your website, they get a series of emails and a call is scheduled with your sales team. Other advanced automations include qualifying your contacts based on annual revenue and adding that information as a tag on the company contact card. That can help your sales team understand the scope and scale of the deals they'll offer in the future.

You can set up everything in a visual builder, adding triggers, actions, and conditionals as you need. It's also possible to add actions based on connected apps, which further plays into HubSpot's integration advantage.

Pipedrive has a respectable library of integrations—a little over 300—but it can't compete with HubSpot. But that doesn't mean you're cut off from the rest of the ecosystem: you can connect Pipedrive to Zapier and, for example, send messages in Slack for new deals or send emails when new deals are added to a stage in Pipedrive.

As for automation, Pipedrive packs quite a punch. Workflows are hidden in the three-dot icon on the left-side menu. You can start from one of 41 templates divided by categories—moving deals by stage, sending emails, or adding products to deals, to name a few—and set them up in a few clicks.

When creating from scratch, the interface is similar to HubSpot's, letting you add triggers, actions, and delays. In addition to actions happening inside Pipedrive, you can trigger actions in Slack, Microsoft Teams, Trello, and Asana right from the interface, but I couldn't find a way to do the same for other integrations. While the builder is solid, it still lacks some functionality and polish when compared with HubSpot.

Pipedrive's reports are more accessible, HubSpot's are deeper

Both apps are very powerful in terms of analytics, but Pipedrive has an edge: there, everything is easier to access, slightly easier to digest, and more affordable.

Behold Pipedrive's simple dashboard page. 

Each statistic is contained within its own card. Click on a card to look deeper into that data, edit the filters, or move the card up or down on the dashboard. If you want another angle, create a new dashboard, and set up new cards just as you want them. The new dashboard will be saved, so you can switch views with a single click.

You can set goals and track them on this page, too: set sales targets by time period or individually for each person working in your team. There's a list of pre-made reports to help you look at the data easily and quickly. You can build your own reports as well, and they'll be saved, ready to generate when you need them.

HubSpot has a different approach. There are local dashboards for each of its hubs—Marketing, Sales, Service, and so on—and a centralized section for everything, letting you create new dashboards from templates. HubSpot has its own Analytics section, letting you take a deep look into service or content analytics, for example. It's impressive, for sure, but it's challenging to create a smooth user experience for such a wide feature set. 

To be clear: HubSpot's report quality is not inferior to Pipedrive. In fact, HubSpot has a lot of reports that offer dozens of angles over your data. The report builder is a beast of its own, and if you have a data or operations team in your company, they'll be able to extract useful insights—especially with Operations Hub. 

If you're not there yet, HubSpot's reports may turn out to be a bit too complex to drive value from. In the end, I prefer Pipedrive to HubSpot as it requires slightly less setup to get started, and the overall experience is more intuitive.

Another aspect of accessibility is pricing, which I'll discuss in-depth in a bit but will also leave the note here: to unlock all the reporting in HubSpot, you need to invest a lot more than in Pipedrive to get the same depth of data.

HubSpot has a free plan but complex paid plans

Free forever: that's HubSpot's promise. Unlimited contacts—up to a technical limitation of 15 million—to let your sales team approach and create deals for everyone. And the free plan isn't limited to the CRM either—you can access a lite plan of all the features I've outlined above.

This free plan is great for cash-strapped organizations, unicorns in the making, and brave solopreneurs alike. It keeps your business organized for no cost, and when you start closing some deals, you can subscribe to each feature set to expand the possibilities.

Pipedrive doesn't have a free plan and has per-user pricing. This makes it more expensive for larger teams. But there's a flipside: if you want more advanced features, it's actually cheaper.

When you subscribe to Pipedrive's Essential plan, for $14.90 per user per month—you get all the CRM features (except for automation), some integrations, and advanced analytics, without contact limits. The highest plan—Enterprise, at $99 per user per month—unlocks everything the platform has to offer. If you want any of the add-ons for lead gen or website tracking, those are billed separately, so you can turn them on or off as you need. The pricing page is straightforward, and it's easy to choose which plan is the best for you.

As for HubSpot, you'll need to invest some time in understanding how pricing works. And then you still won't understand. Here's the gist:

• HubSpot has six Hubs: Marketing, Sales, Customer Service, CMS, Commerce, and Operations

• Each of these Hubs has its own price tag, along with tiers and limitations

• Or you can build your own bundle, choosing which Hubs you want to pay for and which to leave out

The CRM Starter bundle went down in price from $50 to $30 per month this year, a generous move. It doesn't have per-user pricing, so you can bring your entire team at no extra cost. But if you need to expand your marketing contacts pool or access advanced analytics, the intermediate Professional tier starts at a whopping $1,335 per month.

The fact that you can build your own bundle is a plus, as you can tailor the pricing to your exact needs. Just keep in mind that there's a one-time setup fee for the Professional and Enterprise plans, ranging between $5,250 and $13,000. 

These prices are prohibitive for most small and some medium-sized businesses, and I suspect it'd leave those of you in larger operations scratching your heads as well. These high price tags make Pipedrive's per-user pricing more attractive, all things considered.

HubSpot and Pipedrive both have AI features, but HubSpot includes generative AI and a chatbot

AI is everywhere, and HubSpot is following the trend, especially with generative AI. It's introducing a range of tools to generate text and images in different sections of its mega-app, helping you leverage this technology without having to tab out.

The best implementation of AI in HubSpot is the blog writer in the CMS Hub, hands down. The process is clear and intuitive. Here's how it works:

• Start a new blog post, and write down the topic you want to write about.

• HubSpot generates a few title suggestions. If you don't like any of them, you can click to regenerate. Pick the one that you like the most.

• Based on the title you pick, the AI engine generates an article description and subheaders to cover all the topics.

• If you like what you see, click Generate blog post. It will pop up fully written from top to bottom in HubSpot's post editor. All you have to do now is edit and fact-check.

Another AI tool worthy of mention is ChatSpot, HubSpot's own chatbot.

Powered by OpenAI, it can help you with sales prospecting, generating content, and getting SEO insights. But the most exciting possibility is exploring the data inside your HubSpot CRM by asking questions on ChatSpot. When you enter a new prompt, the chatbot will take a look at the data inside and give you the results. You can ask to list your contacts, filter them, and even add new ones, all with written prompts. Who knew you could move the needle by chatting?

Pipedrive is also in the AI game—not in the generative one, though. It has an AI sales assistant that works in the background, combing through your data to find the best next action you should take. You'll get notifications on deal status, overdue tasks, and rotting deals that you should probably dispose of. Here's a snapshot of what it can and can't do:

• It can track your progress, letting you know how strong you're going this week.

• It helps in qualifying your prospects by detecting activity and assigning scores.

• It delivers all of these in the top-right notification bell, so there aren't really any specialized screens or chat interfaces to interact with.

It lacks the sound and fury of most AI apps hitting the market, but that's not a bad thing. It hits the sales pain points with timely notifications and doesn't add an extra learning curve of prompting or dealing with hallucinations. It feels more focused on the problems it means to solve.

HubSpot vs. Pipedrive: Which should you choose?

Pipedrive is a better fit for small and medium businesses that can no longer rely on a free CRM solution. It offers more affordable upgrade options, especially if you don't have a large team. It's a highly specialized platform that aims to solve sales problems. The add-ons are clearly separated from the core of the app, so you can turn them on or off as needed.

HubSpot is better for people who need a free and versatile tool right now. And it's also better for the opposite end of the spectrum: large companies with complex processes, lots of data, and needs across multiple areas, from sales to operations. If you're somewhere in the middle, it's not as competitive.

Related reading:

• HubSpot vs. Zoho: Which CRM is best?

• HubSpot vs. Salesforce: Which is right for you?

• HubSpot vs. ActiveCampaign: Which should you choose?

• Pipedrive vs. Trello: Which tool should you use?

• Pipedrive vs. Zoho: Which CRM should you use?

• Pipedrive vs. Salesmate: Which is best?