Comprehensive Contact Management for Bigger Businesses

Pros & Cons

• • Robust core set of contact and content management features
  • Excellent automation builder
  • High-quality AI tools
  • Tons of seamless integrations
• • Base plan is expensive enough to exclude small businesses
  • Some areas can be confusing to navigate

HubSpot Smart CRM Specs

HubSpot is one of the biggest names in CRM providers for large-scale companies, but it also offers the simpler, SMB-focused Smart CRM tool. The service, which you can now purchase independently of the company’s other products, benefits from an excellent automation builder and several AI tools that streamline contact management. Moreover, the seemingly endless number of available add-ons makes Smart CRM easy to integrate into your existing business operations. However, the base plan is expensive, and some areas of the user experience could be more intuitive. HubSpot is worth considering for bigger businesses, but the extremely flexible Apptivo, the cost-effective Bigin by Zoho, and the exceptionally user-friendly Freshsales remain our Editors’ Choice winners.

Pricing: Expensive, But Worth the Cost for Bigger Companies

HubSpot Smart CRM offers two plans: Professional and Enterprise. A free trial isn’t available for either. Keep in mind that although you can pay monthly, that still locks you into an annual contract, with no option to cancel early. As such, you should subscribe only if you’re confident that you will use it for at least a year. HubSpot’s free Marketing Hub plan lets you create contact lists and use their information to personalize marketing campaigns, but it only includes one deal pipeline, so it’s not a viable long-term CRM solution.

The Professional tier ($45 per user per month, billed annually) includes the full-featured AI agent hub, intent signals to enrich high-value customers, and contact enrichment to improve contact profiles. You can create 1,000 custom properties to connect specific data points to companies, contacts, or deals, with up to 40 calculated properties that roll up data from other fields to calculate things like commissions. Team management tools include the Breeze Assistant, 15 deal pipelines, up to 100 shared inboxes, and up to 75 reporting dashboards with the option to create up to 100 custom reports. Advanced AI agents and collaboration tools, such as a shared inbox, are also available, along with integrations with Slack and Salesforce.

Enterprise ($75 per user per month, billed annually) adds AI insights on CRM index pages (in beta) and more advanced user management tools, such as multi-level team creation. Custom objects let you track virtually any passive data point in the CRM, while custom events let you track actions unique to your business. You also get a sandbox account for experimenting with aspects of the user experience. The calculated properties limit increases to 200; deal pipelines go up to 100; shared inboxes increase to 200; and the reporting dashboard limit increases to 100 dashboards with 500 custom reports.

Both plans include access to an AI data agent for analyzing CRM data, a customer AI agent for answering customer questions, and a prospecting agent that builds personalized outreach for specific leads. However, each of these tools requires HubSpot AI credits. You get monthly allotments of AI credits with both plans (3,000 for Professional and 5,000 for Enterprise). If your company exceeds those allotments, you can buy more at a rate of $10 per 1,000 credits.

HubSpot Smart CRM’s Professional tier is pricey for an entry-level plan on paper. Apptivo’s and Zoho CRM’s equivalents, respectively, cost $15 and $14 per user per month, billed annually. Even Insightly, one of the more expensive CRMs I’ve tested, maintains a base plan for $29 per user per month. However, the Professional plan’s AI and automation features put it on par with—and in some cases, ahead of—similarly priced, high-end plans from other companies. Large businesses will likely find value in the sheer number of features you get with the Enterprise plan, but smaller companies should likely turn to more affordable plans from Apptivo, Bigin by Zoho CRM, and Freshsales.

Setup: Not Quite as Easy as Other CRMs

To sign up for Smart CRM, you need to create a HubSpot account using your name, email, and business name. HubSpot’s AI will ask you some basic questions to set up the core customer platform, with the option for you to configure things yourself. You can then request the upgrade to the Smart CRM product. Next, HubSpot’s AI will ask you additional questions and generate a custom CRM center based on your answers. This process is slightly more involved than signing up for other CRMs I’ve tested, but it’s still largely straightforward.

To add users, you can enter email addresses one at a time or prebuilt options are available, such as sales reps and sales managers. You can create custom permissions presets in the settings area, too

HubSpot lets you import contacts from both CSV and Excel files. It won’t import contacts unless the spreadsheet contains specific fields, however, so your file must have separate columns for first and last names, for example. Otherwise, the requirements are pretty typical. Once you upload contacts, HubSpot maps them automatically to existing categories. The process is similar to what I’ve come to expect from top-ranking CRMs, such as Apptivo and Freshsales.

(Credit: HubSpot/PCMag)

The platform also supports advanced import options, meaning you can pull all of your existing CRM data—including deals and tasks—using a similarly automated mapping process. This can save you a significant amount of time if you’ve collected extensive and varied data. Of all the CRMs I’ve tested, only Pipedrive offers something similar, and its advanced import process isn’t as simple.

Alternatively, you can sync data from dozens of other apps in the HubSpot Marketplace, such as MailChimp, Shopify, or Zoho CRM. Both one-way and two-way sync options are available. You can also hire a HubSpot CRM Data Migration Specialist for $500 to assist you. This process can take up to three weeks, but it might be worth it if you are bringing over a lot of data.

The last setup step includes attaching an email address. This is a two-click process for Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 email addresses. You have to enter POP/SMTP settings if you use a different email provider. Adding a business VoIP system or any social media accounts is optional.

Interface and Ease of Use: Streamlined and Modern

The internal HubSpot Home page uses a simple black-and-white color scheme, with easy-to-read boxes displaying information about upcoming meetings and tasks. Navigating the site is simple, thanks to easily identifiable icons for key areas, such as contacts and reporting, in the left-hand toolbar. The “…” at the bottom of the toolbar lets you access other areas, such as the HubSpot Inbox. You can pin the tools you use most often to the main menu, as well as get rid of others you don’t need.

(Credit: HubSpot/PCMag)

Help: 24/7 Support Across All the Usual Channels

HubSpot displays quick digital tours and tutorial videos when you first log in to your account; you can skip them if you already have experience with CRMs. After that, you can get support 24/7ons), or phone for both plans. Alternatively, you can consult HubSpot’s extensive knowledge base. Many CRMs, including Apptivo and Freshsales, limit some or all support channels to 24/5 access, making HubSpot noteworthy

Contacts: Straightforward, Flexible Management

Unlike Insightly CRM, HubSpot doesn’t separate leads and contacts. Instead, every contact receives a deal-stage indicator (such as New, Open, or Unqualified).

Contact profiles use a standard layout, with basic contact information on the right and a central area with more detailed records, including AI insights based on the contact’s interaction history. A collapsible sidebar displays companies, deals, and (if you’re also using HubSpot’s help desk system) tickets connected to the contact. Within a contact profile, you can modify contact records, move contacts through the pipeline, add a new deal or task, and send an email or make a call (if you have set up VoIP).

Deals: Pipeline Settings Should Be More Prominent

Before you get into deals, it’s best to square away your pipelines. I found this the most confusing part of the Smart CRM experience, since there’s no individual tab for pipelines within the main area or the settings. I ended up asking the AI support bot for help, which directed me to the pipeline editor in Settings > Objects > Deals. Thankfully, the pipeline editor is highly intuitive, with options to edit the default pipeline or create a custom one.

Deals, meanwhile, are simple to navigate even if you’ve never used a CRM before. This section uses a Kanban view by default, which means you can easily move deals forward in the pipeline just by dragging them. You can add calendar, report, or table views to see pipelines in different ways. Apptivo offers similar options.

Both the card- and table-based views let you modify data directly and save whatever lists or views you need most often. That’s convenient for deals across multiple pipelines, deal packages, and long deals. And, as with contacts or companies, you can filter particularly long lists and create new data filters as you go.

Breeze Assistant: AI-Driven Analysis to Enhance Your Workflows

Breeze is what puts the “Smart” in HubSpot Smart CRM. It uses both in-house large language models and those from OpenAI to conduct company research, perform mundane tasks, trigger workflows, unify and enrich your data, and write blog posts, among many other functions. HubSpot divides functionality into two parts: Breeze Assistant and Agents.

Breeze Assistant is available on both CRM plans. You can either select a prompt (such as “generate a report” or “summarize deal”) or type a custom request. Over time, Breeze Assistant learns about your company’s CRM needs. Additionally, it can perform data and contact enrichment, gathering information from your communications and the wider web to add key attributes, such as location and social media links, to contact profiles.

I tested Breeze Assistant by asking various questions about my contacts, outside companies, and the platform itself. I found it helpful for researching potential and existing clients. The minimal information on my sample contacts somewhat limited my ability to test this feature, but Breeze Assistant still impressed me with excellent suggestions for nurturing leads.

You can even ask Breeze Assistant to generate graphics and images for blog posts and collateral. However, since it relies on OpenAI’s DALL-E, expect some of its infamous hallmarks to appear, like garbled text and people with more than five fingers.

Compared with Zoho CRM’s Zia AI, I found the Breeze Assistant easier to talk with and more capable of understanding nuance. Of course, like any AI-powered assistant, you get back what you put into it. Note that some tasks are free, while others require varying amounts of AI credits; be sure to read up on AI credit usage for each task before using Breeze Assistant.

Breeze Agents are what they sound like: AI-powered agents you can train to provide personalized outreach to prospects and clients. The Data Agent’s primary purpose is to create smart properties that generate specialized insights based on the information you select, such as a contact’s previous interactions or their public-facing website. Each prompt response from the Data Agent costs 10 AI credits.

Other agents are available through HubSpot’s broader customer platform plans. All of these agents use AI credits per interaction, with the cost per credit varying by agent type and interaction complexity.

Automation: An Intuitive Workflow Builder With Few Available Templates

HubSpot Smart CRM lets you set up multi-step workflows for automating various marketing tasks, with the option to start from a template, create a workflow from scratch, or build one with AI. Most templates are available only with a paid subscription to HubSpot’s broader customer platform, except for the “Create and assign tasks when a new deal is created” option. As such, you’ll likely end up creating most of your workflows.

(Credit: HubSpot/PCMag)

The workflow builder is a visual designer with a left-hand toolbar for adding elements such as triggers and actions to a flowchart. You can also ask AI to find and enter elements for you. The system is fairly intuitive and doesn’t require coding knowledge. It’s also pretty similar to what I’ve found in other CRMs, such as Pipedrive.

My one frustration here is the inclusion of templates you can’t actually use if you’re on the CRM-only plan. Clicking on these templates opens an upsell page in a new tab, which is highly distracting.

Inbox: Effective, But Not as Flexible as Competitors

The Inbox conveniently integrates all communications channels you’ve synced with HubSpot into one spot, including email, phone calls, and chats. You can sort through all of it here, and the list updates dynamically as new messages arrive. However, this area focuses on team communications, with no clear option for separating individual agents’ inboxes—something common in other CRMs like Freshsales.

The email composer appears in an unusually small box in the right-hand corner and won’t let you enter your email’s subject or content until you’ve selected a recipient. After that, you get plenty of options, including typing out the email yourself, inserting a template or other content (such as articles from a knowledge base), or generating copy via HubSpot’s AI. The last choice is the least useful; it doesn’t offer the same range of tone or length options as similar tools from Pipedrive and others. The emails it created for me were highly generic.

Template creation and bulk emailing are possible through Smart CRM, but both have severe limitations. You need to pay for HubSpot’s email marketing suite or purchase a third-party tool to create dynamic campaigns.

Reports: Highly Customizable Dashboards, But Hidden Export Options

Reports and dashboards are essentially the same thing in HubSpot. You can select one of several canned reports, modify it, and save it under a different name. Unlike many competing CRMs, HubSpot lets you create reports entirely from scratch.

The custom report builder takes a little time to grasp, but it’s essentially a two-stage process. Stage one covers the basic data you’re looking to access (sales, marketing, service, and so on), as well as which subcategories you want (contacts or deals, for example, if your report is for sales). For the second stage, you move to a fairly intuitive report builder that lets you customize how data fields appear (e.g., a pie chart versus a bar chart). Additionally, you can use Breeze AI to generate custom reports.

(Credit: HubSpot/PCMag)

One oddity here is that there’s no immediately visible option for exporting your dashboards. Nonetheless, if you click the Share button and choose to email your report, the composer includes an area to select the file type (such as PNG or PDF) to convert it. I would prefer a one-step export option, something you get with Freshsales and Zoho CRM.

Integrations: A Nearly Endless Range of Options

You can get Smart CRM as part of the complete HubSpot customer platform or bundle it with individual HubSpot tools for email marketing, content management, and customer support. Together, these tools let you manage most of your business tasks in one place, though the cost of running them can be quite high.

HubSpot Smart CRM also connects with various third-party apps, including email marketing tools (such as MailChimp), financial apps (such as QuickBooks and Stripe), Google and Microsoft Office apps, and social media platforms (such as Facebook and LinkedIn). Over 2,400 app integrations are available in the HubSpot Marketplace, making it one of the most versatile CRMs I’ve tested.

Security: It Keeps Both Company Data and Individual Accounts Safe

HubSpot uses application-layer encryption to protect all user data, though it doesn’t state the specific protocol. HubSpot’s software and data centers also go through regular penetration testing and third-party audits to ensure its protocols are effective and meet the requirements of various security certifications, including HIPAA. You can see the details about certifications and incidents here.

As mentioned, HubSpot’s permissions settings give you granular control over what each user can see and modify. You can also set up two-factor authentication and single sign-on to ensure the security of individual accounts. Additionally, you can control the data that HubSpot’s AI can access (though limiting this access may also reduce its functionality).

Final Thoughts

HubSpot Smart CRM Review: Comprehensive Contact Management for Bigger Businesses

HubSpot Smart CRM offers excellent tools for nurturing customer relationships, leads, and deals, while its high-quality automation and AI make it especially suitable for larger companies.

Get It Now
Best DealVisit Site

Buy It Now