Hubspot CRM Review 2023: Is the Free Version Worth a Try?

Curious to know more about HubSpot CRM?

Is HubSpot CRM the real deal, or is it only popular because it’s free?

In our unbiased review of HubSpot CRM, you’ll get to know all of the nitty-gritty details.

We have covered:

1. Why HubSpot CRM is a good fit for your business.
2. The features, benefits, and most importantly, who is it not for.
3. How to set up HubSpot CRM in minutes, step by step.

We gave HubSpot CRM a try, and our one-line review of this free option is:

It’s simple, intuitive, and comes with notable features “under the hood.”

So, how can HubSpot CRM benefit you?

Quick Navigation

• Is It Worth a Try
• Features
• How to Set Up Your HubSpot CRM Account
• Pricing
• Pro & Cons of HubSpot CRM
• Conclusion

To know the answers, let’s dive straight into our HubSpot CRM reviews.

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Hubspot CRM Reviews: Is It Worth a Try? (Free CRM Software)

What is HubSpot CRM?

The first thing to note about HubSpot CRM is that it’s completely free. Yes, HubSpot CRM offers a free forever plan, so you can try all of their superb features without paying a cent.

HubSpot CRM is one of the leading CRM platforms currently available on the market. HubSpot enables businesses of all sizes to track, nurture leads and analyze business metrics with ease.

What’s more, HubSpot CRM seamlessly integrates with other tools and services. You can combine HubSpot CRM with its marketing services, sales strategies, and more.

If you’re a small business owner or a startup on a budget, you should consider trying HubSpot CRM, as it’s a completely free solution that is loaded with an extensive list of features.

The best part – you only need to pay if you’d like extra features that only a small percentage of businesses actually require.

With all that being said, let’s get to know what HubSpot CRM can do for you.

What Does Hubspot CRM Have to Offer?

As an online marketer, you are aware that CRM systems are all about combining support with in-depth marketing strategies and sales tools.

Running an online venture becomes much easier when utilizing a platform that can help you with lead generation, sales pipeline, deal stages, and more.

This is where HubSpot CRM shines.

After giving HubSpot CRM a shot, we discovered that it is more than just a contact management solution.

HubSpot CRM is well known for:

• Free forever plan
• Scalable CRM platform and marketing suite
• Intuitive dashboard for reporting performance

Apart from providing you with a database where you can store new contacts and social media followers, HubSpot CRM features everything you need to grow and nurture your database, not just organize it.

HubSpot provides one of the best free CRMs for tracking and connecting with customers easily.

Some of the advantages of using HubSpot CRM are as follows:

• Organizes the sales process
• Lets you track each buyer’s journey
• Provides website integration and effortless communication
• Allows you to automate various processes
• Provides free services and live chat sessions

HubSpot CRM is built for businesses of all sizes but is tailored specifically to startups, allowing them to nurture leads and analyze business metrics with ease.

Despite being free, it provides a powerful and engaging way to manage customer relationships.

HubSpot also enables you to create and manage email campaigns and track how your emails are performing. You can even get real-time notifications when a contact opens an email or downloads an attachment.

Overall, HubSpot CRM has much to offer – it is a one-stop solution for all your needs.

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Overview of Hubspot CRM’s Features

HubSpot CRM offers a variety of superb features for free that other competitors are charging a hefty amount for.

On top of that, HubSpot’s sales and marketing hub also come with a free version, allowing you to blend HubSpot CRM with a sales and marketing hub for free.

In addition to the free CRM, HubSpot offers a wealth of marketing freebies, including free training, free courses, a top-notch marketing blog, and other online resources to help you master their platform and reap the rewards.

Let’s Take an in-depth Look at Features That Hubspot Crm Has to Offer.

Intuitive Pipeline Dashboard (Everything in One Place)

Many of you might be looking for a CRM to create a sales funnel, meaning that you need an intuitive and clean dashboard where you can bring together all salespeople and easily check every potential client.

Luckily, HubSpot CRM has a stunning dashboard design that is straightforward and easy to use. With the dashboard, you can easily manage everything at your fingertips, from sorting deals, contracts, and more.

On the dashboard, HubSpot provides options for tracking performance and determining which of your salespeople are doing best. HubSpot CRM reveals nitty-gritty details about your entire dashboard and sales funnels in real-time.

HubSpot’s dashboard features:

• Stats on the dashboard are displayed in real-time so that your sales team gets the exact status of each lead.
• The design of the dashboard is intuitive, allowing your team to have a quick snapshot of your lead flow.
• It allows you to track your deals on the basis of performance and other criteria.
• Lets you sort and organize the dashboard, where you can extract almost any trend or dataset that you want to pull.

Automated & Simple Activity Logging

When you don’t deploy any CRM, customer interactions often get lost or archived in your email folders. Luckily, HubSpot CRM has a different approach, as it automatically records all of your customer interactions.

Whether it’s a phone call, email, or meeting, HubSpot automatically records all customer interactions so that you can pull them later.

HubSpot CRM logs every social media interaction, allowing you to effectively minimize the amount of time you must spend on social media.

HubSpot’s logging features work across different platforms. You and your team will always be aware of the exact status of every lead without any guesswork.

HubSpot CRM’s Activity Logging Features:

• Quickly visualize the status of any lead on the dashboard.
• Tracks interaction automatically, so you’ll get to know the status is up to date and current.
• Easily syncs with Gmail and Outlook to easily capture every interaction hassle-free.

Real-Time Chat

If you wish to improve the way customers interact with your brand, offer them a live chat.

When a visitor on your website has questions regarding your products, provide them with a real-time solution so that you never lose a lead when a visitor is curious about your service.

HubSpot CRM comes with live chat support for your business. Using the live chat feature, you can convert leads to potential paying customers if you provide them with friendly real-time support.

HubSpot CRM’s Real-Time Chat Features:

• Chat with visitors, prospects, and customers in real-time without a hassle.
• It comes with a universal inbox so that your team can respond to any customer or visitor inquiry instantly.
• Bot messages allow you to welcome leads, automate messages, collect emails, and more.
• Visitors and customers can have unlimited, personalized conversations with chatbots.

HubSpot Sales & Leads Tool

HubSpot CRM connects with its various sales and marketing tools. These different tools let you manage and book meetings or make calls right from the CRM’s dashboard.

Once you integrate the sales tool with the CRM, you can automate outreach, create and share email templates, easily follow up, track your pipelines, and much more.

You can easily sync it with the CRM to track down won, lost and in-progress deals, and even check which is your best-performing deal.

HubSpot CRM’s Sales Features:

• Uncover more leads in less time
• Automates the outreach process
• Creates trackable email templates so you know which one works for you
• Get instant notification once a lead opens your email or downloads attachments

Form Building

HubSpot CRM also lets you create fully mobile-optimized forms, pop-ups, banners, and slide-ins to easily convert visitors into leads. You can easily embed forms in any of your website’s pages.

Facebook and Instagram Leads Ads

With the help of HubSpot CRM, you can also create leads ads for Facebook or Instagram that automatically grab contact information.

Once it captures the contact information, it will then sync information directly with your HubSpot CRM account.

Integrations

HubSpot integrates with almost every tool and service out there – the email tools are compatible with Gmail, Outlook, Office 365, and more.

It also integrates with Google Drive and allows you to attach Dropbox files to your contacts and records for easy access.

There’s a large variety of integration options available for HubSpot CRM, ranging from a live chat and form builder to WordPress, Shopify, and much more.

Apart from third-party integrations, you can pair HubSpot CRM with its marketing and sales software. When you combine HubSpot CRM with HubSpot Sales, you can easily log emails in the CRM automatically and perform various actions.

Overall, HubSpot CRM integrates with almost every tool and service – you can check the complete list of integrations here.

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How to Set Up Your HubSpot CRM Account

Getting started with HubSpot is straightforward. However, if you’re new to HubSpot, you might feel a bit confused by the wide array of complex features.

To ease the process, we’ll walk through HubSpot CRM’s complete setup experience step by step.

Step #1: Create Your HubSpot Account

The very first step is to create a HubSpot account by clicking on the link here: https://www.hubspot.com/

Once you click the link, you’ll be redirected to the homepage. Simply click on the “Get HubSpot free” option, then select “Get free CRM”.

Now you need to fill out all the required information and personal details, such as your email, last name, first name, and password.

Step #2: Enter Your Website Information

In this step, enter your website details, such as your website’s URL and company name. Once done, click “Next.”

Step #3: Add Contacts & Companies

Next, enter basic details about your business, including how many people work at your company, the field you work in, and various other easy questions.

Once you’re done creating the account, you’ll get access to the HubSpot CRM dashboard where you can create new contacts, generate filters, and import or edit columns as per your needs.

Step #4: Add Tracking Code

In this step, you need to add a tracking code to your website.

You need to copy the snippet codes and place the codes right before the end of the tag on any page for which you want to enable HubSpot tracking.

Step #5: Import Your Contacts

This step is very crucial, as you’ll need to import fields to HubSpot CRM. To get started, click “Start an import.”

Now, choose the files that you want to import – you can select any file, opt-out list, or contact list that is stored in your Gmail account.

You can upload CSV, XLS, or XLSX files from your computer that are related to contacts, the company, deals, tickets, and product information.

You also have the option to choose from one file or multiple files with associations.

Once you select the file, click on the “Next” button.

Step #6: Send Invitations to Your Teammates

Once you have successfully added contacts and companies, HubSpot will send out emails and provide instructions for logging in.

In addition to that, you may send invitations to all your team members to join HubSpot CRM. Doing so will let you unify your company’s services that are provided to the customers.

Step #7: Define Goals & Create Deals

The deals feature of HubSpot CRM’s dashboard actually helps you with organizing your sales and tracking your progress.

By creating deals, you can manage multiple relations at once and define the deal stages and actions.

To start, click on the “Create Deal” button and simply move to the next stage.

When creating deals, simply enter the deal’s name, sales pipeline, stage, amount, contact, and other details. Fill out all the information carefully; once done, click on the “Create” button.

The information that you have entered will be displayed on the dashboard, and from there, you can view the status of your deal.

Addition Deals Setup:

From the dashboard, you can also delete deals, view property history, and much more.

If you want to create emails or make a call schedule, just click on the email, call, and meeting icon. Anyone who is interested in your deal can schedule a call right away.

Make sure you follow the steps listed above to calculate the deal forecast by evaluating the sales dashboard.

Step #8: Generate Lead Ad

Once you’re done creating deals, now it’s the time to generate new leads and enhance your business’ productivity.

To move further, click on “Marketing Ads.” Once you are redirected to another page, click on “Contact account” for creating relevant ads for every stage.

Then, click on the “Facebook” link and move ahead.

In this step, enter your email ID and password to help you sync leads and engage with people through the Facebook and Instagram desktop and mobile apps.

Once you’re done creating your ads targeting a specific audience, you can attract the contacts you have added to HubSpot CRM and easily increase your business’s productivity.

Following these steps, you should have successfully set up your HubSpot CRM account with ease. Play around with the dashboard a little and you’ll uncover all of the benefits of the feature.

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HubSpot CRM Pricing

HubSpot guarantees that its CRM platform is zero cost forever, which means that you don’t need to spend a dime to use it.

However, it’s important to know exactly what features you’re getting with the free plan.

The HubSpot CRM free plan includes:

Like other successful online ventures, HubSpot needs to make money to keep providing the best tools and platforms for marketers. Apart from its free CRM, HubSpot offers other services to enhance their CRM’s core. Let’s have a look at their premium services:

Marketing Hub

The Marketing Hub costs between $50 to $3,200 per month. All plans include advanced features that can help you turn your leads into potential paying customers.

Some of the highlighted features include popup forms, A/B testing, marketing automation, optimizing traffic and conversions, and more.

Sales Hub

The Sales Hub costs between $50 to $1,200 per month and is perfect for capturing and closing more deals. It comes with plenty of superb features, such as email tracking and notifications, deal stage automation, call transcriptions, and more.

Service Hub

The Service Hub costs between $50 to $1,200 per month and is the perfect bundle if you want to offer top-notch customer support to your clients.

The plan includes features like ticket routing, live chat, insights dashboard, customer experience surveys, and more.

HubSpot CMS

HubSpot CMS costs $300 per month, and handles all of your web presence needs quickly and efficiently. The CMS enables you to build powerful and optimized websites and comes with many excellent features, including landing pages, blogs, split testing, call-to-actions, forms, chatbots, and more.

The pricing plans offered by HubSpot are flexible and straightforward. The best part is that you will only need to pay for the tool or feature you’re going to use.

Most of the services offered by HubSpot are free, but if you feel that you still need to upgrade, consider upgrading to one of their paid plans.

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Pro & Cons of HubSpot CRM

Pros

• It’s completely free and includes unlimited users
• Provides live chat tools so you can enable live chat support for your business
• Allows you to customize everything for your brand and specific sales process
• Tracks your customer interactions and offers pro insights into customer behavior
• Blends perfectly with HubSpot’s marketing and sales platforms to get more dynamic results

Cons

• Relatively new compared to other CRMs
• Lacks flexibility for organizations with complex sales processes
• The best option for small business or startups, but too lightweight for large sales teams

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Is HubSpot CRM right for you?

HubSpot provides a perfect customer relation management platform for any business that wants to grow and nurture leads and customers effectively.

HubSpot CRM lets you organize leads in a simple way, where sales teams can close more deals and promote more offers without any hassle.

On top of that, it’s free, and once you explore HubSpot CRM’s intuitive dashboard, you’ll understand how easy it can be to grow and nurture your leads as well as your existing customers.

This service integrates with a variety of marketing apps that makes the life of a marketer even easier. You can attract more visitors to your site with the CRM’s free ad management tools, which helps you convert your visitors into potential paying customers.

HubSpot CRM is a good fit if you’re a small- to medium-sized business with 10-200 employees. For bigger businesses that have a complex sales process, this service lacks in flexibility and doesn’t include advanced features.

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HubSpot CRM Reviews in Conclusion

HubSpot offers a powerful and super flexible CRM that is easy to set up and get started with. Most importantly, it’s free, so you can try and test each feature on your own free of cost.

If you’re looking for a user-friendly and reputable CRM that actually simplifies the process, HubSpot CRM is worth a try.

We hope that our HubSpot CRM reviews helped provide you with deeper insights into HubSpot’s CRM.

Did you try any CRM for your business? What’s your experience with HubSpot CRM?

Feel free to comment below and let us know your thoughts!

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