Hubspot is one of the leading marketing solution providers out there. Designed as a platform for customer-facing teams, HubSpot provides marketing, sales, and customer relationship management (CRM) tools for businesses in a wide variety of industries.
Because you’re here, though, we’re going to assume you’re looking for something different.
Maybe you’re craving a solution that’ll grow with you. With all the building blocks, you need to customize a platform to suit you and your business.
To save you the leg work, we’ve put together this comprehensive guide to Hubspot, what it offers, and why we think monday.com just might be the alternative you’re looking for.
What exactly is Hubspot?
While Hubspot offers some broad functionality, where it shines is providing inbound marketing, sales, and service software.
Hubspot reaches customers through its 4 different hubs. No prizes for guessing the first up — it’s the Marketing Hub.
The Hubspot Marketing Hub helps you to deliver a marketing campaign.
You can plan content for digital marketing promotions, social media influencer collaborations, and email sequences.
In this space, you are able to stay on top of your lead management, track visitors to your landing page, and monitor the return on your investment with reporting and analytic tools.
There’s also:
- The Sales Hub: manage the sales pipeline, deepen customer relationships, and monitor sales rep performance.
- The Service Hub: deliver support and optimize the customer experience.
- The CMS Hub: develop and customize your website as your business grows.
While you can use the hubs alone, teams who want to get the most out of Hubspot should consider using them together.
Hubspot also integrates with a variety of apps, which is common among platforms in its weight class. These integrations allow users to expand HubSpot’s functionality and bring in the tools they already know and love.
There is also automation functionality. Whether that’s inbound marketing automation features or sales automation, Hubspot is happy to do the donkey work.
So, what’s a good alternative to Hubspot?
Hubspot is designed to support the efforts of marketing and sales teams in lead generation, tracking, follow-up, and closing.
But it doesn’t market itself as an all-singing, all-dancing CRM platform, and — sometimes — the 4 hubs feel like, well, 4 hubs.
The data handoff is good — the platform is supported by a single CRM tool that effectively manages contacts — but Hubspot is just a tool. If the way your marketing team works with your sales and support teams isn’t already on point, it’s not going to improve.
Plus, it’s not surprising — given the heavyweight nature of Hubspot’s marketing platform capabilities — that some of the other elements feel like afterthoughts.
Its project management tool, for example.
Didn’t know it had one? That might tell you all you need to know.
We think you can do better. To that end, we present monday.com.
What is monday.com?
monday.com’s Work OS is a digital workspace focused on connection and visibility. Totally customizable, it’s a series of building blocks that gives you the freedom to create and manage your work exactly the way you need to.Easy drag-and-drop functionality creates workflows for task delivery, automations can be set for manual, repetitive tasks, tool integrations make data silos a thing of the past, and effective reporting delivers insights that drive success.
Built around an easy-to-use dashboard, monday.com allows teams to manage their pipelines from one centralized command center. This means everyone stays in the loop, and nobody misses important tasks.
Can it deliver my marketing campaigns?
Given Hubspot’s reputation, the first thing you need to know is that monday.com can also run your marketing campaigns.
You can plan and organize all of your marketing activity — across all your channels — in our marketing calendar template.
And, you can use our campaign tracking template to keep tabs on the status of your campaigns and monitor their performance.
Then, take advantage of our colorful dashboards to share insight on your marketing efforts with key stakeholders so you can decide where to go next.
But don’t just take our word for it.
Tye Rapley-Hawkins, Head of Delivery at O2 Priority, Telefonica credits monday.com with helping them “become 30% more efficient at delivering hundreds of campaigns seen by millions of customers.”
Plus, our shared digital workspace helps boost collaboration with your sales teams, storing and organizing all your important customer data in one place. This allows you to manage the entire customer life cycle with a single solution and without breaking a sweat.
You can build your dream CRM solution easily with our ready-made templates and drag-and-drop interface, and let our custom automation tool do the heavy lifting on routine administration.
Want to know more? Check out our article to see all the ways monday.com can support your marketing strategy.
What are the differences between monday.com and Hubspot?
So, now we’ve got that out of the way, let’s focus on what else monday.com brings to the party.
The main difference between monday.com and Hubspot is that monday.com provides all the building blocks you need to scale your business — across all functions — as you grow.
You can start small, using the core functionality coupled with over 40 integrations to customize the solution you need.
Or — if you’re already established — you can enjoy the full power of monday.com’s Work OS.
Supporting all your business operations
Hubspot is focused on supporting marketing and sales teams.
But, if you’re one of the, umm, every business that has HR, finance, or IT departments well, wouldn’t it be nice to have a range of tools and templates to optimize those too?
For example, the monday.com Work OS has all the features you need to create an effective employee management system.
Our recruitment pipeline template helps you plan and track where candidates are in the process, and in-board collaboration means it’s easy to coordinate with hiring managers and internal departments for onboarding.
And, our HR dashboard helps you monitor recruitment performance against the indicators that matter to you. (The llamas are just for fun).
Finance can keep an eye on the purse strings with our budget tracker and IT operations are streamlined within one central workspace.
In a nutshell, wherever work is getting done in your organization, monday.com has a tool to help.
Expert project management capability
Let’s talk about Hubspot projects. We’re not going to lie, if you run anything more complicated than some pretty simple task management, Hubspot projects isn’t the tool for you.
You can create a list of deliverables, assign ownership, and add a due date. But that’s pretty much it.
If you want even core functionality — like dependency management, Gantt charts, or a project timeline view — you’ll need another solution. It hopefully won’t surprise you to know that monday.com has all that, and more.
We’ve no less than 8 different ways to view your data — including Kanban board, calendar, and timeline views. Our powerful Gantt charts allow you to control your baseline, manage dependencies, and track milestones throughout the project life cycle.
The workload feature allows you to monitor resource capacity in real-time and allocate team members effectively to get the job done.
Information from budget trackers, resource planning, and progress status updates feeds high-level reporting dashboards, so you always have the latest data at your fingertips.
And collaboration within — and between — teams is easy with file sharing, live document annotation, and in-platform communication.
Whether it’s keeping on top of your own workload or delivering a multi-million dollar construction project, monday.com provides everything you need to get the job done.
Hubspot alternatives FAQ
Hopefully, you’re now pretty clear on what Hubspot is, what it’s great at, and how we think monday.com can fill in some of the gaps.
Let’s wrap up with a quick-fire FAQ of some common Hubspot questions.
Is Hubspot really free?
Yes and no. Hubspot does offer a free version of its CRM tool, but you’ll need to upgrade to its premium option for full functionality, and access to the Hubs.
monday.com is a premium service that offers a 14-day trial free of charge. When taking part in this trial period, you’re able to access the whole of monday.com’s features, so you can make an informed decision before throwing down any money.
Who is Hubspot for?
Hubspot, technically, is for everyone. The free access to its CRM software means even businesses with a smaller budget can take advantage.
However, Hub access can get pricey pretty quickly.
Using the Marketing Hub depends on the number of contacts you want to market to and — while its basic edition is reasonably priced — leveling up to an enterprise plan costs a hefty $3,200/month plus onboarding fee.
monday.com has a number of pricing tiers, ranging from super small businesses to massive enterprise-level corporations, making it perfect for organizations of all sizes.
What’s the customer support like?
With Hubspot’s free plan, you can ask questions of its “community” — basically other users like yourself.
The “Starter” plan has access to customer support via live chat and email. With the “Professional” or “Enterprise” plan you also get phone support.
Platform onboarding is supported by its “Knowledge Base” collection of how-to articles, and there’s video training in the Hubspot Academy.
monday.com also has a full knowledge base, webinars, community forums, and video tutorials, along with a 24/7 support team that is on hand to take your queries.
With the monday.com Enterprise plan, you even get your own dedicated customer success manager.
Opt for the alternative that supports your whole business
Hubspot has a big player reputation in the inbound marketing arena for a reason. It’s good at what it does. But, looking past its prowess as a marketing tool, there are some gaps.
If you’re doing any kind of serious project management — or you just want a fully customizable Work OS that grows with you as you scale your business — we’d say that monday.com is the platform for you.
Join the 100,000 other teams getting work done with monday.com today.
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