Hubspot and Zoho are Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems. These systems provide a way to track the complete customer journey in a central location. All information about a customer is stored in a single place; this includes inbound leads, sales, onboarding, and customer success.
Both Hubspot and Zoho have similar features, though the most significant difference is that Hubspot provides a simpler and faster option to get you running. In contrast, Zoho can give a more advanced and customized solution if you have the resources to develop and configure it.
Keep reading as we compare these two CRM systems to see what they offer and if either option is suitable for your business’s needs.
| Hubspot | Zoho | |
| Free / Trial Options | Free lifetime with limited features | Free lifetime with limited features |
| Workflow Automation | Yes | Yes |
| Customization | Dashboard customizations | Full customization available |
| Social Media Monitoring | Yes | Yes, Social Listening Dashboards. |
| Lead Management | Yes | Yes |
| Real-time Data | Yes | Yes |
| CRM Analytics | Yes | Yes |
| Sales Forecasting | Yes | Yes |
| Email Integration | Limited | Yes |
| Prebuilt Third-party Integrations | Yes, numerous. Dropbox Zoom Webex Zendesk Mailgun | Yes, numerous. Google Drive Zoom Webex Salesforce Sendgrid |
| API Support | Yes, limited on some tiers. | Yes |
Hubspot vs. Zoho: Pricing
Hubspot and Zoho have different pricing options. Hubspot starts out with a free tier that provides a huge range of features for businesses that may not require a paid subscription. While the Zoho free tier has limited features suitable for a home-based business. Hubspot wins in the pricing category for this reason.
A big drawback is that Hubspot forces a minimal user license purchase as you move up to more advanced options, while Zoho lets you pay for any tier at a per-user cost and is even cheaper per user.
| Hubspot | Zoho | |
| 2 Standard Users | $50 / Month | $40 / Month |
| 10 Enterprise Users | $1,200 / Month | $1,000 / Month |
Who is Hubspot Best Suited For?
Hubspot is an excellent option for businesses that want a free CRM with a good set of available features that don’t require payment. The free tier is a lifetime account, so you can continue to use it as long as those features meet your needs.
If you’re willing to pay a lot more, then Hubspot opens up a more comprehensive range of enterprise features, which are well outside the budget of most small businesses. So Hubspot is great for free and enterprise but won’t meet the needs of many small to medium-sized companies.
Who is Zoho Best Suited For?
Zoho is best suited for businesses that want to fully customize their CRM, build new integrations, and get advanced features from a CRM product. Unfortunately, to do all of this, you require dedicated development resources to spend time to build the customizations, which is often not suited to smaller businesses.
If you simply need a CRM to work out of the box and get up and running quickly, then Zoho will not be a good option, especially if you don’t have development resources to work on it.
Hubspot vs. Zoho: Features
Hubspot and Zoho both offer similar features depending on which plans you’re comparing. While Zoho can’t compete at the free option Hubspot offers, Hubspot does not provide full API support to all plans, which I feel is crucial even to smaller businesses, so Zoho wins the overall feature comparison.
Let’s review some of the other features that may be more important to you if customization and API support aren’t required for your CRM product.
Lead Management
Hubspot lets you store more leads than Zoho in the lower tier plans, though both have unlimited leads if you’re willing to pay more. But with Zoho, you may not need as many contacts or leads.
Zoho has some excellent lead management automations that Hubspot can’t beat. A lead is only added to the system if it meets specific minimum requirements that you set. You have automations to email the lead with some initial information; then based on the criteria you selected, the lead is assigned to a specific sales rep geared towards their requirements.
For lead management, Zoho is the superior tool in my opinion, with all the automation that it provides, especially if you’re dealing with a lot of leads.
Order Management
Zoho CRM does not provide this functionality out of the box, and you need to buy one of their other products to get it. So if including order management into your CRM is required, then it’s going to cost you more if you’re using Zoho.
Hubspot does offer an order management module as part of its CRM product. You can track the entire process, which is great if you’re dealing with physical products.
Customization
Hubspot allows you to customize dashboards, but that’s where your customization options end. You also must have an enterprise tier plan to get the full use out of the API, so pulling and pushing data to external custom systems may be limited as well.
With Zoho, you can completely customize the user interface to exactly what you need; you can even build custom modules to include into the user interface, which is a massive advantage if you need additional functionality and you have developers.
Analytics
Having full access to how your sales are doing, retention of customers and everything else about your business is crucial. Both Zoho and Hubspot offer complex reporting in similar areas.
The biggest issue is reporting is that Hubspot limits what you can do depending on your pricing plan. As with many of their features, you need higher-level plans to get customized reporting, or automated reporting of specific reports you want is not possible.
Zoho provides all reporting options to all paid plans and in almost any format that you want. You even have a prebuilt module that will alert you to any strange things happening in your data. Perhaps sales significantly dropped, or leads have dried up from specific channels. It’s essential information for you to review that only Zoho is offering.
Implementation Time
One of the significant benefits of Zoho is that it allows you to customize the product fully. However, out of the box, it doesn’t get you running as quickly as Hubspot that lets you almost instantly get up and running with all features ready to go and use.
So if you’re looking for a quick implementation to start using your CRM right now, then Hubspot is the better option.
Hubspot vs. Zoho: Verdict
Hubspot and Zoho are pretty evenly matched overall, though each provides benefits in different feature sets and for different types of companies. I can’t say that one is hugely better than the other based on my review of them.
You will need to look at each of the features that are important to you, the cost of licensing from each product, and then decide based on those factors.
Hubspot vs. Zoho: Which is Better?
Hubspot is better for customers with enough money to pay for the higher tier of features and want to instantly get their CRM up and running without any development work.
In addition, Hubspot offers a superior free option if customers don’t need advanced automation offers and just want basic CRM functionality for life.
If you’re in the middle tiers, then the features are less, and your access to the API is limited by features and how many requests you can make per day. So what you need out of the API and how many requests you’ll need to make will also determine what plan you’d need, which could indicate you need the more expensive tier.
Click here to sign up for Hubspot.
Zoho is a better option for customers that want a fully customized CRM and have the developers available to make it happen. If there are features you want but aren’t readily available in either CRM, then Zoho allows you to build it straight into the product.
The API is available for all plans meaning that no matter what tier you’re at, you can pull reporting data, input customer information, build complex workflows and integrations. For me, this is a significant advantage of Zoho and makes it my preference between the products.
Click here to sign up for Zoho.
