HubSpot Marketing Hub review

HubSpot Marketing Hub review: 1 minute summary

If you are a 1-army business, I don’t feel you’re the right fit for the HubSpot Marketing Hub. Instead, you can find a more affordable tool that can do a better job at email marketing than HubSpot can. Suppose you are working in a bigger team or need to report the results of your work to your superior or your customers, HubSpot Marketing Hub is an excellent choice.

The pros and cons of HubSpot Marketing Hub’s paid plans:

To support our work, please consider using our affiliate link if you plan to sign up for a free or paid plan at no extra cost to you. Thank you!

creatoregg.com/hubspot

HubSpot review: Free Plan

The pros and cons of HubSpot’s free plan:

HubSpot Marketing Hub review: Pricing

• Complex pricing structure at first glance
• Relatively expensive compared to solely email marketing software
• Onboarding fees when subscribing to Professional or Enterprise plans

Hubspot’s pricing can be confusing at first glance.

1. Marketing Hub
2. Sales Hub
3. Service Hub
4. CMS Hub
5. Operations Hub

Each of these five categories offers a Starter plan, a Professional plan, and an Enterprise plan.

For example, the Marketing Hub offers email marketing features similar to email marketing businesses such as AWeber, ConvertKit, Sendinblue, etcetera.

Is HubSpot Marketing Hub expensive?

Comparing HubSpot Marketing Hub’s price with, for example, sole email marketing tools mentioned earlier, its price often is 5 to 10 times higher depending on the plan you’re comparing. So why?

HubSpot customers pay for ease of use, meaning; that if you need an email marketing tool, a sales tool, a CRM tool, etcetera, you usually need to find 3-5 different tools. The next challenge is to integrate all of them, which takes time. Although this is convenient, it can quickly become costly. Note that the average customer pays around $900 per month for using HubSpot.^[1]

The answer to whether or not HubSpot is expensive is that it depends on your needs and situation. For example, suppose you need multiple features that HubSpot offers. In that case, you either need to find individual tools that do a similar job and possibly integrate them or choose one platform that can do it all, HubSpot, and accept the higher monthly price. The other big advantage of HubSpot for agencies and bigger teams is its reporting features. Bigger teams and agencies often need to report monthly if not weekly on their marketing or sales performance to their customers or superiors. HubSpot offers a quick and easy way to generate dashboards and reports of your full marketing efforts. Whereas you might need to use Excel to combine 3-5 tools’ data to create a dashboard it can be done easily inside HubSpot.

HubSpot’s Onboarding fees (hidden costs)

Why call it hidden costs? They don’t mention these prices clearly on their pricing page. To see the total price, including the Onboarding fees, you need to scroll to the bottom of the page and click on a small text link, ‘View price breakdown.’

The onboarding fee is a one-time fee that is required if you subscribe to their Professional or Enterprise plan of one of their five categories. There’s no onboarding fee when subscribing to the Starter plan, though. But if you ever upgrade, you must also purchase the onboarding fee. And to ensure you fully understand, this one-time onboarding fee will be added to your first monthly bill. So, in the first month, you pay the recurring subscription fees of your chosen plan and the one-time onboarding fee.

You can find the onboarding fee prices below.

• Marketing Hub Professional Onboarding (required): $3,000 one-time fee (See a sample plan here.)
• Marketing Hub Enterprise Onboarding (required): $6,000 one-time fee
• Sales Hub Professional Onboarding (required): $500 one-time fee (See a sample plan here.)
• Sales Hub Enterprise Onboarding (required): $3,000 one-time fee
• Service Hub Professional Onboarding (required): $500 one-time fee (See a sample plan here.)
• Service Hub Enterprise Onboarding (required): $3,000 one-time fee

There are no Onboarding fees for:

• All Starter plans
• CMS Hub Professional
• CMS Hub Enterprise
• Operations Hub Professional
• Operations Hub Enterprise

Onboarding with one of HubSpot’s partners

Instead, it’s also possible to choose one of HubSpot’s partners and use their onboarding service. According to one of HubSpot’s Account Executives I spoke to by email, the partner onboarding fees are usually the same. It depends on your employee’s current knowledge of HubSpot and company goals to see what onboarding plan works best.

How to get the Onboarding fee waived

In rare circumstances, getting the HubSpot’s onboarding fee waived is possible if you can prove that your company’s employees have a deep knowledge of HubSpot’s software and there’s no need for any onboarding help.

HubSpot review: Email Marketing Campaigns

Free plan limitations: Email Marketing Campaigns

• You can’t remove the HubSpot logo from your newsletters. You need to upgrade to the Starter plan to remove the logo. Although it looks unprofessional to have a logo of HubSpot below every newsletter, I haven’t seen an email marketing tool that doesn’t add its logo to the newsletters inside a free plan. So, this isn’t the worst.
• You can add your custom email address but can’t connect and authenticate an email sending domain. This is possible in the Starter plan.
• You can’t send more than 2,000 emails per month. This limit isn’t the best compared to the sending limit of free plans of other email marketing tools. The limit to the number of contacts you can have is 1,000,000.
• You can create a maximum of 5 active lists and 1,000 static lists.
• You can create a maximum of 10 custom properties.
• You can create a maximum of 1 automated action.
• You can’t use any of HubSpot’s designer email templates. For that, you need to upgrade to the Marketing Hub Starter plan.

Starter plan limitations: Email Marketing Campaigns

• You can’t send more than 5 times your marketing contact limit monthly. So, for example, if you are on the Starter plan with 1,000 contacts, you can send 5,000 marketing emails (newsletters) monthly. A limit of 5X isn’t that much. I have a list of around 10,000 marketing contacts with my business and send around 120,000 emails per month. I send two weekly newsletters and have an automated workflow for new people joining my list. So, that’s around 10 to 12X my contact number.
• You can’t use Smart content rules. Although this feature is pretty neat, it isn’t necessary to run a successful email marketing campaign.
• You can’t create A/B tests. A/B tests are fun, but you need at least 1,000 contacts to succeed with A/B testing. The reason is that the fewer contacts you have, the less reliable the A/B test is.
• You can’t save your emails as a template. It is not the worst thing that you can’t save your emails to reuse them later. Still, this feature is typically included in a paid plan of other email marketing tools.
• You can’t schedule your emails based on your recipients’ time zone.
• You can create a maximum of 25 active lists and 1,000 static lists.
• You can create a maximum of 1,000 custom properties.
• You can create a maximum of 10 automated actions. For example, a few automated welcome emails. Note that you also can create 10 automated actions per form.
• You can’t perform an action when a link is clicked inside an email. For example, change a contact’s property for segmentation purposes. To do this, you need its Calls-to-action (CTA) feature, which is only available in HubSpot Marketing Hub’s Professional plan.

Professional plan limitations: Email Marketing Campaigns

• You can’t create multiple footers. If you want to this you need to upgrade to the Enterprise plan.
• You can’t use the email frequency safeguard feature. If you want to this you need to upgrade to the Enterprise plan.
• You can create a maximum of 1,000 active lists and 1,000 static lists.
• You can create a maximum of 1,000 custom properties.
• You can send up to 10X your marketing contacts number. So, if you have 10,000 marketing contacts you can send 100,000 emails monthly.

Enterprise plan limitations: Email Marketing Campaigns

• You can send up to 20X your marketing contacts number. So, if you have 10,000 marketing contacts you can send 200,000 emails monthly.

General limitations: Email Marketing Campaigns

• Can’t easily tweak the content of the subscription preferences page. You need to have coding experience.

HubSpot review: Forms

Free plan limitations: Forms

• You can’t remove the HubSpot logo from your opt-in forms. For that, you need to have the Marketing Hub Starter plan, which is too bad, making the forms feature inside the free version far less valuable.
• You can create a maximum of 1 automated email per form, which is nice! For example, you can use the automated email (marketing automation) to deliver a free ebook/report.
• You can create unlimited number of forms.
• All forms are available, such as the pop-up form, embedded form, etcetera.

Starter plan limitations: Forms

• You can’t customize the form embed code.
• You can’t use the Dependent fields.
• You can’t use Smart fields.

If you want to use any of the above features you need to upgrade to the Professional plan. But I think the extra Forms features inside the Professional and Enterprise plan aren’t that big of a deal. I haven’t used those features in my email marketing campaigns, and I gain 50+ new subs daily.

General limitations in regards to forms

I’m not a big fan of HubSpot’s Forms. The reason is that they lack features I use every day and are common inside other email marketing tools. See the list below:

• There’s no option to trigger a popup when someone clicks a button on your website.^[8]
• There’s no option to redirect already subscribed contacts to thank you page when they try to opt-in for a free ebook, for example.
• Can’t create a custom double opt-in confirmation email or page for an opt-in form. There’s only one double opt-in confirmation email and page.
• Letting people resubscribe to your newsletter is weird and cumbersome for both parties; you as a HubSpot Marketing Hub customer and the one trying to resubscribe.^[8]

HubSpot review: Landing Pages

Free plan limitations in regards to landing pages

• You can create up to 20 landing pages, which is a decent amount compared to similar tools.
• You can’t remove the HubSpot branding on your landing pages. To remove its branding you need to upgrade to Starter.
• And you will have the limitations of the free and professional plan too.
• You can add your own custom domain to your landing pages and for the website you can create, which is nice! Not many marketing tools allow you to add a custom domain inside the free plan.

Starter plan limitations in regards to landing pages

• You don’t have access to the entire landing page template library.
• You can’t use Smart content rules. Although this feature is pretty neat, it isn’t necessary to create a good landing page.
• You can’t create A/B tests. A/B tests are fun, but you need at least 1,000 landing page visitors to succeed with A/B testing. The reason is that the fewer visitors you have, the less reliable the A/B test is.
• And you will have the limitations of the professional plan too.

Professional plan limitations in regards to landing pages

• You can’t create adaptive tests for your landing pages.

HubSpot review: Other Marketing Hub features

In my opinion, the above features are the most important and used features of the HubSpot Marketing Hub.

Obviously, like any marketing tool, they offer way more features. See the list below for more of HubSpot’s features.

• Ad management – You can connect your ad accounts to your HubSpot account, track their performance, and see what ads generate new leads. You can connect Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Google.
• Shared inbox – You can set up a shared inbox for all incoming emails, live chats, and social media chats.
  • Free & Starter – limited to 1 inbox
  • Professional & Enterprise – Up to 100 inboxes
• Team email – You can connect your team email addresses to a universal inbox, which is nice if you want multiple employees to reply to customer emails.
• Live chat – HubSpot offers you to add a live chat function to your website.
  • Free plan – Includes HubSpot branding.
  • Starter plan and up – No HubSpot branding.
• Basic bots – You can create a chat bot for your live chat.
  • Some plans have limitations.
• Product library – You can add the products and services you sell inside HubSpot and add those to deals. This will allow you to create reports and see the performance of these products.
  • Up to 1 million produts. Only available in the Professional and Enterprise plan.
• Ad conversion events – Inside HubSpot, you can create an event to sync your HubSpot CRM lifecycle stage to your ad accounts. For example, when you change the stage of a contact from lead to a customer inside your HubSpot CRM, you want to stop Facebook ads from targeting that contact.
  • Not available in the Free and Starter plan.
  • Professional plan – Up to 50 events.
  • Enterprise plan – Up to 100 events.
• Contact create attribution – You can assign credit to what marketing channel attributed to a new lead/contact. This can be interesting to use if you’re a marketing agency and create monthly reports for your customers to showcase your hard work pays off.
  • Not available in the Free and Starter plan.
  • Professional & Enterprise plan – Track up to 10,000 logged contact interactions
• Standard contact scoring – Create rules-based scoring criteria. For example, you can add 1 or more points to a contact when they have filled out one of your forms. Another example is that you subtract points from a contact when they haven’t opened any of your emails in the last X days. You can use many data points to add or subtract points and use this contact scoring to perform an action. For example, you can create a task for your sales employee to contact a lead when they reach X contact scoring points.
  • Not available in the Free and Starter plan.
  • Professional plan – 5 contact scoring properties + 5 total deal and company scoring properties.
  • Enterprise plan – 25 contact scoring properties + 5 total deal and company scoring properties.
• Reporting dashboard – Create custom dashboards to track your marketing performance.Some plans have limitations.
• Marketing asset comparison reporting – You can compare the performance of up to 10 marketing emails, forms, campaigns, or social media posts.Only available in the Professional and Enterprise plan.
• Custom reporting – You can build custom reports and use all the different data points inside HubSpot, such as deal data, marketing engagement data, etceteraNot available in the Free and Starter plan.
  • Professional plan – Up to 100 custom reports.
  • Enterprise plan – Up to 500 custom reports.
• Campaign reporting – Inside HubSpot, you can create campaigns, add so-called assets to that campaign, and track its performance. For example, you can add forms, landing pages, emails, social posts, ad campaigns, etcetera. You can then see how many people have reached with that particular campaign and compare it to other campaigns. Again, a handy tool when reporting the results of your work to your superior or customer.
  • Not available in the Free and Starter plan.
  • Professional & Enterprise plan – 1,000 campaigns per portal.
• Target accounts home – Instead of using contacts separately, you can combine multiple contacts into 1 account. Also called an account-based strategy. For example, you often speak with numerous people from the same company when selling more significant projects. For instance, inside the Target Accounts tab, you have an overview of all the accounts and their data.
  • Only available in the Professional and Enterprise plan.

• Social media – You can connect to your Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn profile to publish updates and monitor their performance.
  • Only available in the Professional and Enterprise plan.
  • Note that the native Instagram app allows you to post up to 10 photos and videos as a single post. Nevertheless, HubSpot Marketing Hub Social doesn’t have the option to post more than one image or video, making this feature far less valuable since Insta’s best practice is to utilize this feature and post more than one image in one post. Furthermore, in the HubSpot community area, HubSpot users have requested this feature since 2018.^[6] And it’s not that such a feature is impossible to create since there are software tools that allow you to post multi-image posts, such as Later.com. You can post up to four images when posting for Facebook, though.
• Dynamic personalization – You can create dynamic pages with this feature. The only downside is that it is not a straightforward process, and I feel you need to have some sort of developer experience to create these dynamic pages. But once you do, for example, you can use it for creating X dynamic landing pages for a lawyer that provides X number of services to people in various cities. Instead of creating hundreds of landing pages, you can create 1 landing page and use dynamic content to create variations of that landing page.
  • Only available in the Professional and Enterprise plan.

HubSpot Marketing Hub alternatives

Salesforce

MailerLite

ConvertKit

MailChimp

AWeber

GetResponse

Constant Contact

ActiveCampaign

Sendinblue

Frequently asked questions

Will HubSpot still be here in 3, 5 or 10 years?

It’s no secret that HubSpot is one of the most popular marketing software companies around. But how healthy is HubSpot financially? Since HubSpot is a publicly-traded company, they have to release every little detail about its business. It would be best if you cared about this because you don’t want to invest your valuable time, energy, and money into a product that will go bankrupt.

About HubSpot

• Dharmesh Shah and Brian Halligan co-founded HubSpot. According to one of the first captures of the Wayback Machine, they scheduled the beta release of their first software version to go live in November 2005.^[3]
• The core business idea of HubSpot when it launched back in 2005/2006 was to offer software features enterprise businesses used for a fraction of the cost and complexity. How? They integrated the most popular enterprise software features inside one platform: HubSpot. They market it as Internet Marketing Software that enables you to get more website visitors and more leads without the need for IT staff to help.
• HubSpot announced its IPO in October 2014.
• According to a Simplywall.st article, insiders own 4.9% of HubSpot’s shares.^[4] And according to Forbes, co-founder Dharmesh Shah owns 3.4% making his stake in the company worth more than $1 billion.^[5]

Customers

• In 2014, HubSpot reported having 11,500 customers in over 70 countries.^[2]
• HubSpot reported growing its customer number to 135,442 on December 31, 2021, up 30% from December 31, 2020. Average Subscription Revenue Per Customer was $10,875 during the fourth quarter of 2021, up 11% compared to the fourth quarter of 2020.^[1] And to give you a better perspective, that’s around $900 on average per month per customer.

Employees

• In 2022, according to HubSpot’s about page they have 6,400 employees around the world.

Revenue

• In 2021, HubSpot’s total revenue was $1.30 billion, up 47% compared to 2020. Subscription revenue was $1.26 billion, up 48% compared to 2020. Professional services and other revenue was $42.3 million, up 41% compared to 2020. ^[1]

HubSpot Marketing Hub review: Conclusion

The basic features of email marketing are sending regular newsletters, automation, forms, and landing pages. Although HubSpot offers these features, I won’t call them the best in email marketing. Some email growth tactics I use daily can’t be done with HubSpot, such as clickable popup forms when offering a freebie. Or redirecting already subscribed people to a thank you page when they try to download one of your freebies. These are just some practical examples that sole email marketing tools DO offer, such as ActiveCampaign.

Furthermore, I’m not a big fan of their sending limitations when sending newsletters to marketing contacts. So, for example, in the Professional plan, you can only send 10X your marketing contact number, which isn’t that much if you send two or more newsletters per week.

It all comes down to the strategy you follow inside your business. Maybe the email growth tactics I use daily you don’t.

Lastly, HubSpot’s strong suit is its wide range of features. Because its Marketing Hub features I discussed in this review aren’t the only features, HubSpot has to offer. Especially when working in a bigger team, HubSpot is an excellent solution. So, for example, if your sales team works in tool X, your marketing team in tool Y, and your customer service team in tool Z, it is hard(er) to keep a good overview. HubSpot has excellent reporting features where you can combine all this data. So there’s no need to create spreadsheets and copy-paste data from the various marketing tools, like sales data, social media, email marketing, live chat, etc.

But suppose you just want to try building an email list without the need for all the other marketing bells and whistles. In that case, I feel you’re better off using a more straightforward email tool like MailerLite.

References

1. HubSpot Reports Q4 and Full Year 2021 Results. (2022, February 10). HubSpot. Retrieved May 6, 2022, from https://ir.hubspot.com/news/hubspot-reports-q4-and-full-year-2021-results
2. Fleishman, H. (2014, October 16). HubSpot Announces Closing of Initial Public Offering. HubSpot. Retrieved May 6, 2022, from https://www.hubspot.com/company-news/hubspot-announces-closing-of-initial-public-offering
3. HubSpot Homepage Nov 2005. (2005, November 1). HubSpot. Retrieved May 6, 2022, from https://web.archive.org/web/20051125222638/hubspot.com/
4. Co-Founder Dharmesh Shah Just Bought A Handful Of Shares In HubSpot, Inc. (NYSE:HUBS). (2022, May 21). Simply Wall St News. Retrieved June 7, 2022, from https://simplywall.st/stocks/us/software/nyse-hubs/hubspot/news/co-founder-dharmesh-shah-just-bought-a-handful-of-shares-in
5. Tognini, G. (2021, December 18). Surging HubSpot Stock Makes Software Firm’s Cofounder A Billionaire. Forbes. Retrieved June 7, 2022, from https://www.forbes.com/sites/giacomotognini/2021/09/14/surging-hubspot-stock-makes-software-firms-cofounder-a-billionaire-cloud-dharmesh-shah/?sh=34c3e7f14498
6. Multiple Pics in Social Posts. (2018, August 2). HubSpot Community. Retrieved June 8, 2022, from https://community.hubspot.com/t5/Social-Tools/Multiple-Pics-in-Social-Posts/m-p/200378
7. Creatoregg.com. (2022, June 9). HubSpot customer support experience [Video]. WordPress. http://creatoregg.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/2022-06-09-13-26-04.mp4
8. Alassman. (2019, July 15). Popup form triggered by clicking a CTA button. HubSpot. Retrieved June 9, 2022, from https://community.hubspot.com:443/t5/HubSpot-Ideas/Popup-form-triggered-by-clicking-a-CTA-button/idi-p/280609
9. A simple way to let users resubscribe to emails. (2020, October 28). HubSpot. Retrieved June 16, 2022, from https://community.hubspot.com/t5/HubSpot-Ideas/A-simple-way-to-let-users-resubscribe-to-emails/idi-p/382365/page/2