Discover folk - the CRM for people-powered businesses
Considering a new CRM system? HubSpot and Brevo are two widely-used platforms that help businesses manage customer relationships and boost engagement. HubSpot offers an all-in-one solution with powerful marketing, sales, and customer service tools, making it a popular choice for growing businesses in need of a comprehensive CRM. Brevo, meanwhile, focuses on multi-channel communication, with email marketing, SMS, and CRM features tailored for small to mid-sized businesses looking to improve customer outreach. In this blog post, we’ll explore key features, ease of use, pricing, and more. However, if you’re looking for a versatile solution that combines simplicity with robust contact management, we'll show you why folk CRM might be a better alternative.
What is HubSpot?
HubSpot CRM is a user-friendly, scalable platform offering integrated tools for managing sales, marketing, customer service, and operations efficiently.
Key features of HubSpot
- Marketing hub: Includes email marketing, ad tracking, landing pages, and lead generation tools.
- Sales hub: Provides deal tracking, pipeline management, sales automation, and reporting.
- Service Hub: Offers customer service tools like ticketing, live chat, and knowledge bases.
- Operations hub: Syncs and automates business processes across different systems.
- Lead scoring: Prioritize leads with predictive scoring to improve sales efficiency.
What is Brevo?
Brevo, formerly known as Sendinblue, is a comprehensive customer relationship management (CRM) and email marketing platform tailored for small to mid-sized businesses. Brevo offers a wide range of tools, including email and SMS marketing, chat, CRM, and marketing automation to help businesses effectively engage with their audience across multiple channels.
Key features of Brevo
- Marketing platform: Provides tools for email, SMS, and WhatsApp campaigns, as well as marketing automation to improve multi-channel campaign engagement and streamline marketing efforts.
- Sales platform: Helps manage pipelines and track sales activities with tools like automated deal tracking, meeting scheduling, and call recording, making it easier for teams to follow leads and close deals.
- Conversations platform: Allows businesses to offer customer support through live chat, a shared inbox, and multi-channel communication solutions, ensuring seamless customer interaction.
- Customer data platform: Enables businesses to unify, manage, and analyze customer data across platforms with a multi-table data model, sourcing library, and customer analytics, improving data-driven decisions.
- Messaging API: Provides APIs for sending emails, SMS, and WhatsApp messages, with features for transactional emails, inbound parsing, and integrations with other applications for customized communication.
HubSpot vs. Brevo: Feature Comparison
Let's break down the key features of two CRM software solutions and take a closer look at their sales automation, email marketing tools, and contact management.
1. Sales pipeline management
HubSpot's pipeline management feature provides a visual overview of deals, allowing users to track the progress of sales opportunities, customize stages, and automate tasks for a more efficient sales process. It offers robust analytics and reporting tools to help teams make data-driven decisions.
Brevo's pipeline feature is designed to help manage the sales process by offering custom deal pipelines. It enables teams to track deals across various stages and organize tasks for follow-ups and meetings. Users can customize deal stages to match their sales cycle and automate some repetitive tasks. The feature also supports bulk contact import, allowing teams to link contacts and deals for easier organization.
2. Ease of use
HubSpot is renowned for its intuitive interface, making it accessible for users of all experience levels. Brevo, while user-friendly, may require a bit more navigation to master its full range of features thanks to its nature as an email marketing platform all-in-one. Both platforms offer robust support resources to help users maximize their CRM experience.
3. Contact enrichment
HubSpot's Breeze Intelligence simplifies data collection by automatically populating known information, enhancing user experience and efficiency. This feature streamlines form filling, ensuring data accuracy and reducing manual entry. Brevo includes contact enrichment capabilities as part of its Customer Data Platform. This feature allows businesses to unify, manage, and sync customer data, making it easier to create a more complete customer profile.
4. Outreach
HubSpot's email marketing tool offers a drag-and-drop editor and A/B testing for subject lines, enhancing campaign personalization. Brevo excels with its multi-channel outreach capabilities, including email, SMS, and WhatsApp marketing.
5. Automation
HubSpot provides robust automation for marketing, sales, and customer service, automating tasks like lead nurturing and email campaigns. Brevo offers automation across its platforms, with tools for email, SMS, and WhatsApp campaigns based on customer behavior, along with AI-driven personalization to enhance engagement.
6. Integration
HubSpot's App Marketplace boasts over 1,500 integrations, allowing seamless connection with a wide range of tools to enhance its CRM capabilities. This extensive integration network supports diverse business needs, ensuring that users can tailor their CRM experience to their specific requirements. Brevo offers extensive integration options, connecting with over 150 digital tools, including CRM, CMS, e-commerce, and analytics platforms. This allows businesses to easily sync data across systems, streamlining workflows and enhancing the functionality of their existing tech stack.
7. Artificial intelligence
HubSpot utilizes AI to optimize sales and marketing by automating data entry, lead scoring, and email personalization. It provides insights for sales forecasting and recommends content based on customer behavior. Brevo's AI focuses on email marketing, personalizing and optimizing content to boost engagement.
Price and plans comparison
Let's take a closer look at the price and plans of both HubSpot and Brevo.
HubSpot prices
HubSpot's sales hub price plans are as follows.
- Starter: $20 per user, per month.
- Professional: $100 per user, per month.
- Enterprise: $150 per user, per month.
Brevo prices
Brevo has a limited free version that gives you access to 300 emails. After that, the price plans provide you with the number of emails you can send per month. As well as other features. You then also have the option of customizing your plan, so that it can be based on the number of emails you send a month. And, the number of contacts. The following is an overview of their annual plan.
- Starter: Starting from $8.08/month.
- Business: Starting from $16.17/month.
- Enterprise: Undisclosed.
Introducing folk CRM: the best alternative to HubSpot and Brevo
Looking for an affordable alternative? We recommend folk. A multiple award-winning CRM platform loved for its easy-to-use, plug-and-play CRM system. folk can support multiple business functions including sales, marketing, recruitment, and more. You can also use it as a solopreneur, small to mid-size team, and large enterprise.
Key features
- Contact management: Bring all your contacts into one place seamlessly, from social media platforms such as LinkedIn, Instagram and X to multiple inboxes including Gmail and Outlook.
- Notes and reminders: Attach notes directly to a contact's profile in folk, and access them on the go. And assign reminders so you know exactly when to follow-up.
- Sales pipeline dashboard: Manage your entire sales cycle and leads with a highly customizable sales pipeline dashboard that can be used in Kanban-board view or listicle.
- Ease of use and customization: Easily customize the pipelines, dashboards, automation, email sequences, so that you can use it across your sales cycle and pipeline management – and other business functions such as recruitment, marketing, and more.
- Social media integration: Import people and companies from LinkedIn, Sales Navigator, Instagram, and X within a click thanks to folk’s Google Chrome extension.
- Contact sync from Gmail and Outlook: Full email sync enabling users to manage all communications directly from the CRM.
- Find email addresses in a click: Contact enrichment powered by Apollo, and Dropcontact so you can fill in missing data points with 1-click.
- Email sequences: Send email sequences with reminders if your leads don’t reply to your first emails. It includes an AI integration allowing you to personalize email at scale.
Price and plans
folk has a 14-day free trial. After that, there are affordable monthly or annual subscription plans. The annual subscription plan is as follows.
- Standard: $20 per user, per month.
- Premium: $40 per user, per month.
- Custom: Starts from $80 per user, per month.
HubSpot vs. Brevo: What's the verdict?
When choosing between HubSpot and Brevo, it's clear that both offer robust features catering to different business needs. HubSpot excels with its comprehensive suite for marketing, sales, and customer service, making it ideal for larger enterprises. Brevo, on the other hand, provides a cost-effective solution with essential CRM functionalities suitable for small to medium-sized businesses. However, for companies that need a more personalized approach to relationship management, folk provides a flexible alternative to these traditional CRM options, blending ease of use with customization. Try folk today, free.
Discover folk - the CRM for people-powered businesses