HubSpot is a leading name in all-in-one customer platforms, but its price and complexity might not suit your current SaaS-specific needs.
While your tech stack doesn't directly impact your growth trajectory, the amount of time and effort spent on menial tasks does. Let your tech stack take care of the little stuff, so you can focus on the more important things.
In this post, we've compiled a list of alternatives that may better fit your SaaS.
What is HubSpot?
HubSpot is an all-in-one customer platform that connects multiple tools that software companies need to scale.
They offer six modules to cater to every aspect of your business:
- Marketing: email marketing, forms, landing pages, live chat, blog, calls-to-action, SEO, social media, and more.
- Content management: hosting, flexible theme, dynamic content, and drag-and-drop page editing among others.
- Sales: contact management, deal pipeline, quotes, live chat, meeting scheduling, sales automation, goals, playbooks, and more.
- Operations: programmable automation, data sync, data curation, and data quality tools.
- Customer service: contact management, ticketing, live chat, team email, shared inbox, help desk automation, and more.
- Commerce: billing and invoices, quotes, and payment links.
Pricing: HubSpot offers a free plan for each of their modules. Their most basic plan, the CRM Suite Starter, comes at $20 per month getting you 1,000 marketing contacts, two paid users for the sales and service hubs, and more.
Why users look for HubSpot alternatives
Product complexity. As with any CRM software, you need a bit of time to familiarize yourself with HubSpot before you can use it proficiently.
Integration issues. HubSpot integrates with a lot of other tools but users have reported running into issues. This might pose a problem if youâre migrating from another tool.
Not-so-exciting customer service. As with many large companies, taking care of smaller customers may no longer be among their top priorities.
Pricing is too expensive for startups. Former customers have remarked that theyâd rather use alternative tools with the same functionalities than pay for HubSpot.
Lock-in contracts. Whether you applied for their 90% startup discount or got the regular paid plan on the monthly billing option, HubSpot requires an annual contract. This might not be great for startups who are still surveying different tools that will fit their use case.
HubSpot alternatives: divide-and-conquer solutions for narrow needs
With all the features that HubSpot has to offer, you might not be able to maximize all of them â which is a major consideration if you're paying a monthly subscription.
Here are some tools that you can mix and match instead.
#1. Userlist
Use for: email marketing automation, marketing and lifecycle email.
Userlist (disclaimer, it's our product) is an email marketing platform built with SaaS companies in mind.
Unlike other email marketing tools, Userlist supports account-level data and account-level automation, letting you manage complex many-to-many relationships between users and companies.
It also lets your customer success manager track users and company progress on their profiles, so you can send targeted communications using segments.
Key features:
- User onboarding emails
- Lifecycle emails
- Marketing emails
- In-app messages
- Behavior triggered emails
- One-off broadcasts
- Segmentation
- Company accounts
- Performance reporting
Pricing: The monthly subscription is based on the number of users and scales depending on your business growth. Plans start at $149 per month for 10,000 users. Startups with less than $500k funding can enjoy 50% off during their first 12 months.
#2. Campaign Monitor
Use for: email marketing automation.
Campaign Monitor is an email marketing platform that helps marketers grow their customer relationships â from simple newsletters to advanced automations.
This platform lets you leverage your customer data so you can send the right messages at the right time. Improve your emails based on performance reports using their testing feature and build customer journeys easily with their visual journey designer.
Key features:
- Email marketing
- SMS marketing (available only in the US, Canada, UK, and Australia)
- Segmentation and personalization
- Marketing automation
- Transactional email
- Analytics
Pricing: Campaign Monitor's pricing depends on the number of your contacts. Their Lite plan comes at $11 per month and already gets you about 500 contacts and 2,500 email sends per month. They also offer a pay per email campaign plan for users who only send emails occasionally.
#3. Help Scout
Use for: customer support and knowledge base.
Help Scout is a dedicated customer support platform built for growing teams.
With Help Scout's shared inbox, your team can easily collaborate and give your customers human and helpful experiences. It also lets you build your knowledge base easily so they can immediately find the answers themselves.
Key features:
- Shared inbox
- Live chat
- In-app messages
- Knowledge base
- Reporting
- Integrations
Pricing: Help Scout's pricing depends on the functionality and number of users per month. The Standard plan comes at $25 per month and gets you two mailboxes, docs knowledge base, integrations, and more.
#4. Close
Use for: sales CRM.
Close is an affordable and flexible sales CRM platform for small and medium-sized businesses.
With its advanced email, call, and SMS features, you can accelerate leads through your sales cycle. Its automation features let you trigger workflows so your sales team can focus on selling by minimizing menial admin tasks.
Key features:
- Calendar sync
- Calls
- SMS
- Task management
- Automations
- Reporting
- Integrations
Pricing: Close's paid plans start at $59 per month and already include one user, three workflows, email and calendar sync, and more.
#5. Pipedrive
Use for: sales CRM.
Pipedrive is a CRM tool that was designed to help small businesses grow.
Their Sales tool lets you empower your salespeople, and enhance the customer journey and experience. With its intuitive design and drag-and-drop interface, your sales team can easily visualize the sales process and move your leads until the deals are worn. Sales' features include:
- Sales pipeline and deals
- Automation
- Insights and reporting
- Email and communication tracking
Campaigns by Pipedrive, their email marketing software, helps you win your leads' attention with their customizable layouts, and help you keep track of your email marketing metrics. Easily leverage your CRM data to send relevant messages to the right customers at the right time. Its features include:
- Email builder
- Segmentation
- Analytics
Pricing: Pipedrive's paid plans start at $15 per month, which already include 3,000 open deals, 15 insights reports, 400+ integrations, and more.
#6. Copper
Use for: sales CRM.
Copper is a CRM platform built for businesses that use Google Workspace.
Because it was designed specifically to integrate with Google's applications, your team can manage everything without having to switch tabs. Copper lets you easily look up scheduled events with clients and prospects, conversations, and files via GMail and Google Calendar.
Key features:
- Contact management
- Task automation
- Email and marketing tools
- Deal tracking
- Reporting
- Integrations
Pricing: Copper's paid plans start at $29 per month, including 2,500 contacts, Google Workspace integration, pipelines, team collaboration, and more.
#7. Versoly
Use for: building your website.
Versoly is a flexible no-code builder that lets you easily create unique, modern, and SEO-friendly websites.
This platform helps you create landing pages in less than 30 minutes with its templates, drag-and-drop editor, 300+ blocks, and more. And if you want to customize your website for advanced use cases, you can do so with its built-in advanced code editor.
Key features:
- Page builder
- Integrated code editor
- SEO tools
- Analytics tools
- Integrations
Pricing: Versoly offers a free plan that gets you a Versoly domain, three static pages, fifty CMS items and more. Their paid plans start at $19 per month.
#8. MailerLite
Use for: email marketing automation, building your website.
MailerLite is a simple but feature-packed email marketing tool and website builder for businesses of all shapes and sizes.
The platform lets you send newsletters, set up landing pages, websites, and pop-ups to help grow your business. They also keep a library of templates so you can quickly build your own in a matter of minutes.
Key features:
- Email marketing and automation
- Website builder
- Landing pages
- Signup forms
Pricing: MailerLite has a free plan that includes 1,000 email subscribers but you can only send up to 12,000 emails per month. Their paid plan starts at $10 per month that gets you unlimited email sends and three users.
#9. Brevo
Use for: email marketing automation, transactional email, sales CRM.
Brevo is a platform that helps build meaningful relationships with your customers. It has separate products for marketing automation, transactional emails, and sales.
Its Marketing Platform lets you set up smart campaigns, build lasting relationships with customers, and generate leads through a variety of channels.
Key features:
- Email marketing
- SMS and WhatsApp campaigns
- Landing pages
- Facebook ads
- Signup forms
Pricing: Brevo's Marketing Platform has a free plan with unlimited contacts but only lets you send up to 300 emails per day. Their paid plans start at $25 per month.
With its Transactional Email product, you can send transactional messages instantly and reliably, personalize your templates, manage your campaigns, and more.
Key features:
- Email API
- Personalization
- CMS integration
- Free inbound parsing
Pricing: Brevo's Transactional Email tool has a free plan that lets you send up to 300 emails per day. Their paid plans start at $15 per month and lets you send 20,000 transactional emails per month.
Using Brevo's Sales Platform, you can boost your sales efficiency by keeping things organized on their platform. It also lets you automate repetitive tasks so your sales team can focus on winning deals.
Key features:
- Sales pipelines
- Phone
- Automation
- Meetings
- Shared inbox
- Sales reports
Pricing: Brevo's Sales Platform has a free plan that already includes unlimited users, unlimited contacts, 50 open deals, and 1 deal pipeline. Their paid plans start at $12 per month per user that includes all the features.
#10. ActiveCampaign
Use for: email marketing automation, sales CRM.
ActiveCampaign is a platform that helps you manage your marketing and sales activities. You can use it to onboard users, track in-app events, manage customer health, send triggered notifications, and more.
Key features:
- Marketing
- Sales
- Ecommerce
- Transactional messages
Pricing: ActiveCampaign offers bundles that already include their marketing automation and sales CRM features. Their Plus plan under this bundle comes at $93 per month that already gets you 5 users and 1,000 contacts.
#11. Zendesk
Use for: help center, customer service, and managing customer relationships for sales
Zendesk has separate products for customer service and sales: Zendesk Suite and Zendesk Sell.
Zendesk Suite is their service solution that lets you personalize customer experiences to build loyalty and revenue. It's easily customizable and scalable so your customer support can keep up with your growing business, letting you add channels and route conversations to agents so you can serve your customers better.
Key features:
- Messaging
- Help center
- AI and automation
- Integrations
- Routing and intelligence
- Analytics
Pricing: Zendesk Suite's Team plan comes at $69 per agent per month which already gets you the core features, two departments, one default language, and more.
Zendesk Sell is their modern sales CRM that frees your team so you can maximize productivity, maintain pipeline visibility, and grow your revenue. Your salespeople can focus on closing deals with prospects by automating menial administrative tasks, and monitor customer conversations all in one place.
Key features:
- Email integration
- Sales engagement tools
- Task player
- Complete customer view
- Forecasting
- Pipeline analysis
Pricing: Zendesk Sell's Team plan comes at $25 per agent per month and gets you up to 2 customizable sales pipelines, email and calendar integrations, pre-build sales dashboards, and more.
HubSpot alternatives: all-in-one players
Working with several different platforms takes a bit of time and effort, which is why others prefer all-in-one platforms to cater to all aspects of their business.
#12. Outseta
Outseta is an all-in-one platform that helps you launch your business, fast. Co-founder Geoff Roberts describes their product as a "starter kit" so you can focus on building your core product.
With Outseta, you can easily accept payments, track your prospects and customers, send emails, serve your customers, and manage their sign-ups and logins.
Key features:
- Subscription billing
- CRM
- Help desk
- Authentication
Ideal use case: Early stage B2B SaaS, membership businesses, and online communities
Pricing: Outseta's paid plans start at $39/month, giving you access to all their features, unlimited team members, and up to 1,000 contacts.
#13. Freshworks
Freshworks provides easy-to-use software to help businesses of all sizes. It has separate solutions for customer service and customer relationship management: Customer Service Suite and Freshsales Suite.
The Freshdesk Customer Service is their easy-to-use omnichannel tool for conversational support and ticketing. Its unified customer information view gives your agents more context to the conversation so they can serve your customers better.
Key features:
- Web widgets
- Knowledge base
- Chatbots
- Unified agent inbox
- Reporting
Pricing: The Freshdesk Customer Service Suite comes at $35 per agent per month which gets you their core features, 500 Freshbots sessions, and 500 campaign contacts per month.
Freshsales Suite brings together sales and marketing in one single platform. Sales teams can organize, track, and manage your deals through its visual sales pipeline. The platform also lets you easily create high-converting landing pages and email campaigns using their drag-and-drop editor.
Key features:
- Contact lifecycle stages
- Built-in chat, email, and phone
- Social media campaigns
Pricing: The Freshsales Suite has a free plan that already includes 3 users with 100 marketing contacts. The paid plan starts at $18 per user per month with 1,000 marketing contacts, multichannel engagement features, and more.
#14. Odoo
Odoo is a suite of open source business apps that covers different aspects of your business: from sales, marketing, operations, and more.
Unlike other software mentioned on this list, Odoo is made in collaboration with their community members. Thirty main applications were developed and maintained in-house while the 16,000+ apps were developed by contributors.
Odoo lets you select apps based on your current use case and add more apps as your customer base grows.
Key features:
- Sales
- Marketing
- Sign
- Website
- Accounting
- CRM
- Inventory
- HR and others
Ideal use case: General audience of any size and industry.
Pricing: You can use Odoo for free with the limited access to only one app in their ecosystem. Its paid plans start at $9.10 per user per month that gets you all apps through their web interface.
#15. EngageBay
EngageBay is an integrated marketing, sales, support, and CRM solution to help startups and growing businesses acquire, engage, and convert website visitors into customers. This integrated platform was designed with ease of use in mind so even non-technical users can set it up in a matter of minutes.
Key features:
- Marketing
- CRM & sales
- Help desk
- Live chat
Ideal use case: Small to medium-sized businesses and startups.
Pricing: You can use EngageBay for free up to 250 contacts. Their paid plans for the all-in-one bundle starts at $14.99 per user per month, getting you 500 contacts, lead scoring, integrations, and more.
Choose the right tools for your tech stack
Reliable tools make it easy to take care of the small stuff so you can focus on building and refining your product.
If you want to know more about Userlist's features and if it's the right fit for you, you're welcome to book a free strategy call with our team.
