The Complete Guide to Buying HubSpot: Which Hubs and Tiers are Best for Your Business

HubSpot at its core is a cloud-based CRM for growing businesses.

Maybe you roll your eyes at the “for growing businesses.” I mean after all, aren’t all businesses looking to grow? Of course, but to HubSpot this is central to how the platform is built.

The company was founded in 2006 to develop an inbound marketing platform. Over the years, HubSpot evolved into a multi-faceted software suite that includes five hubs: marketing, sales, service, CMS, and operations. 

Unlike competitors, with HubSpot you don’t need to purchase a handful of other software tools or build integrations to connect your tech stack and teams. It’s an all-in-one platform capable of upgrading or downgrading as needed.

HubSpot is designed to seamlessly scale with your business. The result is reduced technical debt, less scaling issues, improved usability, and a more connected and simplified tech stack.

HubSpot has grown mighty strong over the years by every trusted indicator. The hype is real and with good reason, but figuring out which solution and how to bundle HubSpot for your business is a big decision that requires careful consideration.

This guide is designed to help identify which HubSpot solution is best for your business - the key features within each hub, which tier makes the most sense, and how the pricing works.

In addition, our guide will touch on how to successfully get your business started with HubSpot. After all, if you’re going to invest thousands of dollars into the platform, you might as well get started right and maximize the investment.

Understanding How HubSpot is Built and Scales

Before deciding which hubs and tiers make the most sense for your business, it’s important to understand how HubSpot is built.

As we mentioned, HubSpot at its core is a CRM. No matter which hubs or tiers you purchase with HubSpot, the CRM is included for free. It’s even available for free on its own if you want to try it out before purchasing anything.

Built on top of the CRM are five hubs you may add depending upon what your business needs. Those hubs are Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, Service Hub, Operations Hub, and CMS Hub.

Additionally, each of the hubs have three different tiers of functionality - Starter, Professional (Pro), and Enterprise.

Each hub and each tier unlocks more and more powerful tools.

For example, let’s say you’re running a young startup and beginning your marketing department. You could choose to purchase the Marketing and CMS Starter Hubs, which would include the CRM.

As your business grows you may need to upgrade to Marketing Hub Pro, remain on CMS Hub Starter, and add the Sales Hub Starter. Perhaps your business goes through a rough patch and needs to downgrade the platform. That’s available to you as well.

Now that you understand how the platform is built and scales, let’s jump into the hubs, the tiers, and the differentiating features of each.

Distinctive Features Within Each Hub and Tier

Our goal with this guide is to help you understand the key differences between the hubs and tiers to help you figure out which key tools you need and which ones you’re sacrificing by not tiering up or adding that extra hub.

Throughout this section we will highlight the unique features within each hub and tier. Keep in mind that higher tiers include all of the features from the tiers below.

For a complete list of all the tools and features of every HubSpot product, please visit HubSpot’s product and services catalog.

CRM

Quick recap in case you skipped the intro (nobody reads those anyway): The core CRM is free with limited features, and all the other hubs are built upon it in an all-in-one, fully integrated solution. This enables HubSpot to empower the CRM based upon which Hubs are purchased and added to it. Essentially, the CRM is the foundation of the entire HubSpot platform. 

The core tools included in the CRM include:

• Contact management - Log and manage contact records of leads, customers, vendors, or whomever comes in contact with your business
• Companies - Log and manage companies and their information that interact with your business or are target accounts
• Deals - Track, manage, and report on all deal your sales team opens up with prospects
• Tasks and activities - Stay organized with tasks and activities to track, notify, and report on action items

It also comes with the following free tools, which are limited but upgrade as hubs are added to the platform:

• Forms - Standalone, pop-up, embedded, and collected data-capture forms to gather information from your website visitors
• Email marketing - Manage marketing emails in an efficient tool to create, edit, and send to whomever you need
• Ad management - Manage your ad networks, target your contacts, and monitor the performance
• Landing pages - Create and edit landing pages to help target and convert leads
• Shared inbox - connect your communication channels (email, live chat, etc.) from one inbox that your team monitors
• Live chat and chatbots - Communicate with website visitors through live chat or chatbots
• Quotes - Create and share quotes to your prospects
• Calling - Place calls to prospects, record them, and log them for future reference and sales rep coaching opportunities
• Ticketing - Log tickets for customer issues and assign them to your support team to manage and resolve
• Mobile app - HubSpot offers a mobile app to access from anywhere

Marketing Hub

HubSpot’s Marketing Hub is designed to help businesses attract the right audiences, convert more visitors into customers, and run complete inbound marketing campaigns at scale, all in one powerful, easy-to-use platform. 

Here’s a breakdown of the key features included with Marketing Hub at each tier:

Starter (Starting at $45/month)

• Email Marketing - With Starter’s email marketing feature, you can send designed marketing emails to lists with HubSpot editor (no external HTML allowed). Allows users to send 5x the amount of marketing contacts allotted per month. For example, if you have 1,000 contacts, you can send 5,000 marketing emails per calendar year.
• Form Creation - You can create forms using standard HubSpot properties or custom properties so that data capture fits your exact needs. You can also automate a maximum of 4 basic follow-up emails upon form completion.
• List segmentation - Marketing Hub Starter allows you to build 25 active lists and 1,000 static lists. Standard HubSpot and custom properties can be used as filters for segmentation. These lists can then be used for target marketing activities.

Professional (Starting at $800/month)

• Marketing automation workflows - Marketing automation workflows let you automate your marketing efforts. Set up flows of marketing emails that get sent based upon contacts, companies, and lists that meet your specific criteria.
• Campaigns/campaign management - Attach all of your emails, ads, workflows, landing pages, social media posts, and any other marketing effort to a campaign to stay organized and gain insights on your entire campaign.
• Social media - Take your marketing efforts to a broader audience with social media posts. With HubSpot’s social media tool, you can connect your social media accounts, schedule posts, and track engagement from all your accounts conveniently in one place.
• A/B testing - Enables users to test what’s working and what needs to be changed with their strategies. With the ability to A/B test emails, CTA’s, landing pages, and website pages, you’ll be able to optimize your strategy based on real, data-driven insights.

Enterprise (Starting at $3,200/month)

• Multi-touch revenue attribution - With this feature, you can get granular in your marketing analysis and see exactly which marketing touchpoints generate revenue and how much ROI you’re getting from your marketing efforts.
• Calculated properties - Calculated properties allow you to set up equations based on any number-based properties. You can use calculated properties to find the time a specific contact has been in a stage or how it has been since they’ve been reached out to last.
• Adaptive testing - Similar to A/B testing, adaptive testing tests certain website pages against others, but rather than manually having to switch better-performing pages, adaptive testing uses AI to show website visitors better-performing pages as soon as it has enough data. 
• Hierarchical teams and partitioning - Managers can use this feature to segment their marketing department into various teams, giving each of them access to certain features within the hub.

Sales Hub

Sales Hub is HubSpot’s powerful platform that enables sales teams to track and manage deals and pipelines more effectively, execute sales campaigns through automated sequences, and report on performance all in one centralized platform. 

Here’s a breakdown of the key features included with Sales Hub at each tier:

Starter (Starting at $45/month)

• Deal pipelines - With the Sales Hub Starter platform, you can create two deal pipelines with customer stages. Whether you need a pipeline to track new customers or one to track post-sale upsell or cross-sell opportunities, you can follow the progression of two channels based on your unique process.
• Basic automation - Basic automation allows you to enable task notifications, removing the need to track processes manually. This is also a great way to streamline prospect follow-up, build consistency throughout the sales cycle, and ensure necessary actions are completed on time during the sales cycle.
• Mandatory field updates - In keeping with data integrity, you can require specific fields once a deal is moved from one stage to another.
• Email templates - Emails sent regularly can be turned into templates using personalization tokens to send to leads easily. For example, onboarding and welcome emails can be created using a template.
• Meeting scheduling - Sales Hub’s meeting scheduling tool allows you to book and accept meetings easily. This feature is directly integrated with Gmail and Outlook.

Professional (Starting at $450/month)

• Sequences - Similar to workflows, they allow contacts to be enrolled in a series of email communications. 
• Required fields - Unlike in Starter, the Professional tier allows for mandatory fields that sales reps cannot bypass without completing the requirements.
• Custom reporting - You can build custom reports that meet your exact specifications.
• Forecasting - HubSpot’s built-in forecasting tool lets you use your HubSpot data to forecast where your sales should be in upcoming months.

Enterprise (Starting at $1,200/month)

• Playbooks - With this feature, you can equip your team with competitive analysis battle cards, calling scripts, and any other process you can think of documenting.
• Custom objects - Custom objects can be added to make HubSpot personalized for a particular business—for example, a vet clinic might want to add a custom object for pets.
• Conversation intelligence - Sales Hub Enterprise can transcribe your calls, allowing you to quickly scan the conversation on paper rather than listen to the whole thing over again.
• Quote-based workflows - Trigger workflow automation based on the completion of actions on HubSpot quotes. Send marketing emails, assign tasks, or update properties automatically. Let HubSpot do the work, so you don’t have to.

Service Hub

Service Hub helps customer success (CS) teams execute seamless onboarding, receive and track customer issues, monitor and improve customer relationships through surveys, and so much more.

Here’s a breakdown of the key features included with Service Hub at each tier:

Starter (Starting at $45/month)

• Tickets and pipeline - Service Hub’s tickets and service pipeline allows you to receive ticket requests and build a service ticket pipeline. 
• Reporting - Through HubSpot’s Service Hub Starter you gain access to powerful reporting dashboards to monitor the performance of your success teams and identify areas for improvement.
• Simple automation - You can send one or two automated emails once a ticket is moved to a specific range with their simple automation feature. 

Professional (Starting at $360/month)

• NPS surveys - At the professional tier, you have access to Net Promoter Score surveys. Using this feedback, you can reach out to your detractor customers and fix issues and gain valuable insights and testimonials from your promoters.
• Knowledge base - Creating a customer help center directly from the HubSpot platform allows them to find the answers they need before reaching out to support. 
• Help desk automation and ticket routing - Use automation to move your tickets to the right support agent and make sure your customers’ queries get answered promptly.
• Complex chatbot - Customize your chatbot experience and automate the entire process. Set up if/then branches and send users down certain paths based on the answers to the questions your bot asks.

Enterprise (Starting at $1,200/month)

• Playbooks - Equip your team with competitive analysis battle cards, calling scripts, and any other process you can think of documenting. 
• Custom Objects - Out of the box, HubSpot comes with four objects: contacts, companies, deals, and tickets. You can add custom objects to personalize HubSpot for certain businesses.
• Sandbox account - Test various changes and functionalities in a safe environment before they go live—without impacting your main account. 
• Salesforce custom object sync - Map Salesforce custom objects to HubSpot custom objects and sync data one way from Salesforce into HubSpot.

Operations Hub

Operations Hub makes it easy for growth and data-driven companies to track and monitor their performance. Through Operations Hub, companies can sync, cleanse, and organize customer data and automate business processes. 

While Operations Hub is the newest platform within HubSpot, it’s helpful for businesses to stay aligned with a connected, single source of truth for customer data. It also better enables businesses to track and adapt to the ever-changing needs of its customers.

Here’s a breakdown of the key features included with Operations Hub at each tier:

Starter (Starting at $45/month)

• Custom field mappings - With this feature, you can map properties from your integrated apps to the custom properties you create in HubSpot.

Professional (Starting at $720/month)

• Programmable automation - Take your automation to the next level with the ability to code in specific functions. You can write your own code directly in the workflow editor so that your automations work precisely the way you want them to.
• Data sync - HubSpot’s data sync feature integrates tools with HubSpot and syncs the data automatically. For example, if you use a separate email marketing solution and a contact unsubscribes, that will automatically sync in HubSpot. 
• Automatic data quality fixes - With so many people using HubSpot, data may not always be entered uniformly, leading to data quality issues. HubSpot fixes this by automatically formatting your data the way you need it.

Enterprise (Starting at $2,000/month)

• Sandbox Account - Use a sandbox account that mimics your main account to test changes and updates to your HubSpot platform. This is HUGE!
• Salesforce custom object sync - Create custom object mapping between Salesforce and HubSpot to sync your data properly into HubSpot
• Custom objects - Qualify, define, create, implement, and maintain custom objects to track and manage any type of unique data your business requires. 

CMS Hub

HubSpot’s content management system (CMS) enables teams to build flexible websites and blogs, easily edit pages, create landing pages, manage multiple domains and brands, and so much more.

Here’s a breakdown of the key features included with CMS Hub at each tier:

Starter (Starting at $23/month)

• Drag-and-drop editor - Create web pages with a “what you see is what you get” drag-and-drop editor. No coding required.
• Mobile optimization - HubSpot will automatically optimize your website for different screens and show you how things look on screens of various sizes.
• SSL certificate - When hosting any website, you need an SSL certificate that requires payment to renew. This certificate is included with CMS Starter.
• Website themes - Don’t feel like starting from scratch? Look to one of HubSpot’s preset website themes for inspiration.
• Multiple pages - CMS Starter gives you access to 15 web pages to house your content and information.

Professional (Starting at $360/month)

• Content staging - Redesign or relaunch your web pages with content staging. Rather than working on your website while the site is live, use a “sandbox” site, and whenever you’re ready, you can transfer your new pages to your live website.
• Password-protected pages - Keep unwanted site visitors away from certain pages with password protection.
• SEO recommendations and optimizations - By following HubSpot’s built-in recommendations, you’ll give your website a better shot at standing out on search engines. This feature will analyze your content and let you know where there’s room for improvement.
• A/B Testing - Test your pages against variants to see what elements perform better. Using this strategy, you can optimize your website and ensure that you’re using the optimal layout and design to bring in the most conversions. 
• Site tree - HubSpot automatically organizes your pages into folders based on their URLs, allowing you to stay organized and quickly find what you’re looking for.

Enterprise (Starting at $1,200/month)

• Adaptive testing - With adaptive testing, you can test up to 5 page variants simultaneously and identify the most successful tweaks. As adaptive testing collects data, it will automatically show the highest-performing variants to your site visitors. 
• Memberships - Distribute content to members of your website, who must log in to view it. This goes beyond password protection and separates your customers and partners from your leads and prospects. 
• Multi-domain support - If your business oversees multiple website domains, they can be effortlessly managed and hosted through your HubSpot account.

How and Where to Buy HubSpot

HubSpot is available for purchase through two vendors:

• HubSpot Growth Specialists - This is the route you’re likely most familiar with and involves purchasing HubSpot directly through the company and its sales team.
• HubSpot Solution Partners - HubSpot Solutions Partners like Revvy are professional service agencies that are certified by HubSpot to sell HubSpot and perform professional services, such as onboarding, administration, and much more.

Which of these vendors is best for you? One is not better or more affordable than the other. HubSpot controls and approves all purchases no matter which route you choose. 

It really comes down to trust. It’s important you go through whichever option listens to your challenges, understands your goals, and provides you with the most value and insight.

With that being said, it’s incredibly important you understand how your business is going to get started and onboarded into HubSpot. 

Too many businesses do not do their due diligence on the post-sale onboarding process, which can result in massive frustration and lost money if you don’t understand your options.

HubSpot Onboarding

HubSpot requires new customers to purchase and complete a certified onboarding experience with either HubSpot or a Solutions Partner. While it may seem like an opportunity for HubSpot to make more money, the fact of the matter is getting HubSpot up and running correctly is imperative to success. And it’s not easy to do.

Investing large amounts of money into a platform that’s not equipped or personalized for your business can be extremely costly to ROI.

We may be biased as a Solutions Partner, but we strongly believe it's best to go through a professional onboarding service to maximize your platform and hit the ground running.

For additional information about the difference between HubSpot-provided onboarding and Solutions Partner onboarding, check out our onboarding solutions guide that digs into the pros and cons of each.

Should you decide a Solution Partner onboarding is best, we also wrote a guide to help you determine which professional service partner is best for you.

At Revvy, we help businesses identify the best HubSpot platform based upon your unique business model and growth goals, and we specialize in HubSpot onboarding and adoption. To learn more about our HubSpot services, please visit our website here or fill out the form below.