HubSpot vs Zoho CRM: Choosing the Best CRM Software for Your Business 

If you take your marketing and sales seriously, start enabling your team with HubSpot.

Looking for customer relationship management (CRM) software to streamline processes, enhance operational efficiencies, and improve your data tracking and reporting?

HubSpot and Zoho offer a comprehensive range of features and pricing options, making them the top picks for businesses.

Which leads us to the following question: how do you choose between the two?

Ultimately, the answer should revolve around what’s best for your business. Let’s explore this together.

Key Features

When it comes to choosing between HubSpot and Zoho, it’s important to understand the two’s key features and what they can bring to your business. 

HubSpot is, essentially, an ‘all-in-one’ platform designed with the intention of benefitting a company’s sales, service and marketing teams. It’s equipped with highly intuitive tools and features, making HubSpot a preferred choice for businesses focused on content-driven marketing and lead nurturing. HubSpot’s key features include:

• Unified CRM Solution
• Live chat and chatbots
• Contact management
• Email tracking and templates
• Sales automation
• Best-in-class marketing attribution
• Training and onboarding services
• Advanced reporting and analytics

On the other hand, Zoho CRM is part of a larger business application suite and appeals more to businesses looking to unify a greater solution across inventory, bookkeeping, projects & more. Being part of a larger suite, Zoho does offer an appeal in terms of adaptability and scalability. Zoho’s key features include:

• Zia AI assistant
• Multichannel communication
• Blueprint, Workflows & Automation
• CRM Functionality
• Diverse app marketplace
• Creative development freedom through custom scripts
• Territory management 
• Advanced analytics

As you can see from the above, HubSpot’s key features are aimed more towards ease of use for users and process streamlining, whereas Zoho focuses on more technical aspects to build a solution that fits a unique business process.

HubSpot vs Zoho: General Features

So, what are the real differences between the features these two CRMs provide? Well, you’re about to find out. Let’s  check out what this looks like in HS…

Marketing Automation Features

When it comes to marketing and sales automations, HubSpot’s workflows are more user-friendly, allowing your team to take the hat as a developer to build out the portal the way they need in order to be efficient. Zoho’s automations require a more technical setup, resulting in a longer setup process than HubSpot. The benefit is that every Zoho level allows you to utilise custom scripts and functions to build upon its native functionality. This makes Zoho usually led by an IT team or a developer partner. HubSpot focuses on allowing your marketing, sales and service managers to make the adjustments themselves without requiring them to jump through hoops.

With HubSpot, you can also enhance your content’s SEO and grow your organic traffic. HubSpot focuses on search engine optimisation (SEO), offering more comprehensive tools, including on-page SEO optimisation, topic clusters, and content strategy tools. 

HubSpot also offers a Smart Content feature, which enables dynamic personalisation across website pages, emails, and even CTAs. HubSpot’s Smart Content feature means that businesses can produce content based on user behaviour, location, and lifecycle stage, allowing audiences to enjoy a more personalised experience. 

CRM and Sales

For those looking for an easy-to-use CRM to enhance their marketing and sales, HubSpot provides the better choice of the two. HubSpot’s visual deal pipeline is more visual, featuring a customisable drag-and-drop functionality that allows marketing and sales teams to manage and move deals throughout the cycle more effortlessly, allowing teams to focus on high-priority leads. 

HubSpot sequences, templates, meetings, and other sales engagement tools are also more intuitive and integrated than Zoho’s, which instead has a somewhat more rigid pipeline and often requires more manual setup and navigation. 

Integrations

Having a CRM with smooth integrations is key to enhancing performance and improving data quality. HubSpot focuses on a creator-led ecosystem driven by fellow HubSpot partners to build key integrations across some of your favourite tools, on top of certified apps. Zoho CRM, on top of its integration into the larger Zoho Business system, focuses on API development with a limited market. Focusing on empowering development teams instead of the marketing, service and sales teams that would be using the product.

Analytics and Reporting

Data allows our success to grow, enables a chance to improve our strategy, and enhances the customer experience. For those in favour of data-driven decision-making, HubSpot is the more powerful tool. With HubSpot, you can create reports tailored to specific metrics and KPIs through customisation and drag-and-drop features, track the customer journey in more detail through multi-touch attribution reporting, and witness real-time data updates to improve campaigns and strategies as they progress — and that’s just to name few. HubSpot allows your end-user to build the reports they need, attached to a world-class attribution system.

Upon initial setup with HubSpot, you will know if your marketing is working, answering a key question for any C-suite or business owner: “Is the money I put into marketing actually working?”

Zoho’s reporting is done in the Zoho Analytics app, often needing data analysis to crunch serious numbers for your business. Zoho Analytics offers full creative reporting when it comes to reporting. Engaging a developer and data analysis specialist is recommended to build it out; this is great for enterprise-level businesses with a complicated tech stack. 

If you are looking for quick decision-making based on marketing and sales performance, our recommendation will be HubSpot.

If you are looking to build a dream report over multiple business functions and tech stack, Zoho Analytics serves a better purpose.

HubSpot

Zoho

User Experience

HubSpot’s modern, all-in-one platform reduces the amount of time needed for training and increases operational efficiency. With smart navigation, 24/7 support, drag-and-drop workflows, and simple API connections, HubSpot users can quickly adapt to the software. 

Zoho favours a traditional interface with a more complex initial setup. Most features require manual configuration, meaning technical knowledge is required for efficient setup. While Zoho does offer Help resources, it has a less structured learning path and limited free training resources. As a result, users can find Zoho more difficult to navigate and master.

Mobile Apps

HubSpot offers its users a fully functional and intuitive mobile app designed to manage leads and receive real-time notifications. The app allows users to manage all their tasks in one, convenient place that can be easily accessed at any time. While Zoho also offers a mobile app, its version is much more limited than HubSpot, requiring different apps for different products. Zoho’s app also only offers basic functionality, making it useful for users needing to access information quickly, but not efficient for those also looking to manage leads and other tasks effectively.

HubSpot

Zoho

Workflows

When comparing workflows and their setups, HubSpot stands out with its visual workflow builder designed to support various triggers, such as custom events, page views, date-based automation, and email interactions. HubSpot’s workflows are intuitive and flexible, easily built with a simple drag-and-drop function. Zoho’s workflows are more text-based, with basic trigger options, often requiring separate triggers for different modules. 

For example, consider the below lead nurturing workflow:

HubSpot Implementation:

• Trigger: Form submission for ebook download → Automatically enrols contact in nurture sequence → Sends personalised welcome email → Waits 3 days, checks engagement → If opened: Sends industry-specific case study → If not opened: Sends reminder with different subject → Based on content interactions, adjusts lead score → Automatically notifies sales when score threshold met

Zoho Implementation:

• Requires multiple module setup: → Form builder for initial capture → Separate email automation setup → Manual scoring rules configuration → Additional setup for sales notifications → Limited branching based on engagement

HubSpot

Zoho

 

As you can see, the HubSpot implementation is more detailed and simpler to build. The entire process has been streamlined into a single workflow, without the need for separate automation or notification setups. Not only does this save time during the initial build, but also during the actual lead nurturing process. With seamless integration and flow from end to end, sales and marketing teams will be able to contact quality leads more efficiently and drive sales. 

Marketing Attribution

Marketing attributions help businesses determine which strategies are helping them to see results and the areas in which they need improvements. HubSpot’s marketing attribution features include total customer journey tracking, real-time insights, revenue impact tracking, automatic data capture, and built-in attribution modelling. With these features (and more) HubSpot provides its users with a robust understanding of their performance. 

Zoho, however, offers limited tracking capabilities, provides basic channel insights, and requires manual attribution setup. Zoho also requires separate tools for each touchpoint, unlike HubSpot’s all-in-one. This creates limitations in collecting and analysing data, impacts user experience due to a lack of streamlined services and platform disruption, and limits return on investment (ROI) tracking. 

HubSpot

Zoho

Is My Business Better Suited for HubSpot or Zoho?

If you’re still wondering which CRM is the best for your business, let us break it down into simpler terms for you. 

HubSpot is designed to focus on growth. By prioritising lead management, user experience, and process automation, HubSpot is the clear choice for any company looking to continue its growth without sacrificing operational efficiency. HubSpot integrates marketing, sales and customer service functions, creating a unified platform that enhances collaboration and aligns reporting and analytics. This powerful CRM will allow your company to effectively scale and manage customer relationships, with the knowledge that support is available at every step of the way.

 

Zoho is better suited to process-driven businesses with workflows, blueprints and custom functions that are looking for a cost-effective solution but at the price of IT resources and a development team. While requiring add-ons to utilise some features on a grander scale may not be suitable for larger businesses, on the flip side, Zoho allows process-driven businesses to use only the features they need. This allows them to align with their budget more easily and focus on specific operational requirements. Zoho is also equipped with all of the essential tools needed for basic automation, managing customer relationships, and straightforward reporting.

Enhance Your Sales and Marketing With HubSpot

It’s time to really focus on growing your business. And to do that, you need the right tool. Utilising your sales and marketing team through HubSpot will allow you to do just that, improving processes, enhancing efficiency, and maintaining flexibility for growth and change within the company. 

As a HubSpot partner agency, BFJ Digital can help you take your company’s success to new heights. We offer end-to-end HubSpot services — from onboarding and training all the way to site development and analytics. 

Talk to our team of HubSpot experts today to create a custom strategy tailored to your business goals and aspirations.