HubSpot vs SharpSpring

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Our analysts compared HubSpot vs SharpSpring based on data from our 400+ point analysis of Marketing Automation Software, user reviews and our own crowdsourced data from our free software selection platform.

Product Basics

HubSpot provides a cloud-based platform built around inbound methodology and designed to help businesses be more customer-centric. It offers a free CRM package along with marketing, sales, service and CMS hubs, which can be deployed individually or together for full flexibility and scalability.

Timeline segmentation provides users with an overview of their prospect’s journey from the attraction stage to closing. Additional capabilities include funnel automation, lead targeting, analytics and reporting, email templates and more. It caters to small businesses but has paid versions robust enough to support the needs of larger organizations.
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SharpSpring is a cloud-based sales and marketing platform that facilitates building automation rules to send customers with dynamic content or targeted emails based on their interests. It also provides adequate support for marketing agencies.

Features include behavior-based email, campaign tracking, dynamic landing pages, a blog builder, anonymous visitor ID, a form builder, reporting and analytics, social media management, and integrations. Lead scoring helps track a lead’s page visits, demographics and engagement to enhance nurturing efforts.
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Mobile

Product Assistance

Documentation
In Person
Live Online
Videos
Webinars
Documentation
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Live Online
Videos
Webinars
Email
Phone
Chat
FAQ
Forum
Knowledge Base
24/7 Live Support
Email
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Forum
Knowledge Base
24/7 Live Support

Product Insights

  • Built Around Inbound: Designed to attract leads and nurture them with helpful information and inbound best practices, all at the push of a button. 
  • All-in-One Software: Managing every aspect of customer relationships is seamless with an integrated suite that helps engage with leads and customers at any stage. Offers a cohesive experience, process alignment and holistic data. 
  • Free CRM: Small businesses can leverage capabilities to enhance and grow without spending a dime. Includes sales, marketing and service tools in addition to foundational CRM features. Supports unlimited users and can store up to a million contact records. 
  • User-Friendly: An intuitive UI and no-code tools make it easy to leverage regardless of technical ability. 
  • Better Organization: Keep teams and data more organized via an all-in-one, centralized structure and tools that simplify tracking and updating information. Managers can use hierarchies and partitioning to focus each team member in the right area and ensure they have the most appropriate content. 
  • Full Scalability: Support business growth at any stage by deploying the free toolsets and adding premium features along the way, all within a single ecosystem. 
  • Salesforce Integration: Achieve a seamless marketing and sales strategy by setting up two-way sync between HubSpot and Salesforce databases. Deliver insights to Salesforce for sales activities and pull relevant information back into HubSpot to enhance marketing efforts. The integration doesn’t require technical setup and is supported by a team of HubSpot engineers. 
  • Free Website Insights: Optimize a website using a free website grader, which determines strengths and weaknesses and offers free improvement tips. 
  • Generators: Receive creative or strategic direction through tools that generate blog topics, build buyer personas, craft email signatures and suggest invoice templates. Go through a step-by-step process that produces a marketing plan based on company needs. 
  • Prospect Journeys: Track prospects from the attraction phase of the buyer’s journey to the closing stage for a high-level overview of where leads are coming from and where they’re going afterward. 
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  • Email Templates: Leverage prebuilt email templates optimized for mobile devices and any email client, including Outlook. The templates' prebuilt layouts can be edited and sent to customers on the fly. 
  • Folders Categorization: Stay organized by grouping emails and templates in folders. 
  • Document Storage: Store documents such as case studies, white papers and marketing sheets with a content delivery network. 
  • Custom Fields: Capture detailed information about customers, including buyer personas, customer service and other attributes. 
  • Buyer Personas: Create buyer personas using a customizable template that can be stored on the platform. Use personas to segment content and campaigns, delivering personalized content. 
  • Cart Abandonment Follow-up: Set up email workflows to automatically follow up with leads that forego their purchases. 
  • Important Page Visits: Mark specific areas of the website as “Important Pages” and the system will automatically boost lead scores for contacts who visit those pages. Set up automated workflows and lead nurturing campaigns for leads who visit those pages. 
  • Email Inbox Delivery: Identify daily priorities without logging into the platform with information about daily anonymous website visitors, leads, opportunities and customers delivered via email. 
  • Landing Page Templates: Create a series of linked pages to funnel visitors and prospects for lead generation by using predesigned templates. 
  • RSS Email Syndication: Automatically send email blog posts to a list of followers on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. Customize with thumbnail images, titles, dates and other dynamic content. 
  • Content Page Templates: Offers a library of prebuilt index and content page templates that are mobile responsive and can be edited from the blog editor. 
  • Campaign Tagging: Create custom categories and common tags such as email, Google, referrals, organic and offline to group, ungroup or break down campaigns. 
  • Social Notes: Promote internal collaboration with social avatars, “Mark as Read” tags and a clear conversation timeline. 
  • Webinar Integrations: Promote, share and improve web conferences through integration with WebEx and GoToWebinar. Capture lead data from sign-ups and link a dedicated sales funnel to each event to follow up with automated email workflows. 
  • CMS Compatibility: Supports all major content management systems, including WordPress, Drupal, ExpressionEngine, Joomla and more. 
  • Reminders: Create reminders from any page and attach them to opportunities and contacts to schedule a follow-up. Reminders can also be combined with social notes to assign tasks. 
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  • Pipeline Management:
    •  Reduces data entry through auto-populated data and grants control over pipelines to match how users work. 
    •  User-friendly edit tools alongside a drag-and-drop interface simplify the entire management process. 
    •  Quick access to key metrics is available with a sales dashboard. 
  • Lead Management: Perform CRM activities without the hassle of reconciling different data sets and gain full visibility into contacts by accessing data-rich profiles in one location. Capabilities include lead segmentation, contact activity history and tasks. 
  • Messaging: Facilitates better internal and external communication, promotes strong customer experiences, supports lead generation and enables more timely follow up. Offers Facebook Messenger, a customizable live chat widget, shared email and a chatbot builder. 
  • Conversations Inbox:
    •  Provides context, alignment and transparency for marketing, sales and service teams through a team-wide inbox. 
    •  Aids cross-functional collaboration via a central hub for communicating with prospects, leads and customers. Routing rules deliver emails to the most relevant team or member. 
    •  Offers a seamless experience to customers no matter what stage they’re in. 
  • Contact Activity: Gain deeper insights by leveraging analytics that show website interactions. Track form submissions, page visits and more. 
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  • Email Builder: Offers drag-and-drop email editor and HTML customization. Dynamic features and smart tags automate the process of customizing email messages. Designs can also be saved as templates for later use. 
  • Email Campaign Testing: Native integration with Litmus facilitates testing and previewing emails on dozens of applications, email providers and devices. 
  • Behavioral-Based Email Tracking: Gives complete information on visitor activity, including page visits, form fills, webinar sign-ups and white paper downloads from email campaigns. 
  • Web Form Builder: Provides: 
    • A drag-and-drop tool with auto-completion capabilities to design and customize web forms and CTA buttons.
    • The option to view and test forms before making them live.
    • CSS to customize forms.
    • Data sharing with other applications and databases by adding a Postback URL to sync information automatically.
  • Customer Segmentation: Offers lists that automatically update as contacts meet the list’s criteria such as location, visited pricing pages, product interest and more. Map a field in web forms to preset buyer personas, setting up questions accordingly. Responses aid list segmentation, allowing follow up with personalized information. 
  • Workflow Builder: Supports automation tasks and leverages branching logic, task combination and action groups to devise a path buyers should take. Responses use custom triggers and filters to personalize lead journeys. 
  • Lead Scoring: Scores leads based on engagement. Custom metrics allow increasing or decreasing scores, including page visits, filled out forms, content downloads and specific demographic characteristics. Assigning a decay rate on leads automatically decreases scores over time. 
  • Real-Time Alerts: Automated workflows can trigger notifications via email and SMS whenever a sale is made, a high-quality lead is created or a prospect moves along their buyer’s journey. 
  • Pipeline View: Create and customize custom deal stages to track the progress of an opportunity. Provides a drag-and-drop interface to move opportunities across deal stages to get an overview of each prospect’s progress through the sales cycle. 
  • VisitorID: Tracks anonymous visitor IP addresses with reverse IP lookup to identify companies that visit the business’ website. Records page visits, recognizes visitors’ views on an important page, determines where they came from and identifies which search terms led them to the website. 
  • Customer Timeline: Offers a timeline view of individual buyers’ journeys to track significant events associated with each contact. 
  • Landing Page Builder: Provides a WYSIWYG interface with HTML for customization. Pages can automatically adapt based on visitor preferences and behaviors. Supports optimizing for mobile and creating a series of linked pages to design a funnel for visitors and prospects. 
  • Content Calendar: Offers an interactive application with daily, weekly or monthly list views of all the planned content such as social activity, scheduled emails and blog posts. Share social media content immediately or at a later date. 
  • Site Tracking: Embeds a custom tracking code snippet in landing pages, websites, microsites or blogs to track every visit. Add media center links to track visits to external resources. 
  • Blog Builder: Provides a WYSIWYG blog and website editor that’s customizable with HTML views. Includes dynamic content that can automatically adapt to resonate with different audiences based on who they are, what interests them and how they behave on the blog and website. Also has an embeddable social sharing widget. 
  • Google Ads Integration: Tracks the ROI of paid search engine marketing campaigns and derives keyword data. 
  • Campaign Analytics Tracking: Automatically tracks website visitors conversions from the moment they first visit till the final sale. Detailed campaign analytics track campaign ROI goals and work offline without the need to set up conversion funnels. 
  • Social Listening: Find and filter social conversations on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn by hashtag, keyword and more. Spots customer queries, captures interactions to identify prospects that are ready to buy and offers affiliate programs to promote current customers to help close the next deal. 
  • Custom Reports: Customizable across campaigns, email, social media and CRM to include business-specific metrics. Measures and predicts present and future performance, turning data into insights. 
  • Open API: Developers have access to a platform-agnostic, open API that supports programming languages such as Java, Ruby, Perl, PHP, Python and more for building custom integrations with third-party software. 
  • Third-Party Integration: An app marketplace provides access to prebuilt extensions and integrations across categories such as CRM, accounting, analytics, forms and more, extending capabilities. 
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Product Ranking

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#7

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Analyst Rating Summary

91
82
79
86
100
35
100
0
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Campaign Management
Compliance and Data Security
Dashboard and Reporting
Social Media Campaign Management
Lead Nurturing
Email Campaign Management
Mobile Capabilities
Text Campaign Management
Lead Nurturing
Lead Generation

Analyst Ratings for Functional Requirements Customize This Data Customize This Data

HubSpot
SharpSpring
+ Add Product + Add Product
AI-Based Capabilities Campaign Management Compliance And Data Security Dashboard And Reporting Email Campaign Management Lead Generation Lead Management Lead Nurturing Mobile Capabilities Platform Capabilities Social Media Campaign Management Text Campaign Management 79 100 100 100 97 93 95 98 62 95 100 57 86 35 0 54 100 91 90 92 100 0 50 100 0 25 50 75 100
71%
0%
29%
86%
0%
14%
100%
0%
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29%
0%
71%
100%
0%
0%
we're gathering data
N/A
we're gathering data
N/A
we're gathering data
N/A
100%
0%
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40%
0%
60%
95%
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5%
100%
0%
0%
86%
0%
14%
82%
0%
18%
90%
0%
10%
90%
0%
10%
100%
0%
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83%
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17%
60%
0%
40%
100%
0%
0%
91%
0%
9%
we're gathering data
N/A
we're gathering data
N/A
we're gathering data
N/A
100%
0%
0%
0%
0%
100%
14%
0%
86%
100%
0%
0%

Analyst Ratings for Technical Requirements Customize This Data Customize This Data

81%
0%
19%
77%
0%
23%

User Sentiment Summary

Great User Sentiment 10050 reviews
Great User Sentiment 1663 reviews
87%
of users recommend this product

HubSpot has a 'great' User Satisfaction Rating of 87% when considering 10050 user reviews from 5 recognized software review sites.

87%
of users recommend this product

SharpSpring has a 'great' User Satisfaction Rating of 87% when considering 1663 user reviews from 3 recognized software review sites.

4.8 (19)
n/a
4.3 (5644)
4.5 (571)
4.5 (2623)
4.5 (620)
4.3 (142)
n/a
4.3 (1622)
3.9 (472)

Awards

SelectHub research analysts have evaluated HubSpot and concluded it deserves the award for the Best Overall Marketing Automation Software available today and earns best-in-class honors for Campaign Management, Compliance and Data Security, Dashboard and Reporting and Social Media Campaign Management.

Analysts' Pick Award
Campaign Management Award
Compliance and Data Security Award
Dashboard and Reporting Award
Social Media Campaign Management Award

SelectHub research analysts have evaluated SharpSpring and concluded it earns best-in-class honors for Email Campaign Management, Mobile Capabilities and Text Campaign Management.

Email Campaign Management Award
Mobile Capabilities Award
Text Campaign Management Award

Synopsis of User Ratings and Reviews

Ease of Use: Every user referencing navigation reports the platform is user-friendly.
Customer Support: The support team is reliable and offers quick responses to any need, according to 91% of reviewers referencing this aspect.
Automation: Automating email campaigns, lead scoring and workflows, managing sales funnel and social engagement, and creating email templates is easy, according to 95% of reviewers who talk about automation.
Feature-Rich: The range of features offered, such as creating landing pages, forms and email campaigns, is a benefit to 85% of users mentioning functionalities.
Marketing: Every user who refers to marketing feels it’s easy to market products.
Interface: A slick interface makes it easy to navigate, in the experience of 80% of reviewers referencing the UI.
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User-Friendly: The platform is easy to use, and the kanban boards, the marketing automation and drip campaigns are easy to adapt to, in the experience of 69% of users referring to this aspect.
Robust Lead Tracking: Over 60% of reviews about this feature appreciate the end-to-end tracking functionality for marketing and sales data, with the ability to generate, track, filter and score leads.
Customer Service: All reviews on support say it’s professional and highly responsive.
Updates: The system constantly keeps updating with new features and offers updated dashboards for use, a benefit according to 75% of users mentioning updates.
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Price: Premium products are expensive for the amount of functionality, especially for small and mid-sized companies, according to 86% of reviewers mentioning cost.
Training: In 85% of reviews referencing training, users say it’s difficult for average users to perform complicated tasks such as tracking leads and making different mailing lists, causing a learning curve.
Email Functionality: All reviews about this issue note that customizing the mobile version of an email affects the desktop version, inserting custom HTML such as a for promo timer isn’t possible and more.
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Mobile App: Every user referencing the mobile app suggests it’s inoperable, not relevant and lacks basic functionalities.
Limited Design Flexibility: The landing page builder lacks the ability to add custom code, restricting users' ability to fully customize their pages and potentially hindering brand consistency or advanced functionality.
Email Deliverability Issues: Some users report challenges with emails landing in spam folders, which can impact campaign performance and lead to missed opportunities. It's important to note that email deliverability can be influenced by various factors, so it's recommended to investigate and address potential causes to improve deliverability rates.
Reporting Limitations: Users mention that the reporting features could be more robust, particularly in terms of attribution and providing deeper insights into campaign performance. This might make it difficult to accurately measure the effectiveness of marketing efforts and identify areas for improvement.
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With basic CRM alongside marketing, sales, service and content management, Hubspot offers a lot of functionalities, which users cite as a primary benefit. Its slick interface ensures an intuitive experience and extensive automation simplifies tasks, although some complicated functions make it time-consuming to learn. Users also appreciate how prompt customer support is, and that there’s a free version that’s ideal for small and mid-sized businesses. However, certain email elements present issues and the paid versions are expensive for what they offer. Overall, businesses that are in need of a robust and scalable product suite, especially those with a focus on inbound marketing, might find this to be a good fit.

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SharpSpring combines CRM and marketing automation functionalities to provide robust, user-friendly features and performance. Users particularly appreciate its lead tracking and regular software updates that improve and add features. Comprehensive customer support is another prominent benefit. Some product limitations include a lack of display functionality in the form and landing page builders and a mobile app that isn’t user-friendly and lacks responsiveness. Custom stylesheets are also time-consuming to work with. Despite some drawbacks, it can be a solid option for businesses looking for a budget-friendly and intuitive sales and marketing solution.

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