HubSpot Vs. ActiveCampaign 2023: Best CRM for SMBs?

Managing your sales process is a crucial factor in scaling your business. 

Luckily, HubSpot provides many tools to help you empower your sales teams to succeed and close more deals across the board. 

Here are some things we liked (during our six months of testing this feature):

• Customization – We could easily customize our pipelines, columns, and views to fit our needs.
• Ease of use – All team members could easily access and edit our pipelines in real time.
• Multiple views – We could easily switch between the traditional view (which showed everything in a list) and the board view with a helpful drag-and-drop interface.

Here’s a sneak peek at the dashboard customization process during our testing. 

We especially liked how many options HubSpot offered, making the platform perfect for SMBs with specific needs. 

Once everything was customized to our liking, we added some of our affiliate marketing deals at Small Business Bonfire to our pipeline. 

Here’s how it looked (to give you a better idea).

Our takeaway: HubSpot lets you easily customize and manage multiple pipelines. We’ve tested many platforms over the years, and HubSpot offers some of our all-time favorite pipeline management in the game. 

If you’ve tried to schedule meetings with your entire team, you know what a nightmare it can be (without the right tools). 

Fortunately, HubSpot’s powerful meeting-scheduling capabilities can save you a ton of time (and headaches) trying to get everyone on the same page. 

To test this feature out, I set up a 15-minute meeting to touch base with my team.

With just a few clicks, I had the whole thing set up and was able to send a link to each team member to confirm or customize their preferences. 

Here’s how it looked from my perspective. 

While this may not be the flashiest feature offered by HubSpot CRM, it’s certainly fantastic for keeping your team on track and organized. 

HubSpot’s meeting scheduling capabilities can be a game-changer if you’re struggling to get everyone in sync.

Staying on top of customer issues and resolving them effectively is fundamental to ensuring customer satisfaction. 

HubSpot makes this easier with its support ticketing tools. 

Whether it’s a product-related concern, a technical glitch, or a general query, HubSpot’s ticket system allows you to categorize and prioritize issues (ensuring timely resolution). 

The system is user-friendly, enabling the team to track the status of tickets and follow up accordingly. 

Some things we liked about this feature include the following: 

• Customization – You can easily create different ticket pipelines to match your team’s needs.
• Integration – The support ticketing tool integrates seamlessly with other HubSpot tools, making it easy for your team to stay on top of customer issues. 
• Automation – You can set up automated responses and ticket routing to save time and streamline processes. 

Here’s our ticket dashboard with a few issues we had at Small Business Bonfire (during the six-month testing period). 

We liked how we could easily see the following information with just a glance:

• Time open
• Ticket priority
• Ticket owner
• Recent activity

This gave our team a bird’s eye view of what needed to be done and who was handling each ticket. 

The bottom line: If you want to streamline your customer support process, HubSpot’s ticketing feature is worth considering. 

Have you ever thought to yourself—if I could just read my customers’ minds, I could deliver the perfect product/experience? 

Well, HubSpot can’t go that far, but it comes close with its customer feedback survey capabilities. 

The tool allows you to create, distribute, and analyze customized surveys based on your business needs. 

Our team set up and sent out tons of surveys throughout our six-month testing period. 

These ranged from the following survey types:

• Customer support
• Customer satisfaction
• Customer loyalty
• Custom survey

Here’s how it looked (to help paint a picture).

This feature is fantastic for SMBs seeking deeper insights into customer needs and wants. 

We identified areas where we could improve and make changes accordingly, thanks to the real-time feedback we received from our customers through these surveys. 

In today’s digital landscape, connecting with your customers in real time is crucial. 

HubSpot’s live chat feature allows you to do just that with a customizable chat widget that can be added to your website or emails. 

We tested this out and found it easy to set up and use. 

Here’s a quick look into the creation process.

We were able to easily customize the following:

• Name
• Color
• Logo
• Custom messages

Once we had customized everything to our liking, we could add the widget to our site and chat with our customers in real time. 

Our two cents: If you’re serious about connecting with your customers and providing excellent service, HubSpot’s live chat feature is a must-have. It’s a great way to empower your customer service teams to deliver exceptional support and build strong customer relationships. 

HubSpot offers the ability to create and manage powerful web pages, blog posts, and landing pages through its CMS Hub. 

This powerful tool provides SMBs with access to the following:

• SEO optimization tools
• Helpful templates
• Mobile responsiveness

We used this feature extensively during our six-month testing period, creating all kinds of content. 

Let’s walk you through the creation process for a web page. 

We navigated to their themes and templates section (shown below) to get started. 

We selected a template and then were able to customize the following:

• Color scheme 
• Font
• Style
• Logo

Here’s the customization section for reference. 

From there, we were brought to a drag-and-drop content editor to create our page. 

Here, we could easily add the following:

• Images
• Video
• Text
• Social links
• Custom code

Here’s a look at the page we created (within minutes).

We were impressed with the ease of use and variety of design options available with HubSpot. 

Our verdict: If you want to create and manage high-quality, professional-looking content without extensive coding knowledge, HubSpot’s CMS Hub has our vote!

Sending out informative, personalized emails and following up with prospects is a crucial part of any marketing strategy. 

HubSpot’s email marketing and automation tools make this process seamless with features such as the following:

• Email templates
• A drag-and-drop editor
• A/B testing
• Automation workflows

We could easily create and send out targeted campaigns, track their performance, and make changes based on the results. 

Let’s go through the creation process.

We started by selecting a template from their impressive selection(shown below).

From there, we were able to fully customize our email using the intuitive drag-and-drop editor.

Here’s how it looked from our team’s perspective during the testing period. 

We were able to easily add the following to each email:

• Text
• Images
• Video
• Buttons
• Social links
• Products

What’s great about HubSpot is that it allows even beginners to create professional-looking emails with ease.

Overall, HubSpot’s email and marketing automation tools are top-notch. In fact, we think they’re some of the best in the biz.

I’ve always been a firm believer in working smarter, not harder (and also sometimes harder). 

Automation lets you do just that by eliminating tedious tasks and streamlining customer relationship management. 

Thankfully, HubSpot offers fantastic marketing, service, and sales automation features that blow the competition out of the water!

We especially loved the pre-made automation templates (pictured below) that make it easy for anyone to automate their business without a second thought. 

Throughout testing HubSpot (over six months), we utilized these templates extensively while creating a bunch of automation from scratch. 

Check out a workflow we created in just a few minutes. 

The purpose of this automation was to capitalize the first letter of each contact’s first and last name. 

This one little automation saved us lots of time and ensured our data was accurate (without having to check it manually). 

The bottom line: If you’re looking to automate your business from the ground up, HubSpot is guaranteed to make your life easier (and save you plenty of time).