HubSpot Vs. EngageBay 2023: Honest Comparison for SMBs

Excellent customer data management is crucial to the success of your business. 

Keep track of relevant information, communications, and interactions with your leads and customers in one place using EngageBay to manage contacts.

We started testing this feature (over three months) by adding in some of our affiliate marketing B2B contacts at Small Business Bonfire. 

Here’s a contact card (to give you a preview of how it looks).

Within each card, it’s easy to add and edit the following info:

• Contact info
• Role
• Tags
• Company
• Custom fields

We especially loved how easy it was to add custom fields for almost anything we needed!

This makes EngageBay perfect for SMBs needing more customization for their contacts.

Once our contacts were put in, here’s how our dashboard looked. 

Overall, when it comes to contact management, EngageBay keeps it simple (while still offering a ton of utility and customization). They offer some of the best contact management in the game. 

Managing your sales process is critical to closing more deals and making money. The best way to do that is with great sales tools (like pipeline management).

Luckily, we found EngageBay’s sales pipeline management to be intuitive and easy to use.

It was easy to add stages, move contacts through the pipeline, and view where our leads were in the sales process at a glance.

We could also easily switch between table and list views with just a click, giving us a better understanding of our sales pipeline (from multiple angles). 

Here’s an example of our table view, which lets us see each milestone in a clear, color-coded layout.

With this view, we could easily see a ton of helpful info. 

However, it is worth shouting out the excellent grid view (shown below) that allowed us to easily move around cards (using the drag-and-drop functionality).

Add onto that the powerful sales automation that eliminates tedious tasks for your sales team, and you’ve got a powerful feature in EngageBay. 

Our takeaway: When it comes to pipeline management, EngageBay makes it effortless. There’s virtually no learning curve to streamlining your pipeline and scaling your business with EngageBay.

Setting and managing tasks within your CRM is essential to keeping your business organized and on track.

EngageBay’s task management feature allows you to assign tasks to specific team members, set due dates, and view all tasks in one place. 

We tested this feature by setting up a few day-to-day tasks at Small Business Bonfire.

Here’s a new task card to give you a better idea of what we were dealing with. 

With each card, we could easily assign the following info:

• Name
• Type
• Priority
• Due date
• Reminder date
• Notes

We thought the notification system was a nice touch, making sure we never missed a task assigned to us. 

Check out our task dashboard grid view, which displays all our tasks in a clean, easy-to-read layout.

The bottom line:  Task management in EngageBay has all the functionality you need in a CRM (without being overwhelming). 

Let’s be real—if you’re sleeping on the importance of email marketing, you’re leaving money on the table. 

Thankfully, EngageBay’s CRM offers a robust email marketing campaign feature with customization and powerful automation capabilities.

Setting up an email campaign was relatively straightforward (and surprisingly beginner-friendly). We set up an email drip campaign for our newsletter (the Bonfire Field Guide).

We could select from a ton of helpful templates (screenshot below) that helped us get started with ease. 

Here’s an example showing us setting up a new broadcast (which just involved a few clicks).

From there, we created our campaign by designing email templates for each stage in the rollout process.

For example, here’s an introduction email we set up (and sent out) within just a few minutes. 

At the end of the day, if you’re serious about ramping up your marketing efforts, EngageBay’s email marketing feature is a must-have. 

The ability to create powerful web forms (for free) whenever you need them is a game-changer for SMBs. 

We utilized this tool quite a bit throughout our testing, creating both inline and popup web forms.

Check out an inline web form that we were able to create (in a matter of minutes).

We were able to easily custom the following elements of our web form:

• Colors
• Logo
• Fields
• Size 

EngageBay makes creating web forms so easy that just about anyone can do it with just a few clicks. 

So, if you want to amplify your marketing efforts (or are just looking for that next growth hack), give EngageBay’s web form creation feature a try. You can thank us later.

Landing pages allow you to capture leads and drive conversions from your website. 

We found EngageBay’s landing page creation tool to be user-friendly and customizable, with plenty of templates to choose from (shown below).

The templates eliminate any entry barrier or learning curve preventing you from creating effective landing pages for your business. 

Here’s a sneak peek into the landing page creation process (about halfway through).

Here are some of the features we could easily customize on our landing page:

• Background image
• Text and font styles
• Form fields and customizations
• Call-to-action buttons

One feature we particularly appreciated was the ability to set up automation for what happens after a contact fills out the form on our landing page. 

This allowed us to easily set up automated email campaigns or tasks (based on a contact’s actions).

All in all, EngageBay’s landing page creation tool makes it easy to capture leads and increase conversions on your website. 

Customers expect quick and convenient communication with businesses in today’s fast-paced world.

That’s where EngageBay’s live chat software comes in, courtesy of HubSpot Service Hub. 

With just a few clicks, you can add a live chat widget to your website and engage with visitors in real time.

Not only does this allow for improved customer engagement, but it also allows you to capture more leads by providing instant support and assistance.

We tested this feature by setting up a live chat widget on our website and were impressed with how easy it was to use. 

We could easily customize the chat box design, set up automated greetings, and assign specific team members to handle incoming chats. 

Here’s how our chat widget customization looked for our Bonfire Support chat.

Our two cents: If you want to provide excellent customer service and increase lead generation, EngageBay’s live chat software should be one of the service tools in your belt. 

EngageBay allows you to track and manage customer inquiries and issues with ease.

With EngageBay’s ticket management, we were able to easily accomplish the following:

• Create custom ticket categories and statuses
• Assign tickets to support team members for resolution
• Set automated responses for customer queries
• Track the progress of each ticket through the system 

This made it easier for us to manage our support efforts and provided a more organized and efficient experience for our customers. 

Here’s how a new ticket looked from our perspective.

Within each card, we could easily edit the following information:

• Subject
• Related contact
• Assignee
• Ticket messages

We also appreciated that we could easily view the status of each ticket, making it easy to prioritize and address urgent issues. 

Here’s our ticket view during our three months of testing. 

Our favorite part of EngageBay’s ticket management is that it’s incredibly easy to use and intuitive. The fact that it’s 100% free doesn’t hurt either!

EngageBay provides fantastic service automation to help you support teams and improve customer engagement.

Not only can you automate ticket responses, but you can also set up workflows to trigger specific actions based on ticket status or other criteria. 

For example, we set up an automation to automatically assign a user when a ticket is submitted (so that it could be addressed promptly). 

Here’s a sneak peek at our service automation setup.

We also accomplished the following with EngageBay’s automation (during our three months of testing):

• Sent automated email responses based on ticket status
• Assigned tickets to specific team members based on category
• Set up reminders for unresolved tickets 

Overall, we were extremely impressed with EngageBay’s service automation capabilities. It helped us improve our response time and provide a better customer support experience—what’s not to love?