If you’re looking for CRM support, contact management, and excellent segmentation, then your choice may come down to Infusionsoft vs Hubspot.
Hubspot, founded in 2006, is one of the most popular marketing automation tools in the industry, providing an all-in-one service for everything from blogging to sales.
Infusionsoft, rebranded to “Keap” in 2019, also aims to provide a one-stop-shop for your marketing needs, complete with a state-of-the-art campaign builder.
Today, we’re going to put Infusionsoft and Hubspot to the test, to see which one comes out on top for your 2019 marketing automation needs.
Infusionsoft vs Hubspot: Pricing
We all have budgets to consider, right?
I know I always check prices before investing in any tools.
Infusionsoft offers 3 pricing models:
- Grow: $79 per month ($23 on offer at the time of writing)
- Pro: $149 per month ($44 on offer at the time of writing)
- InfusionSoft: $199 per month ($59 on offer at the time of writing)
Compared to something like Pipedrive CRM ($12.50 per user per month), those prices are pretty steep.
However, with Infusionsoft by Keap, you’re not paying on a “per agent” basis – so that’s a plus. Additionally, prices start with support for up to 2,500 contacts. Competitors often start their pricing at around 500 contacts instead.
Hubspot is another marketing automation tool that falls on the expensive side of things.
One huge plus that Hubspot has over Infusionsoft is that there’s a free tier.
Personally, that’s a huge advantage for someone like me, who loves testing out new tools.
The free tool comes with a bundle of useful features like ad management, contact management, live chat, and team emails. However, you don’t get any of the marketing automation tools you need, landing pages, or even email marketing services.
If you upgrade to “Starter” for $50 per month, you get a few extra benefits – but honestly, it’s not enough for anyone interested in genuine marketing automation. If you want to create custom workflows and get the hard work of marketing off your hands – you’re going to need the “Pro” package. That starts at $800 per month.
For the extra special features like CMS membership and single-sign-on you can expect to pay at least $3,200 per month. That’s a huge investment in marketing.
Winner
While Infusionsoft definitely isn’t the “cheap” option here, it still comes out cheaper than Hubspot. Although there’s a free version available for Hubspot, it’s not going to give you any email marketing or automation tools.
Infusionsoft vs Hubspot: Onboarding Fees
If Infusionsoft and Hubspot weren’t making you question your budget already, there’s yet another expense to consider – onboarding.
With Infusionsoft, there’s a mandatory “Kickstart” fee, which pays for your one-on-one coaching sessions, reporting, migration and other essential elements to help you get started.
Unfortunately, this handy “extra” isn’t optional, and costs a minimum of $499 depending on how much support you need.
Personally, I would have preferred to figure things out myself and save some cash. However, you might like the extra hand-holding – even if it means paying more money.
Hubspot, on the other hand, provides their mandatory “onboarding” for $3,000. The onboarding service gives you an assigned implementation specialist to work with. This ensures that you set your marketing hub up properly, and hopefully get the most out of your campaign.
Again, it’s an expensive way to get some extra help for the first three months of your campaign. However, you can’t choose not to take it.
I’d rather stumble through the process by myself than pay a few hundred or thousand dollars – but there you go.
Since both Infusionsoft and HubSpot hide the details of their onboarding fees at the bottom of pages and in small print – make sure you budget for this additional expense when you’re going in.
Winner
Again, neither option is ideal if you’re looking for something cheap and cheerful. However, Infusionsoft is significantly cheaper than Hubspot overall.
Infusionsoft vs Hubspot: Features
Let’s get to the meat of this review.
If you’re going to shell out some serious cash for either Hubspot or Infusionsoft, then you’re going to want some excellent features for your cash.
While both of these tools have a lot of capabilities to cover, for the purpose of this review, we’ll be comparing:
- Automation features
- Sales management
- Segmentation / Contact management
- Reporting and Analytics
- UX, Interface and functionality
- Integrations
Infusionsoft vs Hubspot: Automations
In this review, we’re looking for the tool that will help you to reduce the amount of work you need to do on your marketing campaigns – and potentially earn more conversions.
Infusionsoft is a tool that focuses almost entirely on automation at its heart.
For most people (including me), it’s got the best automation builder on the market. Mapping out entire funnels and applying automation rules is an absolutely breeze. Plus, you get all the handy landing pages and email templates you need to convert leads into customers.
Infusionsoft is a “visual” builder. That means that you drag and drop triggers into a list that’s incredibly easy to follow. For instance, you can decide what happens when your audience member clicks on a link or reads an email. There’s even an option to build multiple sequences all leading to the same goal.
In terms of automation, Infusionsoft is very difficult to beat.
Now, let’s look at HubSpot.
Hubspot isn’t actually a marketing automation tool per-se. It’s an inbound marketing service.
So, what’s the difference?
Well, Hubspot offers a lot of different tools, like blogging, lead tagging and so on, but it doesn’t do anything particularly in-depth. Think of it as a jack-of-all-trades rather than a specialist.
Marketing automation is one of the features that Hubspot offers (although not on the free or low-price tiers). HubSpot’s automation tools work on “if-this-then-that” workflows. You’ll set rules to perform specific action based on what your customer does or doesn’t do.
The process is quite intuitive, and pretty easy to follow, but it’s not nearly as immersive as Infusionsoft. You can use automations to turn customer requests into tickets, and route them to people on your team, or use automations to move people further down the sales funnel. However, you don’t have as many trigger options as Infusionsoft offers.
I did slightly prefer the way the graphics looked on Hubspot – but that was more of an aesthetic preference than anything.
Winner
When it comes to creating visual workflows, Infusionsoft can’t be beat. The automation workflow is incredibly in-depth, with countless triggers and potential automations to choose from.
Hubspot didn’t have a chance in this area.
Infusionsoft vs Hubspot: Sales Management
Infusionsoft and Hubspot both advertise themselves as all-in-one tools.
That means you don’t just get marketing automation. You get everything you need to capture and convert a lead. Both of these tools provide access to the full buyer funnel.
So, how does Infusionsoft fare when it comes to sales management?
Pretty well. With Infusionsoft, you can access a host of built-in sales automation features that automate activities like:
- Scoring leads based on activity
- Automatically sending quotes to prospects
- Visually organizing your pipeline
Honestly, Infusionsoft’s Sales management options aren’t nearly as comprehensive as what you’d get from something like Salesforce. However, if you’re looking for something reasonably affordable that fits into your marketing and conversion strategy well – then the sales automation tool is very useful.
There’s also a basic shopping cart – although you’ll probably have an easier time implementing something like WooCommerce or Shopify instead. It wasn’t that I didn’t like the shopping cart – though the functionality was a bit clunky.
The main issue is that I’m just used to using other options, and Infusionsoft’s shopping cart doesn’t feel as natural. Plus, you need to pay extra for it, instead of getting a free integration.
So, let’s take a look at how Hubspot handles sales.
As a complete inbound marketing tool, Hubspot gives you both a CRM and a sales tool alongside your marketing suite. These components come with automation features, so you can determine how leads flow through your pipeline. You can also score leads automatically over time.
The connection between marketing and sales with Hubspot is seamless. If you’re looking for something that gives you more consistent feedback between sales and marketing, then this is an excellent choice.
Hubspot also makes it easier to engage in omnichannel sales and marketing strategies too.
For me, the whole thing felt like working on my whiteboard at home or playing around with post-it notes. It was just seamless.
You can choose to add and remove users to lists, change contacts or company information based on their interactions, send SMS messages when people abandon a cart and more.
The extensive automation options are excellent for larger marketing teams.
Winner
Hubspot comes out on top in this area. As a full inbound marketing suite, it makes it much easier for businesses to manage their entire lead nurturing and acquisition strategy.
Infusionsoft vs Hubspot: Email Builder
Email is crucial for nurturing leads into sales.
So, how do you start building stunning content to send to your audience?
Infusionsoft offers an intuitive email building service, designed to make creating stunning templates simple. Honestly, the number of pre-made templates available is pretty limited compared to competitors. However, where Infusionsoft really shines, is in letting you design emails from scratch.
The drag-and-drop broadcast builder works using blocks.
You drag images, spacers, call-to-action buttons and more into your template, and Infusionsoft makes sure they work well together. You can also preview your email on mobile and desktop or send a tester to a dummy account to check everything works as it should.
I had some serious fun with this feature. It really feely satisfying to watch all of the components of your email click into place like Tetris pieces.
Hubspot also offers a handful of templates to get you started with their email marketing service.
Again, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of options to choose from at first glance. However, when you skip through to the template builder, you’ll discover plenty of extra features to play with.
Like Infusionsoft, everything works with blocks. You can add social-media buttons, images, text, and layout features just by clicking a few buttons.
In terms of editing your design, there’s patterns, colors, and different fonts to choose from to make your content stand out. There’s also the option to add your own company logo.
Honestly, the experience is so similar to Infusionsoft that I had a hard time telling them apart.
The only real difference is that you can’t preview your email in mobile mode.
Winner
I would have called this section a draw if it wasn’t for the extra ability to preview your email in mobile format that you get from Infusionsoft. This additional option pushes Infusionsoft just ahead of Hubspot here.
Infusionsoft vs Hubspot: Segmentation
You don’t just want to send the same email to everyone, right?
Managing your contacts is crucial in any marketing campaign.
As well all know, relevant content is key to success. Personalized email messages increase click-through rates by an average of at least 14%.
Creating a list of contacts in Infusionsoft is a breeze. Just click the + button at the top of the page to get started on your dashboard. Hovering over a contact on the main page will give you access to more information, and you can enter into the contact itself for a more complete run-down of information.
More importantly, Infusionsoft makes segmenting your contacts simple with both lists and tags. You can organize your contacts into lists, then tag them to ensure that they’re getting the right content to drive sales.
To add a tag, visit your Contacts page, and click on the Action tab. Infusionsoft offers the option to add tags to an entire group, like “Repeat Buyer” or “New Customer”, so you can segment in bulk too. You can also mark people with messages like “Payment failed”.
Hubspot also offers plenty of contact management features to get your lists on point.
Because Hubspot integrates with a wide range of CRM systems, one of the best ways to manage your contacts is to import them from the tools you’re already using. For instance, you can pull everything you already have on Salesforce or PandaDoc over to Hubspot.
One particularly impressive component of HubSpot’s contact management options is that adding an URL to a record pulls in demographic information from that URL. For instance, you can add a lead’s website to their contact details, and this will automatically give you info about the company’s location, number of employees and so on.
You can email your Hubspot contacts directly from the record on your Hubspot dashboard and make VoIP calls if you’ve got this paid feature turned on. The integration lets you log and record call information, complete with transcripts.
Winner
Hubspot is definitely the winner for contact management, just because you can do so much more with the contacts you have. However, it’s worth noting that you will have to pay a lot more for extra features like VoIP and call recording.
Infusionsoft vs Hubspot: Reporting and Analytics
It’s important to keep track of how well your campaigns are going.
Both Hubspot and Infusionsoft give you an excellent overview of your success rates, via reporting feature. To find out how things are going on Infusionsoft, click into your email stats page and tap on the “View” option to see the report on each email campaign.
While the Infusionsoft reporting features are quite extensive, they focus more on your emails than other parts of your marketing campaigns. If you’re looking for something that covers full inbound marketing reporting, then you might need to switch to Hubspot instead.
Hubspot gives you everything you need to track your entire customer lifecycle, all the way from visitor on your website to long-term customer.
You can break your reports down by company-level and contact properties in your CRM database, and set-up tests to discover trends in your marketing results over time.
HubSpot even closes the loop with your marketing efforts with revenue and attribution reporting so you can see which activities are contributing most to your bottom line.
For end-to-end guidance on your marketing, HubSpot goes above and beyond. The integrated analytics features even come with widgets you can add straight to your dashboard. This means that whenever you log on to Hubspot, you see how much progress you’ve made.
I felt like a data scientist – and I’ve never done any real hard-core data analytics in my life.
Sure, all of the features can seem a bit overwhelming at first – but that’s probably why HubSpot makes you pay so much for onboarding. They’re teaching you how to use a full analytics system.
Winner
Hubspot delivers amazing analytics from end-to-end for your marketing campaigns. For amazing reports and in-depth insights into your ROI, Hubspot is on-par with analytics services like Google.
Infusionsoft vs Hubspot: Interface, UX and Usability
Even the best marketing tool isn’t much good if you don’t know how to use it.
Fortunately, both Infusionsoft and Hubspot take this into account.
Each of them come with a customizable dashboard, which offers a multitude of widgets that you can add or subtract based on what you need from your campaigns. The Infusionsoft UI is clean and simple.
Depending on what you want to do, you can customize your dashboard by adding everything from contact management features, to usage stats.
What’s more, when talking about usability, it’s worth throwing a mention back to the visual campaign builder offered by Infusionsoft. It’s one of the easiest and most intuitive tools on the market for automation.
There’s also a feature on Infusionsoft called “My Day”, where you can organize the tasks you need to get done. If you’re working with a group, you can even outsource assignments to other people.
Infusionsoft comes with plenty of ways to simplify your marketing management strategy. There’s also an iOS and Android app if you want to work on anything from your smartphone. You can’t create full email campaigns or anything like that – but you can check the basics – like how your emails are performing.
Hubspot also provides a very intuitive UX for such a feature-rich piece of software.
For me, it was a little difficult to figure out where the things I wanted were at times. However, HubSpot does offer plenty of training that will get you up to speed. The home dashboard is very clean and easy to use, just like Infusionsoft.
However, I had trouble determining where I needed to go to find email templates, or even track down help from the support team.
To some extent, Hubspot experiences a little bit of “feature bloat”. There’s so much that you can do with the system that it can seem overwhelming at first glance.
However, once again, I’ll say that there is onboarding available that I assume will give you all the guidance you need to make the interface feel more comfortable.
Even without that extra help, certain features – like the marketing automation suite – are very easy to use. What’s more, blogs and landing pages feel simple and straightforward to create.
There are only a few initial growing pains to get past. For instance – why did it take me five minutes to find the blasted help button?
Winner
For me, Infusionsoft comes out on top just because it seems to put more into usability at the moment. The smartphone apps are a nice touch, and everything feels seamless as you’re moving through the software.
However, Hubspot certainly isn’t too difficult to use either.
Infusionsoft vs Hubspot: Integrations
Want to make sure your marketing automation software plays well with others?
Both Infusionsoft and Hubspot are excellent in this regard.
I’m not going to give you a full list of the integrations that both options offer. The two services make it very easy for you to track down what you need by yourself.
There are hundreds of apps on Infusionsoft, split into options like “Convert Leads” or “Make Money”. When I clicked on “Attract Leads”, I found no less than 109 integrations available.
Hubspot is equally generous with its integrations. There are about 320 in total at the time I’m writing this article. What’s more, they’re all organized into categories based on what you want to accomplish. For instance, you can look for apps to do with analytics and data, advertising, calling and more.
One particularly handy thing about HubSpot is its API. This means that you can create your own programs within the HubSpot platform if you have a developer on board.
Winner
Both tools have plenty of integrations to choose from, but Hubspot does seem to be a little more comprehensive at the moment.
Infusionsoft vs Hubspot: Customer Support
We all need a little help sometimes, right?
Infusionsoft provides plenty of support options, including a help centre, complete with knowledgebase articles, webinars, blogs, and so much more.
If you’re looking for one-on-one support, you can call the free-phone numbers in Australia, UK, Canada, or the USA. There’s also a 24/7 chat feature if you’re lucky enough to have a full Infusionsoft premium account.
For those who don’t have a full account yet, there’s plenty of support available from Infusionsoft’s community too. The forums are open to everyone, and you can ask questions from a group of highly responsive and friendly Infusionsoft users.
I’ve used Hubspot before and found its customer support to be frightfully bad. However, it’s safe to say that the company has improved a great deal on this front in recent years. These days, you can get phone support with a handy call-back feature. That means you don’t have to wait on hold for hours at a time.
You’ll also be able to access the Hubspot knowledgebase for DIY assistance, or you can click on the “Help” button in the bottom right of your Hubspot account for one-on-one assistance.
The Help button takes you to a page where you can search for answers to your questions within the Hubspot knowledgebase, or you can push your questions through to the “HubBot”.
The bot gives you the option to choose between chatting with a coach, or figuring things out on your own, which is nice.
When I clicked on “Chat with a coach” the bot asked me what I was looking for, so it could find the right person for my question. For me, that’s a good sign that you’re going to get the right agent first-time, rather being pushed from person to person.
Winner
Hubspot offers instant chat that’s tailored to suit your needs, call-back functions so you can waste less time on hold, and an excellent knowledgebase. There’s everything you need here for excellent customer support.
Which Tool is Right for You?
If you’re looking for a basic, or cheap marketing tool, then neither Hubspot nor Infusionsoft is the choice for you. Both of these options are expensive (Hubspot more so), but you get what you pay for.
With Hubspot and Infusionsoft, you’ll find plenty of features that help to automate and optimize your marketing strategies. While they both bill themselves as all-in-one sales and marketing solutions, they’re very different in the experiences that they offer.
Infusionsoft is the tool that you want if you’re focused on building highly-responsive and intuitive automation campaigns from the ground up. Hubspot is the service you’re looking for if you need a complete overview and insight into your sales and marketing campaigns.
Choose Infusionsoft if:
- You want automation abilities that are second-to-none
- You’re searching for incredible segmentation and tagging
- You need split-testing features to optimize your campaigns
- You’re looking for an excellent email building tool
Choose Hubspot if:
- You need a complete in-bound marketing tool with blogs, landing pages and HTML emails included
- You want access to a service that integrates with all your favorite CRM products
- You need reporting and analytics features that go beyond the basics.
- You need help with every stage of the customer journey, from discovery to advocacy
