HubSpot Starter vs HubSpot Pro: A Detailed Comparison

HubSpot Starter and HubSpot Pro are two of the three paid tiers available to HubSpot users, and are the most commonly used by small and mid-size businesses. The third and highest paid tier, HubSpot Enterprise, is calibrated towards the needs of larger businesses and high-growth SMEs. We are going to assume for the purpose of this article that you’ve already got some familiarity with the HubSpot platform.

Maybe you are already a HubSpot free CRM user and want to find out more about the platform’s premium tools and features?

If you’re brand-new to HubSpot, grab yourself a warm drink and download our Free Guide To The HubSpot CRM first, and we’ll see you back here in a little while.

Ready to invest in HubSpot premium? Where to start

HubSpot free CRM is an excellent CRM and has a remarkable breadth of features for a free product. However, it’s with the features available to paid subscribers that HubSpot really begins to shine as a business development tool. So, of Starter and Pro, which plan most optimally fits your business needs and growth trajectory?

Pricing

Let’s get the question of cost out of the way. HubSpot Starter is, as its name implies, an entry-level subscription for small start-ups, micro businesses, and business owners that are entirely new to the platform. This subscription starts at just £18 per month, billed annually, allowing you to experiment with a cross-section of HubSpot premium features without it overwhelming your budget.

HubSpot professional starts at £1,404 per month, again billed annually, which is a considerable leap from Starter and reflects the comprehensive range of tools and capabilities available to Pro subscribers. HubSpot Pro simply hits different to starter at every level. This fee includes seats for five users, and additional users can be added for £77 per month per user.

What you get for your money

Investing in any of the three paid HubSpot tiers give you access to premium features in all five ‘hubs’: the Marketing Hub, the Sales Hub, the Service Hub, the CMS Hub (web building and development), and the Operations Hub, so you’ll immediately notice a difference in your capabilities and potential compared to the free CRM.

Nevertheless, the difference between Starter and Pro is a lot of money, the equivalent of hiring a junior employee in house, especially with the commitment to pay annually, so what are the main differences between the two tiers?

Marketing Hub

1. Starter: ideal for small businesses at the very start of their marketing journey, giving you access to basic email marketing, paid ad management, social media, and core content marketing tools.

2. Pro: for growing companies and small teams serious about investing in their marketing strategy, the Pro tier includes a range of advanced features such as content strategy tools, revenue attribution reporting, and A/B testing capabilities to help business owners optimise their campaigns effectively for the best results.

Sales Hub

1. Starter: The starter tier provides a simple CRM system, with email sequences and reminders, and intuitive reporting tools to help business owners track prospects through the sales pipeline. It’s a big increase in capabilities from the free CRM, and many small businesses don’t need any more than this, but the CRM is restricted to 1,000 marketing contacts on the Starter plan.

2. Pro: designed for a more comprehensive approach to sales management, HubSpot Pro includes advanced CRM customisation options, predictive lead scoring, and sales forecasting, as well as seamless integrations with popular software systems, and advanced automation capabilities to improve the productivity of your team.

(Customer) Service Hub

1. Starter: an effective tool for managing small customer service teams, giving you a shared inbox, a live chat feature, and basic customer support automation to improve the customer service responsiveness of your business.

2. Pro: Pro comes with a range of additional tools to help businesses prioritise customer service excellence, including an advanced virtual helpdesk, customer feedback tools, AI-powered website chat bots, and customer feedback analysis dashboard to inform your marketing campaigns.

CMS (Content Management System) Hub

1. Starter: the entry-level tier comes with all the straightforward, easy-to-use content creation and hosting tools you need to develop a solid digital platform for your company, including a good business website, blog, and landing pages.

2. Pro: ideal for SMEs with more complex content requirements and a multi-tiered digital ecosystem, Pro lets you create customised webpages, gives you a content partition system for managing sandbox content, and more advanced SEO recommendations.

Operations Hub

1. Starter: includes contact website activity and attribution reporting, with a focus on top of funnel activity – i.e. awareness level website traffic and lead generation.

2. Pro: for companies needing a deeper level of insight into their website traffic and more responsive performance tracking, HubSpot Pro gives you access to advance attribution reporting, custom report creation capabilities, forecasting, goal/KPI setting, and the potential to create custom event-based triggers for your customer life-cycle stages.

Commerce Hub

1. Starter: lets you set up a simple online shop with basic e-commerce analytics, with the ability to manage your products and orders in one place

2. Pro: for SMEs with robust e-commerce needs, the Professional tier includes more advanced online store building and management capabilities, including abandoned cart recovery messages, advanced personalisation features to enhance your customer shopping experience, and custom reporting and inventory management tools.

What plan is right for your business?

For small teams of less than five people, the Starter plan provides an excellent entry point to HubSpot, offering the fundamental tools you need to manage marketing, sales, and service processes more efficiently. This may be all you need. However, as your business grows and demands more advanced functionality, the Pro plan could help you leverage more advanced analytics, customisation potential and automation to drive continual growth and operational efficiency.

You can always begin with a Starter plan and upgrade to Pro if and when your needs change. However, if you’ve already got a fairly large marketing database, an active digital sales strategy, or an established team of five or more people who need to use the platform, it may be more cost effective and productive for you to dive straight into the Pro level subscription straightaway.

Working with an experienced Elite HubSpot Partner Agency, such as JDR, can help you get the best value from your investment, with greater and faster returns and a shorter learning curve, then you might achieve by going it alone.

To find out more or to discuss your options with one of our experienced HubSpot specialists, please contact us today by clicking here.

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