Your business won’t be a business without your customers. And when it comes to managing customer relationships, a solid CRM software is non-negotiable.
Customer relationship management (CRM) systems handle daily communications and data from potential customers, contacts, and current clients, helping businesses keep track of interactions and preferences to provide better service.
But let’s face it: traditional CRM systems can be quite complex. In the past, businesses relied on custom-made platforms or clunky spreadsheets as CRM alternatives. Neither of these options was ideal.
Luckily, many CRMs are available today to make sales processes smoother and improve client relationships. Two of the most popular choices are ClickUp and HubSpot.
But how do you know which one to pick?
While HubSpot is a comprehensive CRM platform designed for enterprises and growing businesses, ClickUp’s CRM tools are tailored for businesses of all sizes looking for a more lightweight and cost-effective solution. ClickUp’s CRM capabilities complement its powerful project management features, making it an attractive choice for teams seeking an all-in-one platform.
This article will compare ClickUp and HubSpot, and discuss their features, pricing, and overall performance to help you find the best CRM platform.
What Is ClickUp?
ClickUp is an all-in-one productivity management software that comes with its own set of customizable CRM tools.
ClickUp’s CRM tools are specifically made to help marketing teams work better. Easy integration with 1000+ popular tools such as Google, Slack, and HubSpot means that ClickUp makes teamwork smoother and helps everyone get more done in one app.
Keep track of contacts and manage customer relationships better with different templates and views, like lists, Kanban boards, tables, or calendars. ClickUp also gives you insights into your customers’ data so you can make smart decisions and find new opportunities.
By bringing emails directly within ClickUp, your team can talk to customers, track and follow up on leads, and welcome new customers onboard—without switching apps all day.
Overall, ClickUp is a collaborative CRM and project management system that can improve your marketing planning, sales strategies, and team collaboration in one go.
ClickUp features
Some of ClickUp’s best CRM features include:
1. Manage and generate leads with a centralized database
Let’s start with the basics: a CRM tool helps you manage your customers, starting with finding potential leads.
ClickUp’s CRM makes it easy for businesses to organize customer accounts. It helps you create a customizable database to keep all your lead information together— like personal details, contact data, interaction history, and purchase behavior. This prevents duplicate entries and gives you a clear and tidy view of potential customers.
With neatly organized folders, subfolders, and lists, sales teams can use this relational database to quickly find customers, manage their sales processes, and keep their pipelines organized.
Moreover, ClickUp CRM allows sales and marketing teams to categorize potential customers using tags, custom statuses, filters, and locations. This helps them identify and pursue better leads.
How? This well-organized database can be used to determine which leads are more likely to become customers based on factors like company size or industry.
This helps sales teams track their pipeline and know where to focus their sales efforts. Meanwhile, marketing teams can group customers for targeted campaigns.
But can ClickUp also help you find new leads? Absolutely.
Good CRM tools should help you capture potential leads from different sources, such as your website, emails, or social media. You can gather all this information by setting up forms with ClickUp’s Form Builder. You can use all this collected data and auto-import new leads directly into your database with ClickUp Automations (we’ll dive more into that soon).
Here are some of ClickUp’s best features to simplify the lead-generation process:
- See client relationships easily with ClickUp’s 15+ customizable views
- Analyze data for insights into customer behavior using Dashboard widgets
- Centralize customer outreach by integrating emails with ClickUp
- Collaborate on deals, send updates to clients, and onboard customers all from one place
- Automate tasks such as handoffs and status updates to streamline your workflow
2. Save time by automating your sales pipeline management
CRM processes come with a lot of boring, repetitive tasks. They unnecessarily take up your precious time and energy. The solution? Automate them.
Combine ClickUp CRM with ClickUp Automations to reduce repetitive work. This includes setting up email workflows, updating lead statuses and priorities, assigning leads, and creating follow-up tasks.
You can also create more advanced automation workflows, like sending a message on Slack when a deal is closed or assigning a task in your project management tool when a lead becomes a customer.
With ClickUp CRM, you can automate emails based on different triggers, such as form submissions, changes in lead status or priorities, dates, integrations, or API triggers. You can also schedule reminder emails for invoices or follow-up emails based on a customer’s response.
While automations may reduce some of your workload, you must still monitor your pipeline to track leads and close deals. This is where ClickUp Sales comes in, and its highly customizable CRM is the differentiator.
Use this platform’s flexibility to customize all lead details, including fields, tags, and statuses. ClickUp offers eight types of fields (like number, text, phone, email, location, dropdown, and checkbox) and five different views (such as table, board, calendar, list, and form), allowing you to adapt it however you need to.
Another feature that simplifies pipeline management? ClickUp Dashboards.
Your customer database contains many important details, such as customer conversations and spending habits. Zooming out reveals more about campaign costs, conversion rates, and customer satisfaction.
Analyzing this data helps you make smart decisions. For example, you can figure out which customer groups are more likely to make big purchases or are easier to sell to so you can improve your sales approach.
You can use charts to see how sales are going, analyze past data to predict future sales, or even use AI to forecast sales. Then, when you run campaigns or notice trends, you need real-time reports to help you keep track of progress.
Phew, that’s a lot to organize! Luckily, there’s a way.
ClickUp has 50+ dashboard widgets for building reports and analyzing sales patterns and customer engagement. These widgets are fully customizable, and the reports are updated in real time. Group these reports into your dashboards (let’s say, one for conversions and another for acquisitions) and share them with your team or export them as PDFs.
Meanwhile, you can bring in ClickUp Brain to summarize insights from dashboards, answer customer-related questions, provide snapshots of customer interactions, or analyze conversion rates for specific customer groups.
3. Get a jumpstart with a library of CRM templates
With CRM templates, you can quickly create custom projects and processes that fit your team’s needs. This makes managing your team easier and keeps you flexible.
Take the ClickUp CRM Template, for instance. Use it to track your leads and opportunities through pipelines, organize all your contact info in one place, and even prioritize tasks based on their location in the sales process.
If you need to handle clients and plan sales, ClickUp offers client management and sales plan templates to help you stay organized.
Connect ClickUp CRM with other key tools
Your data can become scattered when you use different platforms for various tasks.
Your CRM tool is a central hub for all customer information, so it needs to sync in real-time with your other tools. And ClickUp is pretty great at that.
ClickUp CRM integrates with over 1000 popular tools! For example, you can create a task in ClickUp when a support ticket is generated in HubSpot or automatically update customer contact details in ClickUp when they change in HubSpot.
ClickUp pricing
- Free Forever
- Unlimited: $7/user per month
- Business: $12/user per month
- Enterprise: Contact for pricing
- ClickUp Brain is available on all paid plans for $5/member per Workspace per month
What Is HubSpot?
HubSpot is not just a CRM tool—it’s a comprehensive platform that brings together marketing, sales, and customer relationships all in one convenient place.
With HubSpot, you can optimize the entire customer journey, starting from eye-catching ads and messages through email and social media and going up to creating personalized lead nurture campaigns.
It also tracks every interaction your customers have with your business. This helps you understand what they like and don’t so you can make tweaks to enhance their experience.
HubSpot saves time by automating tasks like organizing data and sending emails. This gives your team more freedom to focus on important things.
Plus, its free CRM software lets you store many contacts and data without worrying about running out.
Lastly, HubSpot lets you send personalized emails to leads and tracks when they open them, helping you follow up at the right moment.
Hubspot features
You’ll find many different products offered by the HubSpot Marketing Hub. Let’s check out some of its key features, with those related to CRM in focus:
1. CRM database and tracking features
With HubSpot, you can create a super organized address book for your business called the CRM database. This is how you can keep track of all your customers and potential customers in one place.
Guess what? You have space for up to a million contacts!
This comprehensive marketing repository neatly stores all kinds of information, including names, titles, email addresses, past interactions, how they found you, how likely they are to buy, and even how much they’ve spent.
HubSpot’s contact management system simplifies the entire process of adding and updating contacts.
Its extensive tracking abilities help you monitor how leads interact with your website, emails, and calls.
Browser cookies allow you to check which pages are popular, how much time was spent on them, and visitor locations. You can also connect your email IDs and send emails, log them, and track opens and clicks from HubSpot.
HubSpot also monitors calls and deals. It logs all your calls so you know who’s been contacted and when.
Meanwhile, for your deals, you can track potential transactions from start to finish, giving you a transparent view of their progress.
2. Reporting and analytics
HubSpot has handy built-in reporting and analytics tools that help you understand how well your strategies work and instantly generate visual reports.
They let you monitor your marketing activities and insights, such as user sessions, engagement metrics, and bounce rates. This helps you see where you’re doing well and where you can improve.
Now, you can quickly create reports and even forecast your sales revenue based on historical data and marketing trends.
3. Sales workflow automation
HubSpot CRM’s automation capabilities can simplify and personalize your marketing, sales, and service tasks. You can create workflows that perform multiple actions, like updating a contact’s information and sending follow-up emails.
You can also set up email sequences to nurture leads over time with personalized emails and create follow-up tasks to stay connected with them. You can also monitor contacts in sequences and adjust as needed.
Workflows can trigger birthday emails, assign leads to your sales team, create records automatically, and update Google Sheets. You can choose triggers, actions, and settings for your workflows.
Before activating a workflow, you can test it and fix any issues in the workflow editor.
Hubspot pricing
The following plans are for the HubSpot product, Service Hub, which includes all CRM tools:
- Free plan: Upto 5 users
- Starter: $20/month per seat
- Professional: Starts at $100/month per seat
- Enterprise: Starts at $130/month per seat
ClickUp vs. Hubspot: Features Compared
Let’s summarize features for a quick comparison to see who did better: ClickUp or Hubspot.
Feature | ClickUp | HubSpot |
Audience | Suitable for businesses of all sizes and from all industries | Suitable for enterprises and growing businesses |
User interface | Feature-rich and intuitive, a slight learning curve | Simple and basic with easy navigation |
Customization | Better suited for overall project management and customer management customization | Offers more customized marketing automation with targeted workflows |
Project management | Strong, containing features specific to managing and tracking project progress | Weak, essentially a CRM software |
Collaboration | Strong, allowing teams to work simultaneously in real time without any interruptions | Weak, not as collaborative as other tools |
Task management | Expansive, can handle all kinds of tasks associated with various projects | Focuses only on tasks related to CRM |
Automation | Yes, with ClickUp Brain | Yes, with HubSpot AI |
Lead generation | Yes | Yes |
Analytics | Generate real-time reports for your projects from customizable dashboards | Analyze all marketing activities using HubSpot dashboards |
Integrations | 1000+ integrations | 1000+ integrations |
Customer support | Phone, emails, chat, tutorials | Phone, email, chat |
Pricing | Offers a free plan. Paid plans start at $7/month/seat and go up to custom pricing for enterprises | Offers a free plan. Paid plans start at $20/month/seat and go up to $150/month/seat for enterprises |
ClickUp and HubSpot are both strong CRM tools that can redefine your sales game. Let’s examine their strengths and weaknesses.
Lead generation
ClickUp
ClickUp is mainly a project and task management tool, with lead generation as a secondary focus.
ClickUp doesn’t have built-in tools for creating landing pages, but once you’ve secured leads, you can manage and assign them to your team. It integrates with CRM and marketing tools to import and track leads in your project management workflows. The automation features are useful for follow-up tasks and reminders but not for generating leads initially.
HubSpot
HubSpot’s core functionality is marketing automation and customer relationship management. Naturally, it puts a lot of focus on lead generation.
It helps you create landing pages, forms, chatbots, and live chat to capture leads from your website visitors. Plus, HubSpot has dedicated lead generation tools designed to track and nurture leads using email marketing, lead scoring, and automated workflows.
Winner: Hubspot
Pipeline management
ClickUp
ClickUp shines when it comes to managing tasks and project workflows, and your sales pipeline is no different. It offers visual pipeline boards (Kanban boards, lists, sales SOP, and 15+ views) to track tasks through different stages. They are also highly customizable for different types of work, including sales processes.
Meanwhile, ClickUp’s automation can move tasks through pipelines based on triggers. It also integrates with external tools, allowing you to incorporate external data directly into your workflows.
HubSpot
HubSpot has all the necessary tools to track leads and deals through different stages. Its marketing automation allows you to create lead-nurturing pipelines with automated emails and lead scoring. It has advanced analytics and forecasting tools to improve your sales and marketing strategies.
However, Hubspot falls short when it comes to visualization. This might make it difficult for teams to get a bird’s-eye view of the entire process, eventually affecting their ability to make quick and smart decisions. It may prompt them to look for HubSpot alternatives.
Winner: ClickUp
Workflow automation
ClickUp
ClickUp’s automation features align with its ability to manage projects and tasks. It lets you set triggers and actions for tasks, like assigning tasks or moving them based on the custom conditions you set.
ClickUp also has an advanced automation builder for creating custom workflows and automating repetitive tasks in your projects. It integrates with many apps, allowing you to automate workflows across different tools easily.
HubSpot
On the other hand, HubSpot’s workflow automation focuses on automating marketing, sales, and customer service tasks. Within the platform, you can create sophisticated workflows based on customer interactions, lead scoring, and email marketing.
It includes built-in features for lead nurturing, email sequences, and tracking customer journeys. HubSpot’s automation is closely integrated with its CRM, effectively automating customer-related tasks and processes.
Winner: Depends; choose ClickUp for task and project automations and HubSpot for marketing and sales-specific automations. For businesses seeking a more streamlined and cost-effective solution, ClickUp’s automation capabilities may be sufficient for managing basic customer-related tasks and workflows, while HubSpot’s advanced automation features cater to more complex enterprise-level requirements.
Integrations
ClickUp
With ClickUp, you can enjoy integrations with over 1000 different apps and services. The focus is on popular tools commonly used by businesses, such as Trello, Slack, and Google Drive.
This targeted approach ensures ClickUp’s integrations are highly relevant and beneficial to a wide range of users, facilitating smoother collaboration and project management.
HubSpot
Hubspot also has integrations spanning 1000+ tools via the HubSpot App Marketplace. These include well-known tools such as Salesforce, Zapier, and Shopify.
With such a diverse range, you can quickly connect HubSpot with various platforms you already utilize. This reduces constant app switching and boosts workflow efficiency.
Winner: It’s a tie!
Pricing
Plan | ClickUp | HubSpot | ||||
Free | Collaborative docs Customizable views like Kanban boards and Calendar Whiteboards Sprint Management Real-time chat Custom fields | Meeting scheduling Email tracking and scheduling Contact management Website activity Reporting dashboard Five email templates | ||||
Paid | Has three plans: Unlimited, Business, and Enterprise | Has three plans: Starter, Professional, and Enterprise | ||||
Unlimited | Business | Enterprise | Starter | Professional | Enterprise | |
$7/month, includes agile reporting and email tracking | $12/month, includes advanced automations and dashboards | Custom pricing, includes customer success manager and advanced permissions | $20/month for one seat, includes simple automation and e-signature | $100/month for one seat, includes call transcription and coaching, ABM tools, and automation | $150/month for one seat, includes predictive lead scoring and recurring revenue tracking |
ClickUp
ClickUp is one of the most affordable platforms on the market. It offers a free version packed with all the CRM features you need to keep your customers happy.
Paid plans are pocket-friendly at $7 and $12 per seat per month. These plans have advanced features such as unlimited storage, marketing automation, and workload management.
HubSpot
HubSpot’s pricing plans vary depending on their products. For the CRM component, called the Service Hub, you get a free plan that allows up to five users. The features in this plan only include the basics, and you’ll have to upgrade to the paid version for the advanced ones.
The paid professional and enterprise plans start from $20 per month for a single seat, more than double the starting price of ClickUp. The plans continue to increase, with the enterprise version priced at $150 per month for a seat.
Winner: ClickUp
ClickUp vs. Hubspot on Reddit
To gain more insight into the Hubspot vs. ClickUp debate, we browsed the opinions of Redditors worldwide.
Some users showed a preference for HubSpot, highlighting its easy-to-use nature.
Then, ClickUp fans spoke about its CRM.
However, most Redditors praised the native integration between ClickUp and HubSpot, reminding others it’s the best of both worlds.
Combining the Best of Both Worlds: ClickUp and HubSpot Integration
Are you having a hard time deciding between ClickUp and HubSpot? Why not combine them both?
By connecting these two tools, teams can enjoy the benefits of ClickUp’s intuitive project management capabilities while leveraging HubSpot’s robust CRM and marketing automation features. This integration enables a seamless flow of data between the two platforms, ensuring that customer information and interactions are readily available within ClickUp’s project management environment.
Here’s how to make the most of the ClickUp-HubSpot integration:
- ClickUp Automations: Create custom rules to trigger actions based on HubSpot data. For instance, automatically assign a task to a specific team member when a deal reaches a particular stage
- HubSpot Workflows: Automate tasks within HubSpot based on ClickUp data. For example, automatically create a ticket in HubSpot when status or priority changes for a critical task in ClickUp
By combining HubSpot with ClickUp, you can create a powerful workflow that streamlines communication, automates tasks, and keeps everyone on the same page. This can significantly improve CRM efficiency and overall customer satisfaction.
Which CRM Tool Reigns Supreme?
We must admit that HubSpot is an excellent CRM software with advanced customer management features and analytics. However, ClickUp offers a more lightweight and affordable alternative for businesses seeking a simpler yet effective CRM solution.
With its intuitive interface, project management capabilities, and competitive pricing, ClickUp emerges as an attractive option for teams looking to streamline their customer relationship management processes without the complexity and cost associated with enterprise-level CRM platforms.
With ClickUp, everything—from personal tasks to team management and collaboration—is in one place. This means you can find what you need instantly and avoid doing the same work twice.
Once you sign up on this platform, you get CRM tools, integrations, and support to set up processes for simple to complex projects and deals. Are you ready to level up? Try ClickUp today for free and manage your projects and customers simultaneously.
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