Have you considered Agile CRM as a HubSpot alternative?

Most companies today use customer relationship management (CRM) for their sales efforts. When it comes to marketing automation, however, these same companies often need to search for a plug-in or add-on that will integrate with their CRM system. For smaller companies or those without deep technology budgets, the costs can add up, and the complexity of integration can limit functionality. That’s why marketing CRMs such as HubSpot & HubSpot alternatives such as Agile CRM are popular.

Marketing CRM systems combine both core CRM functionality with a suite of marketing automation features such as automated email campaigns and sales call assignment, marrying the two into a tight package that is deeply integrated.

Let’s take a look at two of the most popular CRMs for SMBs: HubSpot and our own Agile CRM.

First, let’s talk about what’s not in HubSpot: help desk.

Agile CRM integrates service automation (help desk) with its CRM and marketing automation, which is unique to the marketplace. It allows users to achieve a complete view of their customers’ journeys using a single system: no plug-ins or add-ons required. With this 360-degree view into a customer’s lifecycle, Agile CRM offers a deeper understanding of customer behavior through unified communication with the sales, marketing, and service teams.

This is one reason why Agile CRM is a worthy HubSpot alternative; it doesn’t just combine contact management with marketing automation, it combines marketing with sales and customer support, providing an even deeper integration and one source of data truth across your entire organization.

Flowing from this key differentiation are several reasons why many businesses choose Agile CRM as a HubSpot alternative.

Sales Automation

Agile CRM adds significantly to the sales automation process by providing complete call automation, custom leaderboards, an easy drag-and-drop campaign creator, and unique features not offered by HubSpot. These additional features include push notifications, which allows users to send instant messages to customers whenever they are online; web pop-ups (a sign-in form, for example, for a visitor about to leave a web site); and automated voice broadcasts, or the ability to trigger automated calls to hundreds or thousands of customers or prospects.

Additionally, while HubSpot does offer sales automation, it doesn’t provide the ability to track deals. Agile CRM allows users to create multiple deal tracks, customize milestones, trigger automatic follow-ups for each deal, get real-time deal metrics and predict future revenue. A powerful advantage of Agile CRM is that it can serve as customizable sales platform for clearer insights, repeatable results, and smarter sales force automation. It also provides numerous advantages to HubSpot when it comes to sales forecasting.

Customer Engagement

Agile CRM helps companies advance customer engagement with tools such as push notifications and automated voice broadcasts. These features allow users to be alerted about their emails, contacts, follow-ups, and tasks to be completed, even when they’re not active within the CRM. Users can set up events that happen automatically such as birthday wishes to customers, reminders and special offers that are triggered by current events or market action.

Better email integration features than those offered by HubSpot are another advantage of Agile CRM. Email templates– which are conspicuously missing from HubSpot – allow for faster creation of email marketing campaigns, and email tracking features help users to keep track of the success of these efforts. Additionally, Agile CRM’s automatic email sync allows users to sync up to three email accounts from Google Apps (Gmail), Microsoft Exchange, Office 365 and any IMAP service provider for full two-way email communication.

360 Degree Customer View

While it’s great to be able to track sales, service and marketing activity, doing so in disparate silos isn’t very effective. These processes are strongly interrelated – when viewed from the customer’s perspective, they’re indistinguishable from one another  – and Agile CRM has a distinct advantage over HubSpot when it comes to providing a complete view of all these processes.

Single page contact management allows users to view everything they need to know about a contact on a single page, including contact information, communication history with that customer, social media profiles and lead scores. The result is a 360-degree profile of a prospect.

Application Programming Interfaces (APIs)

HubSpot offers its API in REST. Agile CRM goes further with APIs, offering extensive front-end and back-end API in REST, Java, .Net and various other languages, enabling users to do more with Agile CRM.

As a HubSpot alternative, Agile CRM has far more ways to connect the system to other cloud services.

Better affordability

Agile CRM is more affordable than HubSpot. Agile CRM’s basic pricing starts at $8.99 per month compared to HubSpot’s $200 per month for the most basic plan. Agile CRM’s optional features are also more affordable, and new CRM users can try out Agile CRM for free.

In addition to affordability, Agile CRM offers users more flexibility when it comes to subscription payments. Agile CRM processes payment methods through its various third-party integrations and plugins like FreshBooks, QuickBooks, Xero, and more. HubSpot does not offer users subscription payments.

Both solutions offer robust social automation features; extensive analytics for email tracking, Web visitor tracking and real-time notification; periodic email and graphical reports; Web business metrics and integration with email, web forms, and other widgets. But while HubSpot is a good tool for CRM, it doesn’t provide complete automation for processes that are critical to the sales and customer engagement processes. From sales to service, complete business automation is a unique quality of Agile CRM.

Quite simply, Agile CRM does more, and at a lower cost.