HubSpot is/was a marketing tool for email/web marketing journeys morphed over time into a full featured CRM. ZOHO is/was a full featured CRM that morphed over time to be a marketing tool for email/web journeys. Historically, CRMs were for B2B sales (proposals, presentations, contracts) and then Internet direct to consumer became a thing and B2C became very significant. That is the CRM marketplace in a nutshell. Some CRMs started out as marketing platforms and others as sales platforms and that is their DNA even after they have morphed to more full featured systems. Both have excellent email integration. Both can easily do email reminders.
This is evident in their pricing. HubSpot charges more the more leads you want to market to–essential charging by the lead in your system. Zoho charges more the more seats you have with no charge per lead at all–you can have one seat with a million leads. Zoho is better at managing customers (it has all sorts of bundled apps like Desk, Sign, Flow, Projects and Analytics and the ability to be an application platform and automation platform and have better integration into customer billing, support, etc. in this area) and qualified leads. HubSpot is better at managing leads, particularly “wide funnel” leads but once a lead turns into a customer, it is weaker. It isn’t that HubSpot isn’t customizable, it is the depth of customization is much more shallow. People build vast complex systems inside of Zoho CRM regularly. The same can’t be said of HubSpot.
If you look at a site like Upwork for consultants, or as a consultant looking for projects, way more people want consultants to help them migrate off HubSpot than off Zoho. This is because people outgrow HubSpot and want to migrate off but don’t often migrate off of Zoho because it can always be tailored/customized to a growing changing company and companies can have hundreds of seats on Zoho and it won’t blink. Hundred or thousand seat Zoho orgs is not at all unusual. I can’t imagine a HubSpot implementation like that. I have seen HubSpot on marketing/lead management attached to Zoho or even Salesforce for the rest of the sale journey.