HubSpot is/was a marketing tool for email/web marketing journeys morphed over time into a full featured CRM. Zoho is a full featured CRM that morphed over time to be a marketing tool for complex email/web journeys. Historically, CRMs were for B2B sales (proposals, presentations, contracts) and then with the advent of the Internet direct to consumer became a thing and B2C became very significant. HubSpot was built for B2C and it has morphed into features more in line with B2B. 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 and drip campaigns and manage sales pipelines.
This difference is also evident in their pricing. HubSpot charges both a monthly amount and then they charge 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 customer relationships (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.
Here is my observations in this: I have never seen any a company move off of Zoho after they have been using it for a few years with the following exception. When a company gets some new VP of Sales and insists on Salesforce. That is the only time. Part of this reason is that Zoho lends itself to customization and once customized, it is tough to migrate to another CRM and migrate that customization. That having been said, I have seen quite a few customers move off of HubSpot after using it for a few years because they reach points where the pricing gets out of hand or that they need something customized to help them in post sales delivery or support. I have also seen companies move off of HubSpot for everything but their sales touchpoint workflows. Zoho sees themselves as a mid market package and is heavily adding functionality to eat at Salesforce’s dominance from the bottom and they don’t market themselves too much toward solopreneurs and micro enterprises (5 or fewer employees). HubSpot actively pursues that micro enterprise market to grow up with them.