HubSpot Sales Hub vs. Twilio SendGrid

HubSpot Sales HUB is well suited for teams who want to run a sales team, grow their business, and continue to do so efficiently. The amazing elements of HubSpot Sales HUB is how the UI facilitates the work to begin with. Beyond the features and capabilities, the UI helps make what you and your team want to accomplish easy. The sales teams who have 2-5 people, teams of 20-50, or 500+, the HubSpot Sales HUB will adapt to how you and your organization are structured.

If you're prepared to build out your whole staff UX, audience creation, email production, and analytics on your own using API, this tool may have that flexibility. If you require a sturdy drag and drop production tool, this tool has it but at the expense of a lot of other critical functionality. Out of the box analytics/reporting, is extremely limited. Complex queries, even something like pulling those who haven't engaged in email within a certain time period, is clunky. If you require any support at all, this is not the tool for you. I'm a deliverability consultant and have used many of the top email marketing tools and SendGrid has been extremely difficult for my team. I do not recommend it. Shiny and bright during sales, pretty disappointing thereafter.

• The task feature of HubSpot has been super helpful for me to organize what activities I am focusing on throughout the day. Instead of having a generalized list of the activities that need to take place today, I can organize that list by calls, emails, to-do's, linked-in, etc. That way I can take an hour of my time and focus on only doing phone calls, only doing emails, etc. It has helped me increase my productivity by making 20 phone calls a day to 100 phone calls throughout the day.
• Hubspot Sequences are also super helpful in order to plug and play contacts that need similar solutions. The automatic email feature allows me to not have to spend time sending a simple email template. Instead, it automatically sends that email out at the time that THEY would most likely respond.
• This gives me more time to focus on the tasks that I can't automate, allowing me to be way more productive. I can also customize my sequences to automate when I am reaching out, and what activity I am doing.
• Sequences give me the ability to create a highly customized approach, with the scalability of a plug and play format.

Incentivized

• Managing email lists / audiences is easy with features like groups and segments.
• They provide pre-built email templates that are very easy to modify. It is also super easy to create new email templates with their drag-and-drop email builder.
• Provides clear / easy-to-read analytics of email campaigns.
• I can easily import large email contact lists all at once or add a user manually one-at-a-time, when needed.

Incentivized

• I find the interface to be a bit unorganized and sometimes the information added about projects looks clogged which sometimes makes it difficult to access specific information.
• Sometimes we have to deal with different currencies because we have clients all over the world but the exchange rate tool is not always accurate, causing us to slow down our work.

Incentivized

• Not necessarily their Email API but their email in general - they are currently in beta for automated email sequences but are still bare bones. Much more work is needed before it can be used mainstream and be able to convert everything to SendGrid.
• Helping with warming up our dedicated IP for the best-sending score.
• We seem to hit the promotions folder a decent amount (maybe the IP problem above) and even a lot of their emails hit my spam or promotions folder (whether they be transactional or marketing) which isn't a great sign when trusting an ESP.
• Transactional email sequences would be a huge plus.
• Now that Twilio owns SenGrid, having an integrated platform where you could see all our transactional emails together.
• Better reporting and split reporting between transactional and marketing emails.

Incentivized

Ease of use, ease of customizability, and ease of 3rd-party integration, especially to LinkedIn Navigator, all play a vital role in our increasing reliance of HubSpot Sales for our growing sales team. Also taking into account the great training and support for HubSpot Sales available from HubSpot, including HubSpot Academy.

Incentivized

Since we launched HubSpot Sales Hub into our organisation's tech stack, we've experienced a smooth transition and implementation process for those using this solution. The ease of use and the interface experience is amazing and that was a main priority for us in the purchasing phase. So far, we've been nothing but very happy with the support, implementation, and ongoing development of our sales team adapting to the solution. Highly recommend it for usability and functionality!

Incentivized

It is usable but needs improvement in overall user experience and ease of use. A new joinee/anyone new to the tool would need more tarining currently before he can use the platform seamlessly. The set-up to value realization time for Twilio SendGrid customers is generally high because of this concern.

Incentivized

Oh my goodness HubSpot Support is just amazing. I submitted a question/issue to them yesterday and by this morning I had this response:

"Hi Stephanie, I hope this finds you well and thanks so much for your patience while I was working to update the extension with my team. We were actually able to push through an update yesterday afternoon which set the default lifecycle stage to lead in the sidebar. If you take a look now, that should be in place. If it has not updated yet, I would recommend uninstalling and re-installing the sales extension so an updated version and be pushed through. Again, I want to say that I sincerely appreciate that you took the time to reach out to us and help us iron this out. HubSpot really values constructive feedback with real use-case backing to help push it along. So, thank you!"

Twilio SendGrid Email API is everything we want it to be, and we have no reason to look for any other solution. Features and pricing match exactly what we need. As developers for SaaS products, Twilio SendGrid Email API provides a great service. I hope that they stay this way and don't inflate the service with too many marketing oriented features, because there are other tools for that and Twilio SendGrid Email API is a API for sending email first and foremost.

Incentivized

It was not only SUPER easy to implement, we had some amazing support from HubSpot. They scheduled a call to go over each individual tool with our team and provided guidance and best practices plus answered any questions are new users had. It was wonderful and really helped them get started confidently

To be honest, there are great features in all of these competitors but they aren't quite as user-friendly or robust compared to Hubspot. Hubspot's Sales hub was able to add more features to it's platform while remaining very user-friendly and easy to use. I found myself getting lost navigating platforms like Zendesk or Salesforce, there is also a much nicer onboarding experience with Hubspot.

Sendgrid has a lot of features that other providers have and a few more - like the dynamic template builder, which AWS SES doesn't have. We choose the provider based on the scenario of use and the provider we're using. If we're going to be making regular changes to a template, then we'd go with Sendgrid, as the changes will be easier to make and don't necessarily require developer intervention.

Incentivized

• Lead Response Time:
• Prior to Hubspot, this was maybe 24 hours as an average. Now it is MINUTES. We immediately get back to clients and if we aren't able to then we will connect using email automation and sequences without lifting a finger. It's great!
• Company Growth in difficult times:
• Despite COVID causing issues on Residential Construction in Washington, we have continued to grow as a business, and part of that is thanks to our amazing Sales team, and part of that credit goings to Hubspot directly. If we didn't have Hubspot we would have shrunk or stayed the same as a company. Hubspot made sure we grew.
• ROI [return on investment]
• It's a hard thing to measure but our company has increased its revenue by more than 20% compared to last year. And that is saying a lot for our industry especially with COVID's impact on Residential Construction. I
• can't measure it precisely but I know beyond any shadow of a doubt that HUBSPOT helped make this possible because our Sales and Marketing Teams are sharper and more capable than they have ever been thanks to this wonderful CRM.

• As it was cheaper than the transactional service we previously used, it saved costs.
• The API was relatively easy to work with so it helped us ship the service and test it quickly.
• We still use the transactional email service, even though we recognize its limits as it meets our immediate needs.

Incentivized