HubSpot Features Comparison Tool

An easy overview of all features of the various Hubs

It is not always clear what the differences are between the features of each individual HubSpot product. Especially when you already have certain HubSpot software it can be difficult to assess what other Hubs can add to your existing features.

For example, Sales Professional already offers access to workflow automation, so you no longer need to have Marketing Professional for this specific functionality; could it be that Marketing Starter already meets your organisation’s requirements?

Or did you know that there is quite a bit of overlap between the HubSpot Marketing and CMS Hubs with features such as chatbots, landing pages, and SEO and blog tools, but that it strongly depends on which level Hub you have how many limits there are on each of those features?

To help you make sense of it all, we built a tool that lets you create side-by-side comparisons of their products to help you see which combination is the best for your business. This way you can prevent paying unnecessarily for functionalities you already have.

The HubSpot Features Comparison Tool

When you’re considering Hubspot solutions, it helps to understand which features become available with which level of each software Hub. We regularly come across companies that are not quite sure which level of the different HubSpot softwares best suits the requirements of their business at that time. It gets even more complicated when a company already has some Hubs, for example a Professional Sales or Marketing Hub, and wants to expand to a Starter or Professional Hub in another discipline. The overlap of features between the two Hubs makes it difficult to understand exactly what you will get when you acquire the new Hub.

The HubSpot Features Comparison Tool enables you to compare the features of the main Hubspot software Hubs, so you can make an informed purchasing decision. It allows you to filter and compare the functionality of the most common Hubspot software products, so you can see what features are available on each Hub, and what each Hub offers uniquely as compared to your existing tech stack of HubSpot software.

It gets even more complicated when a company already has some Hubs, for example a Professional Sales or Marketing Hub, and wants to expand to a Starter or Professional Hub in another discipline. The overlap of features between the two Hubs makes it difficult to know exactly what you will get when you acquire the new Hub.

Using the tool to highlight the differences between Hubs

We’ve created a comparison tool that helps you to get this overview: it takes into account the features you already have and shows only the additional to be added features of any new Hubs you select. This way, you’ll know what’s included in each level of HubSpot software, and which Hubs will give you extra functionality.

Within the tool, you can mark the Hubs you already have (if any, otherwise it uses the features in the free tools as base comparison), and the Hubs you are comparing for example, if you want to know the difference between the Sales Starter and Pro levels compared to the features you already have, select both and the feature overview below will show for each separately what unique features they will add to your current Hubs.

Based on your selection, The HubSpot Features Comparison Tool displays all the features of the Hubs you own on the left of the screen. These are not deduplicated and are indicated per Hub. On the right, you will find the unique features that will be added to your tech stack alongside the features you already own in your current Hubs. These are deduplicated, meaning that the tool only shows the unique features that you can still add to your tech stack by purchasing the selected levels of each Hub.

This gives you a clear overview of which specific features will be added, and you can then make a well-informed choice as to whether upgrading to higher levels or expanding to more Hubs is worth it for your marketing and sales organisation.

We have also added, admittedly quite lightly, a rating to each feature on how much of a hindrance its limits are in each package. For example, HubSpot branding on each of your communications is in many cases a no-go, but the limit on the number of contact lists you can create is really only a theoretical one. Based on these indications, you can get a quick overview of which features you want to zoom in on to find out what the exact limits are, without getting overwhelmed by the abundance of corresponding features between the different Hubs.

For the nerds: how the spreadsheet works

Querying the features of the Hubs

The hidden page “HubSpot features per Hub” lists the features of the various Hubs in columns A:I. From cell L1, these columns are transposed with the formula:

=transpose(A:I)

This transpose causes the features to be listed in rows instead of columns, which is necessary for the query we are going to perform in the next step to retrieve the features belonging to the selected Hubs. To be honest, we could have put the features in rows right away, but we found it a lot easier to work in the columns ourselves and then let the spreadsheet perform the transpose.

To retrieve HubSpot features in our Comparison Tool, we are going to execute the same query twice. First, we are going to retrieve the features for the Hubs that we have checked off that we already own. We will do this in cell B24:

=TRANSPOSE(QUERY('-HubSpot features per Hub-'!K1:BW9; "SELECT L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, X, Y, Z, AA, AB, AC, AD, AE, AF, AG, AH, AI, AJ, AK, AL, AM, AN, AO, AP, AQ, AR, AS, AT, AU, AV, AW, AX, AY, AZ, BA, BB, BC, BD, BE, BF, BG, BH, BI, BJ, BK, BL, BM, BN, BO, BP, BQ, BR, BS, BT, BU, BV, BW where K = TRUE" ))

This formula grabs all features on the previous page for which the checkbox in Column K is ticked (the cells in Column K are a direct reference to the checkboxes on the Comparison Tool page). The features are transposed again (because, yes, we like it better in columns), and the query picks up the contents of each of the columns that contain features and displays them here in our Comparison Tool.

Normally, this formula fills all columns from the first cell to the right until there is no more content to display. However, for the sake of overview in this tool, we ask users to tick no more than three checkboxes, so that there is no overflow to the columns in which the features to be compared are displayed (however a fourth would still more or less fit).

This formula also ensures that there is no fixed reference to a specific range, i.e. no matter which Hub you select, the first one will be in the first column, and the next one in the immediately following column and so on.

Deduplicating existing features and querying the to be acquired ones

Because it is possible that there are features in our current tech stack that occur multiple times, we are going to deduplicate them. We do this out of the normal view of the Comparison tool in the columns hidden on the right. In cell M2, we will execute the following formula:

=UNIQUE(FLATTEN(A17;B25:B508;C25:C508;D25:D508;E25:E508))

This formula at the same time ensures that all our features are neatly arranged in the same column and only appear once.

Alongside this list of unique features, we are going to run the same query as we did for the features we own, but this time for the Hubs we have selected that we want to compare and possibly acquire:

=TRANSPOSE(QUERY('-HubSpot features per Hub-'!J2:BW9; "SELECT L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, X, Y, Z, AA, AB, AC, AD, AE, AF, AG, AH, AI, AJ, AK, AL, AM, AN, AO, AP, AQ, AR, AS, AT, AU, AV, AW, AX, AY, AZ, BA, BB, BC, BD, BE, BF, BG, BH, BI, BJ, BK, BL, BM, BN, BO, BP, BQ, BR, BS, BT, BU, BV, BW where J = TRUE" ))

This query grabs the features from the other page in the same way, but this time for the Hubs whose checkbox is selected as to be added. For this, we change the statement to ‘where J = True’ and also adjust the range of the query.

Return deduplicated unique features that can be added to our tech stack

Finally, we want the selected new Hubs to show only the features that are not yet in our current tech stack. To do this, we use the following formula in cell G24, H24, and I24 (note that for all three cells, the column to which it refers changes):

=FILTER(UNIQUE(O:O);COUNTIF(M:M;UNIQUE(O:O))=0)

This formula compares the previously created list of deduplicated features that we already have (in column M), and returns only the features of the selected Hubs that are not in this list. In this way, we get rid of all the unnecessary features we already have, and a much clearer overview remains of what we actually get when acquiring a new Hub.