Low-Cost HubSpot Alternatives: Hatchbuck And Infusionsoft

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As HubSpot partners for over two years, we have nothing but good things to say about their product and team.

But you may be like us and desire both a feature-set and cost that are more in line with the smaller small business.  You’re in luck.  There are good HubSpot alternatives.

If you weren’t aware of it, HubSpot is geared toward larger businesses while Infusionsoft and a newcomer, Hatchbuck, are focused on companies with 10 employees or less (see the comments section of that post for more).

We switched from HubSpot to Hatchbuck (we’ll explain more about why below) in the spring of 2014 and our cost went from $700 per month to $99 per month with very little loss of features that we regularly use.  We also checked out InfusionSoft which would have put us at $200-$300 per month.

HubSpot Alternatives Comparison

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• Analytics – One of the things HubSpot does best is “closed-loop analytics”.  If you want to follow a visitor from their first website visit to becoming a customer, then you’re out of luck with InfusionSoft of Hatchbuck.  There are lots of bells and whistles to HubSpot that you are not going to get with the alternatives.  But you may not need them.  After someone has filled out a form, Hatchbuck does a great job of tracking that lead, but you don’t get reports on site usage before that point and you won’t know where that lead came from.
• CMS – We build 90 percent of our websites in WordPress so we did not need the content management system that is built into HubSpot.  Neither InfusionSoft or Hatchbuck have built-in Content Management, which is fine with us.
• Campaign Builder – One of the big selling points for InfusionSoft is the visual campaign builder.  While this is nice, we were well-trained in Inbound Marketing, so we just didn’t need the visual component to help us understand the process.  In fact, the campaign builder has more steps than it needs and becomes a little jumbled the more pieces you add.  The Hatchbuck campaign builder is actually the simplest and easiest to use of the three.
• Inbound Marketing Training – If you are planning on starting Inbound Marketing from scratch, this may be a big consideration.  There are a lot of tips and tricks that can make a big impact on your learning curve.  Of course, if you work with an Inbound Marketing partner like us, you won’t need the training!  Contact us to set up a consultation.
• Lead Scoring – HubSpot offers a nice custom lead scoring option, but InfusionSoft and Hatchbuck both offer lead scoring systems through tagging which work really well.  We have lead scoring set up in Hatchbuck which automatically bumps leads into prospects based on website and email activity to show our sales team which folks are ready to be contacted.
• Dashboard – Hatchbuck’s dashboard shows real-time contact activity which is a very nice feature.  We liked it better than the both the InfusionSoft and HubSpot dashboards.
• CRM – We have tried to use several customer resource management tools in the past, but never really liked any of them.  Hatchbuck’s CRM is great because we get to see contact activity along with our notes, tasks, and relevant information.  HubSpot does not offer a built-in CRM, but does integrate well with SalesForce.  Again, you’re going to pay a lot more for those services.

To put it simply, Hatchbuck is like 37 Signals in that they stripped Inbound Marketing down to the essentials and made the software very easy to use and very affordable.

Your Inbound Marketing Partner

If you are contemplating Inbound Marketing, you might want to consider working with a team of Inbound Marketing professionals to get the job done.  Inbound Marketing is a great investment, but it can eat up a lot of your time.  Working with a firm like ITD Interactive to plan good strategies and produce valuable content can save you a lot of headaches and help you make more money.  Contact us for a free consultation.