HubSpot vs Pipedrive

2020. Sales CRM Pipedrive becomes unicorn



Pipedrive, the sales CRM tool for small and medium-sized businesses, is the latest European company to reach unicorn status. The company has taken a majority investment from U.S. enterprise software-focused private equity firm Vista Equity Partners and is now valued at $1.5 billion dollars. Pipedrive’s calling card has always been that it is sales software designed to serve first and foremost the needs of sales people, not their managers — built by sales people, for sales people, if you like — but has since matured into a more comprehensive CRM platform play also spanning marketing. Pipedrive claims 95,000 companies use its software.


2020. HubSpot’s new end-to-end sales hub aims to simplify CRM for mid-market customers



HubSpot, the firm that made its name by helping to define the in-bound marketing concept, announced the HubSpot Sales Hub Enterprise. While the company has been offering a CRM tool for five years now, where they feel they have addressed ease-of-use issues for salespeople, the new tool is about bringing a new end-to-end approach addressing not only the needs of sales people, but management and system admins, as well. HubSpot specifically sees larger companies in this space, like Adobe, Salesforce and SAP, acquiring different pieces of the stack, then incorporating them into a solution, or customers pulling together different pieces of the stack themselves. The company believes that by building a single integrated solution themselves, it’s going to be naturally easier to use.


2020. HubSpot unveils new content management system for marketers



HubSpot, the inbound marketing firm, is launching a standalone content management system designed to make it easy for marketing personnel to add and update content. While content management, in a sense, has been core to HubSpot from the beginning — many companies use their blogging platform, for example — the company built this one from the ground up for marketers. It allows developers to use the languages they want to build the site, while taking advantage of the HubSpot CMS’s modular structure. At the same time, the modules give marketers a friendly interface to make frequent changes required in a modern website.


2018. HubSpot added customer service tools to its marketing platform



HubSpot is expanding beyond sales and marketing with the official launch of its Service Hub for managing customer service. It includes an universal inbox for all your customer communications, a bot-builder to automate some of those customer interactions, tools for building a company knowledge base (which can then be fed into the bot-builder), tools for creating surveys and a dashboard to track how your service team is doing. ServiceHub benefits from being integrated with HubSpot’s existing products, allowing businesses to track their interactions with a customer across sales, marketing and support.


2017. HubSpot unveiled Conversations



CRM, marketing, sales and customer experience provider HubSpot unveiled a series of product updates that include integrations with Facebook (advertising), Shopify (ecommerce) and a new "Conversations" tool that, with the help of chatbots, unites customer messages into one inbox. According to HubSpot, Conversations is the evolution of our live chat platform. Having messages in one place is critical for moments like the handoff from sales to support. Features include conversation tie-ins to HubSpot CRM and the ability to build chatbots to aid the conversations process — leveraging technology from HubSpot’s recent acquisition of chatbot platform Motion AI.


2017. Marketing platform HubSpot acquires AI startup Kemvi



Inbound marketing and sales platform HubSpot has acquired Kemvi, a startup applying artificial intelligence and machine learning to help sales teams. A few months ago, Kemvi launched DeepGraph, a product that analyzes public data so that salespeople can ident ify the best time (say, after a job change or the publication of an article) to reach out to potential customers. It also proactively reaches out to verify leads. HubSpot  had been looking for new ways to bring AI technology into its platform to fight alternatives. It found Kemvi particularly appealing because it addressed a real need among salespeople.


2017. Pipedrive CRM gets $17M



Pipedrive, a CRM platform designed to help SMBs sell more, has closed $17 million in Series B funding. Pipedrive says will use the new capital to develop its product and tech, grow its partner ecosystem, and for global marketing. Pipedrive says it now has more than 30,000 paying small business customers from more than 140 countries, making it a genuine contender against more established players in the CRM space for SMB. Its calling card has always been that it is sales software designed to serve first and foremost the needs of sales people not their managers but has since matured into a more comprehensive CRM platform play. This has seen Pipedrive integrate with 50-plus online software solutions, adding more each month. These include various business tools such as Google Apps, Trello, Zapier, Mailchimp, Yesware, and Pandadoc.


2015. HubSpot launches own CRM system



HubSpot, a company best known for its marketing tools, launches its CRM product out of beta. The product is free, but HubSpot’s sales “acceleration” tool, Sidekick, will run you $50 per seat, per month. The company describes the CRM tool as built to help sales reps avoid some of the tedium that comes with data entry and interaction management. Its tool automatically takes in data from a reps sales process, and arranges it in a chronological format. The model of getting free software into companies and then upselling their IT departments is a method that software companies like Dropbox and Box have used to strong effect. There are still costs associated with that sales process, but, certainly, having your products inside more shops does cut some friction.


2015. Cloud-Based CRM Pipedrive gets $9 Million funding



SaaS CRM Pipedrive that helps small companies manage and increase sales, has closed $9 million Series A round. Targeting small to medium sized businesses, and used by a number of tech companies, including Fortumo, Postmates, FalconSocial, and Blippar, Pipedrive aims to fix the broken CRM/sales software experience. Specifically, it says that CRM solutions typically require far too much data entry and have poorly defined workflows, resulting in software that nobody likes using and, ultimately, lost sales. Instead its SaaS takes a more visual approach with a dashboard that shows deals in a pipeline from an initial contact, to contract negotiations to done deals. Pipedrive counts competitors as Zoho CRM, Base, Capsule, Insightly and PipelineDeals. Meanwhile, everyone in the CRM market competes with Salesforce at the high end and with the humble spreadsheet at the low end.


2014. Marketing giant HubSpot files $100M IPO



HubSpot, the provider of marketing automation software has officially filed an IPO to raise up to $100 million. HubSpot is following in the footsteps of its competitor Marketo, which went public last year. Other rivals, including Eloqua and ExactTarget sold themselves to bigger, broader software companies — Eloqua to Oracle for $871 million in late 2012 and ExactTarget to Salesforce.com for for $2.5 billion in six months later. By the way, Salesforce as well as Google are also investors in HubSpot.