Hubspot vs. Hatchbuck: Which Is Right For Your Small Business?

If you’re a small business poking around for marketing platform alternatives that are more affordable than HubSpot, one of the first you’ll likely run into is Hatchbuck. Hatchbuck is specifically targeted at small businesses. Given the smaller-scale nature, there’s a major cost savings over HubSpot: Hatchbuck’s monthly licensing cost is only $59 per month, whereas HubSpot will cost you an initial investment of about $2,000 plus an ongoing cost of at least $200 per month (for the most basic package with a total cap of 100 contacts before the price goes up).

So the savings is definitely there, but how about the features. As should be expected given the significant cost disparity, Hatchbuck does pare out some of the functions and tools that you’ll get with HubSpot. In today’s post we’ll compare the two side-by-side to help you determine which is best for your small business.

Built-in Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Tools

Both HubSpot and Hatchbuck have their own CRM tools, but they function a bit differently. HubSpot does make their CRM software available for free, and it allows you to add up to one million contacts. However, functionality is fairly limited in the free version. If you want to add functions, you have to integrate with HubSpot’s marketing tools, and that means that your formerly free contacts in the CRM tool cross over and become contacts that count toward your monthly HubSpot bill.

Hatchbuck’s CRM (along with the platform as a whole) was designed to be user-friendly for the inexperienced and to strip things down to the essentials. It actually has some helpful features that aren’t widely found in other CRM software — primarily the ability to attach detailed notes to your contact and monitor their activity from within the console. You can also import contacts from .CSV spreadsheets and from most of the significant cloud-based software and services like Office, Outlook and LinkedIn. All tiers allow unlimited emails; the basic $59 tier allows 750 contacts, and that moves up to 1,500 at the $99 tier.

Landing Pages

One thing you will have to give up with Hatchbuck is prefab landing pages. HubSpot comes packed with a bunch of professional templates that you can edit, and that have responsive features that allow you to alter the page based on the visitor’s location and device among other factors. If you go with Hatchbuck, you’ll have to create your landing pages using WordPress or Unbounce.

Content Management

This is another area where Hatchbuck users will have to make do with a third-party solution of some sort. HubSpot allows you to automatically integrate your websites and blogs with your marketing tools in one interface, including allowing you to make updates from within the dashboard. Hatchbuck does not have similar functionality.

Inbound Marketing Lessons

HubSpot comes packed with access to HubSpot Academy, which has features such as courses led by a live trainer and certification programs. In comparison, Hatchbuck’s dozen or so training videos just don’t stand up for the DIY marketing team wanting to dig deep into Inbound Marketing with their entire team. However, if you prefer to partner up with a marketing agency for personalized training and attention to your business, then HubSpot Academy basically becomes a non-factor in the decision.

Campaign Builder

Both of these options come packed with a campaign builder to help you visualize and organize your whole campaign from one platform. This is one place where Hatchbuck actually takes the lead, however, at least if you don’t need super-advanced features that take full time marketing resources to observe, and react to in order to deliver value. The basic and stripped-down aesthetic of Hatchbuck lends itself to the easiest campaign tool to use out of all of the major options on the market.

If you’re considering making the jump, one final selling point for Hatchbuck is that it is extremely easy to import your data from other marketing platforms — something that’s very often not the case. What weaknesses HubSpot has can be shored up by partnering with a digital marketing agency to do the work for you.

I personally love both tools and really enjoy discussing the comparisons between Hubspot and Hatchbuck, but since my inbound agency is so (insanely sometimes) small business focused, Hatchbuck becomes the given first step for our clients wishing to take control of their marketing plan. Click to sign-up today to kick the tires of Hatchbuck.

Branding, logos, names are properties of their respective owners. While not paid anything for this review, Bash Foo is a certified Hatchbuck Partner and seeks to help their clients grow small business revenues through the innovative use of marketing tools and smart business marketing strategies.

Originally published at Bash Foo.