Comparing the 5 HubSpot Hubs: Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, Service Hub, CMS Hub, and Operations Hub

Comparing the 5 HubSpot Hubs: Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, Service Hub, CMS Hub, and most recently now Operations Hub

HubSpot Marketing Hub

Marketing Hub is available in three packages:

• Marketing Hub Starter
• Marketing Hub Professional
• Marketing Hub Enterprise

(Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, Service Hub, and Operations Hub also include free levels.)

Marketing Hub Starter is generally for small business owners that are just getting started with inbound marketing or content marketing, and they're looking to get a little bit of lead capture information, a little bit of insight about what their leads do, and just barely getting started with a few landing pages and email marketing. 

Marketing Hub Professional is more the core mainstream product that I've seen most popular with my clients and implementations over the years because it's like Goldilocks. It's like right in the middle of the road. And typically, the most compelling features that Marketing Hub Professional (and Enterprise) introduces are around workflow automation.

It's for more sophisticated teams that want to orchestrate and automate their multichannel campaigns and customize their whole approach to getting found online, creating landing pages, creating videos, going beyond just basic email automation to be able to fully automate across the board through the full funnel with doing much more aggressive segmentation and personalization and much more granular reporting.

Marketing Hub Enterprise tends to be the most powerful marketing automation engine platform that HubSpot has available and scales up to the needs of large teams around custom objects, behavioral events, event triggers, team partitioning, brand domain, single sign-on, as well as advanced personalization options and the most advanced reporting engine available.

HubSpot Sales Hub

Sales Hub also has three different versions:

• Sales Hub Starter
• Sales Hub Professional
• Sales Hub Enterprise.

(Again, bear in mind that most of the HubSpot Hubs also have free options that allow you to get started without a financial commitment to dip your pinky toe in the pool.)

Sales Hub Starter is an essential part of companies getting their feet wet with the more advanced sales tools beyond just the basic free CRM. So it'll give you access to a bit of templating, a little bit of more aggressive task management, a little bit of being able to self-book meetings. 

Though, Sales Hub Professional is where you start to see teams that are much more aggressively utilizing the tools around sequencing, having more granular deals and task management. Most importantly, it's beginning to apply workflow automation on the sales side. 

And Sales Hub Enterprise starts to introduce, just as on the Marketing Hub Enterprise side, much more granular ways of slicing and dicing and segmentation, much more granular, much more specific reporting, and introduces an AI engine around some predictions with the best time to send messages, as well as giving other much more predictive lead, scoring, more predictive ways of doing multivariate testing.

So we talked a bit about Marketing Hub and Sales Hub.

HubSpot Service Hub

Service Hub was the third big hub that HubSpot rolled out around the 2017-2018 timeframe. 

HubSpot historically was very focused on working with marketing professionals. And then, around 2014, HubSpot started to roll out their CRM and Sales Hub.

A few years after that, HubSpot started to get much more actively involved in customer success, recognizing that in a digitally-first world, your word of mouth spreads digitally in terms of the flywheel from attracting, engaging, and delighting.

If you do a great job with your existing customers, they fuel positive word of mouth. If you do a lousy job with your customers, they fuel negative word of mouth that can slow everything down.

So that was the premise behind HubSpot wanting to get into the service business.

So with Service Hub, there are a couple of different options as well:

• Service Hub Starter
• Service Hub Professional
• Service Hub Enterprise

And again, it just depends on how advanced the feature set you want. 

As with the other Hubs, when you move up to Professional, there's a lot more workflow automation. You can start managing the tickets on a much more granular basis. But across the board, one of the features you see in the upper-level versions of Service Hub is Knowledge Base, a specialized blog that you can use to help people self-serve.

There are tools to keep tabs on customer satisfaction and Net Promoter Score (NPS). And there are also much more aggressive ways of managing your ticketing and your chat flows that are going on there.

HubSpot CMS Hub

More recently, quickly going back in the last two or three years, HubSpot relaunched its CMS as CMS Hub to be on parity with its other Hubs.

Hubspot has had a CMS for several years, going back to the 2010-2011 timeframe, perhaps even earlier, when I first started using the platform. 

For the first couple of years in 2010-2014, there was a Basic, starter kind of CMS. And then there was the full-blown CMS.

More recently, as HubSpot has invested a lot more aggressively into R&D to grow the capabilities of CMS for enterprises, it's split now into

• CMS Professional
• CMS Enterprise

HubSpot Operations Hub

And then finally, much more recently, Operation Hub has been introduced. And there are a couple of different levels of Operations:

• Operations Hub Starter
• Operations Hub Professional

(Plus, as with Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, and Service Hub, Operations Hub also has an entry-level free version.)

At a high level, Operations Hub replaces PieSync being available on a standalone basis. PieSync was a separate company in the infrastructure platform as a service (iPaaS) integration space, similar to Zapier but a little bit different. Quite a bit more robust on being able to manage data syncing. So HubSpot acquired PieSync in late 2019. It worked on the integration, and now it's been completely folded into Operations Hub. 

As you move up into the higher levels of Operations Hub, you gain workflow automation to clean your data automatically.

The basic premise between Operations Hub is that there are so many different parts of a company now that have data flowing back and forth. Having a great customer experience largely depends on making sure that the data is in sync.

In the higher levels of Operations Hub, you also get access to custom webhook programming to customize the sync with a lot more third-party apps.  There are hundreds of third-party apps now where you can have data coming in and out of HubSpot, allowing you to roll out the HubSpot platform much more aggressively throughout companies.

And typically, companies that have a certain amount of integrations involved tend to be way more successful with the HubSpot platform as a whole.

Hopefully, this has given you a good overview of the five current HubSpot Hubs out there: Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, Service Hub, CMS Hub, and Operations Hub.

I'm Joshua Feinberg from SP Home Run. I've been using the HubSpot platform since 2010. I hold and maintain 28 different HubSpot Academy certifications. I led a HubSpot User Group for four years, and I've been an active member in what used to be known as the HubSpot Certified Partner Program and is now known as the HubSpot Solution Provider Program since 2013.

If you have any questions or comments, feel free to leave them below or feel free to look me up on LinkedIn. Send me a Connect request. Reach out and message me there as well.

I look forward to hearing your success stories with deploying HubSpot Hubs to help you grow your business better.