Choosing the right CRM can transform how you attract, engage, and delight customers, but with so many options on the market, it’s hard to know which platform truly delivers.

HubSpot is often seen as one of the premier choices for growing B2B businesses thanks to its all-in-one suites, intuitive interface, and powerful automation tools.

But how does it stack up against EngageBay?

In this comparison, we’ll break down the key differences between HubSpot and EngageBay, looking at everything from features and flexibility to pricing to technical details, such as integrations, which will help you decide which platform fits your business best.

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A slight caveat before we get into the meat of this article - we’re a HubSpot Solutions Partner. We’re well-versed in working with the platform, and we think it’s a brilliant fit for most B2B businesses. However, we would never recommend it if it doesn’t fit your specific business requirements.

Throughout this article, we will give an impartial comparison between HubSpot and EngageBay to help you make the correct decision for your circumstance.

1. Ease of Use and Onboarding

Starting with HubSpot, there are numerous ways to get onboarded and started within the system. You can start with:

A DIY implementation - This requires you to set it up yourself. If you need support, then steal our HubSpot Implementation playbook to give you a head start.
HubSpot’s Onboarding Programme - HubSpot offers an onboarding product which helps you set up the essentials within your portal.
Partner-led Onboarding - This is where you employ an agency to help you get set up on the platform, working with outsourced experts to mould your processes around your portal.

Either one of the three is effective in getting you started and helping you set up your portal in the correct way. And once you’re set up, you can take advantage of the numerous products that HubSpot offers.

Whilst, like all other CRMs, there may be an initial learning curve, HubSpot's user-friendly design supports businesses in effectively leveraging the platform's capabilities to drive growth and improve customer engagement. One user on G2 commented by saying:

Hubspot is very helpful, offering a robust way to learn and manage service, sales, and marketing. Its built-in help resources and user-friendly tools have made it much easier to understand and implement key business strategies.

With its wide array of tools and features across its three tiers, Starter, Professional and Enterprise (including a stripped-back, free version too), HubSpot is known for combining sales, marketing, service, operations and, most recently, eCommerce functionality within its suite. This makes it ideal for those B2B businesses looking to scale their business without the investment into a wide tech stack that needs external integrations to merge with your CRM.

On the other hand, EngageBay is a unified platform that combines CRM, marketing automation, sales tools, and customer support without the overhead of a complex setup.

Its all-in-one design reduces friction in the onboarding process by centralising features under a single interface, which means users can adopt multiple functions, like email campaigns, deal tracking, and customer ticketing, without switching platforms or learning separate systems.

New users are guided through an intuitive dashboard that simplifies the setup of contact management, pipelines, and email workflows. EngageBay also offers in-app guidance, tutorial videos, and a comprehensive knowledge base to support first-time users.

Overall, the sentiment towards ease of use and onboarding is positive, guiding even new users to a CRM system through the basics to help them mould the system around their processes. One Capterra user commented:

The best part is the onboarding support—it's excellent. Even when we were testing the free plan, the team helped us configure everything and answered all our questions with patience.

2. Customisation and Flexibility

HubSpot’s flexibility is one of the key reasons businesses continue to scale with - and use - the platform. With the ability to create custom properties, objects, workflows, and dashboards, teams can shape the system around their exact processes rather than adapting their processes to fit the tool.

Whether it’s segmenting contacts with bespoke criteria, building out tailored sales pipelines, or automating marketing workflows based on specific behaviours, HubSpot’s customisation options and flexibility enable users to design a system that mirrors their real-world operations. As one G2 reviewer puts it:

Adapt quickly with a flexible system that allows you to architect your business exactly as it appears in the real world... without months of custom dev work.

This level of adaptability means that even as your business evolves, HubSpot evolves with you, without the need for expensive development work or third-party tools.

Similar to HubSpot, EngageBay offers a robust suite of customisation features tailored for users looking for an adaptable CRM and marketing automation platform.

Its design philosophy emphasises user-friendly configurability, enabling teams to tailor the system to their unique workflows without requiring extensive technical expertise. Users can create custom fields, define unique deal stages, and segment contacts using tags and lists, facilitating precise targeting and personalised communication.

In addition to that, the platform's drag-and-drop builders for emails, landing pages, and forms further enhance its adaptability, allowing for quick adjustments to marketing materials.

It is to be mentioned that some users have found fault in the customisability of Engagebay, with a lack of depth in advanced automation workflows. One user noted:

You can have multiple automations but there is no priority between them so you end up having to just have one very large one. Not designed or implemented well.

3. Features and Product Ecosystem

This will be no surprise, but HubSpot’s main standout strength is its unified system across all business departments.

From marketing automation and sales pipelines to customer service, CMS, and operations, every tool is designed to work together on a single platform. This native integration removes the friction of jumping between disconnected systems and gives teams a clearer, shared view of the customer journey. It also connects up to your CRM, which enables your users to have a single-view of the customer.

What really sets HubSpot apart, though, is the balance between depth and usability.

Each Hub is feature-rich in its own right, with a level of practicality that you would usually assume to be reserved for specialist, independent tools. Having all these tools under a single umbrella enables businesses to take advantage without the need to patch together a load of third-party apps. As one reviewer puts it:

HubSpot is more than just a CRM – it's an ecosystem of powerful tools that seamlessly integrate to help you grow.

Being an all-in-one system, EngageBay prides itself on being a fully integrated system across all customer-facing departments. It has an integrated suite that encompasses marketing automation, sales pipeline management, customer support, and contact management. This consolidation, like HubSpot, aims to eliminate the need for multiple disparate tools, streamlining operations and reducing costs.

The platform offers a range of features, including email marketing, landing page creation, lead scoring, and appointment scheduling.

Its marketing automation capabilities allow users to design and implement complex workflows, nurturing leads through the sales funnel with minimal manual intervention.

The sales module provides tools for deal tracking, task management, and performance analytics, enabling sales teams to monitor and optimise their activities effectively.

This all sounds good, but it still suffers from a lack of customisation as mentioned in the previous section. One user commented:

EngageBay CRM is a fantastic tool overall, but the customization (sic) options could be a bit more flexible. While the interface is easy to use, a few more layout customization (sic) features would be helpful.

4. Pricing

This is where HubSpot can get tricky, as it’s not exactly a cheap option if you want all the bells and whistles.

HubSpot offers a free CRM option, but only allows you to store up to 1,000 non-marketing contacts within this tier. From there, if you want the customer platform (which is the bundle which encompasses all ‘Hubs’), it comes priced at:

Starter: £45 per month (£41 per month if you want to pay £492 on an annual basis)
Professional: £1,932 per month (£1,738 per month if you want to pay £20,856 on an annual basis)
Enterprise: £5,151 per month

However, what HubSpot does allow you to do is scale your tiers as you grow and adopt new features within ALL tiers if you choose the customer platform option. However, if you don’t you can also pick and choose what tier of each suite and make your own, personalised bundle - something that other CRM providers don’t often allow.

EngageBay, meanwhile, is a comparatively cheaper CRM option for scaling businesses that don’t want to shell out on a costly alternative.

It even offers a free option to get to grips with the system, with up to 250 contacts being able to be in the CRM. They price their system into three paid tiers with increasing functionality:

Basic - £9.49 per user per month
Growth - £41.15 per user per month
Pro - £75.97 per user per month

Compared to HubSpot, EngageBay offers similar functionalities at a more accessible price point. While HubSpot's more advanced features often come with higher costs, EngageBay provides a balanced mix of essential tools that could be suitable for you.

5. Integration and Extensibility

The final comparison point is regarding integrations and how easy it is to connect multiple apps to the CRM.

Firstly, HubSpot offers an extensive integrations ecosystem, featuring over 1,500 native integrations through its App Marketplace. This allows users to connect their CRM with a wide array of tools, including, for example, QuickBooks, Microsoft Teams, LinkedIn Sales Navigator and other ERP & CRM tools.

This connectivity ensures that data flows smoothly between platforms, including HubSpot’s CRM, which reduces manual input and enhances operational efficiency. A Capterra user highlighted the value of HubSpot’s integration abilities by saying:

The integrations of HubSpot are unmatched, big reason they charge big is those ecosystem integrations.

This flexibility ensures that, as your business evolves and introduces more systems into your tech stack, HubSpot can adapt with you without needing substantial change.

Finally, EngageBay offers a growing ecosystem of integrations and developer tools to help businesses connect EngageBay with the wider tech stack they already rely on.

It supports native integrations with major platforms, including Google Workspace, Office 365, X, LinkedIn, and Stripe. These allow for email sync, contact enrichment, calendar management, and payments tracking, all from within the EngageBay dashboard. The platform also integrates with Slack and Zoom to support real-time notifications and meeting scheduling.

For teams needing broader interoperability, EngageBay supports integration via Zapier and Integrately. This opens the door to thousands of potential connections, including Shopify, WooCommerce, Typeform, Calendly, and Mailchimp. For more technical teams, EngageBay offers a RESTful API that allows developers to extend its functionality or build custom apps.

The final thing to mention is that it also integrates with external connectors, such as Zapier, to connect with thousands of more apps.

In summary, EngageBay delivers a practical range of integrations and extensibility options for businesses that need to connect marketing, sales, and support across channels. While it may not match the depth of enterprise CRMs, creates a foundation of growth for your business.

In Summary...

Choosing the right CRM comes down to your team’s needs, technical capabilities, and growth ambitions. While EngageBay may offer strong features in certain areas, HubSpot stands out for its ease of use, unified ecosystem, and scalability, particularly for growing B2B businesses.

If you're leaning towards HubSpot and want to get implementation right from day one, download our 5 Stages of HubSpot Implementation guide. It walks you through each phase of a successful rollout, helping you avoid common pitfalls and maximise ROI from the get-go.