HubSpot Pro vs Enterprise: Which One Does Your Organisation Need?

When weighing up HubSpot Pro vs Enterprise, the real question is "what capabilities do you need from the platform?" Here's the lowdown on the two packages: their features, their costs, and which types of organisations will benefit from each.

It used to be that organisations considering a new sales or marketing system were forced to choose between power and ease of use. In our experience on our journey to becoming an Elite-tier HubSpot solutions partner, larger entities only expected to get around 80% of their requirements from leading platforms.

The introduction of HubSpot's 'Enterprise' packages (Marketing Hub, Sales Hub and Service Hub) changes this landscape. Now, ease-of-use meets advanced capabilities, offering scalability and control to those with complex needs. No longer do you have to spend on more expensive software or tie yourself to a custom CRM to meet your requirements

Now that this option's on the table, you'll be asking, "is it right for me?" What type of organisations will benefit from HubSpot Enterprise, what are the costs, and which features can you get that aren't available in HubSpot Professional? 

This article explains:

What is an enterprise-level organisation?

Is yours an enterprise organisation? What does this mean? Does this mean HubSpot Enterprise is only right for that kind of organisation?

You'll sometimes hear it said that HubSpot Enterprise is for enterprise-sized businesses, but actually that's a bit vague. It's hard to define 'enterprise-sized' because it's not a phrase with a clear definition.

Instead, size really isn't everything in this case. You could be operating a complex business with a low headcount. Though 'small', the complexity of your operations mean you need more flexibility in terms of supporting multiple divisions, product lines, geographical regions etc.

It's more useful to think about the level of complexity than size. Every business has unique demands on it, but the more you multiply them out, the more complex your demands are. If your company has independent functions but some overlap between them, HubSpot Enterprise features like content partitioning will help you streamline your CRM use and get control where it might otherwise have been absent. 

As a company, you may also be looking at your infrastructure, particularly IT systems, as a place to enable your growth. The capabilities of the Enterprise hubs could empower you as you push to achieve this goal.

HubSpot Pro vs Enterprise: which features do you have to choose from? 

You might feel that it's previously been hard to differentiate between HubSpot packages apart from the numbers of contacts on offer. Enterprise may well make you think differently if you've been looking to answer that 'power versus usability' pain point in a multi-faceted organisation (or team). 

Below is a breakdown of what you can find in Pro and what's available in Enterprise. Essentially, Enterprise will help you go further, giving you a more powerful CRM. It's also ready to handle that complexity we were talking about – equipped for multiple brands, teams, languages and so on. 

If you're looking for details about what's brand-new to the Enterprise Hubs, find out more in this article.

The three Hubs available in Enterprise packages are Marketing, Sales and Service: click the links for information on each one.

Marketing

Professional (AKA Starter Plus) Marketing Hub has tools to:

  • Help your business get found online
  • Automate and personalise your marketing efforts
  • Optimise your conversion rates
  • Measure traffic and conversions.

Enterprise (AKA Professional Plus) also has tools to:

  • Expand your HubSpot platform capabilities 
  • Help you manage complex teams and/or multiple brands
  • Give you full control over analysing your revenue streams.

Let's dig into some of the Enterprise-level features you could benefit from.

Marketing tools to help you manage your teams and brands:

  • Partitioning: If your content can be accessed by your entire company, you could run the risk of having it altered or deleted by someone who stumbled on it accidentally. If you have a lot of content, it can be hard to find your way around it. The partitioning feature simplifies things considerably by giving access only to those with permissions. These can be granted according to role, region and other factors.
  • Hierarchical teams: With the option to have up to 200 teams, this allows you to organise your HubSpot users into team, region, brand and other segments.
  • Single sign-on: This lets users log into HubSpot with a single sign-on identity provider (e.g. Okta or OneLogin). You can then benefit from enhanced security offered by that provider. Furthermore, you get the convenience of being able to use a single set of credentials across the many applications you use for your business.
  • Social permissions: Marketing Hub Enterprise gives you the ability to assign 'Draft only' permission. Here, a team member can create a draft social post but not publish. That means extra control over the account and the ability to keep your messaging consistent.
  • Email frequency send cap: This is a gift if you're worried about unsubscribes. The tool stops recipients receiving too many emails from you within a set time period. However, if you have something urgent to say or some kind of 'stop press' announcement, you can choose to override it.

Ways to extend your HubSpot capabilities: 

  • Calculated properties: an essential tool if you want to calculate figures such as discounts or commissions in HubSpot. It's only available in Enterprise, not Professional. Use it to create calculation fields, as well as being able to work out sum, average value, and other operations in associated records.
  • CMS membership:  Access control for your content, with permissions you can apply at blog level. By using HubSpot lists, you can restrict access, create gated content, or share with certain groups (customers, event-goers and so on). 
  • Adaptive testing: A definite time-saver. Basically, adaptive testing is next-gen A/B testing with AI. It's less labour-intensive, time-consuming, and demanding on the brain than a traditional A/B test. It also means site visitors spend less time being directed to poorer-performing pages; it automatically adjusts when it has enough data, directing visitors to the better performing variations in the test. You improve on conversion rates during the testing period, rather than continuing to show 50% of visitors something less effective (as you would in an A/B test). 

If you're interested in the nuts and bolts of adaptive testing, HubSpot has a couple of very interesting blogs on the subject.

To analyse revenue:

  • Multi-touch revenue attribution: This reporting tool is a real game-changer, showing you which marketing touch-points are generating revenue and how much of a result you're getting from marketing. It shines a light on the true value of certain activities like never before. 

Our marketing manager, Hollie Higa, explains use cases for Multi-Touch Revenue Attribution Reporting in this dedicated article.

  • Filtered analytics view: A useful tool for filtering analytics by domain, country or URL path so that your content reporting is more meaningful to you. Both Enterprise and Professional give 25 views per portal.
  • Custom event triggers and reporting: This advanced activity tracker works with Javascript Events API or Events HTTP API. You'll need a developer's help for this one. What does it do? Well, you could create an event that triggers after someone logs in to your external website. You can then use this information to segment via recent log-ins. Alternatively, you could have an event trigger for abandoned shopping carts. You could then use the information to segment those website visitors and send them a reminder or a query to find out why they didn't finish their purchase.
Marketing Hub Enterprise has a 2,000 event limit. It also has an events analytics tool to help you analyse completions and check how many occur in set timeframes.

Sales

Professional (AKA Starter Plus) Sales Hub has tools to:

  • Help you automate with workflow extensions
  • Assist with personalised, scalable outreach (1:1 video creation, sequence queues in which you can enrol multiple contacts, and 'quick assembly' proposals/quotes)
  • Organise your data, including Salesforce integration. You can also track/manage multiple currencies.

Enterprise

These features are intended to step up coaching and sales enablement:

  • Playbooks: If you're unaware of playbooks, they could definitely improve your sales process. They're like a resource library where you can house standardised notes for talking to prospects and customers.
  • Goals: Set quotas and measure team performance. In Enterprise, you can use this for a range of activities, e.g. meetings booked or deals created. In Professional, this is limited to monthly revenue goals only.
  • Call transcription: Available in English, in Enterprise only.
  • Calculated properties: Also available in Enterprise only, this feature calculates figures such as discounts or commissions in HubSpot.
  • Predictive lead scoring: Another Enterprise only feature. It automatically scores and ranks leads so you can prioritise the deals that are the most likely to close.

These features are designed to help you close more deals:

  • Quote-based workflows: Workflows help you automate certain processes to increase your team's efficiency. The type of workflow you can create is dependent on your package and quote-based workflows are Enterprise only. In order to help you stay on top of discounts and deals, they require approvals for quotes that exceed your chosen thresholds.
  • Recurring revenue tracking: lets you track revenue and referrals with detailed reporting. Also Enterprise only.

For complex sales teams:

  • User roles: is the ability to assign different permissions for different functionality to each member of the team that uses your HubSpot account.
  • Single sign-on: makes logging in easy and secure, while giving you peace-of-mind about who has access to your HubSpot account. Enterprise only.
  • Record customisation: is available in Enterprise, although Professional also has limited availability. This allows you to segment and search for different records (of which there are four types in HubSpot – contacts, companies, deals and tickets). You could also look at a record's properties, associated records and activity. 

Service 

Features available in Service Hub Professional are intended to:

  • Make your service offering scalable, so you can look at ticket status, routing and pipelines, plus some automation of repetitive tasks. 
  • Give your visitors the information they're looking for via content: (a Knowledge Base and 1:1 video creation)
  • Give you access to data. Reports, surveys and an insights dashboard help you analyse, report and improve on customer experience.

Enterprise offers the ability to manage complex teams and brands through:

User roles: Assign different permissions for different functionality to different members of your team in HubSpot.

Calculated properties: This Enterprise only feature lets you do calculations (e.g. discounts, commissions) in HubSpot. You can also work out sum, average value and other operations in associated records.

Hierarchical teams: allows you to organise your HubSpot users according to team, region, brand or other segments.

Single sign-on: allows users to log into HubSpot with a single sign-on identity provider (e.g. Okta or OneLogin). You benefit from that provider's enhanced security plus the convenience of signing in with a single set of credentials across the many applications you use.

Slack integration: The popular remote working and internal communication tool integrates with HubSpot to let you do a number of actions (tasks, notifications, see/ share contacts) in Slack itself. This means you don't have to go back and forth between tools, for greater efficiency and less hassle.

Enterprise also offers webhooks, enabling you to pass information from HubSpot to other web apps in use by your team. 

What are the costs involved?

If you're looking to find out HubSpot Marketing Enterprise pricing, Sales Hub pricing or Service Hub pricing, here's a quick breakdown. You'll see a jump in price from Professional to Enterprise, but there is a very good reason. 

At time of writing, monthly costs for the package alone are: 

  • Marketing:  £655 Professional / £2,624 Enterprise
  • Sales:  £410 Professional / £990 Enterprise
  • Service:  £330 Professional / £990 Enterprise.

That price difference is based on the jump in capability. Enterprise accommodates for more contacts or paid users, depending on your package. Marketing leaps from 1,000 contacts (Professional) to 10,000 (Enterprise). Meanwhile Sales and Service both double the number of paid users accommodated: 5 in Professional and 10 in Enterprise.

Some increases are common to all Enterprise Hubs (i.e. Sales, Marketing or Enterprise), so you'll see the ability to handle 30 currencies in Professional and 200 in Enterprise. Another example is the two reporting dashboards in Professional, including 10 reports per dashboard. Enterprise gives you a big step up to 26 dashboards including 20 reports per dashboard.

Some Hubs have greater capabilities in certain related areas. For example, to help you track deals and predict future revenue, Sales offers you 15 deal pipelines in Professional and 50 in Enterprise. You could also use much greater segmentation with rules-based scoring criteria: Professional lets you create one scoring property, and in Enterprise it's 25.  

Depending on your set-up — i.e. if you have a large number of contacts and the extra capabilities are worth it to you — it could even work out cheaper to plump for Enterprise.

With great power comes great usability

OK, we may have misquoted Churchill here. Or was it F.D.R.? (Possibly Uncle Ben?) The point is, if you're the right kind of business, Enterprise Hubs could be worth getting excited about. 

Despite the difference between HubSpot Marketing Enterprise pricing, Sales Hub pricing, Service Hub pricing and the Professional packages, we can really see the appeal of a CRM product that can accommodate organisational complexity – and there's plenty of demand for it too.  

If you're still not sure which package is for you, by all means get in touch. We'll be happy to help you figure out your needs and explain what's involved in integration/migration.

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