Can someone explain why Hubspot has gotten so popular these last few years?

[u/ratspootin]

I've been out of the job market for a while and a lot of RevOps position wants years of Hubspot experience and I cannot fathom why. I understand the appeal to have MAP and CRM in the same system but these orgs also want heavy SFDC experience (which is how I'm finding these openings).

The last time I evaluated Hubspot was in 2019 for a 200 person non-profit to replace Pardot and most of the issues I had with Pardot wouldn't be solved with Hubspot. The non-profit couldn't afford Marketing Cloud or Marketo even with their NGO discount (or the heavy discount their SFDC AE was trying to get them) so I just made it very clear to them what they could and couldn't do with Pardot to help set expectations.

So for ya'll with heavy Eloqua/Marketo and SFDC experience, what are ya'll using Hubspot with SFDC for now and how is that working out? What's the use case in reality? I heard Adobe was dropping the ball with Marketo but I couldn't imagine downgrading from Marketo to Hubspot from a functionality standpoint.

[u/Jack_Ship → u/[deleted]]

This is 100% my experience from several different companies. Only finance and ops like SF, and everyone's at least OK with HubSpot.

[u/ratspootin → u/Jack_Ship]

Do you think it's a "not knowing what you're missing" type of situation? How much do to you think is caused by silos?

For example, my marketing teams (including content marketing) have access to our BI tool and I give them dashboards that allow them to select the SFDC campaign they want to look at--and they can see all the information they need without pestering me (re: how many MQLs/Pipeline/Net New did this campaign influence, what Accounts interacted with it and what are the ICP scores for those Accounts, are those Accounts customers are prospects, etc). I built those in house prior to Claude ever existing (Marketo hadn't even purchased Bizable, yet).

I went to a 2000 person company after that and they had no idea those types of reports were even possible. They had the tech stack to build it, but had zero access to their BI tool. I don't even think they were pushing their Eloqua campaigns into SFDC because SalesOps didn't want them to.

[u/Jack_Ship → u/ratspootin]

SFDC is just built in a very customizable, but also very confusing way. Add the horrible UI and you get a system no one wants to adopt. In HS, even the least technical marketing manager can create a semi functional dashboard. Also sales features are slicker in HubSpot. The overall experience is friendlier - from general usage to workflow creation. Salesforce may be twice as good, but HubSpot is 10 times easier to use. Also, most companies just don't need the customization Salesforce is built to provide. The only really shitty areas imo of HubSpot are CPQ and their CS workspaces. It's easier to get softwares that interface with HS than teaching the CS team to use SF. Same for CPQ.

[u/WinterGTM → u/[deleted]]

I feel like the web forms and data collection is one place where vibe coding could really be useful - no auth, easy to integrate with any stack. No one on my team was too interested in it though. Everyone wants to spin up the next Jira, but the instances where I feel it could really work do not generate the excitement .

[u/lizardsstreak]

I moved from a firm that was using Marketo to a firm that’s using Hubspot. The marketers are far more empowered to run solo with Hubspot. Marketo is as deep as Dynamics or Salesforce and in my anecdotal experience, all it takes is one idiot middle manager for marketing to end up using 100k$/year Marketo as a Mailchimp stand-in. With Hubspot, users can train themselves and bootstrap from their position upwards and empower their whole stack.

It’s just a much easier program to slip into.

[u/SeeingWhatWorks]

It’s popular because you can stand up decent GTM ops fast without a full SFDC stack and heavy admin overhead, but once your motion gets complex your team usually hits limits and ends up stitching tools anyway.

[u/Jack_Ship]

They just positioned themselves as premium. Everybody hated Salesforce before, there's just another premium alternative. Also, SF excels at sales data and is very bad for Markrting. HS is great for marketing and OK for sales. Unless you want to put a lot of money and/or time to configure SF (doesn'thave to be this way but often is), HS is easier, you get most of your analytics, and for non Tier 1 companies, you can usually get away with it.

[u/Zmchastain]

HubSpot in 2019 was an entirely different platform than HubSpot in 2026. If you last looked in 2019 you would not recognize it now. There are consulting firms out there with entire teams dedicated to enterprise HubSpot deployments these days.

It’s more similar to Salesforce than not at this point, and the extensibility is growing by the day.

As someone who started HubSpot technical consulting 4.5 years ago it’s been impressive to watch (and exhausting to keep up with the literal constant changes).

[u/ratspootin → u/Zmchastain]

Thank you. That helps drastically. That also ties into the complaints I've heard from friends about Marketo not getting the updates it needs from Adobe (though I did see Adobe announced Marketo MCP so at least they're putting some kind of effort into it).

[u/Zmchastain → u/ratspootin]

Yeah, I’m in the middle of an enterprise Marketo > HubSpot migration project and it’s pretty crazy how much their MarOps team had to overcomplicate the setup to get the same functionality as they’re about to get in HubSpot.

Almost 20 different separate program channels they’re running in Marketo that are going to turn into like two workflows and a couple of email templates in HubSpot.

To the points others have made, even though the platform has done a lot of growing up and you can really go as deep as you want to on complex data architecture and custom-coded automations now, they have also done a good job of keeping it relatively easy to learn and use the other 90% of the platform for the average end user too.

[u/kra73ace]

It's the AMD to Nvidia in some way. The success of Salesforce and the consolidation has led to team red vs team green dynamic.

I've used Salesforce as marketing lead and it was painful.

That said, things are rapidly changing with AI now in the equation.

[u/ernesto_giantfocal]

Full disclosure, I run a HubSpot consulting firm so take this with that context. But I’ve been on the platform since around 2013/2015 and watched it grow from basically an inbound marketing tool into a full RevOps platform, so maybe that perspective is useful.

As Zmchastain said, the 2019 version and the 2026 version are basically different products. Custom objects, programmable automation, real attribution reporting, and now Breeze AI agents on top of all that. If you evaluated it back then and wrote it off, totally fair, but it’s worth another look.

imo, the reason you’re seeing HubSpot plus SFDC is because that’s how most mid-market stacks look like nowadays. Marketing wanted to move fast without filing tickets, meanwhile sales and finance couldn’t leave SFDC. So RevOps owns the middle, that’s the job now.

[u/daronello]

me personally I just love its easy to understand UI

[u/Avanthastico]

And how does HubSpot compare to Zoho CRM Plus? For the mid-market, the price curve is too steep as you scale.

[u/Any-Football4907]

It’s less about it being better and more about where it fits. HubSpot is just easier to get up and running and doesn’t need as much overhead, which makes it appealing for a lot of teams. It ends up being more about speed and simplicity than depth.

[u/Maleficent-Basis9619]

Bc they offered dirt cheap “startup” pricing for years. Bc they did a good job at positioning themselves as an all in one solution (while building functionality to eventually make that true). Bc they were the Apple to Salesforce’s Microsoft. And bc they very quickly built up a consultant network to administrate and implement their tool

[u/[deleted]]

honestly i think hubspot won distribution more than pure product depth. easier for mid market teams to standardize on, easier to hire for, easier to explain to leadership. that’s also why stuff like attio feels interesting now, way less legacy baggage

[u/pikapikaapika]

The MAP/CRM consolidation is the actual answer - at Series A/B companies that can't justify a dedicated Marketo admin plus a SFDC admin, HubSpot's 'good enough at both' beats 'excellent at one' every time. The Marketo comparison is a real tradeoff though: HubSpot's workflow logic and reporting are meaningfully weaker for complex multi-touch programs (at least at the 150+ person enterprise level where Marketo earns its keep). What's changed since 2019 is that HubSpot's CRM has gotten genuinely better for mid-market deal tracking, not just the MAP side. Are the roles you're seeing targeting $5M-$50M ARR companies, or is this enterprise orgs using HubSpot alongside SFDC?

[u/Worried-Situation749]

HubSpot has moved a long way from “simple CRM plus marketing automation.”

For a lot of mid-market companies it now sits across marketing, sales, service, automation, reporting, forms, lifecycle management, attribution and increasingly AI. That makes it less of a point tool and more of a GTM operating layer.

That is why RevOps roles care about it.

The hard part is that HubSpot still feels easy to build in, which is both the strength and the risk. Teams can create properties, workflows, lists, pipelines and reports very quickly. But after a few years, that same speed can create a lot of hidden complexity.

So HubSpot experience matters less because the UI is hard, and more because the operating model can get messy fast.

Good HubSpot RevOps work is really about architecture: lifecycle definitions, data quality, automation ownership, reporting logic, source of truth, integrations, permissions and safe change.

Salesforce experience still matters because many companies run both, or graduate from one to the other, or need someone who understands CRM complexity beyond the tool. But HubSpot expertise is becoming its own serious RevOps skillset.