HubSpot Marketing Hub

It's very easy for anyone to make a beautiful-looking e-blast to send to a mailing list. Managing lists is also very easy and flexible. The default e-mail templates are beautiful and easy to customize, and the drag and drop interface for e-mails is very easy to use and highly customizable.

Some parts of the marketing hub, such as the Form builder, need a little work. Some features available in Wordpress's Gravity Forms plugin, for instance, are not available in Hubspot (e.g. conditional logic for showing certain form elements such as text boxes, etc.) The landing page editor is also not as easy to use as the e-mail builder, and I'm not sure why it wasn't designed with the same drag and drop system as the email builder.

The customer service team is excellent and there is a handy chat function so you don't have to wait on an email response. For social media, you can schedule posts months in advance and view your marketing activities as a monthly calendar. Landing pages are also easy and quick to set up. This is a great tool for smaller organizations with limited contacts or leads to store who need basic marketing support.

The company continues to make unnecessary updates with little notice that often seems to decrease the functionality of the tool until the changes are reversed. Email is very difficult to use as the template you set up views very differently across multiple popular email platforms (to be fair, this is likely an issue with any email automation software). You also have to change your template in a different view pane from your actual email so you're constantly switch back and forth between views for very minor changes. The simplest spacing adjustment takes forever. However, the contact database portion of Hubspot is where we have the most trouble as it's hard to sort and group leads with any way other than by making smart lists or using personas. Your database will get messy fast and there's very little way to clean it if you are a large company which means over time you will be paying for useless leads in your system you cannot find and eliminate.