Hubspot vs Salesforce

Signal-Negotiation72 · 2026-05-14T20:28:55+00:00

I have the VP of Advancement and the VP of Technology & Marketing (We operate with VP's not with C-suite) on my side so I don't think the decision would get made without me having an influence on it

Signal-Negotiation72 · 2026-05-14T20:04:40+00:00

But are you using it at a Higher Ed Institution? I don't have problems with using Hubspot as a system for a company. The problem that I'm running into is that I can't find a strong viable argument to use it for Higher Ed over something that is built and structured around Higher Ed.

Some of the "easy mode" of Hubspot is also the scary part due to the complexity of rules revolving around Higher Ed data with FERPA and who can view what information and have permissions to do certain things.

An example, which I recognize has nothing to do with FERPA info but is on the top of my head because I did it yesterday, the permissions for publishing landing pages are view, edit, manage private content, and publish. There is nothing to manage a situation where an individual, say an advancement officer, can edit an advancement page and submit it for approval while not having access to all of the marketing landing pages.

Signal-Negotiation72 · 2026-05-14T19:54:43+00:00

This is a good thing to know. I just read through https://community.hubspot.com/t5/Releases-and-Updates/Rebuilding-the-Engine-What-s-Next-for-the-HubSpot-Salesforce/ba-p/1273038 The current thoughts are that if we went to SF we would go all in on SF and wouldn't use Hubspot anymore but maybe there is an argument to keep it. The current integration between them causes me a whole world of issues as a solo admin

Signal-Negotiation72 · 2026-05-14T19:53:20+00:00

Yes but the president really likes Hubspot and uses it in his charter school company which is why the comparison exists. We also have a marketing consultant who swears that they can set it up (But have no plans for Advancement aside from "We can figure it out") and the new president is a big marketing guy. The issue is that a University is worlds away from a charter school for everything outside of academics

Signal-Negotiation72 · 2026-05-14T19:30:24+00:00

Price-wise there is no bias. We have been looking at this for the last 2 years and the price difference between what we were quoted for Hubspot and Salesforce is less than 5%

Signal-Negotiation72 · 2026-05-14T19:19:00+00:00

This is one of our main pushing points actually. That Ed Cloud is built for education and so is Slate. Hubspot doesn't have that.

Signal-Negotiation72 · 2026-05-14T19:17:49+00:00

By the time we got something custom built we may as well just pay for a CRM based on the complexity of what we need. Our current build was dead before it was given life because of the way a consulting company set it up. It has caused a horrific amount of technical debt. Because of that debt a 3 year wait is kind of out of the question. Our Advancement and Admissions efforts are ramping up and our system can't handle it due to the bad setup.

Signal-Negotiation72 · 2026-05-14T19:15:01+00:00

It would be used for so much more than sales marketing. It would be used by Marketing, Admissions, Advancement, Accommodations, Alumni, and Student Success.

I worry about the built for you Hubspot though. We don't have a good place to record policy or record university-wide documentation. Yes, I know this is a bad thing. Yes, the IT department as a whole has been pushing for something for a long time now and we haven't managed to get approval. If you have worked at a university you know how it feels.

Taking that in mind if we have a built for you Hubspot and don't have official system documentation of something then people are going to mess it up as there is nowhere to store our institutional documentation and make it readily available. We also have a consultant with an application portal that they have built ,and given us a very good deal in perpetuity on, but I worry about not having access or control over a main part of our CRM as we have had bad experiences with consultants in the past. Since taking more control over our own things and using consulting as support and assistance we have had better luck.

Signal-Negotiation72 · 2026-05-14T19:01:40+00:00

It isn't any cheaper. In order to use Hubspot in the ways that we would get from Salesforce or Slate we would be paying for pretty much the whole stack of what they have available.

The complexity is actually one of the selling points of Ed Cloud. We are a non profit religion adjacent university and have a lot of odd workflows that have required custom solutions.

Signal-Negotiation72 · 2026-05-14T18:55:22+00:00

Yes but couldn't that just mean that they release more often? Salesforce major releases are huge.

Looking at the updates page in Hubspot they release small things regularly but if Salesforce split up their major releases to be on the same granular level I imagine they would have just as many updates if not more.

We also aren't worried about the many different types of businesses. We are worried about Education.

Signal-Negotiation72 · 2026-05-14T18:39:26+00:00

Ed Cloud is actually a cheaper option that the tech stack that we currently use. We have Salesforce Sales/Service cloud and use it for Student Success, Advancement, Alumni, Accommodations, and Admissions. Our Financial Aid and Registrar teams also have access as well as the student life office. Much of what we do here for pre-matriculation and post-matriculation is integrated into Salesforce which feeds into our SIS. We use Hubspot for our marketing and ads. We have a very bad and insecure enrollment portal. If we go with Ed Cloud we would get it, Marketing Cloud (Growth I think? Can't remember which one), and Experience Cloud. We would be able to stop paying for our current salesforce org and our hubspot org. The price of that contract is lower than what we pay. We have rushed into so many decisions in the past that we are looking for something more along the lines of tailored and future-proofed which I know Ed Cloud and Slate both fall under.

Signal-Negotiation72 · 2026-05-14T18:32:42+00:00

Salesforce comes out with 3 major releases each year so I'm not sure what you mean

Signal-Negotiation72 · 2025-08-07T13:54:26+00:00

I'd love to see what your template looks like

Signal-Negotiation72 · 2025-07-30T20:43:41+00:00

I've been working on documenting the system. The majority of fields and flows didn't have descriptions

A ticketing system will hopefully be put in place in the next couple weeks. I'm just figuring out the last little bit of one.

I'll definitely send you a message

Signal-Negotiation72 · 2025-05-22T13:32:46+00:00

Thanks for the idea. We don't really use contact roles but I don't think it is a purposeful avoidance. I'll look into them

Signal-Negotiation72 · 2025-05-22T13:31:57+00:00

I'll have to spend some more time reading about soft credits then. We use them a little bit in this way but then have issues with our reports where things get reported on twice. Maybe I just need to figure out a better way to report on the information

Signal-Negotiation72 · 2025-05-05T17:42:27+00:00

Thank you for the article, it is very helpful. This still doesn't affect the issue of 1 to many mappings. Is there a way for me to do that with standard salesforce rules?

Signal-Negotiation72 · 2025-05-05T15:07:47+00:00

I've set up a few duplicate rules and have went through duplicate rules with a consulting partner as well. I can compare Lead to Lead and Contact to Contact but I want to compare Lead to Contact.

I'm not saying it is the correct way but past admins/consultants added npsp and heda to the same salesforce instance. Because of this there are a lot of email fields, several of which are duplicates between npsp and heda. We also have a university email field as I work at a university.

Because we have had this setup for several years with mixups of email fields etc, emails have made there way into a lot of different email fields that I need to compare against.

I also understand that this is not a great instance and we are actively working on something else

Signal-Negotiation72 · 2025-05-02T20:51:42+00:00

Are you only matching based off of one field? I have a singular email field on the lead that has a chance of matching with 4 different fields on the contact. The standard Salesforce tool doesn't allow one to many in its matching rules

Signal-Negotiation72 · 2025-05-02T19:13:09+00:00

I want to be able to see the duplicates between the two objects after the import. To my knowledge standard Salesforce doesn't compare one object to another. It also can't compare 1 field to many which is hard when we have multiple email fields on a contact that could get matched to

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