HubSpot Review: Is It Good for Project Management? [2024]

An All-In-One CRM and Project Management Solution

Can a CRM software like HubSpot do double duty for project management? I tested HubSpot over several weeks to find out.

HubSpot’s ever-expanding suite of software, including new AI capabilities, addresses the needs of sales, marketing, customer service, content management, and operations teams. It brings together everything you need to collaborate with colleagues and clients and deliver high-quality projects on time.

In addition, one of HubSpot’s most attractive features is its user-friendly interface, which makes it easy to set up your account, upload data, and create projects, tasks, reports, and dashboards. Well-designed mobile apps are a big plus too. HubSpot’s apps help increase productivity by keeping your team on top of tasks, to-dos, meetings, and reminders on the go.

But the sheer range of plans and options can be intimidating. While HubSpot offers a free plan, it only includes basic tools. That’s why I’d recommend starting with a free 14-day trial. That will give you a better taste of what HubSpot can do for your company and allow you to test all its project management tools.

After a deep dive into its plans and features, I’ve laid out the pros and cons in this review to help you decide if HubSpot is right for you.

Plenty of Features for Enhancing Productivity and Managing Workflow

You can use HubSpot’s CRM and project management software to oversee sales team pipelines, manage marketing campaigns, and create and track content management performance.

Every plan comes with the features you need for effective collaboration and optimal productivity. You can create projects, assign tasks, upload and share documents, manage contacts, and more. Automatic data upload and real-time sync can help you keep project details accessible to anyone who needs it.

A CRM That Also Manages Projects

With a HubSpot Professional plan, you can use the Projects tool to create projects, tasks and subtasks, assign them to team members, and set start and due dates – just like with any project management software. HubSpot keeps it all organized in one convenient location so everyone can view and track their assignments.

You can see projects/tasks in the Calendar view at any time. You can also pull up a comprehensive list of all your projects or tasks assigned to you. If you want to view a project in a Gantt Chart, you can create one in a spreadsheet or start with a free HubSpot business template – but you’ll need a third-party integration for other views, like Kanban Boards.

Considering a free or entry-level plan? You can still use basic project management features to create and assign tasks, add notes, and set start and due dates to keep your team organized. You can also attach a task to a specific marketing or sales campaign or view a list of all tasks assigned to an individual team in a task queue.

Work More Efficiently With Help From AI

Marketing, sales, customer service, and other teams can use HubSpot’s AI capabilities to boost efficiency, improve effectiveness, and enhance project outcomes. Built-in intuitive AI tools for each Hub and offer niche-specific support for a range of tasks.

HubSpot’s new AI features can generate high-quality content and images, develop marketing campaign plans, build sales pipelines, provide project insights, create custom client reports, and much more. There’s even a ChatGPT-powered chatbot to help you handle customer service inquiries and craft sales prospecting templates.

Some AI tools, like the website builder, are only available in English, while others are still in Beta.

Add Functionality With Hundreds of Integrations

HubSpot’s App Marketplace is one of the largest I’ve encountered. It’s stocked with 1500+ apps that integrate with various HubSpot tools and sorted into dozens of categories, such as communication, financial, and productivity. You can further filter and search by price, business focus, and features. More than 300 are free.

There are special categories for compatible and certified apps. While HubSpot reviews every app in the marketplace, certified applications have undergone deeper review by HubSpot’s developers – just look for the orange “HubSpot” icon for the apps that passed the test.

If you’re a fan of HubSpot’s CRM but looking for more specialized project management features, you can integrate a low-cost, certified solution like the PSOhub app, or a costlier integration, such as monday.com or Teamwork.

Automations and Workflows Optimize Productivity

HubSpot’s automations and workflows are a great way to manage tasks, free up time, and improve relationships with clients and customers. You can set custom triggers to automate repetitive tasks like welcome/follow-up emails, subscription confirmations, lead assignments, and notifications to your teammates.

Workflows are also a great way to automate complex processes. With HubSpot’s self-guided templates, you can set up a sequence, or a series of timed, personalized actions tied to a specific project or campaign. I found it easy to create a workflow to nurture marketing campaign leads that would guide them through the sales funnel.

A Beginner-Friendly Platform With Built-In Help Options

HubSpot has set out to make its software easy to use, even if you don’t have any technical expertise or prior experience with CRM or project management services. The user-friendly interface and features are easy to understand, so your team can quickly grasp and use all the built-in tools.

From your home dashboard, you can access demos, knowledge base articles, free webinars, and even the HubSpot Learning Academy. The drag-and-drop editor makes it equally easy to work with forms, emails, website pages, and other templates.

Getting Started with HubSpot

When you sign up for a free HubSpot plan or free trial, you’ll receive a welcome email with links to a video and a series of step-by-step visual demos that introduce your plan’s built-in tools.

HubSpot’s interface is clean and user-friendly – there’s a side panel that contains links to all your tools and a top navigation bar with dropdown menus. Settings let you quickly configure preferences and choose your default homepage. You can customize your home dashboard with frequently used tasks and dashboards, your activity feed, and inbox.

Step-by-Step Project Set Up

Built-in tutorials and templates made creating my first project, adding teammates, and assigning tasks streamlined and easy.

If you’re ever stuck on a setting or tool, there’s also a built-in help option. You can always click on the “?” icon in the top navigation bar or tap the blue Chat/Help button in the lower right corner to start a chat, contact the community, or search the knowledge base.

Templates Simplify Tasks and Keep Work on Track

HubSpot’s high-quality templates help you speed up work, meet deadlines, and manage projects. You can use templates to design emails, forms, newsletters, and website content. Templates also make it easier to create projects, team dashboards, and pipelines to analyze performance.

The quality and range of templates increase along with your plan tier. HubSpot makes up for that by offering dozens of free business templates you can download, including 26 for project management. You’ll find everything from Gantt Charts and mind maps to project views like the Raci Matrix.

Real-time Data Sync and Historical Upload

An essential first step for marketing, sales, and customer service teams is uploading all the data stored on other platforms. I found that HubSpot’s useful app integrations can put an end to tedious manual uploading and simplify the process of storing all your team’s data in one convenient location.

Just integrate an app like Google Contacts, MailChimp, Square, or Zendesk (there are 24 in all) and let HubSpot’s data sync get to work. HubSpot will upload all historical data and then continuously sync (one-way or two-way sync) so your databases are always up to date. If you’ve used a CRM before as I have, this tool may sell you on HubSpot – it makes things so much easier.

Multiple Ways for Teams To Coordinate and Connect

Every specialized Hub and plan tier includes essential collaboration software for internal and external communication. You can communicate with your team through @mentions, comments, internal conversations, and emails. Marketing teams can also collaborate on campaigns using an integrated marketing calendar and in-app commenting.

Chatflows offer a customized chat experience that can enhance communication with your website and Facebook page visitors. All it takes is a few steps: create your message, set chat hours and a response time, and preview it on desktop, tablet, and mobile before you finalize.

You can create a simple welcome message to greet visitors and direct them to your live team or use AI tools to build chatbots that qualify leads or answer frequently asked questions from customers.

Team Dashboard & Communication

HubSpot dashboards help you gain insights into the success of individual campaigns, overall objectives, and where to focus your efforts to improve productivity. Like everything about HubSpot, dashboards are well-designed with prominent visual elements (graphs, charts, and audio/video content) that allow you to quickly grasp and digest relevant data.

Dashboards offer a number of benefits for specialized teams. Marketers can use dashboards to track lead capture, manage events, and evaluate the performance of marketing channels. Sales teams can see an overview of sales prospects, the status of deals, in-process and completed deals by rep, and forecast and actual revenue.

You can customize your dashboard by choosing which data and reports you want to include. For better analysis, you can filter data for one or more reports to a specific date range, team, or pipeline. HubSpot lets you get as comprehensive as you need – your dashboard can include anywhere from 7 to 50 individual reports.

Foster Better Collaboration With a Shared Inbox

A team email box is one of dozens of useful HubSpot collaboration tools. You can set up a shared inbox to more efficiently review, reply, and manage ongoing email and chat conversations with customers and clients. Marketing, sales, and customer service teams can use team inboxes to improve customer engagement and, as a result, project success.

After you create and name a team inbox, you can choose who has access – your entire team to keep everyone in the loop or specific users only. Advanced settings allow you to manage resources by having incoming emails and chats automatically assigned to one or more specific team members. They’ll receive notifications via email, desktop pop-up, or mobile app.

File Sharing

You can upload files to share with your team, clients, and customers. HubSpot lets you upload Adobe PDF, Google (Sheets, Slides, Docs) and Microsoft documents (Excel, Powerpoint, and Word), video, and audio files. Alternatively, you can transfer files from your computer or integrated Google, Dropbox, or Box account.

Teams can use the collaboration sidebar to add general comments or comment on specific sections in the document, view assigned tasks related to the file, and manage approvals.

HubSpot doesn’t limit uploaded file storage size but recommends that you restrict each file to no more than 1 GB to avoid issues when you upload it. However, your plan determines the number of files you can upload. While the free plan limits you to a very low five files, you can upload 5,000 files on professional tier plans.

Mobile Apps

Your team can work from anywhere with HubSpot’s mobile apps for Android and iOS. The app is pretty comprehensive and lets you manage your tasks, meetings, notes, emails, and contacts from a phone or tablet.

HubSpot’s mobile apps also give you one-tap access to documents and let you add notes and follow-ups to contacts and activities, view your daily tasks in the task queue, assign tasks on the go, and view real-time sales leaderboards – all great things to help your team increase its productivity.

Chat, Email, and Phone Support, Plus Free Webinars and Classes

HubSpot offers customer support via chat, email, phone, or Twitter. Phone support is available in English, but chat, callback, and email are also available in French, German, Japanese, Portuguese, and Spanish. But here’s what you should know: the range and quality of support depend on your plan tier, which takes HubSpot down a notch.

If you’re on the free plan, you can get help from the HubSpot community, search the knowledge base, watch webinars and demos, and sign up for free courses. You can also chat with a bot or a sales rep and speak with sales by phone, but not customer/technical support.

As soon as you upgrade to a Starter plan, your support options expand to include live chat and email with HubSpot’s support reps. If you upgrade to a Professional or Enterprise plan, HubSpot adds phone support and one-on-one technical support with an expert.

Whichever support option you choose, the response is fast and helpful. In my experience, it takes 20 minutes or less to get an answer.

The sales reps go out of their way to help, typically including relevant links when responding to your questions.

I did sometimes get vague answers or links that took me to a dead end, like when I asked about signing up for a free trial for the Marketing Hub Professional plan. I finally resorted to using a different email address to sign up with HubSpot.

From Free to Pricey

HubSpot’s plans, tiers, features, and pricing can be confusing due to the multitude of available options. Here’s what I’ve discovered: unsurprisingly, advanced features require a higher payment – often significantly more. But based on my experience with pricing for top-of-the-line CRMs, HubSpot’s fees aren’t that shocking when you consider that it builds project management tools into its plans.

There are five individual Hubs for different niches: Marketing, Sales, Customer Service, CMS, and Operations. From there, each Hub has three plan tiers: Starter, Professional, and Enterprise. There’s also a free plan that includes most of the basic tools, or Hubs, but is only suitable for individuals or very small teams. HubSpot will recommend an upgrade to the Starter Customer Platform plan, but I found its project management features were also limited.

Each tier adds additional tools and usage ceilings rise. HubSpot’s pricing varies by criteria like the number of users on your plan, plus how many contacts and files you can upload and shared inboxes you can create. For example, You can create 3 dashboards with 10 reports/dashboard on the free plan, 10 dashboards with 10 reports/dashboard on a Starter marketing plan, and 25 dashboards with 30 reports/dashboard on a Professional plan.

As you move up the plan tiers to professional editions, you get extra features like the step-by-step Projects tool guide, project templates, calendar view, additional reports, and analytics data. Different pricing tiers also unlock more advanced AI tools.

You can subscribe to a single Hub or mix and match one or more Hubs to get the tools you need. Your cost can range from $20.00 per month for a starter Marketing Hub plan that covers 3 users to more than six times that for a professional tier plan.

HubSpot’s CRM Suite bundles all the Hubs into an expensive package, but is absolutely worth it if you intend to use all the available tools.