Running a business today often involves dealing with marketing, sales, and customer support at once, and that’s nearly impossible without the right CRM. The challenge, however, is choosing that one perfect platform. There are too many options on the market and each of them promises to improve your operations, increase sales, and keep your team productive either for free or at a really small cost, which makes them even more tempting for businesses on a tight budget.
Depending on the requirements, business owners start researching different options trying to select the most effective or at least the most appropriate system that meets the must-have needs. This is where household names like HubSpot end up on your shortlist.
Even though HubSpot’s free plan seems an attractive option and works for many companies, it still is not always the best fit for every business. That’s why today, we’re taking a closer look at EspoCRM as a cost-effective and transparent alternative to HubSpot.
Does affordability meet functionality?
Let’s start with perhaps one of the most important considerations when choosing a CRM—your budget. If you’re a small business owner, founder of an early-stage startup, or just a manager of a fast-growing sales team, you surely understand that every dollar spent on tools needs to deliver real value, because resources are often tight and the cost of the tools you rely on can quickly add up. That’s why you’ll definitely be questioning yourself whether the investment in a premium CRM is really worth it. Fortunately, HubSpot offers a free plan – or does it?
If you look a little deeper, you’ll realize that HubSpot’s free plan provides only the basic features, covering contact and lead management, deal tracking, simple email automation, ticketing, a few standard reports, live chat, etc. Of course, these are a great starting point for small teams in the early stages, but to remain competitive, the sales team will quickly need more advanced tools and that’s where things get more complicated. These features are locked behind paid plans, which creates the ever-present dilemma: upgrade and pay more or switch to another platform?
Cost-effective solution
Now, let’s get back to EspoCRM. For the most part, the self-hosted option also provides the basic set of free features that covers contact, lead, and account management, opportunity tracking, basic marketing automation, customer support tools to manage cases or create customer self-service portals, and so on. These features allow you to manage your customer relationships, sales, marketing, and support, thus helping your business operate efficiently at every stage. Self-hosting lets you get started with no licensing fees and no user or record limits on the basic version. You enjoy full control over your data and use the software to grow your business.
No hidden costs
Another huge advantage of EspoCRM is its pricing transparency. There are no surprise charges or hidden fees looming around the corner. In comparison to some CRMs that have confusing pricing structures and often surprise costs for essential features, EspoCRM keeps things simple. Each extension’s price is clear and you can see all the features it provides upfront. You pay a fixed, one-time fee for a 1-year or 2-year license with updates—nothing more.
There is no fluctuating subscription pricing from month to month and no need to purchase additional sales features one by one. This transparency helps you stay within your budget. In short, the system is easy on your wallet, clear with its pricing, and still has all the features you need to run your business.
Customize it to your business
EspoCRM can be adapted to fit data needs, processes, and workflows that are specific to some industry. Need to manage donors for a nonprofit, track customer birthdays, or monitor subscriptions? EspoCRM can be customized for all of the mentioned cases without coding. You can use Entity Manager to create custom entities to store specific types of data, add new fields to existing entities to capture the information that’s not tracked by default but is important to your company, and even create relationships between entities to reflect how they are connected with each other.
On top of that, you can rearrange layouts to meet your needs. It’s easy to customize List and Detail Views, adjust Field positions, and reorder Tabs, Side, and Bottom panels so that your team sees what’s most important first. And that’s not all. You can also change your system themes, dashboards, and menu tabs to prioritize the tools and features you use most.
All these customizations are also easy to implement. The interface allows you to drag, drop, and change settings until your system perfectly fits your business. The adapted CRM will inevitably change how your team works and make your operations more efficient. You’ll quickly notice: fewer data entry mistakes, less time wasted looking for features, quicker menu navigation and data search, and measurably higher productivity.
An intuitive interface for a smooth user experience
Probably, the first impression you’ll get when you log into EspoCRM is how clean and simple the interface is. There’s no clutter, no overwhelming menus, no complicated configurations, and no tools that are there merely as a promotion but hidden behind the paywall.
Basic sales, marketing, and support features are right at your fingertips, easy to find, and easy to use. Adding new contacts, updating tasks, or checking opportunities on your sales pipeline takes just a few clicks.
The layout is intuitively designed so that you can start working right away without spending time learning how the system works, searching through complex menus, or scrolling through endless options. If you do not need some tools or features, you can easily disable them in the Administration panel and they will not be shown in the interface.
Powerful business process management (BPM) automation
Workflow and business process automation are core to achieving operational efficiency especially if your business wants to have consistent processes, minimize manual tasks, and reduce human error. EspoCRM provides the necessary functionality to set up workflows or BPM processes to automate both repetitive simple operations and complex task sequences with many steps.
For example, you can create a BPM process to automate lead nurturing. Every time a new lead is added, the system will automatically send a welcome email, assign the lead to the right team member, and update the record status. It can even automate the creation of follow-ups with reminders, so you never miss an important sales call. All of this will happen in the background, while your team will be focused on more important tasks.
In comparison, other CRMs may offer basic workflow automation features in higher-tier plans, but often they don’t include built-in BPM tools. That’s why if you need more advanced automation, you may need to look for third-party integrations, which can quickly get expensive. EspoCRM offers BPM features as part of the Advanced Pack extension at a much more affordable price.
Efficient inventory tracking
If you’re running a business that deals with products, you need tools to monitor everything from stock levels to delivery orders. EspoCRM offers inventory tracking features that help manage delivery orders, restock goods, and handle returns. When a product is sold or returned, the system automatically updates stock levels, so you’re always informed about what’s on hand. It also lets you create warehouses and track transfers between them.
HubSpot is a trademark of HubSpot, Inc.