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HubSpot Conversations Review - Summary

What is HubSpot Conversations

HubSpot is a marketing, sales, customer service, and CRM platform that also offers a live chat chatbot for your website, which is called HubSpot Conversations. HubSpot Conversations, however, barely qualifies as a live chat software, and completely misses the mark as a chatbot.

In 2017, HubSpot acquired chatbot startup Motion AI, which is now HubSpot Conversations. Motion AI launched in 2015 and offered an editor for building chatbots that work on websites, and Facebook Messenger, with little to no coding required.

One strange thing about reviews of HubSpot and HubSpot’s marketing material in general, is that it’s almost always referred to as a free tool. There is a free version of HubSpot, just like there’s a free version of most SaaS tools, but do not expect HubSpot to be free forever. As a former HubSpot user, what I can tell you 100% for sure, is that HubSpot is far from “free software.” Any serious business using HubSpot is going to spend $15,000 a year at a minimum.

To further put HubSpot’s pricing into perspective, the top-ranked chatbot on our Best Chatbot Builders list is $299 per month on their most expensive plan, and that’s for an unlimited amount of contacts. HubSpot on the other hand, for 50,000 contacts on the Professional plan (not their most expensive plan), is $56,150 per year, just to get started.

Again, HubSpot is not free, nor does it even qualify as “cheap” because, in fact, it’s expensive.

The most damning thing we can say about HubSpot’s chatbot is that even if you’re using all of HubSpot’s Growth Tools - which includes their sales, marketing, support, and CRM software - we would still recommend integrating a third-party chatbot and avoiding HubSpot Conversations altogether.

Channels: Live chat, Facebook Messenger

Pricing - HubSpot Conversations:

Overall Rating - HubSpot Conversations:

What You’ll Learn
HubSpot Conversations Features
Integrations and API
HubSpot Pricing
Pros and Cons - HubSpot Conversations
HubSpot Conversations Review - Final Analysis
HubSpot Chatbot Competitors and Alternatives
Frequently Asked Questions - HubSpot Conversations

HubSpot Conversations Features

  • HubSpot Conversations chat widget: The HubSpot live chat widget is well designed and works well in both desktop and mobile browsers. Users are given the option of leaving their email address in an inline field in the chat, rather than in an old-fashioned pre-chat form. Customization is somewhat limited, but with an upgrade, you can edit the color of the chat widget and remove the HubSpot branding.
  • Instant reply bot: The instant reply bot allows you to send a response after users start a chat. These are simple, generic responses such as, “Hi, thanks for messaging us. We try to be as responsive as possible. We’ll get back to you soon.”
  • Qualify leads bot: Find out if visitors are qualified before sending them to a sales rep.
  • Book meetings bot: This bot allows visitors book meetings using a link.
HubSpot Conversations review - HubSpot chatbot widget
  • Support bot: Show knowledge base articles to visitors or let them create a support ticket. HubSpot’s Support bot requires you to upgrade to the Service Professional plan or higher.
  • HubSpot Conversations for teams: To create multiple teams you’ll need to be on the Professional plan, and for teams with hierarchical relationships, you’ll need to upgrade to the Enterprise plan.
  • Conversation routing: Automatically route chats to the person or team that’s most qualified to help. This requires upgrading to the Sales Starter Plan or higher.
  • Triggers: You can trigger chats by creating "Chatflows." You can, for example, create a chatflow that is only seen by contacts tracked in HubSpot CRM. Another example is creating a Chatflow based on the website URL.
  • Shared inbox: You can create a shared team email address for each Inbox. One Inbox is provided in the free account, but if you need separate inboxes for support and sales, that requires an upgrade. HubSpot provides a hosted email address or you can have a custom email address, which requires you to upgrade. If you use the hosted email address from HubSpot, you will need to setup up email forwarding from a public email address. Additionally, you can add rules to incoming emails in order to assign them to individuals or teams, and/or set up actions like creating a ticket.
  • Tracking user data: The only way to track user data for HubSpot Conversations is to use HubSpot CRM and create CRM contacts for your chats.
HubSpot Conversations review - HubSpot live chat
  • HubSpot mobile application: HubSpot offers mobile apps for iOS and Android. As well as being able to carry out live chat conversations, you have access to your CRM contacts.
  • Knowledge base: You can create help docs and have your chatbot serve them to your customers if you upgrade to the Service Professional plan. However, the HubSpot chatbot is not triggered by keywords, so you cannot intelligently serve articles to visitors with specific questions. Instead, you could create a welcome message for individual pages of your website that display a few articles that are relevant to that page.

HubSpot Conversations Integrations

HubSpot has hundreds of integrations. Here are just a few examples of HubSpot’s most popular integrations.

HubSpot Conversations review - HubSpot integrations

HubSpot Conversations API and SDK

HubSpot offers an extensive API. The API is built to allow you to create a functional application or integration. The ecosystem of developers creating integrations on top of the APIs is strong and diverse, ranging from webinar providers to CRMs to social media.

All of the HubSpot APIs are organized around REST. The APIs are designed to have predictable, straightforward URLs and to use HTTP response codes to indicate API errors.

HubSpot Conversations Pros and Cons

Pros - HubSpot Conversations

  • Seamless integration with HubSpot: If you’re already using HubSpot, HubSpot Conversations may sound quite appealing because you won’t have to learn a new user-interface.
  • Easy to use user interface: For a wide-ranging platform of different tools, HubSpot has done a great job with its user interface, as most of it is easy to use and navigate.
  • Unified inbox: You can respond to all chats via the HubSpot Conversations inbox, Slack, or the HubSpot mobile app. By taking notes on user profiles, you can remind yourself to follow-up with certain contacts and create support tickets. Every conversation gets automatically saved and stored in your inbox and on the contact’s timeline so your team has context and a view of every interaction. Although the unified inbox is one of HubSpot Conversations ‘pros’, it also happens to be one of its ‘cons’ due to the manual segmentation and non-automated nature of the feature.
  • HubSpot Integrations and API: HubSpot has hundreds of integrations built for the platform. Chances are that an integration exists for most of the popular tools in your tech stack. Additionally, the HubSpot API is robust and is accompanied by lots of documentation.

Cons - HubSpot Conversations

  • Limited number of features: HubSpot’s chatbot software does not have a lot of chatbot features that the best live chat chatbots possess. The basic elements are there, such as quick replies, buttons, text input, emojis, and email validation. However, there are no advanced tools, automation is very limited, and it lacks any type of intelligence. You can build a basic chatbot, yes, but nothing advanced.
  • Easy to miss conversations: If you do not route the end of every chatflow to a user, team or inbox, you will not receive notifications, and therefore you need to monitor everything manually. Essentially, you are not automatically notified of all conversations that are started with your bot. Plus, if you’re familiar with other, more advanced chatbot builders, you might assume that if nobody replies to a visitor, that the chat will remain open for you to respond. Instead, HubSpot Conversations ends the chat.
  • No chat broadcasting: With HubSpot it is not possible to send broadcast messages, which is a common type of campaign you can run with most of the best chatbots built for marketing purposes. This is a huge drawback because this is one of the main benefits of chatbot software in general. In addition to not being able to send a bulk message to your audience, or a segment of your audience, you also cannot send a sequence of messages. Again, sequences are another very common type of campaign option with the best marketing chatbots. Marketing automation tools for HubSpot overall, however, is included in the Marketing Professional and Marketing Enterprise plans. As for HubSpot’s chatbot, automation tools are almost completely absent.
  • No AI, NLP, or NLU: There is no artificial intelligence or natural language processing (NLP) utilized by HubSpot’s chatbot. For a company as large as HubSpot, you might assume that their chatbot could be found among the best AI chatbots, but you would be mistaken.
  • Limited marketing channels: Unlike the best marketing chatbot platforms available, HubSpot Conversations is limited to live chat on your website, and Facebook Messenger chat. And in regards to Facebook Messenger, there’s no auto-reply or Facebook Ads options available on HubSpot Conversations, which severely limits the marketing capabilities of the bot in general.
  • No keyword recognition: The only type of ‘intelligence’ you can gain access to for HubSpot Conversations is the ability to match certain keywords with your articles in the HubSpot knowledge base. The knowledge base extension will require you to upgrade. However, matching keywords and delivering a response to that keyword is not possible with the HubSpot chatbot.
  • Analytics not available for HubSpot chatbot: Another major drawback to HubSpot Conversations is the complete absence of chatbot analytics. Without chatbot analytics, you severely limit your ability to improve the quality of your chatbot.
  • Page targeting options: It does appear, at first, that there are a lot of options for page targeting for HubSpot Conversations, however, you’ll quickly find yourself stuck when trying to create service or product-specific HubSpot chatbots. You also cannot target or exclude certain countries or IP addresses with your chatbot. Therefore, if you only do business in certain countries or regions, this can cause a lot of issues and extra work for your live agents.
  • Messages cannot be used in different chatflows: Quite possibly the most frustrating aspect of HubSpot’s chatbots is that the user cannot go from one chatflow to another. For example, you can qualify a lead with a specific chatbot, but you can’t also provide support with that same chatbot. This means that you can qualify leads, provide support, and book meetings, but not all at the same time in one workflow. This is a major flaw that we haven’t seen in any other top-quality marketing chatbots.

HubSpot Pricing

Although HubSpot has a free forever CRM plan which includes live chat, the platform will be anything but free for a company that’s not simply testing out the software. Furthermore, if you want access to the majority of HubSpot’s features, you’ll need to upgrade your plan.

HubSpot has many different pricing plans and software packages. The most popular package for customers wanting to use HubSpot live chat (HubSpot Conversations), is the Growth Suite bundle, which includes HubSpot’s CRM, Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, and Service Hub. Without this bundle, you’ll lose most of the functionality required for live chat software.

As you can see in the screenshots below, the implementation of HubSpot Conversations and live chat software is far from a “free forever” solution.

In this first screenshot of the HubSpot pricing calculator, we see that the estimated cost to get started on the Professional plan with 50K contacts and 10 users is $56,150.

Hubspot Conversations review - HubSpot pricing - Professional plan

In this second screenshot, we’ve selected the Enterprise plan with 100K contacts and still just 10 users. The total estimated cost to get started on this package is $84,000.

To put this into perspective, the company I currently work with has over 200K contacts in our database, and we’re a small business. If we wanted to implement this HubSpot package, we would need to add well over $100,000 to our tech stack budget.

HubSpot Conversations review - Hubspot pricing - Enterprise plan

HubSpot Conversations - Final Analysis

Ultimately, the only way to make HubSpot Conversations useful at all is to own HubSpot’s tools for marketing, sales, service, and CRM. Even then, HubSpot’s chatbot falls well short of the best live chat software tools available in 2023.

Bottom line, by choosing one of the many other great chatbot platforms out there and integrating that solution with your CRM (even if that’s HubSpot), you’ll gain many additional features and save your business a whole lot of time and money.

HubSpot’s chatbot is as basic as it gets.

HubSpot Conversations Competitors and Alternatives

At Chatbots.org, we’ve reviewed and ranked hundreds of chatbots and chat platforms. We also rank these chatbots by category.

Unfortunately, HubSpot Conversations has not made any of the “Best Chatbot” categories on Chatbots.org. However, if we were to place HubSpot Conversations in any of our chatbot categories, they would be the following:

 

HubSpot Conversations Frequently Asked Questions

HubSpot strongly promotes that it’s a free CRM, however that’s simply not true. Although there is a free forever version of the software, that’s just good marketing on behalf of HubSpot. The HubSpot platform can easily cost companies $25,000 a year, and big businesses regularly spend $75,000 or more per year.

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