HubSpot Professional or Enterprise? 18 questions to help you decide

Purchasing a HubSpot licence is an exciting time for your business. It’s a tool full of fantastic products and features enabling your company to increase website traffic, generate more leads, close more customers, and grow better.

However, if you’re currently trying to decide which HubSpot licence to purchase, you’ll understand the confusion in deciding which level of licence to purchase. In this blog, we’ll identify the differences between purchasing the HubSpot Marketing Professional tool, and the HubSpot Marketing Enterprise tool in detail.

1. What is your budget?

The first question to get out of the way is the cost comparison. For the monthly fee, the cost of a licence rises from £655/month for a professional licence, to £2,624/month for an enterprise licence. The additional costs involved are to do with the size of your contact database, which are explained below:

The most striking thing above is the difference in cost for the monthly fee of around £2,000. However, you really need to think about the size of your contact database. If you have a contact database of over 40,000 contacts, it’s more cost effective to pay for the enterprise licence and receive the benefit of the additional tools.

2. Do you need custom event reporting, or custom event triggers?

Being able to create custom event triggers and use these custom event triggers within HubSpot’s custom reporting dashboard is functionality that you’ll only find within the HubSpot enterprise software. Custom events allow you to track more advanced ‘triggers’, such as logins to an external site, or shopping cart abandonment, however might require the support of a developer into Javascript Events API or similar.

3. Do you require predictive lead scoring?

As your HubSpot portal is being used day to day, it learns the behaviours and interactions that your leads are having before coming customers. For example is there a piece of content, or a number of page views/visits in a certain time frame, are they in a certain industry and/or country. It then uses this information to give predicted scores to your leads. This functionality is only available in the enterprise portal.

However, within the professional HubSpot licence, each of your contacts has a score against the likelihood to close, and the priority of the contact. This helps your sales team to prioritise initial outreach to new leads.

4. Does your company need secure single sign-on?

As companies grow and integrate more and more tools into their marketing, sales, customer service and wider business, you might be looking for a very secure platform to manage and organise who can have access to, and edit your companies data. The HubSpot Enterprise tool now has single sign-on support included, where HubSpot users can login to the tool with a SAML 2.0 single sign-on identity provider, such as Okta or OneLogin.

5. Do you need content partitioning functionality?

As the HubSpot tool has grown over the last few years, so has the number of different teams that use the tool in thousands of companies worldwife. Not just across marketing, sales and customer services, but you might have numerous marketing teams using the tool in different regions and product teams. HubSpot Enterprise users have access to ‘content partitioning’ – allowing you to restrict what each team has access to view, edit and publish.

For HubSpot Professional users, this isn’t available, meaning that everyone has access to all content in things like emails, landing pages and website pages.  

6. Do you need CMS membership functionality?

If you’ve ever wanted to create an area of your website which is restricted to certain contacts or audiences? As part of the HubSpot Enterprise tool, you can create an area of your website which requires a username and password to access. Not only this, but you create the list of people that this is available to out of your HubSpot portal.

A couple of examples where this might be useful include an area for paying customers only, or an extended area of your inbound marketing content efforts that’s only available to paying visitors.

7. Do you need an email send frequency-cap included?

Deciding on how many emails you should be sending your leads and prospects is a tough decision. The last thing you want is to put people off by sending too many messages that you come across as pushy. Within the HubSpot Enterprise tool, you can set a portal wide email send frequency cap – meaning that you can limit the amount of marketing emails your contacts receive within a certain time frame. If you aren’t using the Enterprise version of the tool – this is much harder to manage and limit.

8. Are you looking to integrate YouTube to your portal?

A new integration into the HubSpot ecosystem is an integration with YouTube – for Enterprise users only. By connecting YouTube to your HubSpot portal, you can report on the performance of your channel and the videos published to it. You can even compare YouTube against channels such as LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook to understand where you should be concentrating your social media marketing.

9. Are you looking to manage your ads via your HubSpot portal?

HubSpot’s ad management tool is really smart and easy to use, but there is a couple of key difference between the Professional and Enterprise tools. Within the Professional tool you can spend $10,000 every 30 days, using 5 audiences which are synced daily to the tool. However, if you are using the Enterprise tool those boundaries increase to $30,000 spend in 30 days, using up to 15 audiences which are synced daily.

10. Do you need to build programmable bots and webhooks in the conversations tool?

Building bots is a fantastic way of interacting with your website visitors on your key webpages, creating an interactive experience for your visitors. HubSpot’s standard bot builder is great, and you can create some really cool bots within the Professional tool, from booking meetings, to passing over to sales, to enrolling people in workflows.

However, if you’re looking to use the bots tool to trigger a webhook, or run a code snippet, you’ll need to be using the HubSpot Enterprise tool for that.

11. How many reporting dashboards do you need?

Every company is different, meaning every company wants to report on different things at once. Not only that, but every team in each company is different, and every employee in each company is different - and has different reporting requirements.

Within HubSpot you can build reporting dashboards to include your key reporting metrics. If you are using the HubSpot Professional tool, this is limited to one standard dashboard plus one additional custom dashboard. If you upgrade to the Enterprise tool, the number of additional custom dashboards you can create increases from one, to 25 dashboards.

12. Do you need multiple CAN-SPAM footer addresses?

CAN-SPAM legal requirements mean you have to include your office address in the footer of every marketing email that you send to your contacts. However, what happens if you have multiple offices worldwide, and you want to decide which office to display in each email? The functionality to decide between multiple office locations is only available for Enterprise users

13. How many different lists of contacts do you need to create?

In HubSpot, you can create lists of contacts based on literally any information you have on them. From simply a list of contacts based in the United Kingdom, through to contacts who have clicked on certain emails, viewed certain webpages, completed certain forms within specific time frames – the possibilities are endless.

However, it’s easy to get carried away building lists. Within the HubSpot Professional tool you can create up to 1,000, whilst the Enterprise tool gives you an extra 500 to play with on top of that. We think you’ll do well to reach that number of lists that you use everyday!

14. How many subdomains do you need to connect?

This is a key difference to whether or not you need to purchase the HubSpot Professional or Enterprise tool. If you are using the Professional tool, you can host content on one subdomain per content tool, however the Enterprise tool gives you the ability to host content on multiple subdomains.

15. How many workflows do you need to create?

The workflow tool in HubSpot is an absolute beast, allowing you to put some amazing automation behind lead nurturing and lead management. Although we wouldn’t expect you to fill these straight away, the HubSpot Professional tool has a limit of 300 workflows, whereas the Enterprise tool lets you build up to 500.

16. Do you need to create a high volume of attribution reports?

One key challenge for marketing teams is to be able to show which marketing channels are best at generating leads and customers. Whilst this information is incredibly important, there is also an appreciation that just because a lead originated from a certain source, for example LinkedIn, there are then potentially lots more touch points and influences that turn that lead into a customer. 

HubSpot allows you to build reports based on these interactions. If you are a Professional user, you can create 2 attribution models, whilst Enterprise users can create up to 12.

17. How many different teams will you have using the tool?

In a previous question, we mentioned how as your business grows, you’ll likely have different teams in different regions using the HubSpot tool. Within the Enterprise tool, you can partition content to specific teams. But you need to set up these teams in the first place.

Within the HubSpot Professional tool, you can create up to 25 specific teams, whilst Enterprise users can create up to 200 teams in the tool.

18. How many custom reports do you need to create?

Last but not least – how many custom reports do you need to create? With the sheer about of data and information in HubSpot, there’s an endless about of different things you can report on. Using the Professional tool, you can create up to 20 custom marketing reports, whilst the Enterprise tool gives you 10x the amount at 500.