HubSpot vs Salesforce: The Real Decision for a 60 to 200 Person Australian Business

At 60 to 200 people, HubSpot and Salesforce will both do the job. That is the part the comparison articles get wrong: they argue features, when the feature gap at your size closed years ago.

What separates them for an Australian business is duller and much more expensive to get wrong. What it costs per seat in AUD once you have grown into it, and whether the people who implement it are awake when you are.

We are a HubSpot Diamond Partner, so read everything below knowing where our bread is buttered. We have also inherited enough Salesforce portals to know when it is the right answer.

Start with the number that grows: cost per seat

Both platforms are cloud software billed per user per month, which means the decision you are making today is priced against the headcount you will have in two years.

These are the figures this article has carried, and they are a shape rather than a quote: HubSpot Sales Hub Starter around $75 AUD a month, Professional around $1,150 AUD a month, and enterprise level plans around $4,610 AUD a month, on top of a free tier that gives an unlimited number of users a basic set of sales, marketing and service tools. Salesforce offers four licensing options, from roughly $35 AUD to $416 AUD per user per month, plus a limited free trial with limited support behind it.

Get a current quote for both before you take any of those numbers to a board meeting. Both vendors have repriced more than once, and HubSpot now sells Sales Hub by the seat with different seat types, so a single per portal figure tells you very little at 120 people. Do the arithmetic yourself: seats today, seats in 24 months, multiplied by twelve, in AUD.

Two Australian details that change the answer. First, GST. It is 10 per cent, and an overseas supplier of digital services generally will not charge it once you have given them your ABN and confirmed you are registered for GST, so a quote from an offshore vendor and a quote from a local tool are not directly comparable until you have checked which figures include it. Worth five minutes with your accountant before you build the comparison.

Second, currency. A US dollar list price converted at today's rate is a forecast dressed as a budget. Ask whether your agreement is denominated in AUD or USD, because if it is USD then every exchange rate move turns up on your renewal and stays there.

And the number that actually decides it is the one neither vendor quotes: implementation, plus the person who runs the thing afterwards. A Salesforce build at this size usually assumes a dedicated administrator, either trained internally or hired. That is a salary, every year, on top of the licences. HubSpot at the same size often gets run by an operations manager with the platform as part of their job. Both are legitimate. Only one of them is in the pricing table.

The support question is really a timezone question

On paper, support is close to a tie.

Paid HubSpot customers get 24/7 email and phone support, a basic product query gets an answer inside 24 hours whether you are paying or not, and every customer gets the community, the how-to articles and HubSpot Academy certifications at no cost, which takes a real bite out of what it costs to onboard a new starter. Salesforce gives every customer a standard package with customer success communities and around two day responses to general queries, and its premium tier adds 24/7 phone support with one hour responses on critical issues.

In practice, when a workflow fires on the wrong 4,000 contacts at 9am on a Tuesday, you are not ringing the vendor. You are ringing whoever built it.

Which makes the real question one no comparison table asks: where does your implementation partner sit, and what hours do they keep? A team you can get on a call in AEST before your morning standup is a different experience to a delivery team eight or more hours behind you, however good their engineers are. HubSpot's partner network in Australia is deep enough that local is easy to find. Salesforce work at this end of the market is often delivered by a team that is not local at all, and that is a question to ask directly rather than assume.

We have an obvious interest in you weighing this heavily, and we hold 17 HubSpot Impact Awards on the back of doing it. Weigh it anyway, and ask the same question of every Salesforce partner on your shortlist. If you are working through that process, we wrote up finding the right HubSpot onboarding partner separately.

If you are APRA regulated, add a step

For readers in banking, insurance or superannuation, this is more than a software choice. APRA's CPS 230 holds an APRA regulated entity responsible for managing the operational risk that arrives with its material service providers: assessing them before you sign, keeping a register of them, and having a plan for what happens if the service fails or you need to exit it. A CRM holding your customer records can fall inside that definition.

What that means for the evaluation is that the questions procurement usually asks after the contract is signed need answering during the shortlist. Where the data is hosted, what an exit actually looks like, what you get out and in what format, and who at your end owns the relationship. The standard is on the APRA website and it is worth reading before you build the shortlist.

Where Salesforce genuinely wins

Depth of customisation, and it is not a small win. You can reshape menus, add custom tabs for things like tasks, sales groups and files, and build deal stages that match a genuinely unusual sales process instead of bending the process to fit the tool. Its reporting goes as far as you are willing to configure it, and it has always handled very large volumes of customer data well. On premium plans it adds predictive scoring that estimates which channels a lead is likely to engage with, and its AppExchange lists over 3,400 free and paid apps.

It also sells its capability as separate clouds, Sales Cloud, Marketing Cloud and Service Cloud among them, and a licence buys access to one of them. Worth knowing at budget time, because the marketing side is a separate purchase with its own implementation behind it.

If your sales process has real complexity in it, entitlements, configure-price-quote rules, multi-entity structures, that depth is worth paying for.

The honest cost is the same sentence every time: someone has to own it. Salesforce rewards a business with a dedicated administrator and punishes one without. If you cannot name the person, you are buying capability you will not use.

Where HubSpot genuinely wins

Usability, and the fact that everything reads from the same contact record. Marketing, sales, service and content all sit against one database, so a form fill, an email open, a call log and a deal stage change all appear on the same timeline with no integration in between. G2 users have rated HubSpot 8.6 against Salesforce's 7.8 on that experience, and those scores move, so check the live figure.

Pipelines come preconfigured and are yours to edit. The free tier allows one pipeline per business and paid plans allow several, reporting is available on free and paid, and the paid tiers add custom reports. The App Marketplace carries over 500 free and paid apps, including Slack, Gmail and Mailchimp, and both platforms handle multiple currencies, so a growing business selling into New Zealand and Singapore is fine on either.

The trade is a lower ceiling. There will come a point where a HubSpot workflow cannot express the rule your sales director wants, and you will either simplify the rule or write code. Most businesses at this size hit that wall later than they expect, and some never do.

Reporting, which is where most CRM projects are judged

Worth separating out, because reporting is the thing your managing director will actually look at.

HubSpot gives you dashboards as standard. The free tier includes preconfigured reports for sales pipelines and sales activity, and paid tiers add custom reports built on the same data your marketing and service teams use, which is why attribution questions are answerable without an export.

Salesforce will report on anything, and that is both the strength and the catch. Its custom reporting is deeper than HubSpot's and it copes with very large data volumes, and getting there takes configuration time and someone who has done it before. Plenty of Salesforce portals we have looked inside carry hundreds of reports and a handful anyone opens.

On connections, both are well served. Salesforce's AppExchange is larger, HubSpot's App Marketplace covers what most businesses at this size run, and the integration that matters most is usually the one to your finance system, so price that one specifically instead of counting apps in a directory.

How we would actually decide

1. Do you already employ a CRM administrator? If yes and they know Salesforce, that is a genuine reason to stay put. Their knowledge is worth more than any feature on either list.
2. Who owns the top of the pipeline? If marketing generates most of your leads, one system holding both marketing and sales saves you an integration you would otherwise maintain forever.
3. How unusual is your sales process, honestly? Most 60 to 200 person businesses think theirs is unique and have two motions and a quoting quirk. Some genuinely are complicated. Map it before you shortlist, because the answer decides this.
4. What is the three year AUD total? Licences, implementation, the admin salary, and the integration work. Then compare. The gap is usually not where the vendor pages suggest.

Our position, plainly: for most Australian businesses between 60 and 200 people, HubSpot gets you further for less, because the cost of running it is lower and the people who run it are already in your building. Salesforce earns its price when the process is genuinely complex and you have someone to own it. There is a version of this comparison for smaller teams too, if you are earlier than that: the small business version of this same comparison.

Before you book any vendor demos, try this. Work out what your current CRM costs per closed deal, all in, including the hours your team spends keeping it tidy. If nobody in the business can produce that number, the platform is not your first problem.

This is how NBH builds RevOps and HubSpot systems, on HubSpot and alongside Salesforce.