| Functionality | 5 <p><span style="background-color: transparent; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">For small ecommerce businesses, Flodesk’s features are just right. The team has clearly chosen to focus on certain things and do them well.</span></p><p><span style="background-color: transparent; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">We are concerned that custom fields can only take values of ‘string’ data type, so you can’t validate entries to, say, date or location type fields. Nor can you filter / segment according to the value of custom fields.</span></p><p><span style="background-color: transparent; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">As your needs grow and you want A/B testing, custom dashboards etc, you may outgrow the platform but it is solid for what it is.</span></p> | 10 <p>HubSpot offers all functionality that most companies will need, including functionality required by the largest/ most sophisticated companies. Has all the marketing functionality in one place - emails, SMS, Whatsapp, ads, website, landing pages, socials etc.</p><p><br></p><p>Ability to create highly sophisticated automation workflows across the entire customer lifecycle & create very granular segments - allows you to create hyper personalised outreach at the exact right moment in time.</p> |
| Ease of Use | 10 <p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent;">Flodesk is one of the user-friendly email marketing platforms we have tested. With a simple interface and just 6 clearly labeled tabs, it's super easy to navigate between designing emails, creating forms and building out workflows. We particularly like its workflow builder, which makes it straightforward even for complete beginners to build an email series without guidance.</span></p> | 5 <p>HubSpot is so packed with features and customisation options that it will take an average SMB employee a few days to learn how to navigate the platform.</p><p><br></p><p>For example, to create a email segment/ , there are literally hundreds of filters you can choose from, which can feel rather overwhelming. And even if you only plan on using Marketing Hub, you have access to other products in the suite - operations/ sales/ content etc, which can feel excessive.</p><p><br></p><p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">But once you're past the initial learning curve, most key processes are generally quite intuitive.</span></p> |
| Look and feel | 9 <p>Flodesk offers a delightfully pleasant, modern, uncluttered interface that is straightforward to navigate. In addition, page load times were incredibly fast.</p> | 5 <p>We find HubSpot's interface to be tired and overwhelming compared to the newer MAPs on the market. There is often an overwhelming amount of actions you can take on a single screen, which makes it difficult to locate key information at times.</p> |
| Customisability | 4 <p>There's a classic trade-off between ease of set-up and customisability. No surprises that there is little to customise with Flodesk. That should not be an issue for small businesses looking to grow via email automation. The time may come when you wish to have more control over custom dashboards and analytics but until then we are not concerned.</p> | 9 <p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Hubspot allows you to create very sophisticated & hyper personalised marketing automation workflows with conditional logic, branching, triggers and connection to third party platforms. You're also able to segment based on any thing your heart desires, and you can even create custom events with code.</span></p><p><br></p><p>On top of this, you can customise most things client facing. There's an extremely sophisticated editor and personalisation options, especially with its website builder. You can always bring custom code for the ultimate style customisation.Custom fields are also supported.</p><p><br></p><p>Finally, there's the ability to create rather advanced custom reports and dashboards.</p> |
| Ease of Setup | 10 <p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">We loved how quickly we could self-serve to create an account with very few clicks (via a Google account) and start creating emails, forms and workflows. Thanks to the 'forever free' tier, there is also no need to enter payment card details to access full functionality for the first 30 days.</span></p> | 2 <p>HubSpot Marketing Hub offers a self-serve free trial, but basic setup takes more than an hour to complete. Given that HubSpot is a relatively complex ecosystem of marketing and sales functions, it takes a while to navigate through the various customisation and segmentation options. We'd also expect that fully customising HubSpot would take extensive research or speaking to the customer support team.</p> |
| Customer Support | 8 <p>There is no live-chat functionality but our email query was helpfully answered in just 8 minutes. In addition the knowledge base of 'how to' articles is high-quality and easily searchable.</p> | 6 <p>HubSpot's support team responds via live chat/ email in less than 3 minutes, 24/7.</p><p><br></p><p>That said, you don't get access to their phone/ video support, unless you pay for Professional/ Enterprise plans, and now if you're signed up to their discounted startup plan. We also find their support sometimes frustratingly bureaucratic - you can only speak with the assigned representative in your territory.</p> |
| Integratability | 3 <p>Direct integration is supported only for Instagram and Shopify. The Zapier store has a number of other integrations which may be useful and depending on your needs, you may have to create your own private connection via the Flodesk API.</p> | 10 <p>HubSpot offers native integrations with the overwhelming majority of 3rd part products a company will want to connect your MAP with, plus an ever-growing marketplace of more than 350 free and paid-for apps. The chances are that if you need a particular integration and HubSpot don't have it, it will unlikely be provided by a competitive product.</p> |
| Ease of Migration | 9 <p>In testing we could easily export the mailing list, a specific segment, and analytics (such as daily opt-in and visitor activity) to CSV without needing tech support.</p> | 8 <p>HubSpot allows users to export key data data via self-serve. Export of most other data are also available via API or on request.</p> |
