Top Rated Site of the Week:

Good idea, BAD experience

I just spoke with one of the employees from this company who was trying to convince me to sign with their company to improve website performance and inbound marketing leads for our company. I had read a review elsewhere that termed these salesmen as "oiled snakes". I think they were right on the head.

The offer Hubspot provided was $250/mo for access to their 24 integrated tools that SHOULD help improve my site's score and performance in search engine results and qualified leads. They would also provide 10 group learning sessions and 9 one half hour consultations. Aside from that, it would be up to me to improve our site by using their dashboard of tools. Oh, yeah, and that is an additional $500 up front.

I explained to the representative, Chris, that my concern was both the cost of the product as well as the lack of guarantee for any performance improvements. If I spent an hour a day (TWICE his recommended time), and saw no results, would I be entitled to a refund? No. Would I have any options to get out of my 12 month contract early? No. Would I have any course of action? No.

On Friday, Chris also told me they had a 99% customer retention rate. On Monday, their retention rate was 98%. I asked him what duration of time this information was based on. Oh, you guessed it, 12 months. The same term as the contract agreement. Ironic? I think not.

Finally, after I had repeatedly expressed my concern for spending nearly $4,000 over the next year with their company without any course of action should I get little or no results, he told me that I clearly wasn't ready to improve our site (or company's!) performance and rudely exited the conversation. This is, by the way, after he asked me to tell him what I wanted in order to become a client. Aren't they the ones trying to sell me something?? Why would I make him offers on selling me something?

My advice, AVOID HUBSPOT! The reviewer who said they were oiled snakes were right on. I'd rather by a car from a used car salesman...

HubSpot software not useable

I've been trying to get going with HubSpot with their business owner product, which was actually $750 to start and $250 per month. I was told that they were giving me a free $250 value in the form of 1/2 hours with a blogging consultant. So they sold me the undercoating to begin with. Worse, the free blog expert they charged me for canceled on me which I found out after waiting on hold for him for 15 minutes.

The reason - I hadn't heard the full initial call yet.

The initial tele-conference actually uses Java Applets, a technology well abandoned at least 5 years ago with good reason - I was late getting into the session because I was trying to get this application to load. The gist of the phone call was nothing but an upselling scam call in the name of getting started.

Getting started with HubSpot is not possible unless you let them upsell you services. The application amounts to a "do it yourself" guide to improving your SEO score but was sold as and SEO solution.

Trying to follow the "getting started" guide is a lesson in frustration. The information is half baked or wrong. Following the instruction you find that the application doesn't do what the instructions say it will do.

It seems to be a complete ripoff to me. $3,500 dollars for a do it yourself guide that is itself, mis-guided doesn't work for me. I'm not a sucker and so didn't fall for the upselling. I can't say if I spent another $360/month for 10 hours of consulting time if they could actually help out my on-line presence. I do know that they make it impossible even for a software engineer to work with their website - I can't call it a piece of software as that would dirty the term.

The over all feel of HubSpot website you get access to for $3,500 but not the ability to actually use, is one put together with bubble gum and ASP with a strong flavor of Bling. Much of stinks of a Microsoft tools from waiting for back end servers to do something and never completing to needing to close your browser, clear your cookies and start over again.

I have 5 open tickets with support, most ending with call in, which I'm not available to do during normal business hours. You really can't help yourself as they don't have any useful or complete "How tos" on site!

Over all, this has been one of the worse software experiences of my life and the most expensive. What is upside down, I do not know.

I have found lots of good free sites that do more then HubSpot as I've looked for answers to get the HubSpot site to work for me.

Hubspot saved my business

I am a business owner that was struggling to generate leads in a down economy. We decided to embrace web marketing, but couldn't find a complete system that allowed us to have complete control of our site (CMS), blog, help with SEO, email, lead capture, analytics, etc. all in one place. We found Hubspot and everything changed for us. It was like we finally had control of our web destiny.

Now through our inbound marketing efforts with Hubspot, we've managed to build one of the most successful swimming pool websites in the world.

Needless to say, we love Hubspot because of the impact it's had on our business and therefore our families.

Jason Hughes

Yikes lose business and pay for this privledge

I hired Hubspot a week and a half ago and so far my emails have bounced and my website is down. I have lost a lot of business as a result, not to mention the hassles we have had with our customer communications.

This has not been a smooth transition at all.

Hubspot.com is not worth the money

Hubspot bombards Twitter, Facebook and blogs with basic writings about SEO. They make it seem like they have something to sell. From my actual experience with the company you get all the information you need from their articles and videos. Don't waste your money as we did. As others have said - Hubspot is arrogant and rude. They trick small business owners into signing up, capitalizing on people's lack of knowledge in SEO concepts. Hubspot.com doesn't care about the end user. They only care about their profits. You can see that if you follow @mvolpe @bhalligan on twitter.

Hubspot is Total Waste

If you care about your rankings in Bing but not Google, if you care about your keyword search volume in Bing but not Google, want the worst CMS on the market, want a horrible price, and want to be suckered into paying for what you can largely get for free elsewhere, Hubspot is for you. The only people promoting Hubspot are the people that don't know any better... and BTW Halligan and Shah, the Hubspot founders, are not INTERNET MARKETERS. Their ideas are taken directly from the ideas of others.

NOT worth the money

I have used hubspot for over a year and it is NOT worth the $250 per month. I have another website through bigcommerce.com and it has even better SEO and only costs $25/month. I called hubspot to try to understand why it costs so much when I see no benefit and they were extremely rude and condescending on the phone. Hubspot is a total rip off.

Great product, but pricey

We tried Hubspot at one of my past jobs. It was a great product and Hubspot provides excellent training on inbound marketing such as IMU. The only thing is that if you want/need all the bells and whistles, you are going to pay for it. We looked around at some other comparable options and ended up trying Rhino SEO. Makes everything quick and easy and is much easier on the wallet.

Premium Service That Delivers

Hubspot is a premium service for the serious marketer business owners. I was able to see how Hubspot service works through the company that I work with. It's one of the tools we used for our campaign and I can say that it's price is worth it. You get reports and suggestions on what needs to be done to make your site SEO optimized. The product itself is very easy to use, and they have a very prompt customer service. And it's concept of inbound marketing proves to be useful and effective. One good thing about their service is you actually get to use their website grader for free that will allow you to personally evaluate your site.

Worth checking out!

I've been using HubSpot for over a year now and I'm very satisfied with all the different tools it offers. Hubspot owner has helped my amount of visits to my site boom in less than a month.

The HubSpot Search Engine Optimization tool is one of the most effective SEO tools I've encountered and the marketing analyzer is also very helpful for me, as I can easily see where my visitors are from and how they got to my site.

It's a bit pricey but I've already earned my money back by the increase in visitors and sales. They also feature a large helpdesk that works well (they gave me a lot of extra information and detailed answers).