CRM & Email Automation
Social Media Automation
SEO Automation
Analytics Tracking
Content Marketing Automation
Reputation management
Review Management
Content Management System
Hosting
Landing Page Builder
SeoSamba and Hubspot are both built to help businesses manage leads and activities driving sales. In this article, We evaluated not only the customer relationship management (CRM) side of the product, we also looked into the all-around capabilities and potential of each solution. Please note that all the content and statements are kept objective.
HubSpot allows for field merging into email communications with custom email template creation and forms creation.
HubSpot uses its proprietary contacts database to let users build dynamic email content and customized call to actions with links to questionnaires, customized landing pages or webinars.
The Contacts database can be segmented to manage leads and recreate a CRM environment for website operations, helping to nurture leads throughout a streamlined online presales process.
In terms of email design, HubSpot relies on the same engine used for Landing Pages, including the A/B testing module. Basic analytics are integrated into the HubSpot email platform to get feedback on user behavior, clickthrus, and conversion rates.
HubSpot acts as a standalone online CRM solution for anyone with basic to intermediate needs. It also provides several plugins to integrate various CRM solutions within its own platforms such as SalesForce, BaseCRM or Pipedrive.
Hubspot CRM Pro’s & Con’s
Pros:
Cons:
SeoSamba's SeoToaster integrates natively SMS and action emails easily customizable in both CMS and Ecommerce versions.
Accessible and customizable directly from the user's website, SeoToaster's action emails are programmed to be sent when a set of specific conditions are met, either using any of the default system mail triggers or creating custom ones.
Website operators can also use the same system to trigger automatic SMS directly to any customer's phone upon specific events like shipping or confirming a tracking number.
SeoSamba integrates with Constant Contact, thereby ensuring higher email deliverability rates and access to additional features from the U.S leader in email marketing technology.
Regarding CRM, SeoSamba relies on Salesforce software for the integration of acquired leads, letting users leverage thousands of applications to automate online marketing tailored to users' specific needs
HubSpot's all-in-one marketing solution comes with pros (design, process) and cons (limited analytics and email marketing features), especially with few turnkey online store integration options.
SeoSamba went the open source way with free e-commerce integration out of the box while relying on better and overall cheaper solutions offered by online marketing leaders like ConstantContact or Salesforce.
When comparing HubSpot's features for pricing based on the number of contacts as opposed to SeoSamba's possibilities for a flat monthly fee regardless of the number of contacts, the winning hand is clearly dealt with by the latter.
* All trademarks mentioned herein belong to their respective owners.
HubSpot integrates marketing analytics, CRM and social media tools to allow for interaction with social networks and analytics.
HubSpot has provided a major overhaul with Social Inbox, an all-in-one social media suite within the HubSpot software. Allowing for drafting, scheduling, and monitoring.
Social Inbox works online with HubSpot Contacts databases to provide in-depth information about social profiles and user tracking, with an elegant interface to publish social posts from templates.
With the addition of an internal search engine, Chrome Extension, and mobile app for round-the-clock social monitoring, Social Inbox is so user-friendly that's it's a pity it isn't available as a standalone social media tool.
SeoSamba's online marketing platform allows for multi-sites broadcasting across social channels including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google My Business business profile pages. All social media tools are integrated with the blog, news, Press Release as well as reputation management platform for one-click multichannel publishing.
SeoSamba integrates a full multi-site social calendar, including multiple time-saving functions. You can schedule posts for repeat publishing (promos, events, running ads, holiday greetings...), set multiple publishing times to cover all time zones, copy social posts in one click, curate handpicked new sources directly to your social accounts, and much more.
You can share social media post templates, images and collaborate with a consolidated brand social media calendar accessible by team members or franchisees alike, on the web or via the companion SeoSamba mobile app.
In addition, SeoToaster inline CMS offers free, quick and efficient social network broadcast tools to send posts across social channels, right from your website.
Finally, SeoSamba provides in-depth insight regarding all social activities.
SeoSamba Social Marketing app is available for free download in the Apple store and in Google Play, allows current SeoSamba subscribers to create, schedule and post updates to their connected Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and Google My Business pages anytime, from anywhere! Even customers who manage multiple pages can take advantage of this new app without any limitations on the number of accounts you’re allowed to post to at one time. After the app has been downloaded to your mobile device. The social app also syncs with your SeoSamba Marketing OS account and you can track posts and manage your social calendar directly from your smartphone.
HubSpot's all-in-one Social Inbox provides solid tools for in-depth management of social channels. SeoSamba provides the same core features with added e-commerce and multi-sites possibilities. No matter what size your business is, SeoSamba social marketing tool can substantially enhance reach and engagement. Combines with SeoSamba marketing software, your marketing and sales team will have all they need at their finger tips. While larger and competitive sites will logically require a tighter custom integration, faster and cheaper in an open-source environment like SeoSamba's, Hubspot did a good job in social media integration and will fit the bill for most one-man operations and small businesses - However, when looking for a robust software to support your marketing campaigns' overload, cost effectiveness also comes to play.
Hubspot started out by providing extensive SEO information and keyword research tools to help website owners get a grip on a very complicated subject and process.
In time, Hubspot has realized that integrating other software - e.g. competitor SeoMoz - and slapping their brand on it was a better course of action.
Over time, the SEO recommendation tools have been integrated within the various parts of their online suite, from Landing Pages and Blog creation to CRM and email marketing.
Notwithstanding the TMI syndrome (Too Much Information) experienced by many new users of their platform, search engine optimization tools in Hubspot provide helpful analysis and recommendations, as well as results tracking.
Unfortunately, the gap between recommendation and results tracking is a hard one to fill, as the cumbersome SEO implementation process is left to website owners who ironically chose Hubspot for ease-of-use and automated features.
Yes, Hubspot will help to improve search engine rankings for poorly-performing websites and new domains. However, past this initial bang, any improvement will require huge amounts of work and inflating expenses as you must always keep in mind that with Hubspot more traffic and contacts means increasing costs as well.
As the names suggest, SeoSamba leverages the only CMS that integrates SEO and web marketing automation technology in full compliance with the industry’s best practices.
While SEO came as an afterthought throughout HubSpot's development history, SeoSamba has created its own content management system SeoToaster to integrate search engine optimization natively.
On the frontend side, SeoToaster boasts the most search engine optimization tools found in any existing CMS, with dedicated interfaces to manage Automatic Deeplinks, 301 redirects, Robots files, Link Sculpting and Content Silos.
On the backend side, SeoSamba's online marketing platform SeoSamba Marketing Operating System can automatize thousands of SEO-related tasks, including multi-sites SEO management, e-commerce dynamic SEO and in-depth Google Webmaster Tools (WMT) integration.
SeoSamba is built around Search Engine Optimization, with an algorithm aiming to drive organic traction without you having to invest thousands of dollars on your SEO team or hire an agency.
If you are looking for practical SEO guidance, common-sense free practices then SeoSamba is the way to go. With a professional SEO team, you can’t really go wrong.
With efficient content creation features, HubSpot fits the bill for quality-heavy content sites whose reputation is strong enough or has enough resources to deal with - and pay for - organic SEO strategies.
However, for small business owners who want to dominate their corner of the market on search engines, but rather spend their valuable time on more intelligent tasks, SeoSamba is the logical choice.
SeoSamba also supports automated search engine optimization for websites built on Wordpress. You are one plugin installation away from setting a new benchmark to your SEO practices.
Allowing for multi-sites automated optimization and featuring a blog system able to distribute content over all channels with just one click, SeoSamba's tightly integrated automated SEO software is a clear winner in this area.
* All trademarks mentioned herein belong to their respective owners.
HubSpot provides many useful search engine optimization with basic recommendations but falls short on implementation, leaving business owners in charge of ongoing technical SEO and analytics monitoring.
HubSpot includes various helpful tools for SEO analytics, including Keyword Research, Rank Tracking, and Competitive Research.
Created with self-service in mind, Hubspot’s analytics remain simplistic by choice, lacking the depth of information needed in many areas to properly analyze strong variations in traffic and conversions.
Of course, for any starting entrepreneur with limited knowledge of online traffic essentials and SEO analysis, HubSpot will give enough information for basic fine-tuning or avoiding the biggest pitfalls. Unfortunately, it hardly goes any further, especially with so many - and often free of charge - plug-and-play analysis tools on the market.
The fact that the website HubSpot.com actually uses Google Analytics for its corporate website speaks lengths about its own inherent inability to cover the whole spectrum of effective data analysis.
SeoSamba integrates the best traffic and SEO analytics technology available to leave webmasters in charge of choosing what's best for them.
SeoSamba’s real-time analytics system seamlessly deploys your favorite web analytics package including Google Analytics and Piwik, by far the most advanced tools available.
Therefore, SeoSamba users benefit from any new feature developed by web analytics specialists, that can be customized to fit your specific needs.
On the backend, Google Analytics, Piwik and others offer APIs, development guides and services unmatched by their HubSpot proprietary counterpart as well as with in-depth front-end customization features.
Finally, in this area as in others, SeoSamba provides multi-sites capabilities allowing users to get traffic and SEO analytics for all their online properties at once, including search engine reports.
While HubSpot has boosted its traffic analysis capacities over the years, it still remains no match for analytics giants such as Google or Piwik.
Analytics is a crucial part of the marketing process, you might have the best marketing team and still yet get a hard time tracking you website and campaign performance.
Even compared to the rest of the Hubspot suite, we can consider it a pretty poor feature for the price that is asked of users. Hubspot has pretty much zero edge over its competition.
Combining easy integration - at no extra charge - with unlimited customization and native multi-sites capabilities, SeoSamba offers much more elaborated data analysis that can be customized to match each specific situation, making it the clear winner in this area.
* All trademarks mentioned herein belong to their respective owners.
Hubspot started out by making its blog platform the main channel for inbound marketing and lead generation.
Loaded with features for blog creation and advice for content optimization, Hubspot is known to generate TMI syndrome (Too Much Information) for many users as the software provides countless SEO tips but leaves implementation to website owners.
Hubspot will help unsavvy users get started with quick content development on their site, but the lack of effective automatic optimization tools will merely switch users' time and efforts from design to SEO to achieve meaningful results.
SeoSamba distributes optimized blogs and news posts automatically to websites, social networks accounts, Google My Business profiles and Press Releases networks in a single click.
Content is used by brands to set themselves apart from the competition and stand-out in a crowded digital age. In the content marketing world, distribution is just as crucial as content creation.
Best of all, SeoSamba let you distribute blogs posts to any number and combination of blogs powered by either WordPress or SeoToaster from a central location.
WordPress is a well known blog platform, so we won’t go into more details there, but check out our Enterprise WordPress SEO plugin for more information.
SeoToaster is also an Open Source CMS and blogging platform. It provides all the benefits of classic blog platforms plus automatic optimization to match Google News and Yahoo News' indexing requirements, and full-blown PR distribution network when hooked to SeoSamba's SEO PR distribution services.
You can also very easily password protect blog posts, just like any other page or product listing. You don't have to log into Seotoaster to moderate écomments, instead, you receive a comment moderation request via email, and publish or delete comments in one click.
In addition, you can transform any page of your site into a blog post, or a hybrid page, and because your blog lives on the same domain than the rest of your website, you reap all the blog writing SEO benefits onto your own domains.
SeoToaster also integrates a full blown Shopping Cart and Customer Relationship Management system.
HubSpot’s value proposition is delivering a blog management software integrating lead nurturing and website traffic tools available elsewhere for less money.
Moreover - and this might become a serious blocking point for ambitious business owners - that actual optimization is up to users regardless of their expertise level, often driving up content creation costs exponentially.
Free and open-source, SeoToaster's news and blog system provide a user-friendly interface allowing for extensive customization. Additionally, SeoSamba's marketing platform performs automatically countless optimization tasks before distributing content to all relevant channels and across any number of websites with one single action.
* All trademarks mentioned herein belong to their respective owners.
Reviews have become a valuable source of information for consumers during the buying process, as well as for the business owner to gain insight and feedback from their customers.
The SeoSamba reputation management tool is built to allow marketers to:
Keeping track of reviews across all business encounters, getting more data about the customer experience and leveraging it to upgrade the service, share the top reviews instantly with their community; these are all valid use cases for a reputation management tool like the one blended with the SeoSamba Marketing OS.
On the flip side, Hubspot doesn't offer any sort of reputation management tool. Recommending their user to pay extra for a third-party software and integrate it.
Scalability is always a huge factor in the marketing world. As your business expands, you want a solution that will back up the traction load. When your database has millions of leads, you want to ensure that they are all being leveraged, with no limitations, tens of thousands in extra-contact fees or compromised analytics.
SeoSamba doesn’t claim to be the best marketing automation tool but, to offer marketers a solution that is:
Above and beyond multi-site situations where HubSpot is simply not competitive, we believe that SeoSamba’s execution-based approach delivers the most value, especially to small businesses - as they don’t have to pay for features they don’t end up using anyway.
In essence, HubSpot offers a CMS & a blog with a few pre-built marketing metrics. Hubspot offers no automation that isn’t found in other, cheaper leading CRM’s & analytics packages, and no competitive advantage when it comes to eyeballs acquisition from organic search results. The integration plays nicely its part when it comes to social media monitoring but this looks rather thin as a benefit.
SeoSamba’s focus on traffic & lead generation, content creation, optimized information distribution, and link building activities, is result-oriented. As a result, time-restrained small business managers will get a much bigger bang for their buck with SeoSamba rather than HubSpot. This difference is even larger when taking into consideration both tools’ price-points.
In addition, SeoSamba’s open-source and standard component, hub & spoke architecture & focus on multi-site management makes it a lot safer & more scalable long-term strategy.
* All trademarks mentioned herein belong to their respective owners.
While Hubspot* has not coined the term “inbound marketing”, it has certainly contributed to popularizing one of the buzz words of 2012.
But what technology & services exactly do you find behind the catch-all concept key-phrase when using Hubspot suite of software? What are the important benefits you can expect from it, and what are the ones you should not count on? Is it worth the investment when compared to alternative marketing solutions such as SeoSamba?
Recently upgraded, HubSpots's all-in-one marketing solution is targeting mid-size online businesses with a deep integration approach that ties all the tools together. HubSpot’s COS (Content Optimization System) offers an integrated blog, website, and landing page system out-of-the-box with a focus on Contacts profiling.
HubSpot segments its offer around 9 concepts: Blogging; SEO; Social Media; CTA optimization; Landing Pages; Lead Management; Email; Marketing Automation & Closed Loop Analytics.
In this in-depth comparative reviews, we’ll be looking more precisely at the features supporting these concepts in detail, and then look at Hubspot pricing to access them.
* All trademarks mentioned herein belong to their respective owners.
SeoSamba invented the first Search Engine Optimization platform back in 2008, since then a number of software providers have followed to offer SEO services in the cloud with a market focus on Enterprise clients.
However, as of 2020, SEO Samba is still the only SEO platform provider with more emphasis on execution – as opposed to benchmarking & recommending. This is especially suitable for multi-sites owners and franchisors. It’s pricing also makes it very accessible to small businesses.
SeoSamba’s founding concept is to flawlessly execute SEO’s best practices - on top of auditing, recommending and reporting - to build, and market any number of websites with superior search engine organic rankings.
The vision behind the technological approach is simply not to re-invent the wheel, with a focus on developing new functionalities while integrating the best of breed technologies once they become commodities.
SeoSamba’s 'hub & spokes" framework is composed of SeoSamba Marketing Operating System online marketing platform, SeoToaster CMS & SeoToaster E-commerce V3 goes much further with many valuable - yet free to use - exclusive features.
In this report we look at the merits of each solution, using a feature grid and associated weights, based on our professional marketers & technologists’ opinion*.
* We do not claim to be unbiased, but we try to be as fair as possible to our friends at HubSpot.
Features |
Weight |
HubSpot |
SeoSamba |
|
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) |
15 |
4 |
11 |
|
Multi-sites capabilities |
10 |
0 |
10 |
|
Content Management System (CMS) |
10 |
2 |
8 |
|
Hosting |
2 |
1 |
1 |
|
Blogging |
8 |
3 |
5 |
|
Landing Pages |
5 |
3 |
2 |
|
Email Marketing |
10 |
4 |
6 |
|
Lead Management |
5 |
3 |
2 |
|
Analytics |
5 |
3 |
2 |
|
Social Media Tools |
10 |
5 |
5 |
|
Marketplace |
5 |
3 |
2 |
|
Pricing |
15 |
5 |
10 |
TOTAL |
100 |
36 |
64 |
Scalability is always a huge factor in the marketing world. As your business expands, you want a solution that will back up the traction load. When your database has millions of leads, you want to ensure that they are all being leveraged, with no limitations, tens of thousands in extra-contact fees or compromised analytics.
Our decision: SeoSamba wins by a reasonable marginAbove and beyond multi-site situations where HubSpot is simply not competitive, we believe that SeoSamba’s execution-based approach delivers the most value, especially to small businesses - as they don’t have to pay for features they don’t end up using anyway.
In essence, HubSpot offers a CMS & a blog with a few pre-built marketing metrics. Hubspot offers no automation that isn’t found in other, cheaper leading CRM’s & analytics packages, and no competitive advantage when it comes to eyeballs acquisition from organic search results. The integration plays nicely its part when it comes to social media monitoring but this looks rather thin as a benefit.
SeoSamba’s focus on traffic & lead generation, content creation, optimized information distribution, and link building activities, is result-oriented. As a result, time-restrained small business managers will get a much bigger bang for their buck with SeoSamba rather than HubSpot. This difference is even larger when taking into consideration both tools’ price-points.
In addition, SeoSamba’s open-source and standard component, hub & spoke architecture & focus on multi-site management makes it a lot safer & more scalable long-term strategy.
* All trademarks mentioned herein belong to their respective owners.
Having an appealing, optimized and well-built website is not a necessity but a must nowadays. As your website is how you make the first impression with your potential prospects.
HubSpot does include a CMS, but one that is based on a proprietary system with inherently limited capabilities and support.
HubSpot has released a new interface dubbed "COS" (Content Optimization System) along with some improvements including a "Template Builder" split into two functions: a "Layout Builder" and a "Code Editor" built upon Bootstrap with a drag & drop feature.
While those new features are helpful, users would still need a hand from a developer not to mention the cost of on-going updates and maintenance.
Moreover, it is not advisable nor practical to host and manage a large website on HubSpot COS, notwithstanding increasing costs in the long term due to a pricing policy based on the number of registered contacts.
A proprietary system means that the day you leave Hubspot, you leave your website behind with it. This translates in additional costs because of restricted layout and actions, plugin developments or inability to use true HTML/CSS standards.
SeoSamba offers an inline editing CMS that is free and open-source and anchored into today’s technical standards.
That product is called SeoToaster. It is in fact 3 products in 1. It features a Content Management System, a Shopping Cart, and a CRM all-in-one.
That product can be installed on any suitable server of your choosing or can be operated from SeoSamba’s cloud services.
The CMS and Shopping Cart are both open sources.
As open-source software, SeoToaster lets you build new applications seamlessly within your website using W3C standards such as HTML/CSS, PHP, REST API, and plugin SDK.
The inline edition gives users a fast and reliable way to edit content or add any functionality on the fly with immediate results, including complex e-commerce features such as product listings, forms, quotes, and optimized landing pages.
This translates into lesser costs of development, maintenance, and the ability to migrate your online front-end to any standard content management system.
Should you decide not to use SeoSamba’s premium services, this is a definite big plus for website owners over proprietary systems such as HubSpot.
SeoToaster’s unique benefits:
SeoToaster CMS and HubSpot COS are comparable in terms of benefits for end-users, each with its own merits.
Free and open-source, SeoToaster doubles as a powerful e-commerce solution and a great point of sale system with integrated online quote engines, a Customer Relationship Management system and other useful functions that require additional costs on HubSpot COS.
If you’re looking for an all-around platform that supports not only your online presence but also your marketing and sales efforts - then look nowhere else.
Whether its CMS or E-commerce version, SeoToaster is vastly superior to Hubspot’s CMS from a user interface, capabilities, evolution, and management stand-point.
* All trademarks mentioned herein belong to their respective owners.
HubSpot offers regular hosting which is not suitable for multi-sites online marketing strategies.
HubSpot's hosting solution requires a separate virtual server and marketing platform for each domain, multiplying installation and support costs, while multi-sites integration will generate extra development expenses as it is not provided out-of-the-box.
In other terms, using HubSpot for multi-sites marketing strategies increases implementation costs and long term investment while augmenting the risk of blacklisting with search engines due to duplicated content on the same IP blocks.
Hubspot hosting promises security, reliability, and fast hosting. If you are looking for a way to optimize your budget then Hubspot hosting might make sense since it is a bonus standard feature. However, hosting is the base that sets you up to either a strong website or you’ll have to deal with server errors/ issues later.
Cost-effective "pay as you go" hosting and support
SeoSamba's patent-pending hub and spoke architecture delivers front-end web hosting from the Amazon cloud.
With SeoSamba, your networked websites are hosted on different "class C" IP addresses in order to maximize SEO benefits.
The marketing hub 'SeoSamba Marketing Operating System' lets you optimize, manage and market centrally all your SeoToaster websites while AWS cloud-based hosting ensures full compatibility with search engines requirements and standards.
In addition, you’re free to host your website front-end on your own servers.
HubSpot is a good starting point for professional blogs and small websites however its hosting solutions lack the scalability and flexibility needed to operate wider SEO and marketing strategies as integration and support costs will be exponential due to lack of multi-sites support.
Meanwhile, SeoSamba's patent-pending hub and spoke technology facilitates SEO, social networking and web marketing best practices across any number of websites through a single cloud-based interface.
* All trademarks mentioned herein belong to their respective owners.
HubSpot lets you create landing pages and A/B experiments to test your messaging and increase conversions rates, with a focus on audience-based specific designs.
In terms of landing pages, HubSpot's main advantage resides in its ability to generate pages with drag-and-drop template building abilities and other functions that speed up creation.
Those functions include "personalization tokens" (see above) for pre-filled differentiated content, and "progressive profiling" to present contextual forms, only available in Professional or Enterprise editions, the latter being required to enable A/B testing on landing pages.
The online form builder and smart call to actions will speed up the creation process for landing pages with lead nurturing in mind, but actually optimizing those pages with HubSpot's advisory-only SEO tools will probably require the intervention of a search engine optimization pro.
Moreover, while those tools come handy for most amateur webmasters and content-heavy sites, their limitation to static-only content (blog posts, slide shows...) will require further, extensive integration or 3rd party software to eliminate this important drawback for e-commerce websites.
SeoSamba combines inline edition CMS and automated multi-sites SEO to let you create landing pages optimized on-the-fly according to search engine's everchanging requirements.
Integrating inline content edition and native SEO, SeoToaster produces content optimized for search engines from blog posts to press releases, online quote forms and e-commerce catalogs.
SeoToaster E-commerce actually turns each and every product into a search engine-friendly landing page, including out-of-the-box Microdata format, geolocalization features, and automatic SEO tags.
SeoSamba provides online forms and automatic quotes building tools but relies on Google's Content Experiments and WMT for landing pages testing.
Finally, optimizing landing pages can be accomplished rapidly and safely for any number of websites through SeoSamba's online marketing platform.
HubSpot does present some interesting features to create nice Landing Pages that are both user-friendly and that can be optimized for search engine optimization.
For operators of content-heavy, highly ranked websites (GoogleRank score of 4 or 5), the Hubspot tools will probably help streamline the creation process, especially when multiple editors work on the same site.
However, Hubspot lacks the SEO power that makes content marketing worth its while. While it does help tremendously in creating a lot of content fast, what good is it if this content is lost in the swarming jungle of search engine results? Besides wasting your time, money and energy, we hardly see the point.
By contrast, Hubspot’s competitor SeoSamba was literally born to address SEO execution and automated processes. On the front-end side, SeoToaster CMS covers the vast majority of SEO challenges by automatically taking care of optimization while website owners can concentrate on the content itself.
SeoToaster Ecommerce creates actual Landing Pages on-the-fly for all products in your online catalog, complete with microdata, geolocalization and over one hundred automated SEO parameters.
Hubspot was built initially as a marketing software compared to SeoToaster which is a dedicated content management software, which makes it features-rich, optimized and easy-to-use even for users with no technical knowledge.
All one needs to do is to use the user-friendly inline CMS to enter and style text, add multimedia widgets at will and hit the save button. It might look less fancy on the outside, but it actually turns your entire site content into traffic magnets from search engines.
Hubspot felt it had to reinvent the wheel to get users to get into content marketing and give it a nice-sounding name, but we feel all pages of your website should be "landing pages". With SeoSamba, they are, and what matters most: it gets the job done.
* All trademarks mentioned herein belong to their respective owners.
sales: 
sales: 
