HubSpot overview: What it is & how it works in 2025

If you’ve ever tried to manage a business using a dozen different apps, you know the headache. Your customer data is in one tool, your email campaigns are in another, and your support tickets live somewhere else entirely. It’s a digital juggling act that usually ends with siloed teams, frustrated employees, and a choppy experience for your customers.

That’s the exact problem HubSpot was built to solve. It pitches itself as the all-in-one platform that brings all your customer-facing teams under one roof. But what does that really look like in practice, and is it the right move for your business?

In this HubSpot overview, we’ll pull back the curtain on the whole platform. We’ll get into its main components, its built-in AI, the famously confusing pricing, and the real downsides of putting all your eggs in one basket. By the time we’re done, you should have a much clearer picture of whether HubSpot is the answer you’ve been looking for.

What is HubSpot?

At its heart, HubSpot is a customer platform that revolves around its CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system. HubSpot calls its Smart CRM the "single source of truth," which is a fancy way of saying it’s the central database for everything. On top of that CRM, it offers a collection of connected products it calls "Hubs."

The whole idea is that every single interaction a customer has with your business, from the first time they land on your website to their latest support ticket, gets logged in one place. This gives your marketing, sales, and service folks a complete, 360-degree view of every customer. No more digging through different apps to piece together the story.

It’s a compelling pitch, and it’s worked well enough to get them over 268,000 customers in more than 135 countries. The goal is a perfectly smooth experience for your team and your customers. But as we’ll explore, living in a single, unified world isn’t without its own set of pretty significant trade-offs.

The core HubSpot Hubs

The HubSpot platform is built around a few main products, or "Hubs," with each one tailored to a specific team. They can work by themselves, but the real power (and cost) comes when you start combining them.

Marketing Hub: For attracting visitors and converting leads

The Marketing Hub is where HubSpot’s famous "inbound marketing" philosophy really shines. It’s packed with tools to help you create content, pull in organic traffic, and turn those anonymous visitors into actual leads.

You can build landing pages from scratch, design forms and pop-ups to capture contact info, and create automated email drips to nurture people who aren’t quite ready to buy. It also gives you a central dashboard to run marketing campaigns across different channels and see what’s actually driving results, plus some decent SEO tools to help you optimize your content for search engines.

Sales Hub: For managing your pipeline and closing deals

The Sales Hub is basically a supercharged CRM for your sales team. It’s designed to automate a lot of the grunt work so your reps can focus on what they do best: selling.

It handles things like follow-up emails and data entry automatically, which saves a ton of time. You also get a clean, visual pipeline that shows you exactly where every single deal is at any given moment. Plus, it uses AI to forecast future revenue based on your pipeline’s health, which can help with setting more realistic sales targets.

Service Hub: For supporting customers and driving retention

The Service Hub is HubSpot’s answer to customer service software. It gives your support team the tools they need to track issues, answer questions, and hopefully turn frustrated customers into happy fans.

A key feature is the universal inbox, which pulls in conversations from email, live chat, and social media, so your team isn’t bouncing between different platforms all day. There’s also a full ticketing system to track customer problems and tools for sending out satisfaction surveys like NPS or CSAT.

Here’s the big catch, though. To use the Service Hub, you have to commit to moving your entire support operation over to HubSpot. If your team is already humming along on a dedicated helpdesk like Zendesk or Intercom, ripping that out and replacing it is a massive, disruptive project that can take months.

Content, data, and commerce hubs

To flesh out its offering, HubSpot has added a few more specialized hubs:

• Content Hub: This is an AI-powered tool for creating and managing all your content, from blog posts to website copy.

• Data Hub: This hub focuses on keeping your customer data clean and synced across all your systems, which is a bigger job than it sounds.

• Commerce Hub: This is for B2B companies that need to manage quotes, create invoices, and handle payments right from the CRM.

How HubSpot uses AI with "Breeze"

Like just about every other software company, HubSpot has gone all-in on AI. Their AI engine is called Breeze, and it’s sprinkled throughout the entire platform to help teams get things done faster.

Breeze has two main parts:

First, there are Breeze Agents. Think of these as autonomous AI "employees" that can take on specific jobs. For example, the Customer Agent can field common support questions, and HubSpot claims it can resolve over 65% of them on its own. The Prospecting Agent helps your sales team by researching leads and starting outreach.

Then there are the AI Assistants/Copilots. These are little helper tools you’ll find everywhere in HubSpot. They can help you write an email, generate copy for a marketing campaign, build a report, or even just summarize a long customer conversation.

But there’s a big limitation here: HubSpot’s AI is only as smart as the data inside HubSpot. It creates a knowledge silo. If your company’s real brain lives in external wikis like Confluence, Google Docs, or Notion, Breeze has no idea that information even exists. An AI that can’t see the full picture is bound to give incomplete or inaccurate answers.

This is a problem for any team whose knowledge isn’t neatly contained in one place. A more flexible tool like eesel AI works differently. It plugs directly into your helpdesk and connects to all your knowledge sources, past tickets, internal wikis, spreadsheets, you name it. That gives your AI support agent the full context it needs to do its job right, without being trapped inside a single platform.

Understanding the HubSpot pricing model

Alright, this is where a lot of people get stuck. HubSpot’s pricing can feel like you need a PhD to understand it, and it represents a serious financial commitment. Your final bill depends on which Hubs you choose, the tier you need (like Professional or Enterprise), and the number of "Core Seats" (paid users) on your team.

One of the biggest "gotchas" is the mandatory onboarding fee. If you go for a Professional or Enterprise plan, you’re required to pay a one-time fee that can easily run into the thousands. It’s a hefty cost that isn’t always obvious when you’re just [browsing the pricing page](https Https://www.hubspot.com/pricing).

Let’s look at the Marketing Hub to get a sense of the numbers.

Plan Tier	Starting Price (Annual)	Includes	Onboarding Fee (Required)	Key Features
Marketing Hub Professional	$800/month	3 Core Seats, 2,000 marketing contacts	$3,000	Omni-channel marketing automation, custom reporting, A/B testing.
Marketing Hub Enterprise	$3,600/month	5 Core Seats, 10,000 marketing contacts	$7,000	Multi-touch revenue attribution, customer journey analytics, predictive lead scoring.

Note: This is based on HubSpot’s pricing in late 2024. You should always check their site for the latest details.

The complex structure, high up-front costs, and seat-based model can make it tough to swallow, especially for businesses that are still growing.

In comparison, other AI platforms take a simpler approach. For example, eesel AI’s pricing is straightforward and based on usage, so you don’t get hit with weird per-resolution fees. You can even start with a flexible monthly plan to prove its value before making a big commitment.

The limitations of an all-in-one platform

The dream of having everything in one perfectly organized place is appealing, but it’s important to think about the real-world downsides before you dive in.

First off, there’s vendor lock-in. Once your business is running on HubSpot, all your customer data, all your workflows, all your history, it becomes incredibly difficult and expensive to ever leave. Your company becomes dependent on their ecosystem, their pricing updates, and their product roadmap.

Then you have the "rip and replace" problem. Going all-in on HubSpot usually means you have to ditch the tools your teams already know and like. If your support team is efficient in Zendesk, your sales team has their own favorite CRM, and everyone communicates on Slack, switching to HubSpot forces a massive, painful change on the whole company. It means retraining everyone, rebuilding workflows from the ground up, and migrating mountains of data.

This is where a tool like eesel AI offers a totally different philosophy. Instead of making you move, it adds a powerful AI layer on top of the tools you already have.

• You can keep your existing helpdesk, whether it’s Zendesk, Freshdesk, or Intercom.

• You can keep your wikis and knowledge bases in Confluence or Google Docs.

• You can add an autonomous AI agent, an agent-assist copilot, and automated triage to your current setup without disrupting anything.

The biggest win here is speed. You can go live in minutes, not months. Because eesel AI just plugs into your current stack, you can get it up and running almost instantly and avoid a miserable, multi-month migration project.

Is HubSpot the right choice for you?

So, what’s the final verdict? HubSpot is an incredibly deep and powerful platform. For businesses that are ready to commit their entire marketing, sales, and service operation to a single system, it can absolutely break down silos and create a more connected customer experience.

But it’s not for everyone. The high costs, complex pricing, and all-or-nothing approach can be a dealbreaker, especially for teams that are happy with their current tools and just want more flexibility. The "rip and replace" model is a huge undertaking, and vendor lock-in is a very real risk to consider.

If your main goal is to bring powerful AI to your existing customer support workflow, without the pain of a full-scale migration, a more specialized and integrated solution is probably a much better fit.

This video provides a quick introduction to how the HubSpot CRM works as the core of its customer platform.

See how eesel AI can level up your current support setup. You can connect your helpdesk, train an AI on your company’s unique knowledge, and start automating support in just a few minutes. Give it a try yourself or book a demo to see how it works.