Pipedrive vs HubSpot: Which CRM for agencies wins?

Agencies don’t struggle with “finding tools.” They struggle with keeping pipeline execution consistent while delivery stays on track. When prospect context lives across inboxes, calendars, and spreadsheets, follow-ups slip, handoffs break, and forecasting becomes guesswork. A CRM for agencies has to keep new business moving fast while preserving enough account history to support renewals, upsells, and referrals.

Pipedrive and HubSpot aim to address these challenges, each bringing unique strengths to the table. Pipedrive emphasizes an intuitive visual pipeline and activity-driven selling, tailored for agencies focused on straightforward deal tracking and efficient follow-ups. In contrast, HubSpot offers a comprehensive CRM solution that integrates sales with marketing and service tools, providing a holistic view of client interactions and campaign effectiveness.

The right choice between Pipedrive and HubSpot will depend on your agency's specific needs, including the complexity of your processes, required integrations, and the level of customization your team is prepared to manage.

What is Pipedrive?

Pipedrive is a sales CRM designed around a visual pipeline and activity-driven selling. It's particularly favored by agencies seeking straightforward deal tracking, clear next steps, and light process enforcement. Users can maintain multiple pipelines to distinguish between new business, renewals, or partnerships, while activities ensure follow-ups are scheduled and visible. Automations help minimize administrative work related to repetitive updates and reminders, making it ideal for teams that emphasize rapid pipeline execution over a comprehensive “suite” approach.

What is HubSpot?

HubSpot is a comprehensive CRM platform that integrates sales tools with marketing and service functionalities within a single ecosystem. It is well-suited for agencies requiring pipeline tracking alongside lead capture, email campaigns, and lifecycle reporting all in one location. Depending on the chosen plan, teams can define pipelines, log activities, and automate aspects of follow-up through workflows. The app marketplace seamlessly integrates with popular agency tools and client-facing systems, making it the preferred choice for agencies looking for CRM solutions along with complementary go-to-market tools from one vendor.

Feature comparison of Pipedrive and HubSpot

Multi-pipeline and Custom Stages

Pipedrive allows users to create multiple deal pipelines from the pipeline view, with each pipeline featuring its own set of stages. You can easily edit stage attributes, including names and probabilities, as well as add or remove stages to adapt to changing processes. This flexibility enables you to separate agency activities, such as new business, renewals, and partnerships, into distinct pipelines, while maintaining specific stage definitions for each process.

HubSpot also facilitates the creation of deal pipelines organized around stages, which can be managed through pipeline settings. As deals progress, they move through the defined stages, and you can edit these definitions to align with how your agency qualifies and closes work. Separate pipelines can be established to monitor various processes, like new business versus renewals or different service lines, ensuring that stages remain unique to each pipeline.

Client and Deal Activity Tracking

In Pipedrive, activities represent scheduled actions linked to people, organizations, leads, deals, or projects, including calls, meetings, and follow-ups. You can configure calendar sync as either a one-way or two-way connection, ensuring that Pipedrive activities align with external calendar events. Logged activities are displayed on the corresponding records, enabling you to track past interactions and upcoming tasks for each account or deal.

HubSpot, on the other hand, maintains activities within record timelines, allowing you to log and associate calls, emails, meetings, notes, and tasks with contacts, companies, and deals. This activity data is instrumental in updating properties like the last activity date based on recorded interactions. Additionally, you can filter activity timelines and link activities across related records, ensuring that a deal and its associated contact share the same context of logged activities.

Automation and Workflows

Pipedrive handles reporting through Insights, which offers custom reports, dashboards, and goal tracking. You can share dashboards internally with your teammates, and when permissions allow, create public links so stakeholders can access the dashboard without needing a direct account. Goals in Insights monitor progress across deals, activities, and forecasts, depending on your configuration and plan limits.

HubSpot features workflows that automate actions across marketing, sales, and service processes, with availability based on your subscription tier. You can create workflows using templates or in the workflow editor, and they are triggered by record events or changes in properties. Workflow actions can encompass tasks, notifications, and record updates, with certain workflow types or actions linked to specific hubs and plan levels.

Reporting and Analytics

Pipedrive manages reporting through Insights, offering custom reports, dashboards, and goal tracking. Dashboards can be shared with teammates, and when permissions permit, public links enable stakeholders to view dashboards without needing direct account access. In Insights, goals monitor progress across deals, activities, and forecasts, tailored to your configuration and plan limits.

HubSpot delivers sales reporting via dashboards, its sales analytics suite, and custom reporting tools. Users can save reports to dashboards and share them with those who have the necessary access. The report builder allows for the creation of custom reports to analyze CRM objects and activities, with filtering and dataset selection tailored to specific reporting requirements.

Integrations and Data Hygiene

Pipedrive integrations are available through the Pipedrive Marketplace, featuring various apps and integrations that can be easily installed from within the account. To maintain data hygiene, the Merge Duplicates feature identifies potential duplicate contacts and organizations, offering a streamlined workflow to merge records. Additionally, Pipedrive outlines how its duplicate identification process adheres to rules corresponding with its import logic, influencing how duplicates are recognized and suggested for merging.

HubSpot facilitates connections with external tools via its app marketplace, showcasing integrations tailored for sales, marketing, and operations. To ensure data hygiene, HubSpot provides data quality tools, including deduplication workflows for spotting and managing duplicates, detecting formatting issues, and offering enrichment coverage based on the user's plan. These features are housed under Data Management and Data Quality, allowing teams to review problems and implement corrections for records and properties.

folk: The Best CRM for Agencies in 2026!

folk is an AI-driven CRM that centralizes contacts, conversations, and deal context without complicating the setup process. It’s tailored for agency teams where multiple members engage with the same account throughout prospecting, onboarding, delivery, and renewals. By maintaining a visible record of relationship history, it ensures that handoffs rely on documented information rather than memory or scattered notes.

• Multi-pipeline and custom stages designed for various agency workflows
• Contact and deal timelines that consolidate interaction history in one location
• Email and calendar synchronization that connects conversations to the appropriate records
• Tasks, reminders, and follow-up tracking to ensure standardized next steps
• Contact enrichment to supplement missing company and contact details
• Deduplication tools to merge duplicates and maintain a clean database
• Simple pipeline reporting to track stage health and deal progression
• Integrations and automation connectors to minimize manual updates

For agencies, the primary advantage lies in achieving operational clarity across multiple relationships. Pipelines can represent various revenue streams such as retainers, projects, partnerships, and referrals, while tasks and reminders ensure consistent follow-ups across the team. Data hygiene features like enrichment and deduplication help eliminate duplicate records and fill in missing fields, keeping pipeline reporting reliable over time.

Conclusion

In summary, Pipedrive excels with its intuitive pipeline and activity-driven approach, making it ideal for straightforward deal tracking. HubSpot provides a comprehensive suite that integrates sales, marketing, and service tools for a holistic view of client interactions. However, for teams that rely on email integration, automation, and sequencing, folk stands out as the best alternative. Its AI-driven platform simplifies collaboration, maintains clear interaction history, and ensures consistent follow-ups, making it the perfect fit for agencies focused on relationship-driven work.

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