Zoho CRM x Hubspot: Which CRM excels at WhatsApp integration?

When WhatsApp fuels your sales strategy, choosing the right CRM can mean the difference between sealing a deal and losing a lead. With Zoho CRM vs HubSpot, you'll find features like instant chat access, effortless message logging, AI-driven follow-ups, and intuitive drag-and-drop workflows. However, each platform offers its unique approach to customization, pricing transparency, and pipeline sophistication. Meanwhile, a next-gen contender is quietly transforming the landscape of true WhatsApp integration.

Why WhatsApp CRM Integration Matters

Integrating WhatsApp directly with your CRM bridges the divide between conversations and revenue. Automated contact syncing and message logging eliminate manual data entry and reduce the risk of lost leads, ensuring that every interaction is a valuable record.

• Accelerate response times by initiating follow-ups and reminders as soon as a customer engages.
• Enhance engagement through personalized, template-based outreach that feels tailor-made.
• Optimize workflows with a single dashboard that consolidates chats, contacts, and campaign analytics.

When your team can view every WhatsApp message alongside emails, calls, and deals, they spend less time searching for context and more time closing sales — transforming casual conversations into consistent conversions.

What is Zoho CRM?

Zoho CRM combines AI-driven insights with extensive customization, empowering sales teams to close deals more efficiently and intelligently. Its integrated assistant, Zia, forecasts deal success, identifies anomalies, and recommends real-time action steps. The platform consolidates email, social media, live chat, and telephony into a single hub, ensuring that no lead is overlooked.

With intuitive drag-and-drop dashboards and robust analytics, you gain clear visibility into every phase of your sales pipeline. Additionally, its WhatsApp integration allows you to automate sending and responding to WhatsApp Business messages directly within the CRM, complete with template notifications and a shared team inbox for tracking all interactions.

What is Hubspot?

HubSpot's free CRM centralizes your contacts, deals, and tasks into a streamlined interface—no credit card needed. It offers live chat, email tracking, meeting scheduling, and ticketing tools right out of the box. Strong integrations with Marketing Hub and Service Hub facilitate seamless automation between teams. Plus, as part of HubSpot's ecosystem, you can easily upgrade to paid plans for enhanced automation and reporting capabilities. HubSpot's native WhatsApp integration enables you to send and receive messages in a shared inbox, automate template notifications via workflows, and maintain two-way customer conversations at scale.

Feature comparison of Zoho CRM and Hubspot

Two-Way Messaging

Zoho CRM features a native WhatsApp Business integration through the Business Messaging API, enabling seamless two-way messaging. Each WhatsApp conversation is automatically recorded under the respective contact, providing your team with clear insights into client interactions. Conversations can be assigned to specific agents, and replies are instantly synchronized within the CRM.

Similarly, HubSpot offers a native WhatsApp integration (available with Professional and Enterprise Service Hub plans) that incorporates two-way messaging into your shared conversations inbox. This allows agents to respond to customer inquiries using text, images, or videos—all from within HubSpot. Incoming messages create new threads linked to the corresponding contact, company, deal, or ticket record, while outbound messages, whether templates or free-form, initiate 24-hour sessions to keep the conversation active. You'll gain complete visibility into session limits and conversation counts, ensuring you remain within your monthly quotas. Additionally, workflows can trigger business-initiated template messages for re-engagement or reminders, logging every interaction as a timeline event.

Template Management

Within Zoho CRM, users can create, store, and manage approved WhatsApp templates via the messaging API. These templates are suitable for bulk messages and can also be triggered automatically through workflow automations. The system adheres to WhatsApp Business rules, enabling effortless outreach at scale while ensuring message quality and traceability of approvals.

HubSpot’s WhatsApp integration, accessible on Professional and Enterprise Service Hub, provides a synchronized template manager directly within your CRM. Once you connect your WhatsApp Business account, all approved templates in Meta automatically sync to HubSpot’s CRM under the Templates > WhatsApp tab, where you can filter by status (Ready to use, Needs personalization, Rejected), language, and category (promotional, transactional, OTP).

Automated Responses & Chatbots

WhatsApp allows users to share a variety of media, including images, PDFs, videos, and GIFs. All media exchanged in chats is automatically saved in contact records or help desk tickets, providing sales and support teams with complete context for each interaction without the need to switch tabs.

With HubSpot’s WhatsApp integration available in Service Hub Professional and Enterprise, you can set up workflows that send automated messages—such as welcome sequences, abandoned cart reminders, and delivery updates—directly as WhatsApp template notifications.

Although HubSpot doesn’t offer a built-in chatbot builder for WhatsApp, you can connect external chatbot platforms through Zapier or respond.io. This integration allows conversation flows to be directed into HubSpot’s shared inbox and customer records. Consequently, a chatbot can qualify leads or address common inquiries before escalating matters to a live agent, seamlessly fitting into your existing workflow.

Multimedia Support (Images, Videos, Files)

WhatsApp allows users to share various media types, including images, PDFs, videos, and GIFs. All media files exchanged in chats are automatically saved in contact records or help desk tickets, providing sales and support teams with complete context for each interaction without the hassle of switching tabs.

HubSpot’s native WhatsApp integration (available in Service Hub Professional and Enterprise) enables users to send and receive media attachments—such as images, videos, audio, stickers, and documents up to 15 MB—directly from the conversations inbox or contact record.

Incoming media messages generate timeline events that feature thumbnails and download links, allowing sales and support teams to easily view or forward assets without needing to switch applications.

Contact & Lead Synchronization

WhatsApp messages can automatically generate new contacts or leads in Zoho CRM, or update existing ones, ensuring your team never loses a conversation thread or forgets to follow up. This seamless integration supports ticket creation, making it ideal for both support and sales workflows.

HubSpot’s native WhatsApp integration (available in the Professional and Enterprise Service Hub) syncs every new WhatsApp conversation directly with the relevant contact record in your CRM, either creating or updating the contact based on their phone number.

Once you connect your WhatsApp Business account, only new messages will trigger this sync, leaving historical chats in WhatsApp. Each incoming thread generates a new timeline event linked to the corresponding contact or associated deal. For channels like click-to-WhatsApp ads that require lead capture, you can automate contact creation from form submissions and continue the conversation via WhatsApp, all tracked in HubSpot.

Workflow Triggers & Notifications

Zoho CRM workflows can be activated by WhatsApp events, such as received messages or user interactions. These triggers enable automatic follow-up messages, CRM field updates, or team alerts. With Zoho's flexible automation engine, integrating WhatsApp into your comprehensive sales process is seamless.

HubSpot’s Service Hub connects to WhatsApp through certified partners, allowing it to capture events like new messages, template sends, or delivery failures directly in its workflow engine. This functionality allows you to initiate downstream automations—such as escalating high-priority conversations into deals or support tickets and sending alerts to your team—ensuring that every WhatsApp interaction becomes a meaningful signal within your CRM.

folk CRM: The Ultimate CRM Connected to WhatsApp

If your sales team uses WhatsApp to connect with leads and finalize deals, then folk CRM's WhatsApp integration is a true game-changer.

With folk’s WhatsApp CRM, every interaction is automatically synchronized and recorded in your CRM—eliminating the hassle of manual copy-pasting and preventing lost messages. Enjoy complete visibility into your team’s WhatsApp conversations with leads and customers, ensuring you always grasp the context behind every deal. Whether you need to follow up or make a critical decision, the entire picture is readily available at your fingertips.

However, folk goes beyond just WhatsApp.
It seamlessly integrates with Gmail, Outlook, LinkedIn, Google Meet, Instagram, Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), and more—allowing you to manage emails, meetings, and social interactions all in one platform. Import contacts from any channel and manage them effortlessly within folk.

Here’s what truly distinguishes folk:
AI agents enhance your sales process by automating workflows, revealing deal insights, and increasing productivity—liberating your team from administrative tasks so they can concentrate on closing deals.
Are you ready to revolutionize your sales operations and achieve remarkable results?

Conclusion

In comparing Zoho CRM and HubSpot, Zoho excels with its extensive customization and AI-driven insights, while HubSpot offers a user-friendly interface and seamless integration with marketing tools. Both provide robust WhatsApp features for two-way messaging, template management, and automated responses. However, if you're seeking a CRM that not only integrates WhatsApp effortlessly but also consolidates various communication channels with AI-driven automation, folk stands out as an exceptional alternative, enhancing your sales process and customer engagement.

Start your 14-day free trial or book a demo today.