HubSpot vs Brevo: Which CRM is the best for social selling?

Effective contact management determines whether a CRM enhances productivity or becomes mere noise. HubSpot and Brevo

Social selling thrives at the intersection of your CRM and your network. If your tool falls short in tracking LinkedIn activities, comments, and warm introductions, you risk losing visibility — and ultimately, deals — to teams that maintain closer connections with their relationships.

folk and Clarify both position themselves as modern, relationship-focused CRMs. Clarify centers on transforming unstructured interactions into organized records, while folk offers teams a flexible workspace tailored for social selling, allowing them to track contacts, signals, and their pipeline seamlessly in one location.

In this comparison, we'll explore how each CRM facilitates authentic social selling workflows, enabling you to determine which one aligns best with your team's approach to building and nurturing relationships.

Why is a social selling CRM essential in 2026?

Most B2B deals don't initiate with a cold email or a demo request; they often begin with a LinkedIn comment, a repost, a DM, or a subtle profile visit. If your CRM cannot capture these signals and connect them to real people and pipelines, your team is navigating blindly while competitors cultivate relationships right before your eyes.

A social selling CRM provides a centralized platform to convert these interactions into structured, actionable insights: who engaged, their origin, their interests, and how close they are to making a purchase. Instead of viewing LinkedIn as a mere 'nice-to-have,' it transforms into a measurable, repeatable process within your revenue engine.

With a social selling CRM, your team can:

✔️ Identify buying signals from likes, comments, and profile views and turn them into actionable follow-ups

✔️ Track which prospects are familiar with your content versus those approached through outbound efforts, allowing for tailored messaging

✔️ Map relationships across accounts, champions, and influencers, rather than just maintaining a list of contacts

✔️ Report on deals influenced by social activity, rather than crediting all success to last-click channels

What is HubSpot?

HubSpot is a comprehensive CRM platform that integrates marketing, sales, and customer service into a single contact database. Its email integration allows users to connect their personal Gmail and Outlook inboxes, enabling sales representatives to send personalized emails, log responses, and initiate sequences directly from the CRM or their inbox. Features like open and click tracking, templates, and shared timelines enhance visibility of email activities across the entire revenue team.

What is Brevo?

Brevo, formerly known as Sendinblue, focuses on email, SMS, and marketing automation, with CRM capabilities built on top. It appeals to businesses that prioritize engagement and marketing campaigns rather than complex sales processes. While its CRM features are adequate for basic requirements, they do not match the sophistication of dedicated sales CRMs.

Feature comparison of HubSpot and Brevo

Profile Enrichment & Lead Insights

HubSpot provides smooth two-way email integration with Gmail, Outlook, and any IMAP-compatible provider, enabling you to send individual emails directly from contact records while automatically logging every response in your CRM timeline. Its built-in scheduler adds meeting events to Google Calendar or Office 365, complete with automatic guest invitations and timeline entries for comprehensive visibility.

In contrast, Brevo lacks support for profile enrichment via social media, primarily gathering contact data through forms or email interactions.

Social Listening & Real-Time Alerts

HubSpot’s email synchronization works almost in real-time with Gmail and Outlook, usually reflecting updates within seconds to a minute. After connecting your account, HubSpot establishes a continuous OAuth connection, allowing it to push and pull message data consistently, ensuring your CRM timeline is always current. This reliability is further enhanced by HubSpot’s robust global cloud infrastructure, which features an impressive 99.99% uptime for its core services.

In contrast, Brevo lacks social listening and alert features, focusing instead on email, SMS, and transactional marketing tools.

Social Selling: Which channels?

HubSpot’s Sales Hub Professional and Enterprise offer powerful one-to-one sequences, allowing you to enroll up to 50 contacts simultaneously and send hundreds of personalized emails per user each day. Its intuitive drag-and-drop sequence builder facilitates template creation, manages delays, and detects replies. Meanwhile, Marketing Hub can scale to thousands of recipients, featuring advanced segmentation, A/B testing, and comprehensive analytics on opens, clicks, and bounces. However, since the most advanced campaign features are found in Marketing Hub, Sales Hub users who lack this add-on encounter limitations on total sends and access to more basic reporting.

On the other hand, Brevo specializes in email and SMS, but it does not offer social selling capabilities or integrations within its product suite.

In‑Context Messaging with Templates & Sequences

HubSpot’s Sales Hub Professional and Enterprise offer robust one-to-one sequences, allowing you to enroll up to 50 contacts at once and send hundreds of personalized emails per user each day. The intuitive drag-and-drop sequence builder simplifies template creation, manages delays, and detects replies. Meanwhile, Marketing Hub extends your reach to thousands of recipients, featuring segmentation, A/B testing, and comprehensive analytics for opens, clicks, and bounces. However, since many of its most powerful campaign features reside in Marketing Hub, Sales Hub users without this add-on encounter limits on total sends and basic reporting functionalities.

On the other hand, Brevo does not provide support for templated messaging or browser-based sequences, restricting campaigns to email and SMS formats only.

Activity & Engagement Tracking

HubSpot Sales monitors opens and clicks for every one-to-one email sent from contact records or through the Sales extension, providing real-time desktop notifications and logging each event on the timeline. Note that click tracking requires a paid Sales Hub seat—free users only see opens—and you can easily check the total clicks per link directly in the email activity feed. For advanced attribution, such as multi-variant link analysis across campaigns, you'll need Marketing Hub, as pure Sales Hub users won’t access enterprise-level click analytics without the add-on.

Engagement tracking encompasses email opens, clicks, and SMS delivery rates, but it does not record any social activity in contact history.

folk CRM: The Ultimate CRM for Social Selling!

folk CRM is a cutting-edge social selling CRM that transforms social selling into an efficient, repeatable process. It quickly captures contacts, maintains conversation context, and minimizes manual tasks through smart fields and enrichment, ensuring timely follow-ups.

Designed for LinkedIn-driven outreach, folk enables teams to consolidate leads from various sources, arrange them in personalized pipelines, and monitor all interactions in one centralized location. Automatic contact enrichment fills in missing details, deduplication keeps the database tidy, and shared notes and tags streamline warm introductions and relationship tracking across the team.

For effective daily social selling, folk promotes consistent practices: segment leads, customize outreach, schedule reminders, log interactions, and advance opportunities through the pipeline—all while preserving the human touch that ultimately seals deals.

👉 Try folk CRM for free

结论

In conclusion, HubSpot excels with its comprehensive suite and robust email integration, ideal for teams needing sophisticated marketing and sales alignment. Brevo offers solid email and SMS capabilities but lacks advanced social selling features, making it less suitable for relationship-driven teams. In contrast, folk stands out as the best alternative for teams focused on email integration, automation, and sequencing. Its user-friendly platform captures and organizes social signals, ensuring timely follow-ups and streamlined relationship management. Choose folk for a powerful social selling experience.

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