Personally, I think HubSpot and a lot of the new AI-first CRM tools are great for getting started quickly, they’re simple, fast, and easy to adopt. But when you look at it from a scale and depth perspective, they’re not built the same way as Salesforce.
HubSpot starts to feel limited once workflows get complex or when you need deeper customization. And most of the newer AI layers are essentially sitting on top of other systems... they depend heavily on integrations, which can get messy over time.
What Salesforce does differently is that everything sits in one place data, workflows, AI, and execution. That makes a big difference when you’re trying to run AI across the entire customer lifecycle, not just automate parts of it.
So for me, it's more about foundation and that’s where Salesforce still has a clear edge.
