Hubspot vs Dex as a Personal CRM in 2024

Kevin Sun -

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Hubspot is a customer relationship management (CRM) tool used by businesses of all sizes. With a cloud-based software solution that including sales pipelines, interactive dashboards, and email/notification tracking, Hubspot is a powerful tool.

What about using Hubspot as a personal CRM? While Hubspot excels for tracking business relationships, using it to track your personal and professional network comes with tradeoffs.

In this article, we'll dive into whether Hubspot makes sense as a personal CRM, or if a purpose-built alternative like Dex makes more sense.

What is Hubspot?  

Hubspot is an business CRM platform that focuses on “inbound marketing,” where customers come inbound to a business through content.  As a result, the platform focuses heavily on marketing workflows and tasks.  For example, Hubspot allows you to visualize pipeline, integrate with third-party tools, and create custom fields.

What is “Personal CRM”?

If you manage a broad network, you’ll want to establish a system to stay on top of relationships. Often called a “Personal CRM,” these systems help you with:

  • Keeping track of contacts/
  • Remembering  to reach out.
  • Seeing past context, and leaving notes after a meeting.

You can use Hubspot to track contact information and add reminders.  However, there will be drawbacks for using Hubspot as a personal CRM.  These include the manual input required for Hubspot, lack of periodic reminders, and less overall integration with contacts and social media platforms.

Because Hubspot is not built specifically for the job of relationship management, using Hubspot comes with serious tradeoffs.  Dex, built specifically for the task of Personal CRM, may be a better alternative.

What is Dex?

Dex is a personal CRM that helps you build stronger relationships. With Dex, users can make sure they keep in touch, remember where they left off, and build stronger relationships.  Available as a web application, Browser Extension, and mobile app, Dex is an integrated, flexible solution on your phone and desktop.

Dex provides these key features:

  • Keep-in-touch periodic reminders to that update automatically to maintain connections.
  • Import of contacts from social media (Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn)
  • Mobile and desktop flexibility with apps available on Android, iOS, web, and as a Browser Extension.
  • Seamless calendar integration to keep all your meetings in one place

Platform Integrations: Hubspot vs Dex

When it comes to easy integration, Dex has a large advantage over Hubspot. Unlike Hubspot, which only integrates with Gmail and Outlook, Dex has made it more convenient for users to keep track of contacts on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and email.

Once the Browser Extension is installed, users can open Dex and get context from whereever they are.

Keeping-in-touch: Hubspot vs Dex

Hubspot is great for pipelines, but as a personal CRM, it can’t remind you to regularly keep-in-touch with your network. There’s no easy way to set regular reminders to reach out.

This is where Dex comes in. Dex excels at automating your ability to reach out and stay connected.  Our keep-in-touch view allows users to set  how often they want to reach out.  Once set, Dex sends reminders via email or push notification that make it easy to

Import: Hubspot vs Dex

If you're looking to switch or start a personal CRM, the experience with Hubspot vs Dex is very different.

Hubspot: you can import from .CSV files, which you'll have to export from Google Contacts or Outlook.  There's no straightforward way to import from Facebook, and forget about importing birthdays or profile pictures.

Dex: import from Facebook, LinkedIn, Google, Outlook and more seamless.  Use our native 'Merge & Fix' tool to create a single source of truth within minutes. Deduplication is easy.

Dex has specific functions dedicated to importing lists of contacts from most social media networks (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn) as well as from .CSV files. This saves you hours of copying and pasting contact information from one CRM to another. With the import function, Dex will also fill in available information such as company, role, location and other important information as accurately as possible.

Mobile Experience: Hubspot vs Dex

Hubspot: Hubspot has a mobile app on iOS / Android where you can create and modify contacts and manage your pipeline.

Dex: The Dex mobile app is also on iOS/Android and offers the ability to import from phone contacts, swipe left/right to dismiss reminders, and receive push notifications.

The Hubspot mobile app is ultimately intended for data management, but working in a mobile spreadsheet can be frustrating and time consuming.

With the Dex mobile app, you have all features necessary for relationships management on your phone. Import from phone contacts, jot down a quick note, and get a push notification to reach out quickly and easily.

Calendar Sync

Another important feature Dex has is the ability to link multiple Google Calendars to their Dex account.  This integration then updates last interactions with contacts easily and in real-time.

When you use services such as Hubspot, you have to look back and forth between your calendar and your CRM (or worse, copy-and-paste data) to have one source of truth for your contacts. Dex removes this difficulty and makes it easier to see everything in one place.

Cost Comparison: Hubspot vs Dex

Hubspot has a Free plan that includes features such as contact management, deal and activity tracking, email marketing and live chats for sales and conversations. Its paid subscriptions begin at $45/mo which includes landing pages, webpage activity insights, and targeted ads. The Professional ($800/mo) and Enterprise ($3,200/mo) include additional functionality such as smart content reporting, blog pages, SEO recommendations and programmable chatbots.

Dex has a free Basic plan that includes unlimited contacts, mobile/desktop functionality, social media imports and integrations. With the Premium ($9/mo) plan, you get everything you need for an efficient personal CRM: unlimited reminders, keep-in-touch, and contacts, as well as calendar integration and contact sync.

Conclusion

At the end of the day, choosing between Hubspot and Dex depends on your needs.

Hubspot is a feature-packed business solution that focuses on marketing, data tracking, and project management. Dex is a purpose-built personal CRM that is excellent at making it easier to build stronger relationships.

If you don’t need the business functionality of Hubspot, it’s likely Dex is a better choice with it’s extension, dedicated mobile experience, and relevant integrations. Dex’s future product roadmap is centered around the goal to help you build stronger relationships. Get started today by downloading the Dex Browser Extension or mobile apps.