HubSpot Form Builder Review 2024: Is It as Good as It Seems?

1

Build Online Forms with Seamless CRM Integration

HubSpot’s online form builder comes free as part of HubSpot’s all-in-one inbound marketing platform, which includes other essential marketing tools such as customer relationship management (CRM), email marketing, live chat, and marketing reports. It’s geared toward lead generation, so if you’re looking to grow your business, HubSpot could be a promising option.

There’s a free plan as well as a range of paid plans. As the paid plans are pretty pricey, it’s worth exploring the free version before you commit! Either way, HubSpot is a popular choice, with over 64,000 users (including global giants Casio and Suzuki) in 100 countries.

It supports 18 languages in addition to English (including Spanish, French, German, and Chinese), so it’s ideal if you have a global target audience. All great so far – but it does have some downsides, and there are cheaper options you might want to consider, like JotForm and Cognito Forms.

The question you’re asking, though, is whether HubSpot is right for you. Keep reading to find out!

Great Templates for Lead Capture, but There Are Only a Few

If you’re looking for a form builder with lots of professionally designed templates, I’m afraid HubSpot isn’t it. It only has five templates (even on the paid plans), with a promise to add more “soon.” At least the existing ones are mobile-responsive and nicely designed.

The templates available are focused on marketing and lead generation. You’ll find templates for Registration (so customers can register for product updates or sign up for a service, product, or program), Contact Us, Newsletter Signup, E-book Download, and Event Registration.

The templates aren’t all that different from each other – and they’re very basic. Compared to JotForm, which has thousands of templates, HubSpot is very limited.

You are, however, able to customize pre-designed templates by adding new form fields in the drag-and-drop form editor. There are also styling options in the form settings – which affect all forms – or you can edit the styles on individual forms if you’re on a paid plan. If you want to completely customize your forms with CSS and JavaScript, you have to upgrade to one of the Marketing Hub plans.

Form Features to Grow Your Business

Most of HubSpot’s form builder features are geared at marketers, so they’re not suitable for surveys, quizzes, or job application forms, for example – but they are good for customer relations.

There are lots of contact information fields – including many that you might not have even thought about using. For example, there are form fields for the preferred language, salutation, military status, and Twitter username. There are easy options for GDPR (European data privacy) compliance, too.

You can also create new fields in HubSpot Forms, with options including multiple checkboxes, dropdown lists, text (single/multi-line), date picker, and file upload. If you work with international clients and need to translate your forms into other languages, HubSpot has a translation function with support for English, Spanish, French, German, and Chinese – plus other languages in beta mode.

Easy WordPress Integration

When you sign up with HubSpot, you’ll be asked if you use WordPress for your website. If you do, HubSpot will offer you the option of a free HubSpot plugin, which allows for seamless integration with your website so you can add your forms to your pages with ease.

If you don’t use WordPress, however, you’ll have to either use a “share link” or HTML embed code to publish your forms on your website.

Create Pop-Up and Smart Forms

The Pop-Up Forms feature can help you grow your mailing list. These are primarily for signing up for email updates in a variety of formats (e.g., pop-up box, drop-down banner, or slide-in box).

Smart Forms use what HubSpot terms “progressive profiling” to decide which forms to display to your website visitors depending on their locations (geotargeting) or whether they’ve previously visited your website. This can be a great way to gain new customer leads and ensure that returning visitors aren’t bombarded with signup, registration, or contact forms each time they visit your website.

Automatic Follow-Up Emails

You can schedule up to three follow-up emails to be sent after a form is submitted, helping you nurture potential leads. You have a range of options for your follow-up emails, including customizing the email footers, adjusting the delay between emails, and customizing the subscription type.

Step-by-Step Form Building – Perfect for Beginners

HubSpot has made its whole marketing management platform super simple to use, so it’s no surprise that the forms aspect of the marketing hub is very beginner-friendly. If you’ve never built an online form before, you’ll appreciate the step-by-step process and the built-in help options, too.

Drag-and-Drop

Adding, removing, rearranging, and creating new form fields is simple in the drag-and-drop editor. Once you’ve placed a form field, you just have to click on it to bring up the form field settings panel. Click a button to make the field required, or choose to add a CAPTCHA with another click.

In-Editor Help

If you’re not tech-savvy or are finding the options available to you in HubSpot confusing, there’s a handy drop-down Learn more in the top left of the editor that will take you directly to knowledge base articles with instructions. Or, click the help button at the bottom right of the screen to search the knowledge base yourself.

Click to Chat

If you’re stuck on something and can’t find the answer in the help section, and the tooltips in the settings panel aren’t working for you, there’s a Chat button for paid plan users on the bottom right, next to the Help button, that will connect you to the HubSpot bot. If the bot can’t give you the answer you need, it will connect you to a support agent for real-time human help.

Now, let’s get to building! To add a preset form field, you just have to click on it, then move it where you want it on the form. It’s that simple. If you want to create a new form field, just select the field type and a Create a new field box will pop up. All you have to do is name your field and adjust the settings.

Changing colors and styles is a matter of clicking on the appropriate option and inputting your brand colors in place of the default HubSpot colors. If you’re a free user, you can only apply global color changes (i.e., all of your forms have to have the color scheme you select).

Overall, HubSpot is one of the most beginner-friendly options for form building I’ve tested.

HubSpot support is separated into support for free-plan users and support for paying customers. If you decide to stick with the free plan, you won’t be able to get help from the customer support team – though you can, of course, consult the knowledge base or post a question on the community forum.

If you choose one of HubSpot’s paid plans, you’ll benefit from these support channels (depending on which plan you choose):

• Ticket submission – Response within one working day; available to all paid plan customers
• In-app support – Via the HubBot live chat feature; available to all paid plan customers
• Call-in support – With both US and international numbers to dial, but only if you choose a Professional plan and above

When you first sign up with HubSpot, you’re automatically placed on the free plan. The Starter plan is the lowest-priced option and is paid monthly on an ongoing basis.

When you compare the difference between the Starter and free plans, however, the only real form-related benefits of the paid plan are the removal of HubSpot branding and the ability to customize the style of your forms. In fact, HubSpot sales agents actually recommend you stick with the free plan unless you absolutely need to have the style customization features.

The Professional and Enterprise plans come with high monthly fees that might be challenging to warrant, even when taking into account the inclusion of smart forms. If your business is experiencing rapid growth and you possess a substantial budget, these plans become optimal. Upon upgrading, you retain the choice of making monthly or annual payments, and we accept all major credit cards for your convenience.