Hubspot versus OpenWidget

Hubspot has a wide range of tools and products for inbound marketing, sales, and customer service. They offer 5 Hubs for each respective suite.

The idea for Hubspot was conceived in 2004 by two graduate students at MIT who saw the need for a more helpful, less interruptive, customer service platform. Nowadays, Hubspot has over 140,000 customers in 120+ countries and can be seen as one of Salesforce’s main competitors.

Hubspot’s products and plans are sorted into Hubs for Marketing, Sales, Customer Service, CMS, and Operations. You can combine the Hubs to create your own bundle or choose the complete Hubspot suite. Their Live Chat is included in the Free Tools plan of the Service Hub. This suite also includes the free features of their CRM Hub.

In 2017 Hubspot acquired a company named Motion.ai, a company purely focused on creating the best chatbots. Motion.ai is now known as Hubspot’s Chatbot Builder and is included in their CRM hub.

The Service Hub has integration options for more than 50 apps, most of which incur an additional fee.

OpenWidget is a free eCommerce widget launched in November 2022 by LiveChat.inc. It is not a real-time live chat but has 4 important features.

• Contact form (email)
• Product cards to promote deals
• FAQ section
• Widget customization

It is easy to set up but offers limited customization options, as can be expected for such a free tool. There is no option to upload images, they have to be linked to a URL. All changes are applied to the widget on your website in real time without the need to replace the script.

It has plugins for popular eCommerce platforms like:

• BigCommerce
• Google Tag Manager
• OpenCart
• Shopify
• Squarespace
• Woocommerce
• WordPress