HubSpot (HUBS -0.78%) has grown rapidly since its public debut nine years ago. From 2014 to 2022, the cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) and marketing software provider grew its revenues at a compound annual rate of 40% as its total number of customers grew from 13,607 to 167,386. Its adjusted operating margin also improved from negative 27.7% in 2014 to positive 9.8% in 2022.
HubSpot's stock has risen by a whopping 1,868% from its IPO price of $25 -- which would have turned a $2,000 investment into over $39,000. But with an enterprise value of $24 billion, it's still only a tenth as valuable as cloud-based CRM leader Salesforce, which has an enterprise value of $241 billion. Can HubSpot keep growing over the next few decades and become as big as Salesforce one day?
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The key differences between HubSpot and Salesforce
Cloud-based CRM platforms like those offered by HubSpot and Salesforce make it easier for companies to store, organize, and analyze information about their individual customers. Putting all of that information in a centralized cloud-based location also enables companies to analyze sales trends and make faster, data-driven decisions.
HubSpot and Salesforce also provide marketing tools for crafting lower-cost "inbound" marketing campaigns -- such as social media campaigns, viral videos, or blogs -- which drive consumers to seek out brands on their own. They also provide lead generation and search engine optimization (SEO) tools to boost a company's online exposure.
Their two business models sound similar, but HubSpot primarily targets smaller businesses while Salesforce focuses on larger enterprises. HubSpot's CRM platform is a lot simpler than Salesforce's platform, but HubSpot offers it as a free service to tether more customers to the marketing and analytics services it charges for. Salesforce's CRM platform is a paid service that serves as a launchpad for its other cloud-based marketing, analytics, data visualization, app development, and collaboration services.
Simply put, HubSpot is a smaller CRM and marketing play, while Salesforce is a cloud software giant that competes more intensively against other enterprise software heavyweights like Microsoft and Adobe.
According to IDC, Salesforce controls 23% of the global CRM market, while its closest competitors -- Microsoft, Adobe, SAP, and Oracle -- each hold mid-single digit shares. HubSpot doesn't even make the top-five list.
The CRM market is gradually maturing
HubSpot expects its revenue to rise by 24% to $2.1 billion this year as macroeconomic headwinds curb its near-term growth. From 2022 to 2025, analysts expect its revenue to continue rising at a compound annual rate of 21% and reach $3.04 billion by the final year.
That would be comparable to the $3.05 billion in revenue that Salesforce booked in its fiscal 2013 (which ended in January 2013). From its fiscal 2013 to fiscal 2023, Salesforce grew its revenues at a compound annual rate of 26% to reach $31.4 billion. But from fiscal 2023 to fiscal 2026, analysts expect its revenues will only rise at a compound annual rate of 11% as its business matures.
That growth slowdown highlights another key difference between the two companies. Salesforce leveraged its first-mover advantage to become the top CRM company, but that market's growth is cooling off. HubSpot carved out a niche for itself that allowed it to avoid going toe-to-toe against Salesforce, but it probably can't grow as rapidly as Salesforce did over the past decade given the state of the CRM market.
Could HubSpot become as big as today's Salesforce?
However, HubSpot believes it can continue to grow as smaller businesses continue to scale up their cloud-based CRM systems and marketing campaigns. It also expects its development of new artificial intelligence (AI) tools for generating digital content, summarizing calls and emails, creating chatbots, analyzing data, and optimizing marketing campaigns to boost its revenue per customer and widen its competitive moat. It could also acquire smaller companies to expand its ecosystem.
According to a forecast from Grand View Research, the global CRM market could still grow at a compound annual rate of 14% from 2023 to 2030. If HubSpot's sales simply keep pace with that market, it could generate $5.2 billion in revenue in 2030. If it continues to grow at a slower compound annual rate of 13% over the following 15 years, it could generate $31 billion in revenue by 2045 -- which would make it comparable to today's Salesforce.
But a lot of things could prevent HubSpot from ever reaching that lofty target. Salesforce, Microsoft, and the other enterprise CRM leaders could launch more free CRM services for small businesses, challenging HubSpot in its niche. Recessions, geopolitical conflicts, and other macro headwinds could stunt HubSpot's growth. The rise of new AI-driven services could disrupt older CRM and inbound marketing services.
How those longer-term challenges might play out is impossible to predict, so investors should instead focus on HubSpot's core strengths: It is still growing rapidly, its margins are expanding, and analysts expect it to turn profitable on a generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) basis by 2025. In other words, HubSpot still has plenty of room to grow -- even if it never becomes a megacap cloud software giant like Salesforce.
