HubSpot

Three strengths

• One record per customer. Its CRM stores contacts, companies, deals and tickets, and links them together through associations. 2
• Integrates with other software. Its API lets apps read the CRM, for example fetching all contacts, and apps connect with OAuth or access tokens. 5 3
• Control over app access. Scopes define exactly which HubSpot data and functions an app may access. 3

What it is

Every business needs to remember who its customers are, what they've been told and which deals are open. A CRM (customer relationship management) system is where that's kept. HubSpot's own description of its CRM is "a database of your business relationships and processes". 2 It's organised in objects, which are types of thing such as contacts, companies, deals and tickets, and records, which are individual entries like one specific contact. Each record has properties, the fields that hold its details, and associations link records together, such as a contact to the company they work for. 2

HubSpot was founded in 2006 by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah, who were fellow MIT graduate students, and reports 306,000 customers today. 1

The value of a CRM grows with the systems it talks to. A case study of a cloud CRM found that cloud-based business applications can integrate CRM with other systems more efficiently than older, on-premises ones, which were costly and complex to connect. 4 HubSpot's API is built for that. An app can retrieve CRM records through it, and apps authenticate with either OAuth, which suits an app used across many HubSpot accounts, or a static access token for installing in a single account. 5 3

We choose it because a CRM only helps if the people using it can trust what's in it, and keeping it in step with your other software is how that happens.

How we use it

When your customer details live in HubSpot, the last thing you want is a second copy somewhere else that's slightly out of date. So we've built HubSpot integrations that keep your software and your CRM in step: details entered in one show up in the other, and your team works from the same records everywhere. In software projects, we connect HubSpot through the Node.js and serverless code behind the app, so the app can work with your CRM as it runs.

That's the heart of Integrations & Automations: joining your systems so information moves between them without anyone retyping it. For you, it means one trusted set of customer records, which is the unified systems and efficiency gains the service is built around. Built into your app under Software Development, it means the app and your CRM work from the same records.

References

1. HubSpot, "Our Story", hubspot.com. https://www.hubspot.com/our-story (accessed 29 October 2026)
2. HubSpot, "Understanding the CRM", HubSpot Developer Documentation. https://developers.hubspot.com/docs/guides/api/crm/understanding-the-crm (accessed 29 October 2026)
3. HubSpot, "Intro to authentication", HubSpot Developer Documentation. https://developers.hubspot.com/docs/guides/apps/authentication/intro-to-auth (accessed 29 October 2026)
4. Emre Erturk and Song He, "Study on A High-integrated Cloud-Based Customer Relationship Management System", arXiv:1812.09005, 2018. https://arxiv.org/abs/1812.09005 (accessed 29 October 2026)
5. HubSpot, "API overview", HubSpot Developer Documentation. https://developers.hubspot.com/docs/api/overview (accessed 29 October 2026)