Using HubSpot's 'Projects' for Project Management: Pros & Cons

At a glance: HubSpot Projects is a glorified task management feature that helps small businesses navigate project management. Projects provide small marketing businesses with an easy, affordable way to manage their tasks, but other service businesses are not the targeted users.

HubSpot is one of the world’s most popular CRMs, but it’s not a bonafide project management tool.

However, the powerful platform offers a beneficial feature, the fittingly named HubSpot ‘Projects’, that provides teams with tools to manage everything around their project tasks.

We reviewed Projects, and it’s good news for startups and small marketing firms– 

The built-in project templates will save a lot of time and help increase the team’s knowledge of inbound marketing best practices.

Outside of marketing, Projects may or may not fit the bill for HubSpot project management, since it doesn’t offer key features like time tracking and connected invoicing. 

Cut to the chase– Read on to see what HubSpot Projects actually does. We’ll break down the pros & cons of using this task management feature for your daily project management needs.

What You Need to Know:

• What is HubSpot Projects?
• What can you do with HubSpot Projects?
• Pros
• Cons
• What users say
• Final Verdict

What is HubSpot Projects?

HubSpot’s ‘Projects’ is a task management tool that helps you plan and organize your team’s work in one place. Projects give HubSpot teams an easy, organized way to collaborate on tasks and manage deadlines. 

The Projects feature was originally launched in 2016 and has remained relatively the same since.

You can only access the Projects feature with a Professional or Enterprise subscription. Currently, ‘Projects’ can be found under the Marketing Tab. After that, hover over Planning & Strategy, and you’ll see it.  

What can you do with HubSpot Projects? 

HubSpot Projects helps you create, assign*, and track tasks around all your projects with handy, structured lists. You can easily share all the information you need for each task by uploading documents and commenting on the status. This makes HubSpot Projects an excellent collaboration tool.

In Projects, your team can easily view all tasks, tie those tasks to projects, and assign due dates. 

You can create your project from scratch or use one of HubSpot’s project templates which are great for saving time. We also like that you can learn a lot from these templates about inbound marketing tactics, in general. 

Next up, give your project a name, list out your tasks in order, and include any details and attachments that you need. You’ll also name each task and can engage in discussion around those tasks with mentions. That way, each team member will get an alert immediately when their collaboration is needed.

*Note that you can only assign tasks to people who have marketing access in your HubSpot account.

Pros 

• Templates galore!

HubSpot is known for their handy templates and overall helpful content that they extend to this project's feature in full force. HubSpot’s pre-populated project templates take you step by step through virtually any marketing project you can think of, like web redesign and launching a new email campaign.

These project templates were created by HubSpot’s own inbound marketing experts with best practices in mind. They’re essentially an extension of the HubSpot Academy, which means you can learn a lot about marketing just by going through them.   

You can also use past projects as templates, which is useful when you want to replicate successes. 

You can even build your template and push it to a different HubSpot portal, so that your customers can benefit from it, too. All in all, the wealth of super-useful templates is the best part of HubSpot Projects.

• You’re already in HubSpot anyway

You’re already using HubSpot to manage your sales and marketing, so you won’t have to jump to another tool when it’s time to lay out tasks for each project. Keeping your project management within the HubSpot environment can help you increase productivity by cutting down on multitasking. 

It’s also mentally easier for your team to stay within the same platform day to day; you won’t have to train anyone on a new, fancy software tool.

• Zero learning curve

Unlike onboarding a full-blown project management software solution, there is zero learning curve for HubSpot Projects. Anyone can pick up on its intuitive list functionality. You can get started immediately, no matter your tech IQ.

• Mentions & document sharing make it easy

Like Asana, PSOhub, and other project management tools, you can use mentions (i.e. “@JohnDoe”) to get a message to team members you need to communicate with to collaborate and execute the task at hand. 

Make sure everyone has their alerts turned on, and no one will be left out in the dark again. Share whatever documentation you need to by attaching it to individual tasks or to the project details.

Cons

• There are no project planning tools like Gantt charts or Kanban boards

Comprehensive project management is about more than just tasks, with planning as one of its most important disciplines. Besides a task list, HubSpot Projects doesn’t give you any standard project planning tools like Kanban boards or a Gantt chart. 

For many users, these tools are non-negotiable, which means they’ll have to onboard a more comprehensive project management solution. Doing so will also enable planning tools to ‘talk’ to task management, contracts, etc so that all your project data is interconnected.

HubSpot does offer a couple of project management templates (which you can find here and here) that have some planning charts. 

But they’re not ‘smart’, like say, a real-time Gantt chart in a project management tool. This will force you into a siloed data situation that can create more work for you and your team to keep track of. 

• Not available with the Starter version

For small startups, it would be cheaper to onboard even the most expensive project management software than to upgrade to a Professional HubSpot license. Since Projects is not available with Starter, it will be out of reach for many users anyway.

• Templates geared toward marketing projects, specifically

Don’t get us wrong, the project templates in HubSpot Projects are great, and you can learn a lot from them. However, they’re centered around marketing, specifically. So if you’re a consulting firm or a creative agency, for example, they’re not targeted to those needs, and they’re less applicable to a wider spectrum of projects.

• You can’t track time to individual tasks.

Time tracking isn’t available with the Projects feature, which can make accurately tracking your billable hours difficult. Businesses that don’t adopt a time-tracking tool will suffer as they grow without keeping track of what needs to be billed and what doesn’t.

• No connected invoicing

Since you can’t track time to tasks or projects in HubSpot Projects, this means you can’t use connected invoicing based on the time you need to bill. If you charge by billable hour, this isn’t the best system for you.

• No dependencies

Software developers and content creators, especially, deal in task-related dependencies in their daily work. So do designers and fit-out firms. It’s important to know which tasks carry dependencies since the project can in effect get stuck if someone misses a deadline or a supplier falls through. 

HubSpot Projects doesn’t offer dependencies in their task management tools, so you’ll have to invent a way to flag this on your individual tasks. You could add it in the task details, but the point is, that the functionality for dependencies isn’t built-in. 

What users say

It was difficult to find any HubSpot Projects users who have stuck with the tool in the long term, and we’ve never heard of teams of more than five who use it. 

We’ve seen on Reddit and other forums the same sentiments we’ve discussed here– 

HubSpot Projects just simply does not offer enough to solve all or even most of your project management needs, even for most small businesses. 

That’s why we recommend Projects for solopreneurs, startups, and small marketing firms, basically teams that don’t require an actual project manager.

Final Verdict

Who HubSpot ‘Projects’ is good for: Solopreneurs, small startups, small marketing teams

Who probably shouldn’t use Projects: Teams of 5 or more, teams with multiple contracts and projects at once, service businesses outside of marketing

Pros:

• Awesome project templates
• Stay in HubSpot
• No learning curve
• Easy collaboration & organization

Cons:

• No time tracking
• No project planning tools
• Not available in the Starter version
• Project templates specifically for marketing
• No task dependencies

Project management, as a discipline, contains many moving parts. HubSpot Projects doesn’t have the capability of managing all those parts. Businesses that are growing will inevitably have to switch to something with more all-in-one functionality, especially if they want to be more efficient. 

However, for a small marketing startup with just a couple of active clients at one time, HubSpot Projects can do the trick. Everything surrounding the task management is good to go. Where you’ll run into trouble is when you want to have planning tools, contracts, and invoices connected.

Our take? All-in-one project management tools that offer a two-way integration with HubSpot are better suited, and the most popular ones are pretty affordable. 

At the end of the day, it makes more sense for businesses that aren’t marketers to onboard a tried-and-true project management tool to grow with them from the jump.