HubGrader is a free tool that analyzes how you actually use HubSpot, assigns a grade, and benchmarks you against other users. It pulls in your real activity data, highlights strengths and gaps, and gives you concrete recommendations so you can turn “we own HubSpot” into “we’re genuinely getting value from HubSpot.”
Most teams, including economic development organizations and business support groups, underestimate how much value they’re leaving on the table in HubSpot. They may log in daily, send emails, and manage a pipeline, but they rarely see a clear, objective picture of their usage. HubGrader changes that by turning raw activity into a single, understandable score backed by detailed context.
At a high level, HubGrader connects to your HubSpot account, analyzes historical events, and shows how deeply you are using different HubSpot products and features. A test account, for example, might show 167,781 total historical events. That big number is no longer just a mystery; HubGrader translates it into engagement metrics, strength areas, and practical suggestions.
One of the most useful aspects is that HubGrader looks at you as an individual HubSpot user. This is not just a portal health score. It’s a view of how you personally use the platform, where you excel, and where you may be under‑utilizing key tools like automations, reporting, or service features.
HubGrader is currently in public beta (v0.9.1), and it’s already seeing strong adoption. According to its creator, Dharmesh Shah (HubSpot’s founder and CTO), over 9,000 people have used the product, and thousands have connected their LinkedIn profiles. It has quickly become a top app in the HubSpot App Marketplace, already ranking around #85.
For busy practitioners, that momentum matters. A tool with an active user base and daily improvements is much more likely to keep pace with HubSpot’s evolving feature set. HubGrader’s roadmap is shaped by community feedback, which means the insights it surfaces will only get sharper over time.
Finally, HubGrader isn’t only about introspection. It positions your HubSpot usage in a broader context: how you stack up against peers, which features others rely on, and what “great” usage actually looks like. That’s powerful for leaders who want to justify their HubSpot investment or coach a team toward better adoption.
When you first connect a HubSpot account, HubGrader ingests and analyzes your activity history. One of the opening metrics you see is total events over time. In a sample test environment, that might be a figure like 167,781 past events—every email send, form submission, page view, ticket update, and more that HubSpot tracks.
On its own, a large event count just tells you that “things are happening.” HubGrader goes further by translating those events into engagement signals. It shows you which HubSpot products you actually use—Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, Service Hub, Operations Hub, and so on—and how active you are in each. For example, you might discover that 80% of your events come from Sales Hub while Marketing Hub barely registers.
You also get visibility into feature usage. Instead of just saying “you use Sales Hub,” HubGrader breaks down which specific tools show up in your activity footprint. Are you sending sequences regularly? Logging calls? Building custom reports? Using playbooks or ticketing? The app counts not only how many features you’ve touched but also how often you use them.
These feature‑level insights are particularly useful for teams who bought HubSpot for several reasons—marketing automation, service tickets, CRM—and then settled into only one primary workflow. HubGrader can make that imbalance obvious. If your event history shows thousands of email sends but almost no automation or reporting activity, you know exactly where to focus next.
Another helpful pane in HubGrader summarizes your engagement levels, top strengths, and recommendations. Engagement levels summarize whether your current activity is light, healthy, or heavy relative to others. Strengths identify the areas where you’re ahead—for instance, consistent deal updates or diligent ticket management. Recommendations highlight gaps, such as “You rarely use workflows” or “Your account shows little form activity; consider capturing more inbound interest.”
This combination—events, feature usage, and product‑level insights—turns HubSpot’s raw telemetry into an approachable performance review. Instead of manually pulling usage reports or guessing which tools your team relies on, you can see it at a glance. That’s especially valuable for economic development teams managing project pipelines, outreach campaigns, and business support tickets in a single CRM.
Finally, HubGrader includes basic timeline and date views, allowing you to tie your activity back to specific periods. You can see whether your grade improved after you launched a new retention program, rolled out a new email sequence, or trained staff on a new feature. Over time, that feedback loop makes HubSpot adoption feel less like a black box and more like a measurable, improvable practice.
Many users have more than one HubSpot portal. You might manage a main production portal, a sandbox, and perhaps an older instance from a previous organization. HubGrader’s “By Portal” view helps you understand how each of these environments is being used, and how they relate to one another.
In the “By Portal” breakdown, you can see which portals are most active, which are effectively dormant, and how your grade varies across them. For example, your primary economic development portal may show a strong grade thanks to steady deal updates and email engagement, while an older sandbox portal sits at the bottom with minimal recent activity.
This multi‑portal context is particularly useful now that HubGrader supports linking multiple HubSpot accounts across multiple login emails. As long as you can verify each inbox via a secure email link, you can pull together a more complete picture of your past usage. That’s helpful for professionals who’ve worked across different organizations over the years and want to demonstrate a consistent history of HubSpot adoption.
HubGrader also offers a time‑based view, sometimes described as “By Week” or bi‑weekly usage. This lets you see how your activity and grade trend over time, rather than just a snapshot. You might notice that your usage spikes during key campaign periods—like a major BRE survey launch or a new initiative to recruit employers—and then drops off.
By examining week‑over‑week patterns, you can answer questions like:
Even simple observations can be powerful. If you see a steady decline in weekly events after a major project wraps up, that’s a signal to design new campaigns or internal processes that keep data flowing. Conversely, if your weekly usage and grade climb after a training session, you have evidence that your enablement efforts worked.
For leaders, these comparative views support better planning. You can decide which portal should be the “system of record” based on real usage, identify where to sunset old portals, and track whether new policies or incentives are actually changing behavior inside HubSpot.
Ultimately, the combination of portal comparisons and weekly trends transforms HubGrader from a one‑time score into an ongoing adoption dashboard. You’re not just graded once; you’re coached over time as your usage evolves.
One of HubGrader’s most motivating features is its leaderboard. Rather than grading you in isolation, it shows where you stand relative to other HubSpot users. You can see who is ahead of you, who is just behind you, and even explore what top performers are doing differently.
The standard leaderboard highlights individual users with high grades and strong usage patterns. Each row typically includes their name, profile picture, and a link to their LinkedIn profile. This makes it easy to recognize familiar names in the HubSpot community or discover new practitioners whose setup you might want to learn from.
HubGrader also supports country‑level leaderboards. Inspired partly by global competitions like the World Cup, these rankings show how different countries stack up in terms of HubSpot usage among users who’ve graded their accounts. For instance, a country with only one highly active user might sit at the top for average grade, while larger countries like the United States or India rise to the top by number of users.
There are a few important details about how these leaderboards work. Only users who have graded their account and connected their LinkedIn profiles are eligible to appear. That filters out anonymous or partial data and focuses on real practitioners who are ready to showcase their usage publicly. As more people connect, the leaderboards become more representative of the broader HubSpot community.
From a practical standpoint, the leaderboard offers both inspiration and benchmarking. If you see that your grade is 10–15 points below peers in your region or industry, that’s a clear prompt to explore your recommendations panel, ask the AI chat for improvement ideas, and experiment with underused features. Conversely, if you’re near the top, you can use your profile to demonstrate expertise to employers, partners, or clients.
For economic development organizations, the leaderboard can also be a conversation starter. A staff member who appears on the board can demonstrate that your organization doesn’t just own software licenses—it actively uses CRM tools to manage projects, business retention visits, and community outreach. That kind of operational maturity can be compelling when you’re coordinating with regional partners or justifying budget.
In short, the leaderboard turns HubSpot usage into a friendly competition. It nudges you to move beyond “good enough” and explore what the very best users are doing, while still keeping the focus on actionable learning rather than vanity metrics.
Raw data and scores are useful, but only if they lead to better decisions. HubGrader addresses this with a built‑in AI chat panel that sits alongside your grade, usage charts, and leaderboard. Instead of leaving you to interpret everything alone, the AI helps you translate those insights into specific next steps.
You can ask straightforward questions such as, “What can I do to improve my grade?” or “What are the top five features I use most often?” The AI responds using the context of your HubGrader data—events, feature usage, and engagement patterns—so its suggestions are tailored to your account, not generic advice.
It’s also helpful for identifying what you’ve stopped using. A common question is, “What features have I used in the past but not recently?” The AI can highlight tools that used to appear in your event history but no longer do. For example, maybe your team was once diligent about logging calls or updating ticket properties, but that behavior tapered off over the last quarter.
With that information, you can design targeted interventions. If you’ve stopped using a feature that clearly supported your goals—like workflows that sent follow‑up emails after business retention visits—you can schedule a quick training refresher or adjust your internal playbooks to bring that capability back into everyday use.
The AI chat is also a gentle on‑ramp for exploring unfamiliar features. If HubGrader shows that you barely use lists, campaigns, or knowledge base tools, you can ask, “How do advanced users typically use these features?” The AI can then outline concrete workflows: segmenting employers by risk, setting up service tickets for business support requests, or creating dashboards for project pipelines.
Because the AI is embedded directly in the HubGrader interface, you don’t have to switch tools or guess at what the charts mean. You can move from insight (“Our weekly events just dropped by 30%”) to action (“What should we experiment with this week to increase activity?”) in a single place.
Over time, using the AI chat regularly turns HubGrader into more than a static report. It becomes a coaching system that nudges you toward more complete and effective HubSpot adoption, aligned with your real‑world objectives.
HubGrader is not only about private analytics; it also gives you a way to publicly showcase your HubSpot expertise. By connecting your LinkedIn profile, you can display a visual badge that highlights your HubGrader grade and percentile ranking directly on your LinkedIn presence.
Once connected, HubGrader adds a small LinkedIn icon and grade indicator to your profile within the app. It also associates your HubSpot accounts with your identity, showing which portals you’re tied to and what kind of work you do in them. This can include roles like managing pipelines, configuring automations, or overseeing service operations.
Thousands of users have already linked LinkedIn, according to public updates from HubGrader’s creator. That early adoption suggests that professionals see real value in signaling their HubSpot proficiency in a trusted, visible place. For CRM admins, consultants, and growth leaders, a strong HubGrader score becomes a quick credibility marker.
For economic development leaders and staff, showcasing HubSpot expertise on LinkedIn has an additional benefit: it demonstrates that your organization treats CRM as core infrastructure, not an afterthought. When partners, site selectors, or local businesses view your profile, they see evidence that you manage relationships and projects with modern, data‑driven tools.
HubGrader’s recent support for linking multiple HubSpot accounts across multiple login emails strengthens this story. If you’ve used HubSpot at different organizations over the years, you can verify each account by email and pull that history into a single profile. That gives you a more complete narrative of your experience, rather than starting over each time you join a new team.
You can explore the broader community, too. On the leaderboard, every entry that has LinkedIn connected gives you a quick way to visit that user’s profile. This makes it easier to follow power users, join relevant conversations, and learn how others are configuring HubSpot for their contexts.
In practice, the combination of grading, benchmarking, and LinkedIn showcasing turns HubGrader into both a personal development tool and a professional branding asset. You’re not just improving your grade in private; you’re building a visible track record of HubSpot excellence that can support your career, your organization, and your community.
To learn more about HubGrader and see public discussions, you can browse posts from its creator, Dharmesh Shah, on LinkedIn, such as his announcement of the public beta and leaderboard features at LinkedIn and his update on country leaderboards at LinkedIn.