HubSpot alternatives

Almost everyone who leaves HubSpot leaves at the same place: the step from Sales Hub Starter at $20 per seat a month to Professional at $100, which also carries a mandatory $1,500 onboarding fee and an annual contract. The free CRM is genuinely useful and Starter is fair value, so the question is rarely "what is cheaper than HubSpot" — it is "which part of HubSpot were we actually using". Each tool below answers a different version of that.

Pipedrive is the answer when the honest reply is "only the pipeline". It is a sales-first CRM — a visual deal board, email sync, automation — with none of the marketing and service hubs attached, and its tiers climb gently from $24 per seat a month rather than jumping, so the Professional cliff never arrives. The trade-off is scope: lead generation, projects, campaigns and web visitor tracking are paid add-ons, so a shortlist priced on the entry tier alone understates the bill, and there is no free plan to fall back on. Best for a small sales team that wants reps to actually keep the CRM updated.

Zoho CRM is the answer when you want HubSpot's depth without HubSpot's price. Custom modules, workflow automation and a wide suite of adjacent apps are all there, and it scales further up-market than Pipedrive does. You pay for it in setup time and interface polish: Zoho expects to be configured, and somebody has to own that. Check the price in your own currency before committing — its published rates vary by region and we have not been able to confirm a single comparable figure, so treat any number quoted elsewhere as local. Best for a team with an administrator and a process worth modelling.

Salesforce Sales Cloud is the move only if HubSpot's data model is the constraint. Starter Suite at $25 per user a month reads like a HubSpot Starter substitute, but the reason to choose Salesforce sits above it, in Pro Suite and Core at $195 and the customisation, reporting and app ecosystem that come with them. The trade-off is severe: it is the least approachable tool here — we score it 2 out of 5 for ease of use against HubSpot's 4 — and it expects an administrator or an implementation partner. Best for an organisation whose CRM has to model something unusual; for a five-person team it is a step in the wrong direction.

Brevo is the answer when the part of HubSpot you were paying for was the email. It is a marketing platform first — email, SMS and WhatsApp with automation — priced by sending volume rather than per seat, from $9 a month, which is a different shape of bill entirely: contacts are not what you pay for, sends are. The trade-off is that its built-in CRM is basic, so it replaces Marketing Hub rather than Sales Hub. Best for a small team whose pipeline fits in a spreadsheet but whose mailing list does not.

folk is the answer for relationship work that is not a sales process. It is deliberately light — contacts, shared lists, enrichment and sequences, with the cleanest interface here at 5 out of 5 for ease of use — and it suits agencies, founders, recruiters and partnership teams who track people rather than push deals through stages. Standard is $30 per member a month, with no free plan and a two-week trial. The trade-off is reporting: if you need a forecast, this is not the tool. Best for a small team managing relationships across sales, hiring and partnerships.

If HubSpot's free CRM still covers you, none of this is urgent — staying on it and revisiting when a specific limit blocks you beats migrating ahead of a price rise you have not reached. The cheaper and free lists below are computed only from pricing we have checked in the last 90 days, so a tool missing from them is one whose price we could not confirm, not one that is expensive.