The best HubSpot alternatives, compared honestly
HubSpot's 2024 move to Core Seats was genuinely good for buyers: seat minimums went away and view-only seats are free and unlimited. What did not change is the meter underneath. Marketing Hub runs three at once, and only one of them is the price you see quoted: seats, marketing contacts, and a one-time onboarding fee the catalogue calls required. The contact meter is a ratchet. It goes up immediately and automatically, and by HubSpot's own terms it cannot come back down until your renewal date. This page compares 8 alternatives on one identical anchor, five people who need edit access and 10,000 contacts they intend to email, with every price read from the vendor's own page on 20 August 2026.
Nothing here replaces all of HubSpot. Leaving it is an unbundle, so pick by which half you are escaping:
- You need the marketing half → Brevo: priced on monthly email volume, not list size, so 10,000 contacts costs nothing extra.
- You need the CRM half, hosted → Zoho CRM at EUR 23 per user per month, or Attio if the data model matters more than the suite.
- You want it on your own server → Odoo (LGPL-3.0, One App Free is unlimited users), EspoCRM or SuiteCRM (both AGPL-3.0).
- Watch out for → ActiveCampaign, the one popular alternative that runs the same contact meter, and is harsher at the low end.
Why teams look elsewhere
What pushes teams off HubSpot
HubSpot is a very good product with an unusual billing shape. Every item below comes from HubSpot's own Product and Services Catalog, knowledge base or terms of service, not from a review site.
The contact meter only ratchets upward
The catalogue is explicit: designating contacts as non-marketing takes effect "only at the start of the following month or your contract renewal date", and "your contact tier pricing cannot be downgraded until your contract renewal date". Crossing a tier the other way is instant: "if you exceed your marketing contacts tier at any time, you will be billed immediately." The Customer Terms of Service back it up: "You are not permitted to downgrade your Subscription Service during your Current Term."
Forms put new contacts on the meter by default
HubSpot's own doc on default marketing statuses says forms, both HubSpot and non-HubSpot, create contacts as marketing contacts, while imports, chatflows, the mobile app, logged email and any integration or API default to non-marketing. So the one channel whose entire job is generating leads is the channel that puts every new record onto the billable meter. A campaign that works raises the bill without anyone deciding to spend money.
Onboarding is required, not offered
The catalogue words are "Onboarding is required for a one-time fee of $3,000" on Marketing Hub Professional and $7,000 on Enterprise, with $1,500 on Sales Hub Professional and $3,500 on Sales Hub and Service Hub Enterprise. The pricing-page FAQ adds that you will "automatically be charged for onboarding". It is not a line you can decline at checkout.
There is no step between Starter and Professional
Five people on Marketing Hub Starter is 5 × $20 = $100 a month. The next edition up, for the same five people, is $990 a month plus $3,000 onboarding. First-year cost goes from $1,200 to $20,880, a 17x step, and the trigger is usually one capability (real multi-step workflow automation) rather than growth.
Your send limit is derived from the contact tier
The monthly marketing-email allowance is 5x your contact tier on Starter, 10x on Professional and 20x on Enterprise. So the tier is not only a price, it is your email budget. Marking contacts non-marketing to save money also shrinks how many emails you are allowed to send, which makes the obvious cost-control move self-defeating.
Credits became a third meter in 2025
HubSpot Credits went live for all Pro and Enterprise customers on 2 June 2025, bundling 500 credits on Starter, 3,000 on Professional and 5,000 on Enterprise. They reset monthly and do not roll over. The published consumption rates on the current pricing page include 50 credits per conversation resolved and 10 credits per smart-properties run, with top-ups sold per thousand.
The arithmetic
What five people and 10,000 contacts actually cost
Marketing Hub Professional, five people who need edit access, 10,000 marketing contacts. Contacts are sold in 5,000 blocks on Professional, so 10,000 means buying up to the 12,000 tier. Every figure is USD from HubSpot's Product and Services Catalog.
| Line item | Monthly | Year 1 | Year 2 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Marketing Hub Professional base, 3 Core Seats included | $890 | $10,680 | $10,680 |
| 2 additional Core Seats at $50 | $100 | $1,200 | $1,200 |
| 8,000 extra marketing contacts, 2 blocks of 5K at $250 | $500 | $6,000 | $6,000 |
| Required onboarding, one time | n/a | $3,000 | $0 |
| Total | $1,490 | $20,880 | $17,880 |
The number quoted for this configuration in most write-ups is $890 a month, or $10,680 a year. The first-year bill is 1.96x that, and $10,200 of year one, 49%, sits in the two meters the headline never mentions. Read the list line on its own too: 8,000 extra marketing contacts cost $6,000 a year, which is more than the entire annual bill of most of the alternatives below. USD list prices, no discount assumed, verified 20 August 2026.
The shortlist
8 HubSpot alternatives worth evaluating
The ranking rewards a bill that is a function of one thing you control, an entry tier that is genuinely usable, and nothing one-time that is mandatory. Feature depth breaks ties, it does not win them. Read the honest frame first: HubSpot sells a CRM and a marketing-automation platform on one bill, and nothing here replaces both, so most readers will end up with two tools. Each entry says which half it covers.
The most important finding on this page: Brevo's pricing widget has one control, monthly email volume. Contacts are an allowance attached to the tier, and from the 20,000-email tier upward that allowance is 500,000 contacts. So the 10,000-contact list that costs $6,000 a year at HubSpot costs nothing here. Twenty thousand emails a month is EUR 25.25 monthly on yearly billing, EUR 303 a year. Free forever at 300 emails a day, no card, and the FAQ says plainly there are no setup or hidden fees. Weakness: the seat cliff. Nothing exists between EUR 25 and Professional at EUR 449.08 a month for a team that needs five logins, so Brevo is cheapest when one person runs marketing. Removing Brevo branding is a paid add-on and SMS is separate credits.
A full sales CRM with workflow automation, forecasting and deep customisation, billed on seats and nothing else. EU list, per user per month excluding VAT: Standard EUR 14 yearly, Professional EUR 23, Enterprise EUR 40, Ultimate EUR 52. Five people on Professional is EUR 1,380 a year, and 10,000 contacts does not change it. Free forever for 3 users. Onboarding is optional: Jumpstart is priced at $200 an hour with a 10-hour minimum, and the FAQ confirms it is a paid service you can decline. Weakness: the free tier dies at 5,000 records long before three users is the constraint, the value case assumes you buy into the Zoho suite, and Zoho's own marketing-automation product is priced by contacts, so moving the marketing half to Zoho reintroduces the meter you just left.
LGPL-3.0 (confirmed in the repo licence and in addons/crm's own manifest), 53.8k stars, last commit 2026-08-20. One App Free is EUR 0 for one app with unlimited users, forever, and CRM qualifies, which is the strongest free offer in this set by a distance. Standard is EUR 11.90 per user per month billed yearly, so five people is EUR 714 in year one. Weakness: read the footnote. That discount "is valid for 12 months, for initial users ordered", so year two is EUR 894. More importantly, adding a second app ends One App Free, and email marketing is a second app. In-App-Purchase credits for SMS and lead generation are a real second meter, version upgrades and support are cut from Community, and the US list price is roughly double the EU one.
AGPL-3.0, 3.3k stars, last commit 2026-08-18. A lightweight, metadata-driven CRM you extend by configuration rather than code. Self-hosted core is free, and the Advanced Pack (reports, BPM, workflows) is EUR 395 a year per instance, a number that does not move when you hire. Cloud Basic is EUR 12.90 per user per month with a 3-user minimum, so five people is EUR 774 a year, and every cloud plan includes the full extension catalogue. Weakness, and it inverts the usual open-core intuition: the free self-hosted build has no reports, no workflows and no BPM, because those live in paid extensions, while the cloud plans include them. Extensions are separately licensed and are not AGPL.
55.2k stars, last commit 2026-08-19, a modern object-model CRM with REST and GraphQL APIs and workflows, and every plan states records are unlimited. Self-hosted Pro is $0 per user per month for up to 5 workspaces, community support only; cloud Pro is $9 per user per month yearly, so five seats is $540 a year. Weakness: self-hosting does not escape per-seat pricing where it counts. Self-hosted Organization is still $19 per user per month, and that is the plan that unlocks SSO and row-level permissions, confirmed in the docs. The licence needs care too: AGPL-3.0 with an explicit commercial carve-out, gated by @license Enterprise markers on individual files rather than a segregated ee/ directory, which is harder to audit. And there is no email-marketing product at all.
A data-model-first CRM aimed at startups. The free plan gives 3 seats and 50,000 records, which is fifty times HubSpot's free contact cap. Plus is $35 per seat per month billed yearly, so five seats is $2,100 a year, and 10,000 contacts sits comfortably inside the Plus record cap. Worth a correction: listicles still quote Attio at $29 and $69; the live page today says $35 and $79 on yearly billing, and the euro prices are a separate list, not a conversion. Weakness: two secondary meters. Records step at 50,000, 250,000 and 1,000,000, and every AI action burns credits, with the workspace-credit top-up price not printed as text on the page. No marketing automation and no self-host.
EU list excluding VAT, per user per month on yearly billing: Lite EUR 14, Growth EUR 39, Premium EUR 59, Ultimate EUR 79. Five Growth seats is EUR 2,340 a year, or about EUR 2,500 with the Campaigns email add-on. Weakness, and it is a substantial one: the 2025 repackage renamed every plan and introduced caps where the top tier previously had none, taking custom fields from unlimited to 500, reports per user to 500, and teams, visibility groups and permission sets to 25 each. Record caps also change unit between tiers (5,000 per user on Growth, 15,000 per company on Premium). There is no free plan, and five add-ons stack separately on top.
AGPL-3.0 on both lines, v7 and v8, maintained by SalesAgility. There is no seat-priced SaaS and no contact meter at all: self-managed is GBP 0 for any number of people and any number of records. What SalesAgility sells is services, and the prices are published: managed hosting from GBP 50 a month, Standard support GBP 1,200 for 10 hours, SuiteASSURED from GBP 3,350 a year for warranty, patent protection and indemnity. Nothing is cut from Community, which is why it stays on the list despite its age. Weakness: batched, infrequent releases (7.15.2 and 8.10.2 both landed 2026-07-31), a SugarCRM 6 lineage that shows, and a confusing two-repo v7 and v8 split.
The counterexample: ActiveCampaign runs the same meter
Worth naming rather than ranking, because it is the one popular HubSpot alternative that bills contacts the same way HubSpot does, with seats capped per plan on top. At 1,000 contacts Starter is $15 a month; at 10,000 contacts the same plan is $149 a month and still gives you one seat, roughly a 10x step for a 10x list. Sends are a derived second meter too, capped at 10x the contact limit on Starter and Plus. The only plan that fits five editors and 10,000 contacts is Enterprise at $589 a month billed annually, $7,068 a year. To its credit, and this is the real contrast: ActiveCampaign publishes "no setup costs or hidden fees", offers free migration, and its FAQ says you can move contact bands without penalties, which is the opposite of HubSpot's no-mid-term-downgrade rule.
Deliberately left out, and the reasons are part of the finding: Adobe Marketo Engage, which lists four packages and a "Get pricing" button instead of a number, so it cannot be placed on the anchor; Keap, which publishes a base price and a contact slider but states that "required implementation services" are needed and puts the amount behind a phone number, so it runs all three of HubSpot's meters and prices only two; and Salesforce's SMB suites, which do publish per-user prices but list "Marketing Email Sends" as an add-on with no published price and no contact or send figure anywhere, so the seat price is a floor rather than a total. Salesforce deserves one mention regardless: Free Suite is $0 for 2 users with no contract and no card, which is the only genuinely free, contract-free production CRM of its size, and a reader coming off HubSpot's free tier should know it exists.
Side by side
HubSpot alternatives compared
The anchor is the same for every row: five people who need edit access, 10,000 contacts they intend to email, list prices, year one including any mandatory one-time fee. Currencies are never converted. Several of these vendors serve a different number rather than a converted number by region, so each row carries the currency the vendor published. Verified 20 August 2026.
Read this caveat before the table. The bottom of this list are CRMs, not marketing-automation platforms. Zoho, Pipedrive, Attio, Twenty, EspoCRM and SuiteCRM will not send your campaign email. The like-for-like rows are Brevo and ActiveCampaign; everything else is a CRM plus an email service provider you still have to add.
| Tool | Year 1 for the anchor | Currency | Contacts a separate meter? | Mandatory one-time fee | Free tier: the limit that bites | Self-host | Licence |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| HubSpot Marketing Hub Pro | 20,880 | USD | Yes, 5,000-contact blocks at $250/mo | $3,000 | 1,000 contacts, 2 users, 1 pipeline | ✗ | Proprietary |
| Brevo | 303 (1 operator) / 5,389 (5 logins) | EUR | ✓ no, priced on email volume | none | 300 emails per day | ✗ | Proprietary |
| Zoho CRM | 1,380 (Professional) | EUR | ✓ no | none | 5,000 records, 3 users | ✗ | Proprietary |
| Odoo CRM | 0 (One App Free) / 714 Standard | EUR | ✓ no | none | One app only; a second app ends free | ✓ | LGPL-3.0 |
| EspoCRM | 395 self-hosted / 774 cloud | EUR | ✓ no | none | No free tier, 30-day trial | ✓ | AGPL-3.0 |
| Twenty | 0 self-hosted / 540 cloud | USD | ✓ no | none | No free cloud tier; self-host capped at 5 workspaces | ✓ | AGPL-3.0 with a per-file commercial carve-out |
| Attio | 2,100 (Plus) | USD | ✓ no, but records and AI credits step | none | 50,000 records, 3 seats | ✗ | Proprietary |
| Pipedrive | ~2,500 (Growth + Campaigns) | EUR | ✓ no, but leads and deals are capped | none | No free plan at all | ✗ | Proprietary |
| SuiteCRM | 0 self-managed | GBP | ✓ no | none | No cloud tier to be free on | ✓ | AGPL-3.0 |
| ActiveCampaign (counterexample, not ranked) | 7,068 (Enterprise) | USD | Yes, contacts are the primary meter | none | No free plan, 14-day trial | ✗ | Proprietary |
Two readings worth stating out loud. HubSpot's mandatory onboarding fee alone, $3,000, is larger than the entire year-one bill of every option below Brevo on this table: the fee you cannot decline costs more than most of the alternatives cost to run. And the 8,000 extra marketing contacts alone cost $6,000 a year, more than Attio, Zoho, EspoCRM, Odoo and Twenty charge for five seats combined. Two columns were deliberately left out: integration counts (unverifiable and gameable) and AI features (every vendor renamed something into one during 2025 and 2026, so the column would be noise). The credit meters that do matter are covered in the prose above. Methodology note: HubSpot, ActiveCampaign, Pipedrive and Salesforce all serve prices only after JavaScript runs or refuse non-browser requests outright, so these figures were read from a rendered browser and, for HubSpot, cross-checked against its legal catalogue. Pricing changes often; check each vendor for current terms.
Official pages: HubSpot catalogue · HubSpot pricing · Brevo · Zoho CRM · Odoo · EspoCRM · Twenty · Attio · Pipedrive · SuiteCRM · ActiveCampaign
A fair call
When HubSpot is still the right choice
The switching cost is not the export, it is the rebuild. Your records come out cleanly; your automation does not. HubSpot's own export doc says workflows come out as a spreadsheet of metadata plus a PNG of the diagram, and landing pages come out as raw HTML rather than portable templates. Budget for reimplementing every workflow by hand, and remember that leaving HubSpot usually means buying two products instead of one.
HubSpot is still right if…
- You genuinely need CRM and marketing automation on one bill with one data model. Running a CRM plus a separate ESP means owning the sync between them forever, and that integration is real work that never finishes.
- Your list is small relative to your team. The contact meter is what makes HubSpot expensive, so a 20-person sales org with 2,000 marketing contacts is a very different bill from a 3-person team with 80,000.
- You are on Sales Hub or Service Hub only. Neither carries the marketing-contacts meter. Most "HubSpot is expensive" writing blurs the hubs together, and Sales Hub Professional at $100 per seat is a normal seat-priced CRM.
- The 2024 seat model fits you. Seat minimums are gone and view-only seats are free and unlimited, so people who only read reports genuinely cost nothing. That was a real improvement and it is worth crediting.
Look elsewhere if…
- Your list grows faster than your revenue: the contact meter ratchets up automatically and cannot come back down until renewal, so a good quarter of lead generation is a permanent price rise for the rest of the term.
- You mostly need the email half: Brevo prices on send volume, so the size of your list stops being a billing question entirely.
- You mostly need the CRM half: Zoho, Attio and Pipedrive all bill seats and only seats.
- A required one-time fee is a blocker on principle: none of the eight alternatives here charges one, and HubSpot's is $3,000 before you have sent a single email.
- The data has to stay on your own infrastructure: Odoo (LGPL-3.0), EspoCRM, Twenty and SuiteCRM (all AGPL-3.0 family) self-host, and SuiteCRM gates nothing behind a paid edition.
Common questions
Common questions about HubSpot alternatives
What is a HubSpot marketing contact, and what does it cost?
A marketing contact is any contact you are allowed to send marketing email or ads to. Everyone else is a non-marketing contact, is free, and cannot be emailed by a campaign. Marketing Hub Professional includes 2,000 marketing contacts and sells more in blocks of 5,000 at 250 US dollars per month; Enterprise includes 10,000 and sells blocks of 10,000 at 100 dollars per month; Starter includes 1,000 and sells blocks of 1,000 at 50 dollars per month. So 10,000 marketing contacts on Professional is 500 dollars a month on top of the seat bill, which is 6,000 dollars a year for the list alone.
Can I lower my HubSpot bill by marking contacts as non-marketing?
Not immediately, and not mid-contract. Setting a contact to non-marketing takes effect only at the start of the following month or your contract renewal date, whichever comes first, and HubSpot's own catalogue states that your contact tier pricing cannot be downgraded until your contract renewal date. Crossing a tier upward, by contrast, bills you immediately. The meter is asymmetric: up is automatic, down waits for renewal, and the Customer Terms of Service make that a contract term rather than a setting. That asymmetry is the single most useful thing to understand before you run an import.
Is HubSpot's onboarding fee optional?
No, on Professional and Enterprise. HubSpot's product catalogue states that onboarding is required for Marketing Hub Professional at 3,000 US dollars, Marketing Hub Enterprise at 7,000, Sales Hub Professional at 1,500, Sales Hub Enterprise at 3,500 and Service Hub Enterprise at 3,500. The pricing-page FAQ is explicit that when you purchase Marketing Hub Professional or Enterprise you will automatically be charged for onboarding. It is a one-time fee, so it hits year one and not year two, but it is larger than the entire annual bill of most alternatives on this page.
Which HubSpot alternatives do not charge by contact count?
Almost all of them. Zoho CRM, Pipedrive, Attio, Twenty, EspoCRM, SuiteCRM, Odoo and Salesforce all bill by seat and none of them adds a per-contact fee. Brevo prices on monthly email volume instead, and its 20,000-emails-per-month tier carries a 500,000-contact allowance, so a 10,000-contact list is effectively free there. The one popular exception is ActiveCampaign, which meters contacts the same way HubSpot does and is steeper at the low end: a 10,000-contact list on its Starter plan is 149 US dollars a month for a single seat.
Is there a free alternative to HubSpot's free CRM?
Yes, several, and most of them are less restrictive. HubSpot's free tier caps you at 1,000 contacts, 2 users, one deal pipeline, ten custom properties and one automated action. Odoo's One App Free gives you CRM with unlimited users and no contact cap, forever, as long as CRM is your only app. Attio's free plan allows 3 seats and 50,000 records. Zoho CRM is free forever for 3 users up to 5,000 records. Salesforce Free Suite is 0 dollars for 2 users with no contract and no card. Twenty and SuiteCRM are free to self-host with no seat or record limits, though Twenty charges 19 dollars per user per month even self-hosted once you need SSO.
Can I export everything out of HubSpot?
Your data, yes. Your automation, no. CRM records, form submissions, campaigns, HubDB tables, redirects and knowledge-base articles all export as data files. Workflows export only as a spreadsheet of metadata plus a PNG image of the diagram, and landing pages export as raw HTML rather than as portable templates. HubSpot's own documentation also states there is no way to merge all the data between HubSpot accounts. Plan the migration as rebuilding the logic and importing the records, not as a lift and shift.
Why does HubSpot show me a different price than the one in this article?
HubSpot's pricing page is rendered in the browser and localised by IP address, and the euro figures are separate list prices rather than converted dollars. Marketing Hub Professional is 890 US dollars a month in the US view and 880 euros in the EU view, and the required Professional onboarding is 3,000 dollars or 2,930 euros. Every figure on this page is the US dollar list price from HubSpot's own Product and Services Catalog. Always read the price in your own currency, and check whether the number you are looking at is the pay-annually-upfront rate or the pay-monthly-on-an-annual-commitment rate, because HubSpot displays both as a monthly figure.