HubSpot is a widely used sales and marketing platform that’s had a grip on the market for years. But its costly pricing has left many businesses searching for HubSpot alternatives.
Trotz der zahlreichen Funktionen, die HubSpot bietet, können viele kleine und mittlere Unternehmen die hohen Kosten der kostenpflichtigen HubSpot-Tarife nicht rechtfertigen. Ohne das Personal und die Zeit, um viele Aspekte der HubSpot-Plattform zu maximieren, kommen Sie möglicherweise nicht auf den Wert Ihres Geldes.
If you’re managing a sales team of 5-20 reps and watching your HubSpot sales and marketing costs climb as you add users and features, you’re not alone. Many growing B2B companies find themselves priced out of HubSpot’s advanced features—or paying for capabilities they’ll never use.
If you’re looking for a HubSpot alternative to help you automate your marketing processes and streamline sales, this list is for you. We’ve broken down the eight top HubSpot competitors and how they can benefit your business.
Other than digging into the best alternatives to HubSpot, we also crunched the numbers on HubSpot’s ambiguous pricing structure, and here’s what we found relating to what HubSpot really costs.
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💬 ChatGPT
🔍 Perplexity
🤖 Claude
🔮 Google AI Mode
🐦 Grok
Before we dive into our top HubSpot alternatives, let’s see what HubSpot is really about and why businesses might look for other options. HubSpot consists of a marketing automation solution, a customer relationship management (CRM), a content management system (CMS), and a help desk solution. Some of their standout features include:
HubSpot has always been good at providing an intuitive platform for growth-minded digital marketers. They have historically been a leading brand in the inbound marketing world, and the marketing aspects of the software certainly reflect that. Their marketing automation software and reporting functions are still some of the best on the market.
Learn how to boost your team’s efficiency with automation in your CRM with our guide to sales and marketing automation.
Despite these benefits, there are several reasons why some companies may look for other options:
A digital marketing agency serving small business clients found itself in a common predicament. They had adopted HubSpot to transition from project-based work to retainer-based relationships, attracted by the platform’s promise of efficiency and automation.
However, the reality proved different. While HubSpot offered powerful features, their small business clients—who had the motivation and drive to grow—struggled with the platform’s complexity. These business owners needed tools they could actually use, not enterprise-grade software that required extensive training and ongoing management.
This scenario plays out repeatedly across industries. Businesses invest in HubSpot expecting it to solve their growth challenges, only to discover they’re paying for capabilities they can’t fully utilize—or that require more time and resources to manage than they save.
Before diving into specific alternatives, it’s important to understand the key trends reshaping the CRM landscape in 2025. These shifts are driving businesses to reconsider their CRM choices:
81% of organizations are expected to adopt AI-powered CRM systems by 2025, but businesses are also scaling back excessive automation to maintain authentic human connections. The best alternatives strike a balance between intelligent automation and personal touch.
In 2024, HubSpot shifted to a seat-based pricing model, and one company saved $33,300 per year simply by optimizing their seat allocation—highlighting how difficult it can be to manage HubSpot costs effectively.
With 70% of businesses now using mobile CRM systems and mobile users 150% more likely to exceed sales goals, mobile accessibility is essential for any HubSpot alternative you consider.
CRMs are evolving into comprehensive hubs with built-in email marketing, scheduling, quoting, and more—reducing the need for multiple tools and simplifying the tech stack.
To ensure we’re recommending the most effective HubSpot alternatives, we evaluated each platform against seven critical criteria. These factors reflect what matters most when you’re investing in a CRM and marketing platform: usability, value, and the ability to help your team sell more effectively:
To help you make an informed decision, here’s a detailed comparison of key features across leading HubSpot alternatives:
| HubSpot alternative | Key features (Pros) | Limitations (Cons) |
| Nutshell | • CRM, marketing, and contact engagement suites, plus quoting and prospecting, rolled into one easy-to-learn platform • Marketing and engagement features include email and SMS marketing, web forms, AI-powered webchat, messaging app integrations, and more | • Marketing and Engagement features, as well as quoting features, are growing in capabilities |
| ActiveCampaign | • Multi-step marketing automation • High-level view of automations • A/B testing of marketing automations | • 1:1 sales emails and pipeline management locked behind add-ons • High monthly cost for advanced features and multiple users |
| EngageBay | • Affordable pricing for teams with small marketing budgets | • Basic plans lack essential features like marketing automation and A/B testing |
| Drip | • Creates a customizable contact experience for B2C e-commerce companies • Multiple integrations for your e-commerce tech stack | • Lack of B2B features, like 1:1 sales emails, CRM, SMS, and more |
| Ontraport | • Email and SMS automation • Keyword-based text response automation | • Light features available for CRM, CMS, and payment processor functions |
| Brevo | • Ease of use for beginner marketers or teams without a dedicated marketer • Manage email marketing, SMS, WhatsApp, and forms in one location | • Lack of powerful CRM, customer chat, and marketing automation features |
| Keap | • Provides CRM, email marketing, SMS, quotes, and more, all at an SMB scale | •All features are offered in one package, making it difficult to tailor Keap to your business needs. • Cost can escalate with larger teams |
| Pipedrive CRM | • CRM-first features work best for sales teams | • Features like email campaign sending, • No SMS capabilities |
Now that you know what you’re looking for, let’s take a look at the best HubSpot competitors we’ve found.
Rating: 4.8/5
Best for growing B2B businesses needing all-in-one CRM and marketing
Nutshell is a CRM-first solution that combines powerful sales automation, marketing tools, and engagement features in one easy-to-learn platform. Unlike HubSpot’s complex hub structure, Nutshell delivers enterprise capabilities through an intuitive interface that teams can master in hours, not months.
Nutshell’s standout features include:
Nutshell’s powerful pipeline management lets marketers and sales reps simplify their workday by automating email marketing campaigns, lead advancement, and much more. Reviewers say that Nutshell is super easy to learn and that the software’s ease of use helps convince sales teams to adopt Nutshell more readily than other solutions and makes it one of the best CRM alternatives to HubSpot.
Here’s a list of Nutshell’s core advantages as a HubSpot alternative:
While Nutshell cons are few and far between, here are some disadvantages to look out for:
Nutshell Sales plans start at just $13/month per user. With access to several types of reports, email automation features, and the ability to send up to 150 marketing emails for free every month, you get excellent value on just the Foundation plan.
For greater customization and sales automation features, businesses can opt for the Nutshell Growth plan at only $25/month per user.
The next plan up, Nutshell Pro, costs just $42/month per user and includes up to 5 customizable sales pipelines, unlimited click-to-call and phone recordings, advanced sales reports and user permissions, more sales automation features, and Nutshell scheduler.
You can also enjoy significant discounts when paying annually. Nutshell’s email marketing is a tiered add-on that’s part of its Marketing suite and starts at $5/month for up to 100 contacts.
All Nutshell Sales users get access to Nutshell’s Marketing Foundation and Engagement Foundation plans, making powerful email marketing, a no-code landing page builder, web chat, and an AI chatbot available to them.
Upgrading to Marketing Pro at $49 per month opens up SMS marketing, advanced lead attribution, forms, and email marketing reporting, email campaign A/B testing, and Nutshell brand-free landing page builder capabilities.
Choosing the Engagement Pro plan at $16 per user per month offers 1:1 SMS messaging, SMS automation, native integration with WhatsApp Business, Facebook Messenger, and Instagram DMs, and an omnichannel inbox to organize and manage all your conversations in one central hub.
Comparing Nutshell with HubSpot makes it easy to see why it is a solid alternative. Growth-focused sales teams will find Nutshell helpful in improving their sales process, while marketing teams will find Nutshell’s marketing features excellent for covering the email marketing basics while staying in sync with their sales team.
Nutshell delivers the same core capabilities as HubSpot—CRM, email marketing, automation, and reporting—at a fraction of the cost and complexity. While HubSpot targets organizations of up to 2,000 employees, Nutshell is purpose-built for small to medium-sized businesses that need powerful features without enterprise-level complexity. Reviewers consistently praise Nutshell as having high adoption rates that make it one of the best CRM alternatives to HubSpot.
See how HubSpot pulls a bait and switch with their pricing model. Check out the real price of HubSpot.
Rating: 4.6/5
Best for marketing automation experts with existing landing page solutions
ActiveCampaign is a marketing automation-first solution that helps customer-centric companies grow with advanced automation capabilities, CRM functionality, and customer support tools rolled into one platform.
Some of the noteworthy features ActiveCampaign boasts are:
Some of ActiveCampaign’s pros include:
When considering ActiveCampaign as a HubSpot replacement, bear the following drawbacks in mind:
Price may also be a concern for some businesses, as ActiveCampaign’s marketing plans start at $15/month per user for up to 1,000 contacts.
ActiveCampaign is a top-notch option for marketing automation nerds who already have a good landing page and CMS solution. However, ActiveCampaign’s sales automation lacks the ability to auto-drip emails to contacts from work emails.
Rating: 4.6/5
Best for small businesses with tight marketing budgets
EngageBay explicitly seeks to provide small businesses and entrepreneurs with the same kind of comprehensive marketing system that HubSpot provides to larger companies. They feature a CRM, a marketing automation solution, and a help desk offering.
Some noteworthy features include:
Choosing EngageBay comes with the following advantages:
EngageBay also comes with a few disadvantages, like these:
EngageBay’s “All-in-one” plan, which incorporates essential sales and marketing features, starts at $12.74 per user per month when billed every two years. It includes up to 500 contacts, lead scoring, and some third-party integrations, with plans increasing from there. As a result, though, EngageBay’s feature set is often lighter than some users expect.
Engagebay is a solid option for experienced digital marketers with tiny budgets. EngageBay means you don’t have to settle for limited EMS functionality when you can make use of so much more.
Rating: 4.4/5
Best for e-commerce businesses using Shopify or similar platforms
Drip is a fairly unique take on growth software. Its foundation is a B2C CRM best suited to service e-commerce marketing teams. The CRM and marketing automation systems are not as clearly defined from each other as other growth software solutions. Drip sees itself not as a suite but as a single solution that gathers contact data, customizes your storefront to that data, and then engages the customer where they are with email, SMS, and social media outreach.
Beyond the unusual perspective, Drip offers several notable features, such as:
Without question, Drip does e-commerce well and excels in the following ways:
Here are some of the Drip downsides you should know about:
Drip starts at $39 per month for up to 2,500 contacts. Listed pricing caps out at $1,999/month for up to 180,000 contacts. You’ll need to book a demo with one of Drip’s sales reps for pricing beyond 180,000 contacts.
Growth-focused e-commerce marketers with a holistic view of the customer journey will find Drip to be a great tool.
Rating: 4.2/5
Best for entrepreneurs needing a robust solution with payment processing
Ontraport is focused on providing a simple solution to help entrepreneurs grow their businesses. The solution has a foundation of marketing automation with a CRM, a CMS, and an online payment processor built in.
Some of their standout features include:
For small businesses that don’t want to pay for multiple pieces of software, Ontraport is a solid solution:
Here’s what you should look out for when considering Ontraport as an option:
Ontraport’s Basic plan starts at $24 per month for one user and up to 500 contacts. Their highest established price is $524 per month for their Enterprise plan for up to 10,000 contacts. After that, it’s custom pricing.
A small team that doesn’t need deep functionality on any of Ontraport’s software types will find it very useful to center all their data in a single location.
Rating: 4.5/5
Best for marketing beginners without a dedicated marketer
Brevo bills itself as an easy-to-use marketing software system focused on SMBs (though they do have an enterprise offering). Its foundation is an email marketing system, though it features some lite marketing automation features and a CRM and customer chat.
Brevo’s notable features include:
Brevo’s basic capabilities are great at helping beginners advance their digital marketing skills, and include:
Common Brevo painpoints include:
Brevo offers a free marketing plan for up to 300 emails sent per day. Paid plans start at $8.08 per month for up to 5,000 emails sent in a month. Its highest advertised price is $4,088.67 per month for 10,000,000 emails sent per month.
To combine your sales and marketing tools in one system, you’ll need to add a sales plan to your marketing plan starting at an additional $27.92 per month for Brevo’s Sales Essentials plan.
Brevo is an excellent growth marketing solution for a business without a dedicated marketer. Its ease of use makes it ideal for a marketing beginner to get a business rolling on modern digital marketing practices.
Rating: 4.2/5
Best for SMBs with sales teams needing basic marketing functions
Built by the people at Infusionsoft, Keap is a CRM-first growth software designed for SMBs.
Keap’s notable features include:
Here’s where Keap does well:
Although Keap excels in several areas, there are pitfalls—most notably:
Keap starts at $299 per month for two users and 1,500 contacts, along with your basic CRM functionality. Its established prices for its minimum of 2 users top out at $719 per month, which includes up to 26,500 contacts. Thereafter, custom solutions are available.
SMBs with a sales team but no marketing person will find Keap a useful tool to set up some marketing functions for the company.
Rating: 4.3/5
Best for sales-focused teams prioritizing pipeline management
Pipedrive CRM is a popular choice utilized by companies globally, offering an intuitive interface and robust sales management features.
Notable Pipedrive features include:
Designed by salespeople for salespeople, Pipedrive users have positive things to say about the following features:
Considering Pipedrive CRM as a HubSpot alternative? Here are the cons you should be aware of:
Pipedrive offers a basic Lite plan starting at $14 per month per user, but you’ll need the Premium plan, which starts at $59 per month per user, to unlock the essential features necessary for effective CRM usage.
To initiate email marketing campaigns from your CRM, you’ll need to include Pipedrive’s Campaigns add-on, with pricing starting from $13.33 per month.
Pipedrive is ideal for those seeking straightforward sales management. Its user-friendly interface and essential features make it suitable for businesses of any size. It helps sales teams reach their goals smoothly.
When choosing an alternative to HubSpot, the best strategy is to look for the features you need. HubSpot may try to sell you add-ons and capabilities your business doesn’t really need, increasing your cost and weighing your platform down with additional tools. But plenty of options won’t do that, ensuring you only pay for what you’ll actually use.
While your company’s needs are the top priority, remember that HubSpot also provides a customer relationship management (CRM) platform, sales automation, and a customer support tool in addition to its marketing automation features. The best substitutes will streamline collaboration between marketers, salespeople, and support teams.
Here are a few additional features to consider when comparing HubSpot alternatives:
These FAQs might provide some additional information that can help you choose the best HubSpot substitute for your team:
Companies cite escalating costs, feature restrictions, and overwhelming complexity as primary reasons for leaving. The emergence of AI-powered alternatives and “CRM fatigue” from unused features accelerate this trend. Teams are choosing platforms like Nutshell that deliver enterprise features through intuitive interfaces their entire team can master in hours, not months.
The best replacement depends on your needs. Salesforce suits enterprise teams, ActiveCampaign excels at marketing automation, but Nutshell offers the ideal balance for growing businesses. With built-in email marketing, sales automation, and unlimited contacts at every tier, it’s designed for teams that want to start selling immediately—not learning software.
Budget-friendly alternatives include Nutshell, EngageBay, Zoho CRM, and Pipedrive. However, true affordability considers hidden costs like add-ons, training time, and support fees. Nutshell includes email marketing, automation, and live support in all plans—features that others charge extra for—making it a smart investment for growing teams.
Yes. Modern CRMs prove powerful doesn’t mean complicated. Nutshell delivers enterprise capabilities—pipeline automation, custom reporting, email sequences, and AI tools—through an interface built for productivity. Unlike HubSpot’s learning curve, most teams are fully operational within 48 hours.
HubSpot’s data export has limitations—you’re restricted to 300 exports per day with only 3 running simultaneously. Large datasets arrive as multiple files, and API limits can cause timeouts. Many businesses use third-party tools to handle complex migrations. Nutshell offers free migration assistance, handling the technical work so you can focus on selling instead of spreadsheets.
Whether you’re looking for a CRM-first or email marketing-first solution, there’s a good option for every growth-minded company in these top HubSpot alternatives. And while you’re here, start a free trial of Nutshell to see our email marketing and sales automation features in action.
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