ActiveCampaign vs HubSpot: when the bill stops counting seats

This is the one move on Switchyard where the migration changes the shape of your bill rather than its size. HubSpot's Sales Hub charges by the seat. ActiveCampaign charges by the contact. Everything awkward about moving between them follows from that one difference.

The short answer

If your team is growing and your list is not, ActiveCampaign's model is cheaper and gets relatively cheaper. If your list is growing and your team is not, it is the other way round. And because a migration is the moment you decide how many contacts to carry, it is the moment that decision gets priced — permanently, every month, for as long as you keep them.

What each one actually charges for

ActiveCampaign's pricing page prices by email contacts, with a selector running from 1,000 upwards. At 1,000 contacts, Starter is $15 a month, Plus $49, Pro $79 and Enterprise $145, all shown billed annually. The user counts are part of the plan rather than the price: Starter and Plus include one user, Pro three, Enterprise five.

HubSpot Sales Hub prices by seat. Starter is $20 a seat a month at list, currently shown at $7 under a limited-time, new-customers-only banner whose renewal rate HubSpot does not publish. Professional is $100 a seat at list with a required, one-time Professional Onboarding of $1,500, and Enterprise is $150 with a required $3,500. HubSpot's free tools cover, in its words, up to two users and 1,000 contacts.

Those two structures are not comparable at a glance, and any comparison that presents them as two numbers side by side is hiding the interesting part.

The archive question, priced

Here is the decision the migration forces. Every contact you import into a per-contact platform is a contact you pay for every month from then on. Import a decade of cold leads because deleting them feels wasteful, and you have bought a subscription tier you did not need.

This is not an argument for losing data. It is an argument for deciding, once, which records belong in the CRM and which belong in a file. A per-seat CRM lets you avoid that decision forever; a per-contact one presents you with the bill for avoiding it.

Do the count before you export, not after you import, because after you import the cheapest plan you qualify for has already been chosen for you.

What moves

The record half is ordinary. ActiveCampaign's pricing page lists contact migration among the services included with every plan, which is more than most vendors offer, and it is worth taking them up on if the offer holds.

The half that does not move is the half that never does. HubSpot workflows, sequences, lifecycle stages and reports are not in any export; ActiveCampaign automations, were you going the other way, are not in any either. This is the rebuild every page on this site ends on, and swapping pricing models does not change it.

Getting the data out of HubSpot is the same job as always: records export from the object list view with their property values and associations, and activities require a separate pass through per-contact exports, activity reports or the engagements API.

Which way the arithmetic runs

Two illustrative shapes, using only the published figures above.

A five-person sales team with 1,000 contacts pays $100 a month on HubSpot Sales Hub Starter at list. The same team cannot buy ActiveCampaign Starter or Plus at all, because those include one user — it needs Pro at three users or Enterprise at five, which at 1,000 contacts is $79 or $145 a month billed annually.

A one-person operation with a large list inverts it completely: one HubSpot seat at $20 list against an ActiveCampaign plan whose price is set by how many contacts that one person is talking to.

That is the whole comparison. Not which product is better, but which axis your business grows along.

Is this even the same category?

Not quite, and pretending otherwise is how people end up with two subscriptions. ActiveCampaign is a marketing-automation platform with CRM capability; HubSpot's Sales Hub is a sales CRM inside a platform that also sells marketing software separately. Teams that move because "HubSpot got expensive" and find they have replaced the CRM but not the marketing automation have usually compared the wrong two products.

The honest test is to write down what you actually open every week. If most of it is sequences, segments and campaigns, the comparison is fair. If most of it is a pipeline and a call log, you are looking at a CRM replacement and there are cheaper and better-documented ones on the full comparison.

If you are leaving HubSpot generally

Start from what the move carries rather than from what the destination does. The ceilings, free tiers and onboarding fees are on the HubSpot alternatives page, and the best-documented single move on this site is worked through in the Pipedrive note.

The contact count is a policy, not a number

Once you are on a per-contact plan, "how many contacts do we have" stops being a reporting question and becomes a standing decision with a monthly price. That needs an owner and a rule, written down before the migration rather than after the first surprise invoice.

A workable rule has three parts. What earns a contact a place in the CRM. What happens to one that has not been touched in a defined period. Where those go when they leave — because "delete" is rarely acceptable and "keep paying" is rarely necessary, and a dated CSV in cheap storage satisfies both.

None of that is a feature of either product. It is the thing the pricing model makes you do, and teams that do it before the migration pay less than teams that do it after.

What to check on the ActiveCampaign page yourself

Two things on that pricing page move independently of each other, and this post quotes both at one setting — 1,000 email contacts, billed annually — because a price quoted without its contact tier is meaningless.

Move the contact selector and every number changes. Switch from Email to the Email-plus-WhatsApp channel option and they change again. So take the figures here as the shape of the thing and read your own tier before you budget; the published user counts per plan — one, one, three and five — are the part least likely to move under you and the part most likely to decide which plan you can actually buy.

One more thing the archive decision touches

Deliverability, indirectly. A per-contact platform charges you to keep addresses that have not engaged in years, and those same addresses are the ones most likely to be dead, recycled or turned into spam traps by the mailbox providers. The commercial pressure and the hygiene advice point the same way for once.

That is not a reason to delete on instinct, and this site is not going to print a percentage about it, because it has measured nothing. It is a reason to make the archive decision deliberately at the moment of the migration, when the whole list is in front of you in a spreadsheet and the cost of each row is about to become visible.

The comparison nobody makes

Worth stating once. A per-seat CRM punishes you for hiring. A per-contact platform punishes you for marketing successfully. Both are rational ways to price software and neither is aligned with what you want to do, which is grow both.

The practical consequence is that the right answer changes over a company's life, and a migration two years from now is more likely than not. Which is an argument for choosing a destination whose export side you have actually read — the question this whole site exists to ask, and the one nobody asks on the way in.