HubSpot vs Salesforce: the move, not the feature list

Comparing HubSpot and Salesforce on features is a job for someone choosing their first CRM. If you already have one of them, the useful comparison is a different one: how hard is it to get your data out, and what does the other one charge you to take it in. On that measure they are not close, and the winner is not the one with the longer feature page.

The short answer

HubSpot is the easier platform to leave and the more expensive ladder to climb. Salesforce is the harder platform to leave and the one whose entry price is lower than its reputation suggests. If you are weighing a move in either direction, the export mechanics should decide your timetable and the seat price should decide your shortlist — in that order, because one of them is on a clock and the other is not.

Getting out of HubSpot: an afternoon, then a second job

HubSpot's export runs from the object list view. You pick a view, choose a format, and HubSpot emails you a download link; the export carries each record's current property values and its associations. There is no queue and no weekly quota — up to 300 exports in a rolling 24 hours, three at a time.

The second job is your history. HubSpot's own article on exporting records is explicit that if you want contact activities such as calls and notes, you export individual contact data, export certain activity reports, or use the engagements API. So a full picture of your customer relationships is two projects, not one, and the second is the one people discover late.

Two details worth diarising: the download link on an export expires after 30 days, and by default an export carries up to one thousand associated record ID values per association column.

Getting out of Salesforce: a calendar problem

Salesforce's Data Export FAQ says backup files can be generated manually once every 7 days for weekly exports, or 29 days for monthly exports, that weekly exports are available in Enterprise, Performance and Unlimited Editions, and that export files are available to download for 48 hours after completion. It then says there is no SLA for data exports and a request may be expected to take longer than a week to complete.

That is not a worse version of HubSpot's export. It is a different kind of thing. HubSpot's export is a button; Salesforce's is a scheduled job with a queue, a cadence and a collection window. If your renewal is eight weeks away, you have at most eight attempts, and realistically fewer.

Switchyard has not read Salesforce's import documentation, because Salesforce's help centre refuses automated readers from this machine. That gap is why no move on this site that ends at Salesforce carries a score, and why this post has no numbers for what Salesforce will accept on the way in.

The prices, both ladders side by side

HubSpot's Sales Hub page lists Starter at $20 a seat a month at list, currently shown at $7 under a "Save up to 65% on Starter" banner marked new customers only and limited time; HubSpot does not publish what that offer renews at. Professional is $100 a seat a month at list, with a footnote adding a required, one-time Professional Onboarding of $1,500. Enterprise is $150 a seat a month, with a required, one-time Enterprise Onboarding of $3,500.

Salesforce's Sales Cloud editions, read the same day, are Free Suite at $0, Starter Suite at $25 a user a month billed monthly or annually, Pro Suite at $100 billed annually, Core at $195, Advanced at $395 and Max at $550.

Two things fall out of putting those next to each other. Salesforce's entry rung is $25 against HubSpot's $20 list — closer than the folklore. And HubSpot's second rung carries a published $1,500 you pay before a record moves, where Salesforce's second rung is the same $100 a seat with no equivalent published fee. The expensive part of HubSpot is not the seat.

The free tiers, which are smaller than you remember

HubSpot's free CRM is, in its own words, "up to two users, 1,000 contacts, and no limits on customer data", with no expiration date. Salesforce publishes a Free Suite at $0. Neither is a way to run a team of six for nothing, and anyone whose plan is "we will start free and see" should size that against their actual headcount before building a timetable on it.

What this means if you are moving between them

Moving from Salesforce to HubSpot is mostly a scheduling exercise: start the export early, because you get one attempt a week and 48 hours to collect it, and HubSpot's door is wide enough that the arrival is not the constraint. HubSpot accepts 1,048,576 rows per import file on a paid plan and 500,000 rows a day even on the free tools.

Moving from HubSpot to Salesforce, this site cannot advise you on, and says so rather than guessing. What it can tell you is the half it has read: the export from HubSpot is easy, your history is a separate job, and the download link dies after 30 days.

Moving away from either to something smaller is the case most people here are actually in, and it is covered in full on the HubSpot alternatives page, which orders nine destinations by what the move carries rather than by what they can do.

What neither of them moves

Whichever direction you go, the same things stay behind: workflows, automations, reports and dashboards. None of the import articles this site is built on describes importing any of them. That is the budget line nobody writes down, and it is usually larger than the difference in seat price that started the conversation.

If the destination you are weighing is Pipedrive rather than either of these, the arithmetic is worked through in the note on moving from HubSpot to Pipedrive, which is the best-documented move on this site.

Three questions to settle before you compare anything else

When does your contract end? On Salesforce this is the governing number, because it sets how many export attempts you have. One request every seven days, no service level, 48 hours to collect each result: count backwards from the renewal date and you have your project plan. On HubSpot the question barely matters, because the export is available whenever you want it.

How much of your CRM is history? If the value in your system is the current pipeline, both of these are straightforward to leave. If the value is five years of logged calls and notes, HubSpot makes you fetch that separately and this site cannot tell you what Salesforce's import side would do with it.

How many automations are live? Count them before you price anything. They are the part no importer carries, on either platform, in either direction, and rebuilding twenty of them is usually more expensive than a year of the seat-price difference you were arguing about.

The one comparison that is genuinely close

For a small team, HubSpot's free tier and Salesforce's Free Suite look like the same offer and are not quite. HubSpot publishes what its free tier holds — two users and 1,000 contacts — so you can tell in advance whether you fit. This site has not been able to read an equivalent statement of limits for Salesforce's Free Suite, and does not print one.

That asymmetry runs through this whole comparison. It is not that one product is more generous than the other. It is that one of them tells you the numbers before you commit, and the reading on this site suggests that is worth more than most features.