Zoho CRM vs HubSpot: the best importer with the worst map

Moving from HubSpot to Zoho CRM scores 7 out of 10 on Switchyard's published rubric. It has the best-equipped importer of any destination this site has read and the worst published planning information, and those two facts are both true at once.

The short answer

Zoho is the destination to choose when your data is complicated rather than large. Its migration wizard names twenty-two modules, including the ones every other importer here treats as an afterthought — Notes, Activities and Attachments. What it will not tell you is how big a file it takes, because it publishes no row ceiling at all, so you cannot size the job in advance.

What Zoho's wizard accepts

The supported module list for a migration from another CRM runs: Users, Leads, Accounts, Contacts, Deals, Campaigns, Notes, Activities (Tasks, Meetings, Calls), Attachments, Custom Modules, Linking Modules, Cases, Solutions, Products, Quotes, Sales Orders, Invoices, Purchase Orders, Vendors, Price Books, Services and Appointments.

That is the difference between this and a spreadsheet importer. Attachments arrive as a folder beside the data, with a CSV of attachment mappings so records keep their files, and custom modules can be created during the migration rather than beforehand.

The four catches, all published

Fifty new fields. The wizard will create up to 50 fields for you mid-migration, counted against your edition's overall custom-field limit.

Two field types it cannot create. Zoho states plainly that Autonumber and Formula are not available as types during migration. Anything computed in HubSpot arrives as a plain value or not at all.

Ten tags. Tags migrate, but if a record has more than ten only the first ten come across, and each tag is capped at 25 characters.

Five thousand skips. If more than 5,000 records in one module are skipped, the migration pauses and asks whether to discard or continue. That is a far better failure mode than completing quietly with a hole in it, and it is the closest thing Zoho publishes to a size limit.

You can also undo a migration from Import History, which is a genuine safety net and rarer than it should be.

The thing nobody checks until later: getting back out

Zoho is generous on the way in and metered on the way out, and this is the part that does not appear in comparisons. A module export in CSV tops out at 200,000 records in one go and in XLSX at 50,000; the download link lives for seven days; and the number of exports you may run per day is set by edition — 10 on Free, 100 on Standard, 250 on Professional, 500 on Enterprise, 1,000 on Ultimate.

Full data backups are a quota rather than a feature. Zoho's backup article says Ultimate Edition users can avail four backups without payment, recommends other paid editions use their two free backups on a twice-monthly schedule, and notes that additional backups are purchased. The backup download link stays active for a maximum of seven days.

None of that is a reason not to move to Zoho. It is a reason to know, on the day you arrive, what leaving would look like — which is the question this whole site exists to ask early.

Price, both terms

Zoho CRM Standard is $14 a user a month billed annually and $20 billed monthly. Professional is $23 billed annually and $35 monthly. The Free Edition holds three users, which is one more than HubSpot's free tier and still not a team.

Against HubSpot Sales Hub Starter at $20 a seat a month at list, or Professional at $100 a seat plus a required one-time $1,500 onboarding fee, the seat arithmetic is not the hard part of this decision.

Where the three points went

Two points went on the row ceiling, because Zoho publishes none and you cannot plan a migration against a number that does not exist. One went on HubSpot's side: activities leave HubSpot by a separate route from records, whatever the destination.

Zoho keeps full marks for having somewhere to put that history when it arrives, and for charging nothing to onboard you.

If you are still choosing

The other eight destinations, with their ceilings where they publish them, are on the HubSpot alternatives page. If your database is large and simple rather than small and complicated, the Pipedrive note describes a move that scores higher precisely because its numbers are published.

How to plan a migration with no published ceiling

You cannot, exactly — but you can make the absence safe. Run one module first and small: a few hundred records of a single type, mapped properly, so that you learn what the wizard does with your field names before you learn it at scale. Check what happened to the fields you care about most, because that is where the Autonumber and Formula exclusion will show up.

Then scale by module rather than by file size. Zoho's stopping rule counts skipped records per module, so keeping each pass to one module keeps that rule meaningful instead of averaged across everything at once. And keep every source file, because Import History lets you undo, and an undo is only useful if you can run the pass again.

Attachments deserve their own afternoon

The Attachments folder is the part of a Zoho migration most likely to go wrong, because it is the only part that is not a spreadsheet. The data and the attachments go up as two zipped folders, with one CSV inside the data folder recording which file belongs to which record.

Zoho's documentation is blunt about the shape: upload the original zip rather than recompressing an extracted folder, and any additional folders in the zip may make the upload fail. That is the kind of instruction that is trivially easy to follow once and impossible to guess. Read it before you build the archive, not after the first failure.