Ordered by what the move carries
HubSpot alternatives, sorted by what the move actually carries
Nine CRMs you can move to, compared on the figures that decide a migration: how many rows each one takes in a file, whether your call history has anywhere to land, and what you pay before a single record moves.
Down the line
How much fits through the door in one file
Rows per import file, where the vendor publishes a ceiling
Ten million rows a day across up to 500 imports — and three imports at a time, of which two may be over 10,000 rows.
CSV only, and every object you import needs at least one unique attribute or you will be making duplicates.
One tab per import, and every deal or lead must already have a person or an organisation to attach to.
One file at a time per board, 100 files an account per hour — and ten column types are all it will match.
The manifest
What rides, what rides with a catch, what stays behind
Contacts, companies, deals Rides
Every importer here takes them from a spreadsheet, and every exporter here writes them to one. This is the easy part, and it is the part vendors show you.
Read in: all four import articles
The links between them Rides with a catch
They survive only if your file carries the key that ties them together — an email address, a company domain, a record ID. HubSpot needs a unique identifier in the file; Pipedrive refuses a deal with no person or organisation attached.
Read in: HubSpot “Understand the import tool”; Pipedrive import article
Calls, emails, meetings, notes Rides with a catch
They go in, but they do not come out the same door. HubSpot’s record export gives you property values and associations and points you at per-contact exports, activity reports or the engagements API for the rest; Pipedrive says activities, notes and files must be exported separately.
Read in: HubSpot “Export your records”; Pipedrive “Exporting data from Pipedrive”
Tasks Rides with a catch
HubSpot’s import tool will create tasks and will not update them. Import the same file twice and you get two sets.
Read in: HubSpot “Understand the import tool”
File attachments Rides with a catch
Zoho takes them as a separate Attachments folder beside the data, in the exact structure its wizard expects. Pipedrive exports file records but says files held in Google Drive are not included in a global export.
Read in: Zoho migration article; Pipedrive export article
Calculated and auto-numbered fields Stays behind
Zoho will create up to 50 new fields for you mid-migration, but says plainly that Autonumber and Formula are not among the types it can create. Those columns arrive as ordinary text or not at all.
Read in: Zoho “Migrating Data from Other CRMs”
Tags, past the tenth Rides with a catch
Zoho migrates tags, then adds: if a record has more than ten, only the first ten come across, and each tag is capped at 25 characters.
Read in: Zoho “Migrating Data from Other CRMs”
History, when the importer takes it inline Rides with a catch
Capsule will carry notes and emails inside the contact import itself, dated, if you separate them with its exact marker — and it adds that notes can only ever be imported for brand new contacts, never onto ones already there. Get the order wrong and the history has nowhere to go.
Read in: Capsule “Importing Contacts”
The ability to undo it Rides with a catch
Zoho lets you undo a migration from its Import History. Capsule will undo only the brand new contacts an import added — updates to existing contacts cannot be undone. Plan the order of your imports as if the second one is permanent.
Read in: Zoho migration article; Capsule “Importing Contacts”
Workflows, automations, reports, dashboards Stays behind
Not one of the four import articles on this page describes importing a workflow, an automation, a report or a dashboard. They describe rows and fields. Rebuilding those is the work nobody budgets for.
Read in: HubSpot, Pipedrive, Zoho and monday import articles
Your automations’ opinions about new rows Stays behind
monday warns that importing into a Leads board with automations running flips every imported item to “New Lead”, and tells you to switch them off first. The rules that survive are the ones on the receiving end, and they do not know this is history.
Read in: monday “Import from Excel to monday CRM”
Start here: the move you may not have to make
If your team is two people and your list is under a thousand contacts, the honest answer may be to stay where you are and pay nothing. HubSpot's own product page says its free CRM covers "up to two users, 1,000 contacts, and no limits on customer data", with no expiration date. This site earns nothing when you take that answer, and it is still right for a surprising number of people who arrive here.
It stops being the right answer the moment you need a third seat or a 1,001st contact. And the free tiers elsewhere are no roomier: Zoho's Free Edition is three users, Attio's free plan is up to three seats, Capsule's is a maximum of two users and 250 contacts. Nobody here is giving away a CRM for a team of six.
What leaving costs you in data, before it costs you anything else
Every CRM here will take your contacts, companies and deals. What decides how bad a move feels is everything attached to them, and that answer lives in articles nobody reads until the second week. Getting out of HubSpot is the easy half. Its export gives you each record's current property values and its associations, from the object list view, in CSV or Excel. What it does not give you is your history: HubSpot's own export article says that for contact activities such as calls and notes you export individual contact data, export certain activity reports, or use the engagements API. Your call log leaves by a different door from your contacts, and you want to know that before you start.
Two smaller details set the clock. An export download link expires after 30 days, and an export carries by default up to one thousand associated record ID values per association column — beyond that, the tail is simply not in the file.
The nine alternatives, and how wide each door is
The manifest above is the general answer to what rides; the table below is the specific one. Here is the whole field, with the figure that actually governs a migration in the fourth column. Everything was read from the vendors' own pricing and help pages on 24 September 2026, and where a vendor publishes no ceiling that is what the cell says — an absence of a published number is not a promise of an unlimited one.
| CRM | Cheapest paid seat | Free tier | Rows per import file | What the move carries |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pipedrive | $14 a seat a month billed annually; $19 billed monthly | None | 50,000, in a file up to 50 MB | Activities and notes are item types its importer creates and updates |
| Zoho CRM | $14 a user a month billed annually; $20 billed monthly | Free Edition, 3 users | None published | Notes and Activities (Tasks, Meetings, Calls) are named modules in its migration wizard |
| Attio | $35 a user a month billed annually; $44 billed monthly | Free, up to 3 seats | 100,000, 100 columns, 100 MB | Records and attributes; each object needs a unique attribute or you create duplicates |
| Capsule | $18 a user a month billed annually; monthly rate not captured | Free, max 2 users, 250 contacts | None published | Notes and emails inline in the contact import — for brand new contacts only |
| monday CRM | $12 a seat a month billed annually; $18 billed monthly, quoted at three seats | None on the CRM table | Fewer than 8,000, fewer than 50 columns, 10 MB | Ten column types onto board items; no activity object to receive a call log |
| Freshsales | $9 a user a month billed annually; $11 billed monthly | None on the pricing page | Not published where we could read it | Import documentation did not load for us; check it yourself before committing |
| folk | $24 a member a month billed annually; $30 billed monthly | None | Not published where we could read it | Import documentation did not load for us; check it yourself before committing |
| Insightly | $29 a user a month billed annually; no monthly rate published | None | Not published where we could read it | Import documentation did not load for us; check it yourself before committing |
| EngageBay | Three different figures on one page — see below | Free, 250 contacts | Not published where we could read it | Advertises a free migration service from any other platform |
Pipedrive: the widest door with somewhere for your history to land
Pipedrive is the least painful move here for a dull reason: its importer takes the things HubSpot makes you export separately. Its own article says you can add or update people, organisations, leads, deals, projects, activities, notes and products in bulk — so your call log has a destination rather than a workaround.
The mechanics are generous too: XLS, XLSX or CSV, one tab per import, a header row, no more than 50,000 rows, under 50 MB. Two rules bite a careless file — every deal and lead needs a person or organisation attached, and people need a name. Miss either and those rows are skipped, not guessed at.
Lite is $14 a seat a month billed annually — one payment of $168 a seat a year — and $19 billed monthly. There is no free tier, no required onboarding fee, and its pricing page goes further: implementation is free on any plan over $400 a year.
Partner link, marked sponsored and nofollow. A commission never buys a place in a table here, and the ordering above is set by published figures, not by rates — the arrangement, in full. Read the vendor’s own ceilings before you commit a database to it.
Zoho CRM: the only importer here that names your history as a module
Zoho is the one migration tool on this page that was built for exactly this job, and it shows in the list of things it will accept. Its migration article names 22 supported modules, including Users, Leads, Accounts, Contacts, Deals, Campaigns, Notes, Activities (Tasks, Meetings, Calls), Attachments and Custom Modules. Attachments go in as their own folder beside the data, in the structure its wizard expects.
The catches are specific. The wizard creates up to 50 new fields during the migration but says plainly that Autonumber and Formula are not types it can create, so those columns arrive as something else or not at all. Tags migrate, but past the tenth on a record they do not, and each is capped at 25 characters. If more than 5,000 records in one module are skipped the migration pauses and asks whether to continue — a better failure mode than finishing quietly with a hole in it.
What Zoho does not publish is a row ceiling, which is a real gap when you are planning: no number to size a file against, only a promise that it stops if things go badly wrong. Standard is $14 a user a month billed annually and $20 billed monthly. The Free Edition is three users. Leaving Zoho later is a slower job than arriving.
Partner link, marked sponsored and nofollow. A commission never buys a place in a table here, and the ordering above is set by published figures, not by rates — the arrangement, in full. Read the vendor’s own ceilings before you commit a database to it.
Attio: the biggest published ceiling, and the newest data model
Attio publishes the largest import ceiling here: 100,000 rows, 100 columns and 100 MB, CSV only, header row required. For a database that is large but simple, that is the most headroom on this page outside HubSpot itself.
The condition is about shape, not size. Attio's importer wants at least one unique attribute per object or you create duplicates instead of updating records — and because its model is objects, lists and attributes rather than the contact-company-deal furniture the rest of this page assumes, what maps to what is a decision you make once and live with. Plus is $35 a user a month billed annually and $44 billed monthly; the free plan runs to three seats.
Partner link, marked sponsored and nofollow. A commission never buys a place in a table here, and the ordering above is set by published figures, not by rates — the arrangement, in full. Read the vendor’s own ceilings before you commit a database to it.
Capsule: the one that takes your notes inline, if you get the order right
Capsule does something none of the others do: it imports history in the same file as the contacts. Notes and emails go in as part of the contact row, dated, separated by a marker its documentation shows exactly — and which it warns must be formatted exactly as in its example, without any extra or removed spaces.
The sequencing trap in that is the most expensive sentence on this page. Capsule states that notes can only ever be imported for brand new contacts and cannot be imported onto existing ones. Import your contacts first to check they look right, and you have locked yourself out of their history for good. It compounds: Capsule's undo reverses only the brand new contacts an import added, never updates to existing ones.
Capsule also offers a free migration from over 25 CRM tools through Import2. Starter is $18 a user a month billed annually in Capsule's USD view; its monthly rate did not render for us and is not printed here. The free plan is a maximum of two users and 250 contacts.
Partner link, marked sponsored and nofollow. A commission never buys a place in a table here, and the ordering above is set by published figures, not by rates — the arrangement, in full. Read the vendor’s own ceilings before you commit a database to it.
monday CRM: the cheapest seat and the narrowest door
monday CRM has the lowest entry price here and the tightest import in the comparison, and those two facts will meet. Its import article states a file must have fewer than 50 columns and fewer than 8,000 rows and be 10 MB or less, that you upload one file at a time per board, and that an account may upload 100 files an hour.
The deeper limit is what it matches. monday's importer supports ten field types — Name, Status, Link, Email, Long text, Numbers, Text, Phone, Date and People — onto board items. There is no activity object, so a call log has no natural home: history arrives as long text or not at all.
Its documentation flags a live-automation trap too: import into a Leads board with automations running and every imported item flips to "New Lead". It says to switch them off first — good advice for every CRM here, written down only on this one.
Basic is $12 a seat a month billed annually and $18 billed monthly, quoted at three seats. The plan limits matter as much as the price: Basic lists 1,000 active contacts and deals, Standard 10,000. A 20,000-record database does not fit the cheapest seat here however patient you are with 8,000-row files.
Partner link, marked sponsored and nofollow. A commission never buys a place in a table here, and the ordering above is set by published figures, not by rates — the arrangement, in full. Read the vendor’s own ceilings before you commit a database to it.
Freshsales, folk, Insightly and EngageBay: the four we could not fully read
These four are here because their pricing is published and legible, and marked down in the last column because their import documentation would not load for this site. That is a statement about our reading, not their products, and this is the honest place to put the gap.
Freshsales is the cheapest seat in the comparison at $9 a user a month billed annually and $11 billed monthly, with no free tier on its pricing page. folk is $24 a member a month billed annually and $30 billed monthly. Insightly is $29 a user a month billed annually and publishes no monthly rate at all. EngageBay advertises a completely free migration service from any other platform — a genuine differentiator if it holds.
EngageBay's price needs its own warning, which is why its price cell above says what it says. Its All-in-One Basic tier shows $14.99, $13.79 and $12.74 a user a month on three tabs labelled Monthly, Yearly and Biennial — and the figure the page's headline quotes, on the panel it opens on, is the two-year rate. The tab labelled Monthly then captions its own price "per user/month, paid yearly". Those labels cannot all be true, so this site prints all three with their tabs and asserts none as the monthly price.
What a HubSpot bill actually is, before you compare it to any of this
Compare against the wrong HubSpot number and every figure above looks worse than it is. HubSpot's Sales Hub page shows Starter at $7 a seat a month with $20 a seat a month struck through, under a banner reading "Save up to 65% on Starter… New customers only. Select offers available for a limited time." The list price is $20. HubSpot does not publish what the $7 renews at, so this page does not guess.
Above Starter the arithmetic changes shape. Professional is $100 a seat a month at list, shown at $90, and its footnote says the cost shown does not include the required, one-time Professional Onboarding for a fee of $1,500. Enterprise is $150 a seat a month with a required, one-time Enterprise Onboarding of $3,500. Those are published figures you pay before a single record moves, and not one of the nine alternatives above publishes an equivalent.
That is the real comparison. Not $7 against $14, but $20 against $14 — and if the plan you were quoted was Professional, $100 a seat plus $1,500 on the first invoice against $14 a seat and nothing.
Partner link, marked sponsored and nofollow. A commission never buys a place in a table here, and the ordering above is set by published figures, not by rates — the arrangement, in full. Read the vendor’s own ceilings before you commit a database to it.
The order to run the move in
The order matters more than the tool, because two traps on this page are one-way doors.
- Export everything before you buy anything. Records, then activities, then notes, then files, in separate passes, because that is how the exporters are built. Leaving Salesforce rather than HubSpot, start weeks early — the reasons are on the Salesforce page, and they are about scheduling, not software.
- Count rows and columns against the destination's ceiling. A 40,000-row contact file is one Pipedrive import and six monday CRM imports. That is a planning number, not an opinion.
- Import history in the same pass as the records wherever the destination allows it. On Capsule that is mandatory rather than merely efficient.
- Turn the destination's automations off first. Then turn them on and watch what they do to one test record before letting them near the rest.
- Budget the rebuild, not the import. Workflows, reports and dashboards are the work, and no importer here carries any of them.
If you take one thing from this page, take the fourth column of the table. Everything else about a CRM you can change your mind about later.