Ordered by what the move carries
Salesforce alternatives, and the export clock you are already on
Where Salesforce leavers land, what each destination's importer will take, and why the hardest part of the move is a scheduling constraint Salesforce publishes and almost nobody reads.
Down the line
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”
Leaving Salesforce is a scheduling problem before it is a software problem
Start the export before you start the shopping. Salesforce's own Data Export FAQ says you can generate backup files 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.
Then it adds the sentence that decides your calendar: "There is no SLA for Data Exports. It may be expected for a request to take longer than a week to complete."
The manifest above sets out what rides in any CRM move; this page is about the half of it that Salesforce controls. Read those sentences together and the shape of the problem is obvious. You get one attempt every seven days at best, the result may take longer than a week to arrive, and when it does you have 48 hours to be at a computer with enough disk space to catch it. If your contract ends on a date, the number of attempts you have left is a small integer, and it is smaller than you think.
A gap in this page, stated up front
Salesforce's own help and pricing pages refuse automated readers from this machine. The export rules above came back through a different route and are quoted rather than paraphrased for that reason. Where this page cannot read something at source it says so rather than borrowing a figure from a directory.
That also means Switchyard has read no Salesforce import documentation, so no move that ends at Salesforce carries a score anywhere on this site. And because Salesforce runs no publisher programme of any kind, nothing on this page earns anything — there is no partner link to Salesforce here because there is nothing to link to.
What Salesforce costs now, so the comparison is fair
These are the Sales Cloud editions as the pricing page listed them on 24 September 2026, in USD per user per month: Free Suite at $0, Starter Suite at $25 billed monthly or annually, Pro Suite at $100 billed annually, Core at $195 billed annually, Advanced at $395 billed annually and Max at $550 billed annually. Everything above Starter Suite is annual-only on that page, which matters: the exit date is the renewal date, and there is no month-to-month escape hatch.
Set those against the cheapest paid seat at each destination below and the arithmetic is rarely subtle.
| Destination | Cheapest paid seat | Rows per import file | Salesforce-specific path? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Zoho CRM | $14 a user a month billed annually; $20 billed monthly | None published | Yes — a Salesforce option in the migration wizard, with a documented file layout |
| Pipedrive | $14 a seat a month billed annually; $19 billed monthly | 50,000, in a file up to 50 MB | No — a general spreadsheet importer that also takes activities and notes |
| HubSpot | $20 a seat a month at list price | 1,048,576 on a paid plan; 500,000 rows a day on the free tools | No, but the widest door of any destination here |
| Freshsales | $9 a user a month billed annually; $11 billed monthly | Not published where we could read it | Not checked — its import documentation did not load for us |
| monday CRM | $12 a seat a month billed annually; $18 billed monthly, at three seats | Fewer than 8,000, fewer than 50 columns, 10 MB | No, and no activity object to receive a call log |
Zoho CRM: the only destination here that names Salesforce on the box
Zoho publishes a Salesforce-specific migration article, and it is the most detailed account of this particular move anywhere in the documentation this site is built on. Its wizard has a Salesforce option; you upload a zip of CSVs plus a folder named Attachments, and one of the CSVs carries the attachment mappings so records keep their files.
It also tells you what to expect from Salesforce's own backup, which is the sort of detail that only comes from having done it many times. Custom modules arrive as files with a _c suffix. The backup contains extra folders named Attachments, Documents and Content Version, and Zoho states those will not cause the migration to fail — while any other additional folder may make the upload fail outright.
The module list for a Salesforce move covers Users, Leads, Accounts, Contacts, Deals, Campaigns, Notes, Activities (Tasks, Events, Calls), Attachments, Competitor, Cases, Solutions, Products, Quotes, Sales Orders, Invoices, Purchase Orders, Vendors and Price Books. If you are leaving a Salesforce org with a real shape to it, that list is the reason to look here first.
The limits are the same ones on the general Zoho path. No per-file row ceiling is published. Autonumber and Formula are not field types the wizard can create. Tags past the tenth on a record do not travel, and each is capped at 25 characters. The migration pauses if more than 5,000 records in a module are skipped. Standard is $14 a user a month billed annually and $20 billed monthly, and the Free Edition holds three users.
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.
Pipedrive: when you want the pipeline and not the platform
Pipedrive is the right answer for a sales team that used maybe a tenth of Salesforce and paid for all of it. Its importer takes people, organisations, leads, deals, projects, activities, notes and products in bulk, in files of up to 50,000 rows and 50 MB, which is enough headroom for most orgs leaving a mid-market Salesforce edition in one pass per object.
It has no Salesforce-specific wizard, so the mapping work is yours. Two rules will cost you rows if you skip them: a deal or a lead must have a person or an organisation attached to it, and a person needs a name. Anything missing those is skipped rather than guessed at, and the skipped rows come back in a file you have to reconcile.
Lite is $14 a seat a month billed annually and $19 billed monthly, with no required onboarding fee, and its pricing page says 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.
HubSpot: the widest door, at a published price
If the reason you are leaving Salesforce is that it is unwieldy rather than expensive, HubSpot is the move most Salesforce leavers actually make, and on pure import capacity it is the least constrained destination on this page: 1,048,576 rows per file on any paid plan, 512 MB, ten million rows a day. Even the free tools take 500,000 rows a day, which is more than most orgs leaving Salesforce have.
The cost is at the other end of the ladder rather than the bottom. Starter is $20 a seat a month at list — the page currently shows $7 under a limited-time new-customer banner, and HubSpot does not publish what that renews at. Professional is $100 a seat a month at list, and its footnote adds 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.
If that ladder looks familiar, it should. The full comparison of what it costs to leave HubSpot again is the other half of this site, and reading it before you arrive is cheaper than reading it in two years.
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 and monday CRM: the cheap seats, with conditions
Freshsales is the cheapest seat in anything this site covers, at $9 a user a month billed annually and $11 billed monthly, with no free tier published. Its import documentation would not load for us, so this page cannot tell you what its ceilings are — which is exactly the thing to check before you point a Salesforce org at it.
monday CRM is $12 a seat a month billed annually and $18 billed monthly at three seats, and it is the wrong destination for most Salesforce leavers for one documented reason: its importer matches ten column types onto board items and has no activity object, so a Salesforce activity history has nowhere to land. Its file ceiling is fewer than 8,000 rows and fewer than 50 columns at 10 MB, which turns a 60,000-record org into at least eight imports per object.
The one thing to do this week
Request the export. Not because you have decided anything, but because the clock in the first section starts the moment you ask and not the moment you choose. One request every seven days, no service level, 48 hours to collect it: that is the whole constraint, and it is the only part of this page you cannot buy your way out of later.
Everything after that — which destination, which plan, which fields — is a decision you can still change. The number of export attempts left before your renewal date is not.
Leaving Salesforce, briefly
How do I get my data out of Salesforce?
Which CRM is easiest to move to from Salesforce?
_c suffix on custom-module files and which extra folders are safe to leave in the zip. Its module list for that move runs to nineteen objects including Notes, Activities and Attachments. What it does not publish is a per-file row ceiling.