HubSpot vs Salesforce: which CRM fits a small business

The short answer

HubSpot is the easier product to start with and the harder one to leave. Salesforce is the harder product to start with and the one you will not outgrow. Everything below is a detail on those two sentences.

If you have fewer than 20 people, nobody who wants to be the CRM admin, and a preference for marketing, sales, and service in one login, HubSpot is the safer first choice. Two people get it free with 1,000 contacts. Starter costs $7 a seat on the current offer; you can pay monthly, and G2 reviewers rate it ahead of Salesforce on ease of use, setup, admin, and support. The bill changes shape at Professional: $90 per seat, a required $1,500 onboarding fee, and a contract that, per HubSpot's terms, you cannot cancel or downgrade until it renews.

If you already know you need custom objects, an API, territory management, or a consultant to build the system, Salesforce is the safer choice, and Starter Suite at $25 a seat is a reasonable way in. The product most people picture when they say "Salesforce" begins with Core, at $195 per seat, billed annually. Salesforce introduced that name on September 3, 2026, so if you priced this last quarter, the numbers have moved.

If you are one of 10 people and the bill decides it, neither is the cheapest option. I get to that at the end, with the disclosure it deserves.

HubSpot vs Salesforce pricing, with the fees the price cards leave off

HubSpot vs Salesforce pricing, with the fees the price cards leave off

Per seat per month, billed yearly, in USD, as shown on the US pricing pages on September 28, 2026.

There are three things the table cannot show.

The $7 is a promotion. HubSpot's page marks it "new customers only" and "available for a limited time", against a $20 list price, and nothing on the page says what happens at renewal. Five seats for three years cost $1,260 at $7 per seat and $3,600 at $20 per seat. Budget for the second number.

Onboarding is not optional. Sales Hub Professional carries a "required, one-time" $1,500 fee, Enterprise a $3,500 one. Five Professional seats over three years come to $17,700 with the fee. Salesforce publishes no onboarding fee and points you to its partner directory, where the quote is whatever the partner says it is. Small teams tend to read that silence as "free". It is unpriced, which is different.

Salesforce renamed its editions. On September 3, 2026, Core at $195 replaced Enterprise at $175, Advanced at $395 replaced Unlimited at $350, and Max kept the old Agentforce 1 price of $550. Salesforce calls it more value, since the new editions bundle Slack, Tableau Next, Flex Credits, and Premier support; existing customers keep legacy pricing. If a comparison you read quotes Enterprise at $175, it predates the change.

The mid-tier lands closer than most people expect: $17,700 for five Professional seats over three years, compared to $18,000 for the Pro Suite. The $300 gap is noise. What separates them is what you can build, which is the next section. Above that, Core is $35,100 for the same five seats.

One more line comes from the fine print. HubSpot lets you pay monthly for Starter and Professional ($100 per seat instead of $90), but its terms of service state that you cannot cancel before the term ends, receive a refund, or downgrade until renewal. Salesforce bills Starter monthly or yearly; Pro Suite and everything above it are yearly with a contract.

What each one lets you build

The customization limits sit on help pages that few people read before buying. Side by side, they explain most of the price difference.

*Salesforce had not published allocation pages for Core on the read date; the Enterprise figures it replaces are shown. "Not published" means the vendor's own pricing and help pages do not show it.

HubSpot hands you fields and pipelines cheaply and keeps custom objects behind Enterprise. Salesforce gives you almost nothing to shape at Starter, 25 fields and no objects or API, then opens up at Pro Suite, and again at Core. Five active flows on a $100 Pro Suite seat is the number that surprised me most, though HubSpot Starter's 50 workflows come with "restricted triggers and actions", so neither entry tier automates much. The API row matters more than it looks: if a developer will ever connect anything, Salesforce wants you on Core at $195 a seat, while HubSpot includes 250,000 calls a day on the free tier.

AI is priced in two ways

Both vendors now sell AI on a consumption basis in addition to seats, and the units are not comparable at a glance.

HubSpot bundles Breeze Assistant into every core seat. Its agents run on HubSpot Credits: 500 per month on Starter, 3,000 per month on Professional, and 5,000 per month on Enterprise, which expire at the end of the month. Extra credits cost $0.01 each. A customer-agent conversation that resolves without a human costs 50 credits ($0.50); a handoff costs nothing.

Salesforce's Starter Suite includes an Employee Agent for record summaries and email drafts. Agentforce runs properly on Flex Credits at $500 per 100,000; one action uses 20 credits, $0.10, and a per-conversation plan costs $2 each, though an org cannot run both. Core includes 500,000 Flex Credits a year, about 25,000 actions; Advanced 1 million; Max 2.75 million. None roll over.

So a resolved support conversation costs $0.50 on HubSpot and $2 on Salesforce's per-conversation plan. Under the credit plan, the cost is whatever its actions add up to, and neither company publishes a typical figure.

Support: two days or one hour

HubSpot's free accounts include access to the knowledge base and community. Starter adds chat and email. The professional adds a phone. Salesforce includes its Standard Success Plan on every license, with a 2-day response time for all inquiries. Premier, with a one-hour response for business-stopping issues, costs 30% of net license fees and comes bundled with Core and above. A two-day response on a $25 seat is the line I would weigh hardest if I ran a five-person team with no admin.

What reviewers say

A star rating without a review count tells you nothing, so here are both. All read September 28, 2026. G2 and TrustRadius now list Sales Cloud as "Agentforce Sales".

The headline scores tie. The sub-scores do not. G2's compare page puts HubSpot ahead on ease of use (8.7 vs 8.2), ease of setup (8.3 vs 7.8), ease of admin (8.6 vs 7.9), and quality of support (8.6 vs 8.1). Salesforce leads on one of the seven, meets requirements, 8.8 to 8.6. That is the G2 version of the two sentences this article opened with.

The widest gap is on Android, where Salesforce's app scores 3.6 from about 59,600 reviews, compared to HubSpot's 4.5. On iOS, the order flips, 4.8 to 4.7.

Both products average 4.4 on G2, so the praise is easy to find. The complaints are more useful. Here are two from the "dislike" sections of recent small-business reviews on G2, quoted word-for-word.

On HubSpot: "We signed an annual contract, but after just one month of constant friction, we stopped using the platform entirely. Even though we are stuck paying for the remaining 11 months of the contract, cutting our losses immediately was still the better monetary solution..." Verified user in financial services, small business, August 6, 2026, rated 0/5.

On Salesforce: "The cost adds up quickly once you factor in per-user licensing, add-ons, and the premium tiers needed to unlock the better features. The learning curve is steep, and meaningful setup or changes often require an admin or consultant rather than an end user." harish J., small business, September 16, 2026, rated 3.5/5.

HubSpot's complaint is the contract. Salesforce needs an admin. Both match the terms and the limits table above, which is why reviews are worth reading next to the documents rather than instead of them.

Is HubSpot replacing Salesforce?

No, and the customer counts explain why the question keeps coming up. Salesforce cites IDC's April 2026 tracker for a 20% share of CRM application revenue, the largest of any vendor, and says more than 150,000 customers use it. HubSpot reported 306,446 customers as of June 30, 2026, paying an average of $11,800 per year. That is twice the customers at a fraction of the spend per customer. The two mostly sell to different companies, and a small business choosing between them is standing at the intersection of their markets. Neither publishes a ranked list of competitors, so "biggest competitor" has no sourced answer.

Is HubSpot just a CRM?

No. The CRM is the free layer. Paid hubs for marketing, sales, service, content, and data sit on top of it, and the Starter Customer Platform bundles all of them for $7 a seat on the current offer. Salesforce's Starter Suite covers the same ground in a single product for $25, with a free Slack workspace included.

Where Bigin fits

Disclosure before the pitch: Bigin is our product, a pipeline CRM built for small businesses, so read this section knowing who wrote it.

Bigin Express costs $7 per user per month, billed yearly, with no offer clock and no onboarding fee. It includes a built-in phone, WhatsApp, three web forms, and 30 automations, holds 50,000 records, and the one-user free plan has no time limit. It scores 4.6 on G2 from 875 reviews, 4.7 on Capterra from 744, and 4.7 on Google Play. The ceiling is real: 10 custom fields per team pipeline on Express and 50 on Bigin 360. A team that needs what Salesforce Core offers should start there; our guide on choosing a CRM says so at length.

The short version

HubSpot is cheaper to start, at $7 a seat on offer or free for two users, and easier to run by every G2 sub-score except one. Its costs arrive as a required onboarding fee at Professional and a contract you cannot leave early. Salesforce is the product you will not outgrow, and it charges for that from Core at $195 a seat, where the API, custom objects, and one-hour support live. Its entry tiers are cheap and thin. The mid-tier costs are within $300 of each other over three years, so pick based on what you need to build. And if you are 10 people or fewer watching the bill, try Bigin free before you sign anything with an annual term.