- Anubhav S
- Published: 10/14/2026
- Last Updated: 10/14/2026
Pipedrive is a sales pipeline tool, and its vendor keeps it that way on purpose. HubSpot is a free CRM with paid hubs for marketing, sales, service, content, data, and now revenue stacked on top of it. For a small team, the choice usually turns on two questions: whether you want marketing, chat, forms, and a phone in the same login as your deals, and where you are willing to meet the first real paywall.
HubSpot gives away more at the bottom. Two users get the free CRM with two-way email sync, live chat, web forms, one meeting link, and 2,000 marketing emails a month, all carrying HubSpot branding. Sales Hub Starter, which lists at $20 a seat, adds built-in calling with 500 minutes a month for the account. Pipedrive has no free plan and no built-in dialer on any plan, and its $14 Lite plan has no email sync at all, so the real Pipedrive starting point is Growth at $39 a seat billed yearly.
Pipedrive gives away more in the middle. Growth includes automations, sequences, a forecast view, and a meeting scheduler. On HubSpot, the workflows tool, sequences, the forecast tool, and the custom report builder all require Sales Hub Professional, which costs $100 per seat, carries a required one-time onboarding fee of $1,500, and comes with terms that say you cannot cancel or downgrade before the term ends. That jump from Starter to Professional is the most common complaint in HubSpot's recent small-business reviews, and I'll quote one below.
Neither product is the cheap, simple answer for a five-person team watching every dollar. I say where I think that team should look at the end, with the disclosure it deserves.
What each one is built to do
Pipedrive calls itself “an easy and effective CRM,” and its help center is candid about the edges: no custom objects on any plan, no built-in calling, and no marketing email without the Campaigns add-on. The company was founded in 2010, is headquartered in New York, is majority-owned by Vista Equity Partners, and says that more than 105,000 companies in over 180 countries use it.
HubSpot’s free CRM is the base layer, and everything else is a paid hub. Sales Hub is the focus of this article, with Starter, Professional, and Enterprise tiers. One change this year matters for small teams: quoting moved into a separate Revenue Hub, so new quotes and e-signatures need a Revenue Hub Professional or Enterprise seat, and the old Sales Hub quotes tool “is no longer available to new users.” HubSpot reported 306,446 customers on June 30, 2026, paying an average of $11,800 per year each, a figure that sits well past Starter.
Feature by feature: the plan you need for each one
Every cell below names the plan that unlocks the feature, because “included” on a pricing card usually means included on a plan you were not looking at. The plan names are the ones each vendor uses today: Lite, Growth, Premium, and Ultimate for Pipedrive, and Free, Starter, Professional, and Enterprise for HubSpot Sales Hub.
Feature | Pipedrive | HubSpot Sales Hub |
|---|---|---|
Email sync and tracking | Two-way email sync, templates, and open and click tracking start on the Growth plan, which syncs one inbox per user. Lite has no email sync. | Two-way inbox sync for Gmail, Outlook, and IMAP is included on the free plan. Free accounts get 200 tracking notifications a month and three email templates; Starter removes the notification cap and allows 10,000 templates. |
Sequences | Automated email sequences start at Growth, with 5 per company, 25 per company on Premium, and 50 per company on Ultimate. | Sequences need Professional and an assigned Sales seat, with 500 sequence sends per user per day, or 1,000 on Enterprise. |
Automation | Automations start on Growth, with 50 active automations for the whole company, 150 on Premium, and 250 on Ultimate. Lite has none. | Starter gets simple automation: pipeline stage triggers that create a task, send an internal email, or edit a record, plus one simple workflow per form. The workflows tool, with 300 workflows, needs Professional; Enterprise allows 1,000. |
Forecasting | The forecast view starts on Growth. | The forecast tool needs Professional and an assigned Sales seat. Starter gets a revenue goal only. |
Quotes and e-signatures | Smart Docs, which covers quote templates and e-signatures, is included on Premium and Ultimate and is a paid add-on from $32.50 a month on Lite and Growth. | New quotes and e-signatures need a Revenue Hub Professional or Enterprise seat, sold separately from Sales Hub. The documents tool for sharing and tracking files starts on Starter. |
Custom fields | Lite allows 30 custom fields for the whole company, Growth 100, Premium 300, and Ultimate 500. Required and formula fields need Premium. | The free plan allows 10 custom properties in total. Starter, Professional, and Enterprise allow 1,000 per object. |
Custom objects | Pipedrive has no custom objects on any plan. Custom fields attach only to leads, deals, people, organizations, products, and projects. | Custom objects need Enterprise, with up to 10 object definitions and 1,000,000 custom object records. |
Record limits | Pipedrive caps leads plus open, won, and lost deals at 2,500 per seat on Lite, 5,000 on Growth, 15,000 on Premium, and 20,000 on Ultimate, up to 300,000 per company. Contacts are unlimited. | The free plan allows 1,000 contacts and up to 1,000,000 records for the other standard objects. Paid plans allow up to 15,000,000 contacts depending on the subscription. |
Pipelines | Pipedrive publishes no pipeline limit and advertises unlimited pipelines on every plan. | The free plan gets one pipeline per object. Starter allows 15 pipelines per account across object types, Professional 100, and Enterprise 350. |
Reports and dashboards | Lite allows 15 reports per user, Growth 50, Premium 250, and Ultimate 500. Lite and Growth get one dashboard; multiple dashboards and reports on custom fields need Premium. | The free plan allows 10 dashboards with 50 reports each, Starter 30, Professional 75, and Enterprise 100. The custom report builder needs Professional. |
Phone | Pipedrive has no built-in calling on any plan. You connect a calling app from its marketplace, such as Aircall or JustCall, and pay that vendor separately, or log calls made from the mobile app. | Built-in calling starts on Starter with 500 minutes per account a month and one HubSpot number, rising to 3,000 minutes on Professional and 12,000 on Enterprise. Calling is not supported in every country. |
Forms, chat, and marketing email | Web forms, live chat, and a chatbot come with the LeadBooster add-on, starting at $32.50 per company per month, and are included on Premium and Ultimate. Marketing email requires the Campaigns add-on, available from $13.33 a month on every plan. | Forms, live chat, a basic chatbot without branching, and 2,000 marketing emails a month are included on the free plan with HubSpot branding. Starter removes the branding. |
Permissions | Lite and Growth get the default admin and regular permission sets. Custom permission sets, visibility groups, and teams need Premium, with 15 of each, or 25 on Ultimate. | Starter and Professional get permission templates only. Enterprise allows custom permission sets, nested teams, and field-level permissions. |
API and webhooks | API access and webhooks are on every plan. The daily token budget is 30,000 per seat on Lite, 60,000 on Growth, 150,000 on Premium, and 210,000 on Ultimate. | The API is included on every plan: 250,000 calls per day on the free and Starter plans, 625,000 on the Professional plan, and 1,000,000 on the Enterprise plan. |
AI | The AI sales assistant, AI report creation, and Nova meeting notes are on every plan at no extra cost. AI email writing, summaries, and suggested replies need Premium. | Breeze Assistant is on every plan, including the free plan. Agents run on HubSpot Credits: 500 a month on Starter, 3,000 on Professional, and 5,000 on Enterprise, then $0.01 a credit. The prospecting agent starts on Starter at 100 credits per lead; the customer agent needs Professional. |
Support | Chatbot support is on every plan, and Pipedrive's plan table lists live chat from Growth. Phone support needs Premium. | The free plan gets the knowledge base and community. Starter adds chat and email support. Phone support needs Professional. |
Two things stand out to me in that table.
The two ladders run in opposite directions. Pipedrive charges early for the things a salesperson touches all day, email sync and automation, and gives everyone the API, the AI assistant, and Nova. HubSpot gives away email sync, forms, chat, a scheduler, and marketing email on the free plan, then holds the automation engine, sequences, forecasting, and custom reports until Professional at $100 a seat. If your team's day is email and follow-ups, Pipedrive Growth at $39 includes the tools HubSpot sells at $100.
The phone row is the one most comparison articles skip. HubSpot includes a dialer from Starter up, with minutes pooled across the account. Pipedrive has never had one, and its help center says so in one sentence. A team that calls from the CRM pays HubSpot once or pays Pipedrive plus Aircall or JustCall. The quotes row moved against HubSpot this year: a new Sales Hub Professional account no longer gets quotes without a separate Revenue Hub seat, while Pipedrive's Smart Docs come with Premium.
Pipedrive vs HubSpot for small businesses and startups
For a team of three to 10 whose job this quarter is to close, Pipedrive Growth is the shortest path from signup to a working pipeline with email, automations, sequences, and a forecast. Monthly billing can be canceled at any time, there is no onboarding fee, and Pipedrive's pricing page says implementation help is free once a subscription passes $400 a year. Skip Lite unless nobody on the team sends email from the CRM.
For a team that wants marketing email, forms, chat, and a phone in the same product as its deals, HubSpot's free plan and then Starter cover a lot of ground for very little, and that is where I would start if the team expects to stay under Professional for a year or two. The price of that convenience arrives later. A verified user in e-learning, at a small business, wrote on G2 on September 27, 2026, rating HubSpot Sales Hub 5 out of 5: "The main downside is pricing: once you need advanced features, the jump from the free or Starter plans to Professional is significant, especially for small teams and side projects." That reviewer gave full marks and still led with the bill, which tells you the trade is well known.
The contracts differ in shape too. HubSpot's terms of service, last modified September 16, 2026, say "you may not cancel your subscription prior to the end of your Current Term" and "You are not permitted to downgrade your Subscription Service during your Current Term." Pipedrive's help center says monthly subscriptions can be canceled at any time, with the cancellation taking effect on the next payment date, and that annual subscriptions are prepaid and cannot be refunded. On both products, read the term length before you sign.
Is HubSpot or Pipedrive cheaper?
HubSpot is cheaper to start, and Pipedrive is cheaper in the middle. The plan ladder above says more than the sticker does, so this stays short.
Billed yearly, Pipedrive charges $14 a seat per month for Lite, $39 for Growth, $59 for Premium, and $79 for Ultimate. Its pricing page says annual billing saves up to 42% against monthly and does not print the monthly figures anywhere I could read. Add-ons start at $13.33 a month, and Premium and Ultimate include three of the five. There is a 14-day trial, no free plan, and no onboarding fee.
HubSpot's free CRM costs nothing for two users. Sales Hub Starter lists at $20 a seat per month, and HubSpot's Starter page shows a new-customer offer of $7 billed yearly or $10 billed monthly, marked "available for a limited time." Professional costs $100 a seat per month plus a required one-time onboarding fee of $1,500. Enterprise costs $150 a seat, billed yearly, plus $3,500 onboarding.
So the realistic comparison for a small team is Growth at $39 against Starter at $20 list, and then Premium at $59 against Professional at $100 plus $1,500 once the team needs custom permissions and more than one dashboard. Five Professional seats for a year cost $7,500 on HubSpot, including the fee. Five Premium seats cost $3,540 on Pipedrive.
Can you use Pipedrive and HubSpot together?
Yes, and HubSpot built the connector. HubSpot's app marketplace lists "Pipedrive - CRM App for HubSpot," built and certified by HubSpot, which syncs people, deals, organizations, products, and activities two ways in real time with default field mappings (read October 14, 2026). Data sync is part of HubSpot's free tools, so the base connection costs nothing; custom field mappings need Data Hub Starter, which lists at $20 a seat. The same connector appears in Pipedrive's marketplace under HubSpot's name. Users are lukewarm about it: 2.7 out of 5 from 28 ratings on HubSpot's marketplace and 3.5 from 15 reviews on Pipedrive's. Zapier and Make both list ready-made recipes, such as creating a Pipedrive lead from a HubSpot form submission.
My guess is that most people searching for a Pipedrive HubSpot integration are moving from one to the other. Pipedrive's help center documents a HubSpot migration through Import2, which is free for up to 1,000,000 records and for which Pipedrive says to allow 24 hours, plus a CSV route that imports organizations, people, deals, leads, activities, and notes in that order. HubSpot's comparison page mentions guided migration services and does not price them.
What reviewers say
A star rating without a review count tells you very little, so both are here, as of October 14, 2026. Capterra lists HubSpot’s CRM and Sales Hub as separate products; the Sales Hub listing is the one in the table, and the HubSpot CRM listing scores 4.5 from 4,491 reviews. Google Play ratings differ by country storefront, so the US figures are shown.
Platform | Pipedrive | HubSpot Sales Hub |
|---|---|---|
G2 | Pipedrive scores 4.3 out of 5 from 5,078 reviews. | HubSpot Sales Hub scores 4.4 out of 5 from 14,360 reviews. |
Capterra | Pipedrive scores 4.5 out of 5 from 3,063 reviews, with 4.5 for ease of use and 4.4 for value for money. | HubSpot Sales Hub scores 4.5 out of 5 from 506 reviews, with 4.4 for ease of use and 4.2 for value for money. |
TrustRadius | Pipedrive scores 8.7 out of 10 from 519 reviews. | HubSpot Sales Hub scores 8.8 out of 10 from 583 reviews. |
Apple App Store | The Pipedrive app has a score of 3.7 out of 5 based on 675 ratings. | The HubSpot app has a 4.7/5 rating based on about 16,000 ratings. |
Google Play (US) | The Pipedrive app has a 4.0 out of 5 rating based on about 3,590 reviews. | The HubSpot app has a 4.5/5 rating based on about 13,400 reviews. |
The headline scores sit within a tenth of a point of each other. The G2 compare page separates them a little. Pipedrive leads on ease of setup (8.7 against 8.3) and product direction (8.9 against 8.7). HubSpot leads on quality of support (8.6 against 8.4) and meets requirements (8.6 against 8.5). The two tie on ease of use at 8.7 and ease of admin at 8.6. Pipedrive is faster to set up, and HubSpot does more and supports it better. The mobile apps are the widest gap: Pipedrive's iPhone app rates 3.7 and its US Android rating is 4.0, against 4.7 and 4.5 for HubSpot. If your reps work from their phones, install both on their phones during the trial.
Capterra's 2026 CRM Shortlist, last updated October 13, 2026, includes Pipedrive and Bigin, and the HubSpot entry on it is HubSpot CRM. G2's Best Sales Software Products for 2026 list put HubSpot Sales Hub second and Pipedrive sixth.
Complaints teach more than praise, so here are two from the "dislike" sections of recent small business reviews on G2, word for word.
On Pipedrive: "The Web Visitors function - that costs $49/mo - does not allow users to export an Excel, or even a PDF, of the visitor activity. Lastly, the analytics functions could be easier to use, allowing users to create reports that utilize all the data found in the Deals." Verified user in automotive, small business, September 21, 2026, rated 4 out of 5. The first sentence is the add-on model, and the second is the Premium row of the reports table.
On HubSpot: "I think my understanding with HubSpot Sales Hub, I would get all the features. Finding out that I need to upgrade even more to get all the features was a bit frustrating. SMS use. We ended up adding it on, but again didn't know it wasn't part of the hub." Carrie O., Director of Membership and Events Sales, small business, September 22, 2026, rated 4 out of 5. That is the hub model, described by someone who met it on an invoice.
Is Pipedrive better than HubSpot?
Pipedrive is better for a team that sells and does nothing else in its CRM and will pay $39 per seat for Growth. HubSpot is better for a team that wants marketing, chat, forms, and a phone next to its deals, and that will either stay under Professional or budget for it. The G2 sub-scores say the same thing in numbers: Pipedrive wins setup, HubSpot wins support and meeting requirements, and the rest is a tie. Neither is better in the abstract, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling one of them. I work on a third one, which is why the disclosure section exists.
What are the disadvantages of Pipedrive?
Pipedrive's disadvantages are the edges of its design. It has no custom objects, so anything beyond leads, deals, people, organizations, products, and projects must be captured in custom fields. It has no built-in phone. Marketing email needs the Campaigns add-on, and web forms, live chat, and a chatbot need LeadBooster unless you are on Premium or Ultimate. The Lite plan lacks email sync and automation, leaving it a place to look at your deals and little else. Leads and deals are capped per seat, and won and lost deals count toward the cap until you archive them. The iPhone app rates 3.7. A team that sells one product through one pipeline will notice none of this, and that team is who Pipedrive is for.
What are the disadvantages of HubSpot?
HubSpot's disadvantages arrive on the bill. The free plan allows 1,000 contacts and 10 custom properties in total, which a working sales team can fill in a quarter. Sequences, the workflows tool, forecasting, and custom reports all require Professional at $100 per seat, with a required $1,500 onboarding fee, and the terms forbid canceling or downgrading mid-term. New quotes and e-signatures now need a separate Revenue Hub seat. AI agents run on credits that expire at the end of each month. And every feature is a hub, which is how a reviewer ends up buying SMS they thought was already included. None of this will bother a team that planned for Professional from the start, which is who Sales Hub is for.
Where Bigin fits
Disclosure first: Bigin is our product, a pipeline-centric CRM built by Zoho for small businesses, so read this section knowing who wrote it. If you arrived here from a "Pipedrive vs Zoho" or "HubSpot vs Zoho" search, this is the Zoho product built for the size of team this article is about.
Bigin Express costs $7 per user per month, billed annually, or $9 per user per month, billed monthly, with free onboarding and no offer clock. It includes a built-in phone on every plan, including the free one, WhatsApp from Express up, 30 automations, three team pipelines, and 50,000 records (as of October 14, 2026). It scores 4.6 on G2 from 877 reviews and 4.7 on Capterra from 744 reviews, and holds the 2026 CRM Shortlist designations for best ease of use and best value for money. The ceiling is real, and you should hear it from me first: 10 custom fields per module on Express and 50 on Bigin 360, no custom objects, and no marketing hub. A team that needs HubSpot Professional should buy HubSpot Professional. Our guide on choosing a CRM says so at length.
Wrapping up
Pipedrive is the faster product to set up and the one that charges early: email sync, automations, sequences, and forecasting begin on Growth at $39, and permissions, multiple dashboards, e-signatures, and AI writing live on Premium at $59. It has no custom objects, no built-in phone, and no marketing without add-ons. HubSpot is the more generous product at the bottom and the more expensive one in the middle: free covers email sync, forms, chat, and 2,000 marketing emails for two users, Starter adds a phone, and Professional at $100 plus a $1,500 fee is where the automation engine, sequences, forecasting, and custom reports live. Reviewers rate the two within a tenth of a point of each other and split the G2 sub-scores. And if you are 10 people or fewer, try Bigin free before you sign anything with an annual term.