HubSpot alternatives (2026)
The best HubSpot alternatives in 2026 depend on how much of the suite you are actually replacing. ActiveCampaign and Brevo carry a CRM alongside marketing, so they can swap the whole thing. Encharge and Customer.io carry none, so you keep a CRM. fromHello runs growth with an AI team and is in early access.
- Check the meter before the feature list: Brevo bills on monthly email volume, ActiveCampaign on contact bands plus seats, Encharge on subscribers, Customer.io on profiles, and self-hosted fromHello — in early access — on nothing at all.
- HubSpot meters three ways at once — per Core Seat, per marketing-contact band, and per HubSpot Credit for AI — on top of a one-time onboarding fee HubSpot's own pricing footnotes call required at Professional ($3,000) and Enterprise ($7,000). Starter has none.
- You can keep HubSpot's free tools as your system of record and move only the marketing hub. Contacts you set as non-marketing are stored without counting toward the billed contact tier.
- Read the ratchet before you downgrade: HubSpot's Product Specific Terms state that the marketing-contact fee "will not decrease, even if there is a subsequent reduction in the number of Marketing Contacts."
Marketing Hub is one hub inside a suite, and it is priced like one — per Core Seat, per marketing-contact band, and per HubSpot Credit for AI, with a one-time onboarding fee at Professional and above. Starter lists at $20/mo per seat with 1,000 marketing contacts; Professional is $890/mo billed monthly, or $800 committed annually, with three Core Seats and 2,000 marketing contacts; Enterprise starts at $3,600/mo. Most teams looking to leave do not want to tear all of that out. They want the CRM to stay where it is and the sending to move. So this guide sorts five alternatives by how much of the suite each one absorbs, and which of those meters you stop paying.
We sorted on the three things a HubSpot exit actually turns on: whether the tool carries a CRM or assumes you keep one, what it meters (seats, contacts, profiles, or email volume), and what it costs to start. Vendor facts come from primary sources — pricing pages, product terms, and vendor documentation — checked on 10 August 2026. We build fromHello, so it is listed last and held to the same standard, early-access caveat included.
- 01BrevoProprietary (SaaS)
Best for: Teams replacing the whole suite on a small budget, billed on email volume rather than per marketing contact, with SMS, WhatsApp, and a separate sales package alongside.
Strengths- The meter is monthly email volume, not marketing contacts. Starter runs $9/mo, and contact storage is a per-tier cap rather than the thing you are billed for.
- Channel and sales breadth in one account: SMS campaigns to 180+ countries on credits priced by destination, WhatsApp campaigns and 1:1 messaging, and sales tooling packaged separately from Sales Free upward, so the CRM half of a HubSpot setup has somewhere to land.
- Aura, Brevo's AI layer, drafts content, builds a workflow from a plain-language objective, and scores churn risk.
Watch-outs- Seats are still gated by tier: Free and Starter are single-user, Standard adds up to three as an add-on, and ten are included only at Professional, which is $499/mo.
- Closed-source and cloud-only, with Brevo branding on free-plan emails and a 300-sends-a-day ceiling before you pay.
- 02ActiveCampaignProprietary (SaaS)
Best for: The least disruptive suite swap — sales pipelines and marketing automation stay in one account, at a fraction of HubSpot Professional.
Strengths- Pipelines, deals, and contact management sit next to the automation builder, so marketing and sales stay in one account the way they did in HubSpot. Ad-audience sync is native and broad — Facebook Custom Audiences and Lead Ads, Google Ads, LinkedIn Lead Ads, TikTok Ads — with Site messages covering in-app from Professional up.
- Entry pricing is $15/mo on annual billing at 1,000 contacts ($180 a year), or $19/mo billed monthly, with a 14-day trial and a 30-day money-back guarantee stated on the pricing page.
- Active Intelligence is a substantial AI layer: a Google Ads connector that builds Performance Max campaigns from a prompt, campaign generation from an uploaded brief, and memory that persists across sessions.
Watch-outs- It keeps both of HubSpot's main meters: contact bands plus seats. Starter and Plus include one user, Professional three, Enterprise five — so a five-person team pays for the tier, not just the list.
- SMS, WhatsApp, and CRM pipelines are all separately priced add-ons on top of the contact band, and push arrives through marketplace integrations such as OneSignal rather than a native channel.
- Closed-source and cloud-only, with no self-hosted or source-available edition.
- 03EnchargeProprietary (SaaS)
Best for: B2B SaaS teams keeping HubSpot's free tools as the system of record and moving only the marketing hub — Encharge carries no CRM and does not want to.
Strengths- No CRM by design. This is marketing automation that assumes you already have one, which is the right shape when HubSpot's free CRM is staying put.
- Unlimited team members on the Growth plan, per its own pricing page, so the seat meter disappears entirely.
- Behavior-triggered email built on product events, with native web forms and site tracking, plus Magic Writer drafting emails, outlines, and subject-line variants inside the editor.
Watch-outs- No free plan, and one of the highest entry prices here: $99/mo billed monthly or $79/mo billed yearly at 2,000 subscribers, after a 14-day trial.
- Email-first. SMS runs through its Twilio integration rather than a carrier layer Encharge operates, and its integrations page lists Meta Custom Audiences with no Google or LinkedIn audience sync.
- A quiet year: the 2026 changelog entries are maintenance work — form fixes, spam hardening, sending reliability — and above 2,000 subscribers the price is set on an interactive slider rather than a printed table: $249/mo at 10,000 subscribers, $550/mo at 50,000, custom pricing beyond that.
- 04Customer.ioProprietary (SaaS)
Best for: Product-led teams that keep a CRM elsewhere and want every messaging channel in one mature journey builder, billed on profiles rather than seats.
Strengths- Every channel HubSpot gates or hands to a third party — mobile push, web push, in-app messaging, WhatsApp, and SMS through Twilio, Sinch, Infobip, or Vonage — in a single journey builder.
- No seat meter. The bill follows the account's maximum count of uniquely identified people and objects, Essentials includes 5,000 profiles with 1 million emails a month, and the Startup Program gives a full year free to companies that have raised under $10M.
- The Agent works inside your own permissions and approval flows, drafting messages, building automations, and running recurring checks on the account.
Watch-outs- Essentials starts at $100/mo, and the overages stack on top: $0.009 per extra profile, $0.12 per extra 1,000 emails, and $10 per 100,000 AI credits.
- Objects count toward the profile meter alongside people, so a B2B data model can raise the bill faster than your contact list suggests.
- Closed-source and cloud-only, and scoped to messaging — it does not try to replace HubSpot's CRM, forms, or landing pages.
- 05
Best for: Small teams replacing Marketing Hub and the people who were supposed to run it, on an open-source platform they can self-host — currently in early access.
Strengths- Eight AI specialists — Growth Lead, Growth PM, Growth Engineer, Performance Marketer, Lifecycle Marketer, CRO Specialist, Data Analyst, and Copywriter — coordinated by an Orchestrator. They propose; you approve, edit, or auto-ship.
- A complete growth platform underneath: email, SMS, in-app, web push, ad audiences, a 16-node visual journey builder, real-time segments, GDPR consent tracking, and a first-party JS/TS SDK.
- AGPL and self-hostable on Postgres + Redis, so your data stays on your infrastructure — and self-hosting is free, so none of HubSpot's three meters follows you.
Watch-outs- The hosted product and the agents are in early access, and hosted pricing is set at general availability — every other tool here is generally available today, with a price you can read now.
- No forms, no landing pages, and no plugin marketplace, so HubSpot's lead capture and its app ecosystem both need another home.
- No CRM here either. If one account for marketing and sales is the requirement, ActiveCampaign or Brevo is the shorter path.
Common questions
Do I have to replace my CRM too, or can I move only the marketing hub off HubSpot?
You can move only the marketing hub. HubSpot's free tools cost $0 and keep working as a CRM, and contacts you set as non-marketing are stored without counting toward a billed marketing-contact tier — so the records stay put while sending moves to Brevo, Encharge, Customer.io, or fromHello. The trade is two systems to keep in sync instead of one, and a marketing email cap of 2,000 sends a month if you stay on the free tools.
Which of these alternatives include a CRM, and which assume you keep one?
ActiveCampaign and Brevo include one. ActiveCampaign sells CRM pipelines as separately priced add-ons next to its automation builder, and Brevo packages sales tooling on its own ladder from Sales Free upward. Encharge, Customer.io, and fromHello carry no CRM at all — they assume a system of record already exists and work next to it.
Do any of these charge per seat like HubSpot does?
Not the way HubSpot does. HubSpot bills Core Seats on top of the contact band, with three included at Professional and five at Enterprise. ActiveCampaign bundles seats by tier instead (one on Starter and Plus, three on Professional, five on Enterprise), and Brevo does the same (single-user on Free and Starter, ten included at Professional). Encharge's pricing page states unlimited team members on Growth, Customer.io meters profiles, and self-hosted fromHello meters nothing.
What happens to my HubSpot workflows, lists, and forms when I leave?
Contact records and properties export. Workflow logic, forms, and landing pages are HubSpot objects, so budget time to rebuild them on the other side — and if you keep the free tools, your existing forms and lists keep running as they are. Sequence the sending move separately from the data move; our guide to switching email platforms covers domain warm-up and carrying the suppression list.
Is there a HubSpot alternative with no onboarding fee?
All five here. HubSpot's pricing footnotes call onboarding required at Professional ($3,000) and Enterprise ($7,000); Starter carries no such fee, and its page lists Inbound Consulting there as optional, for an additional fee. Brevo, ActiveCampaign, Encharge, and Customer.io all publish self-serve pricing with no mandatory onboarding line. fromHello is self-serve too, though the hosted product is on a waitlist during early access.
What does five users and 10,000 marketing contacts cost after you leave HubSpot?
On HubSpot that shape is Enterprise, from $3,600/mo with five Core Seats and 10,000 marketing contacts included. Off it, the meter changes shape rather than shrinking uniformly. Brevo does not bill contacts at all — storage is a per-tier cap and the bill follows email volume, from $9/mo at Starter. ActiveCampaign at 10,000 contacts is $469/mo on Professional billed monthly, which includes three seats, or $739/mo on Enterprise, which includes five and is still self-serve rather than quote-only. Encharge sets 10,000 subscribers at $249/mo on its slider, which runs to $550/mo at 50,000 before custom pricing. Customer.io includes 5,000 profiles on Essentials and charges $0.009 for each one after that, about $45/mo for the next 5,000, on top of the $100/mo Essentials price. Self-hosted fromHello counts neither contacts nor seats.
- 01HubSpot — Marketing Hub pricing (tier prices, Core Seats, marketing contacts, onboarding footnotes)
- 02HubSpot — Product Specific Terms (contact-tier upgrades, fee ratchet, AI credit consumption)
- 03HubSpot — marketing vs non-marketing contacts, knowledge base
- 04Brevo — pricing
- 05ActiveCampaign — pricing
- 06Encharge — pricing
- 07Customer.io — pricing
See the platform the team runs.
- Growth for small teamsA small team can run real growth — lifecycle, experiments, retention, segmentation — without hiring a growth org. This track covers how: the metric that focuses you, the lifecycle that structures the work, and the journeys that automate it, written for two-to-ten-person teams, not enterprises.Read
- Channels & deliverabilityA customer-engagement platform is the system that reaches your customers across every channel — email, SMS, web push, and in-app — and keeps those messages landing. This track explains the channels, how they work together instead of in silos, and the deliverability and consent rules that decide whether a message is seen at all.Read
- What is a customer-engagement platform (CEP)?A customer-engagement platform is software that manages customer profiles and events and reaches people across multiple channels — email, SMS, web push, in-app — from one place. It differs from an email service provider, which only sends email, and a customer data platform, which unifies data but does not send.Read
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- How to switch email platformsTo switch email platforms, export everything before you cancel anything, carry your suppression list to the new tool, re-permission where consent doesn't transfer, and warm up the new sending domain gradually. Your data moves in an afternoon. Your sender reputation does not — that is the part that needs a plan.Read
- What a growth team costs: 8 roles, 2026 salariesA full eight-person growth team costs roughly $1.0M to $1.2M a year in US base salaries alone, and comfortably $1.5M to $1.7M once you add benefits, payroll tax, and overhead. Those figures come from public 2026 salary databases, summed across the eight senior roles most startups can't afford to fill.Read
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