HubSpot

HubSpot (HubSpot, Inc., Cambridge, Massachusetts, NYSE-listed, founded 2006, European headquarters in Dublin since 2013) is the platform that comes closest to running a small business's entire customer relationship in one place. The Smart CRM underneath is free for up to two users with contacts, deals, one pipeline, email tracking, meeting links, quotes, live chat and the Breeze AI assistant. On top of it sit Sales Hub, Marketing Hub, Service Hub and Content Hub, sold separately or as a bundle, and all of them write to the same contact record. That is the reason to choose it: a lead captured by a marketing form, worked through a sales pipeline and handed to support never leaves the system, and the reporting sees all of it. Add a remote MCP server at mcp.hubspot.com with read and write access to every core object, a second developer MCP server, over 2,000 marketplace apps and an EU data centre in Frankfurt (opened 19 July 2021, selectable on paid accounts), and you have the most complete platform in this comparison for a company that does not have Salesforce money.

The price is where you need to read carefully, because HubSpot's pricing is built to start small and grow. Prices in GBP as shown to a UK visitor on 8 September 2026 (VAT basis not stated on the page). Sales Hub Starter is £7 a seat a month on annual commitment as a limited-time new-customer offer, or £18 a seat paid monthly. It has no sequences, no forecasting, no custom reporting, two pipelines and basic automation only. The features a sales team of ten actually uses (sequences, up to 300 workflows, forecasting, 100 custom reports, playbooks, deal-stage automation, 15 pipelines) sit in Sales Hub Professional at £77 a seat a month on annual commitment or £85 paid monthly, and Professional carries a required one-time onboarding fee of £1,310 (Enterprise: £135 a seat, £3,050 onboarding). Marketing Hub Professional is not priced per seat at all: it starts at £702 a month on annual commitment (£780 monthly) with three core seats bundled, extra seats from £40, 2,000 marketing contacts included, contact tiers above that, and a £2,600 onboarding fee. AI features draw on HubSpot Credits (3,000 a month on Professional, £8.10 per 1,000 after that). HubSpot removed seat minimums for Sales Hub in March 2024 when it moved to seat-based pricing. Then the clause that matters at year two, section 3.2 of the Customer Terms of Service, "Fee Adjustments at Renewal": "Upon renewal, we may increase your Subscription Fees up to our then-current list price", with 30 days' notice. Subscriptions auto-renew for the shorter of the prior term or one year unless auto-renewal is switched off. A ten-seat Sales Hub Professional team is therefore £9,240 a year on annual commitment plus £1,310 in year one, before marketing contacts, credits or calling minutes.

Trustpilot is the weak spot on the public record: 1.5 on 1,164 reviews (51% one-star, no recent history of asking for reviews), and the one-star themes from August and September 2026 are auto-renewal charges after cancellation requests, sales guidance that did not match what was bought, onboarding cost surprises and a deleted account within a notice period. G2 (4.4 on 35,912 reviews) and Capterra (4.5 on 670-plus) tell the opposite story, which is the usual pattern for a product whose users like it and whose ex-customers dislike the billing. The other item on the record is a June 2024 security incident in which fewer than 30 customer portals were accessed; HubSpot disclosed it, contained it within five days and closed the investigation on 12 July 2024. SOC 2 Type II, SSO, enforced two-factor authentication and field-level audit logging are all present.

In our experience: we have worked with HubSpot across many client organisations over the past decade, supporting thousands of seats in total, and it is the CRM we pick. The reason is the one above: sales, marketing and the rest of the customer record live in one system, and it does that job reliably. It is expensive, like most CRMs, and the price you start on is not the price you finish on, which is why this profile spends so long on the pricing. Saaskly has an affiliate link for HubSpot; the verdict came first and the link does not affect the score.