A deep dive into the HubSpot AI CRM: Features, pricing & a smarter alternative (2025)

Let's be real, AI has gone from a futuristic buzzword to a must-have tool for any business that wants to keep up. If you're not using it, you're probably working harder than you need to. HubSpot has definitely gotten the message, pouring a ton of resources into making its platform an all-in-one AI command center for marketing, sales, and service.

But what does that actually mean for you and your team? An "all-in-one" platform sounds fantastic in theory, but it usually comes with some strings attached. The point of this post is to give you an honest, no-fluff look at the HubSpot AI CRM. We'll walk through its key features (including the new Breeze AI), unpack the pricing, and talk about the potential downsides that might give you pause. By the end, you'll have a much clearer picture of whether it's the right move for your company.

What is the HubSpot AI CRM?

A screenshot of the HubSpot AI platform landing page, illustrating the HubSpot AI CRM's interface.::HubSpot AI CRM

Before we get into all the cool things it can do, it helps to understand that the HubSpot AI CRM isn't just one thing. It’s built on two main components that work together: the Smart CRM and Breeze AI. They’re a team, but they have very different jobs.

What is Smart CRM: The data foundation

Think of the Smart CRM as the central hub for all your customer data. It's the database that stores everything, every contact, company, deal, and support ticket.

The magic isn't just that it holds all this info, but that it connects it across all of HubSpot's different products (or "Hubs"). Every single AI feature, whether it's writing a marketing email or trying to guess which lead will close, is fueled by the data in this central system. This is probably the platform's biggest selling point, but it's also a hint at its biggest limitation: it's a bit of a walled garden. The AI works wonders, but only if all your data is already living inside HubSpot's walls.

What is Breeze AI: The intelligence layer

If the Smart CRM is the foundation, Breeze AI is the brain built on top. It’s the brand name for HubSpot’s whole suite of AI tools and agents. You might have heard of their "AI Copilot" before, but Breeze is a much bigger deal.

It’s easiest to break Breeze into three parts:

• Breeze Assistant: This is your personal AI helper for day-to-day tasks. Need to summarize meeting notes, draft a quick email, or get the lowdown on a company? This is your tool.

• Breeze Agents: These are the new AI "teammates" designed to take on entire jobs by themselves, like answering support tickets or finding new sales leads.

• Breeze Intelligence: This is the analytics engine working in the background, digging through your data to find trends and insights so you don't have to.

Key HubSpot AI CRM features for go-to-market teams

The HubSpot AI CRM isn't a separate product you buy; its features are woven throughout the Marketing, Sales, and Service Hubs. Let's look at how it actually helps your teams get their work done.

HubSpot AI CRM for marketing teams

For marketers, HubSpot’s AI is all about doing more, faster. Staring at a blank page trying to write another blog post or email campaign? The AI Content Writer and Email Writer can spin up a solid first draft in minutes, which is a huge timesaver. Beyond just creating content, the platform uses AI to help you find and build specific audience segments. It can even create lookalike lists to help you target website visitors who are acting like they're ready to buy. It also brings AI into its reporting, helping you spot campaign trends without getting lost in a sea of spreadsheets.

HubSpot AI CRM for sales teams

On the sales side, the AI is focused on making sure your reps spend their time on the right things. The predictive lead scoring feature looks at your historical data to bubble up the leads most likely to become customers, so your team isn't wasting energy on dead ends. The upcoming Prospecting Agent is supposed to take that even further by automatically finding and qualifying new leads for you.

A view of the HubSpot CRM showcasing the HubSpot AI Predictive Lead Scoring feature with scores and priority tiers.

A really useful feature is Conversation Intelligence. It records, transcribes, and analyzes sales calls, giving you summaries and coaching opportunities for managers. And, just like for the marketing folks, the AI Email Assistant is there to help sales reps write personalized outreach and follow-up messages much more quickly.

A screenshot demonstrating the HubSpot AI summarize long ticket threads tool within the conversations inbox.

HubSpot AI CRM for service teams

Service teams get some of the most powerful customer-facing AI tools. You can set up an AI-powered chatbot on your website to handle common questions around the clock. This bot is what HubSpot calls the "Customer Agent," and it’s trained on your knowledge base to resolve issues on its own. Within the help desk, AI gives your human agents a hand by summarizing long, complicated ticket histories, suggesting replies based on similar solved tickets, and even drafting new knowledge base articles after a tricky problem gets solved.

Breeze AI agents in the HubSpot AI CRM: The next step in automation

Beyond the helpful features baked into each Hub, HubSpot is making a big bet on its autonomous "Breeze Agents". These aren't just tools that give you a hand; they're designed to be AI teammates that can run entire processes for you.

Here are the main agents HubSpot is rolling out:

• Customer Agent: Think of this as your automated frontline support. You train it on your help center content and other knowledge docs, and it gets to work resolving customer questions. HubSpot says it can handle over 65% of common queries, freeing up your team to focus on the really tough stuff.

• Prospecting Agent: This agent is like a virtual sales development rep (SDR). It digs through your CRM and other data sources to find companies that seem ready to buy, then crafts and sends personalized outreach emails at a scale a human just couldn't manage.

• Data Agent (Beta): This agent is your personal data analyst. You can ask it in plain English, like, "Show me all enterprise customers in the UK who we haven't contacted in 90 days," and it will generate the report for you. It's also designed to help clean up and enrich the data in your CRM automatically.

A user providing HubSpot AI Automation Recommendations to the AI assistant to build a marketing workflow.

The goal is pretty clear. HubSpot wants these agents to work together to create a system that isn't just AI-assisted, but truly AI-driven.

This official tutorial provides a comprehensive overview of Breeze AI, HubSpot's suite of AI tools designed to enhance productivity across its CRM platform.

The limitations of an all-in-one HubSpot AI CRM

While having everything in one place sounds powerful, it’s not always the perfect solution. This "walled garden" approach has some real downsides, especially for businesses that don't want to be locked into a single vendor.

The challenge of vendor lock-in

To really get your money's worth from HubSpot's AI, you have to be fully committed. We're talking Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, and Service Hub. The AI is at its best when it can see data from every part of that ecosystem.

But what if your support team is already a well-oiled machine using a best-in-class tool like Zendesk, Freshdesk, or Intercom? To unlock HubSpot's full AI potential, you'd have to undertake a massive "rip and replace" migration project. That’s a painful and risky process that most teams would rather avoid.

Complexity and a steep learning curve

Let's be honest: HubSpot is a huge and complex platform. Turning on its advanced AI features isn't like flipping a switch. It takes a lot of setup, configuration, and team training to get it working just right.

This is where a tool like eesel AI follows a completely different philosophy. Instead of making you move your entire tech stack, eesel AI is designed to plug right into the helpdesk you already use. With one-click integrations, you can be up and running in a few minutes, not a few months.

A screenshot of the eesel AI landing page, highlighting its features as an alternative to the HubSpot AI CRM.::HubSpot AI CRM

Lack of risk-free testing and gradual rollout

Letting an AI talk to your customers is a big step. If it's not tested properly, it can lead to some really frustrating customer experiences and hurt your brand. Unfortunately, HubSpot's platform doesn't give you a great way to see how its AI will perform on your actual historical data before you unleash it on live customers.

In contrast, eesel AI was built to solve this exact problem. It has a powerful simulation mode that lets you test your AI agent on thousands of your past support tickets in a completely safe environment. You get a clear forecast of how well it will perform and can tweak its behavior before a single customer ever interacts with it. This lets you roll it out with confidence, one step at a time.

HubSpot AI CRM: Generic automation vs. total workflow control

HubSpot's AI is smart, but it's designed to play by HubSpot's rules. If you need it to perform a custom action or pull data from a system outside its ecosystem, things can get complicated and often require a developer.

With eesel AI, you get complete control through a fully customizable workflow engine. You can define the AI's exact tone of voice, create custom actions to look up order details in Shopify or any other tool via an API, and decide exactly which types of tickets you want to automate. It brings together knowledge from all your company's sources, like Google Docs and Confluence, not just what's locked inside one platform.

A look at HubSpot AI CRM pricing

Let's talk money. HubSpot's pricing can be a bit of a maze because features are bundled into different Hubs and tiers. To get the best AI tools, you generally need to be on their pricier Professional or Enterprise plans.

The main thing to understand is that you're not just paying for AI features; you're paying for the entire Hub subscription they come with. For instance, the Breeze Customer Agent requires a Service Hub Professional plan, which starts at $100 per user, per month. For a small team of five support agents, you're already at $500 a month, and that's before you've even paid for the Marketing or Sales Hubs. The costs can balloon pretty quickly.

Here’s a simplified look at the plans where the main AI features live:

Is the HubSpot AI CRM the right choice for your business?

So, what's the final call? The HubSpot AI CRM is a seriously powerful and deeply integrated platform. If your company is already running on HubSpot or you're looking to consolidate all your tools into one place, it offers a seamless experience that’s tough to match.

But that all-in-one convenience comes with a trade-off: flexibility. You're giving up the freedom to pick the best tools for each job in exchange for the simplicity of a single platform. For teams that want top-tier AI without having to ditch their favorite help desk or move all their internal docs, a more nimble solution makes a lot more sense.

This is exactly where a tool like eesel AI comes in. It provides the powerful AI automation you're looking for, learning from your past tickets, performing custom actions, and connecting all your knowledge sources, all while fitting perfectly with the tools you already know and love.

Instead of planning a complicated, months-long migration project, you could have a powerful AI agent tailored to your business up and running in minutes. See for yourself by starting a free trial or booking a demo today.