The best HubSpot alternatives for small business in 2025: A strategic guide

Let's be honest, HubSpot is a beast. For a lot of businesses, it's the default, all-in-one platform for marketing, sales, and customer service. It seems to have a tool for everything, and its free CRM is a pretty great way to get your feet wet with customer relationship management.

But that all-in-one power comes with a catch, one that a lot of small businesses run into sooner or later: it can get complicated and pricey, really fast. The jump from HubSpot’s free or starter plans to its professional tiers can feel less like a step up and more like a leap of faith over a canyon. All of a sudden, you could be paying a small fortune for a bunch of tools you don’t even use.

If that sounds familiar, you’re in the right place. This guide is all about looking at the landscape of HubSpot alternatives for small business, not just to find a cheaper option, but to build a smarter, more cost-effective set of tools for 2025.

What exactly is HubSpot?

So, what’s under the hood? At its heart, HubSpot is a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform. Everything is built around its Smart CRM, which is basically a central database for every single interaction you have with your customers. From that core, it splits off into different “Hubs”:

• Marketing Hub: This is for bringing in leads through email marketing, landing pages, and social media.

• Sales Hub: This helps you track deals, manage your pipeline, and connect with potential customers.

• Service Hub: This is for customer support, with tools like ticketing, knowledge bases, and live chat.

• Content Hub (CMS): This lets you build and manage your company’s website.

The big appeal of HubSpot is that everything is connected. All your data is in one spot, giving you a full 360-degree view of your customer’s journey. It’s a market leader for good reason, built on a solid inbound marketing philosophy and supported by tons of free educational content.

But as many small business owners find out, this unified model isn't always perfect. A common gripe is the constant upselling. You might sign up for a simple CRM, but the moment you need basic automation or a specific report, you’re nudged into a much more expensive plan. It can feel like you're paying for a bloated system when you really only need one or two key features to work well.

The cost and complexity problem: Why you need HubSpot alternatives for small business

The number one reason small businesses start hunting for HubSpot alternatives is the total cost. The starter plans look tempting, but they’re often just the entry point. As your business grows, you'll naturally need more advanced features, maybe some slick automation, custom reports, or the ability to A/B test your landing pages. And that's exactly when you hit the paywall.

Making that jump from a $20/month plan to an $800/month plan is a tough pill to swallow for any small business.

It’s not just about the monthly bill; it’s about feeling like the platform is actively working against your budget.

This is where building your own "best-of-breed" stack comes into play. Instead of pouring your budget into one expensive tool that does everything reasonably well, you can piece together several specialized, affordable tools that are experts at their specific jobs. This modular approach gives you way more control, flexibility, and often, a much better return on your investment.

This is especially true for customer support. Rather than shelling out for HubSpot's pricey Service Hub just to get some decent automation, you could stick with a more focused helpdesk and connect it to a dedicated AI platform like eesel AI. This gives you incredibly powerful, specialized AI features for a fraction of the cost, and you don't even have to switch away from the tools your team already knows and loves.

Finding the right HubSpot alternatives: Sales, marketing, and support

To find the right HubSpot alternatives for your small business, you have to get clear on what you actually need. Let’s break down the core jobs to be done and look at some specialized tools that might do it better, and for less money.

HubSpot alternatives for sales-focused teams

If you're running a sales team, you know the game is all about managing your pipeline. Your team needs a clear view of their deals, reliable forecasting, and simple tools to track leads and automate follow-ups. HubSpot's Sales Hub is solid, but many of its best features, like sales automation and advanced reporting, are locked away in its expensive upper tiers.

For a fraction of that cost, you can get a tool that’s designed from the ground up with salespeople in mind.

• Pipedrive: This one is famous for its super intuitive, visual sales pipeline. It’s built to help reps focus on the activities that actually lead to closed deals, rather than getting bogged down in admin work. It's clean, simple, and effective.

• Zoho CRM: Zoho is a powerful and very customizable CRM. It offers a surprisingly generous free plan and its paid tiers are much more affordable than HubSpot's. It's a fantastic choice for businesses that need the flexibility to tweak their setup without the enterprise-level price tag.

These tools are laser-focused on the sales process. They often provide a more streamlined and less distracting experience than trying to navigate the massive, all-encompassing HubSpot platform.

HubSpot alternatives for marketing automation

Marketing teams have the tough job of nurturing leads at scale. That means running email campaigns, creating landing pages, and setting up automated workflows that gently guide people from curious visitor to happy customer. HubSpot’s Marketing Hub is a giant in this area, but its true power, omnichannel marketing automation, doesn’t really unlock until you hit the Professional plan, which starts at a whopping $800 a month.

Thankfully, there are some amazing alternatives that specialize in marketing automation and are much more budget-friendly for small businesses.

• ActiveCampaign: This tool is an absolute powerhouse for email marketing and automation. It gives you sophisticated workflow builders, lead scoring, and even CRM features at a price that a small business can actually justify.

• Brevo (formerly Sendinblue): Brevo is an all-in-one marketing platform that bundles email, SMS, chat, and a CRM. It’s well-known for its competitive pricing and robust automation capabilities, making it a strong contender.

HubSpot alternatives for customer support and service

HubSpot’s Service Hub covers the basics: you get ticketing, a knowledge base, and live chat. It’s a decent starting point, but because it’s a newer part of their suite, it can feel a bit less polished than dedicated support platforms. And, you guessed it, the more advanced features, like AI-powered ticket routing or deep analytics, are locked behind those expensive plans.

When it comes to customer support, the single biggest leap in efficiency you can make is through smart automation. Instead of paying a premium for HubSpot’s built-in features or ripping out your entire CRM, you can add a powerful, specialized AI layer right on top of your existing helpdesk.

This is where a tool like eesel AI really shines for small businesses.

• You can get it running in minutes, not months. Setting up big enterprise software can be a total headache. eesel AI offers one-click integrations with the helpdesks you’re probably already using, like Zendesk, Freshdesk, or Gorgias. There’s no complicated setup process. You can be live in just a few minutes.

A flowchart outlining the quick, self-serve implementation of eesel AI, a great HubSpot alternative for small business.

• It trains on your actual company knowledge. Generic AI gives generic, and sometimes wrong, answers. eesel AI is different. It learns directly from your company’s unique knowledge base, past support tickets, your help center articles, and even internal documents you have stored in Confluence or Google Docs. This means the answers it provides are accurate, relevant, and sound like they’re coming from you.

An infographic showing how eesel AI, a powerful HubSpot alternative for small business, integrates with various knowledge sources.

• You can test it with confidence. Committing to a new automation tool can feel like a gamble. What if it doesn’t work as well as you hope? eesel AI has a powerful simulation mode that lets you test its performance on thousands of your past tickets before you ever turn it on for your customers. You get a clear, data-backed forecast of your potential resolution rate and cost savings, so you know exactly what you’re getting into.

A screenshot of the eesel AI simulation feature, a key benefit for those seeking HubSpot alternatives for small business.::A screenshot of the eesel AI simulation feature, a key benefit for those seeking HubSpot alternatives for small business.

HubSpot's pricing: The case for HubSpot alternatives

To really understand why so many small businesses are looking for an out, you just have to look at the numbers. HubSpot’s pricing is built to scale up, but that scaling can quickly leave a small business’s budget in the dust. Here’s a quick look at their Marketing Hub plans, which is where most companies start.

Plan	Starting Price (Annual)	Key Features for SMBs	Major Limitations / What's Missing
Starter	$15/month	Basic email marketing, forms, landing pages, live chat.	No marketing automation, no A/B testing, HubSpot branding on everything.
Professional	$800/month	Omni-channel marketing automation, custom reporting, social media tools, A/B testing.	The price jump is just too big for most small businesses to handle.
Enterprise	$3,600/month	Multi-touch revenue attribution, custom objects, predictive lead scoring.	This is built and priced for massive companies, not your typical SMB.

And here's the kicker: the mandatory onboarding fees. The Professional plan requires a one-time $3,000 onboarding fee, and the Enterprise plan hits you with a $7,000 fee. These are serious hidden costs that can take a small business completely by surprise. While they offer bundles that give you a slight discount, the fundamental problem doesn't go away: as your needs grow, the price climbs at an alarming rate.

This video explores some of the best HubSpot alternatives for small business, covering options for lead management, email campaigns, and sales tracking.

A smarter way to build your tech stack

Look, HubSpot is an impressive platform, there’s no denying it. But its one-size-fits-all approach isn’t always the best fit for a growing small business. The high costs, the features locked behind expensive tiers, and the overall complexity can leave you paying for more than you need, while still not having the specialized tools that would actually help you grow.

The big idea here is to think differently about your software. A modular, "best-of-breed" approach often gives you more power, more flexibility, and a much better return on your investment. You can pick a lean, affordable CRM for your sales and marketing, and then layer on specialized tools to solve your biggest headaches.

So instead of searching for a single, cheaper HubSpot clone, ask yourself: what’s the one thing that would make the biggest impact on my business right now? If your support team is drowning in repetitive customer questions, a dedicated AI solution is probably the most powerful investment you can make.

If you’re ready to see how specialized AI can handle over 65% of your customer questions without forcing you to switch your CRM, take a look at the eesel AI Agent. You can get it live in minutes and see the results for yourself.