HubSpot alternative for small agencies: what to know before you switch

For many agencies, HubSpot is the first introduction to a CRM, usually through the free plan. The problem is not that entry point, it is the step after: once you need more contacts, more automation or multiple pipelines, the bill climbs faster than most small agencies expect.

HubSpot charges based on the number of users and the features you use, with a free plan up to 2 users and 1,000 contacts, and an entry subscription (Starter) that at the time of writing regularly costs $20 per user per month, currently offered at $7. For an agency of five people, that, especially in higher tiers with marketing and service features added, quickly adds up to an amount out of proportion for a small agency with a handful of clients.

Why do agencies run into trouble with HubSpot?

Not because it is a bad product. HubSpot is genuinely broad and mature, with marketing, sales and service as separate modules you can buy separately or together. That is exactly what small agencies run into: you pay for a structure built for companies that run marketing, sales and service as separate departments, while a small agency often does all three with two or three people at once.

On top of that, the contact-based pricing grows with your database, including contacts you no longer actively reach out to. That makes costs harder to predict than a flat price per user.

There is also a less discussed side to it: HubSpot is so broad that agencies in practice only use a small part of it. You pay for reporting options, workflows and automations that a team of three or four people will never fully use. That is not a criticism of the product, but it is a reason to honestly check whether you are paying for the full breadth, or only for the slice you actually use.

What alternatives are there, and at what price?

Freshsales (from Freshworks) is a sales-focused CRM, with an entry plan from around $9 per user per month on annual billing, rising to $39 for the Pro plan with more automation. It is lighter than HubSpot and more transparently priced, but like HubSpot, it lacks built-in project management or a client portal: it stays a sales system, not a place where you also track ongoing work for a client.

Capsule CRM is a lightweight CRM aimed at small businesses, with a free plan up to 2 users and 250 contacts and paid subscriptions per user per month billed annually. Capsule is deliberately simpler than HubSpot, with contacts, pipelines and tasks as its core, and a separately priced marketing add-on. For an agency that mostly wants overview without excess features, that is often exactly enough, but here too: no client portal, no project planning included.

I wrote earlier about how Pipedrive compares for agencies: like Freshsales and Capsule, it is a strong CRM, but without the rest of agency work built around it.

Is Wecooking a HubSpot alternative?

Partly. Wecooking has no marketing hub with email campaigns and landing pages like HubSpot, and you should be upfront about that when comparing: if you are missing those marketing features, HubSpot, or a dedicated marketing tool alongside it, is still needed.

What Wecooking does choose is CRM together with project management and a client portal in one subscription, from €19 per month all included, currently free in beta. For an agency of two to ten people that mostly wants to follow up leads and then have them land neatly in a project, without buying a separate tool for it, that is a more direct match than a CRM disconnected from your projects.

The reverse also needs to be said honestly: if you specifically need heavy marketing automation with segmented email flows, Wecooking does not build that for you, and HubSpot, or a separate marketing package alongside it, remains the more logical choice.

How do you choose in practice?

A few questions that help: do you actually need marketing features like email campaigns, or mostly overview of leads and clients? How many users and contacts do you expect a year from now, since that is where the biggest pricing risk sits with HubSpot? And after winning a deal, do you want to manually switch to another system for the project, or stay in the same one?

If you are torn between a pure CRM and something broader, that connects to the trade-off I made in what is the best CRM for agencies. Want to see if the combination of CRM and project fits your agency? Trying it for free is the fastest way to find out.