First, the honest part: HubSpot is genuinely excellent software. Their CRM is one of the best on the market. Their marketing automation is the gold standard for a reason. Their team has spent 20 years and ~$3 billion of R&D making it that good. We have nothing but respect for what they've built.
It's also wildly oversized for most of the people buying it. That's the part nobody in the SaaS marketing world wants to say out loud, because comparing yourself to HubSpot is how every CRM startup positions itself. Pretending HubSpot is bad gets you clicks. Pretending HubSpot is too good for the customer is more accurate and less comfortable.
The thesis, plainly: fit, not quality.
HubSpot was built for, and excels at, the use case it was originally designed for: a sales-led SaaS company with a dedicated marketing function, 50+ employees, and a sales team running ~3-stage pipelines with marketing automation triggering off behavioral data.
That is a specific shape of company. The number of US companies that match it: somewhere around 80,000. The number of companies signed up for HubSpot: about 250,000.
The gap — the other ~170,000 — are smaller teams who bought HubSpot because that's what CRM is supposed to be, who use about 10% of the features, and who are paying about 6× what their actual usage warrants.
HubSpot is the right tool for the wrong customer.
What the 10-person team actually does.
Pull the HubSpot logs for a typical 10-person agency. Here's what their team uses, in our audit of 200+ customers who migrated to Mewayz:
- Contacts & companies database. Yes, every day.
- Deal pipeline. Yes, daily. Usually 1–2 stages, not 5.
- Notes & activity logging. Sometimes. Mostly forgotten.
- Email tracking. Sometimes. Usually replaced by Gmail's native version.
- Meeting scheduler. They use Calendly instead. Always.
- Marketing automation workflows. Almost never. Too complex to set up.
- Lead scoring. Never. The team is small enough to score leads in their head.
- Custom reports. Almost never. Use Excel exports.
- Sequences. ~30% of teams. Often misconfigured.
- SEO & content tools. Used once during onboarding, then forgotten.
Out of HubSpot's roughly 200 features, the typical 10-person agency uses 6 to 10. They're paying for the other 190.
The math, at a 10-person team.
Here's what HubSpot Sales Hub Starter actually costs at headcount = 10, billed annually with standard list pricing in mid-2026:
That number jumps to about $5,400/year if you add Marketing Hub Starter (which most growing teams need for email campaigns). It jumps to ~$14,400/year if you upgrade either to Professional, which most teams of 15+ end up doing because Starter caps too low.
Total enterprise SaaS spend for a 10-person team paying for the HubSpot Suite at Pro: ~$1,200/month, just on HubSpot. That's before any of the other software in their stack.
The trap: "this'll grow with us."
The reason teams buy HubSpot when they're too small for it is the same reason teams buy Salesforce when they're too small for it: the promise of "this is what we'll grow into."
That promise is real for some companies. About 5% of the teams who buy HubSpot Starter eventually scale into using HubSpot Pro the way Pro was designed to be used. The other 95% stagnate in feature usage, pay the full freight, and quietly think every year about migrating to "something simpler."
It's the same trap as buying a Tesla because you might one day want self-driving and a yacht. You probably won't. Statistically, you really probably won't.
What "right-sized" looks like.
A 10-person team doesn't need a CRM with 47 entity types and unlimited custom properties. They need: contacts, companies, deals with 3 stages, a basic activity log, and an inbox that captures everything when someone emails a customer. That's it. Maybe 8 to 10 screens total.
They also need that CRM to talk to their accounting, their HR, their helpdesk, and their email marketing. The integration is the actual product. The CRM is the table-stakes part.
That's the inversion that all-in-ones like Mewayz make. We're not better than HubSpot at CRM. We're roughly as good as the $50/month version of CRM-only software — which is what a 10-person team would buy on its own. The difference is the same data model also runs your invoicing, your project management, your helpdesk. The connection is the value. The standalone module just has to clear the "good enough" bar.
Where HubSpot is actually right.
To be fair to the comparison: if your team is selling B2B SaaS, 30+ employees, with a dedicated marketing function building genuinely sophisticated nurture funnels, and your customer acquisition cost is high enough that a 10% lift in lead conversion justifies $20K/year of software — buy HubSpot.
It's better than the alternatives at that profile. Its reporting is better. Its integrations with other enterprise tools are better. Its support quality at the Enterprise tier is actually excellent. We've migrated those customers onto HubSpot, not off it.
But that's the 5%. If you're not that 5%, you're paying retail for tools you don't run.
The migration path, honestly.
We'll save the migration playbook for a separate post. The short version: HubSpot's data export is good, our import is good, and most teams complete the swap inside an afternoon. Contact lists, deals, notes, and email histories all map cleanly to Mewayz equivalents.
The things that don't migrate: workflows you'd built in HubSpot's automation builder (you'd rebuild them in Mewayz, or find you didn't actually need them), and historical reports tied to HubSpot's specific reporting schema (export to CSV, archive).
The thing nobody admits about CRM migrations: 90% of the friction is psychological. Once you decide, it's mostly clicking buttons.
What to look at instead
If we've convinced you HubSpot is the wrong shape, the candidates roughly cluster into:
- Single-purpose simpler CRMs — Pipedrive, Folk, Attio. Great if CRM is your only software need. But you'll buy 7 other things alongside.
- All-in-ones — Zoho, Odoo, Bitrix, Mewayz. CRM is one of many modules. The integration is the value.
- Embedded-in-everywhere — Notion, ClickUp. Powerful, but you're using a docs/projects tool with CRM tacked on. Usually fragile.
We're obviously biased toward (2), so take this for what it is. The point isn't that Mewayz is the answer for everyone. The point is that HubSpot is the answer for fewer people than HubSpot's marketing implies.
And if that's news to you — congratulations. You've just unlocked $10K/year of budget.