Leaving HubSpot: what to export, what it costs, and which CRM to choose next

Perhaps nothing in HubSpot actually broke. Perhaps the bill simply stopped matching how your team uses it. A renewal arrives that costs more than the value you get. The features you need sit one tier up, and the jump from Starter to Professional is bigger than you expected. Or you look at your account and realise the team uses a contact list, a pipeline and a few email templates, while you pay for a whole platform.

If that sounds familiar, switching may well be the right call. But two things decide how smoothly it goes: HubSpot's contract terms, which control when you can leave, and its export tools, which control what you can take with you. This guide walks through both, then helps you choose a replacement based on what your business really needs rather than on a list of brand names.

A quick note on how to read it. The terms, help-centre guidance and prices quoted below were read on the vendors' own pages on 17 October 2026, and the product cards and comparison table show each catalog price's own check date. We mark where each point comes from: HubSpot's contract terms (Terms of Service and Product Specific Terms), its help centre (guidance on how the product works), or a pricing page. Your own Order Form can differ from the standard terms, so treat this as a checklist to confirm, not as legal advice.

Should you switch?

Start with the honest question: is HubSpot the problem, or is the way you're using it the problem? Switching is worth serious consideration when:

• Your renewal is approaching and the price is the problem. HubSpot's Terms of Service say that "Upon renewal, we may increase your Subscription Fees up to our then-current list price", with "at least thirty (30) days" notice of the increase. If that notice has just landed, you have a natural decision point.
• You use HubSpot mainly as a contact list and a pipeline. Several cheaper CRMs cover that well (see below).
• The next tier is the only reason you would stay. If staying means upgrading, compare the full cost of the upgrade with the cost of moving, not just the monthly price.

Imagine a five-person agency that uses HubSpot for three things: client contacts, a simple deal pipeline and the odd follow-up call. Nobody touches the marketing tools. For a team like this, a simpler CRM with a flat per-user price may cover everything it uses today.

Now consider a sales team of several people whose HubSpot setup has grown over the years. Workflows assign new leads, sequences send follow-up emails, and managers rely on custom reports every Monday. Every one of those automations has to be rebuilt, tested and explained in the new tool, and things slip while that happens. The software might cost less; the move won't be free.

That is the trade-off to keep in mind throughout: a cheaper subscription does not always mean a cheaper migration. The more HubSpot does for you automatically, the more work leaving creates.

Timing matters too. It is usually not worth switching mid-contract just to save money. The Terms of Service say that, "Except as specifically provided for in this Agreement, you may not cancel your subscription prior to the end of your Current Term", and that HubSpot "will not provide any refunds of prepaid fees or unused Subscription Fees through the end of your Current Term". The exceptions are narrow (for example, termination for cause), and your Order Form may add its own terms. If you are halfway through an annual contract, the useful move is to start preparing now, so you can leave cleanly at renewal.

Staying can also be the right answer. If HubSpot's marketing automation is central to how you win customers, the CRMs compared below are not like-for-like replacements; they focus on contacts and sales pipelines. In that case, it may be better to downgrade what you don't use, or to negotiate at renewal, than to rebuild everything elsewhere.

What staying on HubSpot can cost

Before you decide, put an honest number on staying. HubSpot's pricing page shows prices in the currency of your region. The card below shows the euro price that was served to our research location, with the date it was checked; the price in your currency may differ, so check it on HubSpot's site. A few cost drivers are easy to miss:

• Seats, not just plans (pricing page). HubSpot's Customer Platform pricing lists Professional and Enterprise per seat, with additional seats priced separately. A price that looks reasonable for two people can look very different for eight.
• Onboarding fees on higher tiers (pricing page). HubSpot's Marketing Hub pricing page, in its US-dollar version read on 17 October 2026, says: "Cost shown does not include the required, one-time Professional Onboarding for a fee of $3,000", and the same for Enterprise Onboarding at $7,000. Its FAQ adds: "When you purchase Marketing Hub Professional or Enterprise, you'll automatically be charged for onboarding". Amounts can differ by region and hub; we did not confirm the fees for other hubs. If an upgrade is on the table, include this in the comparison.
• Contacts, seats and credits are locked in for the term (help centre). HubSpot's cancellation guide counts "decreasing marketing contacts, seats, or HubSpot Credits capacity packs" as a downgrade, and downgrades take effect only at renewal. If your team shrank mid-year, you keep paying for the larger setup until then.

Compare that with the whole cost of leaving: the new subscription plus the time to move your data, rebuild what matters and get the team comfortable.

How cancelling and downgrading work

If you decide to leave, the mechanics are simple, but the timing is strict. From HubSpot's cancellation guide (help centre) and its Terms of Service (contract terms, last modified 16 September 2026):

• No early exit (help centre). "Mid-contract cancellations are not permitted." When you turn off auto-renewal, your subscription "will be automatically canceled on your renewal date, not immediately". HubSpot's own example: on a 12-month contract cancelled after eight months, "you'll still be charged until the end of your commitment term".
• Renewal is automatic (contract terms). Unless your Order says otherwise, a subscription "will automatically renew for the shorter of the same duration as your prior term or one year". To stop it, you "must turn off the auto-renewal setting in the Account & Billing section of your HubSpot account prior to the end of your Current Term".
• Who can cancel (help centre). "Super Admins or users with billing admin permissions can turn off auto-renewal." HubSpot then sends "a notice of non-renewal" to the billing admin with the commitment term and the effective cancellation date. Keep it somewhere safe.
• Downgrades need notice (help centre). "Mid-contract downgrades are not permitted." To move to a lower tier or fewer seats or contacts, contact HubSpot "at least five business days prior to your renewal date": by email support ticket on Starter, or through your Contract Manager on Professional and Enterprise.
• After cancellation (help centre). "Following the cancellation date, your account will be downgraded to HubSpot's free tools." You can delete the account only once no subscription has an active commitment.
• Your Order Form wins (contract terms). "In the event of a conflict between the terms of the Agreement and an Order, the terms of the Order will control". If you negotiated special terms, read your Order first.

In practice, this means you should know your renewal date before you do anything else. Put it in your calendar, along with a reminder a few weeks earlier, so that a busy month doesn't turn into an automatic renewal.

Pre-cancellation checklist

Work through these in order, ideally a month or two before renewal. Only the last step commits you.

1. Find your renewal date and commitment term

   Look in Account & Billing, and check your Order Form for special terms. Everything else in this list is planned backwards from that date.

2. Decide between downgrading and cancelling

   A downgrade request needs at least five business days before renewal; cancelling means turning off auto-renewal before the term ends. If you are unsure, a downgrade can buy you time without losing your data.

3. Shortlist and trial a replacement

   Do this while you still have full access, using a small sample of real data (see "Choosing what comes next").

4. Export your data

   Follow the next section, including the parts a normal record export leaves out. Export early, check the files, then export again closer to the switch so nothing recent is lost.

5. Replace website forms and old calls-to-action

   HubSpot warns that "all HubSpot forms will lose their paid features once your account is deactivated" and that legacy CTAs "will stop functioning". List every page where a form or CTA lives, so none is forgotten.

6. Document your automations

   You can export a spreadsheet of your workflows, but HubSpot notes that "workflows exports don't include performance data or the workflow's history", so the logic has to be rebuilt in the new tool. Write down what each one does in plain words before you start.

7. Turn off auto-renewal

   A Super Admin or billing admin does this. Keep the non-renewal notice.

What to export, and what a normal export leaves out

Exporting from HubSpot is easy to start and easy to underestimate. You click Export, an email arrives with a download link, and you have a spreadsheet of contacts, but not yet the history behind them.

HubSpot's export guide is available on "All products and plans". A record export "downloads their current property values and associations" for objects such as contacts, companies, deals, tickets, calls and custom objects. In plain terms, that is the current state of each record plus the links between records (which contact belongs to which company, which deal involves whom).

What needs separate steps:

• Activities such as calls and notes. "If you want to export contact activities (e.g., calls, notes) instead, you can: Export individual contact data. Export certain activity reports. Use the engagements API."
• Sales activity. Calls, chat conversations and meetings can be exported "by creating reports with the custom report builder or using HubSpot's Engagements API".
• Inbox conversations "can be exported using the Conversations API".
• Property history, files, quotes, products and website content each have their own export, listed in HubSpot's content and data export overview, which also links to a full backup of your CRM data.

The API routes in that list usually mean asking a developer, or using an integration tool, so find out early whether you have that help available.

For example, picture a solo founder moving to a simpler CRM. The contact export takes minutes. Then they notice that the pipeline stages, the reminders they relied on and two years of call notes didn't come with it. The data was never the hard part; the working habits built around it were.

Practical limits:

• "You can complete up to 300 exports within a rolling 24 hour window, and up to three exports simultaneously."
• "Download links to export files will expire after 30 days", so save files as soon as they arrive.
• Large CSV or XLSX exports arrive as several files above 1,000,000 rows, and XLS and XLSX have column limits (256 for XLS).
• By default an export contains only the properties and associations in your current view. Choose All properties and associations when you export for a migration.

A few things people often overlook when they move:

• Pipeline stages and their meaning. Stage names transfer as text, but the rules behind them (when a deal moves, what "qualified" means to your team) live in people's heads. Write them down.
• Owners and custom properties. Create every record owner in the new CRM before you import, and map each custom property to a field, or decide consciously to leave it behind.
• Anything that sends. Forms, sequences, notifications and integrations keep running in HubSpot until the account changes. Switch them off, or move them, on purpose rather than by accident.

Choosing what comes next

Start from the reason you are leaving, not from a list of brands. If price is the problem, look for predictable pricing. If you are drowning in features, look for simplicity. If your history matters most, look at how well each tool imports it.

The comparison below comes from our catalog, where every value was read from the vendor's own page. "Checked" means a person has verified it against that page; "Not yet verified" means it is the vendor's claim as we recorded it, not yet checked; "No data" means we have not recorded it, not that the feature is missing.

Whichever tools make your shortlist, test them the same way. Take one real pipeline, import the contacts and deals behind it, and have the people who will use the CRM daily run a normal week in it. Check that you can find a customer's history quickly, move a deal, set a follow-up and get the report you actually look at. If a trial expires before you've done that, it was too short for your decision, not too short for the product.

If you want one predictable price: Less Annoying CRM

Less Annoying CRM sells a single plan: "$15 per user per month + applicable tax", with "No tiers. No contracts. No features locked behind upgrades." Its pricing page lists unlimited contacts, companies and pipelines, task management, email logging and "25GB file storage per user", and a 30-day trial without a credit card. It also states: "You can export everything at any time." It suits small teams that need contacts, follow-ups and a simple pipeline, not marketing automation. For the five-person agency described earlier, this is the kind of tool worth trialling first.

If you want a low entry price: Bigin by Zoho

Bigin's yearly prices start at "US$ 7 /user/month/billed yearly" (Express), with Premier at US$ 12 and Bigin 360 at US$ 18. A free edition exists for a single user with 500 records. Watch the record limits, which count "Each row of data you enter across Pipelines, Contacts, Activities and Notes": 50,000 on Express, 100,000 on Premier and 1 million on Bigin 360. Because activities and notes count too, estimate your total before you choose a plan, not just your number of contacts. Bigin offers a 15-day trial and says it can "import data from your spreadsheets"; we found no HubSpot-specific migration tool, so plan on a CSV import.

If you want your activity history to come with you: Zoho CRM

Zoho CRM has a HubSpot migration that runs through HubSpot's API with a private-app token. Its field map covers companies, contacts and deals, and also tasks, meetings, calls and notes, products and quotes. That makes it worth a look if the history behind your contacts matters as much as the contacts themselves. Limits to know before you start:

• "Zoho CRM does not support custom modules in API migrations."
• "You can undo or rerun the migration only 3 times."
• "If a record has more than 10 tags, only the first ten tags will be migrated."

The Zoho CRM card shows euro prices as served to our research location, with their check date; check Zoho's pricing page for your region and billing period.

If you want an enterprise path with a low starting price: Salesforce Starter

Salesforce's Starter Suite is "$ 25 USD/User/Month (Billed monthly or annually)" and covers lead, account, contact and opportunity management, email syncing and email marketing. Pro Suite, with more customisation and automation, is "$ 100 USD/User/Month (Billed annually)". For moving data in, Salesforce's Data Import Wizard imports "accounts, contacts, leads, solutions, campaign members, person accounts, and custom objects" from CSV files, "up to 50,000 records at a time". That list does not include opportunities (deals), so check Salesforce's other import options if your deal history matters.

Recommendations by situation

Use this table as a starting point for your shortlist, not as a verdict.

Before you commit, check three things: your renewal date and Order Form, that you have opened every export file (activities included), and that your team has used the alternative with real data long enough to find the gaps. If any of them fails, staying one more term and planning the move properly is usually the better deal.

Prices exclude tax where the vendor says so, vary by region and currency, and change; confirm them on each vendor's site before you buy.