How to switch from HubSpot to Pipedrive

Should you switch from HubSpot to Pipedrive?

If your team only ever used HubSpot for the sales pipeline and never touched Marketing Hub, switching from HubSpot to Pipedrive usually cuts your per-seat cost and keeps the parts you use. Pipedrive's entry Lite plan is $14/seat/month against HubSpot Sales Hub Professional's $90/seat/month plus a $1,500 one-time onboarding fee. You give up HubSpot's shared marketing-sales-service contact record and its native reporting, so this move makes sense for sales-led teams, not teams that lean on HubSpot's marketing automation.

The actual cost difference

HubSpot's cost depends on which Hub and tier you're on. Here's what a 5-seat sales team pays on each platform, using list prices from both companies' pricing pages.

The closest feature match to Sales Hub Professional is Pipedrive Premium, which bundles LeadBooster's lead generation tools, deal scoring, and data enrichment for $295/month across 5 seats instead of $450 plus a $1,500 setup charge. Pipedrive has no onboarding fee at any tier. It also has no permanent free plan, only a 14-day trial with full access to whichever plan you pick, so you can't stage the move gradually the way you could sit on HubSpot's free CRM.

What ports over cleanly

HubSpot exports contacts, companies, and deals as CSV files from each record type's list view, with no column limit on CSV exports (XLS and XLSX exports cap at 256 and 16,384 columns). Pipedrive's spreadsheet importer accepts CSV, XLS, or XLSX files and maps people, organizations, deals, leads, activities, notes, and products, up to 50,000 rows and 50MB per file. That covers the core of most sales pipelines: contact records, company records, open and closed deals, and logged activities.

What doesn't move automatically:

• Email history and threads. HubSpot's logged emails don't export in a format Pipedrive imports. Two-way email sync in Pipedrive (Growth tier and up) starts fresh once you connect your inbox.
• Workflow automations. HubSpot's workflows have to be rebuilt manually in Pipedrive's automation builder, which is only available from Growth tier up.
• Custom reports and dashboards. Both platforms build reports against their own data model, so HubSpot dashboards need to be recreated, not imported.
• Marketing Hub assets. Landing pages, forms, and email templates don't have a Pipedrive equivalent, since Pipedrive isn't a marketing platform. If your team runs email marketing off HubSpot, you'll need a separate tool for that after the switch. Our HubSpot alternatives guide covers options like ActiveCampaign and Brevo built specifically for that job.

What you lose leaving HubSpot

The biggest functional gap is HubSpot's single contact record shared across marketing, sales, and service. Pipedrive doesn't offer a marketing hub or a service desk, so if you're using more than Sales Hub today, you're not doing a like-for-like swap, you're splitting your stack. You also lose HubSpot's Breeze Customer Agent and Data Agent, which sit across whichever Hubs you pay for. Pipedrive's AI Sales Assistant covers deal-stage suggestions and activity nudges but isn't a support-ticket automation layer.

Reporting is the other real loss for teams on Sales Hub Professional or Enterprise. HubSpot's custom reporting and forecasting dashboards, especially at Enterprise, go deeper than what Pipedrive builds natively. Pipedrive's forecasting and reporting live in the Growth tier and up, and cover deal-stage and rep-level pipeline views well, but don't match HubSpot's cross-object custom report builder.

Migration steps and timeline

1. Audit what you're using. List every HubSpot feature your team touches weekly: pipeline stages, workflows, reports, forms, live chat. Anything outside Sales Hub needs its own answer before you cancel.
2. Export your data. Pull CSV exports of contacts, companies, and deals from HubSpot's list views. Files over 2MB zip automatically, and download links expire after 30 days, so do this early.
3. Set up your Pipedrive pipeline. Build your deal stages, custom fields, and pipelines in Pipedrive before importing, so records land in the right place instead of a default pipeline you have to reorganize later.
4. Import through Pipedrive's spreadsheet tool. Go to Tools and apps, then Import data, then Import from spreadsheet. Map columns manually where names don't auto-match, and check the skip file afterward for rows that failed, usually bad dates or missing required fields.
5. Reconnect email and calendar. Two-way sync needs to be set up fresh in Pipedrive; nothing carries over from HubSpot's inbox connection.
6. Rebuild your top workflows. Start with the 2-3 automations your team relies on most, not a full one-to-one rebuild of everything HubSpot ran.
7. Run both systems in parallel for one billing cycle before canceling HubSpot, so you can catch anything that didn't import cleanly while you still have the source data.

A team with a few thousand contacts and no complex custom objects can usually complete steps 1-4 in a few days. Rebuilding workflows and reports well takes longer, often one to two weeks of someone's part-time attention, depending on how many automations you're recreating.

The part people underestimate is step 6. It's tempting to try to recreate every HubSpot workflow on day one. Most teams only depend on a handful: a new-lead assignment rule, a stale-deal reminder, maybe a Slack notification when a deal closes. Rebuild those first, run the pipeline for a couple of weeks, then add the rest only if someone asks where they went.

Who this switch is for

This move fits teams whose HubSpot bill is mostly Sales Hub seats, not Marketing Hub contacts. If your marketing team runs email campaigns, landing pages, or lead scoring inside HubSpot today, switching your CRM to Pipedrive doesn't remove that cost. It adds a second bill, because you'll need a separate marketing tool once Sales Hub is gone. Check your actual HubSpot invoice before you commit: a bill dominated by Marketing Hub's contact-tier pricing is a different problem than a bill dominated by Sales Hub seats, and it points toward a different fix. Our ranked list of HubSpot alternatives breaks down options for both cases, including platforms that keep marketing and sales in one product.

Frequently asked questions

How much cheaper is Pipedrive than HubSpot?

At the entry tier, Pipedrive Lite is $14/seat/month against HubSpot's Starter Customer Platform at $7-20/seat/month, roughly comparable. The bigger gap shows up higher: HubSpot Sales Hub Professional is $90/seat/month plus a $1,500 one-time onboarding fee, while Pipedrive's closest match, Premium, is $59/seat/month with no onboarding charge.

Does HubSpot data transfer to Pipedrive automatically?

No. You export contacts, companies, and deals from HubSpot as CSV files, then import them through Pipedrive's spreadsheet importer, which maps columns automatically where names match and lets you assign the rest by hand. Email history, workflows, and custom reports don't transfer and need to be rebuilt.

What do you give up moving from HubSpot to Pipedrive?

Marketing Hub, the Breeze Customer Agent, and HubSpot's shared contact record across marketing, sales, and service. Pipedrive is a sales pipeline tool, not a unified marketing-sales-service platform, so teams using more than Sales Hub end up needing a separate marketing tool after the switch.

Is there a file size limit when importing into Pipedrive?

Yes. Pipedrive's spreadsheet importer caps files at 50MB and 50,000 rows, with one tab per import and a required header row. Larger contact lists need to be split into multiple import files.