Freshsales vs HubSpot: Two Dollars Apart at the Door, Fifty-One at the Second Step

Both of these products put a free plan in front of you and a cheap paid plan behind it. Both then ask you to climb. The whole comparison is about how steep that climb is, and the two answers are three times apart.

OUR TAKE: HubSpot is the better product and the more expensive decision. Its free CRM is far more usable than Freshsales', and its paid entry is cheaper still; but the step from that entry to the plan where the product becomes serious is thirteen times the price, and it carries a mandatory onboarding fee that Freshsales has no equivalent of. Freshsales climbs at 4.3 times with no fee. If you expect to stay small, take HubSpot. If you expect to need automation within a year, the Freshsales ladder costs much less to walk up.

## The two ladders, side by side

Per user, per month, on annual billing.

	entry	middle	top
Freshsales	$9	$39	$59
HubSpot Sales Hub	$7	$90	$150

Read from the left, HubSpot wins. Read from the middle, it is not close.

Freshsales goes from $9 to $39, a multiple of 4.3. HubSpot goes from $7 to $90, a multiple of thirteen^[6]. On ten seats paid annually, that is a difference of roughly five hundred dollars a month between the two middle plans before anything else is counted.

And HubSpot's middle plan carries a mandatory one-off onboarding fee, which is the single largest number in either vendor's pricing and does not appear on a per-seat comparison at all. Freshsales has nothing equivalent: no implementation fee, no required services attachment.

## The free plans are not the same kind of thing

HubSpot's free CRM is a genuine product that a small team can run a business on for years. It is the reason the company has the market position it has.

Freshsales' free plan is a different animal, and the vendor's own documentation lets us be exact about it. The feature matrix has 136 rows; the free plan appears on 44 of them; the three paid plans differ from one another on 92. Those add to 136 exactly, which means the free plan carries every feature common to all plans and not one single feature that distinguishes any paid plan from any other^[2]. No workflows, no API, no file storage, no sales dashboard. Three users maximum.

It is also not on the Freshsales pricing page at all; it appears only on a separate comparison page^[2].

So if a free CRM is what you are shopping for, this comparison ends here and HubSpot wins it outright.

Where each product puts the wall

HubSpot's wall is between Starter and Professional, and it is famous. The five caps that matter on the free plan are the same five on Starter: what the seven dollars buys is mainly the removal of HubSpot branding. Everything that makes the product a system sits on the other side of the thirteen-times step.

Freshsales' wall is between Growth and Pro, and it is lower but it is in a similar place. Below it: twenty workflows, one pipeline, no sales sequences, no custom reports, no AI insights, and, the one most people do not check, no lookup or formula fields, meaning records cannot point at one another at all^[4].

The structural difference is that Freshsales' wall costs thirty dollars a seat to get over and HubSpot's costs eighty-three, plus onboarding.

## What Freshsales includes that HubSpot charges for

Telephony. Freshsales has a built-in phone with call recording, call masking and voicemail drop from the first paid plan, a power dialer from the middle one, and bring-your-own-carrier alongside^[2]. It also includes a chat widget and a chatbot builder, with ten chatbot features available on the free plan.

For a team whose day is calls, that is the strongest single argument for Freshsales in this comparison, and it is not close.

The caveats are real though. Phone credits are a separate prepaid purchase on every plan. The included local incoming minutes do not apply to the free plan or the trial. And the five hundred chatbot sessions listed as a plan feature are, by the vendor's own FAQ, a one-time grant per account rather than a monthly allowance^[1].

What HubSpot has that Freshsales does not

Scale, in the literal sense. HubSpot is a suite: marketing, sales and service share one contact record, and for a company that wants all three on one platform there is no Freshsales equivalent.

A larger and verifiable integration ecosystem. We could not read an application count for the Freshworks marketplace on any page, and its own filter splits Freshsales from Freshsales Suite, so even a headline figure would need dividing. We do not give credit for catalogues we cannot measure, and this is one of them.

A reputation that survives contact with procurement. On our eight-axis rubric HubSpot scores 3.67 and Freshsales 3.25.

## What reviewers complain about, in both cases

Support, in both cases, and it is worth saying plainly because it is the one thing neither vendor fixes with money.

For HubSpot, support is the leading theme at 41 per cent of the hundred reviews we read, with price at 36 and contracts at 34.

For Freshsales it is worse: support is the subject of 60 per cent of the English-language reviews we read, averaging 1.9 stars: the highest single-theme share we have measured for any product in any category. And unlike HubSpot, Freshsales offers exactly one level of support, 24x5, identical on every plan including the free one^[2]. There is no premium tier to escalate to.

That asymmetry matters more than the feature lists. With HubSpot you can at least spend your way toward attention. With Freshsales the published ladder does not offer it at any price.

A year of ten seats, both ways

Per-seat tables flatten the decision. Here is the same team, ten people, over twelve months on annual billing.

On Freshsales Growth, ten seats at $9 is $90 a month, so $1,080 for the year. On Freshsales Pro it is $390 a month, $4,680 for the year.

On HubSpot Starter, ten seats at $7 is $70 a month, $840 for the year: the cheapest line in this whole comparison. On HubSpot Professional it is $900 a month, $10,800 for the year, and that is before the one-off onboarding fee that the Professional tier requires.

So the entry plans are $240 apart over a year and the serious plans are more than six thousand dollars apart, before onboarding. That is the shape of this decision, and no per-seat figure shows it.

What neither total includes: Freshsales' add-ons, which are offered on every paid plan and therefore never included, branded documents at $19 a seat a month would add another $2,280 a year on ten seats^[1]; and telephony, which is a prepaid purchase on both products, built in on one and bought elsewhere on the other.

## The caps nobody reads

Both products have limits that stay flat while the price climbs, and they are in different places.

HubSpot's notable one is at the bottom: the five caps that matter on the free plan are the same five on Starter. The seven dollars buys the removal of HubSpot branding more than it buys headroom.

Freshsales has three flat ceilings, and they run the whole length of the ladder^[2][5]:

Limit	Freshsales entry	Freshsales top
Support	24x5	24x5
API calls per minute	400	400
Chatbot sessions	500, once per account	500, once per account

The support row is the one to sit with. Spending six and a half times more per seat buys exactly the same support entitlement. On HubSpot, support does at least vary by tier — so a team that expects to need help has a reason to climb that Freshsales does not offer.

Switching between them

Both products import from a CSV and both document migration from another CRM. Freshsales puts import and migration on its free plan, which makes a trial genuinely testable with real data^[2].

Two asymmetries matter if you think you might leave later. Freshsales' free plan has no API, so getting data out of it again is a manual export rather than a programmatic one^[2]. And Freshsales' custom field limits shrink when you move down a plan, with fields above the new limit needing to be deleted before the move completes^[4] — so the cost of being wrong about which Freshsales plan you need is paid in data, not just money.

The contracts

HubSpot's contract terms draw sustained complaint from its own reviewers, which is why contracts appear as a theme in a third of them.

Freshsales' terms are not obviously better; they are just less discussed because fewer people are looking. The master agreement states that payment obligations are non-cancelable and non-refundable, that seats cannot be reduced nor plans downgraded during a term, that renewal is automatic unless cancelled thirty days ahead, and that fees may be adjusted at renewal^[3].

Neither of these is a month-to-month product in the way the monthly column implies. Read the terms for whichever you choose.

What we could not compare, and why it matters

Two gaps, both on the Freshsales side, and both of them count against it rather than being written off as unknowns.

We could not establish how many integrations Freshsales has. The Freshworks marketplace filters by product but publishes no application count on any page we could read, and its own filter separates Freshsales from Freshsales Suite — so even a headline number would need splitting between two products. HubSpot's ecosystem is large, documented and countable. We score what we measure, so Freshsales gets no credit here.

We could not find out what Freshsales' advertised extendable API rate limit extends to. The top plan lists one; no page defines the term or names a ceiling, and the only documented route to a higher limit is emailing support to ask — which any plan can do^[5].

There is also a product-identity problem that has no HubSpot equivalent and that you should know about before you start reading reviews. Freshworks sells Freshsales and Freshsales Suite as separate products under nearly identical names, and lists them separately in its own marketplace. Several third-party rating pages and help articles cover the Suite rather than the CRM. If you compare ratings without checking which product each page is about, you will be comparing HubSpot against an average of two different things.

## Who should pick which

Pick HubSpot if you want a free CRM you can actually run on, if you need marketing and service on the same record, or if you are confident you will never need the Professional tier. Its free plan is the best in the category and its entry price is the lowest.

Pick Freshsales if your team lives on the phone, if you know you will need automation and reporting within the year, and if a four-times step up is affordable where a thirteen-times step plus onboarding is not.

Pick neither on price alone. The entry prices of these two products are two dollars apart and tell you almost nothing. The number that decides your bill is what the second plan costs, and there they are fifty-one dollars apart per seat.