HubSpot publishes a free tier and three paid editions. Its entry tier, Starter, is $20 per month per seat, and its free tier is free for up to two users. GoHighLevel publishes $97 per month per sub-account, with unlimited users inside it. This page compares what each one includes at those prices, what sits on a higher tier, and what each one costs to run once it is live.
HubSpot is a CRM platform sold as separate hubs, Marketing, Sales, Service, Content and Data, each in a free tier plus Starter, Professional and Enterprise editions. Contacts, companies, deals and tickets live in one record layer underneath, and what you can do with them depends on which hub and which edition you bought.
HighLevel sells a single feature set per plan and prices it by sub-account rather than by seat. Its published core features include CRM and pipelines, booking calendars, forms, workflow automation, email and SMS, calling and reputation management. Enciu Consulting builds on it and supports it as Enciu CRM.
These are two CRMs, not a CRM and something else, which makes this a straight comparison rather than a gap analysis. It leaves three honest outcomes.
A real answer, and the cheapest starting point on this page. What that covers →
That is a different price, and HubSpot publishes what it is. What sits higher up →
Only one of the two vendors documents a path. What HighLevel publishes about it →
The useful question is not which product is better. It is whether the thing you are missing is a plan tier, an add-on, or a different system.
Every HubSpot figure below comes from HubSpot’s own pricing pages and its own product catalog, and every GoHighLevel figure from HighLevel’s own pricing page and help centre, all checked on September 24, 2026. Where a vendor does not publish something, this page says so rather than guessing.
| Area | HubSpot | A CRM built on HighLevel |
|---|---|---|
| Entry price, and what it buys | A free tier, free for up to two users. Then Starter at $20 per month per seat, HubSpot’s published list price, which is $40 per month at two seats and $100 at five. Professional and Enterprise include a set number of core seats and bill additional seats on top. | $97 per month per sub-account on the Starter plan, which includes three sub-accounts. HighLevel’s own line is unlimited contacts and unlimited users on all plans, so the price does not move with team size. |
| Free tier | A permanently free edition for up to two users, included in every paid edition as well. HubSpot’s own product catalog sets its limits, including HubSpot branding on forms, live chat, the booking link and marketing email. | None. HighLevel publishes a 14-day free trial on any plan, with full access to the features of the tier you pick. |
| Contact records | Contacts, companies, deals and tickets on the free tier. On Marketing Hub, marketing contacts are billed by tier: Starter includes 1,000 and charges $50 per 1,000 above that, falling to $45 and then $40 at higher volumes. Non-marketing contacts are free, in HubSpot’s own words. | “Unlimited Contacts” on every published plan. Contacts are not a billed dimension, and nothing in HighLevel’s pricing rises with list size. |
| Pipelines | One HubSpot-provided pipeline per object type on the free tier. 15 total pipelines per account across object types at Starter, 100 at Professional, 350 at Enterprise. | “CRM & Pipelines” is in the core feature list on every published plan. Pipeline setup covers how the stages and handoffs get decided, whichever tool holds them. |
| Forms and booking | Forms and one personal meeting link on the free tier, both carrying HubSpot branding. Starter removes the branding, adds multi-step forms, consent collection and custom styling, and raises meeting links to “up to 1,000 personal and team meetings links”. | “Forms, Surveys & Quizzes” and “Booking Calendars” are in the core feature list on every published plan. |
| 2,000 sends per calendar month on the free tier, with HubSpot branding. On Marketing Hub there is no separate sending fee: the limit is five times your marketing contact tier per month at Starter, ten times at Professional and twenty times at Enterprise. | Billed by use rather than included. HighLevel charges $0.675 per 1,000 emails across all plans, drawn from the agency wallet. No carrier fee and no markup apply to email. | |
| SMS | Not included on any HubSpot plan at any tier. It is sold as a $75 per month add-on covering a 10DLC number and 1,000 message segments, available on Marketing Hub, Sales Hub and Service Hub Professional and Enterprise, United States customers only. Unused segments do not roll over, and incoming messages count against the same limit. | “Email + SMS Marketing” is in the core feature list on every published plan, billed by use. HighLevel’s own rate card puts United States and Canada SMS at $0.00747 per segment, outbound and inbound, with the recipient’s carrier fee charged on top of that, from $0.0035 to $0.0050 outbound depending on carrier, and a fixed 5% markup applied to those carrier fees and to A2P registration fees at the sub-account level whether or not rebilling is turned on. |
| Workflow automation | Sales Hub Starter carries “Up to 50 workflows with restricted triggers and actions”, and Marketing Hub, Sales Hub and Service Hub Starter each carry 10 automated actions for form automation and 10 for email automation. Sales Hub Professional takes workflows to “Up to 300 fully customizable workflows”. Marketing Hub Starter does not include omni-channel marketing automation at all; Marketing Hub Professional adds it at “Up to 300 workflows for 10 teams”, across email, social media, ads, your website and chat. HubSpot’s catalog does not say which Starter triggers and actions are restricted. | “Workflow Automation” is in the core feature list on every published plan. Premium triggers and actions are billed separately at $0.01 per execution from the agency wallet, with volume tiers down to $0.004. |
| Sequences | Not included at Sales Hub or Service Hub Starter. From Professional up, 5,000 sequences per account with up to 500 email sends per user per day, rising to 1,000 per user per day at Enterprise. | Multi-step follow-up is built in workflows rather than as a separate product, on timing and channel order you set. Estimate follow-up sets out the shape. |
| Review requests | HubSpot’s own product catalog lists no review-request feature. Its 402 named features include none covering review collection or reputation management, and a knowledge base search for “review request” returns results about reviewing apps on HubSpot’s own marketplace. | “Online Reputation Management” is in the core feature list on every published plan. HighLevel documents three ways to send a review request: manually from Quick Actions, manually from the Reputation tab, and automatically as a workflow action, with a Google Business Profile connected first. |
| Cost | Free for up to two users. Starter $20 per month per seat. Marketing Hub Professional $890 per month for three core seats and Enterprise $3,600 for five. Sales Hub Professional $100 per month per seat and Enterprise $150. Onboarding is required, and separately priced, on all four Professional and Enterprise editions named here. | $97, $297 and $497 per month per sub-account, or $970, $2,970 and $4,970 per year. No published Enterprise price. Usage for phone, SMS, email and AI is billed on top of the plan. |
HubSpot’s entry pricing is the cheapest starting point on this page, and its free tier costs nothing at all. This section exists so you can work out whether your business needs anything else.
On the free tier, free for up to two users:
Starter is $20 per month per seat, which is $40 per month at two seats and $100 at five. It removes HubSpot branding from forms, live chat and the booking link, raises pipelines to 15 per account, raises meeting links to up to 1,000 personal and team links, lifts form and email automation to 10 automated actions each, and raises the marketing email send limit to five times your marketing contact tier per month. Starter also includes 1,000 marketing contacts, with non-marketing contacts free.
Starter can be committed monthly. HubSpot’s own term selector offers “Pay Monthly” with “Commit monthly”, or “Pay Annually”.
If that describes your business, HubSpot’s free tier or its $20 seat is the answer, and nothing further down this page improves it.
If you run field service software rather than a general-purpose CRM, the comparisons against Jobber and Housecall Pro cover how much CRM each of those tools already includes.
Starter includes some automation. HubSpot’s catalog gives Sales Hub Starter “Up to 50 workflows with restricted triggers and actions”, and gives Marketing Hub, Sales Hub and Service Hub Starter 10 automated actions each for form automation and email automation. HubSpot’s catalog does not say which Starter triggers and actions are restricted.
What sits above it, with the price difference in each line:
Price those before you decide a different system is the answer. Every figure in that list is HubSpot’s own published list price, and the onboarding fees are HubSpot’s own footnotes, which state that the plan cost shown does not include them.
The gates are in a different place. HighLevel’s three published plans carry the same core feature set, and the FAQ on its own pricing page says the primary difference is the number of sub-accounts: Starter includes three, Unlimited and Agency Pro include unlimited. What the higher plans add is agency machinery, rebilling phone and email usage to clients at cost on Unlimited and with a markup on Agency Pro, SaaS mode, automated sub-account creation and advanced API access.
So a single business on HighLevel is not upgrading to unlock CRM features. It is either staying on Starter or not using HighLevel directly at all. What it is paying on top is usage, which HighLevel’s own FAQ describes as charges for phone numbers, SMS, emails sent and premium AI usage.
If you do decide a build is worth it, the process is the same one every build on this site follows. What a CRM implementation involves covers the phases in order, what to prepare before a CRM setup lists what gets asked for, how long a CRM setup takes explains the up-to-90-day window, and CRM software cost vs. implementation cost separates the software bill from the work.
HighLevel publishes an integration with HubSpot, a data importer for HubSpot, and a written migration guide from HubSpot. HubSpot publishes none of the three. Everything in this section is what HighLevel publishes. None of it is something this site has built, run, or tested.
HighLevel’s own support article describes a Workflows integration connected by OAuth rather than an API key, either from inside the workflow builder or from Settings then Integrations, authorising the HubSpot portal and its requested permissions.
On the action count, HighLevel’s own article contains an unremoved editorial note reading: “Internal Review Note: Confirm the exact supported action list before publishing. The existing article references five actions in some areas but only lists two actions in another section.” Its changelog entry has the same split. Read it yourself before you rely on the number.
HighLevel’s HubSpot Importer article says the importer supports contacts, opportunities from HubSpot deals, companies, custom fields from HubSpot properties, custom folders, pipelines, stages, emails, notes and tasks, connected by signing in to HubSpot and authenticating.
Its own documented limits, in HighLevel’s words: an opportunity with no contacts associated to it cannot be imported; custom field mapping is based on field keys, and a conflicting key already in HighLevel may fail the import; HubSpot calculated fields import as single line text; recurring tasks are not supported; imported emails are read only; and some associations may not import due to platform limits, so critical associations need validating afterwards. HighLevel also advises turning duplicate blocking off during the import and testing in a new or non-production location first.
Anything the importer does not carry falls to HighLevel’s written migration guide, which is a manual process: export contacts, companies, deals and pipelines from HubSpot as CSV files, save HTML copies of email templates, download the HTML for landing pages, then rebuild pipelines, workflows, campaigns and pages inside HighLevel and test them before going live.
As of September 24, 2026, a search of HubSpot’s own knowledge base for “highlevel” returns no results, and the same search for “gohighlevel” returns no results, across its Knowledge Base, Academy and Customer Blog alike.
As of September 24, 2026, HubSpot’s own app marketplace returns no HighLevel app. A control search for Calendly on the same interface returns Calendly’s own listing first, so the search itself works.
These are two different purchases priced in two different units. HubSpot sells seats. HighLevel sells sub-accounts. Neither figure below is a total for your team.
Pricing checked on September 24, 2026, on HubSpot’s own pricing page and in its own product catalog.
Pricing checked on September 24, 2026, on HighLevel’s own pricing page, with usage rates from its own phone system pricing guide.
A CRM built on HighLevel is not finished on signup. You can set it up yourself, or pay someone to set it up around how your business takes a request and finishes a job. Enciu Consulting charges a setup fee and a monthly fee for that work, and that monthly fee covers the HighLevel sub-account the system runs in rather than a separate HighLevel bill; pricing has the current scopes.
Both columns are what each vendor publishes, not a quote. HubSpot’s figure moves with how many people need a seat and how many marketing contacts you hold. HighLevel’s plan figure does not move at all, and its usage figures move with how much you send and call. Which one is cheaper depends on those two shapes, and they are different shapes.
The free system review starts with how your business takes a request and finishes a job, not with a feature list. If the answer is that HubSpot’s free tier already covers it, that is a fine answer. Pricing has the current scopes if you want to see what a build involves first.
