You came for a CRM.
They sold you a platform.
You're probably here because HubSpot's free plan ran out, or because you opened it on a Monday and couldn't find the thing you needed. HubSpot is serious software and plenty of companies run on it happily. If you're eight people who just need to know who owes you money, here's what you're actually buying.
Log a call.
Find the customer.
The things you do forty times a day. In HubSpot each one is a few clicks deeper than it should be, through a menu built for somebody whose whole job is HubSpot. That person exists at a 200-person company. They don't exist at yours.
It isn't one bad screen. The product holds six departments' worth of tools, and the four you actually use are in there somewhere with the rest. Big software gets heavy, too: opening a customer, moving between records, running a search. Seconds, not minutes, but seconds forty times a day, forever.
This is ours. Never a spinner is a thing we say on the front page, and it's the claim we'd rather be judged on than any price.
Don't take our word for it.
It's a twenty minute test.
- Both products are free to start and neither asks for a card. Open a customer record in each and count.
- Then log a call, move a deal, and add a contact from an email. Count the clicks both times.
- A slow, clicky CRM doesn't just irritate people. It teaches your team to avoid it. And a CRM nobody updates is worse than the spreadsheet you were already using.
Four of eighteen
is the CRM.
This is the part that wears people down. You start on Starter, you find the thing you actually needed, and it's on Professional at $90 a seat with a required $1,500 onboarding fee on top. And it isn't one ladder: HubSpot sells Marketing, Sales, Service, Content, Data and Agent hubs, each with its own tiers. Working out what you'll actually pay is a project. Here's what's in the box at Professional.
- Contact records
- Deal pipelines
- Email and templates
- Meeting booking
- Attribution reporting
- Lookalike audiences
- CPQ and quote approvals
- Conversation intelligence
- SLA management
- Custom behavioural events
- Playbooks
- Forecasting
- Blog hosting
- Social scheduling
- Ad audience sync
- Customer portal
- Omnichannel inbox
- Lead scoring models
4 av 18. The four lit ones are the CRM, and they're the four a small team opens. The rest arrives whether you use it or not, and the bill is the same either way. We have three plans, every feature is on all of them including the free one, and paying gets you more room rather than permission.
Their AI is a chatbot.
You already pay for a better one.
HubSpot's answer is a chat box in the corner that answers questions about HubSpot. We built it the other way round: connect ChatGPT or Claude to SoftSync and it runs the CRM, on the subscription you already pay for.
Five people,
one year.
We're comparing Sales Hub Professional, because it's the cheapest HubSpot plan with automated follow-ups, and that's usually why people leave their spreadsheet. Starter is $7 a seat and doesn't have them.
HubSpot Sales Pro
5 seats · 12 months
- Per seat, per monthAnnual commitment. $100 if you pay monthly.$90
- Five seats, twelve months$5,400
- OnboardingTheir own words: required, one-time Professional Onboarding.$1,500
Enterprise is $150 a seat with a required $3,500 onboarding. Professional and Enterprise also price on seat type as well as plan, so seats aren't the only thing that moves the bill.
SoftSync Pro
5 seats · 12 months
- Per seat, per monthAnnual billing. $39 if you pay monthly.$29
- Five seats, twelve months$1,740
- OnboardingThere is no onboarding fee at any tier, Business included.$0
Automated follow-ups are on every tier here, including the free one.
HubSpot's figures are their own, from hubspot.com/pricing/sales at annual commitment, read 10 September 2026. The onboarding fees are published on that same page. Ours are on our pricing page. If a figure here is wrong, tell hello@softsync.ai and we will fix it and re-date it. hubspot.com/pricing/sales · softsync.ai/pricing
Where HubSpot
genuinely beats us.
We'd rather tell you now than have you find out in month three.
- Integrations. This is the big one. HubSpot connects to well over a thousand tools out of the box. We have no integrations directory at all. What we did instead was give the assistant you already use a way in, so it works across your CRM and your other tools in the same conversation, plus direct email and calendar and an API for your own code. For a lot of businesses that's better. For some it plainly isn't, and if you need a specific connector on day one, check before you switch, because the honest answer is usually no.
- Marketing. Landing pages, blog, social scheduling, ad audiences, attribution. We don't do any of it. If your marketing runs on HubSpot, that's a real reason to stay.
- Support and service. Ticketing, SLAs, a customer portal, a shared inbox across channels. We have none of that.
- Scale and safety. They're a public company with a partner in every city and reviews you can read for a week. We're young and we don't have public references yet. If you need the choice nobody can second-guess, it's them.
Questions.
We're already deep in HubSpot. Can we even move?
Isn't $7 Starter cheaper than your $29?
Do you have a free plan?
You say it's slow and clicky. Where's the proof?
Do you charge for AI?
What does HubSpot cost?
Open both and
try to log a call.
If you have a marketing team, a sales team and a support team, go and use HubSpot. Genuinely. If you're a real business that just needs to know who to call, what was agreed and who hasn't paid, open both, log a call in each, and count the clicks. Free forever, no card, no salesperson, no onboarding invoice.