HubSpot Alternatives for Small Business: Leaving Without Losing Data

Small teams leave HubSpot for familiar reasons. Every user on a paid plan is assigned a seat, and the seats that unlock the paid features are priced per person, so the bill follows headcount and plan tier. Useful features sit on higher tiers. The pipeline never quite matches how the business sells. Some owners simply want their customer data in their own hands.

Choosing among the HubSpot alternatives is the easy part. The hard part is getting everything out of the old one, intact and on time. This guide covers both, with the emphasis on the exit. If you are still deciding whether a custom CRM makes sense at all, start with our comparison of custom CRMs, HubSpot and Salesforce.

The three kinds of HubSpot alternative

Before you commit to any of them, put the same questions to the new vendor that you wish you had asked HubSpot:

• Can we export every object, activity and file in an open format, at any time, on any plan?
• Is API access included on our plan, and at what limits?
• What is the price measured by: seats, contacts, features or usage?
• What happens to our data when we leave, and for how long can we retrieve it?
• Who does the migration, and is it included in the price?

Whichever route you choose, the migration work is largely the same, and it starts with a date.

Read the two clauses that set your deadline

Two clauses in HubSpot's own terms shape the whole project.

• Renewal. HubSpot's Customer Terms of Service say a subscription automatically renews for the shorter of the same duration as the prior term or one year. To stop that, you turn off auto-renewal in the Account & Billing section before the current term ends.
• Access after the term. HubSpot's Product Specific Terms say that for Smart CRM and Free Services it will not provide any access to customer data after the subscription term ends. The exception is Marketing Hub Professional and Enterprise, where a written request within 30 days of the end of the subscription gets temporary access.

So the renewal date is the project deadline. A workable schedule starts about eight weeks before it: inventory first, exports and cleaning by week six, imports and rebuilt automations by week four, and a parallel run in the final weeks, finishing before the term ends rather than on the day.

What exports cleanly, and what does not

• Records. Contacts, companies, deals and tickets export from the records view. By default the file includes only the properties and associations in the current view, so choose all properties and associations instead. Association columns stop at 1,000 associated records unless you export to CSV and select all of them.
• Activities. The timeline of notes, calls and emails on each contact does not come with a record export. HubSpot points to individual contact data exports, activity reports or its engagements API instead, so plan this as its own step.
• Workflows. HubSpot exports workflows as spreadsheets and PNG images, without performance data or history. Automations get rebuilt, not moved.
• Website content and forms. Pages, landing pages and blog posts export as HTML files. HubSpot notes that its forms lose their paid features once an account is deactivated, so replace any HubSpot form on your website before the switch.
• Unsubscribes. A full contact export includes contacts who have unsubscribed. Keep their opt-out status and carry it into the new system, or you will end up emailing people who asked you to stop.
• Everything else. HubSpot's export guide also covers properties and property history, files, reports, dashboards, quotes and invoices. Work through it once as a checklist.

Moving activity history through the API

For years of calls, notes and emails, a script using HubSpot's API is often the only practical route. Plan it around the published rate limits. For privately distributed apps, HubSpot allows 100 requests per 10 seconds per app on Free and Starter accounts, with 250,000 a day, and 190 per 10 seconds on Professional and Enterprise, with 625,000 and 1,000,000 requests a day respectively.

Some illustrative arithmetic: a script that fetched 50,000 activity records one at a time at 100 requests per 10 seconds would need 5,000 seconds, a little under an hour and a half. Batch endpoints cut that sharply. Either way, run the job early, because you will probably run it twice.

A migration plan in eight steps

1. Freeze the schema. Stop adding properties, pipelines and stages in HubSpot.
2. Take inventory. List objects, properties in use, pipelines, workflows, sequences, forms, meeting links, email templates, reports and every connected app.
3. Export everything, twice. Once now for mapping, and once at cutover for anything that changed.
4. Clean before you move. Merge duplicates, standardize phone numbers and email addresses, and archive records nobody will use again.
5. Map fields and stages. Decide where each property lands in the new CRM, and what you will deliberately leave behind.
6. Import in order. Companies and contacts first, then deals, then associations, then activities and files.
7. Rebuild automations from the workflow exports. Test each one with sample records before it touches a real customer.
8. Switch the edges, then run in parallel. Replace website forms, tracking code, chat widgets and meeting links, run both systems for about two weeks, and retire HubSpot before the term ends.

When leaving HubSpot is not worth it

• Your marketing runs on it. If email campaigns, landing pages and ad reporting all live in HubSpot and the team knows them well, the switching cost can exceed the seat savings.
• Your team is small and stable. A handful of seats on a standard sales process may simply cost less than any migration.
• Nobody owns the CRM. If records go stale today, a new system will not change that. Fix ownership and habits first.
• The timing is wrong. A migration started a few weeks before renewal invites rushed exports and lost history. If you cannot finish cleanly, renew for the shortest term available and plan the move properly.

Owning the next one

OWNIT builds custom CRMs around a business's own pipeline and handles the move: contacts, companies, deals, notes and history from HubSpot, Salesforce or Pipedrive, mapped to the new stages. There are no per-seat fees, the code and database sit in accounts in the client's name, and every record can be exported at any time. The price is fixed in writing before work starts, and most CRMs go live in weeks, depending on scope and how much data moves across. The CRM service page shows live demos and how the process runs, starting with a free 30-minute demo.