Capsule vs HubSpot: 80% of the CRM for a third of the price

Capsule and HubSpot are the two names that come up most when UK small businesses and SMEs ask us to recommend a CRM, and the Capsule vs HubSpot question usually arrives with a budget worry attached: HubSpot looks like the safe choice, but the quotes don’t feel safe at all. We set up and migrate both platforms as part of our CRM implementation work, we hold no reseller deal with either vendor, and we’ve watched this decision play out in real businesses for years.

It helps to be clear about what’s being compared. HubSpot is a platform of six hubs covering marketing, sales, service, content, operations and commerce. Capsule is a focused CRM that handles contacts, pipeline, tasks and post-sale projects, then connects to other tools for the rest. Line them up hub for hub and HubSpot wins on sheer surface area every time, but line them up against what a ten-person business will use by Friday, and the picture changes.

Our position, stated up front: Capsule gives most small businesses roughly 80% of what they’d genuinely use HubSpot for, at about a third of the price. The rest of this page is our reasoning for that claim, and a fair account of the businesses that really do need the other fifth.

Contents

• Capsule vs HubSpot at a glance
• How do Capsule and HubSpot compare on price?
• What does HubSpot do that Capsule can’t?
• Where does Capsule beat HubSpot?
• So which should you choose?
• Capsule vs HubSpot FAQ
• TL;DR

Capsule vs HubSpot at a glance

Capsule is a focused small-business CRM with paid tiers from £14 to £42 per user per month on annual billing, with monthly billing also an option. HubSpot’s like-for-like CRM ladder, Sales Hub, runs from £18 to £135 per seat, plus a mandatory onboarding fee at Professional level, and the honest comparison between the two looks like this:

The pattern is consistent in our findings; HubSpot’s wins sit in the marketing and platform layer, Capsule’s sit in cost and the daily-use CRM core. So the deciding question is rarely which product is better. It’s whether anyone in your business will genuinely operate the marketing machinery that HubSpot’s price assumes.

How do Capsule and HubSpot compare on price?

Capsule’s paid plans cost £14 (Starter), £27 (Growth) and £42 (Advanced) per user per month on annual billing, rising to £17, £32 and £52 if you pay monthly. HubSpot Sales Hub costs £18 (Starter), £85 (Professional) and £135 (Enterprise) per seat per month on annual billing, and a direct Professional purchase adds a mandatory one-off onboarding fee of around £1,200.

A quick note on which HubSpot those figures describe. The like-for-like CRM ladder is Sales Hub; if what you’re really buying is marketing automation, the relevant product is Marketing Hub Professional at £780 a month, a different decision we’ve covered in our line-by-line HubSpot cost breakdown. Current figures for both vendors live on the Capsule and HubSpot pricing pages.

Three mechanics widen the gap in practice. HubSpot’s Professional and Enterprise plans need a twelve-month commitment with no refund for leaving early, while every Capsule tier can run month to month. HubSpot’s marketing side prices by contact volume, so a growing list raises the bill, whereas Capsule’s tiers carry generous contact allowances (30,000 on Starter) rather than per-contact charges. And if your business isn’t VAT-registered, the 20% on top of HubSpot’s larger numbers is real money rather than a pass-through.

Here’s what that means for a five-person team over the first year, on annual billing and before VAT.

That £4,680 first-year gap is the standard shape of this comparison at small-team scale, and it recurs every year apart from the one-off onboarding fee. Email marketing does add a line to Capsule’s column: Transpond, built by the same company, covers campaigns and automations for less than the price of a single Sales Hub seat at typical small-business list sizes, and our Transpond review covers what it does and who it suits.

What does HubSpot do that Capsule can’t?

HubSpot’s real advantages sit in the layer above the CRM: automation workflows, email sequences, lead scoring, landing pages, A/B testing, a service desk and a reporting engine with no Capsule equivalent. A business that genuinely runs those functions from one platform gets real value for the higher price, because the alternative is four or five separate subscriptions and the plumbing between them.

Email sequences deserve a specific mention, because they’re the feature that pushes most sales-led teams up the ladder, and they only arrive with Sales Hub Professional at £85 a seat. The same gating applies across the platform: the features that make HubSpot feel like HubSpot mostly start at Professional.

In our experience reviewing SME HubSpot accounts, most are paying for that breadth and using about a third of it: the contact database, the pipeline, email, and little else. If a suite would honestly earn its keep across four or more hubs, the maths flips in HubSpot’s favour, and our framework for the suite-or-separate-tools decision includes a worked example of exactly when.

Both platforms now ship AI, and neither version should decide this. HubSpot’s Breeze assistant and agents draw on a monthly credit allowance bundled with each tier; Capsule’s AI adds activity summaries, contact enrichment and meeting prep from the Growth plan. Each is only as good as the data underneath it, and our round-up of AI in CRMs covers which of these features matter in practice.

Where does Capsule beat HubSpot?

Capsule wins on cost, speed of adoption, and the daily CRM jobs a small team touches most. On G2’s head-to-head comparison, Capsule scores 4.7 out of 5 against Sales Hub’s 4.4, from roughly 490 reviews against more than 13,000, so read the direction rather than the decimals: the smaller product is the better-liked one.

That matches what we see at handover with our clients. A team is usually working in Capsule the morning they get their logins, with nothing left to configure that an owner-manager can’t handle. HubSpot onboarding is a project with a project’s price, which is exactly why HubSpot charges around £1,200 to run it for you!

Capsule also carries the post-sale half of a small business. Project boards are included on every plan (the Free plan gets one boards which supports many projects), Tracks apply repeatable task sequences to a deal in one click, and from Growth the workflow automation can spin up a delivery project the moment an opportunity is won. HubSpot added a native projects object in late 2025, but delivery work still fits more naturally in Capsule’s boards, and none of it costs extra.

For UK businesses, the accounting integrations can settle it alone. Capsule connects natively to Xero, QuickBooks, FreeAgent, KashFlow and Sage Business Cloud, the broadest UK accounting lineup we’ve compared in any small-business CRM; check HubSpot’s marketplace before assuming parity if your accounts live outside Xero and QuickBooks. And if Capsule is pulling ahead by this point, our five-question Capsule fit check covers the tier-by-tier detail.

So which should you choose?

If you’re still weighing whether your business needs a CRM at all, start with our plain-English explanation of what a CRM does. If you know you need one and it’s these two on the shortlist, here’s where we’d point you:

Whichever way you lean, remember that the decision is reversible. Moving from HubSpot to Capsule is one of the most common migrations we’re asked to run, and the practical risk is lower than the dread suggests: contacts, notes, deals and custom fields all come across cleanly when the data is prepared properly. One B2B video agency cut its CRM costs by 60% making exactly this move, keeping every contact and activity record. If the real question is how to leave HubSpot rather than where to land, our guide to switching away from HubSpot walks the whole route, and if Pipedrive or Zoho are also circling the shortlist, our Capsule vs Pipedrive comparison and Capsule vs Zoho head-to-head run today’s exercise against different opponents.

Capsule vs HubSpot FAQ

Is Capsule cheaper than HubSpot?

Yes, by a wide margin at the tiers most teams need. Capsule Growth costs £27 per user per month on annual billing. HubSpot Sales Hub Professional costs £85 per seat on the same basis, plus a mandatory onboarding fee of around £1,200 on a direct purchase, with 20% UK VAT on top of everything.

Can Capsule replace HubSpot for a small business?

For most small businesses weighing a HubSpot alternative on cost grounds, yes. Capsule covers the contact database, pipeline and follow-up jobs well and pairs with Transpond for email marketing. It can’t replace Marketing Hub’s automation workflows, lead scoring or landing pages, so businesses genuinely running those should stay.

How hard is it to switch from HubSpot to Capsule?

It’s a well-trodden path rather than a leap. Contacts, deals, notes and custom fields export from HubSpot and import into Capsule cleanly; the real work is cleaning and mapping the data before it moves. Most small teams complete the switch within a couple of weeks.

TL;DR

• Capsule and HubSpot are different sizes of product. Capsule is a focused small-business CRM; HubSpot is a six-hub platform with a CRM at its core.
• At the tiers where the useful features live, Capsule Growth is £27 per user per month against £85 for Sales Hub Professional, which also carries a £1,200 onboarding fee and a twelve-month commitment.
• A five-person team pays about £1,620 for a year of Capsule Growth against about £6,300 for the first year of Sales Hub Professional, a 74% saving before VAT.
• HubSpot earns its price when a business genuinely runs marketing automation, lead scoring, landing pages or a service desk from one platform. Most SME accounts we review use about a third of what they pay for.
• Capsule wins on adoption (4.7 vs 4.4 on G2), monthly rolling contracts, included project boards, and the broadest UK accounting integrations we’ve compared.
• Our conclusion: Capsule delivers 80% of what most small businesses would use HubSpot for, at a third of the price. Pay HubSpot’s premium only if you’ll genuinely use the other fifth.