HubSpot vs Zoho: which CRM and website setup is better for a small business? (2026)

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The quick verdict

Pick HubSpot if you are a team of one or two and want a free CRM and a small website in one login. The free tools cover up to 2 users and 1,000 contacts, and they include a drag-and-drop website builder with free hosting. When you outgrow free, Starter is $7 a seat a month billed yearly ($10 billed monthly) right now, but that is a limited-time price for new customers. The regular price is $20 a seat a month.

Pick Zoho if you have three people, want the lowest bill, or already use Zoho apps. Zoho CRM’s free edition covers 3 users, and Zoho Sites starts at $1 a month billed yearly for a one-page site. The trade-off: Zoho’s website builder and CRM are two products you connect, and Zoho Sites has no free plan.

Side by side

Two quick terms first. A CRM (customer relationship management software) keeps your leads and customers in one place, with the notes, emails and tasks for each person attached. A seat is one paid user login. Both companies price their paid CRMs per seat or per user.

HubSpot’s prices come from its CRM pricing page. Zoho’s pricing page shows prices by visitor location, so the Zoho Sites prices here come from Zoho’s September 2026 relaunch post, and the Zoho CRM prices from its edition comparison page.

Cost over 3 years

Headline prices leave out the domain and email. So we priced the same setup on both: a service business with a site of about 10 pages, a contact form that sends leads into the CRM, a .com domain and one email inbox per person.

• Domain: HubSpot does not sell domains, and Zoho does not publish its Zoho Domains price outside checkout. So both columns use Namecheap’s published .com price: $11.28 for the first year, then $18.48 a year to renew. That is $48.24 over three years.
• Email: neither includes mailbox email hosting. We add Google Workspace Business Starter at $7 per user a month on the annual plan, or $84 a year per person.
• Zoho Sites plan: Basic ($8 a month billed yearly) stops at 5 pages, so a 10-page site needs Plus at $15 a month billed yearly (25 pages).
• HubSpot Starter: HubSpot does not publish what you pay once the promo ends, so we budget the regular $20 a seat a month.

One person

HubSpot Free is the cheapest setup here, by a wide margin. The price is HubSpot branding on your website pages, landing pages, blog, live chat and emails. Starter removes it.

If the promo price held for all 36 months ($7 a seat a month billed yearly), one Starter seat would be $252 over three years and the total $552.24. Treat that as the best case, not the plan.

Three people

HubSpot’s free tools stop at 2 users, so a third person means Starter seats for the team. If the promo price held, 3 seats would cost $756 over three years ($7 x 3 x 36) and the total would drop to $1,560.24.

Zoho wins at three people as long as Zoho CRM Free is enough. Once you need Zoho CRM Standard ($14 a user a month billed yearly), the gap almost closes: $2,856.24 against $2,964.24.

Zoho One, the full bundle, is a different budget. At $90 a user a month with yearly licensing, three users cost $9,720 over three years before domain and email. It pays off only if you will use its finance, HR and service apps too.

The CRM side

A few terms you will see on both pricing pages. A deal is one potential sale. A pipeline is the row of stages a deal moves through, such as new lead, quote sent and won. An automation or workflow is a rule that does a task for you, like sending a follow-up email when a form comes in.

HubSpot

The free CRM includes contact management, deal pipelines, forms, email marketing with HubSpot branding, live chat and Breeze Assistant, HubSpot’s AI helper. HubSpot does not show how many pipelines the free plan gets on the pages checked for this comparison.

Starter adds the limits most small teams care about:

• 15 pipelines and up to 50 workflows, plus 10 automated email actions in Marketing Hub.
• Monthly email sends up to 5 times your marketing contact tier, with no HubSpot branding.
• 500 calling minutes and 1 HubSpot phone number.
• 500 HubSpot Credits a month for AI features.

The big jump comes after Starter. Fuller automation lives in the Professional tiers, and Marketing Hub Professional is $800 a month billed yearly with 3 seats, plus a $3,000 one-time onboarding fee. HubSpot says it connects to more than 1,000 apps.

Zoho

Zoho CRM Free gives 3 users storage for 5,000 records, 150 emails a day, 5 active workflow rules, 1 web form per module, 10 email templates and iOS and Android apps. It has no custom fields, custom reports or forecasting. Paid editions run $14, $23, $40 and $52 a user a month billed yearly (Standard to Ultimate).

Bulk email marketing is a separate Zoho app, Zoho Campaigns, so plan for that if newsletters matter.

Zoho also sells Bigin, a simpler pipeline-first CRM. Bigin Free is 1 user, 500 records and a single pipeline. Express is $7 a user a month billed yearly for 50,000 records and 3 team pipelines, and Premier is $12 for 100,000 records and 5 pipelines.

The website side

HubSpot’s website builder

HubSpot’s builder lives in Content Hub, its CMS. You get drag-and-drop website pages, landing pages and a blog, with hosting and SSL included and free connection of a domain you own. Themes come from HubSpot’s marketplace, and an AI Website Generator drafts pages from a description of your business.

Because the site and the CRM are one system, a form on your site drops leads straight into your contacts. That is the main reason to choose HubSpot for a website.

The limits are firm. Free and Starter both cap you at 30 website pages and 30 landing pages. The free blog holds 100 posts and Starter holds 10,000. The next step up for pages is Content Hub Professional, from $500 a month with 3 seats, which allows up to 10,000 pages. There is no built-in online store.

Zoho Sites

Zoho relaunched Zoho Sites in September 2026 as an AI-first builder. It generates a full site from a prompt, and you then edit visually or by asking Zia, Zoho’s AI assistant. Collections and dynamic pages handle catalogs and directories, and the Advanced plan adds a members portal.

To connect the site to Zoho CRM, you create a web form in Zoho CRM first, then add it in Zoho Sites. Each submission arrives in the CRM as a new lead or contact.

Two cautions. We could not confirm from Zoho’s pricing table which plans include a custom domain, SSL and removal of Zoho branding, so check that before you pay. And Zoho Sites is not a store: Zoho sells Zoho Commerce for that. You can try Zoho Sites for 15 days with no credit card.

Leaving later

Our exit scores rate how much of a site you can take with you, out of 10. Content, design, code, data and domain get up to 2 points each.

HubSpot exports HTML files of your pages, blog posts and templates, and blog data as a spreadsheet. Its help article does not say whether images and other media files come along. Themes are written in HubL, HubSpot’s own template language, so they will not run on another host. CRM records export to CSV, XLS or XLSX on every plan, with all properties and associations, per HubSpot’s export guide. HubSpot never holds your domain, since you register it elsewhere.

Zoho‘s help guide for the classic Zoho Sites describes a Download Site option that gives you a password-protected zip of the published HTML. We could not confirm it on the new September 2026 platform. Zoho CRM exports each module to CSV (up to 200,000 records) or XLSX (50,000), and offers a full data backup. Zoho CRM Free allows 10 exports a day. If you buy your domain through Zoho Domains, the transfer-out steps were not documented in the article we checked.

On both, plan to rebuild the design on your next platform. The habit that saves the most trouble is buying your domain at an independent domain registrar and connecting it. Our guide to leaving your website builder covers the rest, including redirects.

Which one should you pick?

Pick HubSpot if

• You are one or two people and want to pay $0 for a CRM and a small website.
• You want the site, forms, email and CRM in one login with no setup between them.
• Your site fits in 30 pages and 30 landing pages.
• You expect to grow into HubSpot’s paid marketing tools and can budget the regular $20 a seat.

Pick Zoho if

• You have three users and want a free CRM for all of them.
• You want the cheapest paid website: a one-page site for $1 a month or five pages for $8, billed yearly.
• You already use other Zoho apps, or want the option of Zoho One later.
• You want a simple pipeline CRM like Bigin at $7 a user a month billed yearly.

Neither? Look at these

• You want funnels, texting and tools to run client accounts: read GoHighLevel vs HubSpot.
• You want to see every option: our website builder with a CRM guide compares 10 setups.
• You want to own the website outright: self-hosted WordPress scores 10/10 on exit. We build on WordPress every week, and either CRM’s free plan can sit beside it as a separate tool.