HubSpot vs Copper
HubSpot API
Best free CRM endpoint Free tierCopper
CRM that lives inside Google Workspace $29/HubSpot unless the team genuinely lives inside Gmail and will not adopt anything that is not there, which is the one argument Copper wins outright. HubSpot is free, publishes its rate limits, ships two MCP servers and does not cap how many contacts you may store; Copper starts at $29 a seat and caps Basic at 2,500 contacts. The unusual thing about Copper is the metering axis, and it is worth understanding before you dismiss it: a database-size ceiling is a different planning problem from a request-rate one. For most integrations it is the worse of the two.
Where they actually differ
Every value comes from the same record that drives the CRM and sync APIs listing, so this table cannot disagree with the cards. Accented tags are data one provider returns and the other does not.
| Compare | HubSpot API | Copper |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Write back to the CRM your team already lives in | Metered on contacts stored, not on calls made |
| Entry price | Free tier | $29/seat/mo |
| Unit cost | $0.0000 free tier | Not sold by the unit |
| Billing model | Free tier Subscription Per seat | Per seat Subscription |
| Free tier | Free CRM including API access | No free tier. Free trial, and annual billing takes up to 26% off. |
| GTM motion covered | Sync Engage | Sync |
| Data returned | CRM recordsWork emailFirmographics | CRM recordsWork emailFirmographics |
| MCP server | Yes Official remote and local servers | No |
| Interfaces | REST API MCP server Webhooks Bulk or async Native in Clay n8n node | REST API Webhooks Bulk or async |
| Auth | Private app token or OAuth 2.0 | API key, or OAuth 2.0 for user-facing integrations |
| Rate limits | 100 req/10s on Free and Starter, 190 on Professional. Daily cap shared across apps. | Not published in the developer documentation. Copper's own reference is authoritative. |
| Coverage | Global | Global |
| Compliance | GDPR DPA SOC 2 Type II CCPA | GDPR DPA CCPA |
| Best for | Best free CRM endpoint | CRM that lives inside Google Workspace |
Pick each one when
HubSpot API
- Anything calls the CRM programmatically and you want a number to design against.
- Free matters, and so does not capping how many records you may hold.
- Marketing, forms and workflows belong in the same system.
Copper
- The team works in Gmail all day and will not adopt a separate interface.
- Your contact count is small and stable, so a 2,500 or 15,000 cap is irrelevant.
- An embedded app SDK inside Google Workspace is the integration you need.
There is no match rate to test here, so the bake-off is about shape and headroom. Build the object you actually sell on in each of them, using one free tier and one trial, write a thousand records through the API, and watch which one needs a custom object and which one needs a plan upgrade to take the write rate. An afternoon, and it surfaces the data-modeling work before it is in production rather than after.
What each one costs, tier by tier
Both publish a full rate card, so this comparison runs on numbers rather than on adjectives. HubSpot API lists 4 tiers and Copper lists 3. Every figure is read off the vendor's own pricing page, and the pages they came from are listed at the foot of this one.
| The short version | HubSpot API | Copper |
|---|---|---|
| Cheapest paid plan | Starter, $20 | Basic, $29 |
| Tiers published | 4 | 3 |
| Free tier | Free CRM including API access | No free tier. Free trial, and annual billing takes up to 26% off. |
| Unit cost at entry | $0 free tier | Not sold by the unit |
The cheapest paid plan is rarely the plan you end up on, because what moves you up a tier is usually volume rather than a feature. The two rate cards below are what you are choosing between.
HubSpot API
HubSpot API publishes 4 tiers, one of them free, and the paid ladder runs from $20 to Quote.
Free
- Full CRM object access over the API
- Free Marketing, Sales, Service, Content, Data and Revenue tools
- 100 calls per 10s, 250,000 a day
- No credit card required
Starter
- Same API, same limits as Free
- 500 HubSpot Credits included
- 1,000 marketing contacts
- From $7/seat/mo on the current new-customer offer
Professional
- 190 calls per 10s per app
- 625,000 calls a day per account
- Where the limit increase starts to matter
Enterprise
- 190 calls per 10s per app
- 1,000,000 calls a day per account
- Highest published daily ceiling
Copper
Copper publishes 3 tiers, none of them free, and the paid ladder runs from $29 to $134.
Basic
- 2,500 contact limit
- Pipelines and task automation
Professional
- 15,000 contact limit
- Workflow automation, bulk email and reporting
Business
- Unlimited contacts
- Email series, custom reports and multi-currency
What HubSpot and Copper cost at your volume
Put your own volume in. The model picks the cheapest published plan that covers it on each side, which is the question a rate card cannot answer and the one that decides the bill.
HubSpot API
Priced per seat, so the bill moves with headcount rather than with volume.
Copper
Priced per seat, so the bill moves with headcount rather than with volume.
Plans are read from each vendor's own pricing page and the model picks the cheapest one that covers you, so these are list prices before any discount you negotiate and before annual billing, which most of these vendors discount.
What a year costs at three volumes
The same plan-fit arithmetic as the model above, run out to a year, because an annual number is what a budget actually asks for. HubSpot API and Copper are priced per seat, so those columns do not move with volume. The figure shown is 3 seats for a year.
| A year at | HubSpot API | Copper |
|---|---|---|
| 1,000 a month | $720 Starter | $1,044 Basic |
| 10,000 a month | $720 Starter | $1,044 Basic |
| 50,000 a month | $720 Starter | $1,044 Basic |
2 of the 2 providers here publish enough to be put in this table. These are list prices on the published plan that covers each volume, so they are the number before you negotiate and before annual billing, which most of these vendors discount by between a fifth and a half.
How this plays out once it is running
The metering is the interesting difference and it is unusual in this directory. HubSpot caps the rate: 100 requests per 10 seconds on Free and Starter, 190 on Professional, with a daily pool shared across every app on the account. Copper caps the database: Basic holds 2,500 contacts, Professional 15,000 and Business unlimited, at $29, $69 and $134 a seat a month. One of those ceilings you hit during a backfill and the other you hit a year in, quietly, when the CRM stops accepting new records.
The rest of the comparison is ordinary and lopsided. HubSpot gives the CRM away with full API access on the free tier and publishes two MCP servers. Copper publishes API keys and OAuth 2.0 with an embedded app SDK, and does not state a rate limit anywhere in its developer documentation, so the throughput you will get is something you discover rather than something you plan. Copper's real argument is none of this: it is that the CRM sits inside Gmail, and teams that want that want it more than they want an API.
What each one is genuinely good at
Not a feature list. These are the things that make somebody keep paying after the novelty has worn off, which is a different question from what the marketing page leads with.
HubSpot API
Free, with no cap on how much you store
Full object access over REST on the free plan, no credit meter, no clock, and no limit on contact count at that level. Copper's cheapest plan stops at 2,500 contacts, which a single list import can exhaust, and the fix is $69 a seat a month rather than a bigger request allowance.
The rate limit is a published number
100 requests per 10 seconds on Free and Starter, 190 on Professional. Copper publishes nothing, so sizing a Copper integration means measuring it in production. For anything on a schedule, designing against a stated figure is worth more than most feature differences.
Two official MCP servers
A remote one for the CRM and a local one for builds. Copper has none, so an agent-driven workflow is REST and your own glue on that side and a configuration line on this one.
Copper
It genuinely lives inside Google Workspace
Copper's whole proposition is that the CRM is in Gmail rather than beside it, and the embedded integration SDK extends that to your own apps. For a team that will not adopt a separate interface, this is not a preference, it is whether the CRM gets used at all, and an unused CRM has no API worth comparing.
Unlimited contacts on Business, with everything else included
The cap lifts at $134 a seat a month, along with email series, custom reports and multi-currency. If your objection to HubSpot is the quote-only step above Starter, Copper at least publishes a price for its top tier.
OAuth 2.0 and an embedded app SDK
Both API keys for scripts and OAuth 2.0 for user-facing integrations, plus an SDK for embedding your own app in the Copper interface. That last one has no HubSpot equivalent of the same shape, and for a product that wants to live inside a customer's CRM it is the relevant surface.
Where each one falls down
Every provider on this site has a case it handles badly, and the people who find out are the ones who bought it for that case. These are the ones worth knowing before you sign rather than after.
HubSpot API
The daily cap is shared across every app
The per-10-second figure is generous and the daily pool behind it is common to every integration on the account. Something a colleague installed from the marketplace spends it, and the first sign is your job failing.
Professional and Enterprise are not priced publicly
Free and Starter at $20 a seat are on the page; above that it is a quote. If your integration needs the 190-per-10-seconds ceiling, the price of that ceiling is a sales conversation.
It stores and does not source
Every contact comes from a provider bought separately, so HubSpot is never the whole stack. The same is true of Copper.
Copper
The contact cap is the real ceiling, and it is low
2,500 on Basic and 15,000 on Professional. An enrichment pipeline that writes everything it finds will cross 2,500 in its first run, and the remedy is a seat price that more than doubles. Plan the cap before the rate limit, which is the opposite of how you plan most CRMs in this directory.
No rate limits published at all
Nothing in the developer documentation states a request ceiling, so throughput is something you find by hitting it. Copper's own reference is authoritative on current behavior, which is the honest thing to say and not a thing you can design a backfill against.
No MCP server, and $29 a seat to start
There is no free tier and no MCP endpoint. Against a competitor that is free with the API included and publishes two MCP servers, Copper needs the Gmail argument to carry the whole decision, which for the right team it does.
Using HubSpot and Copper together
A two-way comparison assumes the answer is one of them. On this pairing it often is not, and the arrangement below is what teams actually end up running.
These two are rarely run together on purpose, and when they are it is because a company bought Copper for a Gmail-native sales team and HubSpot for marketing. That works, with HubSpot owning campaigns and Copper owning the sales record, and a one-way sync into HubSpot so the marketing side sees the pipeline.
Write that sync in the direction that respects the ceilings. HubSpot publishes a rate you can batch against; Copper publishes nothing, so treat it as the fragile side, keep the request rate conservative and back off on anything that looks like throttling. And watch the contact cap on the Copper side rather than assuming it will grow with use, because it will not.
If this is a choice rather than an inheritance, the question is simply whether the team will work outside Gmail. If yes, HubSpot is free, faster, better documented and does not cap your records. If no, the API comparison is academic, because the better-integrated CRM is the one that has data in it.
HubSpot or Copper, for you
Five questions, answered from the same records as the rest of this page. Nothing is sent anywhere and there is no result to email yourself.
Each answer leans one way. The recommendation appears here once you have picked at least two.
A tool like this can only weigh what is on the page. It does not know your segment, and the one test that does is the bake-off further down: real rows, cheapest entry on each side, spend divided by survivors.
Where an answer leans on a certification or an integration, it means that vendor publishes it on the pages this directory read, which is not the same as the other one lacking it. The sources are listed at the foot of the page.
Where the data comes from, and what you may do with it
The question that arrives late and expensively is not how good the data is, it is who is allowed to hold it. These are the fields each one returns, the coverage it claims and the compliance it publishes.
| Provider | Fields returned | Coverage | Compliance | Redistribution |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| HubSpot API | CRM records, Work email, Firmographics | Global | GDPR DPA SOC 2 Type II CCPA | Not stated |
| Copper | CRM records, Work email, Firmographics | Global | GDPR DPA CCPA | Not stated |
None of these states a redistribution position on its pricing or docs pages. Internally that never matters. Put the rows in something your customers can see and it becomes the question your legal team asks first.
Two practical notes that apply to every provider on this page. A compliance badge describes the vendor, not your use of it, so a GDPR DPA does not give you a lawful basis for the outreach you send. And every one of these vendors runs its own opt-out, which means a person who asks you to delete their record has to be removed from your copy as well as from theirs.
Moving between HubSpot and Copper
Most readers of this page are already on one of these two. A swap is four hours of code and a month of watching, and the order below is the one that catches the expensive mistakes while they are still free.
Measure the thing you are about to lose
Run 500 rows you already have through HubSpot API and record the match rate, the fields that came back populated and the cost. Without that number a migration cannot be judged, because every provider looks cheaper per unit than the one you are paying for today.
Check the fields, not the field count
Copper returns every field HubSpot API does, so nothing downstream has to change shape. Confirm the values rather than the keys: two providers can both return a mobile number and disagree about which one it is.
Rewrite the auth and the limits, in that order
HubSpot API authenticates with private app token or OAuth 2.0. Copper uses API key, or OAuth 2.0 for user-facing integrations.
The limits are the part that bites later. HubSpot API rate: 100 req/10s on Free and Starter, 190 on Professional. Daily cap shared across apps.
Copper rate: Not published in the developer documentation. Copper's own reference is authoritative. A loop tuned to the first will either crawl or get throttled on the second.
Run both for one billing cycle
Keep the old key live and route a slice of real traffic to the new one. A month is the shortest honest test, because credit expiry, rollover and the overage rate only show up at renewal and those are where the surprises live.
Cancel on the renewal date, not before
Credits on most of these plans do not survive a downgrade. Check what happens to the balance you have already paid for, and time the switch so you are not buying the same records twice.
The step people skip is the first one, and it is the only one that cannot be done after the fact. Once the old key is off you have nothing to compare the new match rate against, so a provider that is quietly worse on your segment looks like a provider that is fine.
What practitioners say about HubSpot
The one part of this page that is not a vendor claim. Quotes are transcribed as written, linked to the thread, and nothing here is the only source for a figure in the tables above.
The per-app rate limit is why people end up running several private apps
API limits are not being respected or the sync isn't really set up in a way that someone with knowledge of the api. They may not be using a queue system. They haven't optimized and paid attention to api limits. [...] This may need to be done using multiple private app keys because you are hitting specific limits. [...] If these updates are happening all at once, batch and import/export APIs are the way to go
r/hubspot · April 2025 · 2 points
This corroborates the shape of HubSpot's limits rather than the numbers. The rate, 100 requests per 10 seconds on Free and Starter and 190 on Professional, is per app, which is exactly why splitting work across several private apps raises throughput at all.
The part that is easy to miss is that the daily cap is not per app, so the same trick does nothing for it. Splitting a sync across three private apps triples the requests a second you can make and shares one daily budget between them, which is a fix for the wrong half of the problem if the daily cap is what you were hitting.
The search endpoint is the one to design around
When building custom integrations or custom data migrations, always set the external ID as a unique property so you can use the unique identifier endpoint to read/query records... instead of using the search endpoint which has a 5 calls per second limit. Use batch endpoints as much as possible.
r/hubspot · August 2025 · 10 points
The same lesson the Pipedrive side of this directory records as a token cost, arriving here as a separate rate. Search is the expensive call on every CRM in this listing and it is the one a first integration reaches for, because searching by email is the obvious way to find a contact when you have not stored its id.
Storing an external id on creation is the fix in both products, and it is cheaper to do on day one than to retrofit. Treat this as a design note rather than as a published figure: HubSpot's own documentation is the authority on the per-endpoint limits.
14 threads read on 13 October 2026, searched by vendor name. Scores and dates are the comment's own. Nothing here is the only source for a price or a limit on this site: every figure in the tables above comes from a vendor's own page.
Where each one sits in a working pipeline
Neither of these is bought in isolation. These are the worked stacks on this site that use one or both, with the cost run end to end.
The wider field for both
A two-way comparison assumes the answer is one of these two. Often it is not, and the reason you are comparing them at all points somewhere else entirely: HubSpot alternatives both start from the reason people leave.
Related comparisons
The 26 providers behind every pairing here are in the main listing.
Pairings that share a side with this one: HubSpot vs Freshsales, HubSpot vs Close and HubSpot vs folk.
And: HubSpot vs Zoho CRM and HubSpot vs Salesforce. Every comparison in the directory is on the compare hub.
HubSpot API vs Attio API
A free CRM API against a CRM whose data model you define in code.
Compare them →HubSpot API vs Salesforce
A CRM that gives the API away against one that sells it by the seat.
Compare them →HubSpot API vs Pipedrive
A free tier with a per-second rate limit against a $14 seat with a daily token budget.
Compare them →Comparison pages end at the rate card. Your list does not.
We run the bake-off on your actual data, pick the provider order, and build the pipeline behind it: waterfall routing, credit ceilings and the write-back that puts a verified contact in front of a rep the same day.
Worked with 300+ companies. A senior operator runs your account.
HubSpot and Copper, answered
Read from the same records that drive the table above.
Is HubSpot or Copper cheaper?
On the entry plan it is HubSpot, free against Copper at $29/seat/mo. The entry price is the comparable figure, because they do not meter the same thing.
Can I try HubSpot and Copper for free?
HubSpot: Free CRM including API access. Copper: No free tier. Free trial, and annual billing takes up to 26% off.
What are the rate limits on HubSpot and Copper?
HubSpot: 100 req/10s on Free and Starter, 190 on Professional. Daily cap shared across apps. Copper: Not published in the developer documentation. Copper's own reference is authoritative.
Do HubSpot and Copper both have MCP servers?
One of them. HubSpot ships one (Official remote and local servers); Copper documents none.
Which is better, HubSpot or Copper?
HubSpot unless the team genuinely lives inside Gmail and will not adopt anything that is not there, which is the one argument Copper wins outright. HubSpot is free, publishes its rate limits, ships two MCP servers and does not cap how many contacts you may store; Copper starts at $29 a seat and caps Basic at 2,500 contacts.
What are the downsides of HubSpot and Copper?
Measured against each other rather than in general. HubSpot: none of the structural gaps in this answer; the limits section carries its operational ones. Copper: there is no free tier, only a trial, so test your own list inside its limits before paying; there is no documented MCP server, so an agent has to go through your own code.
Can you use HubSpot and Copper together?
These two are rarely run together on purpose, and when they are it is because a company bought Copper for a Gmail-native sales team and HubSpot for marketing. That works, with HubSpot owning campaigns and Copper owning the sales record, and a one-way sync into HubSpot so the marketing side sees the pipeline.
Can I migrate from HubSpot to Copper without losing data?
The fields survive: Copper returns everything HubSpot does. What changes is the auth and the limits. Either way, measure your match rate on 500 rows before you switch, because that number is the one you cannot recover afterwards.