HubSpot vs Freshsales
HubSpot API
Best free CRM endpoint Free tierFreshsales
Cheapest seat with a published API ceiling $9/HubSpot for anything programmatic, and it is not close: its free tier allows 600 requests a minute against Freshsales' 1,000 an hour, and Freshsales charges $9 a seat for the privilege. Freshsales only wins when seats are the whole cost and the API is a monthly export, which is a real situation and a narrow one. Check your request volume before the seat price persuades you, because 1,000 an hour is account-wide and shared across every integration you will ever run. If that number fits, Freshsales is genuinely the cheapest CRM seat in this directory.
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 | Freshsales |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Write back to the CRM your team already lives in | $9 a seat, and 1,000 API requests an hour for the whole account |
| Entry price | Free tier | $9/user/mo annual |
| 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 ongoing free tier on the published plans. Free trial. |
| 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 in the Authorization header, with the account bundle alias in the host |
| Rate limits | 100 req/10s on Free and Starter, 190 on Professional. Daily cap shared across apps. | 1,000 API requests an hour per account, shared across every key and integration |
| Coverage | Global | Global |
| Compliance | GDPR DPA SOC 2 Type II CCPA | GDPR DPA CCPA |
| Best for | Best free CRM endpoint | Cheapest seat with a published API ceiling |
Pick each one when
HubSpot API
- Anything calls the CRM on a schedule, or several things do.
- You want to start free and prove the integration before buying seats.
- Marketing, forms and workflows need to live in the same system.
Freshsales
- Seat cost is the whole budget and the API is an occasional export.
- You want a published hourly ceiling rather than a burst window to reason about.
- The Freshworks suite is already in the business.
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 Freshsales 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 | Freshsales |
|---|---|---|
| Cheapest paid plan | Starter, $20 | Growth, $9 |
| Tiers published | 4 | 3 |
| Free tier | Free CRM including API access | No ongoing free tier on the published plans. Free trial. |
| 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
Freshsales
Freshsales publishes 3 tiers, none of them free, and the paid ladder runs from $9 to $59.
Growth
- 1,000 API requests an hour, account-wide
- Branded documents $19 a user a month as an add-on
Pro
- Same published API ceiling
- Freddy AI Agent at $49 per 100 sessions
Enterprise
- Same published API ceiling
What HubSpot and Freshsales 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.
Freshsales
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 Freshsales 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 | Freshsales |
|---|---|---|
| 1,000 a month | $720 Starter | $324 Growth |
| 10,000 a month | $720 Starter | $324 Growth |
| 50,000 a month | $720 Starter | $324 Growth |
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 ceiling is the comparison and it is lopsided enough to end most evaluations. HubSpot allows 100 requests per 10 seconds on Free and Starter, which is 600 a minute or 36,000 an hour, rising to 190 per 10 seconds on Professional. Freshsales allows 1,000 requests an hour per account, which is a little over 16 a minute, and that allowance is shared across every key and every integration on the account rather than issued per key.
The second thing to weigh is where the money goes. HubSpot's CRM is free with full object access over REST and no credit meter, and the paid tiers buy seats and features. Freshsales is $9 a user a month on annual billing, which is the cheapest seat in this directory, rising to $39 and $59, with branded documents at $19 a user and the AI agent at $49 per 100 sessions on top. So Freshsales is cheaper per human and dramatically more expensive per request, and which of those you are buying decides this page.
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 the API included rather than trialled
Full CRM object access over REST on the free plan, with no clock and no credit meter, up to two users. That is the cheapest legitimate place in this directory to land rows you have already paid to enrich, and it means the integration can be built and proved before a budget exists.
36 times the hourly throughput, at no cost
600 requests a minute against 16. For a nightly sync of 50,000 records that is the difference between 83 minutes and two full days, and the HubSpot figure is the free tier rather than the paid one. No amount of Freshsales seat saving pays that back.
Two official MCP servers and the whole suite behind it
A remote server for the CRM and a local one for builds, which is more MCP surface than anything else in this directory. Freshsales publishes none. And HubSpot carries marketing, forms, workflows and reporting in the same system, which Freshsales answers with the wider Freshworks suite rather than in the CRM itself.
Freshsales
The cheapest seat in the directory
$9 a user a month on annual billing, against HubSpot Starter at $20 a seat. For a sales team of twenty where the CRM is mostly a place humans type, that is $132 a year per head saved and the API ceiling genuinely may not matter.
The ceiling is a published number, not a burst window
1,000 requests an hour, stated plainly in the API documentation against the 429 response. It is a low number and it is an honest one: you can calculate whether your integration fits before you build it. HubSpot's daily cap is shared across apps and less visible until something else on the account spends it.
Simple authentication
An API key plus the account bundle alias, both findable in the interface in a couple of clicks. HubSpot wants a private app token or an OAuth app, which is more correct and more work for a script somebody needs working this afternoon.
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 on the account
The per-10-second ceiling is generous, and behind it sits a daily cap that every integration on the account draws on together. A marketplace app a colleague installed can quietly spend it, and the first symptom is your job failing rather than theirs.
The tiers above Starter are not on the pricing page
Free is free and Starter is $20 a seat a month. Professional and Enterprise are a quote, so if your plan depends on a Professional feature, the price of that feature is a conversation rather than a number.
No contact data, and the suite is the upsell
HubSpot stores and does not source, so rows come from a provider you buy separately. And the free CRM is the entrance to a suite whose marketing tiers are where the money is, which is a fair trade and worth naming.
Freshsales
1,000 requests an hour, for the whole account
Not per key, per account. Two integrations sharing that allowance get roughly 8 requests a minute each. Any bulk operation has to be scheduled around every other thing you run, and the ceiling does not rise with the plan: Growth, Pro and Enterprise all publish the same figure.
No MCP server
Integration is REST and your own glue. Against a vendor shipping two official MCP servers, that is a build on this side and a configuration line on the other, which matters more every quarter.
The add-ons arrive quickly
Branded documents are $19 a user a month and the Freddy AI agent is $49 per 100 sessions, both on top of the seat. The $9 headline is real and it is the floor rather than the price, which is the ordinary shape of a cheap seat.
Using HubSpot and Freshsales 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.
Running both is unusual and happens for one reason: a business already standardised on Freshworks for support and ticketing wants HubSpot for marketing. In that arrangement Freshsales holds the service-side record and HubSpot holds the campaign side, with a sync between them that has to be written against the slower of the two ceilings.
That sync is the thing to size honestly before anybody commits. Freshsales gives you 1,000 requests an hour account-wide, so a bidirectional sync of any real volume will consume most of it and leave nothing for the integrations the support team already depends on. Batch it, run it nightly, and build the backoff properly rather than discovering the ceiling in production.
If you are choosing rather than inheriting, the free HubSpot tier makes the test cheap. Point both at a thousand of your own records, run the actual integration you intend to build, and see which ceiling you hit first. On this pair that test usually finishes before the Freshsales trial does.
HubSpot or Freshsales, for you
Three 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 |
| Freshsales | 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 Freshsales
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
Freshsales 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. Freshsales uses API key in the Authorization header, with the account bundle alias in the host.
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.
Freshsales rate: 1,000 API requests an hour per account, shared across every key and integration. 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 Copper, 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 Freshsales, answered
Read from the same records that drive the table above.
Is HubSpot or Freshsales cheaper?
On the entry plan it is HubSpot, free against Freshsales at $9/user/mo annual. The entry price is the comparable figure, because they do not meter the same thing.
Can I try HubSpot and Freshsales for free?
HubSpot: Free CRM including API access. Freshsales: No ongoing free tier on the published plans. Free trial.
What are the rate limits on HubSpot and Freshsales?
HubSpot: 100 req/10s on Free and Starter, 190 on Professional. Daily cap shared across apps. Freshsales: 1,000 API requests an hour per account, shared across every key and integration.
Do HubSpot and Freshsales both have MCP servers?
One of them. HubSpot ships one (Official remote and local servers); Freshsales documents none.
Which is better, HubSpot or Freshsales?
HubSpot for anything programmatic, and it is not close: its free tier allows 600 requests a minute against Freshsales' 1,000 an hour, and Freshsales charges $9 a seat for the privilege. Freshsales only wins when seats are the whole cost and the API is a monthly export, which is a real situation and a narrow one.
What are the downsides of HubSpot and Freshsales?
Measured against each other rather than in general. HubSpot: none of the structural gaps in this answer; the limits section carries its operational ones. Freshsales: 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 Freshsales together?
Running both is unusual and happens for one reason: a business already standardised on Freshworks for support and ticketing wants HubSpot for marketing. In that arrangement Freshsales holds the service-side record and HubSpot holds the campaign side, with a sync between them that has to be written against the slower of the two ceilings.
Can I migrate from HubSpot to Freshsales without losing data?
The fields survive: Freshsales 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.