HubSpot vs Zoho CRM
HubSpot API
Best free CRM endpoint Free tierZoho CRM
The cheapest CRM here with a published API allowance US$14/HubSpot vs Zoho CRM is a question about which ceiling you would rather hit. HubSpot is free to start with full CRM object access and throttles you at 100 requests per 10 seconds on Free and Starter, 190 on Professional, with a daily cap shared across apps. Zoho CRM starts free for three users, costs US$14 a seat after that, and meters a daily credit pool instead. HubSpot wins on everything around the API, and Zoho wins on cost and on throughput you can predict.
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 | Zoho CRM |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Write back to the CRM your team already lives in | Concurrency instead of a rate limit, and credits by the day |
| Entry price | Free tier | US$14/user/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 tier | Free CRM including API access | Free edition for up to 3 users, with 5,000 API credits a day. |
| GTM motion covered | Sync Engage | Sync Engage |
| Data returned | CRM recordsWork emailFirmographics | CRM recordsWork emailFirmographics |
| MCP server | Yes Official remote and local servers | Yes Four Zoho CRM MCP servers, OAuth |
| Interfaces | REST API MCP server Webhooks Bulk or async Native in Clay n8n node | REST API MCP server Webhooks Bulk or async n8n node |
| Auth | Private app token or OAuth 2.0 | OAuth 2.0, with per-scope consent |
| Rate limits | 100 req/10s on Free and Starter, 190 on Professional. Daily cap shared across apps. | No per-second limit. Daily credit pool plus concurrency of 5 to 25 per org. |
| Coverage | Global | Global |
| Compliance | GDPR DPA SOC 2 Type II CCPA | GDPR DPA HIPAA |
| Best for | Best free CRM endpoint | The cheapest CRM here with a published API allowance |
Pick each one when
HubSpot API
- You want the free tier to include a real API and a real ecosystem.
- Marketing, sales and service objects should share one system.
- Prebuilt connectors and a free tier behind the MCP servers matter.
Zoho CRM
- US$14 a seat, or free for three users, decides it.
- Bursty traffic suits concurrency limits better than a rolling window.
- You want the whole API allowance published before you commit.
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 both free tiers, 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 Zoho CRM lists 4. 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 | Zoho CRM |
|---|---|---|
| Cheapest paid plan | Starter, $20 | Free, US$0 |
| Tiers published | 4 | 4 |
| Free tier | Free CRM including API access | Free edition for up to 3 users, with 5,000 API credits a day. |
| 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
Zoho CRM
Zoho CRM publishes 4 tiers, one of them free, and the paid ladder runs from US$14 to US$40.
Free
- 5,000 API calls a day
- Contact management and workflow automation
- No credit card required
Standard
- Email integration and mass email
- Multiple sales pipelines
- Built-in calling
Professional
- AI agents and process management
- Inventory management
- Predictive intelligence
Enterprise
- Customer portals and web-to-case
- The edition most API allowances are quoted against
- 100 users gives 150,000 API credits a day
What HubSpot and Zoho CRM 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.
Zoho CRM
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 Zoho CRM 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 | Zoho CRM |
|---|---|---|
| 1,000 a month | $720 Starter | $504 Standard |
| 10,000 a month | $720 Starter | $504 Standard |
| 50,000 a month | $720 Starter | $504 Standard |
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
Zoho's pool is 50,000 credits plus 250 to 2,000 per license depending on edition, where most calls cost one credit and a few cost more. The striking part is that Zoho states plainly there are no time-based restrictions at all, so you may make as many calls a minute as you like provided concurrent calls stay within 5 to 25 depending on edition. For a burst workload that is a materially easier design than HubSpot's rolling window.
What HubSpot has instead is everything around the endpoint: a larger integration ecosystem, two official MCP servers, and marketing and sales objects in one place. If the integration is one job among several, that usually outweighs the rate limit.
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
A free tier that includes the API, not a trial of it
HubSpot's free CRM carries full object access over REST with no clock on it. Zoho's free edition is also genuinely free for up to three users with 5,000 API calls a day, so this is closer than usual, and HubSpot's has no user cap at the free level.
Two official MCP servers
A remote one for the CRM and a local one for builds. Zoho CRM now publishes four of its own, split into data insights, data operations, module customization and workflow automation, so the difference is the free tier HubSpot's sit on.
A rate you can hold a queue under
A hundred requests per 10 seconds on Free and Starter, 190 on Professional. It is a simple shape to design against, and it fails fast and visibly rather than draining a pool you have to forecast.
Zoho CRM
No time-based rate limit at all
Zoho is the only CRM in this directory that says outright there is no per-second or per-minute limit. The constraints are a daily credit pool and a concurrency ceiling of 5 to 25 per org. For a bursty job that is a genuinely different experience: you can go as fast as your concurrency allows.
The whole allowance is published
Fifty thousand daily credits plus 250 to 2,000 per license by edition, with per-operation credit costs documented. A hundred Enterprise users gives 150,000 credits a day. You can calculate your ceiling exactly, which HubSpot's shared daily cap does not let you do.
US$14 a user, and HIPAA
Standard is US$14 a user a month against HubSpot's $20 a seat, Professional is US$23 and Enterprise US$40. Zoho also publishes HIPAA alongside its GDPR DPA, which HubSpot's record here does not, and for a healthcare-adjacent motion that is a procurement requirement rather than a preference.
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 connected app
The per-10-second rate is per app and the daily cap is not, so a marketplace integration somebody installed spends the same budget your pipeline does. You find out through a failing sync rather than through a notification.
The tier where limits improve has no public price
The rate rises from 100 to 190 requests per 10 seconds at Professional, and Professional and Enterprise are not on the CRM pricing page. HubSpot is free until exactly the point where you need it not to be, and then it is a quote.
Zoho CRM
Concurrency is the ceiling, and it is low
Five to 25 concurrent calls per org. Removing the per-second limit sounds generous until you try to parallelize: five concurrent requests is a narrow pipe, and it is the number that will actually bound a backfill.
MCP calls spend the same API credits
Zoho CRM publishes four MCP servers, and calls through them consume API credits exactly as REST calls do, so an agent spends the same daily allowance as your integrations.
The credit pool scales with licenses, not with need
Fifty thousand plus 250 to 2,000 per license by edition means an unattended integration on a small org has a small allowance, and the published way to raise it is to buy seats or move edition. The extra credits can be bought as pay as you go, which is a second line item to track.
Using HubSpot and Zoho CRM 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.
Both are systems of record, so this is a choice rather than a stack, and the two-CRM state is a transition or an accident rather than a design.
If you are in it, decide which system owns each field before writing a line of sync code. Two CRMs that both believe they own the email address will overwrite each other in a loop, and that loop spends HubSpot's shared daily cap and Zoho's daily credits at the same time.
Where this does come up legitimately is a group with separate business units on separate CRMs. There the answer is not to sync them at all but to report across both from a warehouse, because the write conflicts are the expensive part and reads are cheap on both.
HubSpot or Zoho CRM, for you
Two 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 |
| Zoho CRM | CRM records, Work email, Firmographics | Global | GDPR DPA HIPAA | 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 Zoho CRM
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
Zoho CRM 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. Zoho CRM uses OAuth 2.0, with per-scope consent.
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.
Zoho CRM rate: No per-second limit. Daily credit pool plus concurrency of 5 to 25 per org. 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, Pipedrive vs Zoho CRM and HubSpot vs Copper.
And: Salesforce vs Zoho CRM and HubSpot vs Close. 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 Zoho CRM, answered
Read from the same records that drive the table above.
Is HubSpot or Zoho CRM cheaper?
On the entry plan it is HubSpot, free against Zoho CRM at US$14/user/mo. The entry price is the comparable figure, because they do not meter the same thing.
Can I try HubSpot and Zoho CRM for free?
HubSpot: Free CRM including API access. Zoho CRM: Free edition for up to 3 users, with 5,000 API credits a day.
What are the rate limits on HubSpot and Zoho CRM?
HubSpot: 100 req/10s on Free and Starter, 190 on Professional. Daily cap shared across apps. Zoho CRM: No per-second limit. Daily credit pool plus concurrency of 5 to 25 per org.
Do HubSpot and Zoho CRM both have MCP servers?
Both do. HubSpot: Official remote and local servers. Zoho CRM: Four Zoho CRM MCP servers, OAuth.
Which is better, HubSpot or Zoho CRM?
HubSpot vs Zoho CRM is a question about which ceiling you would rather hit. HubSpot is free to start with full CRM object access and throttles you at 100 requests per 10 seconds on Free and Starter, 190 on Professional, with a daily cap shared across apps.
Can you use HubSpot and Zoho CRM together?
Both are systems of record, so this is a choice rather than a stack, and the two-CRM state is a transition or an accident rather than a design.
Can I migrate from HubSpot to Zoho CRM without losing data?
The fields survive: Zoho CRM 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.