HubSpot's free CRM gets a lot of small businesses through the door, and fairly reasonably so. The searches for alternatives tend to start once the free tier stops being enough and the paid 'hubs' start looking expensive for what you actually use.
Why businesses go looking for an alternative
HubSpot's pricing is built around separate hubs, marketing, sales, service, each with its own tiers, plus contact-based pricing that scales as your list grows. None of that is hidden, but it does mean the bill can look quite different a year in from what it looked like on day one.
The other common reason is that HubSpot is, at its core, built for marketing-led businesses. If most of your work is quoting, invoicing and delivering rather than running email campaigns, you're paying for a lot of capability you'll rarely open.
Pipedrive
If what you actually used HubSpot for was tracking deals, Pipedrive does that with less clutter and a friendlier price. The pipeline view is arguably the best of any CRM in this price range, and there's no marketing suite to ignore.
You lose the free tier, and you lose the option to bolt on marketing tools later if you ever want to. For a sales-focused small business, neither of those tends to matter much.
Zoho CRM
Zoho is the closest like-for-like swap: broadly similar scope to HubSpot, a genuine free tier for small teams, and paid pricing that's typically lower once you need to upgrade. It also has its own bundled marketing and support tools if you want them later.
The interface is the trade-off again here, it feels older than HubSpot's, but for businesses moving away from HubSpot specifically to save money, it's usually the most direct swap.
Capsule CRM
Capsule is a good fit for businesses that found HubSpot overwhelming rather than expensive. It's deliberately simple, built in the UK, and focused purely on contacts, deals and basic task tracking without anything extra bolted on.
It won't replace HubSpot's marketing tools if you were actually using them. For businesses that never touched that side of things, that's not a loss worth worrying about.
Before migrating away from HubSpot, export your contact and deal data first and check it imports cleanly into whatever you're moving to. Custom fields and deal stages don't always map across one to one.
WeekOne
WeekOne isn't a marketing platform, so it's not a direct swap if email campaigns were the main reason you were on HubSpot. Where it fits is for businesses that were using HubSpot's CRM and sales side, and separately paying for invoicing or project tools elsewhere.
Bringing CRM, quotations, invoicing and projects into one subscription tends to work out considerably cheaper than a HubSpot plan plus two or three other tools, even before you account for the time saved not switching between them.
Which one actually fits
If deal tracking is genuinely all you need, move to Pipedrive or Capsule and keep it simple. If you want the closest thing to HubSpot's breadth at a lower price, Zoho is the obvious choice. If invoicing and projects are also part of your day-to-day, that's where an integrated platform starts to make more sense than another standalone CRM.