HubSpot Sales Hub vs Zoho Bigin

Both of these are a very large software company's answer to the complaint that its main product is too much. Both publish a free tier and a cheap paid one. The interesting difference is what each company expects to happen next.

What the free tier is for

HubSpot's free tools are a genuine product: contact management, a deal pipeline, email tracking and a mailbox integration, with no expiry, within a ceiling of two users and a thousand contacts. It is also, unmistakably, the bottom of a very long ladder — the free tier exists to start a relationship that continues upward.

Bigin's free tier does the same job with less ambition behind it. Paid plans are Express at US$7 a seat each month on annual billing and Premier at US$12, and those figures sit at the bottom of this field while still including Gmail and Outlook integration, automation, a developer API and documented data migration.

So both are cheap to begin. The divergence is in what the vendor wants you to do in year three.

Where each one expects you to go

HubSpot's ladder climbs steeply and deliberately. Starter is US$7 a seat, Professional is US$90, and Professional cannot be switched on without a required one-time onboarding purchase of US$1,500. That is disclosed, and it turns a subscription decision into a budget one. What you get for climbing is real: custom objects, forecasting, deep automation and one of the largest integration catalogues in software.

Bigin has no such ladder, because it is built not to. It is deliberately shallow, and outgrowing it means moving to a different, larger product rather than a higher tier — a migration scheduled in advance rather than an upgrade.

Neither position is dishonest. They are different bets about what a small business becomes.

Which should you choose?

Choose HubSpot Sales Hub if you might need the depth later and would rather not migrate to get it, or if marketing and service tooling on the same platform is plausibly in your future. Price Professional including its onboarding fee before you assume the path is affordable.

Choose Zoho Bigin if you are confident you will stay small, and you would rather have a cheap product that admits its limits than a cheap tier of an expensive one. At US$7 a seat with the mailbox connected and an API available, very little is being withheld to make you upgrade.