Is Bigin by Zoho CRM or HubSpot CRM cheaper?

Bigin by Zoho CRM starts at $7 per user per month on annual billing (Express), or $0 for a single user (free plan available). HubSpot CRM starts at $0 for the free CRM, then $7 per seat per month on annual billing for Sales Hub Starter (free plan available).

Bigin by Zoho CRM vs HubSpot CRM

An independent, review-free comparison compiled by the SaaSTracker editorial team. Both products are profiled in full, and neither can pay for placement here.

The short answer

Editorial assessment

Bigin by Zoho CRM compared with HubSpot CRM

HubSpot's free CRM is more generous on contacts and gives a path into a real marketing platform, but the sales automation a team needs sits in Sales Hub Professional at $90 a seat plus an onboarding fee. Bigin is a fraction of that with native calling and WhatsApp but no marketing engine. Marketing-led businesses take HubSpot; sales-and-service small businesses take Bigin and add Zoho Campaigns if they need sends.

Choose Bigin by Zoho CRM if

Small businesses and teams of one to about twenty-five people who want a real CRM with native calling, WhatsApp, email, and automation for under $20 a seat, and who are comfortable living inside Zoho's conventions and possibly adopting more of its suite later.

Choose HubSpot CRM if

Small businesses that want a capable CRM for free today and a credible path to a single marketing, sales, and service platform later, and mid-sized teams that can justify $90 per seat per month for Sales Hub Professional's automation, reporting, and forecasting.

Side by side

13 attributes

Attribute	Bigin by Zoho CRM	HubSpot CRM
Category	CRM	CRM
Starting price	$7 per user per month on annual billing (Express), or $0 for a single user (free plan available)	$0 for the free CRM, then $7 per seat per month on annual billing for Sales Hub Starter (free plan available)
Pricing model	Per-user subscription across a free tier and three paid tiers, with records, custom fields, pipelines, automations, and AI credits all metered by plan.	Freemium platform with per-seat paid tiers. Sales Hub seats carry sales tooling, Core Seats give shared CRM edit access to other staff, view-only seats are free, AI usage is metered in HubSpot Credits, and Professional and Enterprise carry mandatory one-time onboarding fees.
Free plan	Free plan for one user with 500 records, a single pipeline, three automations, built-in telephony, standard dashboards, and mobile apps.	Free CRM for up to 2 users covering contacts, companies, deals, and tickets, one deal pipeline, email and calendar sync, meeting links, forms, live chat, and limited automated actions, with HubSpot branding on public-facing assets and low caps on custom properties, templates, and marketing email sends.
Free trial	15-day free trial on paid plans, no credit card required	14-day trials of paid tiers, though the permanent free plan is the normal evaluation path
Best for	Small businesses and teams of one to about twenty-five people who want a real CRM with native calling, WhatsApp, email, and automation for under $20 a seat, and who are comfortable living inside Zoho's conventions and possibly adopting more of its suite later.	Small businesses that want a capable CRM for free today and a credible path to a single marketing, sales, and service platform later, and mid-sized teams that can justify $90 per seat per month for Sales Hub Professional's automation, reporting, and forecasting.
Setup time	Under an hour to something usable. Import a CSV, pick a pipeline template, connect a mailbox, and the team can work. Adding telephony and WhatsApp channels is another hour of provider setup.	The free CRM is usable in under an hour: sign up, connect the mailbox, import a CSV. A Professional implementation with workflows, lifecycle stages, custom reports, and lead routing is a 4 to 8 week project, which is precisely why the mandatory onboarding fee exists.
Learning curve	Low by design, and lower than Zoho CRM by a wide margin. The vocabulary is Zoho's, so occasional terms feel unfamiliar, but there is no module builder or layout designer to get lost in because Bigin removed them.	Low for reps, who mostly work from the inbox extension and the prospecting workspace. Moderate to high for administrators, because lifecycle stages, workflow enrolment logic, association labels, and permission structures all interact and are easy to get wrong in ways that surface months later.
Platforms	Web, iOS, Android, Apple Watch, Mobile widgets	Web app, iOS, Android, Gmail and Outlook extensions, Chrome extension
Compliance	GDPR, SOC 2 Type II, ISO/IEC 27001, HIPAA available in parts of the Zoho estate	SOC 2 Type 2, GDPR, ISO 27001, HIPAA support on eligible higher-tier subscriptions
Founded	1996	2006
Headquarters	Chennai, India, with a US base in Austin, Texas	Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
Ownership	Privately held and bootstrapped; Zoho Corporation has never taken outside investment	Public company (NYSE: HUBS)

Strengths and limitations

Bigin by Zoho CRM

Strengths

Native telephony, WhatsApp, email, and social capture in a $7 seat, where nearly every competitor at that price pushes calling and messaging out to third-party tools.
Automation is included from the entry tier rather than gated behind a $39 plan, which changes the effective price comparison against Pipedrive dramatically.
Zia AI credits are bundled into the plan allowance instead of metered separately, making the bill predictable.
One of the best mobile experiences in the category, with genuine feature parity, call logging, watch support, and widgets.

Limitations

Custom fields are rationed at ten per module on Express, which is a hard ceiling for businesses that record a lot of structured detail.
No custom objects or module builder at all; that capability was deliberately removed and only exists in Zoho CRM.
Record caps of 50,000 and 100,000 on the lower tiers mean a data-heavy business is pushed up the ladder by volume rather than by need.
Reporting is competent but shallow compared with Zoho CRM or Pipedrive: standard dashboards, limited custom analytics, and no serious forecasting engine.

HubSpot CRM

Strengths

The strongest free tier in the category by a wide margin, usable indefinitely and complete enough to run a two-person company's sales.
One shared record across marketing, sales, service, content, and commerce, which delivers closed-loop attribution that stitched-together stacks rarely achieve.
Enormous ecosystem: over a thousand marketplace apps, a mature API, a certified partner network, and a hiring pool that already knows the product.
The Professional workflow builder and custom report builder are genuinely excellent, and materially deeper than Pipedrive or Capsule at any tier.

Limitations

The Starter to Professional gap is a cliff, not a step: $7 to $90 per seat plus a $1,500 onboarding fee, with sequences at volume, workflow automation, custom reporting, and forecasting all on the far side.
The free plan is capped at two users, so the third hire forces a paid decision earlier than most buyers expect.
Custom objects are Enterprise-only, so unusual data models are handled with custom properties until you are paying $150 a seat.
AI credit metering adds a variable line item and makes total cost harder to forecast than flat per-seat competitors.

Pricing compared

Bigin by Zoho CRM

Per-user subscription across a free tier and three paid tiers, with records, custom fields, pipelines, automations, and AI credits all metered by plan.

Free$0
Express$7
Premier$12
Bigin 360$18

Express at $7 a seat is the best raw value in this directory's CRM category, and it is not a close contest. Native telephony, WhatsApp, mass email, thirty automations, payment links, and 50,000 records for a third of what Pipedrive charges before its automation tier even begins is a serious proposition. The honest caveat is that you are buying breadth within tight limits: ten custom fields per module and no custom objects means Bigin fits businesses whose data model is genuinely simple. If yours is, this is the cheapest complete CRM you can responsibly buy. If yours is not, the limits will chase you up the ladder and eventually into Zoho CRM proper, which is exactly what Zoho designed the ladder to do.

HubSpot CRM

Freemium platform with per-seat paid tiers. Sales Hub seats carry sales tooling, Core Seats give shared CRM edit access to other staff, view-only seats are free, AI usage is metered in HubSpot Credits, and Professional and Enterprise carry mandatory one-time onboarding fees.

Free CRM$0
Sales Hub Starter$7
Sales Hub Professional$90
Sales Hub Enterprise$150

The free tier is the best free CRM available and worth taking on its own terms. Starter at $7 a seat is decent value for removing branding and lifting caps. Professional at $90 a seat is where the value argument gets hard: you are paying more than double Pipedrive Growth and roughly four times Zoho Professional for automation and reporting that are better, but not four times better, in a pure sales context. The honest case for Professional is platform breadth, meaning one record shared by marketing, sales, and service with real attribution. If you only need pipeline and follow-up, HubSpot is the expensive answer; if you need the whole customer lifecycle in one system, it is the cheapest way to get there without an integration project.

Editorial verdict on each

Bigin by Zoho CRM

Bigin is the best value CRM a small business can buy, and the reason is structural: Zoho already owned the infrastructure, so it could afford to build a cheap product properly rather than as a stripped-down lure. Native calling and WhatsApp at $7 a seat, automation from the entry tier, bundled AI credits, and a genuinely good mobile app add up to something most competitors cannot match without doubling the price. Buy it if your data model is simple, your conversations happen across channels, and you are comfortable in Zoho's world. Do not buy it if you need custom objects, hold more than 100,000 records on a budget, or want a big third-party marketplace. And model the metering before you sign: records, fields, pipelines, and automations are all counted, and those counts, not the feature list, are what will eventually move you up the ladder.

Read the full Bigin by Zoho CRM profile

HubSpot CRM

Category Leader

HubSpot CRM is two products wearing one name. The free CRM is the best no-cost option a small business can pick up, and starting there costs nothing but a mailbox connection. The paid platform is a different proposition: excellent, deep, and expensive, with the features a working sales team actually needs stacked behind Sales Hub Professional at $90 a seat plus a $1,500 onboarding fee. Start free without hesitation. When you hit the automation wall, do the arithmetic honestly, because Pipedrive Growth or Zoho Professional will do the pipeline job for a quarter to a half the price. Pay HubSpot's premium only if marketing, sales, and service genuinely need to share one record, which is the one thing nothing else in this category does as well.

Read the full HubSpot CRM profile

Bigin by Zoho CRM profile last reviewed 2026-08-22; HubSpot CRM last reviewed 2026-08-22. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.