Zoho CRM vs HubSpot for teams already on Zoho: switch or stay?

Which problems a switch can and cannot fix (practical advice)

This section is practical advice from experience, not vendor documentation.

• Usually a setup or adoption problem, so it travels with you: duplicate or inconsistent data, too many required fields, nobody trusting reports, a pipeline that does not match how deals move, reps entering data late or not at all, workflows nobody has reviewed since launch. A new CRM loaded with the same data and the same process tends to reproduce these.
• Possibly a real reason to switch: a documented, business-critical requirement your current Zoho edition cannot meet and that a custom build would not reasonably solve; or a decision to standardise on one vendor's marketing, sales and service tools that your team will actually adopt.
• Often a plan or edition question rather than a product question: a capability you want may exist in a higher Zoho edition. Check Zoho's edition page before assuming it is missing.
• The same applies in reverse: HubSpot also has editions, and capabilities differ by plan, so compare the edition you would actually buy, not the product name.

What the vendors' own pages say

• Zoho CRM's pricing page lists editions Free (up to 3 users), Standard, Professional, Enterprise and Ultimate, billed per user per month. It lists workflows and custom modules from Standard, process automation (step-by-step guidance) from Professional, and custom functions for cross-app workflows from Enterprise. Check the page for current prices and for what each edition includes.
• HubSpot describes its free CRM as unifying customer data on one platform and lists contact management, deal pipelines, CRM import and a reporting dashboard among its free features. Its navigation describes each Hub as having free and premium plans. The pages we fetched did not show plan prices, so check HubSpot's pricing page directly.
• HubSpot states its free CRM includes a CRM import feature for importing data from another tool. That is an import route, not a guarantee that Zoho's customisations, automations or reports come across.

Source: Zoho CRM pricing, HubSpot CRM, HubSpot CRM pricing

Step 1: Check the Zoho setup before you decide (practical advice)

• Write down the three to five specific things you cannot do or cannot trust today, in plain terms, with an example of each.
• For each, ask whether it is data quality, process, permissions or training, or a real missing capability. Only the last is a reason to change product.
• Run Skyfall's Zoho CRM health check or a similar review to see how much of the frustration is configuration.
• If most items are configuration, a clean-up or re-implementation inside Zoho is generally a smaller project than a migration.

Step 2: Know what you can export from Zoho CRM

• Module exports: users with the Export (Module) permission can export to CSV or XLSX. Zoho states a maximum of 50,000 records in XLSX and 200,000 records from a single module in CSV per export, and suggests splitting by Created Time or taking a backup for more. Daily export caps depend on edition (Zoho lists Free 10, Standard 100, Professional 250, Enterprise 500, Ultimate 1,000). The download link is available for seven days and export history covers 60 days.
• Full data backup: users with an administrative profile can request a backup. It arrives as CSV files in a ZIP, with data and attachments in separate folders, and the link stays active for a maximum of seven days. Zoho states email content and attachments, documents and data obtained through integrations are not part of the backup, and that backup for emails with IMAP configuration is not supported.
• Practical advice: because email, documents and integration data are outside the backup, decide separately how you will keep or move them.

Source: Zoho Help: Export CRM data, Zoho Help: Requesting a data backup

Step 3: What HubSpot's import requires

• File types: HubSpot states import files must be .csv, .xlsx or .xls, contain one sheet, have a header row where each column header corresponds to a HubSpot property, and be UTF-8 encoded if they include foreign language characters.
• Required properties: contacts need Email; companies need Name or Company domain name; new deals need Deal name, Pipeline and Deal stage, and the stage must be valid in that pipeline.
• Associations: HubSpot says to associate records in one file by including a unique identifier for each record in the same row, and warns that without unique identifiers the import will create duplicate records instead of associating them.
• Limits: HubSpot lists 20MB files and 50 imports per day for free tools, and 512 MB files and 500 imports per day for Starter, Professional and Enterprise, applied over a rolling 24-hour period.
• Practical advice: Zoho's lookups and related lists will not map one-to-one onto HubSpot's pipelines, properties and associations. Plan the mapping, and agree which Zoho fields are dropped, before you export.

Source: HubSpot Knowledge Base: Set up your import file

Step 4: Safety checklist before any move (practical advice)

• Ask a Zoho administrator to take a full data backup and download it inside the seven-day window.
• Export every module you rely on, including notes, and reconcile record counts against the backup.
• Separately copy email, documents and integration data, which the backup excludes.
• Document custom fields, layouts, workflows, blueprints, custom functions and integrations as a map, since none of this is a data export.
• Clean duplicates and obsolete records before exporting, not after importing.
• Import a small sample into HubSpot first and check associations and duplicates.
• Keep Zoho CRM running in parallel until the new system is verified, and do not bulk-delete during the move.
• Confirm current terms for your Zoho edition with Zoho before downgrading or cancelling. We did not confirm what happens to data after cancellation.

Not sure whether to switch or stay?

Skyfall Labs can review your setup and tell you whether your frustrations are fixable inside Zoho or point to a genuine mismatch. Because we are a Zoho Partner, treat that view with the interest we have disclosed, and use the checklist above to test it.