Published 18 August 2026 · All prices below were read directly from HubSpot’s and Salesforce’s own pricing pages on 18 August 2026 and are quoted in USD.
How we researched this: Every figure in this article was read from the vendors’ official pricing pages on 18 August 2026 — HubSpot’s Sales Hub pricing page and Salesforce’s Sales Cloud pricing page — including the prices shown under each billing toggle. We have not run structured hands-on testing of either platform, and nothing here is presented as personal experience, as a vendor quote, or as a performance rating. Software pricing changes often: check the vendor page before you buy, and treat any figure older than a few weeks as unverified.
The short answer
On list price alone, HubSpot Sales Hub is cheaper than Salesforce Sales Cloud at every equivalent tier we could compare. But the two vendors hide their extra costs in different places, and the gap narrows once you account for them.
- HubSpot’s extra costs are one-time and mandatory. A required onboarding fee is charged automatically on Professional and Enterprise — 1,500 USD and 3,500 USD respectively for Sales Hub.
- Salesforce’s extra costs are structural. Everything above Starter Suite is billed annually only, and the biggest AI capabilities sit in higher editions or paid add-ons rather than in the base seat price.
- HubSpot’s entry pricing is promotional right now. The 7 USD per seat Starter rate is a new-customer discount against a standard 20 USD per seat. Salesforce’s 25 USD Starter Suite rate is shown without a promotional strike-through.
Side by side, as displayed on 18 August 2026
These are the two vendors’ own list prices, per seat or per user, per month, on their best-value billing term. They are not equivalent feature sets — a HubSpot seat and a Salesforce seat buy different things — but they are the numbers a buyer sees first.
| Tier | HubSpot Sales Hub | Salesforce Sales Cloud |
|---|---|---|
| Free | 0 USD/mo, up to 2 users | Free Suite, listed at 0 USD/user/mo |
| Entry | Starter — 7 USD/mo/seat annual (standard 20 USD) | Starter Suite — 25 USD/user/mo, monthly or annual |
| Mid | Professional — 90 USD/mo/seat annual (standard 100 USD) + 1,500 USD onboarding | Pro Suite — 100 USD/user/mo, annual only |
| Upper | Enterprise — 150 USD/mo/seat + 3,500 USD onboarding | Enterprise — 175 USD/user/mo, annual only |
| Top | No higher published tier | Unlimited — 350 USD/user/mo; Agentforce 1 Sales — 550 USD/user/mo |
Two things stand out. Salesforce publishes two tiers above anything HubSpot Sales Hub offers, which matters if you expect to grow into heavy customisation or unmetered AI. And HubSpot’s cheapest paid seat is currently around a third of Salesforce’s — but at HubSpot’s standard, non-promotional rate of 20 USD it is closer to four-fifths.
What the sticker price leaves out
HubSpot: onboarding, credits and contact tiers
HubSpot bills on more than one meter. Beyond seats, its pricing pages list HubSpot Credits — a consumption meter powering its AI agents — with 500 included on Starter, 3,000 on Professional and 5,000 on Enterprise, and additional credits at 9.00 USD per 1,000 when paid annually. Marketing contacts are a separate meter again, which matters if you buy Marketing Hub alongside Sales Hub.
The one that most often surprises buyers is onboarding. It is not an optional professional-services upsell: HubSpot’s pricing page states it is charged automatically when you purchase Professional or Enterprise. We broke all of these meters down in detail in our HubSpot pricing explainer.
Salesforce: annual commitment and the add-on layer
Salesforce’s pricing page shows Starter Suite as the only paid edition billed either monthly or annually. Pro Suite, Enterprise, Unlimited and Agentforce 1 Sales are all listed as billed annually. In practice that means a ten-person team choosing Pro Suite is looking at a twelve-month commitment from day one, not a month-to-month subscription they can stop.
The page also lists Agentforce, Data Cloud and the Premier Success Plan as items available for purchase alongside Enterprise and Unlimited rather than included in them. Salesforce does not publish a single blended price for those add-ons on this page, so a like-for-like AI comparison against HubSpot Credits is not possible from published figures alone.
Salesforce’s own footnote is worth quoting for what it implies about precision: the page is provided for information purposes only and is subject to change.
The entry tiers are not the same product
HubSpot Sales Hub Starter and Salesforce Starter Suite both sit at the bottom of the paid ladder, but they are scoped differently. Salesforce describes Starter Suite as a cross-functional suite covering lead, account, contact and opportunity management with built-in sales flows, lead routing and automatic email, event and contact syncing. HubSpot Starter is a per-seat upgrade to the free CRM that raises limits and removes HubSpot branding, and can be bought hub by hub.
Both vendors also list a free tier. HubSpot’s free CRM is capped at two users on the Sales Hub page; Salesforce lists a Free Suite at 0 USD per user per month covering basic lead, account, contact and opportunity management. We have written up what HubSpot’s free tier does and does not include in our HubSpot CRM review. We have not made an equivalent assessment of Salesforce’s Free Suite, and are not going to characterise it from a pricing page alone.
The mid-tier jump
This is where most buyers actually make a decision, and where the two vendors converge. HubSpot Professional lists at 90 USD per seat on annual billing, Salesforce Pro Suite at 100 USD per user. A 10 USD per seat monthly difference is small enough to be decided by fit rather than budget — until you add HubSpot’s mandatory 1,500 USD onboarding, which for a small team can outweigh the per-seat saving in year one.
Note also that HubSpot’s 90 USD figure is itself promotional against a standard 100 USD. At standard rates, HubSpot Professional and Salesforce Pro Suite are listed at the same per-seat price, and HubSpot is the more expensive of the two in year one because of onboarding.
What a five-seat and a ten-seat team would pay
The arithmetic below is ours, built from the list prices above at the annual rates displayed on 18 August 2026. These are not vendor quotes. They exclude tax, add-ons and any negotiated discount, and they assume no promotional rate survives past year one.
| Scenario | Year-one total |
|---|---|
| 5 seats · HubSpot Starter at promotional 7 USD | 420 USD |
| 5 seats · HubSpot Starter at standard 20 USD | 1,200 USD |
| 5 users · Salesforce Starter Suite at 25 USD | 1,500 USD |
| 5 seats · HubSpot Professional at 90 USD + 1,500 USD onboarding | 6,900 USD |
| 5 users · Salesforce Pro Suite at 100 USD | 6,000 USD |
| 10 seats · HubSpot Professional at 90 USD + 1,500 USD onboarding | 12,300 USD |
| 10 users · Salesforce Pro Suite at 100 USD | 12,000 USD |
| 10 seats · HubSpot Enterprise at 150 USD + 3,500 USD onboarding | 21,500 USD |
| 10 users · Salesforce Enterprise at 175 USD | 21,000 USD |
The pattern is consistent and worth stating plainly: at the entry tier HubSpot is materially cheaper, and from Professional upward the two land within a few hundred dollars of each other in year one. Anyone choosing between them on price at the mid tier is optimising a rounding error. From year two, with onboarding paid and promotions expired, HubSpot is the cheaper line item again.
Which one fits which team
Price is the part we can verify, so it is the part we will commit to. On fit, we will only say what the vendors’ own published packaging supports:
- Very small teams and solo operators. HubSpot’s free tier is capped at two users and its Starter seat is the cheapest paid seat of the two. If budget is the binding constraint, the published prices favour HubSpot.
- Teams that want to buy one function at a time. HubSpot sells by hub, so you can pay for Sales and not Marketing. We compared that choice against HubSpot’s bundled option in which HubSpot product you actually need.
- Organisations expecting to outgrow a mid tier. Salesforce publishes Unlimited and Agentforce 1 Sales above Enterprise; HubSpot Sales Hub publishes nothing above Enterprise. If your ceiling matters, Salesforce has more published headroom.
- Teams that need month-to-month flexibility. Salesforce lists monthly billing only on Starter Suite. HubSpot lists a commit-monthly option at Starter and Professional, at a higher per-seat rate.
If you are still shortlisting rather than choosing between these two specifically, our best CRM for small business guide compares six options on verified price structure, and our roundup of SaaS tools for small business covers the wider stack.
What we could not verify
- Neither vendor states on its pricing page what promotional rates renew at. HubSpot’s Starter and Professional discounts are labelled new-customer offers; we are not going to guess the renewal price.
- Salesforce does not publish prices for Agentforce, Data Cloud or Premier Success on the Sales Cloud pricing page, so the AI and data layers are not price-comparable to HubSpot Credits from published figures.
- Neither page states a minimum seat count for the paid tiers we compared.
- All figures are the USD prices shown to a US visitor. Both vendors offer currency selectors and regional pricing may differ.
- We have not conducted hands-on testing of either platform and make no claims about performance, usability, support quality or implementation effort based on personal use.
Both of these sit well above the entry end of the market. For the other end, see our verified pricing comparison of the cheapest CRMs for small teams.
Sources
- HubSpot Sales Hub pricing — hubspot.com/pricing/sales, accessed 18 August 2026
- Salesforce Sales Cloud pricing — salesforce.com/sales/pricing, accessed 18 August 2026
- Salesforce Sales Cloud editions and pricing — salesforce.com/editions-pricing/sales-cloud, accessed 18 August 2026
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