Keap vs HubSpot Sales Hub

Keap fits small businesses that want CRM, email automation and payments in one plan; HubSpot fits B2B sales teams planning to scale. Keap, formerly Infusionsoft and owned by Thryv since October 31, 2024, has dropped feature-based tiers and now sells a single plan containing the whole platform: CRM, email marketing, landing pages, web forms, text messaging and payment collection, at $249 a month on an annual contract with 2 users and 1,500 contacts included. HubSpot Sales Hub is a per-seat sales CRM with a free entry point, where marketing automation lives in a separate Marketing Hub subscription and quoting has moved out into Revenue Hub. That is the core architectural difference. Keap bundles the whole small-business revenue motion behind one price and meters you on contacts. HubSpot unbundles by job, meters you on seats, and expects you to buy more hubs as the company grows. The buying situation follows from it. An owner-led service business that captures a lead from a form, nurtures it by email, quotes it and takes the card payment wants one system and one bill. A B2B team hiring reps, adding a sales manager and starting to forecast wants per-seat pricing and a path to forecasting, which Keap's single plan is not built to provide.

Keap: From $249/mo. Checked against the vendor on September 25, 2026. Keap pricing and plans

HubSpot Sales Hub: Free plan; from $20/user/mo. Checked against the vendor on September 25, 2026. HubSpot Sales Hub pricing and plans

One product covers the whole small-business motion. CRM, email marketing, landing pages, web forms and payments sit together, and reviews on Keap's own site keep returning to having everything under one roof. The owner of a service business benefits most: a lead can be captured, nurtured, quoted and paid without an integration between four vendors.

Automation is approachable for non-specialists. A Gartner Peer Insights reviewer calls the automation easy to pick up, and Black Swan Media's review describes the drag-and-drop email builder as intuitive. That matters when the person building the follow-up campaign is also the person selling.

Payments are native, not bolted on. Collecting money inside the same record that holds the nurture sequence removes a reconciliation step that small teams usually handle by hand or by paying for a connector.

Pricing reality, checked September 2026 on keap.com/pricing: one plan at $249 per month billed annually ($2,988 a year) or $299 month to month, including 2 user licenses and 1,500 contacts. Extra users are $39 per month, and the checkout data behind the page also lists extra users at $384 per year on annual billing, so ask which rate your quote uses. Extra contacts are priced by volume: the page's calculator data lists the first 1,000 extra contacts at $346 a year and a 2,501 to 5,000 band at $1,440 a year.

Worked example: a 10-user team on annual billing pays $2,988 plus 8 extra users at $39 x 12 = $3,744, so $6,732 a year with 1,500 contacts. Month to month the same team pays ($299 + 8 x $39) x 12 = $7,332. Growing to roughly 5,000 contacts adds about $1,440 a year. At 25 users, add 23 extra licenses for $10,764, taking the base to about $13,752 before contacts.

Who it fits best: owner-led service businesses and small teams under about 10 people who sell and collect payment in one flow and have no separate marketing function.

It is built to grow with headcount. HubSpot Sales Hub gives pipeline management, sequences, email tracking and reporting that scale as reps are added, with forecasting, call recording and transcription arriving at Professional. A founder who expects to hire a sales manager in 18 months is buying that path.

You can start for nothing and commit later. The free CRM covers up to 2 users, and customers who joined after March 5, 2024 have no seat minimums, with view-only seats free. That lets a small team put real data in before signing anything, which Keap's structure does not allow.

The record is shared across functions. Because Marketing Hub, Service Hub and Sales Hub sit on the same contact record, lead handoff and lifecycle reporting work without a sync. Marketing is a separate bill, but it is not a separate database, which is the part that usually breaks.

Reporting answers sales questions properly. Gartner Peer Insights reviewers cite automation, email tracking and pipeline management as strengths, and reviewers consistently describe the interface as intuitive. For a sales manager running a weekly pipeline review, that is the gap Keap leaves open.

Pricing reality, checked September 2026 on hubspot.com/pricing/sales: Free up to 2 users, Starter $20 per seat per month list, Professional $90 per seat billed annually plus a one-time $1,500 onboarding fee, and Enterprise $150 plus $3,500. Ten seats cost $2,400 a year on Starter, $12,300 in year one on Professional and $21,500 on Enterprise; 25 seats on Starter cost $6,000 and on Professional $27,000 plus onboarding. Marketing Hub is a separate subscription, and AI credits beyond the monthly allowance cost $0.01 each.

Who it fits best: B2B teams that plan to add reps, managers and a forecast over the next two years and want each function priced separately as it is needed.

Compare like for like, which means adding Marketing Hub to the HubSpot side. For 10 users, Keap is about $6,732 a year with everything included, against $2,400 for HubSpot Starter seats alone. Once you add a Marketing Hub subscription for the email marketing and landing pages Keap bundles, the gap narrows sharply, so price the whole job instead of the sales seat.

Both overlap on contacts, pipelines, automated email, forms and landing pages. The real divide is metering: Keap charges you for contacts and bundles features, HubSpot charges you for seats and unbundles features. Work out which of those two numbers grows faster in your business, because that is what your bill will track.

Hidden costs sit on both sides. Keap requires an implementation package that the pricing page does not price, though the checkout catalog embedded in it lists an Ignite package at $1,500, and annual contracts carry a $299 early termination fee, with texting beyond the included tier at $0.015 per message and $0.01 per voice minute. HubSpot's onboarding fees are $1,500 at Professional and $3,500 at Enterprise, and quoting now lives in the separately priced Revenue Hub.

Support and price increases are the recurring complaints about Keap. Software Advice reviewers report a confusing interface for new users and slow support, and a long-time Trustpilot customer complains about repeated price increases. Ask for a renewal cap in writing and ask what Thryv's ownership changes about support and roadmap. Keap's trial also caps email sending at 25 messages and blocks payments and texting, so a real test needs a paid month.

Migration out of Keap is a rebuild, not an export. Contacts, tags and payment history export cleanly enough, but automation logic does not transfer, so plan to rebuild campaigns as HubSpot workflows one at a time while both run. Do that arithmetic before signing an annual Keap contract, not after.

You may not need either. A solo operator with a few hundred contacts can often run this on HubSpot's free CRM plus a standalone email tool for a fraction of both prices. Only move to a paid plan when a specific follow-up is being missed or a report cannot be produced.

Neither shortlist survives a demo unchanged, so write down the one workflow that has to work before you take the call. Our research and ranking method explains how we weigh these trade-offs.