Notion vs HubSpot for Startups: Which One Should Actually Be Your CRM?
here's my take: they're not really competing products. Treating them like they are is where most of the confusion starts.
lemme tell you
Okay what’s this new guy called HubSpot
HubSpot is kind of a real CRM. Built from the ground up to manage deals, track pipelines, log calls, send sequences, and give your sales team a dashboard they can stare at all day. If you've never used a dedicated CRM before, HubSpot is genuinely great at teaching you how a CRM should work, the logic of contacts, companies, deals, activities. That's actually valuable.
But here's the catch: HubSpot is pretty expensive once you grow past the free tier. You start needing features that should be basic. Worse, the data model is fairly rigid. You end up paying for a bunch of related databases and workflows that you're using maybe 20-30% of.
keep in mind HubSpot has a reputation for making data exports and migrations annoying, bcz why not we are public company :)
What You're Getting With Notion
Notion is not really a CRM though you can make it too look and function like a CRM. It's very flexible, like reallyyyyyy customizable.
The upside: you have to build it yourself, it's cheap (or free), you can model your CRM exactly the way you want. but as someone’s dad said, "with great power comes great responsibility”
The semi-downside: you have to build it yourself yeahhhh. Probably fun or probably shitty, depends on what kind of person you are and do you like watching tutorials on youtube or not. Notion gives you the LEGO bricks. on each page you can add databases, text, images, change the view of table from classic spreadsheet like to a gallery/kanban like, invite other humans, add a page inside a page and another page inside that page and keep doing it until you reach black hole etc…
basically you have to watch a lot of weird slow speaking youtubers to get a gist of how notion works and once you got it you are basically a super human. btw you can keep your notion as simple as you want or as quantum advance as you like
So Which One Should a Startup Use?
For most early-stage startups: Start with Notion.
bcz when your SaaS is small, keep shit simple, fast and flat. You don't need sequences and lead scoring and 47 pipeline stages. You need to know who you talked to, what they said, and what happens next. Notion handles that fine, costs less, and keeps your workflow in one place.
If you need some kind of an advance automation, proper email tracking, or you have a dedicated sales team that talk in HubSpot, then maybe HubSpot is a right thing
Ask Yourself:
Before picking, ask: what do I actually need to track?
If the answer is "contacts, some notes, and a simple pipeline" Notion, probably.
If the answer involves marketing automation, email sequences, deep reporting, or a sales team that needs structured workflows they didn't have to build from scratch, then HubSpot starts making more sense.
Bottom Line
always remember the KISS principle