HubSpot or HighLevel

Updated 2026-09-19

Stay on HubSpot if you have several teams, need reporting and forecasting across them, or your sales process depends on its sequences and its ecosystem. Move to HighLevel if you are a small business using a fraction of what you pay for and you need phone, SMS, booking, pages and courses in one flat-priced account.

What HubSpot is built for

HubSpot is built as a customer platform that unifies marketing, sales and service teams around one shared set of customer data, with tiers and seats priced to scale from a small team up to a large organization. It suits a business with more than one team working the same records, where reporting and forecasting across those teams drives real decisions.

Where a small business starts to need more

The need that shows up most often is scale mismatch rather than a missing feature: one or two people running the whole business on a platform priced and built for growing teams, paying for tiers used at a fraction of their depth, with no need for the cross-team reporting that justifies the structure. Alongside that, a small business often wants phone and SMS as a channel, a booking calendar, a page builder and courses in the same account rather than as separate purchases.

What a flat-priced account changes

HighLevel has no seat pricing on any published plan (as at September 2026), so a one or two person team is not paying per login, and phone, SMS, booking, pages and courses sit on the same subscription as the CRM and pipeline. Where HubSpot can still be the fit: a business with several teams working the CRM, whose reporting and forecasting depend on multi-object data at a depth a single-object CRM does not attempt to match, has a real need HighLevel is not built to carry at that depth.

What the export carries and what the rebuild owes you

Contacts, companies, deals and notes generally export as a CSV; verify current export options on HubSpot's own site for your specific plan. Sequences, workflows and reports are rebuilt inside HighLevel using your export as the reference. Mapping HubSpot's deal stages onto a HighLevel pipeline is a manual step worth doing on paper before the import. Multi-object reporting at HubSpot's depth is not something HighLevel is built to replace; if that reporting is what your team relies on, name that as the reason to stay rather than treating it as something to work around after the move.

Sizing the migration itself

A HubSpot move depends heavily on how many sequences, workflows and reports need rebuilding, so there is no single typical range to quote here; the setup timeline tool builds one for your case once you know your record counts. The sending domain warm-up is a fixed 2 to 4 weeks, as at September 2026, and should start on day one regardless of how the rest of the timeline runs. the setup checklist lists every step in order.

Reading your own case against these conditions

Stay on HubSpot if:

1. More than one team works the CRM day to day.
2. Reporting and forecasting across those teams drive real decisions.
3. Your seat count is growing and each seat is genuinely used.

Move to HighLevel if:

1. One or two people run everything and seat pricing no longer matches how the business works.
2. You need SMS and phone as a channel tied to the same contact record.
3. You run several businesses or client accounts under one login.

The mistake most small teams make in the first month is trying to recreate every sequence and report before the pipeline goes live, rather than the other way around. the setup and migration checklist puts the pipeline and first workflow ahead of the rest for exactly that reason.

Questions people ask

Can a small business move from HubSpot to HighLevel?

Yes, and it is the more common direction for this move: a small team that no longer needs multi-team reporting exports contacts, companies and deals as a CSV and rebuilds sequences as workflows.

Will I lose my reports?

The reports themselves are rebuilt rather than imported, and HubSpot's multi-object reporting depth is not something a single-object CRM is built to match. If that reporting drives decisions today, weigh it directly against the channels you would gain.

Does HighLevel charge per user?

No published plan charges per seat; users are unlimited on every plan (as at September 2026).

Can I move my deals and pipeline?

Deal records export as a CSV, and the pipeline itself is rebuilt with your stages mapped across by hand, since the two platforms structure pipelines differently.

Is HighLevel a CRM in the same sense?

It covers contacts, companies as tagged records, deals as pipeline stages, and notes, alongside calendars, SMS and pages; sales pipeline and feature matrix go into how the pipeline itself works day to day. For businesses evaluating a CRM move more broadly, pipedrive, salesforce and zoho cover other CRMs people move from.

Who should own a HubSpot migration?

One named person, given how much of the value in a HubSpot account sits in sequences, workflows and reports that do not transfer automatically. Rebuild the pipeline and one enquiry workflow first so the business keeps running on the new system while everything else is rebuilt behind it, rather than trying to recreate every sequence before anything goes live.

What about the marketing side of HubSpot?

Landing pages, forms and email sequences built inside HubSpot are rebuilt inside HighLevel's own page builder and workflows rather than imported, so treat the marketing rebuild as its own project alongside the CRM move, not an afterthought once contacts and deals are in.