Pipedrive vs HubSpot: the €7 is for new customers only

What the record says

Both of these pages advertise a discount in large type, and only one of the two discounts is something you keep. HubSpot's banner reads 'Save up to 65% on Starter'. The sentence underneath is the important one: 'Get special Starter pricing when you choose a monthly or annual subscription. New customers only. Select offers available for a limited time.' The plan card then shows 'Starts at €7/mo/seat' next to €20/mo/seat. The 65% is arithmetically correct — €7 is 65% off €20 — but it is an acquisition offer, and €20 is the number to budget against.

Pipedrive's discount is a different kind of thing entirely. Its switch says 'Save up to 42%', and that is the ordinary annual-versus-monthly trade every vendor offers. Nothing on the page is time-limited, new-customer-only, or first-year. In a batch of pricing pages where four of the last five vendors we read were running introductory rates, Pipedrive's is the one where the number you see is the number you keep paying.

That said, its 42% deserves unpacking, because it applies to exactly one plan out of four. Lite is €14 per seat per month annually against €24 monthly — €168 a year against €288, which is 41.7% and reaches the claim. Growth is €39 against €49, or €468 against €588: 20.4%. Premium is €59 against €79: 25.3%. Ultimate is €79 against €99: 20.2%. So a buyer on Growth — the tier most small sales teams actually land on — saves about half what the banner led them to expect. 'Up to' is doing real work.

Compare the two at their standing prices and Pipedrive wins the entry tier. HubSpot Starter at €20 per seat per month is €240 a seat per year. Pipedrive Lite at €14 billed annually is €168. For a four-person sales team that is €672 against €960 — a €288 difference in year one and every year after, once HubSpot's introductory period ends. Even Pipedrive's monthly-billed Lite at €24 is only €4 above HubSpot's standing rate, while carrying no promotional expiry at all.

But the comparison is not quite like-for-like, and it is worth being straight about that. HubSpot's Starter Customer Platform is a bundle: email marketing, meeting scheduling, live chat, ticketing, a drag-and-drop editor, contact management and a deal pipeline, plus 500 HubSpot Credits and branding removal. Pipedrive Lite is a sales pipeline — lead, calendar and pipeline management, AI-powered reports, a real-time sales feed and 500+ integrations. If you would otherwise pay separately for a help desk and an email tool, HubSpot's €20 covers ground Pipedrive's €14 does not.

The free tier is the other place HubSpot has something Pipedrive simply does not offer. HubSpot Free Tools is a standing account for up to 2 users with no credit card required, covering all six of its tool families at reduced limits. Pipedrive publishes no free plan; its entry is a 14-day trial. For a two-person operation testing whether a CRM helps at all, that difference outweighs several euros a seat.

One structural note on how each page treats you. Pipedrive prints both figures for every tier — the per-seat monthly rate and the annual total, as 'One payment of €168 per seat/year' — so there is no ambiguity about what committing costs. HubSpot offers Pay Monthly and Pay Annually on Starter with annual marked BEST VALUE, but we could not read a separate annual per-seat figure in our view, so we have not quoted one. Where a page tells you plainly, we can be precise; where it does not, we would rather say so.

The short version: if you want a sales CRM and a predictable bill, Pipedrive Lite at €168 a seat per year is the cheaper and the more honest page. If you want a platform, or you have two users and no budget, HubSpot's free tier and bundle are things Pipedrive has no answer to — just do the sum at €20 rather than €7.