HubSpot vs Keap 2026

HubSpot and Keap land on the same shortlists constantly, but they’re built for fundamentally different buyers. HubSpot is a platform that can scale from a solo founder to a 2,000-person sales org. Keap is a focused tool designed to help small business owners automate their follow-up, collect payments, and stop letting leads fall through the cracks. The real question isn’t which is “better” — it’s which fits the stage your business is actually at right now.

Quick Verdict

Choose HubSpot if you’re building a team, want a marketing-and-sales platform you won’t outgrow in two years, and you’re willing to invest in Professional tier to unlock the automation you actually need. Choose Keap if you’re a solopreneur or micro-team (1-5 people), you want automation from day one without a $890/month commitment, and your sales process is straightforward enough that you don’t need custom objects or multi-pipeline management.

Pricing Compared

Pricing is where this comparison gets genuinely complicated, because the sticker prices don’t tell the full story.

HubSpot’s free tier is remarkably generous for contact storage and basic CRM functionality. You can run a real business on it. But the moment you need marketing automation, sequences, or custom reporting, you’re jumping from $20/seat/month to $890/month for Professional. That’s a cliff, not a slope. For a five-person team on Professional, you’re looking at roughly $1,090/month all-in after adding extra seats.

Keap starts at $299/month with no free plan, which looks expensive next to HubSpot’s free CRM. But here’s the thing — that $299 includes automation capabilities that require HubSpot Professional to match. For a solo consultant or a two-person team that needs automated follow-up sequences, appointment scheduling, and payment collection, Keap’s entry price actually delivers more relevant functionality per dollar.

Where Keap gets expensive is contact scaling. Each plan caps your contacts, and overages add up. If you’ve got a 10,000-contact database, you’re paying meaningful surcharges. HubSpot’s marketing contacts model is also tiered by volume, but the base allowances are more generous.

The real total cost of ownership calculation:

For a 1-2 person business needing automation: Keap costs $299-$399/month. HubSpot with equivalent automation runs $890+/month.

For a 10-person team with complex needs: HubSpot Professional at roughly $1,490/month (with extra seats) gives you far more than Keap’s Scale plan at $499/month — better reporting, more integrations, custom objects, and a platform that won’t constrain you.

Don’t forget Keap’s mandatory onboarding fee. You’ll pay $499-$1,499 upfront for implementation coaching. HubSpot’s onboarding for Professional is $3,000 and for Enterprise it’s $6,000. These costs are one-time, but they matter for cash-flow planning.

Where HubSpot Wins

Marketing and Sales Alignment

HubSpot was built around the idea that marketing and sales should share a single source of truth. Contact records show every touchpoint — ads clicked, emails opened, pages visited, deals created, support tickets filed. For teams where marketing generates leads and sales closes them, this unified view eliminates the “what happened to that lead?” problem entirely.

Keap tries to do this too, but its marketing tools are limited to email and basic landing pages. HubSpot gives you blog hosting, social media management, ad tracking, SEO tools, and video hosting — all feeding data back into the same contact record.

Reporting and Analytics

On HubSpot Professional and above, the reporting engine is genuinely powerful. You can build custom reports that combine deal data with marketing attribution, create dashboards for different roles, and track revenue back to specific campaigns. I’ve helped teams build revenue attribution models in HubSpot that would cost $50,000+ to replicate with standalone BI tools.

Keap’s reporting covers the basics — revenue by source, pipeline value, email performance. But if you need to answer questions like “which marketing channel produced the most revenue last quarter?”, you’ll hit walls quickly.

Ecosystem and Scale

HubSpot’s integration marketplace is massive. Whatever tool your team uses — Slack, Shopify, QuickBooks, Salesforce, Zoom, Asana — there’s probably a native integration. More importantly, HubSpot’s custom object feature (Enterprise tier) means you can model nearly any business process. I’ve seen HubSpot implementations tracking real estate properties, SaaS subscriptions, franchisee relationships, and insurance policies.

Keap can connect to common tools, but you’ll rely on Zapier far more often, which adds cost and introduces reliability concerns for mission-critical workflows.

Content and Inbound Strategy

If content marketing is a significant channel for your business, HubSpot is in a different league. The CMS Hub, blog tools, and SEO recommendations are tightly integrated with the CRM. You can gate content, track which blog posts influenced deals, and personalize website content based on contact properties. Keap has no equivalent.

Where Keap Wins

Automation Accessibility

This is Keap’s strongest card. On every paid plan, you get access to the Campaign Builder — a visual automation tool that lets you create multi-step sequences triggered by form submissions, tags, purchases, or dozens of other events. You don’t need a $890/month plan to set up an automated follow-up sequence that sends five emails, creates a task for your sales rep on day three, and applies a tag if the prospect doesn’t respond.

I’ve worked with solo consultants who built their entire client acquisition workflow in Keap’s Campaign Builder in an afternoon. Getting equivalent functionality in HubSpot requires Professional tier, which is nearly three times the cost for a small team.

Built-in Payments and Invoicing

Keap includes native invoicing, payment collection, and even basic e-commerce features. You can send a quote, convert it to an invoice, and collect payment via Stripe or PayPal — all inside the CRM. For service businesses, coaches, and consultants, this eliminates the need for a separate invoicing tool.

HubSpot added payment processing (through Stripe) in recent years, but it’s more limited in functionality. If you need recurring billing, subscription management, or payment-triggered automations, Keap handles this natively with much more depth.

Small Business Focus

Keap’s interface and feature set are designed for business owners who don’t have a marketing department. The templates, the guided campaign setup, the way automations are structured — all of it assumes you’re the CEO, the salesperson, and the marketing team rolled into one.

HubSpot can be configured for this use case, but you’ll spend time turning off features you don’t need and learning to ignore entire sections of the platform. For a plumber, a financial advisor, or a personal trainer building a client base, Keap’s focused approach means less time configuring software and more time working.

Appointment Scheduling

Keap’s built-in appointment scheduling is tightly integrated with automations. A prospect can book a call, automatically enter a pre-meeting email sequence, receive reminders, and trigger a post-meeting follow-up — all without Zapier or third-party tools. HubSpot has meeting scheduling too, but linking it into complex automated workflows requires Professional tier and more setup.

Feature-by-Feature Breakdown

Contact Management

HubSpot’s contact model is more sophisticated. Contacts associate with companies, deals, tickets, and custom objects. Lifecycle stages (subscriber → lead → MQL → SQL → customer) provide structure for teams that need lead qualification frameworks. The timeline view shows every interaction across all hubs.

Keap uses a tag-based system that’s flexible but less structured. You create your own organizational logic through tags, which is either liberating or chaotic depending on how disciplined you are. For small lists (under 5,000 contacts), Keap’s approach works fine. Above that, the lack of formal lifecycle stages and company associations starts to hurt.

Pipeline Management

HubSpot’s pipeline is one of its best features. Drag-and-drop deal management, required fields per stage, automated actions on stage change, and forecasting tools. On Professional, you can run multiple pipelines for different products or services. The deal board is intuitive enough that sales reps actually use it without constant nagging.

Keap’s pipeline is functional but basic. It’ll track your deals through stages, and you can trigger automations based on stage changes. But if you need weighted forecasting, multiple pipelines, or complex deal properties, you’ll feel the constraints. For a business with a simple sales process (lead → qualified → proposal → closed), it’s adequate.

Email and Marketing

Both platforms include email marketing, but the depth differs enormously. HubSpot provides A/B testing, smart content, send-time optimization, and detailed engagement analytics. On Professional, you get marketing automation with branching logic, lead scoring, and behavioral triggers.

Keap’s email tools cover broadcasts (one-time sends) and automated sequences. The email builder is competent but not as polished as HubSpot’s. Where Keap shines is in the ease of connecting email to automations — because the automation engine is available on all plans, you can set up sophisticated email sequences without hitting a paywall.

Automation

This deserves extra attention since it’s the core of this comparison.

HubSpot’s automation engine on Professional is extraordinarily powerful. You can build workflows triggered by virtually any data point — contact properties, deal stages, form submissions, page views, email engagement, list membership, even score thresholds. Branching logic, delays, if/then conditions, and external action triggers make complex multi-channel automations possible.

The catch: you need Professional ($890/month) to access most of it. The Starter tier gives you simple automations — basic sequences and form follow-ups — but nothing approaching what serious automation requires.

Keap’s Campaign Builder is available immediately. It’s a visual canvas where you connect triggers, actions, and decision points. The logic is solid: triggers fire based on tag applications, form submissions, purchases, or appointment bookings. Actions include sending emails, applying tags, creating tasks, starting/stopping other campaigns, and sending internal notifications.

Keap’s automation is deep enough for most small business needs but has a lower ceiling than HubSpot Professional. You won’t build complex lead scoring models or multi-channel attribution workflows. But for “when someone fills out this form, send them five emails over two weeks, create a task for me to call them on day three, and move them to a different sequence if they book an appointment” — Keap handles this beautifully at a fraction of the cost.

AI Capabilities

HubSpot has invested heavily in AI through its Breeze platform. You’ll find AI-powered content generation for emails and blog posts, predictive lead scoring that actually improves over time, conversation intelligence that analyzes sales calls, and AI-driven forecasting. The quality varies — content generation is useful for first drafts, and predictive scoring works well once you have enough data (typically 500+ closed deals).

Keap’s AI features are minimal. There’s some smart send-time optimization, but the platform hasn’t made AI a strategic priority. If AI-assisted selling and marketing matter to you, HubSpot is the clear winner here.

Integrations

HubSpot’s 1,700+ native integrations mean you can usually find a direct connection to whatever tools you’re using. The integrations vary in depth — some are just contact syncs, while others (like Salesforce, Shopify, and Slack) offer deep two-way data flows.

Keap’s ~300 integrations cover the essentials — QuickBooks, Gmail, Outlook, WordPress, Zapier, Stripe — but you’ll hit gaps faster. A mid-size team using 15-20 SaaS tools will likely find 2-3 critical integrations missing from Keap’s marketplace. Zapier fills many gaps, but each Zap adds monthly cost and a potential failure point.

Migration Considerations

Moving from Keap to HubSpot

This is the more common migration direction as businesses grow. The good news: HubSpot has a dedicated Keap migration path and several partner agencies that specialize in this transition.

Data migration typically takes 1-2 weeks. Contacts, companies, and deals transfer cleanly. Tags in Keap usually map to custom properties or list memberships in HubSpot. The tricky part is automation — Keap campaigns need to be rebuilt as HubSpot workflows, and the logic doesn’t translate one-to-one. Budget 20-40 hours of work to rebuild automations for a typical small business.

Email history is the biggest pain point. Keap’s email engagement data (opens, clicks, sequences) doesn’t transfer to HubSpot’s timeline in a meaningful way. You’ll lose historical email engagement context.

Payment workflows require rethinking. If you’re using Keap’s invoicing and payment collection, you’ll need to set up HubSpot Payments or integrate a standalone tool like Stripe Billing or FreshBooks.

Plan for 2-4 weeks of total transition time and $2,000-$8,000 in implementation costs if you hire a partner.

Moving from HubSpot to Keap

Less common, but it happens — usually when a team realizes they’re paying for Professional features they don’t need and would be better served by Keap’s simpler approach.

Contact and deal data migrates fairly cleanly. HubSpot’s lifecycle stages and custom properties need to be mapped to Keap’s tag system, which requires planning. Custom objects in HubSpot have no Keap equivalent, so that data needs a new home.

Complex multi-hub workflows won’t translate. If you’re using HubSpot’s marketing attribution, content management, or service hub, you’ll need replacement tools.

The biggest risk is losing integration connections. If your tech stack relies heavily on HubSpot’s native integrations, audit which ones have Keap equivalents before committing.

Our Recommendation

The decision between HubSpot and Keap comes down to team size, complexity, and growth trajectory.

Choose Keap if:

• You’re 1-5 people and need automation now
• Your sales process is straightforward (single pipeline, under 5,000 contacts)
• You want built-in invoicing and payment collection
• You don’t have a dedicated marketing team
• You’d rather spend $299-$499/month than $890+ for automation

Choose HubSpot if:

• You’re growing a team beyond 5 people
• You need sophisticated reporting and attribution
• Content marketing and inbound are core strategies
• You want a platform that scales to 50, 100, or 500 employees
• You need deep integrations with a complex tech stack
• AI-powered features matter to your sales process

For the classic small business owner — a consultant, agency founder, coach, or local service business — who needs to automate their follow-up and stop losing leads, Keap delivers faster time-to-value at a lower price point. The automation you get out of the box on Keap’s entry plan would cost three times as much on HubSpot.

For businesses with growth ambitions that extend beyond a small team, HubSpot is the safer long-term bet. You’ll pay more upfront, but you won’t have to re-platform in 18 months when you outgrow Keap’s capabilities.

One more thing worth considering: you can start on HubSpot’s free CRM to manage contacts and deals, then add Keap purely for its automation and email capabilities via Zapier integration. It’s not elegant, but some small businesses use this hybrid approach to get the best of both worlds while keeping costs down.

Read our full HubSpot review | See HubSpot alternatives

Read our full Keap review | See Keap alternatives

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