Custom CRM, HubSpot or Pipedrive: what fits an SME team?
Pipedrive and HubSpot are a fine choice for most small teams. This article is about the cases where they pinch, and what a custom CRM as a subscription does and does not solve.
Where Pipedrive and HubSpot are strong
Running within a day. A pipeline everyone understands, email and calendar in it, a mobile app, hundreds of integrations and a community that has already answered every question. For a sales process from lead to deal with three to thirty salespeople they are hard to beat, and Pipedrive is cheap as well.
Whoever has that process does not need to read on. How the two compare with Salesforce is in HubSpot vs Salesforce and Pipedrive vs Salesforce.
Where it pinches
The bottlenecks we see at SMEs fall into three groups:
More than one pipeline
- Quote requests to several suppliers at once
- Contracts that expire and need renewing
- Files that continue after the deal: delivery, service, renewal
External parties looking in
- Clients who want to see their own data
- Dealers or partners who supply leads
- Call centres or subcontractors who work in the system
Data that does not fit company, contact or deal
- Fleet, objects, installations
- Projects with phases and parties
- Products with their own rules per client
The standard fix is then: extra fields, a Zapier link, an Excel sheet on the side. That works for six months. After that nobody knows where the truth is.
Comparison on six points
 Pipedrive |  HubSpot Sales Hub |  Custom CRM | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Start | A day | A day; with Professional an onboarding of €1,470 | Base within weeks, complete after two to four months |
| Process | Their pipeline, your fields | Their objects, your fields and workflows | Your process, their building blocks |
| External users | No portal | No portal; client portal only through Service Hub | Included: €1 per portal user per month, in bundles of 20 |
| Cost at 5 users | €295 per month (Premium) | €450 per month (Professional), plus onboarding | €500 per month, everything included |
| Changes | Yourself, within the limits of the package | Yourself, or a partner per hour | In the subscription, in order of priority |
| Ownership | Data yours, software theirs | Data yours, software theirs | Data yours, code with the builder, transfer by agreement |
List prices per user per month, excluding VAT, billed annually. Checked on 29 September 2026 on the pricing pages of Pipedrive, HubSpot (euro prices) and Salesforce. Negotiated prices are often lower, especially at Salesforce.
Worked example: five users, three years
Pipedrive Premium: €10,620 in licences, plus the hours the team spends on setup and on working around the package. HubSpot Sales Hub Professional: €16,200 in licences, €1,470 onboarding and usually a partner for the workflows. Custom CRM as a subscription: €18,000, with build, hosting, management and ongoing development in it.
The difference between Pipedrive and custom is well over €7,000 over three years. That is the price of a system that follows your process. Whether it is worth it depends on how many hours your team now spends working around the package. Two hours a week per person is, with five people, already €25,000 a year in time.
Add a hundred clients looking in and the sum changes. At Pipedrive and HubSpot it cannot be done without extra tooling; with custom it is €100 per month extra. More worked examples, also for fifteen users and with Salesforce included, are in What does a CRM system cost?
When you should stay with a package
- ✓Your process is a standard sales pipeline and will stay that way.
- ✓You have more than thirty users with the same process; then you share the build cost with all the package's other customers.
- ✓You want a ready-made marketing suite on day one, with hundreds of templates and ad platform integrations. Mailings, follow-up sequences and lead scoring we build into a custom CRM as well, on your own data and without contact limits, but we do not have HubSpot's template library.
- ✓Your team changes every six months; a well-known package is then easier to hand over.
- ✓Nobody wants to own the system. Custom software without an owner stands still after a year.
How to decide
- Write the process on a single page, from first contact to invoice and beyond.
- Mark what does not fit a pipeline of steps.
- Count the external parties that need to look in or work along.
- Work out both routes over three years, with the calculator on the product page or with the table above.
If nothing is marked after step two, choose Pipedrive or HubSpot. If half the page is marked, then having a custom CRM built is worth considering.
In short
Pipedrive and HubSpot win with a standard sales process, on price and on speed. A custom CRM as a subscription wins when the process is more than a pipeline, when external parties need to look in, or when the data does not fit company, contact and deal. At five users the price difference is between €7,000 and nothing over three years; at large teams with a standard process the package wins.
Prices checked on 29 September 2026, excluding VAT. CRM Force builds custom CRM systems itself and implements Salesforce; we have no commercial relationship with Pipedrive or HubSpot.
Torn between a package and custom?
In half an hour we walk through your process and tell you which route fits. Even if the answer is Pipedrive.