When you start shopping for a CRM, two well-known names show up quickly: monday CRM and HubSpot. Both promise more clarity, less chaos, and a growing sales team that finally works in one system. Yet the two tools follow very different philosophies. This article compares them fairly and factually, so you can see which one fits your sales process better.
Two Different Starting Points
The biggest difference lies in where each product comes from.
- monday CRM grew out of the monday.com work and project management platform. At its core, the CRM is a highly flexible board system that you assemble like a construction kit for sales processes. Columns, statuses, automations, and views can all be customized freely.
- HubSpot was built from day one as a marketing, sales, and service platform. It thinks heavily in terms of contacts, lifecycle stages, and inbound marketing. The features mesh tightly, from the first website visit to the closed deal.
Put simply: monday CRM is an extremely adaptable work system that also handles sales. HubSpot is a well-considered sales and marketing ecosystem with clear, predefined paths.
Usability and Flexibility
Both tools are considered relatively easy to use, but they set different priorities.
monday CRM scores with its visual flexibility. You build pipelines, fields, and workflows exactly the way your team works. That is powerful when your processes deviate from the standard, or when you want to map sales, onboarding, and projects in the same tool. The trade-off: you have to design the structure yourself, or the system quickly becomes cluttered.
HubSpot gives you more structure out of the box. Contacts, deals, tasks, and reports are already sensibly designed. That speeds up your start but leaves you less freedom to rebuild everything in detail. If you want a clear, proven sales logic, you will feel at home quickly.
Features Compared
The core features overlap heavily, but each tool weighs them differently.
- Pipelines and deals: Both offer visual pipelines. monday is more flexible to set up, while HubSpot is stronger at connecting with marketing data.
- Automation: monday relies on simple if-then rules right inside the board. HubSpot offers deeper workflows that link marketing, sales, and service.
- Marketing: Here HubSpot clearly leads. Email marketing, landing pages, forms, and lead nurturing are tightly integrated. monday CRM is much leaner in this area.
- Reporting: Both provide dashboards. HubSpot offers more ready-made sales and marketing reports, while monday shines with freely buildable overviews.
- Integrated communication: Phone, WhatsApp, and SMS are not a native core building block in either tool and usually run through add-ons or integrations.
Pricing and Scaling
Both systems start cheap or free and become noticeably more expensive with more features and users.
- monday CRM charges per user and tier. Higher plans unlock automations, integrations, and advanced reporting. If you connect your whole team, calculate the per-seat cost carefully.
- HubSpot lures you in with a generous free entry point. Serious sales and marketing features, however, sit in higher hubs and tiers, and costs scale strongly with the number of contacts.
In both cases the rule is the same: check exactly which features you actually use, or you will pay for unused modules.
When monday CRM, When HubSpot?
- monday CRM fits when you want maximum flexibility, run sales and projects in the same tool, and want to design your processes yourself.
- HubSpot fits when marketing and sales should work hand in hand, you want a proven sales logic, and inbound is central to your strategy.
So there is no universal "better." The right choice depends on team size, your processes, and the role of marketing.
AM CRM as an Alternative
Both platforms can do a lot, but for pure sales teams they are often too broad or too marketing-heavy. This is exactly where AM CRM comes in. It is an all-in-one sales CRM where everything is included in every plan: contacts with a 360-degree history, visual drag-and-drop pipelines, integrated telephony (one-click calling, auto-dialer, recording, call logs), WhatsApp, SMS, and email in two-way mode, automations through a visual flow builder, appointment booking, and AI features such as call summaries.
Instead of licensing modules one by one, you get a focused tool for everyday sales, fast to launch, transparently priced from 12 €/month (40% off annually), and built with GDPR in mind in Europe. Especially for teams that call a lot and work over WhatsApp, this is often the leaner choice.
Want to compare all three worlds? Try AM CRM free for 14 days and see for yourself how much simpler sales can be.