CRM migrations get quoted as a licence comparison: take the seat rate you pay now, find the seat rate you would pay next, multiply by headcount. That arithmetic is correct and it is also incomplete, because a migration is a period of time during which two subscriptions exist at once. The second subscription is not a rounding error — at twenty-five seats on the tiers that most growing teams actually use, it is a five-figure line.
This page prices the switch from the vendors' own pages and nothing else. Every rate below is a rate those vendors print themselves, on the pricing page, in the billing cycle named next to it. What follows is what it costs to change CRM, separated into the three places the money goes.
| Bill | What it is | Range at 25 seats |
|---|---|---|
| 1. The new licence | Twelve months of the target vendor's seats, on its published annual rate | $2,700 – $45,000 |
| 2. Onboarding | One-time implementation the vendor marks required, which is where migration usually sits | $0 – $3,500 |
| 3. The old subscription tail | Months the old plan keeps billing while the new system is being populated and tested | $1,150 – $4,500 for two months |
Four vendors publish per-seat CRM rates for a comparable second tier: Pipedrive, Freshsales, Zoho CRM and HubSpot Sales Hub. Two of them print one billing cycle on the card, one prints two, and one prints two with a commitment attached. All four can be bought for twenty-five people; the difference is what twenty-five people cost.
| Vendor & tier | Per seat / month | 25 seats / month | 25 seats / year |
|---|---|---|---|
| Freshsales Growth $9 | $9 | $225 | $2,700 |
| Zoho CRM Standard $14 | $14 | $350 | $4,200 |
| Pipedrive Lite $14 | $14 | $350 | $4,200 |
| Zoho CRM Professional $23 | $23 | $575 | $6,900 |
| Pipedrive Growth $39 | $39 | $975 | $11,700 |
| Freshsales Pro $39 | $39 | $975 | $11,700 |
| Zoho CRM Enterprise $40 | $40 | $1,000 | $12,000 |
| Pipedrive Premium $59 | $59 | $1,475 | $17,700 |
| Freshsales Enterprise $59 | $59 | $1,475 | $17,700 |
| Pipedrive Ultimate $79 | $79 | $1,975 | $23,700 |
| HubSpot Sales Hub Professional $90 | $90 | $2,250 | $27,000 |
| HubSpot Sales Hub Enterprise $150 | $150 | $3,750 | $45,000 |
Annual-billing rates, checked October 2026 on pipedrive.com/en/pricing, freshworks.com/crm/pricing, zoho.com (CRM edition) and hubspot.com/pricing/sales. Pipedrive and Zoho CRM print a per-seat annual rate on the card; Pipedrive publishes no monthly position at all. Pipedrive's page did not return a readable copy on the day of this check, so its four rates are carried from the most recent successful read in October 2026 rather than from the same morning as the others. HubSpot Sales Hub prints $90 against $100 on Professional and $150 alone on Enterprise. The promotional HubSpot Starter rate of $7 with $20 struck through is not in this table because it sits a tier below the ones a migrating team usually lands on. Tax excluded, read in USD.
Nothing in a migration is instant. Records have to be exported, mapped, imported and checked; automations have to be rebuilt; the team has to be trained on the new interface while the old one still holds the history. During that period both vendors bill, and the size of the bill is simply the sum of the two seat rates multiplied by the headcount and the number of months.
That makes the overlap the most controllable line in a switch, and also the one nobody quotes. None of the four vendors publishes a recommended migration window, so the table below prices three lengths against three real pairings rather than asserting a number.
| Old plan → new plan (25 seats) | Both bills, 1 month | 2 months | 3 months |
|---|---|---|---|
| Freshsales Pro $39 → Zoho CRM Professional $23 | $1,550 | $3,100 | $4,650 |
| Zoho CRM Professional $23 → HubSpot Sales Hub Professional $90 | $2,825 | $5,650 | $8,475 |
| Pipedrive Premium $59 → HubSpot Sales Hub Professional $90 | $3,725 | $7,450 | $11,175 |
Read the top and bottom rows together and the planning rule falls out: the cost of overlap time is the sum of the two seat rates, so overlap is cheapest when you are moving to a lower seat rate. A team leaving a $59 seat for a $23 seat buys two months of parallel running for $3,100; a team leaving a $39 seat for a $90 seat pays nearly double that, $5,650, for the same two months of the same twenty-five people.
The second row is the one that tends to surprise a budget review. $5,650 is 82% of an entire year of Zoho CRM Professional at twenty-five seats — a figure that exists only because the two subscriptions run at once, and one that would vanish entirely if the migration completed inside a month.
This is where the four vendors stop looking alike. One marks implementation as required and prices it; one names a self-serve migration route and prices nothing; two print no onboarding line at all.
| Vendor | What the pricing page says | Published cost |
|---|---|---|
| HubSpot Sales Hub | Professional and Enterprise cards carry a footnote that the cost shown "does not include the required, one-time Professional Onboarding for a fee of $1,500", and the same for Enterprise Onboarding at $3,500 | $1,500 / $3,500, marked required |
| Zoho CRM | Pricing page carries a switch prompt and a self-serve migration route; the highest edition is described as including migration assistance | none published |
| Pipedrive | No onboarding or migration line appears on the pricing page | none published |
| Freshsales | No onboarding or migration line appears on the pricing page | none published |
The asymmetry matters more than the amount. A required fee can be budgeted on day one, because the vendor has already told you what it is. An unpriced programme cannot: you find out what implementation costs when the statement of work arrives, and at that point the decision to move has already been taken. Teams leaving a vendor with an unpriced implementation for a vendor with a required one are trading an unknown for a known, which is usually the better trade — but only if the required line is in the plan.
Two neighbouring vendors that are not in the seat table above show the same pattern in a different product line. Wrike's pricing page answers its own onboarding question with a recommendation that reads as a requirement for larger accounts, and monday.com withdraws even its published seat rate above a headcount the FAQ names. Both are covered in the cross-vendor guide to the fees outside the seat rate.
Put the three bills together and the switch stops looking like a price comparison. In each row below the new licence is a full twelve months, the onboarding is the fee the new vendor marks required, and the old-plan tail is two months of the subscription you are leaving while the data is rebuilt.
| Moving from (25 seats) | To (25 seats) | New licence | Onboarding | Old tail | Year one |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Zoho CRM Professional | HubSpot Sales Hub Professional | $27,000 | $1,500 | $1,150 | $29,650 |
| Pipedrive Premium | HubSpot Sales Hub Professional | $27,000 | $1,500 | $2,950 | $31,450 |
| Zoho CRM Professional | HubSpot Sales Hub Enterprise | $45,000 | $3,500 | $1,150 | $49,650 |
| Pipedrive Premium | Freshsales Pro | $11,700 | — | $2,950 | $14,650 |
| HubSpot Sales Hub Professional | Zoho CRM Professional | $6,900 | — | $4,500 | $11,400 |
Compare the first row with the last. Both are twenty-five seats, both land on the middle tier of the vendor being joined, and both spend two months overlapping. One is $29,650 and the other is $11,400 — an $18,250 difference that comes from the direction of travel rather than from the difficulty of the work. The team moving into HubSpot pays a $90 seat rate and a $1,500 required fee; the team moving out of it pays a $23 seat rate and no published fee, and its larger overlap bill is the only line pushing the total up.
This is also why "the licence difference pays for the migration" is a weaker argument than it sounds. Between the two middle tiers the annual licence gap is $20,100 in favour of Zoho CRM at this seat count. Against a first-year total of $29,650 that gap is real, but it is not the whole story, because the same comparison run in the other direction produces a total of $11,400 — and neither figure includes the internal cost of rebuilding the automations that already work.
Seat count changes which migration is worth doing, so it is worth seeing the two most expensive ladders in this comparison at the sizes teams actually buy. Annual billing throughout, per seat per month.
| Seats | Zoho CRM Standard $14 | Zoho CRM Professional $23 | Zoho CRM Enterprise $40 | HubSpot Starter $7 | HubSpot Professional $90 | HubSpot Enterprise $150 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 5 | $840 | $1,380 | $2,400 | $420 | $5,400 | $9,000 |
| 15 | $2,520 | $4,140 | $7,200 | $1,260 | $16,200 | $27,000 |
| 50 | $8,400 | $13,800 | $24,000 | $4,200 | $54,000 | $90,000 |
Two things fall out of the table for anyone planning a switch. The first is that the entry tiers of the two vendors are close enough that the licence alone will rarely justify a migration: at fifteen seats the promotional HubSpot rate is $1,260 against Zoho CRM Standard at $2,520, a gap of $1,260 that two months of overlap on middle tiers would consume entirely. The second is that the second tiers diverge so far that the licence stops being the deciding factor in the opposite way: at fifty seats, HubSpot Professional is $54,000 against Zoho CRM's $13,800, and at that distance the migration budget stops being a rounding error against the saving.
Two of the four vendors address the exit directly on the page that sells the entry, and the two answers are not the same shape.
The practical reading is that the cost of leaving is set by the billing position you are standing in, not by the migration. A team on Zoho CRM's pay-as-you-go position can stop paying in the month it stops using the software, so its only switching cost is the overlap it chooses to buy. A team sitting inside a HubSpot annual commitment carries the rest of that commitment into the switch: at twenty-five seats on Professional, six months of unexpired commitment is $13,500, which is 90% of what the switch itself costs a similarly sized team moving the other way.
That is not an argument against either vendor. It is an argument for deciding the billing position with the same care as the tier, because a twelve-month commitment taken six months before a platform review is what turns a manageable migration into an expensive one. Our guide to which CRM vendors still publish a monthly rate covers the same choice from the rate side, and the pricing change tracker records what has moved and what has not across the platforms we follow.
Do not migrate to take a cheaper seat rate while your overlap window is unplanned. Two months of parallel running at twenty-five seats on middle tiers is $3,100 to $7,450, and the cheapest tier difference in the table above is $1,260 a year at fifteen seats. A migration that drags into a third month can consume the entire first-year saving of a modest seat-rate move, and overlap length is the line most teams leave blank in the plan.
Do not migrate out of an annual commitment mid-term and book the saving in the same year. HubSpot's cards print the monthly position and the annual-commit position side by side, and the annual one is a commitment. At twenty-five seats on Professional the unexpired half of that commitment is $13,500 — and it is spent whether or not the new platform is live, because the old one keeps billing for the term you signed. Time the switch to the renewal date and the same migration costs a different number.
Do not treat "free migration" as "no migration cost". A self-serve migration tool with no published fee removes the vendor's invoice, not your team's time. The same applies in the other direction to a required onboarding fee: $1,500 on a twenty-five seat Professional account is 5.6% of the first-year licence, which is a small number next to the staff hours a rebuild consumes, and buying it may be cheaper than not.
Do not switch on tier-two pricing if the tiers are not doing the same job. This page prices licences and fees from vendor pages. It does not price the value of what already integrates with the platform you are on, or the automations that would have to be rebuilt. The $18,250 spread between the two directions in the year-one table is a licence-and-fee fact; whether a particular switch is worth it depends on how much of your current stack is portable.
Every rate on this page comes from a vendor pricing page with the billing cycle named next to it, taken in October 2026. Our pricing methodology explains how the figures are collected and dated, and the same sources are re-checked on a schedule recorded in the pricing change tracker.
Three things, and only one is the new licence. First, the new vendor's seats for the year ahead: at twenty-five seats that runs from $2,700 a year on Freshsales Growth to $45,000 on HubSpot Sales Hub Enterprise, on published annual rates. Second, any onboarding the new vendor marks required: $1,500 on HubSpot Sales Hub Professional and $3,500 on Enterprise, both one-time. Third, the months your old subscription keeps running while the new system is populated, which at twenty-five seats on middle tiers is $1,550 to $3,725 for each month of overlap.
None of the vendors priced here publishes a recommended window, which is why it is the least budgeted line in a switch. Plan the arithmetic instead of a number: at twenty-five seats on middle tiers each month of parallel running costs $1,550 to $3,725 in duplicate licence fees, and two months costs $3,100 to $7,450. Because the cost is the sum of the two seat rates, the cheapest overlap is the one where the new rate is lower than the old one.
It depends on the billing position, not on the migration. Zoho CRM's pricing FAQ states that you are not bound by any contracts or commitments and calls the service pay-as-you-go monthly or yearly, which means there is no unexpired term to write off. HubSpot's Sales Hub page prints $90 a seat for committing annually against $100 month to month, and the annual position is a commitment: at twenty-five seats on Professional, six months left on it is $13,500 that no migration plan recovers.
At twenty-five seats on the second tiers, moving into HubSpot Sales Hub Professional totals $29,650 in year one — $27,000 of licence, $1,500 of required onboarding and $1,150 for two months of the Zoho CRM Professional subscription still billing. Moving out of HubSpot Professional into Zoho CRM Professional totals $11,400 — $6,900 of licence, no published migration fee and $4,500 for two months of the HubSpot subscription still billing. The $18,250 gap is licence and fee, not migration difficulty.
Only one of the four publishes a number, and it is bundled with onboarding rather than sold as migration: HubSpot's Sales Hub page marks Professional Onboarding at $1,500 and Enterprise Onboarding at $3,500 as required one-time fees. Zoho CRM's pricing page advertises a self-serve switch with no published fee and describes its highest edition as including migration assistance, also unpriced. Pipedrive and Freshsales print no onboarding or migration line on their pricing pages.