Plainsend vs HubSpot Marketing Hub
HubSpot is a good all-in-one: CRM, marketing, sales and service in one login. If you want all of that from one vendor, it's hard to beat. This page is for teams who want email journeys and consent without paying per contact tier and seat, or who want their agents to build marketing as code.
Read on 2026-10-12. Check the sources for today's prices.
Where HubSpot is strong
- One product for everything. CRM, forms, landing pages, blog, ads, social, chat and reporting together.
- Easy to start. A polished editor, a large template marketplace and lots of training (HubSpot Academy).
- An MCP server. HubSpot's remote MCP server went GA on 2026-04-13, with write access to CRM records (HubSpot changelog).
Where Plainsend is different
| HubSpot Marketing Hub Professional | Plainsend | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | About $890 a month with 3 seats and 2,000 contacts, plus about $3,000 onboarding | Starter $29, Growth $149 a month; no seats, no onboarding fee |
| What grows the bill | Marketing contact tiers and seats | Contacts and emails |
| Contract | Renews for the same term (up to a year); no downgrades during a term | Monthly on Starter and Growth; Solo yearly |
| Journeys | Workflows on Professional and above | Journeys on every plan, including the $1 Solo plan |
| Automated emails by API | Not available: workflow emails can't be created through HubSpot's API | Every template, journey and send is an API call, a CLI command and an MCP tool |
| Approvals | Enterprise | Every plan: what an agent wants to put live waits for an owner's approval, part by part |
| Duplicates | Merge (not reversible) | Records linked into one person automatically; one email per person per send |
Keep HubSpot as your CRM
You don't have to leave HubSpot to use Plainsend. The HubSpot connector reads contacts, companies and deals, takes consent per subscription type, and writes unsubscribes back to HubSpot, so the two systems agree.
What Plainsend doesn't do
- No CRM, sales pipeline, chat, blog, landing pages, ads or social publishing.
- No hosted forms yet (coming). Today, forms post to your own site or app, which sends the contact to Plainsend's API or a signed webhook.
- No drag-and-drop page builder; the email builder is MJML-based, and HTML import works.
- No SMS yet (coming).
- A small company. You'll be talking to the people who build it.
Sources
- HubSpot Marketing Hub Professional: about $890 a month with 3 seats and 2,000 contacts, plus about $3,000 onboarding. The list price moved between $800 and $890 during 2026 (third-party tracking, pricingsaas.com); today's price is at hubspot.com/pricing.
- Renewal and downgrade terms: HubSpot Customer Terms of Service (updated 2026-09-16).
- API limits on automated emails: found building a HubSpot integration in 2026 (we could not create AUTOMATED emails or set the email footer through the API).