HubSpot, Pipedrive or Zoho for a small service business.

The short answer

All three keep contacts, deals, tasks and emails in one place, with a mobile app. They differ in what they make easy and what they charge for:

• Pipedrive suits a firm whose work moves through stages, such as enquiry, call, proposal and signed. Its screen is the pipeline, and every deal shows its next activity. There is no free plan.
• HubSpot suits a firm that also wants forms, live chat and email marketing in the same place, and may grow into its paid marketing and service tools. Its free tools are generous for two users.
• Zoho CRM suits a firm that wants the most on a free plan for up to three users, and does not mind more settings to work through.

Our view: for one to three people who mainly need every enquiry followed up, try Pipedrive and Zoho first, because they make the daily follow-up screen simple. Choose HubSpot when the website, forms and email marketing matter as much as the pipeline.

If you are not sure you need a CRM at all, start with spreadsheet or CRM. If you run vans and jobs rather than an office, job software such as Jobber usually fits better: see Jobber, Housecall Pro or ServiceTitan.

How each one charges

All three charge per person, so count everyone who will add or change records, including part-time help:

• HubSpot's free tools cover up to two users. Paid Sales Hub plans, Starter, Professional and Enterprise, are priced per seat, and Professional and Enterprise each carry a required one-time onboarding fee. View-only seats cost nothing, and paid plans include a monthly allowance of HubSpot Credits for its AI features, with more available to buy.
• Pipedrive has four plans, Lite, Growth, Premium and Ultimate, priced per seat per month and cheaper when billed annually. There is a 14-day free trial and no free plan. Add-ons such as LeadBooster, Campaigns and Projects cost extra, and its European prices exclude VAT.
• Zoho CRM's free edition covers three users. Its paid editions, Standard, Professional, Enterprise and Ultimate, are priced per user per month, billed monthly or annually, and it also sells team user licences for people outside sales who need only part of the system.

Work it through for three people: an owner who sells, an account manager and a part-time administrator. On HubSpot, the free tools cover two, and the administrator could take a free view-only seat if they only read records. On Pipedrive, you pay three seats on the plan whose features you need. On Zoho, all three fit the free edition until you need its paid features, such as email integration or forms.

Price the plan for a year at the number of people you expect next year, and add the add-ons you will really use.

What the free plans leave out

HubSpot's free tools, for up to two users, include the CRM, a form builder, live chat, a chatbot builder with limited features, one-to-one email and a meeting booking link. HubSpot's branding stays on email, chat and the meeting link, and the free tools allow only a handful of email templates and snippets. Workflows start on Starter, with restricted triggers and actions, and sequences of follow-up emails start on Professional.

Zoho CRM's free edition, for three users, includes contact management, follow-up reminders, workflow automation, up to ten custom email templates, tasks, meetings and calls, standard reports, mobile apps and access to its API with a daily limit. It leaves out email integration, built-in calling, calendar integration, web forms and its automated follow-up sequences, which start on Standard. Zoho also limits free exports, which matters when you leave.

Pipedrive has no free plan. Its 14-day trial gives full access, so use it on real enquiries, not demo data.

Follow-ups: reminders and sequences

What a small firm needs first is simple: every open enquiry has an owner, a next step and a date, and the CRM reminds the owner when that date arrives. All three do that. The difference is in what happens automatically after it:

• Pipedrive's Lite plan covers the pipeline, the calendar and activities on each deal. Growth adds automations and sequences of personalised emails and follow-ups, full email sync and a meeting scheduler.
• HubSpot's free tools and Starter cover tasks and reminders, and Starter adds limited workflows. Automated sequences start on Professional, with a daily limit on sends per user.
• Zoho CRM's free edition includes follow-up reminders and workflow automation. Standard adds cadences, Zoho's automated follow-up sequences across email and other channels.

Do not buy sequences before you need them. Two follow-ups written by a person, at the right time, beat a five-step sequence nobody reads. How to follow up on a quote has wording to copy, and enquiry follow-up covers enquiries that nobody answered.

Website forms and chat

Enquiries should land in the CRM without anyone copying them from an email:

• HubSpot's free form builder, live chat and chatbot builder all feed its CRM, with HubSpot branding on the free tools.
• Pipedrive's LeadBooster bundles a chatbot, live chat, web forms and Prospector, a lead database. It is an add-on to any plan, priced per company rather than per seat, and it is included in Premium.
• Zoho CRM's Standard edition adds data capture through built-in forms.

You can also keep the form on your own website and send each enquiry into the CRM through its API or an automation platform. HubSpot lists more than two thousand app integrations and Pipedrive more than five hundred, including Zapier, and Zoho's free edition includes API access with a daily limit. Zapier, Make or n8n compares the platforms.

A chatbot that asks the first questions and creates the enquiry in your CRM, where its API allows, is what our lead capture chatbot does. We check what your CRM and your plan allow before promising the connection, and if it fails, the enquiry reaches an inbox with an alert.

Email, calendar and calls

In a service firm, most of the selling happens in email and on calls, so check how each one handles them:

• Pipedrive syncs Gmail, Outlook or your company email fully from Growth, with open and click tracking and bulk email. Premium adds several email accounts at once and shared team inboxes.
• HubSpot's free tools include one-to-one email and a meeting link, with HubSpot branding, and paid plans remove the branding and add calling minutes and phone numbers in some countries.
• Zoho CRM's Standard edition integrates Gmail, Outlook and Zoho Mail, adds calendar integration and built-in calling, and supports several sales pipelines.

Connect each person's own mailbox, not a shared login, so emails land on the right record with the right owner. And agree what does not go in the CRM, such as personal emails and HR matters.

One practice, set up in each

Take a three-person accountancy practice that wins new clients through its website and referrals. Its stages are enquiry, discovery call, proposal sent, engagement letter signed and onboarding, with a lost stage that asks for a reason.

In Pipedrive, those are the columns of one pipeline. Each enquiry from the website form becomes a deal with the person attached, the partner who takes the call owns it, and Growth sends one follow-up if a proposal has had no answer after the days the practice chooses.

In HubSpot, the same stages sit in a deal pipeline, the website form and chat create the contact, and the partner sets a task for each next step. Automated follow-up sequences would need Professional.

In Zoho CRM, the free edition holds the pipeline, the reminders and a workflow that assigns new enquiries to the right partner. Standard adds web forms on the site and a cadence for proposals with no reply.

All three work for this practice. The deciding question is which screen the partners will open every morning.

AI features, and when they matter

All three now sell AI features. HubSpot runs its agents and AI features on HubSpot Credits, with a monthly allowance included in paid plans. Pipedrive's Lite plan includes meeting intelligence that prepares a brief before a meeting, transcribes calls and suggests updates to the record for you to approve. Zoho lists AI agents from Standard and its Zia assistant, with predictions and recommendations, on Enterprise.

Treat these as extras to try once the basics run. A record update you approve after a call can save real typing. A prediction about which deal will close means little in a firm with twenty open deals, where the partner already knows. Choose the CRM for the daily follow-up screen, the forms and the export, and let the AI features earn their place later.

How hard it is to leave

Find out before you sign, because the CRM will hold years of your client history:

• HubSpot lets users with export permission download records, such as contacts and deals, with their property values and associations. Activities such as calls and notes are exported separately.
• Zoho CRM's free edition allows a limited number of free exports, so plan when you use them.
• For Pipedrive, run an export during the trial and open the file.

Whichever you choose, export a test file in the first week and check it holds notes, emails and activities as well as names. Keep an export each month on your own storage. And put the account in the business's name with two admins, so the client history stays with the firm when someone leaves.

Client data, in Europe and elsewhere

A CRM gathers your clients' details in one supplier's system, so check three things before you import anyone. Where the data is stored. Whether the vendor offers a data processing agreement, which the GDPR requires with any supplier that processes personal data for you in Europe. And who at your firm can see which records.

Keep sensitive client matters, such as tax disputes, health details or anything under professional confidentiality, out of free-text notes in a sales tool unless you have agreed that with whoever advises you on data protection. A CRM is for the relationship. The client file belongs in your practice or case software.

Mistakes small teams make with these three

• Buying HubSpot Professional for sequences before the team uses the CRM every day, and forgetting the onboarding fee in the budget.
• Leaving HubSpot's free branding on client emails and the meeting link when the firm sells on its own polish.
• Turning on every Zoho module and field on day one, so nobody can find the deal screen.
• Paying for Pipedrive's LeadBooster when the website already has a form that could send enquiries in through the API.
• Using the free Zoho exports up early, and having none left when you need a full copy.
• Running the account on one person's login, so the client history leaves with them.

Each of these is cheap to avoid in the first week and expensive to unpick after a year.

How to choose

• Write down your stages, in your own words, before you open any trial.
• Import twenty real enquiries from your spreadsheet or inbox into two of the three.
• Connect your own mailbox and send and receive a few real emails from the CRM.
• Send a test enquiry from your website form and see where it lands.
• Set a follow-up date on a deal, ignore it, and see how the reminder reaches you.
• Export everything and open the file.
• Price the plan you would really need, for a year, at next year's headcount.

Pick the one your team opens without being asked. A CRM nobody updates is a spreadsheet that costs more. When it is running, connecting the website form, the chatbot and your reminders is where automation saves the typing.