CRM

HubSpot, Pipedrive or Zoho CRM: free plans, seat prices, limits and where the data is kept

HubSpot and Zoho CRM have free plans; Pipedrive sells four paid ones. All three charge per seat or user when you pay, and all three have data centres in the EU. They differ in what they count, what the free plans leave out, and how the data processing terms are agreed.

By Oscar CobbeCurrent as at 30 October 20268 minute read17 sources

What each costs

HubSpot and Zoho CRM have free plans. Pipedrive has four paid plans, each with its own price per seat, and a trial. The figures below are as each vendor's pages showed them in October 2026.

	HubSpot	Pipedrive	Zoho CRM
Free plan	Yes, for up to 2 users	No: a trial, then a paid plan	Yes, for up to 3 users
Paid plans	Starter, then Professional and Enterprise	Lite, Growth, Premium, Ultimate	Standard, Professional, Enterprise, Ultimate
Entry paid plan	Starter: €20 a seat a month at list price; in October 2026, new customers were offered €7 a seat a month paid yearly upfront, or €10 month to month, for a limited time	Not quoted: the pricing page could not be read	Standard: US$14 a user a month billed yearly, US$20 billed monthly
How you pay	Monthly or yearly; prices in euro, subject to any tax that applies	Monthly, or yearly upfront at a discount, in a currency set by your location	Monthly or yearly; Zoho's page showed US dollars, and says local taxes may apply

What the prices count

HubSpot and Zoho charge for each user's seat. Pipedrive charges for every seat on the account, including any not assigned to a user. HubSpot's page offers a choice of currency, so its euro prices are quoted. Zoho's page showed US dollars, so its prices are in dollars here. Pipedrive's pricing page did not open for this article in October 2026, so no Pipedrive price is given.

What the free plans keep

Two of the three can be used at no charge, with limits that differ in kind:

1HubSpot free: up to 2 users and 1,000 contacts, with a limit of 1,000 records across its other standard record types, and no time limit. It has the default pipeline and no custom pipelines. It connects to Gmail and to many versions of Outlook, and sends up to 2,000 marketing emails a calendar month, with HubSpot branding on them.
2Zoho CRM free: up to 3 users and 5,000 records (10 MB of data), the default pipeline only, 10 email templates, and 50 emails per user a day, no more than 150 for the whole organisation. Connecting a mailbox, by IMAP, POP3, the Gmail API or the Microsoft Graph API, and mass email both start on Standard.
3Pipedrive: no free plan. A trial lets you use it without billing details; if none are added, access is restricted when the trial ends and the trial account and its data are deleted shortly after.

Contacts, deals and pipelines on the paid plans

Each one limits something different, and the limit that matters is the one you would reach first.

1HubSpot Starter: 15 custom pipelines on top of the default one, shared across all record types, and 1,000 marketing contacts included.
2Pipedrive: no limit on contacts. Leads and deals together are capped for the company: 2,500 per seat on Lite, 5,000 on Growth, 15,000 on Premium and 20,000 on Ultimate, and never more than 300,000. Automations: none on Lite, 50 on Growth, 150 on Premium, 250 on Ultimate.
3Zoho CRM: Standard stores 100,000 records (200 MB) and allows 5 pipelines; Professional stores 10 GB, which Zoho puts at about 5 million records, and allows 10; Enterprise allows 20.

Email from the CRM

HubSpot connects a Gmail or Outlook inbox for one-to-one email, on the free plan and on Starter; on the free plan those emails carry HubSpot branding, and Starter removes it. Marketing email is capped at 2,000 sends a calendar month on the free plan and at five times your marketing contact tier on Starter.

Pipedrive syncs email from Growth upwards: one account per user on Growth; three on Premium and five on Ultimate, which can include a shared team inbox. Lite has no email sync. Campaigns, Pipedrive's tool for email campaigns, is a paid add-on on all four plans.

Zoho CRM's Standard plan and those above it connect a mailbox and let each user send 300 individual emails a day. Mass email is capped for the organisation: 250 a day on Standard, 500 on Professional and 1,000 on Enterprise. Zoho says that limit is for sales activity and points to Zoho Campaigns for marketing campaigns.

Whichever CRM sends it, a marketing email to a customer or a prospect is subject to the same rules on consent and the soft opt-in: the Irish rules for marketing email.

Where the data is kept

All three have data centres in the EU. Where an account lands depends on how it signs up:

1HubSpot hosts on Amazon Web Services in the United States, Canada, Australia and the EU (Germany), and stores and processes an account's data in the data centre it is assigned. A subscription bought on HubSpot's website is assigned from the location of the IP address at sign-up. A paid account can move to another data centre; a free one has to upgrade first. HubSpot lists cases where data is processed outside that location, including its sub-processors and HubSpot, Inc. in the United States.
2Pipedrive hosts on Amazon Web Services in Frankfurt and Dublin for the EU, and in London, the United States, Canada and Sydney. New sign-ups from the EU are hosted primarily in the EU, but Pipedrive says an account can land in a different data centre because of how IP addresses are mapped, and to ask its support team to know exactly where a company's data is. Its backups are made through Amazon Web Services, which Pipedrive describes as storing data around the globe.
3Zoho's European data centres are in Amsterdam (primary) and Dublin (secondary). The data centre follows the country chosen when signing up, which is filled in by default from the IP address.

The data processing terms

With all three, your business decides what goes into the CRM and why, which makes it the controller, and the CRM is its processor. Controller or processor explains the two roles, and what a data processing agreement must contain is the list to check each vendor's terms against.

1HubSpot: the data processing agreement is part of its Customer Terms of Service, so it applies once you accept those terms. Data may go to HubSpot, Inc. in the United States, under the EU-US Data Privacy Framework and the EU's standard contractual clauses. HubSpot will tell you of a personal data breach without undue delay and no later than 72 hours after it becomes aware of it. For its enrichment products, and its tracking code with intent data sharing on, HubSpot is a controller in its own right.
2Pipedrive: the data processing addendum forms part of its Terms of Service and takes effect when you accept them. A business in the EU contracts with Pipedrive OÜ, in Tallinn, Estonia. Pipedrive, Inc. in the United States receives personal data, under the standard contractual clauses, and is registered under the Data Privacy Framework. Pipedrive will report a breach without undue delay, with a target of no more than 72 business hours, and gives 10 calendar days to object to a new sub-processor.
3Zoho: its privacy policy offers a data processing addendum on request: you fill in a form and Zoho sends one for signature. Zoho says transfers within its group, to the United States, the EEA and other countries where it operates, are covered by agreements such as a group company agreement based on the EU's model contractual clauses.

Which suits which business

From what each vendor documents:

1Up to two users and up to 1,000 contacts: HubSpot's free plan, with one pipeline and branded emails.
2Three users, or up to 5,000 records, with no mailbox connected: Zoho CRM's free edition.
3A sales team working deals through a pipeline, with a large contact list: Pipedrive, which sets no limit on contacts and caps leads and deals per seat, from Growth if each person's email has to sync.
4Prices in euro: HubSpot's page offers them; Zoho's showed dollars.
5A data centre in Ireland: Zoho's secondary European data centre and one of Pipedrive's two EU regions are in Dublin; HubSpot's EU data centre is in Germany.
6A data processing agreement in place from the first day: HubSpot's and Pipedrive's are part of their terms; Zoho's has to be requested and signed.

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Who wrote this

Oscar Cobbe · Founder, FourWinds Digital

Writes and maintains the legal explainers on this site, and does the compliance work behind them. Every date and article number here is checked against the legislation itself before it is published, and each article shows the date it was last checked.

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