HubSpot vs Efficy CRM: a full comparison and which to choose

HubSpot or Efficy? If you need a CRM closely tailored to a specific industry, with project or timesheet modules and a clear preference for a European vendor, Efficy is a serious option. If you are looking for a platform your team will adopt in days, with marketing, sales, service and content on a single CRM, ready-to-use AI and a huge ecosystem, HubSpot is the better choice for most growing companies.

At Vexco we are a HubSpot Diamond Solutions Partner, so we have a side. That is exactly why we want to be fair to Efficy, which has clear strengths. We compare them criterion by criterion, without price figures (they change often) and with what we see in real projects.

What are Efficy and HubSpot?

Efficy is a CRM vendor headquartered in Brussels that has expanded across Europe with its own product and by acquiring other CRMs, such as E-Deal in France, SumaCRM in Spain, webCRM in Denmark and PerfectView in the Netherlands. Its main product, Efficy CRM, covers sales, marketing, customer service and project management, with a high degree of customisation and solutions for sectors such as the public sector, healthcare, manufacturing, professional services and insurance.

HubSpot is a customer platform built on a single CRM, Smart CRM, with products you switch on as you need them: Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, Service Hub, Content Hub, Data Hub and Revenue Hub, plus Breeze as the AI layer with an assistant and agents. Its typical customer is a growing company that wants all its teams working from the same customer data.

HubSpotEfficy

ApproachUnified, ready-to-use platformHighly customisable industry CRM

MarketingVery complete Marketing HubEmail, SMS, events and segmentation

Customer serviceService HubService module with portal

Projects and timesheetsVia apps or custom buildBuilt-in modules

AIBreeze, assistant and agentsAsk efficy and agents

App ecosystemVery broadSmaller

Learning curveLowMedium

Vendor originUnited States with EU data hostingEuropean

CRM and data model

Efficy’s data model is very flexible: you can adapt entities, fields, screens and documents to each industry using its own configuration tools. That is one of the reasons it has a presence in public administrations and organisations with specific processes.

HubSpot works with standard objects (contacts, companies, deals, tickets, products, quotes) and, on Enterprise editions, custom objects. For most business models this is enough and, above all, easy to maintain: a functional admin can create properties, pipelines and associations without development. When you need custom logic, UI Extensions and private apps add it inside the record itself.

Which is better for the sales team?

Efficy offers opportunity management, quotes from a product catalogue, document templates, sales route planning, gamification to motivate the team and a mobile app. It is a complete proposition, especially for field sales teams.

Sales Hub is designed so reps sell more and log less: visual pipelines, follow-up sequences, meeting links, templates, calling, quotes, forecasting, playbooks and a prospecting workspace, with the Gmail or Outlook extension logging activity automatically. Breeze adds summaries, meeting preparation and help with prospecting. The practical difference shows in adoption: reps see value from the first week.

Marketing: can Efficy match Marketing Hub?

Efficy includes email and SMS marketing, events, forms, landing pages, dynamic segmentation and automated campaigns based on contact behaviour. It handles communications with the customer base and event management well.

Marketing Hub goes further in digital demand generation: forms and landing pages, email, automation on any object, ads, social media, SEO, chat, lead scoring and revenue attribution by channel, with website and blog on Content Hub. Everything sits on the same contact that sales then works, so you can measure which campaigns generate business and not just clicks. If your growth depends on your website and content, this is where the difference is clearest.

Customer service

Efficy’s service module offers multichannel ticketing, SLA tracking, a self-service portal, a knowledge base and KPIs, with AI to classify requests and detect the sentiment of messages. It is one of its strongest areas.

Service Hub covers the same ground and connects it to everything else: a shared inbox with email, chat, WhatsApp and forms, tickets, SLAs, a knowledge base, a customer portal, surveys and customer success. Breeze’s customer agent can resolve conversations using your knowledge base content, and sales can see open issues before a renewal.

Automation and AI: Breeze versus Efficy’s AI

Efficy has invested in an AI layer with a European angle: a conversational assistant, Ask efficy, to query the CRM in natural language and suggest actions, industry agents, data enrichment and help writing emails. According to the vendor, its agent hub is hosted in France and uses a European open-source language model by default, which appeals to organisations most concerned about data sovereignty.

HubSpot builds AI into the whole product. Breeze Assistant writes, summarises and researches inside any record, and Breeze agents handle support conversations, analyse accounts and prepare prospecting. Workflows automate across contacts, companies, deals, tickets and custom objects, with branches, webhooks and, on higher editions, code. The advantage is that AI and automation work on a unified CRM, with the full context of marketing, sales and service.

• Marketing Hub
• Sales Hub
• Service Hub

Smart CRM

• Content Hub
• Data Hub
• Breeze

Reporting and analytics

Efficy offers configurable dashboards and KPIs, with export to spreadsheets and presentations. It works well for tracking activity in each module.

HubSpot gives you reports that combine marketing, sales and service on the same database, from first touch to revenue and renewal, with multi-touch attribution, forecasting and datasets on higher editions. For leadership, having the full funnel in one dashboard without exporting anything is a very tangible advantage.

Integrations and API

Efficy integrates with Microsoft 365 and Outlook, calendars, e-signature and email tools, and has an API and a network of integration partners. Even so, some user reviews mention that fewer integrations are available than with the most widely used CRMs.

HubSpot’s marketplace is one of the broadest on the market and its REST API is very well documented, with webhooks, private apps and serverless functions. Where there is no connector, Vexco builds custom integrations with ERPs, invoicing tools or payment gateways, with consultants and developers in the same 19-person team.

Which is easier to use and adopt?

Efficy is well rated for its interface and support service, but reviews also point to a noticeable learning curve due to the number of options, and some users admit they only use part of the product. Customisation is a strength that also calls for good judgement so as not to overcomplicate the experience.

HubSpot is known for its ease of use: reps log activity from the first week and admins adjust properties, pipelines or workflows without depending on a developer. The free HubSpot Academy speeds up role-based training.

Implementation and total cost of ownership

Efficy is licensed per user, with plans geared towards sales, customer service, the full platform or custom projects, and some plans may have a minimum number of users. HubSpot offers free tools and hubs in Starter, Professional and Enterprise editions, with per-seat licences and, for marketing, pricing based on the number of contacts. See Efficy pricing and HubSpot pricing on their official pages.

Beyond the licence, factor in implementation time, the effort of maintaining customisations, the tools you would need separately and how easy it is to find people who know the platform. With our method, a Sales or Marketing Hub project is usually up and running in 4 to 8 weeks, and complex projects in 10 to 14.

Support, community and partners

Efficy has well-rated in-house support, training and a partner network concentrated in the countries where it operates. HubSpot adds a huge global community, HubSpot Academy, support included in paid editions and a very wide partner network across Europe, giving you more choice over who works with you.

Security, GDPR and EU hosting

Efficy makes its European origin a central argument: data hosted in Europe, GDPR compliance and AI hosted in France. For public bodies or organisations with data sovereignty policies, this can be decisive.

HubSpot lets you host your account data in its EU data centre in Germany, offers a data processing agreement, consent and lawful-basis management, SSO, team permissions and, depending on the edition, audit logs. For most private European companies, it meets GDPR requirements without difficulty.

HubSpot vs Efficy comparison table

When could Efficy make sense?

• You are a public administration or an organisation with sovereignty requirements that call for a vendor of European origin.
• You need project management, timesheets or sales route planning inside the CRM itself and do not want to integrate another tool.
• Your industry has very specific processes and Efficy already offers a vertical solution that fits.
• You already use Efficy, the team makes good use of it and digital marketing is not your main growth channel.

If these points ring true, Efficy deserves a serious evaluation. If you are also comparing other European CRMs for SMEs, you may find HubSpot vs Teamleader and HubSpot vs Sellsy useful.

Verdict: why HubSpot wins

1. One platform, one source of truth. Marketing, sales, service and content on the same customer record, with full-funnel reporting.
2. Fast adoption. A simple, consistent interface; the team works in the CRM within days, not months.
3. Benchmark marketing. Native demand generation, automation and attribution that go beyond communications to the existing customer base.
4. Ecosystem. More integrations, more partners and more trained professionals across Europe.
5. AI applied to unified data. Breeze works with the full customer context from day one.
6. More predictable total cost. Less customisation to maintain and fewer add-on tools with a phased HubSpot implementation.

How to migrate from Efficy to HubSpot

Migrating from Efficy means translating a heavily customised model into HubSpot’s structure and simplifying along the way. The data moves across well; the work lies in deciding what stays and how it is represented.

1. 01Inventory of modules and entities
2. 02Clean-up and deduplication
3. 03Mapping to objects and properties
4. 04Test load and validation
5. 05Cutover and adoption

1. Objects. Companies and contacts move to their equivalents; opportunities become deals; tickets stay tickets; products and quotes become HubSpot products and quotes.
2. Custom entities. Projects, contracts or case files become custom objects if they have a life of their own, or properties if they are simple.
3. History and documents. Activities, emails, notes and attachments are loaded against each record with their original dates.
4. Marketing. Lists, segments and consents are migrated with their lawful basis; active campaigns are rebuilt in Marketing Hub.
5. Processes and integrations. They are redesigned as pipelines and workflows, and each integration is replaced by a connector or custom development.
6. Cutover. Data freeze, final load and validation with key users.

Common pitfalls: copying every customisation without questioning it, losing marketing consents and forgetting the project or timesheet modules another department relied on. At Vexco we have carried out migrations to HubSpot from Salesforce, Odoo and Clientify; if you want to do it methodically, take a look at our HubSpot migration service.

• Breeze
• Comparison
• Efficy
• GDPR