HubSpot vs Keap: which CRM to choose if your business wants to grow

If you run a small service business and want to automate follow-up, bookings, quotes and payments in a single tool, Keap does the job well. If your company wants to grow with a sales team, marketing that generates demand and structured customer service, HubSpot is the better bet: easier to adopt, far more complete and built to scale without switching CRM.

What Keap is and what HubSpot is

Keap is the former Infusionsoft, a company founded in Arizona in the early 2000s that became popular with entrepreneurs, coaches and service businesses for its marketing automation. In 2024 it was acquired by Thryv, a US software company for small businesses, and Keap now presents itself as a Thryv brand. Its pitch is a single platform with CRM, email, funnels, bookings, quotes, invoices and payments.

HubSpot is a customer platform built on a shared CRM, Smart CRM, with Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, Service Hub, Content Hub, Data Hub and Revenue Hub (formerly Commerce Hub), and Breeze as the AI layer. It is used by everyone from SMEs starting with the free tools to companies with hundreds of users and complex processes.

The essential difference: Keap is designed so that one person or a very small team can automate their business. HubSpot is designed so that several teams can work together on the same data, and so that this keeps working when the company doubles in size.

HubSpotKeap

Typical customerSMEs and growing companiesMicro-businesses and services

CRMObjects, associations and permissionsContacts, companies and pipeline

MarketingFull Marketing HubEmail, funnels and landing pages

Customer serviceService Hub with ticketsNo native help desk

PaymentsRevenue Hub and StripeKeap Pay in the US and others

AIBreeze with agentsContent and automation assistants

OnboardingIn phases, at your paceMandatory implementation

EcosystemGlobal marketplace and partnersSmaller

What kind of business is Keap for?

Keap shines in businesses where one or a few people do everything: capture a lead with a form, send a sequence, book a call, send a quote, take payment and ask for a review. All of that can be automated with templates and a visual builder, without connecting five different tools.

That same focus defines its limits. Keap is heavily centred on the US market: its own payment processor works in the United States, a good part of its texting features are limited to the US or North America, and phone support is based there. For a European company, that means more integrations and more compliance questions.

CRM and data model

Keap’s CRM offers contacts and companies, tags, custom fields, lists, lead scoring and a sales pipeline. It works well for segmenting and automating, but it revolves around the contact and its tags. Many accounts end up with hundreds of them, and understanding who each customer is gets harder over time.

HubSpot works with related objects: contacts, companies, deals, tickets, products, quotes and, in Enterprise, custom objects. Each association can carry labels and each record keeps its full history. If you sell to companies with several stakeholders, manage renewals or need to separate data by team, that model saves you a lot of workarounds.

Sales and payments

This is where Keap has a genuine strength: quotes, invoices, checkout forms, recurring payments, promo codes and payment reminders inside the same product. For a coach or a small consultancy selling standardised services, it is very convenient.

Sales Hub is built for sales teams: multiple pipelines, sequences, meetings, playbooks, forecasting, call logging and analysis, and the Breeze Prospecting Agent. With Revenue Hub you add quotes, payment links, invoices and subscriptions, with HubSpot Payments or Stripe as the processor depending on your country. At Vexco we have connected HubSpot to SEPA, Redsys and Stripe payments and to local invoicing software, so the payment flow is no obstacle to switching.

Marketing and automation

Automation is in Keap’s DNA. Its builder lets you set up campaigns with triggers, delays and branches, and the library of pre-built automations speeds up the start considerably. Landing pages, multi-page funnels and forms linked to campaigns round off a simple lead capture system.

That said, many users agree that the learning curve for advanced automations is steep and that maintaining them needs someone dedicated. HubSpot offers equally powerful workflows, but on any object, with a clearer editor, change history and the option to add code when needed. Marketing Hub adds what Keap does not cover as well: SEO, ads, social media, account-based marketing and revenue attribution.

• Marketing Hub
• Sales Hub
• Service Hub

Smart CRM

• Revenue Hub
• Content Hub
• Breeze AI

What about customer service?

Keap includes internal forms, tasks, review requests and billing reminders, which are useful for looking after customers in a small business. What it does not offer is a help desk with tickets, queues, service level agreements or a knowledge base.

Service Hub covers all of that: a shared inbox, tickets, a knowledge base, a customer portal, surveys and the Breeze Customer Agent, which answers queries using your own documentation. For a business with repeat customers, linking service to sales is what lets you anticipate churn and spot opportunities.

AI: Breeze vs Keap’s AI

Keap includes AI assistants for drafting emails and for building automations from templates, along with resources grouped under Keap AI. They are practical helpers that save time in the day-to-day running of a small business.

Breeze plays in a different category. Breeze Assistant is available across the platform to draft, summarise and analyse using your CRM data; Breeze agents handle customer queries, research accounts or keep data clean; and Breeze Intelligence enriches company and contact information. Because the AI sees deals, tickets and conversations, its answers have the context that a writing assistant lacks.

Reporting

Keap offers a customisable dashboard and reports on sales, campaigns and payments that cover the basics. User opinions on the flexibility of custom reporting are mixed, and when leadership needs to cross-reference data it usually falls back on exports.

HubSpot lets you build custom reports across objects, team dashboards, sales forecasts and revenue attribution by channel. For leadership, that means seeing in one place how much each campaign generates, how each rep is progressing and which customers have open issues.

Integrations and API

Keap has an API, webhooks, a native Zapier integration and a marketplace of third-party apps. That is enough to connect the usual tools, although many integrations rely on middleware connectors.

HubSpot’s ecosystem is one of the broadest around, with native integrations for invoicing, telephony, e-commerce and messaging, plus a development platform with private apps, UI Extensions and serverless functions. If something does not exist, it can be built inside the CRM itself; see our custom HubSpot integrations.

Ease of use and adoption

Keap has simplified its interface considerably since the Infusionsoft days, and everyday tasks are straightforward. Even so, several users describe a steep learning curve once you get into complex automations, and Keap itself requires an implementation service when you sign up. If yours is an older account, you may be working in Max Classic, the legacy Infusionsoft version, with its own interface.

HubSpot is known for its ease of use and a gentle learning curve for sales and marketing teams. HubSpot Academy offers free role-based training and the interface is the same across every hub, which helps new starters become productive quickly.

Implementation and total cost of ownership

Keap has moved to a single-platform model: you do not choose features by plan; instead the price depends on users and contact volume, with messaging and payment processing on top, plus a mandatory implementation service. HubSpot offers free tools and Starter, Professional and Enterprise editions per hub or as a full platform, priced per seat and by marketing contacts; higher editions include initial onboarding.

When working out total cost, add what you will need outside Keap (help desk, reporting tools, connectors, a European payment processor) and the time of whoever maintains the automations. Check HubSpot’s official pricing and Keap’s pricing. If you are also considering a European email tool with a CRM, see our HubSpot vs Brevo comparison.

Support, community and partners

Keap offers a customer success manager, round-the-clock chat, US-based phone support, Keap Academy and a network of certified partners, mostly in North America. HubSpot has a global community, HubSpot Academy and a partner network spanning dozens of countries. We are a HubSpot Diamond Solutions Partner with a team of 19 people across Barcelona and Dubai, rated 4.9/5 in HubSpot’s directory.

Security, GDPR and EU data hosting

Keap states that it complies with GDPR and offers a data processing addendum, but its public information does not mention an option to host data in the European Union. HubSpot lets you host your account in its EU data centre, publishes its sub-processors and offers subscription types and lawful bases for processing built into the CRM. For a European company, it is a difference worth reviewing with your legal adviser.

HubSpot vs Keap comparison table

When could Keap make sense?

• You are a solo professional or a micro service business in the US and want bookings, payments and follow-up in one tool.
• You sell standardised services (training, coaching, consulting) through a simple funnel and have no sales team.
• You already have mature campaigns running in Keap and do not expect your team to grow in the short term.

If email automation is what you mainly need, our HubSpot vs ActiveCampaign comparison may also help.

Verdict: why HubSpot wins

1. It scales with you: it works just as well for a team of three as for a team of a hundred, with no CRM switch halfway.
2. Marketing, sales and service together: one record per customer and workflows across departments.
3. Easier to adopt: a clear interface, free training and a gentle learning curve for salespeople.
4. Breeze AI with full context: agents and an assistant working across the entire CRM.
5. Built with Europe in mind too: an EU data centre, integrations with local payment and invoicing tools, and partners close by.
6. A huge ecosystem: marketplace, community and custom development so you never fall short.

How to migrate from Keap to HubSpot

HubSpot lists Keap among the CRMs it offers migration support for, and you can also do it with imports or with a partner. What matters is not the tool but the mapping:

• Contacts and companies: these move across almost directly; check for duplicates and contacts without consent before loading them.
• Tags: turn them into properties, lists or lifecycle stages. Migrating hundreds of tags as they are is the most common mistake.
• Opportunities: they become deals with their pipeline and stages; watch close dates and owners.
• Orders, invoices and subscriptions: decide which history you need in the CRM and what stays in your invoicing software or in Stripe.
• Campaigns and automations: they are redesigned as workflows. Take the chance to simplify.
• Forms, bookings and payments: reconnect them before cut-over so you lose no leads or payments.

1. Phase 1Keap and tag audit
2. Phase 2Data mapping and clean-up
3. Phase 3Load, payments and integrations
4. Phase 4Workflows, training and cut-over

If you want to do it with a team that has already migrated companies from Salesforce, Odoo and Clientify, our HubSpot migration service takes care of data, payments, workflows and training.

• Automation
• Comparison
• Keap
• SMEs