HubSpot vs Zendesk Sell: what to do now Sell is being retired

If your sales team works in Zendesk Sell, the question is no longer whether to change CRM but which one and when: Zendesk has announced the retirement of Sell, with an end-of-life date of 31 August 2027. For most growing businesses HubSpot is the strongest destination, because it replaces Sell for sales and adds marketing, service, AI and reporting on a single database.

What is happening to Zendesk Sell?

In September 2025 Zendesk announced that Zendesk Sell and its mobile app would be retired on 31 August 2027. Customers keep full access until that date, but the company will stop offering a sales CRM so it can focus on its support and employee service products. The details are in Zendesk’s official announcement.

Two points in the announcement deserve a careful read. First, Sell data is deleted under Zendesk’s data deletion policy when your subscription ends or on 31 August 2027, whichever comes first, and that deletion is permanent. Second, the standard export from Sell’s settings does not include activity history, appointments, emails, call logs or documents.

Zendesk has partnered with Pipedrive and recommends it as the alternative, with dedicated migration tools. That is a legitimate option and we cover it below. But it is not the only one, and the move is a good moment to ask whether you want to swap one sales CRM for another just like it, or take a step further.

What each one is, in a nutshell

Zendesk Sell started life as Base CRM, a tool Zendesk acquired and turned into its sales product. It focuses on the salesperson’s day: leads, contacts and deals in a visual pipeline, smart lists, email tracking, calling from inside the CRM and a polished mobile app. Its big selling point was the connection to Zendesk Support, so sales could see a customer’s tickets.

HubSpot is a customer platform built on a shared CRM, Smart CRM, with several products on top: Sales Hub, Marketing Hub, Service Hub, Content Hub, Data Hub and Revenue Hub, plus Breeze as the AI layer. Sales Hub is the direct equivalent of Sell; the rest extends what the business can do without leaving the same records.

HubSpotZendesk Sell

Product futureActively developed platformEnd of life announced

ScopeMarketing, sales and serviceSales

MarketingNative Marketing HubExternal integrations

Customer serviceService Hub on the same CRMSeparate Zendesk Support

AIBreeze across the platformNo roadmap for Sell

Custom objectsYes, in higher editionsCustom fields

EcosystemThousands of apps and partnersLimited and winding down

CRM and data model

Sell works with leads, contacts (people and companies) and deals, with custom fields and smart lists for segmentation. It is a clear model and enough for a team that sells in a fairly linear way.

HubSpot starts from standard objects (contacts, companies, deals, tickets, leads, products, quotes) with labelled associations between them, and Enterprise editions let you create custom objects for whatever your business needs to model: contracts, properties, subscriptions or payments. That flexibility is what stops critical information ending up in side spreadsheets a few years down the line.

Which is better for day-to-day selling?

For daily work Sell had real strengths: a clean pipeline, alerts on stalled deals, built-in calling and SMS, and a mobile app that field sales teams valued highly. Add-ons such as Reach brought prospecting and data enrichment.

Sales Hub covers all of that and goes further: multiple pipelines, follow-up sequences, meeting scheduling, templates and snippets, quotes, forecasting, playbooks, a prospecting workspace and calling with transcription. Some features depend on the edition, so check them before you decide. HubSpot’s mobile app lets reps log activity, look up records and work the pipeline on the road.

Marketing: what Sell never had

Sell did not include marketing. Leads came from external forms, email marketing tools or integrations, and attributing revenue to campaigns happened outside the CRM or relied on syncs.

In HubSpot, the contact who fills in a form, opens your emails and visits your pricing page is the same record the rep works in the pipeline. That lets you score leads on real behaviour, hand them to sales automatically when they meet your criteria and see which campaigns generate revenue. If your pipeline depends on your website and content, this difference carries a lot of weight.

Customer service: Zendesk Support stays, Sell goes

Zendesk Support is not being retired, and many companies used Sell precisely because their support desk already lived in Zendesk. You have two routes. You can keep Support and connect it to HubSpot through the official integrations, so sales see tickets on the customer record. Or you can move support into Service Hub as well and give every team a single customer record.

There is no need to decide everything at once. A common approach is to migrate sales first and review support in a second phase, once the sales team is comfortable in HubSpot.

Automation and AI: Breeze versus a product with no roadmap

Sell offered sales automation (sequences, tasks, assignment rules) that was perfectly adequate for its scope. Zendesk’s AI investment, however, has gone into its support product, and Sell, with its retirement announced, has no further development ahead.

In HubSpot, workflows act on contacts, companies, deals, tickets and custom objects, with branches, delays and, in higher editions, custom code. Breeze, HubSpot’s AI, adds Breeze Assistant to query and draft with CRM context, plus prospecting, data and customer service agents that work on the same records. Some AI features consume HubSpot credits or require specific editions, so check what applies to you.

Reporting and forecasting

Sell’s reports were good for the sales team: activity, funnel, forecast and revenue. Their limit was that they only saw sales.

HubSpot brings marketing, sales and service into the same dashboards: cost per channel, lead-to-customer conversion, cycle time by source, tickets per customer ahead of a renewal. For leadership, that full-funnel view is one of the clearest reasons to choose a platform over a standalone sales tool.

Integrations and API

Sell had an API and a modest marketplace, and its flagship integration was Zendesk Support. With the retirement, third-party integrations are disappearing too: some vendors have already stopped allowing new connections to Sell.

HubSpot has a marketplace with thousands of apps, a well-documented public API, webhooks, private apps and UI Extensions for building your own screens inside the CRM. Whether you need to connect invoicing, an ERP, telephony or your own product, there is almost always a native route or a clear path with custom development. We see it every day in our HubSpot integrations work.

Ease of use and adoption

Sell was easy to learn, and that is to its credit. So is HubSpot: its interface is among the best rated on the market and most reps are working comfortably within days. Because there are more modules, the trick is to switch on only what will be used and train by role, rather than showing the whole platform to everyone.

Implementation and total cost of ownership

Comparing prices with a product that is being retired makes little sense; what matters is the total cost of the destination. Sell was sold per user and edition, with add-ons such as Reach. HubSpot has free tools, Starter, Professional and Enterprise editions per hub, per-seat licences, platform bundles and credits for some AI features. See HubSpot’s official pricing page.

When you work out total cost, include what you pay today outside the CRM (email marketing, forms, surveys, connectors) and the cost of maintaining those syncs. With HubSpot, many of those pieces are replaced by switching on another hub over the same data. A well-planned Sales Hub implementation usually takes four to eight weeks; a project with several hubs and complex integrations takes longer.

Support, community and partners

Zendesk continues to support Sell customers during the transition, but the ecosystem around the product is fading. HubSpot has a very active community, a free academy with certifications and a broad partner network. At Vexco we are a HubSpot Diamond Solutions Partner with a 4.9/5 rating in HubSpot’s directory, and our consultants and developers work in the same team.

Security, GDPR and EU data hosting

HubSpot offers data hosting in European Union data centres for new accounts, a data processing agreement, consent tools and, in higher editions, permission controls, audit logs and SSO. For a European business, choosing where your data is hosted when you open the account is good practice and best done from day one.

Side-by-side comparison

When might another option make sense?

To be fair: if your team is small, only sells and does not need marketing or service in the CRM, the alternative Zendesk proposes, Pipedrive, is reasonable. It is simple, close to Sell in philosophy and has migration tools ready. We compare them in detail in HubSpot vs Pipedrive.

It also makes sense not to rush if you are in the middle of a critical quarter: Sell works until the announced date, and a well-planned migration beats a hasty one. What we would not recommend is waiting until the final month, because exporting history through the API and rebuilding automation both take time.

Verdict: why HubSpot wins

• It replaces Sell and goes further. Sales Hub covers everything Sell did for sales and adds sequences, quotes, forecasting and prospecting on a more flexible CRM.
• One database for the whole business. Marketing, sales and service work on the same record, with no syncing between tools.
• AI that keeps evolving. Breeze is built into the whole platform and has a future, unlike a product that is winding down.
• Full-lifecycle reporting. Leadership can see which channel each sale comes from and what happens to the customer after the sale.
• An ecosystem that will not leave you stranded. Marketplace, API, community and partners mean you will not have to migrate again in two years.
• Lower total cost in the medium term. Fewer standalone tools, fewer connectors to maintain and less admin work.

How to migrate from Zendesk Sell to HubSpot

Migrating from Sell is not complicated if it is done in order, but the retirement brings some specifics. These are the steps we follow in a HubSpot migration:

1. Week 1Sell audit and full export
2. Week 2Object and property mapping
3. Weeks 3-4Data and history migration via API
4. Week 5Workflows, sequences and integrations
5. Week 6Role-based training and cutover

1. Rescue your data early. Run a full export from Sell’s settings and use the API for activity history, emails and calls. Do not wait until your subscription ends.
2. Map your objects. Sell leads usually go to contacts or HubSpot’s leads object; people and companies to contacts and companies with their associations; deals to deals with their pipeline and stages.
3. Create properties before importing. Review every custom field: many are redundant, and others should be dropdowns rather than free text.
4. Keep the history. Notes, calls and emails should arrive as associated activities with their original dates, not as text pasted into the record.
5. Consider a temporary sync. HubSpot’s data sync app for Zendesk Sell syncs contacts, leads, companies and deals and can help both systems run side by side for a few weeks; custom field mapping requires Data Hub. See the app listing on the HubSpot marketplace.
6. Rebuild, do not copy. Sell automations and sequences are redesigned as HubSpot workflows and sequences; it is the right moment to drop whatever nobody uses.

The usual pitfalls are always the same: duplicates caused by different email addresses, owners who do not exist in HubSpot, badly mapped stages and a cutover with no fixed date. Set the cutover date, tell the team and make Sell read-only from that moment.

Before

• Sales in Sell and support in Zendesk
• Marketing in another tool
• Separate reports
• A product with an end date

After

• One CRM for every team
• Native marketing and attribution
• Full-lifecycle dashboards
• A platform with a future

At Vexco we have migrated support data from Zendesk and complete CRMs from Salesforce, Odoo and Clientify into HubSpot, always testing with real data before cutover. If you want leaving Sell to also be the start of a well-run HubSpot implementation, let’s talk.

• Comparison
• Migration
• Sales Hub
• Zendesk Sell