Bigin vs HubSpot,
for a 20-person
sales team.
The CRM decision small businesses face most often. We've set up both for small sales teams. Here's the side-by-side: real cost, real feature trade-offs, and the question that decides it for most teams.
Both products are perfectly good. Both have happy customers. But they're built for different mental models, and for an small business sales team most of the difference comes down to one question: do you need the marketing automation, or don't you?
The headline difference
HubSpot started as a marketing platform and grew downward into sales. Bigin started as the small business version of Zoho CRM — pipeline-first, sales-shaped, deliberately lightweight.
That origin shows in everything from pricing structure to what's on the dashboard by default. HubSpot wants to manage your funnel from first website visit to closed deal; Bigin wants to manage the deals once they're already in your pipeline.
If your marketing is meaningfully separate from your sales process, Bigin's probably better. If it isn't, HubSpot's probably better.
That's not the whole answer, but it gets you 70% of the way there.
Real cost, at 20 users
Sticker prices both look low. Real costs at 20 active sales users diverge sharply once you add the bits an actual sales team needs.
HubSpot, 20 users
- Sales Hub Professional: $90/user/month × 5 paid seats minimum = £~330/month base
- Add the other 15 users at Sales Hub Starter pricing
- For most teams, the upgrade to Sales Hub Professional everywhere ends up justified by reporting needs
- Marketing Hub if you want the marketing automation HubSpot is built around
- Realistic annual cost for a 20-person sales team: £15,000–£35,000/year
Bigin, 20 users
- Bigin Premier: £14/user/month × 20 = £280/month
- Plus integration to email/calendar (included)
- Optional managed-admin service (us): from £350/month
- Realistic annual cost for a 20-person sales team: £3,400–£7,500/year
Roughly 4–5× less, like-for-like. That's not a small detail.
Where HubSpot is clearly better
- Inbound marketing — landing pages, forms, email campaigns, attribution, the whole funnel. HubSpot does this; Bigin doesn't.
- Marketing-to-sales handover — lead scoring, MQL workflows, automated routing. HubSpot was built for this.
- Content management — if your CRM is also your CMS, HubSpot fits. (Bigin is not a CMS.)
- Network effects — HubSpot has a huge ecosystem of agencies, contractors and templates. Bigger talent pool to hire from.
Where Bigin is clearly better
- Cost — particularly when "user count" grows; Bigin scales sublinearly
- Time to live — two weeks not two quarters; the surface area to configure is smaller
- Adoption — sales reps actually use it. In our experience Bigin sticks, where heavier HubSpot setups often drift into disuse
- Mobile — Bigin is mobile-first; field sales actually use it on the train
- Pipeline focus — fewer fields, fewer screens, fewer ways to fall off the path
The most-used CRM is the one your sales team will actually open on a Monday morning. Sticker prices come second to that.
The cases we've seen
Case for HubSpot: inbound-led B2B SaaS
A 22-person SaaS team where 70% of leads come through marketing forms, content downloads, webinars. Marketing owns the early stage; sales picks up at MQL. HubSpot is genuinely the right tool — the cost is justified by what the marketing team gets out of it.
Case for Bigin: outbound sales-led services
A 12-person professional services firm where every deal starts with someone picking up the phone or being introduced. No real marketing funnel; pipeline is everything. Bigin is exactly right — HubSpot would be over-engineered and 80% unused.
The middle case: the answer is usually Bigin
Most small businesses we meet have a marketing function but it isn't their growth engine. Pipeline management, sales reporting, forecast accuracy — that's what they actually need from a CRM. Bigin handles it at a fraction of the cost.
What about full Zoho CRM?
Zoho also sells Zoho CRM proper — a much bigger product that's a direct HubSpot competitor on features. We do that too, mostly for businesses with complex products, channel partners, or multi-team service-cloud needs.
For a pipeline-shaped small business sales team, Bigin is right. For a business with 50+ sales reps, a service team, a partner channel and a custom product model — Zoho CRM (or Salesforce, or HubSpot) is the conversation.
How we'd decide
- Are you running real marketing automation today, and would you be sad to lose it? → HubSpot stays
- Is your CRM project mostly about getting the sales team to log their deals? → Bigin wins
- Is cost a real constraint? → Bigin wins more obviously
- Do you have an internal CRM admin? → Either works. No internal admin? Bigin is easier to manage and we run it for you anyway
If you want us to walk through your specific case in 20 minutes, we will. We'll be honest if HubSpot is the right answer for you — we don't resell either product so we don't have a thumb on the scale.
A CRM you'll
actually use.
We implement Bigin in two weeks, not two quarters. Migration from HubSpot is a routine project.