HubSpot or Creatio: Which CRM platform is right for your business?

What are the fundamental differences between HubSpot and Creatio?

The difference comes down to the very first feature:

provides a ready-to-use CRM that you can customise.

provides a platform on which you can build your CRM.

Three questions that will decide the election in practice:

• Three questions that will decide the election in practice: Do you start with a template or a blank page? HubSpot provides a tried-and-tested template developed through hundreds of thousands of implementations. You benefit from this, but you have to work within its framework. With Creatio, the project begins earlier – namely with the question of what your processes and data structures should actually look like. This freedom is valuable if you already have a clear vision. It takes time, however, if you first need to develop that vision.

• Who should maintain the system? With HubSpot, it’s usually enough for someone to understand their own process. Fields and workflows are created directly within the relevant department. With Creatio, you help to design the foundation – that is, the data structures and process logic. As such changes affect the entire organisation, Creatio provides separate environments for development, testing and production, and prohibits changes being made directly to the live system. This is the right approach, but it means you need someone with an understanding of both business processes and IT, either in-house or at a partner organisation.

• Who coordinates the processes? This is where the risk differs most significantly. With HubSpot, the common framework is predefined: marketing, sales and customer service inevitably work on the same contacts, companies and sales opportunities. With Creatio, you define this framework yourself. Without a binding target vision, solutions emerge over time that work in their own right but contain different definitions of the same thing – for example, three different versions of what constitutes a qualified lead. Creatio offers tools to counter this, including centralised rules that automatically apply across the board. However, these are only effective if someone is responsible for the overall view.

Both providers fully cover the customer lifecycle—from marketing through sales to service—and both offer ready-to-use AI agents for sales, marketing, and service. The differences lie in the depth of the individual disciplines.

Both platforms offer equivalent features that are relevant for Swiss companies: multilingual support, multi-currency capability, and role-based access rights are standard on both platforms.

One point that often goes unnoticed until later: HubSpot comes equipped out of the box with contacts, companies, sales opportunities, and tickets. If your business needs to manage something not included in this list—such as machinery, contracts, real estate, or vehicles—you’ll need a custom data type for it. HubSpot offers this, but only in its highest tier, Enterprise. With Creatio, this is included regardless of the package you choose.

Creatio offers the more technically powerful process engine, while HubSpot enables faster implementation of AI-powered automations throughout the customer journey.

HubSpot uses a workflow tool that supports triggers, branches, delays, evaluations, and data operations. Through Data Hub (formerly Operations Hub), you can add custom code actions, data quality rules, and webhooks. Two new features introduced in 2026 are relevant for day-to-day use: Breeze, the built-in AI, creates workflows from a natural-language description and displays a preview before they are applied. And the “Run Agent” workflow action triggers AI agents from within a workflow, for example, when a deal phase changes.

Creatio relies on a full-featured process designer based on BPMN, a vendor-neutral standard with uniform symbols for start, task, decision, responsibility, and end. This is complemented by dynamic case management for processes that cannot be modeled linearly. In its Unlimited plan, Creatio advertises unlimited workflows, applications, data types, and API calls.

Both platforms handle process documentation, approvals, deadline monitoring, and cross-system workflows. The difference lies in how they are created.

Practical Application: The entire customer lifecycle is managed on a single data platform in HubSpot. Lead nurturing, lead routing, deal automation, quote approvals, and service escalations therefore run seamlessly across marketing, sales, and service without the need for integration, and with Breeze, they are increasingly created based on a description rather than through configuration work. Integration with ERP, financial, or logistics systems is also handled via webhooks and approximately 2,000 pre-built integrations from the Marketplace.

The relevant boundary, therefore, does not lie in the number of departments involved, but in the subject matter of the process. As soon as workflows no longer pertain to customer relationships but rather to areas such as production, procurement, human resources, or case management, you’re moving beyond the scope for which HubSpot was built. That’s where Creatio’s architecture shines, because such applications can be modeled on the same platform as the CRM.

For simple fields and standard automations, HubSpot is more self-sufficient; for complex processes and custom data structures, it’s Creatio. The key factor is whether a change affects only the user interface or the underlying structure.

In HubSpot, a user with admin rights can create a field in under a minute—it’s immediately usable and
without interfering with the system logic. There are limits, but they’re generous: around 1,000 custom fields
per data type.

In Creatio, a field is more than just a display. When you create one, you also change the underlying data structure. This is more powerful because you’re shaping the model yourself rather than just populating it, and it carries more weight. Creatio notes in its own documentation that such changes can affect system behavior and should therefore be made in a separate test environment.

In HubSpot, building workflows is simple, and the upper limit is clearly defined: up to 1,000 workflows at the Enterprise level, along with limits such as a maximum of 20 branches per decision point.

In Creatio, business units build processes using a visual designer. Rules can be defined centrally at the data type level and then automatically apply wherever that data type is used. Creatio positions itself so that business users with an understanding of processes can work without developers.

HubSpot also offers test environments, and they are the recommended practice for larger changes: A sandbox replicates data types, field definitions, pipelines, and most workflows from the production system, though without the actual data records. Elements newly created in the sandbox can then be transferred to the production system, whereas changes to existing elements cannot; those are replicated there directly. Sandboxes are part of the Enterprise tier. 

The point, therefore, is not that HubSpot lacks a testing environment, but rather that it isn’t necessary for day-to-day adjustments. A new field, a modified drop-down list, or an additional workflow is created directly within the live system. With Creatio, separate environments are provided for development, testing, and production; changes to the production system are expressly prohibited, and customizations are managed in batches and versioned to ensure traceability of who changed what and when. This is best practice, but it requires consistent discipline and a sense of responsibility.

One insight from the reviews supports this: On G2, Creatio scores around 9.1 out of 10 for usability, but only 8.3 to 8.4 for setup. This gap reflects the difference between “easy to use once set up” and “easy to set up yourself.” And Creatio itself documents where the visual tools end: that’s when the logic is added in the source code.

This section delves deeper into the technical details and is aimed at IT managers. In short: HubSpot leads the way with standardized interface extensions, while Creatio excels at customizing the interface itself.

Custom Cards—technically known as App Cards via HubSpot UI Extensions—are standard-compliant extensions within the platform, not separate in-house developments. This is the key difference from traditional customization: they remain within the standard, updates continue to apply, and maintenance costs remain predictable.

Technically, these are React components that HubSpot renders within its own interface—not embedded third-party content or pop-ups, but genuine components based on the HubSpot Design System, running on HubSpot’s infrastructure and connected to your own backend. Development takes place locally via the CLI, with the development server applying changes without the need to reload.

They can appear in the customer, company, deal, and ticket views, as well as in the service area, the preview sidebar, and the configuration interface for your own workflow actions. The Spring 2026 release introduced App Pages—full-screen, multi-page applications directly within HubSpot with their own navigation and data connections. Serverless Functions are back in Developer Platform 2026.03 and available via App Cards, App Pages, and App Settings, supplemented by a Developer MCP server.

Regarding licensing: Since November 2024, all Enterprise customers have been able to build their own Custom Cards, regardless of the Hub.

One point that’s often overlooked in comparisons: External content can be embedded in dashboards without developer involvement, starting at the Professional tier.

Creatio does not have a card concept because its architecture does not require one. Instead of adding an extension alongside the user interface, you modify the user interface itself in the Freedom UI Designer. For external content, an iFrame component has been available since version 8.3.3, which allows third-party systems to be embedded in Freedom UI pages without custom development, including access permissions without code. For true native components, Creatio uses Remote Modules based on the module federation principle, recommended for use with Angular, developed in a separate npm package using an external IDE. Locally, the familiar live updates of the Angular tools are available; for display in Creatio, a build and integration step is required in the source code of the Freedom UI page.

There is one limitation: A Custom Card is an additional tile, not a replacement for standard behavior. It retrieves ERP data, availability, scores, or service histories into the record. It does not change how the record itself functions. This is exactly what Creatio can do, because there is no boundary between the core and extensions.

For most Swiss SME projects, the HubSpot approach is the more practical one, because the need is almost always for “additional information on the contact” rather than “different contact logic,” and because many of these requirements can be met using an existing Marketplace app without writing a single line of code.

Both platforms have elevated AI from an add-on feature to an architectural component by 2025 and 2026, respectively, but they take different approaches in doing so.

Both come with ready-to-use agents, and both now allow you to build your own.

HubSpot covers the customer lifecycle with Customer Agent, Prospecting Agent, Data Agent, and Content Agent, supplemented by agents from the Breeze Marketplace, including those for company research, customer status, deal loss analysis, handoffs between AI and employees, and bid processing. Custom agents have been created in the Agent Builder since July 2026. Two points are particularly relevant: The assistant itself is included in all subscription tiers, and the agents access the existing customer database without requiring any integration work.

Creatio maintains a comparable library for sales, marketing, and service, though the available agents depend on which applications are installed. Additionally, agents from partners are available via the Creatio Marketplace. Custom agents are created in the no-code Agent Builder and can also work with user-defined data types.

The difference, therefore, lies less in the offerings themselves than in how they are tailored. HubSpot links agents to measurable results and, in some cases, charges per resolved case—which makes the value immediately verifiable—and consolidates setup, monitoring, and collaboration within the Agent Hub. Custom language models can also be integrated: A workflow action connects HubSpot via its own API to OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Cohere, or xAI, with the model and parameters freely selectable and processing taking place directly at the provider’s end. Creatio takes this a step further because the model can also be defined for the agents themselves, and agents can work with custom data types; however, this requires more configuration work. In 2025, Gartner explicitly cited the manual configuration effort required for generative AI as one of the caveats regarding Creatio.

Neither provider develops its own language models; both rely on models from external providers. The surrounding layer is therefore crucial. With HubSpot, the agents access only the data necessary for the specific task from the CRM, connected knowledge bases, and explicitly approved sources. The data is temporarily transferred for processing; it is not permanently stored by the model provider and is not used for its training. Your company remains the data controller; HubSpot acts as a data processor; and the agents are subject to the same roles and permissions as the rest of the platform. We’ve broken down the specifics of how this is regulated in a separate article on security and data protection for AI agents. Creatio also offers the option to run models in your own data center, ensuring that the processing never leaves your premises. For most companies, contractual safeguards are sufficient; however, where data sovereignty must be contractually guaranteed, in-house operation is the stronger argument.

On average, Creatio receives higher ratings, while HubSpot has a significantly broader base of reviews. In German-speaking countries, the picture is reversed because Creatio is rarely reviewed there.

Both platforms scale, but along different axes.

HubSpot scales across tiers and user types. The path leads from Professional to Enterprise, with Marketing Hub additionally scaling based on the number of actively marketed contacts. Users who are only meant to read along don’t cost anything, which makes a noticeable difference for growing organizations.

Creatio scales based on the selected platform tier. Since May 2026, there has also been an Unlimited model, where the price no longer depends on the number of users but applies to the entire organization. This is an important distinction, especially for corporate groups and large organizations : adding employees or AI agents to the system does not increase licensing costs, which simplifies planning over multiple years.

For Swiss companies, the question of scaling rarely arises from a technical perspective, but rather an organizational one. The decisive factor isn’t “How many users can the system handle?” but rather: How many people actually work with it on a daily basis, how clean does the data remain as usage grows, and who oversees further development? At the scales typical for Swiss SMEs and mid-sized companies, neither platform reaches its technical limits. The difference lies in the effort required to manage them. With HubSpot, support remains largely within the functional departments, supplemented by a coordinator. With Creatio, the need for support grows with the scope of functionality: as long as it’s limited to CRM, a single person in charge is sufficient. As soon as additional specialized applications are added, a small team is effectively required, because technical process responsibility, configuration, and oversight of the development, test, and production environments must all be managed together. Whether this team is internal or provided by a partner is a question of cost, not a matter of principle.

HubSpot delivers the first usable results faster, while Creatio can be further customized without the need for programming.

HubSpot is deliberately built for business departments. Implementing a single module, including data migration, integrations and training, typically takes three to six months; several modules take correspondingly longer.

HubSpot Academy and a very large community noticeably reduce the training effort. The downside of this simplicity is that you work within a predefined model and adapt your processes to its logic rather than the other way around.

 

Creatio addresses usability through visual tools. Business departments build pages, processes, reports and, increasingly, AI agents through designers and natural language. Its usability ratings are correspondingly high.

The downside of this flexibility is complexity: where more can be designed, more decisions must be made, and the interface therefore presents more options. Users report that the introductory documentation assumes previous CRM experience or IT support, and that the mobile application is less mature than the web interface.

 

The maintenance effort varies less between platforms than between operating models. Those who work in the cloud have little to do with maintenance in either case; those who operate the system themselves take on this responsibility.

HubSpot does not have versions in the traditional sense. Maintenance, operation, and further development are fully included in the license price. New features are released on an ongoing basis and are available at no additional cost and without the need for an update project; HubSpot bundles the major updates twice a year. Features added in 2026—such as AI agents billed based on results, the ability to create workflows via description, the sales workspace, or tools for visibility in AI assistants—did not require existing customers to request or implement them. There are no maintenance windows and no need to request new licenses. What remains is technical maintenance: ensuring data quality, cleaning up orphaned workflows, keeping permissions up to date, and monitoring interfaces when implementing custom UI extensions.

To be fair, the same principle applies to Creatio in the cloud: there, too, updates and further development are included in the subscription and occur automatically.

Creatio in the cloud also updates automatically. Creatio ensures backward compatibility for public interfaces and data models, so that customizations made using wizards and designers are preserved. However, one aspect remains your responsibility, regardless of whether you operate in the cloud or on-premises: Creatio does not check what you’ve built yourself—such as custom processes, data structures, or UI components—after an update. If errors occur there, the provider refers the issue to whoever developed it—that is, your team or your partner. The more customized your solution is, the more this review should be included in your annual planning.

RunningCreatio in your own data center is a whole different ballgame, because you assume the role of the operator. Specifically, this means:

Jemand muss verfügbar sein.
Aktualisierungen laufen ausserhalb der Geschäftszeiten, weil die Anwendung währenddessen nicht erreichbar ist. Das braucht entweder eine interne Person mit Bereitschaft oder einen Wartungsvertrag mit Ihrem Partner.

Jedes Update ist ein kleines Projekt.
Konfigurationsanpassungen sind manuell zu übertragen, Lizenzen neu anzufordern, danach folgen Kompilierung und Funktionsprüfung. Der Aufwand fällt bei jeder Version erneut an, nicht einmalig.

Sie tragen den Systembetrieb.
Server, Datenbank, Sicherungen, Verfügbarkeit und Sicherheitsaktualisierungen liegen bei Ihnen.

Das grössere Risiko ist der Rückstand.
Weil jedes Update Aufwand bedeutet, werden Aktualisierungen in der Praxis aufgeschoben. Ein System, das zwei Versionen zurückliegt, bekommt neue Funktionen nicht und wird mit jedem weiteren Sprung teurer nachzuziehen.

Both providers publish list prices, and in both cases, the list price is not the final invoice amount. We’ll focus here on the Professional tier and above, as the feature set below that level is insufficient for the use cases described.

The following figures are the providers’ gross list prices and are provided for guidance only. They do not include discounts, multi-year terms, implementation costs, or operating expenses. A comparison of your actual costs can only be determined through a calculation based on your specific use case.

The units have similar names but function differently, and that is the key point for budget planning.

Creatio counts every single call to the language model as an AI action. If an agent needs to take multiple steps to complete a task—such as retrieving data, summarizing it, and formulating a response—each of these steps is counted separately. A single customer inquiry can thus consume multiple actions. The effort is counted regardless of whether a usable result is ultimately achieved.

HubSpot counts the outcome for agents. A resolved customer inquiry costs 50 units, regardless of how many steps the agent took to resolve it. If the agent transfers the case to a colleague, no costs are incurred.

In practice, this means: With Creatio, usage depends on how complex your workflows are. With HubSpot, it depends on how often the AI is successful. Therefore, you can only compare the monthly cost of a specific use case, not the size of the quota.

On both platforms, it’s not the starting price that determines the cost, but rather the usage profile. Four factors determine the actual bill, and none of them are listed on a pricing page.

The sound approach is therefore always the same: Have both providers run calculations based on your specific use case—including your roles, volumes, and growth assumptions—over a three-year period, covering both implementation and operation. Be sure to request a detailed breakdown, not a package overview. Comparing entry-level prices means comparing the one number that says nothing about your specific situation.

Neither platform offers data storage in Switzerland by default. The practical difference lies in the operational options.

With HubSpot, your data is automatically stored in Europe. Anyone who registers from Switzerland or another European country is assigned to the data center in Frankfurt upon signing the contract. This requires no additional option or request.

For Swiss companies, one point is crucial: The European GDPR is considered the strictest data protection standard worldwide and goes further than the revised Swiss Data Protection Act in several areas. HubSpot is designed to meet this standard and provides the necessary tools, such as consent management, cookie banners, documentation of the legal basis for each contact, and functions for providing information and deleting data. Those who meet the stricter requirements also meet Swiss requirements.

Creatio offers cloud operations on AWS and Azure with data centers in Frankfurt, the United Kingdom, Ireland, and the Netherlands, among other locations, as well as managed private cloud services through partners and full on-premises operations. Creatio.ai can also be operated on-site and connected to self-hosted language models.

For Swiss companies with heightened requirements stemming from revDSG, industry regulations, or customer contracts, this is a key decision-making factor: Where data sovereignty and the location of operations must be contractually guaranteed, Creatio offers greater flexibility. Where standard EU hosting is sufficient, the difference is minimal.