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HubSpot Alternative: A Free CRM That Doesn't Lock Your Data

We needed HubSpot features without the $800/month tax. Here's the CRM we use instead — pipelines, contacts, deals, and actual data ownership.

Sales tools should help you close deals, not drain your budget.

Why HubSpot gets expensive fast

HubSpot’s free CRM is genuinely useful — until your team grows. Then you hit the wall:

  • Marketing Hub Starter: $20/month (but you want Professional at $890/month for automation)
  • Sales Hub Professional: $500/month for sequences and forecasting
  • Service Hub: another $500/month for ticketing

A 10-person sales team paying for basic automation and reporting? Easily $1,500–$2,000/month.

And if you ever want to leave? Your data exports as flat CSVs. No relationships. No activity history. Years of context, gone.

We needed the features without the lock-in.

What a real HubSpot alternative looks like

Plenty of tools call themselves “HubSpot alternatives.” Most are just contact lists with a pipeline view. A real alternative needs:

  1. Visual pipelines — drag-and-drop deals, custom stages, probability weighting
  2. 360-degree contact view — every email, call, note, and meeting in one timeline
  3. Company ↔ contact ↔ deal relationships — not just flat records
  4. Forecasting — weighted pipeline value, close-date projections
  5. Data you own — export everything, any time, with relationships intact

That’s what CRM in the Vault delivers.

The switch: what gato CRM does differently

Pipelines that match your process

Create unlimited pipelines with custom stages. Set win probabilities per stage. Drag deals; watch your forecast update in real time.

No “you’ve reached your pipeline limit” upsell. No “forecasting requires Professional tier.”

Activity timeline without the $500/month add-on

Every interaction — emails, calls, meetings, notes — streams into one chronological view. Click a deal, see the story. No extra module required.

Contacts, companies, deals: linked

A contact works at a company. The company has deals. Deals have activities. The CRM understands these relationships natively, so you can:

  • See all deals for a company
  • See all contacts involved in a deal
  • See a contact’s entire history across companies

HubSpot does this too — but only if you’re paying for the right tier.

Your data, your export

Export to JSON with full relationships. Import into another system. Archive for compliance. The data is yours.

A real workflow: qualifying a lead

Here’s how our sales team uses gato CRM:

  1. Lead arrives — from a form, manually, or via API. Contact record created.
  2. Research — open the contact, add notes, link to their company.
  3. Create deal — one click; deal lands in “Qualified” stage; linked to contact and company.
  4. Schedule call — click “Add Meeting,” pick a time; Calendar event created; activity logged.
  5. Send proposal — link to an Invoice estimate; click to preview, send, track.
  6. Close won — drag to Done; deal value hits forecast; optional invoice auto-generates.

One CRM. No five different hubs.

What you keep from HubSpot

  • Contact and company management
  • Deal pipelines with drag-and-drop
  • Activity logging and timeline
  • Email templates (basic)
  • Reporting and dashboards

We didn’t clone HubSpot. We took the features sales teams actually use and cut the features that exist to justify pricing tiers.

Try it

Open the CRM app — free, no credit card. Create a contact, add a deal, drag it through your pipeline. See how it feels when your CRM doesn’t ask for your wallet.

Because CRM lives in the Vault, your sales data connects to:

  • Kanban — deals auto-sync to task boards
  • Invoice — generate invoices from closed deals
  • Calendar — meetings log to deal timelines
  • Doc — link proposals and contracts to deals

One platform, no Zapier tax.