HubSpot, Inc. sells itself as a platform that grows with a customer from startup to enterprise. ETR data suggests that story holds better at one end of that range than the other. We interviewed technology leaders about their HubSpot spend plans. Their answers describe a company expanding cleanly into large enterprises and consolidation deals while fighting a much messier battle for its smallest accounts.
Every Fortune 100 and other large-enterprise respondent in this sample was increasing spend, seven of seven. Fortune 500 and Global 1000 accounts were split evenly, one increasing and one decreasing at each tier. Small businesses were the only segment leaning net negative, eight increasing against nine decreasing. A director at a large industrials company described the increase in enterprise terms: "We're expanding our use of HubSpot's integrated platform to consolidate multiple point solutions and improve operational efficiency across our sales and marketing teams." Compare that with a small IT and telecom company cutting spend: "As a CRM, we didn't find its value for money. The time you add all the modules in to make it usable, it's very expensive." With only 40 respondents, this pattern is directional, not proof of a durable bimodal retention curve, but it is consistent with a business that is executing well on enterprise land-and-expand while its bottom of funnel stays exposed to price sensitivity.
Salesforce is the most frequently named competitor in this dataset, and it cuts both ways. On the increase side, a midsize IT and telecom company explained its switch plainly: "Salesforce was too expensive for our needs." A Global 1000 services company described a similar dynamic at larger scale, increasing HubSpot spend while reducing Salesforce spend "due to costs." On the decrease side, the direction reverses on a different axis. A small education company cutting HubSpot spend cited the opposite complaint: "Too expensive for what we get. Not enough native features compared with Salesforce." A small financial services and insurance company consolidating onto Salesforce called HubSpot "widely underutilized." The boundary looks consistent across both directions: HubSpot wins the cost-conscious switch, and loses the account once feature depth becomes the deciding factor.
Vendor consolidation shows up more often as a reason to expand HubSpot than a reason to leave it. Increasers described absorbing Marketo, Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Management, Intercom, and ZoomInfo into HubSpot "for efficiency" and "ROI from AI automation and analytics," and a separate large APAC company consolidated Mailchimp, SendGrid, Zendesk, Zoho, and Salesforce into HubSpot for "unified customer lifecycle management." A Fortune 100 healthcare and pharma company is replacing homegrown tools and evaluating MuleSoft's removal as part of post-M&A integration. On the losing side, the pattern is smaller but real: one Fortune 500 financial services company is migrating "all units to Microsoft Dynamics" to shrink its total vendor count, and a small IT company is eliminating HubSpot entirely in favor of "smaller vendors and internal tools" due to cost and complexity. HubSpot is participating in more consolidation waves as the destination platform than as the vendor being consolidated away.
AI shows up as a growth driver far more often than a churn driver in this sample. Six increasers cited it directly, from a Global 1000 services company increasing spend "driven by AI capabilities, ecosystem fit, and strategic priorities" to a small services company reporting that "AI features exceeded expectations" for expanding social media reach. One response points the other way and is worth flagging on its own. A small IT and telecom company is cutting HubSpot spend specifically because it moved sales and marketing inquiry handling to "Anthropic API subscriptions" for AI agents, replacing a SaaS CRM module with agents built directly on a model provider's API rather than switching to a competing suite. It is a single data point, not a trend, but it describes a different kind of competitive threat than Salesforce or Zoho: disintermediation of the SaaS layer itself rather than share moving between platforms.
None of this is a market-wide verdict, ETR built this sample to represent both spend directions, not to mirror the installed base. What it does offer is a clear, first-person account of where HubSpot's growth motion is working. Enterprise and consolidation-driven expansion look durable in these responses. Small-business retention looks like the more exposed part of the business, driven by cost sensitivity and feature ceilings rather than dissatisfaction with the product's direction. AI is a net tailwind today, with one account already testing whether it needs a CRM suite at all once agents run on a model API directly.
The article was developed using an ETR Edge Report. Interested in reviewing this and other Edge reports? Contact our Service Team.