HubSpot Marketing Hub is a serious platform and it is priced like one: Professional is $890 a month for 2,000 contacts, plus $3,000 of mandatory onboarding in year one. If what you actually need is email, automation and a CRM, that is most of a HubSpot bill spent on a suite you will not open.
HubSpot Marketing Hub Starter is $20 per seat per month and includes 1,000 marketing contacts; Professional is $890 a month for 2,000 contacts and three seats, with $3,000 of required onboarding in the first year and extra seats at $45 a month. Crossing a contact tier bumps the bill automatically — going from 2,000 to 2,001 contacts moves you to the 5,000 tier and adds roughly $250 a month. Bluey bills on emails sent: a 2,000-contact list emailed weekly is 8,000 sends, which is $14 a month on Spark, and the CRM is included. Pick HubSpot if you are buying the whole revenue suite — sales, service, CMS, attribution reporting — and have someone to run it; pick Bluey if email and a working CRM are the actual requirement.
HubSpot's price is justified when marketing, sales and service all live in it and attribution flows across the three. If your team only ever opens the email and workflow tools, you are funding a platform to use a feature.
One contact over a threshold moves you to the next tier. Going from 2,000 to 2,001 marketing contacts jumps you to the 5,000 bracket and roughly $250 a month. Send-based billing has no thresholds to cross.
HubSpot Professional carries $3,000 of mandatory onboarding in year one. That is more than a decade of Bluey Spark before a single email is sent.
HubSpot is expensive because it is doing much more than sending email. Choose it when:
If none of those apply, you are paying suite prices for a mail tool. That is the specific case Bluey is built for.
HubSpot to Bluey is mostly a data export and a flow rebuild. The CRM records come across; the workflows are recreated, which is genuinely the longest part.
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Start free and get the checklistFor email specifically, dramatically. A 2,000-contact list emailed weekly is 8,000 sends, which is $14 a month on Bluey Spark, against $890 a month for HubSpot Marketing Hub Professional at the same contact count — before the $3,000 first-year onboarding fee. The comparison stops being fair the moment you are also using Sales Hub and Service Hub, because Bluey does not do those things.
It has a built-in CRM with contacts, deal pipeline, event history and customer lifetime value, included in the plan. It is a marketing-led CRM, not a sales platform: there is no quote builder, no sales sequences product, no forecasting. If your sales team needs to live in the CRM daily, HubSpot's is deeper.
HubSpot distinguishes marketing contacts — the ones you can email — from stored contacts. You are billed on the marketing contacts, and crossing a tier boundary raises the bill automatically. Teams often manage this by regularly demoting contacts to non-marketing status, which is administrative work created purely by the pricing model.
Not automatically — no two platforms model branching identically, so workflows are rebuilt rather than imported. In practice most teams find that two or three flows are doing nearly all the work, and rebuilding those is an afternoon. Contacts, properties and lists do import cleanly.
Only as a paid add-on, and it is not the product's focus. Most HubSpot customers run a separate transactional provider alongside it. Bluey sends both from one account, which removes a subscription and a second sending reputation to manage.
Pricing verified 4 September 2026 against each provider’s public pricing page. Bluey figures use the Grow plan (send-based). Competitor tiers shift at least quarterly; figures marked “~” are interpolated between published tiers.
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