Most HubSpot migration guides are written by HubSpot partners who bill you to migrate in. This one is written to get you out. In fourteen days. With a free white-glove option that Close's team is running as part of the current HubSpot alternative campaign, and a full DIY playbook for teams who would rather do it themselves.
The reason fourteen days is realistic and not marketing math: Close's native HubSpot to Close integration already does most of the heavy lifting for you. Leads, Contacts, Opportunities, Calls, Emails, and Tasks sync automatically, in real time, both directions. What is left is the human work no integration can do for you: cleaning your data, mapping your custom fields, deciding what to leave behind, and cutting the cord on the day you switch.
This post walks you through both paths. If you take the white-glove path, Close's migration team handles days three through nine and you review. If you take the DIY path, you follow the same fourteen-day schedule and do the work yourself with the toolkit below. Either way, day fifteen is your first full day selling in Close.
Free HubSpot to Close migration (through 2026)
Close is currently running free white-glove migrations for teams moving off HubSpot Sales Hub. That includes CSV export, field mapping, historical email and call import, custom object translation, and pipeline reconstruction. You spend the fourteen days doing discovery and QA. Close does the migration work. See the offer and book a scoping call.
Why sales teams are migrating off HubSpot in 2026
Before the plan, the diagnosis. If your reasons for leaving HubSpot are not on this list, the migration is probably premature and you should stay. If two or more of these are true, the fourteen days will pay for themselves.
- The Starter to Professional pricing cliff has broken your budget. HubSpot's Sales Hub Starter is fifteen to twenty dollars per seat per month. The jump to Sales Hub Professional is roughly ninety dollars per seat per month plus a mandatory fifteen-hundred-dollar onboarding fee, per HubSpot's own pricing page. Enterprise adds another jump plus a thirty-five-hundred-dollar onboarding fee. A team on the Starter plan hitting the Pro upgrade wall is the single most common reason people book a Close scoping call. One small-business owner in a 2025 r/HubSpot thread described being quoted seventeen-thousand-five-hundred dollars per year to move up from their two-hundred-fifty-dollar Starter plan. That is not a typo. That is the cliff, and the same thread is still climbing in engagement in 2026.
- You pay per marketing contact and it is compounding. Marketing Hub bills by contact tier on top of your seats. Pro starts at eight-hundred-ninety dollars a month, Enterprise at thirty-six-hundred, and every list clean-up buys you three months and then you are back where you started. If your sales team does not actually use the marketing side, you are paying twice for one CRM.
- Breeze AI moved to outcome-based pricing and the bill is unpredictable. As of April 2026, HubSpot's AI features charge fifty cents per resolved conversation and one dollar per recommended lead, on top of your seat cost, and they are gated to Pro and above. Teams that switched on Breeze for a pilot and got a surprise line item are a real cohort we hear from every week.
- HubSpot bought Warmly and you are worried about lock-in. On June 30, 2026, HubSpot signed a definitive agreement to acquire Warmly, the person-level website intent platform. Warmly's team has said contracts and integrations are unchanged for now, but the public roadmap is convergence into HubSpot's Smart CRM. If you run Salesforce or Close, that is a signal to plan for a walled garden.
- Your reps live in Sales Hub and it is slow. This is the quiet reason. Sales reps do not file support tickets that say the CRM is slow. They just stop logging activity. If your team has drifted back to spreadsheets and personal inboxes for the real pipeline work, HubSpot is failing at its job whether it is priced right or not.
For a full side-by-side, we keep a running Close versus HubSpot comparison with feature parity and pricing. This post assumes you have already decided. If you have not, start there.
What the HubSpot to Close integration handles for you
The single reason a fourteen-day plan works is that Close ships a free, native HubSpot to Close syncing integration. It is bidirectional and it runs in real time. Here is the honest map of what it syncs and what it does not, straight from Close's help documentation.
What the integration does not sync (plan around these on day 8):
- SMS messages. Close has native SMS, HubSpot does not. If HubSpot is holding your SMS logs somewhere, they will not carry over.
- Meetings. HubSpot's meeting object has no direct Close equivalent. You will rebuild booking links inside Close's calendaring.
- Notes. The integration does not sync free-text notes on records. Export them separately as CSV on day 5.
- Custom Objects and Custom Activities. If your ops team built these in HubSpot, they need CSV translation into Close custom fields on day 6.
- Historical email conversations. New emails sync going forward. If you need years of history in Close, request the historical email import as part of the free migration.
The other quiet gotcha is field shape. HubSpot uses First Name and Last Name as separate fields. Close uses one Contact Name field. Phone number labels also do not map cleanly, because Close supports many labels and HubSpot only ships Phone, Mobile, and Fax. Neither is a blocker. Both need a decision on day 4. If you take the free migration, Close's team makes the recommendation and you approve.
The 14-day HubSpot to Close migration plan
Three weeks broken into three phases. Week one is discovery and cleanup. Week two is setup and dry-run. Weekend two is cutover. Every day is one clear deliverable a single owner completes in half a day or less. If you take the white-glove path, Close's team owns days 3, 5, 6, 7, and 9. You still do the rest, because nobody at Close knows your pipeline shape better than you do.
Week 1 (days 1 to 5): Discovery and clean-up
Day 1: Name the migration owner and the freeze date.One person owns this migration. Ideally a RevOps lead or a Head of Sales. Not the CEO, not the marketing team. Pick the day two weekends out as your HubSpot freeze date. On that day, HubSpot becomes read-only, Close becomes the system of record, and nobody writes to HubSpot anymore. Put it on the calendar today so reps see it coming. Book a free scoping call with Close's migration team if you have not already.
Day 2: Export the HubSpot state of the world.In HubSpot, export CSVs of Companies, Contacts, Deals, Products, Tasks, Notes, and any Custom Objects. Also export your pipeline stage definitions, deal properties, workflow definitions, and email templates. This is your inventory. Whatever is not in this export does not exist in your migration, so be thorough. HubSpot's export lives under Settings, Data Management, Import & Export. You do not need to clean anything yet. Just get the raw file.
Day 3: Decide what to leave behind.This is the day most migrations fail. You will not migrate every closed-lost deal from 2019. You will not migrate the seventeen custom properties nobody has used in eighteen months. Open the CSV and cut aggressively. A reasonable rule: migrate every open opportunity, every won opportunity from the last twenty-four months, every contact touched in the last twelve months, and nothing else. Everything older lives in a HubSpot read-only archive you keep for six months. On white-glove, Close's team gives you the recommendation and you approve.
Day 4: Map your custom fields and pipeline stages.Take your cleaned CSV and build a mapping document. For every HubSpot property, decide: is this a Close standard field, a Close custom field, or does it get dropped? Same for pipeline stages. Close's default pipeline is Prospect, Qualified, Demo, Proposal, Negotiation, Won, Lost. If your HubSpot pipeline has fifteen stages, this is your chance to compress. Reps close faster in fewer stages. Close's help center has guidance on setting up custom fields if you have not seen the model.
Day 5: Export your Notes and Meetings.The native integration does not carry notes and meetings, so this is a separate CSV job. In HubSpot, run a Notes export and a Meetings export, then use Close's Notes import support tool to attach them to the right leads once the integration finishes syncing. If you use HubSpot's meeting booking links, decide now whether reps will rebuild them in Close's calendaring or move to a dedicated scheduler. Do not skip this day. It is the difference between reps trusting the new CRM on day 15 and reps opening HubSpot in a private tab "just to check" six weeks later.
Week 2 (days 6 to 10): Setup and dry-run
Day 6: Spin up your Close account and pipeline shell.Start a free 14-day Close trial. Create the pipeline stages from your day-4 mapping. Add all your custom fields. Connect your team's email accounts. Turn on call recording. Set up your first Smart View for "my open opportunities." This is a two-hour job, not a two-day one. If it takes longer, you are overbuilding. Ship the minimum and iterate later.
Day 7: Turn on the HubSpot integration in test mode.Follow the official Close HubSpot integration setup guide. Start with a scoped test: sync a single pipeline or a single owner's book, not everything. Watch what shows up on the Close side. Confirm that Companies are becoming Leads correctly, Deals are becoming Opportunities in the right stage, and email history is threading onto the right contact. If field mapping is wrong, fix it now while the volume is small.
Day 8: Handle the objects the integration does not sync.Now use Close's Import from a CRM tool (powered by Import2) for anything the integration missed, and the support tools for Notes, Tasks, and Calls for the CSV-based objects. If you have Custom Objects, translate them into Close custom fields on the parent Lead or Opportunity record. On white-glove, this is where Close's team does the heavy lifting.
Day 9: Rebuild the workflows and templates.HubSpot workflows do not port over. This is intentional. Rebuild them from scratch as Close Workflows and Sequences, using your day-2 export as the reference. Start with the three you actually use: new-lead follow-up, no-response nurture, and post-demo. Ignore the twenty-nine dormant HubSpot workflows nobody touches. Rebuild email templates the same way. If you were using HubSpot's meeting scheduler, set up Close's scheduling links today.
Day 10: Dry-run with one rep for a full sales day.Pick your fastest, most opinionated rep. Give them Close for one full day of real selling. Have them call, email, log activity, book meetings, move opportunities. At end of day, do a retro: what was slower than HubSpot, what was faster, what was broken. Fix everything on the list before Monday. If you cannot fix it, decide whether to work around it or defer it. A dry run finds twice as many bugs as an all-hands training, so do this before you train the team.
Weekend and week 3 (days 11 to 14): Training and cutover
Day 11 (Monday): Train the team.One hour of live training. Not two. Record it. Cover the four things reps do every day: create a lead, log a call, send an email, move an opportunity. Skip the admin features. Skip the reporting layer. Reps do not need to see reports on day one. Send a written cheat sheet after the call. This is where eighty-seven percent of Close customers place calls or emails inside their first week starts, and it happens because training is short.
Day 12: Reps work in Close, HubSpot is read-only for new writes.This is soft cutover. Reps do all new work in Close. HubSpot stays live for reference but nobody writes to it. If a rep opens HubSpot to "check something," that is fine on day 12. It is not fine on day 20. The sync is still running both ways, so anything that accidentally lands in HubSpot will flow into Close. That is the safety net.
Day 13: QA the sync, verify reporting parity.Pull the same three reports out of both systems. Open opportunities by rep. Won deals last thirty days. Activity by rep last seven days. Numbers should match within tolerance for the accounts that have been touched since sync started. Where they do not match, dig in. This is the day you find the two custom fields that did not map, the one pipeline stage that got compressed too aggressively, and the seventeen closed-lost deals from 2020 that snuck in against your day-3 rule. Fix, verify, sign off.
Day 14: Full cutover. Turn HubSpot to read-only.Everyone works in Close only. HubSpot becomes read-only in the admin panel. Do not cancel your HubSpot contract yet. Keep it live as a read-only archive for at least sixty days so you have a rollback path if anything is missing. Cancellation is a day 75 decision. On day 14, all you do is flip the switch and celebrate. First real sales day in Close is day 15.
Which path to take: DIY or free white-glove
Same fourteen-day schedule, two very different levels of effort. Here is the honest split.
Rule of thumb: if you can name your RevOps lead in one breath and your database is under five-thousand records, take the DIY path. It builds muscle in the new tool. Everyone else should take the free white-glove. It is included in the current HubSpot alternative offer, so there is no reason to leave it on the table.
You might recognize yourself in this migration
The scenario below is a composite drawn from migration patterns we see on scoping calls, not one specific named customer. For named customer stories across other CRM migrations, browse the Close customer library.
Picture a mid-market B2B SaaS team. Around a dozen outbound reps. Tens of thousands of contacts in HubSpot, a few thousand open opportunities, a couple of years of email history. Sales Hub Professional on a two-year contract that is about to renew, and the quote to move up to Enterprise has just landed on the CFO's desk. The Head of Sales likes HubSpot. The CFO does not like the renewal number. RevOps is stuck in the middle. Sound familiar?
Here is how the fourteen days tend to play out for a team in that position. Week one is a fight about scope. The RevOps lead wants to migrate a clean subset. The Head of Sales wants everything. They compromise on the sensible cut: every open opportunity, every won deal from the last twenty-four months, every contact touched in the last twelve months, and nothing else. The custom-property list gets audited and roughly half of them survive. The pipeline compresses from too-many stages down to something a rep can actually forecast against.
Week two is the surprise. Close's team handles the historical email import and the custom-object translation, so RevOps mostly does QA. The dry-run on day ten catches a mapping mistake nobody would have noticed for weeks. The Head of Sales, still skeptical, watches one rep run a full day of calls in Close on day ten and gets quiet.
Cutover happens on a Friday. Reps do their first full day in Close on Monday. By end of week three, activity is meaningfully up over the HubSpot baseline, not because anyone is working harder, but because the built-in calling and email in Close removes the tab-switching that had been quietly eating time all day. The Head of Sales sends a note to the team that reads, roughly: I was wrong, we are not going back.
Total sunk cost of the migration: roughly one work-week of team time spread across the fortnight, and zero migration fees. First-year savings versus renewing at HubSpot Enterprise are material enough that the CFO stops asking about the renewal number and starts asking why nobody suggested this last year. If this scenario reads like your team, the fourteen-day plan above is the one to use.
"Switching from Salesforce to Close has saved us over $100,000 in tech costs. We're doing things we never thought possible in a CRM."
Zac Muir, VP Revenue, Sisu. Source
TL;DR
Ready to start?
Book your free scoping call. Close's team will scope the migration, quote the timeline, and start on your day 3. Or, start a free 14-day Close trial (no credit card). Bookmark this post. Day 1 is the day you name the owner.
Not ready yet? Compare Close pricing against your current HubSpot bill first, then read our Close versus HubSpot deep-dive.
