Honest comparison · prices checked July 2026
Every CRM makes the same quiet demand: someone has to feed it. HubSpot softens that with inbox logging and AI assists, and rewards big teams with a marketing suite nothing else matches. But for a small business, the update you were supposed to log already exists — it was the email. BLAM8 reads it, answers it, books the job in it, and files the contact, the deal and the promise without anyone typing a thing.
And the free tier is a genuinely good starting point. None of that is what BLAM8 does.
Flat £99/month, no seats, no onboarding fee, no data-entry discipline required.
HubSpot prices from hubspot.com/pricing (USD; UK partner-listed GBP where noted) — checked July 2026. HubSpot bills per seat plus marketing contacts; BLAM8 bills per business.
| HubSpot | BLAM8 | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | A 7-hub customer platform — CRM plus marketing, sales, service, content, operations and commerce | An AI agent on your mailbox that answers customers, books jobs — and fills in its CRM as a by-product |
| How the CRM gets filled | Connected inbox logs your sent emails and replies, auto-creates contacts, extracts basics (name, phone); deals, notes and next steps are logged by your team | By itself — contacts, companies, deals and tracked promises captured from the conversation the agent is already handling |
| Answering customer email | Breeze Customer Agent resolves enquiries from a knowledge base — on Professional-tier hubs, metered at ~$0.50 per resolved conversation; on Free/Starter, AI is an on-demand copilot | Core product from £39/mo: every inbound email drafted in your voice from your own knowledge, approval-first, full-auto when you're ready |
| Booking | Meetings = a booking-link scheduler (customer self-serves against a rep's calendar); round-robin pages at Sales Pro+ | Booked from the email thread against your live diary, with holds that can't double-book; rate-card quotes and job tracking on the OS modules |
| Where automation lives | Professional: real workflows, sequences, lead routing, custom reports — the famous Starter→Pro cliff | Included: the agent, scheduling, chasing and the self-filling CRM are the product, not an upsell tier |
| Pricing | Free (2 users, 1,000 contacts for new accounts) · Starter ~$20/seat/mo (~£18) + $50/mo per extra 1,000 marketing contacts · Professional platform from ~$1,300/mo (6 seats) or ~$100/seat per hub, plus mandatory onboarding ~$1,500–$3,000 · Breeze agents on credits | Email £39/mo · Core £99/mo — CRM, Scheduling, 750 emails, no seats · Core + your OS £248/mo (Transport £298) · no onboarding fees |
A new customer writes: "Hi — Sarah from Fenwick Interiors. Could you do our two offices monthly? What would that run us, and could you start next week?"
If your inbox is connected, Sarah becomes a contact and the thread logs to her record — genuinely useful. But the reply is yours to write, the price is yours to look up, the deal is yours to create, the follow-up is yours to remember (or to automate, once you're on Professional). The CRM knows the conversation happened; it didn't do any of it.
The reply is drafted with your actual monthly rate for two sites and offers a start date the diary can honour. Sarah, Fenwick Interiors, the deal and the "start next week" promise are already on the record — created from the thread, not typed. If she goes quiet, the agent chases. You approved one draft; the CRM wrote itself.
It does — a connected inbox logs sent mail and replies, auto-creates contacts and extracts basic fields. Logging is not the same as doing: the answering, quoting, booking, deal creation and follow-up remain human work (or Professional-tier workflow building). BLAM8's CRM records what its agent already did.
On HubSpot Starter: ~$60/month for 3 seats — until you need workflows, sequences or routing, at which point Professional means roughly $1,300/month (or ~$100/seat per hub) plus a $1,500–$3,000 one-time onboarding fee, plus marketing-contact charges. BLAM8 is £99/month flat with the automation included, because the automation is the product.
There's no integration today, and for most small businesses running both CRMs would be double bookkeeping. The realistic split: if marketing campaigns are central, HubSpot; if the customer inbox and the diary are central, BLAM8. Growing into both later is a good problem.
No — and it doesn't try to be. No custom report builder, forecasting suite or 1,500-app marketplace. It holds what a small business actually loses sleep over: who asked for what, what was promised, what it's worth and what happens next — kept current automatically because the same agent is living in the conversation.
Free 14-day pilot, no card. Connect the mailbox and watch the contacts, deals and promises appear on their own.
HubSpot is a trademark of HubSpot, Inc. BLAM8 is not affiliated with or endorsed by HubSpot. Competitor details and prices were checked against public sources in July 2026 (promotional and grandfathered pricing varies) and may have changed — see HubSpot's pricing page for current rates.
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