HubSpot migration
HubSpot migration services for B2B revenue teams
We move B2B revenue teams into HubSpot, out of HubSpot, and will tell you when the answer is neither. Independent, based in Berlin, working across Europe. We are not a HubSpot Solutions Partner and take no share of your subscription, which is the reason that third answer stays on the table.
The short version
- The data move is the small part. The decisions about your data model, your activity history, and what you deliberately leave behind are the work.
- Three things reliably do not survive a lift and shift: logged activity, the full web of record associations, and Salesforce campaign attribution history.
- Year one costs more than the subscription. HubSpot requires a one-time onboarding fee on Professional and Enterprise tiers, from 1,500 to 7,000 USD depending on hub and tier.
- Almost every agency ranking for this search is a HubSpot Solutions Partner earning 20% of your subscription for up to three years. That is not disqualifying, but you should know it before you ask them whether to migrate.
Are you migrating, or still deciding?
Most people who reach us on HubSpot questions are still deciding, and we can show that rather than assert it. Across our own Google Search Console data for 1 June to 29 August 2026, 135 of the queries that put a Ziel Lab page in front of someone contained the word HubSpot, for 4,421 impressions. Roughly 92% of those impressions, 4,046 of them, were on comparison or ranking questions: which CRM is better, how does one stack up against another, what do users say. Three impressions, across three queries, were phrased as a migration question.
That split is our own classification of the query text rather than a published taxonomy, so treat the exact percentage as indicative. The shape of it is not in doubt: on the evidence of our own search data, the question people arrive with is almost never how to move the records. It is whether the move is the right call at all.
If you are at the deciding stage, the comparison work is already written and free: HubSpot vs Attio, the honest 2026 comparison, the HubSpot and Salesforce comparison, and, if the answer turns out to be Attio, our Attio consulting page.
What we do
Migration into HubSpot
From Salesforce, Pipedrive, Attio, a spreadsheet, or a custom system. Object mapping, import sequencing that keeps associations intact, an explicit decision on activity history, and a cutover plan that does not leave the team without a CRM.
Migration off HubSpot
The same job in reverse, and harder, because logged activity leaves HubSpot through the API rather than the export button. We take this direction as readily as the other one, which is part of why we can be honest about the first one.
HubSpot audit
A read of the portal as it stands: properties nobody fills, workflows that fight each other, lifecycle logic that does not match how you sell, reporting that cannot be trusted. Output is a prioritised list with the reasoning attached, not a score out of 100.
Fractional HubSpot admin
For teams that need senior HubSpot judgement a few days a month rather than a full-time hire. Property governance, workflow changes, data hygiene, and the reporting the leadership team actually reads.
Clay, n8n, and AI wiring
Enrichment, routing, and automation around the CRM rather than inside it. This is the stack we run our own revenue operation on, so the recommendations come from daily use.
Why we are not a HubSpot partner
Search for HubSpot migration services and nearly every result is a HubSpot Solutions Partner. That is worth understanding rather than holding against them, because the economics are public.
Under HubSpot's published Solutions Partner Program terms, a partner earns a 20% share of the subscription revenue on the product lines it sells, accrued monthly, paid quarterly, for up to three years while the customer keeps paying. From 15 July 2026 the program also charges partners a membership fee of USD 400 per month, renewed annually, and sorts them into five tiers whose standing depends on sold and managed recurring revenue.
None of that makes partner advice wrong. Plenty of partners do excellent work, and for a large Marketing Hub build the accreditation genuinely matters. It does mean that the question "should we migrate to HubSpot at all" is being answered by someone whose income depends on the answer for the next three years, and whose tier depends on it too. We sit outside the program. We are paid by the client, once, for the work, which is what lets us write the paragraph below.
When we say do not migrate
When the problem is process rather than platform. A CRM nobody updates does not get fixed by a different CRM nobody updates. If the audit finds that your pipeline stages do not match how you sell, that routing is manual, and that reporting is untrusted, that is six weeks of work inside your current system and no migration risk at all. We would rather sell you that.
What actually transfers, and what does not
This is the table we wish every migration quote came with. Sources for each row are listed at the bottom of the page.
| Data | Standard import | What that means |
|---|---|---|
| Contacts, companies, deals | Transfers | The standard import handles the core records. Duplicates are the main risk, usually from years of small variations in how a company name was typed. |
| Record associations | Partly | The import maps some relationships but is not built for the full web of contact, company, deal, and note links. Notes commonly land detached from the record they belonged to. |
| Logged activity: calls, emails, meetings, notes, tasks | Does not transfer | HubSpot stores these as engagements on a separate timeline. They are not covered by the standard interface export and have to move through the API. |
| Salesforce campaign membership and attribution history | Does not transfer | A campaign member record is a relationship, and a direct import does not preserve it in a form HubSpot's attribution reporting can use. This is usually discovered six weeks later, by the person who owns the pipeline report. |
| Custom Apex, validation rules, heavy custom objects | Does not transfer | These are a rebuild, not a transfer. Anyone quoting a fixed price before seeing the org has not looked at it. |
The recurring failure in the write-ups from teams who have done this is not a technical one. It is the lift and shift: importing every object, field, workflow, and report from the old system, so the accumulated complexity arrives intact and the new platform is harder to use than the one you left. A migration is a system redesign with a data move inside it. The decisions about what not to bring are the valuable part.
What HubSpot costs in year one
The subscription is the number on the quote. The one that surprises people is the onboarding fee, which HubSpot requires on Professional and Enterprise tiers as a one-time charge in year one: 1,500 USD for Sales or Service Hub Professional, 3,000 USD for Marketing Hub Professional, 3,500 USD for Sales or Service Enterprise, and 7,000 USD for Marketing Enterprise. Where an accredited partner delivers onboarding instead, HubSpot's own fee is typically waived and you pay the partner, so the cost moves rather than disappears.
We do not publish our rates on this page. What we can say about the shape: engagements are scoped and bought in blocks against a written plan, with no retainer and nothing built before it is scoped. The full cost breakdown of HubSpot itself, including seats, contact tiers, and AI credits, is in our HubSpot pricing breakdown.
How the engagement works
Audit and plan
We read the current system before proposing anything. Output is the migration plan itself: what moves, what gets rebuilt, what gets left behind, and in what order. The plan is yours either way, whether your team executes it or we do.
Build and move in blocks
Data model first, then a test import, then reconciliation against record counts you agreed in advance, then cutover with the old system read-only. Bought in defined blocks against the plan.
Land it, then leave
The weeks after go-live decide whether a migration worked. Adoption checks, a named contact for questions, a dated decommission for the old system, documentation, and handover. We measure success by how quickly you stop needing us.
The longer form of phase one, written for teams doing it themselves, is our CRM migration strategy cheat sheet, and the build-side detail is in the HubSpot implementation guide.
Questions we get asked
How long does a HubSpot migration take?
It depends on the source system and on how much of it you decide to bring, and any range quoted before someone has looked at your data is a guess. What we can say is where the time goes: a spreadsheet or a lightweight CRM is mostly cleanup, while a Salesforce org with years of custom logic is a rebuild whose length is set by how many of those customisations are still load bearing. The audit exists to answer this question with your data rather than an average.
Can we keep our activity history?
Usually yes, but not through the import screen. HubSpot holds logged calls, emails, meetings, notes, and tasks as engagements on a timeline that the standard interface export does not cover, so moving them in either direction is an API job. The real question is how much of it you need. Full history for the last 18 months plus a searchable archive is often a better trade than paying to move a decade of it.
Do you also move teams off HubSpot?
Yes, and we treat it as the same service rather than a lesser one. It is the harder direction, for the export reasons above. We run our own revenue operation on Attio wired to Clay, n8n, and Claude, so the destination side of that move is a system we use daily rather than one we read about.
What is a HubSpot audit, exactly?
A structured read of the portal against how you actually sell: properties and who fills them, workflows and whether any two contradict each other, lifecycle and deal stage logic, routing, data quality, and whether the reports leadership uses can be trusted. You get a prioritised list with the reasoning attached and an estimate of effort per item. It stands alone. It is not a lead magnet for a migration.
Where these numbers come from
Every external figure on this page and where it originates, so you can check it rather than trust us.
- 20% revenue share, up to three years, accrued monthly and paid quarterly; USD 400 per month membership and five tiers from 15 July 2026: HubSpot's published Solutions Partner Program policies, partner commissions FAQ, and its 2026 entry and tiers policy (hubspot.com/partners/solutions-program-policies, hubspot.com/partner-commissions-faq, hubspot.com/2026-entry-and-tiers-policy-for-hubspot-solutions-partners).
- Onboarding fees of 1,500, 3,000, 3,500 and 7,000 USD: HubSpot's published pricing, as compiled in our own HubSpot pricing breakdown and corroborated across independent 2026 pricing reviews from Avidly (avidlyagency.com/blog/hubspot-onboarding-fees-2026) and Encharge (encharge.io/hubspot-pricing).
- Engagements are outside the standard export and require the API; the standard import does not carry the full association web: HubSpot's own developer documentation on the engagements API and its community answers on exporting engagements, plus practitioner write-ups from Computan (computan.com/blog/how-to-migrate-capsule-crm-to-hubspot-without-losing-record-associations) and Rework (resources.rework.com/guides/data-migration/exporting-from-hubspot).
- Campaign attribution history does not survive a direct import, and custom Apex and validation rules are a rebuild: The Pedowitz Group (pedowitzgroup.com/blog/migration-failures-blog) and Aptitude 8 (aptitude8.com/blog/when-salesforce-hubspot-migration-gets-complex).
- Lift and shift as the dominant failure mode: Huble (huble.com/blog/salesforce-to-hubspot) and the Pedowitz Group write-up above, which agree on it independently.
- Nearly every agency ranking for this search being a HubSpot partner: the published 2026 roundups of HubSpot migration agencies, which select on partner tier and accreditation and name OneMetric, Aptitude 8, SmartBug, RevPartners, New Breed, Denamico, Instrumental Group, Huble and SyncMatters (onemetric.io/blog/best-hubspot-migration-agencies, blendb2b.com/resources/top-10-hubspot-cms-migration-agencies).
- The 4,421 impressions, 135 queries and 92% comparison split: our own Google Search Console property for ziellab.com, 1 June to 29 August 2026. The comparison versus migration classification is ours, applied to the query text, not a published taxonomy.
One limitation worth stating plainly: hubspot.com is not reachable from the environment this page was written in. The HubSpot figures above were established from multiple independent sources that agree with each other and are attributed to HubSpot as the organisation that publishes them. Anything we could not corroborate that way was left off the page rather than softened.
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