HubSpot vs monday : Which CRM for startups wins?

Early-stage startups often find that success hinges not just on their product, but on their ability to manage relationships and follow-ups effectively. Without a structured approach, vital interactions can become lost in the chaos of inboxes, spreadsheets, and team messaging. A CRM for startups consolidates everything into one view, ensuring that every interaction, next step, and responsible team member remains clear and accessible.

In this article, we’ll explore two prominent CRM solutions—HubSpot and monday.com—each offering distinct methodologies for managing sales processes. HubSpot provides an extensive suite that emphasizes automation, integration with marketing efforts, and advanced reporting features. On the other hand, monday.com focuses on a streamlined, work management approach that enhances team collaboration and simplifies pipeline tracking.

We will dissect how these platforms differ in day-to-day functionalities including contact management, pipeline hygiene, automation capabilities, reporting clarity, and overall cost as your team scales.

Wat is HubSpot?

HubSpot is an all-in-one go-to-market platform that integrates CRM, marketing automation, sales tools, and customer service. It's ideal for startups seeking a single system to oversee the entire funnel, from acquisition to retention, with robust segmentation and reporting capabilities. The CRM is easy to get started with and can evolve into advanced workflows and attribution as your needs expand. It's widely used in the US and seamlessly integrates with most modern SaaS tools, although costs can rise quickly when utilizing multiple hubs and higher tiers.

What is monday.com?

monday Sales CRM is tailored for teams already operating within the monday.com ecosystem. It's particularly suited for startups aiming to manage leads, deals, and post-sale processes within a unified work management platform. Its strengths lie in enhancing visibility and collaboration across tasks, pipelines, and inter-team handoffs. It can be configured swiftly and supplemented with automations to minimize manual updates. While it's a great match for operationally-driven teams, comprehensive CRM analytics and complex data models might necessitate additional tools.

Feature comparison of HubSpot and monday

E-mail en agenda synchroniseren

HubSpot seamlessly connects Gmail or Office 365 inboxes via the HubSpot Sales integration, enabling email logging directly from the inbox along with tracking for opens and clicks. Calendar sync is compatible with both Google Calendar and Outlook Calendar, allowing meetings created in the calendar to appear on the relevant record timeline when the invited contact is in the CRM. Additionally, meetings can be scheduled within HubSpot and synced to the connected calendar. This results in a unified activity history for both emails and meetings, maintained with minimal manual logging.

monday Sales CRM integrates email and calendar activities through dedicated connections, ensuring that communication remains visible on the record timeline. The Outlook integration connects emails and calendar events to monday, facilitating email-driven workflows from a board view. Meanwhile, the Google Calendar integration syncs calendar activities into the CRM timeline, centralizing meetings and touchpoints. This creates a single hub for reviewing recent conversations and upcoming events, perfect for teams seeking CRM context within a work management framework.

Contactgegevens opschonen met verrijking en ontdubbeling

HubSpot offers built-in data enrichment that automatically populates company and contact details, minimizing incomplete records and the need for manual research. Its enrichment features, along with buyer intent functionalities, operate on a credits system where HubSpot Credits are required for accessing certain premium data capabilities. Duplicate management identifies potential duplicates, enabling users to review and merge records, thus maintaining a clean database. This process minimizes fragmented activity histories across multiple contact entries, leading to improved segmentation, routing, reporting, and automation reliability.

monday provides a streamlined merge flow for handling duplicates, allowing users to consolidate items without losing update history. Duplicate entries can be merged into a single retained item, while the duplicates themselves are archived, ensuring their updates are preserved. This method is particularly beneficial for startups that frequently import data from various sources. Data enrichment typically stems from the tech stack, whereas monday emphasizes structured fields and data hygiene.

Flexibele pijplijnen en weergaven

HubSpot enhances collaboration within each record by integrating activities like notes, tasks, calls, emails, and meetings. You can create tasks directly from a record as part of an activity workflow, ensuring that next steps are clear and assigned. Mentions in activities or comments notify teammates, facilitating quick handoffs while maintaining context. Activity association settings determine which linked records share the same activity history, ensuring consistent visibility across contacts, companies, deals, and tickets. This configuration promotes cross-team alignment as volume grows.

monday Sales CRM manages pipelines through a Deals board designed for stage-based tracking. Its Kanban pipeline view allows for easy drag-and-drop movement between stages, making deal status straightforward to interpret. Stages and columns can be customized to fit a startup's sales approach without extensive configuration. Filtering and views effectively differentiate between inbound, outbound, renewals, or partner motions, keeping the setup operational and focused on execution.

Team samenwerking

HubSpot fosters collaboration within each record by integrating activities such as notes, tasks, calls, emails, and meetings. You can create tasks directly from a record as part of an activity workflow, ensuring that next steps are visible and assigned. Mentions within activities or comments notify teammates, facilitating quick handoffs while preserving context. Activity association settings determine which linked records share the same activity history, enhancing visibility across contacts, companies, deals, and tickets. This arrangement supports cross-team alignment, especially as workload increases.

monday is designed with collaboration in mind, ensuring that CRM work remains visible across teams without the need to switch tools. Records allow for updates and threaded discussions directly tied to specific items, keeping context close to the deal or account. Clear accountability is established through ownership, assignments, and status columns during handoffs. Views can be shared to align sales, success, and operations on the same pipeline reality, while permissions and board structures keep collaboration organized as the team expands.

Lichtgewicht automatisering en integraties

HubSpot facilitates automation via workflows that span marketing, sales, and service processes, featuring a visual builder for triggers and actions. The platform seamlessly connects to external tools through Zapier triggers and actions for contacts, companies, deals, and custom objects. For those seeking greater control, HubSpot offers developer APIs to create custom integrations and data synchronization logic. This approach enables lightweight automations from the outset, followed by more sophisticated orchestration as your stack develops. Centralized governance is maintained through CRM settings and automation controls.

monday streamlines automation with built-in recipes that trigger actions based on status changes, deadlines, or item stage transitions. Integrations are enhanced through connectors and no-code workflows, including Zapier connections for popular startup stacks. For more advanced requirements, monday provides a GraphQL API to programmatically read and write data. This flexibility allows users to begin with lightweight automation and scale workflows as processes evolve, all while ensuring that automation remains manageable through clear board logic.

folk CRM: The Best CRM for Startups in 2026

folk is a contemporary CRM designed for startups that manage relationships across platforms like Gmail, Google Calendar, LinkedIn, and spreadsheets. It consolidates contacts, companies, deals, notes, files, and every interaction into a single lightweight workspace, ensuring that pipeline context is linked to genuine conversations rather than scattered across multiple tabs.

Top features startups find most valuable in folk

• Seamless Gmail and Google Calendar sync for an automatic activity timeline
• Contact capture ready for LinkedIn via a Chrome extension
• Contact enrichment to quickly fill in missing data
• Deduplication to maintain a clean database as it expands
• Custom pipelines and fields tailored to any go-to-market strategy

For startups, folk excels in speed-to-value and daily usability. Setup is rapid, workflows remain adaptable, and multichannel context is easily accessible without burdening the CRM with excess complexity. This leads to more consistent follow-ups, cleaner data, and enhanced revenue visibility with less friction.

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Conclusie

In summary, HubSpot is ideal for startups that seek a comprehensive go-to-market platform with extensive automation and reporting, albeit at a potentially higher cost. monday.com excels in enhancing team collaboration and managing sales processes within a unified work management framework, though it may require additional tools for advanced analytics. For teams that prioritize email integration, automation, and sequencing, folk emerges as the superior choice, offering a streamlined solution that consolidates multichannel interactions and maintains a clean database for efficient follow-ups.

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