HubSpot vs Copper: Which CRM for startups wins?

Early-stage startups often struggle with managing customer relationships effectively, leading to missed opportunities and lost deals. The challenge lies in coordinating follow-ups that tend to get lost in a sea of inboxes, spreadsheets, and communications on platforms like Slack. A CRM for startups addresses this issue by providing a clear view of every interaction, next step, and assigned owner—ensuring nothing slips through the cracks.

In this article, we’ll explore two prominent CRM solutions: HubSpot and Copper. HubSpot offers a comprehensive suite that emphasizes deep automation, marketing alignment, and robust reporting, making it an ideal choice for those seeking an all-in-one platform. Conversely, Copper provides a streamlined, sales-first approach, especially suited for teams that favor a lightweight pipeline and a quick setup without sacrificing the essence of relationship management.

This comparison will delve into the daily operational differences between the two systems, examining aspects like contact capture efficiency, pipeline integrity, automation capabilities, reporting clarity, and overall cost as your team scales.

O que é o HubSpot?

HubSpot is a comprehensive go-to-market platform that integrates CRM, marketing automation, sales tools, and customer service. It's ideal for startups seeking a unified system to manage the entire funnel from acquisition to retention, featuring robust segmentation and reporting capabilities. The CRM is user-friendly at the outset and can scale into more sophisticated workflows and attribution as your needs evolve. It's widely used in the US and offers integration with most contemporary SaaS tools. However, costs can escalate quickly as you transition into multiple hubs and higher tiers.

What is Copper?

Copper is a straightforward CRM that works particularly well for teams utilizing Google Workspace. It caters to service businesses and startups seeking lightweight pipeline tracking and contact management with minimal friction. The product prioritizes user-friendliness and quick adoption over extensive customization. It serves as a strong choice when relationship tracking is more crucial than complex automation. However, larger teams may find it limiting if they require advanced workflows, forecasting, or multi-object reporting.

Feature comparison of HubSpot and Copper

Email and Calendar Sync

HubSpot seamlessly integrates Gmail or Office 365 inboxes through its Sales integration, allowing emails to be logged directly from the inbox while tracking opens and clicks. Calendar sync is compatible with both Google Calendar and Outlook Calendar, ensuring that meetings created in these calendars appear on the relevant record timeline when the invited contact exists in the CRM. You can also schedule meetings directly from HubSpot, which then sync to the connected calendar. This functionality results in a comprehensive activity history for both emails and meetings, kept up-to-date with minimal manual input.

Copper is specifically designed to integrate effortlessly with Google Workspace, allowing email and calendar activities to remain linked to the appropriate people and companies with minimal setup. It supports Gmail and Google Calendar, making it an ideal choice for startups that operate primarily from their inboxes. Activity history is readily accessible on records, minimizing the need for manual logging and ensuring context remains consistent during handoffs. This solution is particularly suited for teams seeking a lightweight, familiar CRM experience.

Clean Contact Data with Enrichment and Deduplication

HubSpot offers built-in data enrichment that enhances company and contact details, minimizing incomplete records and the need for manual research. This enrichment, along with buyer intent features, operates on a credits model, utilizing HubSpot Credits for specific premium data features. Duplicate management identifies suggested duplicates and facilitates the review and merging of records, ensuring databases remain organized. This approach reduces fragmented activity history across multiple contact entries, leading to improved segmentation, routing, reporting, and automation reliability.

Copper provides essential tools for maintaining data integrity as lists expand, including duplicate detection and merging capabilities for both contacts and companies. This functionality helps avoid split timelines when teams import leads from forms, events, or spreadsheets. Clean records enhance segmentation, routing, and follow-ups, minimizing confusion and proving particularly beneficial for small teams, where disorganized data can hinder adoption.

Flexible Pipelines and Views

HubSpot fosters collaboration within each record by integrating activities like notes, tasks, calls, emails, and meetings. Users can create tasks directly from a record as part of an activity workflow, ensuring that next steps remain visible and assigned. Mentions within activities or comments notify teammates, facilitating quick handoffs while preserving context. Activity association settings dictate 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 increases.

Copper offers customizable pipelines and stages for tracking deals, allowing teams to design a straightforward sales funnel and maintain momentum with clear next steps. Records remain connected to the individuals and companies involved in the deal, ensuring pipeline activity retains relationship context. This approach is ideal for startups that adopt a consultative sales strategy or manage partnerships without the burden of complex forecasting.

Team Collaboration

HubSpot enhances collaboration within each record by integrating activities like notes, tasks, calls, emails, and meetings. Tasks can be generated directly from a record as part of an activity workflow, ensuring that next steps remain clear 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, promoting consistent visibility across contacts, companies, deals, and tickets. This structure fosters cross-team alignment as workload increases.

Copper enhances team collaboration by providing shared visibility on records, tasks, and activity timelines. Clear ownership and assignments ensure accountability, while shared notes and history minimize dependence on separate threads. Permission settings regulate who can view or edit information as the team grows, enabling smooth handoffs without burdening processes.

Lightweight Automation and Integrations

HubSpot enables automation across marketing, sales, and service processes through workflows that feature a visual builder for triggers and actions. It seamlessly connects with external tools using Zapier triggers and actions for contacts, companies, deals, and custom objects. For more advanced requirements, HubSpot offers developer APIs, allowing the creation of custom integrations and data synchronization logic. This approach facilitates lightweight automations initially, with the potential for deeper orchestration as the technology stack matures, all while ensuring centralized governance through CRM settings and automation controls.

Copper similarly supports automation via workflow rules that trigger actions based on record changes, significantly minimizing the need for manual updates. It integrates effortlessly with Zapier, allowing startups to link Copper to forms, marketing tools, and internal workflows without the need for custom development. For those looking to dive deeper, Copper provides an API for crafting custom sync logic and data pipelines, making it easy to begin with simple automations and scale as the stack evolves.

folk CRM: The Best CRM for Startups in 2026

folk is a cutting-edge CRM specifically designed for startups that manage relationships through Gmail, Google Calendar, LinkedIn, and spreadsheets. It consolidates contacts, companies, deals, notes, files, and all interactions into a streamlined workspace, ensuring that pipeline context is linked to real conversations rather than being lost across multiple tabs.

Key features that startups love in folk

• Gmail and Google Calendar synchronization for an automatic activity timeline
• LinkedIn-compatible contact capture through a convenient Chrome extension
• Contact enrichment to swiftly fill in missing data
• Deduplication to maintain a clean database as your volume increases
• Customizable pipelines and fields to align with any go-to-market strategy

For startups, folk excels in delivering speed-to-value and encouraging daily usage. The setup is quick, workflows remain adaptable, and multichannel context is readily accessible without burdening the CRM with unnecessary complexity. This leads to more reliable follow-ups, cleaner data, and improved revenue visibility with reduced friction.

👉 Experimente o folk CRM gratuitamente

Conclusão

In summary, HubSpot excels with its all-in-one platform that offers deep automation and comprehensive reporting, ideal for startups seeking extensive marketing alignment. Copper provides a streamlined experience for Google Workspace users, focusing on lightweight pipeline management and ease of use. However, for teams that prioritize email integration, automation, and contextual follow-ups, folk emerges as the superior choice. Its seamless synchronization with Gmail and Google Calendar, coupled with customizable workflows, ensures effective relationship management without the complexity.

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