Highrise vs HubSpot CRM (2026)

TL;DR

• Pick HubSpot CRM if you are choosing today — it is the only one you can sign up for, the free tier is genuinely usable, and paid starts at $20/seat/mo.
• Highrise is closed to new customers and frozen. Existing users can stay indefinitely, but they are on a product with no roadmap.

One of these you cannot buy

Start with the fact that settles the shortlist: Highrise stopped accepting new customers in August 2018. 37signals — the Basecamp company — chose to stop investing in it, and it has been in permanent maintenance mode since. The roughly 10,000+ businesses already on it keep their accounts, and 37signals has publicly committed to keeping them secure and online, a promise it has honored. But no features are being added, and none will be.

So this page is really two comparisons. For anyone shopping in 2026, HubSpot CRM wins by default because it is the only entrant. For an existing Highrise user weighing a move, the interesting question is whether HubSpot is the right landing spot — and the answer is less obvious than its market share suggests.

Opposite design philosophies

Highrise and HubSpot represent genuinely opposed views of what a CRM should be.

Highrise was built on 37signals' calm-software philosophy: do one thing, refuse scope, keep it learnable without training. It tracked contacts, companies, conversations, notes, and follow-up reminders. Users who still miss it miss the absence of everything else.

HubSpot is a growth platform. CRM is the free entry point into marketing automation, landing pages, forms, sequences, service ticketing, and CMS, with 1,500+ marketplace integrations and HubSpot Academy wrapped around it. The product is designed so that the more of it you adopt, the harder it is to leave — and its own well-documented churn reasons include feature bloat, with sales teams paying for marketing and ops modules they never touch.

If you are migrating off Highrise because your needs grew, that expansion path is the argument for HubSpot. If you are migrating only because Highrise is frozen and you still want a simple contact tracker, HubSpot will feel like a large answer to a small question, and Pipedrive or Attio are closer in spirit.

Cost: free is real, but the ladder is steep

The strongest practical case for HubSpot as a Highrise successor is the free tier, and it is not a token one: unlimited users, up to 1 million contacts, basic CRM, ticketing, and 2,000 marketing email sends per month. A Highrise-sized workload — a small team logging contacts and follow-ups — fits inside that comfortably, which means a migration can cost nothing at all.

The caveat is what happens next. HubSpot's own pattern is that most teams outgrow the free limits within 6 to 12 months, and the paid ladder is unforgiving: $20/seat/mo Starter, then a 5x jump to $100/seat/mo Professional with a one-time $1,500 onboarding fee, then $150/seat/mo Enterprise. Marketing Hub layers contact-tier pricing on top, roughly $150–$250/month per additional 5,000 contacts, which auto-escalates as your database grows and is the single most common source of mid-year bill shock.

Highrise users hold grandfathered rates that do not exist in the current market, so any move is a cost increase. HubSpot's free tier defers that increase better than most — it just does not eliminate it.

Risk of staying put

Staying on Highrise is not irresponsible. 37signals is profitable, independent, and has an unusually strong record of keeping promises to customers, so the "we'll keep it running" commitment is credible in a way most sunset announcements are not.

But a frozen CRM is a ceiling. No AI, no new integrations, no adaptation to future security or compliance expectations, and no vendor to escalate to when your process changes. Each additional year of accumulated contacts and history also makes the eventual migration heavier. The rational stance is: stay if nothing about your process is changing, move now if you can see it changing within two years.

Who should pick what

• Anyone evaluating a CRM in 2026 → HubSpot CRM (Highrise is unavailable).
• Highrise user with an unchanged, stable process → staying is defensible for now.
• Small team wanting a free, supported CRM immediately → HubSpot's free tier.
• Team that needs marketing automation alongside CRM → HubSpot.
• Team that loved Highrise specifically for its minimalism → neither; look at Pipedrive or Attio.
• Budget-sensitive team wary of contact-tier price escalation → not HubSpot; consider a flat-priced alternative.

Bottom line

Highrise is a discontinued product and HubSpot is the largest CRM platform in the SMB market, so on availability alone this is settled. For an existing Highrise user, HubSpot's free tier is the easiest possible landing — unlimited users, a million contacts, no cost — and if you genuinely want to grow into marketing and service tooling, it is the right destination. But be clear-eyed: HubSpot is the philosophical opposite of what Highrise was, the Starter-to-Professional cliff is steep, and contact-tier pricing escalates on its own schedule. If minimalism was the point, migrate somewhere smaller instead.