Though Pipedrive offers a free 14-day trial, it doesn't offer a free-forever plan, so if you have zero budget for your CRM, HubSpot is the best choice for you.
However, when it comes to accessing more features and upgrading to paid plans, the gap quickly widens between HubSpot and Pipedrive.
While HubSpot offers a much wider feature set, it also tends to be much more expensive than Pipedrive if you need more than the free plan.
Pipedrive pricing
Pipedrive's pricing is much more straightforward than HubSpot's, consisting of four core price plans.
The Essentials plan offers a useful starting point at $12.50/user/month, with customizable pipelines, contact and org management, deal management and more.
Pipedrive's workflow automation is gated behind the Advanced plan. Paying $24.90/user/month for this should be a worthwhile investment: it gives you access to all of Pipedrive's automation features excluding team management.
The Advanced plan also opens up contact data enrichment, email syncing, recurring revenue reports and a customizable catalog of your products to make selling easier.
For the most power from Pipedrive, you can opt for one of their top-level plans: either Professional for the full feature set, or Enterprise for custom onboarding and support on top of this.

HubSpot pricing
All HubSpot users start with the free CRM, which of course won't take up any of your budget - it really does does stay free forever.
This also offers some other compelling free features for marketing, sales and service teams:

However, you get even more value when you add paid Hubs to the mix. There are currently Sales, Marketing, Service and CMS Hubs, and each one offers a range of price points.
Sales Hub plans include:
- Starter (from $40/month, paid annually): organize your sales process with deal pipelines, simple automation, quotes, custom properties, reporting dashboards and more.
- Professional (from $400/month): manage your growing team with custom reporting, products, email sequences and more advanced features.
- Enterprise (from $1,200/month): advanced features to scale your marketing team such as recurring revenue tracking and predictive lead scoring.
With the Marketing Hub you can choose from:
- Starter (from $40/month): key functionality to capture, convert, understand and engage leads, from landing pages to list segmentation and email marketing.
- Professional (from $800/month): access marketing automation features, optimize conversion rates with calls-to-action and more, and measure traffic and conversions.
- Enterprise (from $3,200/month): advanced functionality to manage your teams and brands and analyze revenue with full control.
Service Hub includes:
- Starter (from $40/month): access ticketing, a conversations inbox, simple automation and more to start managing customer support.
- Professional (from $320/month): optimize customer experiences with a knowledge base, streamline ops with ticket routing and pipelines, and measure results on a custom dashboard.
- Enterprise (from $1200/month) enables advanced playbooks, goals, and scope to manage multiple teams and businesses.
And CMS Hub, the newest addition to HubSpot, offers everything you need to build and scale a powerful, optimized website that converts. This is offered at Professional (from $240/month) and Enterprise (from $900/month) levels.
With HubSpot, the key thing is to look at what your business needs now and what it will likely need in future. It's worth checking if these are both aligned with your budget.