Every few months a consultant friend asks me the same question: “Should I get Pipedrive or HubSpot?” It’s the wrong question, but it’s wrong in an interesting way, so let’s answer it properly first.
Both are excellent products. Both are also built, from the pricing page down to the data model, for sales teams. When a one-person consultancy adopts one, you’re buying a team sport and playing it alone. Sometimes that’s fine. Often it’s why the CRM is abandoned by March.
Here’s the honest comparison, then the question I think you should be asking instead.
Pipedrive: the pipeline specialist
Pipedrive does one thing with total clarity: visual deal pipelines. Drag a deal from “Contacted” to “Proposal sent”, attach activities to each deal, and the system nags you when a deal has no next action scheduled. That last feature is genuinely well designed and more tools should copy it.
Where Pipedrive shines for a solo consultant:
- The kanban pipeline is the best in the business. If your engagements follow a repeatable sales process, it maps beautifully.
- Entry pricing is reasonable, and you only need one seat.
- It stays out of your way. Pipedrive doesn’t try to be your marketing department.
Where it strains:
- It’s deal-centric, not relationship-centric. A contact with no open deal is effectively invisible, and for a consultant, dormant relationships are next year’s revenue.
- Everything is manual. Deals move when you move them. Notes exist when you write them. The admin is light for a salesperson doing 40 deals a quarter; it’s disproportionate for a consultant doing 8 a year.
HubSpot: the platform play
HubSpot’s free CRM is famously generous: contacts, deals, email tracking, forms, at no cost. The model is land-and-expand, and the paid hubs (Marketing, Sales, Service) are where it gets expensive, sometimes startlingly so, as your usage grows.
Where HubSpot shines for a solo consultant:
- The free tier covers a solo practice’s basics for £0. That’s a real offer, not a trick.
- If you run content marketing alongside consulting (newsletters, landing pages, forms), having it in one place has genuine appeal.
- It grows with you. If you’re building an agency rather than a practice, you won’t outgrow it.
Where it strains:
- It’s a lot of software. The navigation assumes a revenue team; you’ll use a tenth of what’s on screen.
- The free tier is a front door, and the pricing jumps behind it are steep. Solo operators regularly report sticker shock at the first upgrade prompt.
- Like Pipedrive, it records what you tell it. The relationship intelligence you run on (what Dana said about her budget cycle, which client mentioned a reorg) lives in your head or your inbox, not in the CRM fields.
Side by side
| Pipedrive | HubSpot | |
|---|---|---|
| Best for | Process-driven deal tracking | All-in-one marketing + sales |
| Free tier | No (trial only) | Yes, genuinely useful |
| Pipeline UX | Excellent | Good |
| Weight for a solo user | Light-medium | Heavy |
| Relationship memory | Fields you fill in | Fields you fill in |
| Risk | Abandonment through admin | Cost creep, complexity |
The question behind the question
Here’s what I’ve noticed after years of running my own consultancy: when a solo consultant asks “Pipedrive or HubSpot?”, what they usually need isn’t a sales CRM at all. Their pipeline is 5 to 15 live conversations. What they’re struggling with is:
- remembering what was said and promised across dozens of relationships,
- following up on time without a boss or a process forcing them to,
- and noticing when a good relationship is quietly going cold.
Sales CRMs weren’t designed for any of that. They were designed to give sales managers visibility into a team’s process. You don’t have a team, and you already have visibility. You have a memory problem and a timing problem, and both are getting worse as your network grows.
When neither fits: the assistant model
That gap is why I built Aldous. Aldous is an AI assistant for people who win work through relationships: consultants, advisors, fractional executives. The cleanest way I can describe the difference: a CRM is a filing cabinet you report to; Aldous is a competent colleague on your team whose whole job is your relationships and your growth. You talk to them, by message or voice note, and they keep a deeper picture of every relationship than CRM fields ever hold, then hand it to you at the moment you need it, so you walk into every conversation remembering the things that make people feel known. There’s still a pipeline (kanban boards you can organise however you sell), but the centre of gravity is different:
- Aldous remembers for you. Personal details, open threads, who introduced whom. Say it once, in a chat or a voice note, and it’s saved against the person. Your email, calendar, and meeting notes fill in the rest.
- Aldous watches timing. A morning briefing on WhatsApp with the day’s meetings and overdue follow-ups, and a flag when someone’s gone quiet.
- The pipeline updates conversationally. “Dana signed the proposal” moves the deal, logs the activity, and asks if you want to schedule the kickoff. No card-dragging required.
- Aldous works like a growth partner, not a system of record. They help you set 7, 30, and 90-day goals, review each week what moved and what stalled, and plan each day around the conversations that move those goals forward. A sales manager’s cadence, without the sales manager.
If you’re comparing team CRMs, you may also want my take on the lighter end of the market: the best personal CRM for consultants.
My honest recommendation
- Choose Pipedrive if you run a genuinely process-driven practice with steady deal volume and you’ll do the admin.
- Choose HubSpot if you want marketing and sales in one place and you’re building towards a team.
- Look at Aldous if what you’d hire, given the choice, isn’t software at all: a colleague who remembers everyone, watches the timing, and keeps you pointed at your goals.
Aldous is in invite-only alpha. If the third description sounds like you, tell us about your practice.