Leaving HubSpot for self-hosted Twenty CRM on a VPS

HubSpot has restructured its offerings in recent years, The Starter plan, often cited as a reasonable entry point, now sits at $20 per seat per month but excludes advanced workflow automation, lead scoring, and custom reporting — features most sales teams rely on daily. For a five-person agency on Professional, the annual bill reaches $6,000, before adding Service Hub or Marketing Hub modules, each billed separately. HubSpot's pricing mechanics compound the issue: increases arrive with 30-to-60-day notice, annual contracts renew automatically, and exported data rarely arrives in a directly reusable format. The nominal cost therefore conceals an exit cost that few teams anticipate. Meanwhile, the open-source ecosystem has closed much of the functional gap. Twenty CRM, Formbricks for forms, and Chatwoot for support now cover most of the HubSpot footprint without contractual lock-in.

Twenty CRM is an open-source CRM developed by Twenty HQ, published under the AGPL-3.0 licence, and available on GitHub with more than 22,000 stars at the time of writing. It uses a modern architecture: a GraphQL backend in Node.js, a React frontend, and a PostgreSQL database. The interface borrows visual conventions from Notion — blocks, list or Kanban board views, global search — which shortens the learning curve for teams already comfortable with contemporary tools. Functionally, Twenty covers the core use cases of a commercial CRM: contact and company management, customisable sales pipeline, activity tracking (calls, emails, meetings), object-linked notes, webhooks, and an open GraphQL API. Workflow automations are progressively landing in the 2025-2026 releases, with a triggers-and-actions system that handles the most common scenarios — automatic assignment, Slack notifications, field updates. However, Twenty does not replace HubSpot Marketing Hub: mass email campaigns, predictive lead scoring, and landing pages are not in scope today. Being clear about this matters: if your HubSpot use is primarily Marketing, migrating to Twenty alone will not be sufficient and will need a complementary tool such as Mautic or Listmonk.

Twenty CRM installs via Docker Compose on any Linux VPS. The prerequisites are deliberately modest for a five-to-ten-person team: 2 vCPU and 4 GB of RAM provide a comfortable baseline for normal daily usage; 4 vCPU and 8 GB of RAM leave headroom for peak load or large imports. Recommended storage is 40 GB minimum for PostgreSQL data, attachments, and logs, with the ability to attach an additional volume later. On the software side, you need Docker Engine 24+ and Docker Compose v2 (the plugin built into Docker, not the standalone Python version), plus a reverse proxy — nginx or Caddy — to terminate TLS. A domain name pointing to the VPS and a valid HTTPS certificate (Let's Encrypt via Certbot or native Caddy) are essential to secure access. TCP ports 80 and 443 must be open inbound; it is not necessary to expose the application ports directly (3000 for the frontend, 3000 for the API) since all traffic flows through the reverse proxy.

HubSpot offers a native export from the account settings. Go to Settings → Data Management → Export Data. You can export each object separately: Contacts, Companies, Deals, Activities (calls, emails, meetings). The export produces UTF-8-encoded CSV files, typically delivered by email within minutes of the request. Be aware of several known friction points. Custom property names are exported but may be truncated or normalised in column headers, which complicates mapping to Twenty. Associations between objects (a contact linked to multiple companies, a deal linked to multiple contacts) are not always captured in a single CSV file and may require intermediate processing. Volumetric activity exports (years of email history) can take several hours to generate. Plan for this lead time and trigger the export at least 24 hours before your migration window.

This cost estimate uses conservative assumptions. On the HubSpot Professional side, the published rate is $100 per seat per month in 2026. For five seats, that is $500 per month, $6,000 per year, and $18,000 over three years — without accounting for future increases or add-on modules. On the self-hosted Twenty CRM side, spending reduces to the VPS cost and, optionally, initial setup time. A 4 vCPU / 8 GB RAM VPS handles a five-to-ten-person team comfortably; check the corresponding configuration in our catalogue for a precise figure. Over three years, gross savings land in a wide range depending on the VPS selected, but the order of magnitude is significant: between $15,000 and $17,000 for a small agency, while retaining full ownership of the data. Add to this the migration cost (a few days of internal work) and the cost of a complementary email marketing tool if your team actively uses HubSpot Marketing Hub. The balance remains strongly positive from the first year for teams whose usage is centred on commercial CRM.

An honest presentation requires naming the current limitations. Twenty CRM is a young project in active development, and some features that HubSpot Professional offers in mature form are not yet available or are still stabilising. Workflow automations work for simple cases (trigger on status change, notification, field update) but do not yet cover complex multi-branch conditional scenarios that HubSpot Workflows allows you to build visually. Integrated email marketing does not exist in Twenty: you will need to connect a dedicated tool (Listmonk, Mautic, Brevo in API mode) via webhooks or the GraphQL API. iOS and Android mobile apps are available but less complete than the web interface; if your sales team works primarily on mobile, evaluate the experience before committing. Finally, automated lead scoring, AI-based sales forecasting, and lead-qualification chatbots are not on the immediate roadmap. These advanced features correspond to use cases that Twenty can cover via third-party integrations, but not natively. For teams whose sales process relies on these automations, migration warrants a serious proof-of-concept phase before any definitive commitment.

If you prefer to skip the manual configuration described above, our Marketplace offers Twenty CRM as a one-click deployment on VPS. The pre-configured image includes Twenty CRM, PostgreSQL, an nginx reverse proxy, and a Let's Encrypt certificate, with critical environment variables generated automatically at installation. You get a ready-to-use environment in minutes, hosted on our European infrastructure, with full data ownership — no third party has access to your contact database. Updates are at your initiative: you control the timing of version upgrades, without surprises imposed by a SaaS vendor. Our support team is available for integration, backup, or sizing questions as your team grows beyond the initial five people.