Loops vs HubSpot: an email tool for product events against a CRM suite sold per seat
HubSpot Marketing Hub lists Starter at $7 a month, Professional at $800 and Enterprise at $3,600, priced per seat and by tier. Loops costs $99 at about 10,000 subscribers and $249 at about 50,000 with no seat charge. The gap is the CRM. If sales reps need deals, companies and marketing email in one record, HubSpot is the product. If your lifecycle runs on signups and plan changes, Loops costs a fraction of it.
By Julian Pryor · Updated 7 Oct 2026
Short answer
Choose HubSpot when a sales team and a marketing team share contacts and you want automation limits in the hundreds of workflows. Choose Loops when email is sent by product or growth staff, triggers are app and Stripe events, and you want a bill that rises with subscribers only. HubSpot's $800 Professional starting price is 8.1 times Loops' $99 at 10,000 subscribers, and its Enterprise price of $3,600 is 14.5 times Loops' $249 at 50,000.
Prices and automation limits by tier
HubSpot's figures are the plan prices and feature-table readouts on its Marketing Hub pricing page on 7 October 2026. Loops' are slider readouts from the same day. HubSpot's page prices per seat and by contact tier, and the readout does not state how many marketing contacts each starting price includes, so a 10,000-contact HubSpot bill sits at or above its starting price, not below it.
| Plan | Starting price a month | Email and workflow automation limit |
|---|---|---|
| HubSpot free tools | $0 | 1 automated action |
| HubSpot Starter | $7 | Up to 10 automated actions |
| HubSpot Professional | $800 | Unlimited actions, omni-channel automation, up to 300 workflows for 10 teams |
| HubSpot Enterprise | $3,600 | Up to 1,000 workflows for 300 teams, behavioral events, predictive lead scoring, workflow health monitoring |
| Loops at 4,788 subscribers | $48 | All features, unlimited sends to subscribers |
| Loops at 9,998 subscribers | $99 | All features, unlimited sends to subscribers |
| Loops at 49,989 subscribers | $249 | All features, unlimited sends to subscribers |
Held against Loops at 10,000 subscribers, Professional's $800 is $701 a month more, which is $8,412 a year. Enterprise at $3,600 is $3,351 more than Loops at 50,000, or $40,212 a year. These are starting prices, and HubSpot's seat and contact charges can push them up, so the real gaps are at least this large. Pricing is at hubspot.com/pricing/marketing and loops.so/pricing.
The action cap on Starter is the real constraint
HubSpot Starter at $7 looks cheaper than anything else on this page, but the feature table limits email automation to 10 automated actions. A realistic SaaS onboarding series has a trigger, several emails, waits, a branch on whether the user activated and a handoff when they pay, and it can reach that count within one flow. HubSpot Professional removes the cap at $800. Loops puts no action cap on any plan, including the free one, which also includes branching, timers and experiments.
Behavioral events sit in the top tier
For a software company, "behavioral events" means things the product reports: a project created, a seat invited, a limit reached. HubSpot's table lists behavioral events in the Enterprise column of omni-channel marketing automation, next to predictive lead scoring. Loops treats events as a core input: you POST an email or userId and an event name to its send-event endpoint, and an "Event received" trigger starts a workflow. Its Stripe app does the same for checkout.session.completed, invoice.payment_failed and customer.subscription.deleted.
If you run a SaaS on Stripe or Paddle
The free plan covers 2,500 emails a month and $29 buys 30,000. Its site lists native Stripe, Paddle and Lemon Squeezy integrations, and it has its own comparison with HubSpot.
What HubSpot does that Loops does not describe
HubSpot's pricing page lists contact, company and deal records on its free tier, plus two-way sync with dozens of apps. Professional and Enterprise add workflow allowances counted per team. Loops' documentation covers campaigns, workflows and transactional email, with no deal pipeline or company records. HubSpot publishes a data processing agreement, and the page read does not name a hosting region; Loops' pricing page gives no hosting region either.
On the other hand, Loops' paid plan includes transactional sending at no additional charge, with API and SMTP guides for Django, Laravel and Rails. In Loops, transactional emails carry no open or click tracking and need no unsubscribe link, while HubSpot's readout does not state a transactional price.
Who should pick which
- HubSpot, if sales is a human process: SDRs, deal stages, quotes, and a marketing team that wants lead scores. Budget for Professional, not Starter.
- Loops, if the funnel is self-serve: signup, activation, trial, upgrade. The savings against Professional are $701 a month at 10,000 subscribers.
- Both, in companies where sales works in HubSpot but product-triggered mail is cheaper to run elsewhere. Keep one source of truth for unsubscribes between them, because HubSpot and Loops each store their own.
Moving from HubSpot to Loops
- Export contacts with lifecycle stage, plan and any properties the emails use, and add an explicit unsubscribed column from HubSpot's email subscription status.
- Create the matching contact properties in Loops first, then import. A CSV import will not start "Contact added" workflows.
- Rebuild each HubSpot workflow as a Loops workflow with timers and a branch node. Deal-stage steps have no equivalent and stay in the CRM.
- Authenticate your sending domain with Loops, send to a small group, then switch the remaining lists.
Related reading on CRM-backed and standalone email choices:all comparisons, ActiveCampaign vs HubSpot, Klaviyo vs HubSpot, Iterable vs HubSpot and tools for sales-led teams.
Loops vs HubSpot: common questions
Is HubSpot Marketing Hub more expensive than Loops?
At the Professional and Enterprise tiers, by a wide margin. HubSpot lists Professional at $800 a month and Enterprise at $3,600, against $99 for Loops at about 10,000 subscribers and $249 at about 50,000. HubSpot Starter lists $7 a month, but its email automation stops at 10 automated actions. Marketing Hub is also priced per seat, which Loops is not.
Does HubSpot have a free plan?
Yes, for its free tools, and the Marketing Hub feature table shows one automated action on the free column. Loops' free plan includes every feature, for up to 4,000 sends in any rolling 30 days to the 1,000 newest contacts, with a small "Powered by Loops" footer.
Can HubSpot trigger emails from product behavior?
Its feature table places "behavioral events" in the Enterprise column of omni-channel marketing automation, alongside up to 1,000 workflows and predictive lead scoring. Professional lists up to 300 workflows without that item. Loops accepts events from its API, forms or integrations on any plan, including the free one.
Should a sales-led SaaS pick HubSpot over Loops?
Often yes. If account executives work deals in a CRM and want marketing email on the same contact records, HubSpot's suite is built for that. Loops sends email from contact properties and events and does not describe deal tracking, so it suits product-led companies where signup and usage drive the messages.