We’re not here to sell you Dynamics 365

We implement Dynamics 365. That’s what we do. But we’re not going to tell you it’s the best CRM in the world for everyone, because it’s not.

If after reading this you decide HubSpot or Salesforce is better for you, great. We’d rather you make a good decision than sign a project with us that doesn’t fit.

Quick comparison

	HubSpot	Salesforce	Dynamics 365	SuiteCRM (open source)
Starting price	Free (basic CRM)	€25/user/mo	€60/user/mo	Free (self-hosted)
Best for	Startups and SMBs with simple processes	Large enterprises with high-volume B2C/B2B operations	Mid-market companies already in Microsoft ecosystem	Companies with technical staff who want full control
Worst for	Companies needing deep customization	Small teams with tight budgets	Companies that don’t use Microsoft	Companies without internal technical capacity
Ecosystem	Own (marketing, sales, service)	Massive (AppExchange: thousands of apps)	Microsoft (Office 365, Teams, Power Platform)	Open source community + custom integrations
Learning curve	Low	High	Medium	Medium-High
Typical implementation time	Days to weeks	Months	Weeks to months	Weeks to months

HubSpot: the good, the bad, and what they don’t tell you

Who it’s for

Startups and SMBs with small sales teams and relatively simple sales processes.

Pricing

Plan	Price/user/month
Free CRM	€0
Starter	€18
Professional	€90
Enterprise	€135

The good

The free CRM is genuinely good. It’s not a disguised demo. You can manage contacts, companies, deals, and do real follow-up without paying a cent.
The most intuitive interface of the three. Your team will adopt it faster.
Marketing and sales integrated out of the box. If you need email marketing, landing pages, and CRM in one place, HubSpot handles it well.
Fast implementation. You can be operational in a week.

The bad

Gets expensive fast. The jump from Free to Professional is steep. Many features you’ll need (like advanced workflows or custom reports) are only in Professional or Enterprise.
Limited customization. If your processes don’t fit HubSpot’s standard model, you have a problem.
No ERP. If you need financial management, inventory, or manufacturing, HubSpot can’t help you.

The hidden cost

The per-contact pricing trap. HubSpot Marketing Hub charges based on the number of contacts in your database. You start with 1,000 contacts included, and when you hit 50,000, the bill skyrockets. Many companies don’t realize it until the invoice arrives.

Salesforce: the good, the bad, and what they don’t tell you

Who it’s for

Large enterprises with complex processes, multiple departments, and budget for a dedicated administration team. Historically B2B, but Salesforce has invested heavily in B2C capabilities (Commerce Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Data Cloud). If your business has a strong high-volume B2C component — e-commerce, mass marketing campaigns, personalization for thousands of consumers — Salesforce has purpose-built tools for that.

Pricing

Plan	Price/user/month
Starter	€25
Professional	€75
Enterprise	€150
Unlimited	€300

Watch out: the entry price looks cheap, but Starter is very limited. The moment you need real automation, advanced reporting, or customization, you land at Enterprise (€150/user/month) or higher. That’s where Salesforce gets truly expensive.

The good

The largest ecosystem on the market. AppExchange has thousands of apps for virtually any need.
Nearly unlimited customization. If you can imagine it, you can probably build it in Salesforce.
The standard for large enterprises. If your company works with Fortune 500s, many already use Salesforce. System-to-system integration is easier.
Massive community. Trailhead, forums, partners — finding help is easy.
Strong B2C at scale. Commerce Cloud, Marketing Cloud, and Data Cloud are powerful tools for companies with high-volume B2C operations.

The bad

Expensive. Very expensive. The base price is just the beginning. Most useful features require paid add-ons. Premier Support costs an extra 20-30% on top of total license fees. Extra storage runs ~€125/month per 500MB. Additional sandboxes cost 15-30% of annual spend.
You need a dedicated admin. This isn’t a set-it-and-forget-it system. You need someone (or a team) maintaining it constantly. A certified Salesforce admin costs €60,000-€90,000/year in Europe.
Slow and costly implementation. A Salesforce implementation project for a mid-size company can take 6+ months and easily exceed €100,000.
Unnecessary complexity. For 80% of companies, Salesforce has more features than they’ll ever use.

The hidden cost

Add-on hell. CPQ: extra. Pardot (marketing automation): extra. Einstein Analytics: extra. Additional sandbox: extra. Extra storage: extra. In the end, the real per-user price can double or triple the base price you see on the website. And the three annual releases (Spring, Summer, Winter) can break custom Apex code and integrations, meaning more consultancy hours to fix what broke.

Dynamics 365: the good, the bad, and what they don’t tell you

Who it’s for

Mid-market companies that already use Microsoft 365 (Outlook, Teams, Excel) and need a CRM that natively integrates with their everyday tools. Also for companies that need CRM + ERP on a unified platform. Unlike Salesforce (which was born as a pure CRM), Dynamics 365 is a hybrid CRM + ERP platform by design, making it especially strong for companies that need to connect sales with finance, operations, and supply chain.

Pricing

Plan	Price/user/month
Sales Professional	€60
Sales Enterprise	€95
Sales Premium	€135

The good

The Teams integration changes everything. This deserves its own section because it’s not a minor detail. From any Dynamics 365 record (opportunity, account, case) you can start a Teams chat linked directly to that record. The entire conversation history stays associated with the data. You can make calls from the CRM using the Teams dialer, and calls are automatically logged with transcription. You can create Teams meetings from a record and notes are saved automatically. You can pin CRM records as tabs in Teams channels. Files uploaded to a linked Teams channel automatically appear in the CRM record, and vice versa. If your team already lives in Teams (and if you’re running Microsoft 365, they probably do), this completely eliminates context-switching. Your CRM stops being “yet another app to open” and becomes part of the natural workflow.
CRM + ERP on one platform. If you need sales AND finance AND operations, Dynamics 365 is the only option that handles it all under one roof with a shared data model. No integrations between systems needed — the data is already connected.
Power Platform. Power Automate, Power Apps, and Power BI let you automate, build apps, and analyze data without depending on your partner for every change.
Best value in the mid-market. For companies with 20-500 users, the total cost (licenses + implementation + maintenance) is usually lower than Salesforce for comparable functionality.

The bad

The interface isn’t as intuitive as HubSpot. There’s a real learning curve, especially for non-technical users.
Smaller app marketplace than Salesforce. AppSource has fewer options than AppExchange. For very specific needs, you might not find a ready-made app.
No free version. There’s no “Dynamics 365 Free” to try with your team.
Confusing documentation. Microsoft’s docs are extensive but often disorganized and hard to navigate.
Works best when you embrace the full Microsoft ecosystem. Windows, Outlook, Excel, SharePoint, Teams, Power Platform. If you already use all of this, Dynamics 365 fits like a glove. If you don’t, you’ll lose much of its differentiating value.

The hidden cost

Licensing complexity. Microsoft has a licensing model that requires a master’s degree to understand. First-party apps, attach licenses, Team Members, per-device licenses, per-user licenses… It’s easy to end up overpaying or, worse, falling short and discovering you need a more expensive license mid-project.

The option nobody mentions: SuiteCRM (open source, free, on your server)

If you have a technical team and want full control over your data, there’s an alternative that consultancies will never recommend (because they don’t earn anything from it): SuiteCRM.

It’s 100% open source (AGPLv3 license), with no paid “enterprise” tier. All features included. Unlimited users. Install it on your own server and the data is yours, period.

What it offers

Sales pipeline, contact management, campaigns, customer portal, workflows, reporting
Self-hosted on any LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP)
Active community with documentation and forums
Full data ownership

What it doesn’t offer

No free official support. If something breaks, you rely on the community or a consultant you hire.
The interface feels dated compared to HubSpot or Dynamics 365 (SuiteCRM 8 improves this, but slowly).
You need someone technical to install, maintain, update, and secure it. This is not optional.
Integrations with external tools require development — there’s no app marketplace.

Real costs (because it does have them)

Item	Approximate cost
License	€0
Implementation and customization	€5,000 - €15,000
Hosting (own server or cloud)	€50 - €300/month
Maintenance and support	€1,500 - €3,000/month
Estimated annual total	~€20,000 - €55,000

It’s not free in practice. But for a company with 50+ users, it can be significantly cheaper than any SaaS with per-user licensing. And the data never leaves your infrastructure.

Maintenance and evolution costs: what you pay after year 1

This is what nobody puts in the comparison and should be the first thing you look at. A CRM is not a project — it’s a living system that needs maintenance, updates, and evolution.

	HubSpot	Salesforce	Dynamics 365	SuiteCRM
Dedicated admin	No	Yes (required)	Partial (existing IT staff can absorb it)	Yes (sysadmin + developer)
Annual admin cost	€0 (absorbed)	€60,000 - €90,000	€0 - €50,000 (depends on complexity)	€30,000 - €60,000 (part-time)
Partner support	€5,000 - €15,000/year	€30,000 - €80,000/year	€6,000 - €40,000/year	€18,000 - €36,000/year
Consultant hourly rate	€80 - €150	€120 - €250	€80 - €200	€80 - €150
Updates	Automatic (SaaS)	Automatic but can break customizations	Automatic + optional Wave releases	Manual (you apply them)
Risk of breakage on updates	Low	High (Apex, triggers, integrations)	Medium (Power Platform absorbs changes)	High (custom PHP code)

The Salesforce trap: the three annual releases (Spring, Summer, Winter) can break Apex code, triggers, and integrations. Each release requires regression testing and potentially hours of consultancy to fix what broke. This doesn’t appear in any initial budget.

The Dynamics 365 advantage: the Microsoft ecosystem. If your IT team already manages Microsoft 365 and Azure, the learning curve for maintaining Dynamics 365 is much shorter. And Power Platform lets non-technical users create automations and reports without depending on external consultants.

Decision matrix

Choose HubSpot if…

You have fewer than 10 CRM users
Your sales process is standard (no deep customization needed)
You need marketing + sales integrated and don’t want complexity
Your budget is limited and you want to start free
Speed of implementation is your priority

Choose Salesforce if…

You have 200+ CRM users
You have high-volume B2C operations (e-commerce, mass marketing)
Your processes are highly complex and industry-specific
You have budget for a dedicated admin (or a team)
Your industry demands Salesforce (finance, pharma, large consultancies)

Choose Dynamics 365 if…

Your company already uses Microsoft 365 (Outlook, Teams, SharePoint) — and especially if it lives in Teams
You have between 15 and 500 CRM users
You need integrated CRM + ERP (sales + finance + operations)
You want to empower your team with Power Platform (automations, reports, apps)
You’re looking for the best value in the mid-market

Choose SuiteCRM if…

You have internal technical staff (or are willing to hire them)
You want full control over your data and infrastructure
You have 50+ users and want to avoid per-user license costs
Data sovereignty is a requirement (public sector, legal, healthcare)

What nobody tells you: hidden costs for each

Hidden cost	HubSpot	Salesforce	Dynamics 365	SuiteCRM
Pricing trap	Per-contact pricing in Marketing Hub — scales brutally with volume	Add-ons for “basic” features (CPQ, analytics, sandbox) + Premier Support at 20-30%	Licensing complexity — easy to overpay	”Free” but hosting + maintenance + development add up
Implementation	Low (but limited customization)	Very high (6+ months, €100k+ for mid-market)	Medium (4-12 weeks for standard CRM)	Medium (requires technical profile)
Admin required	No (for basic use)	Yes (dedicated or team, €60-90k/year)	Partial (depends on complexity)	Yes (sysadmin + dev)
Migration	Simple if coming from nothing; harder from another major CRM	Expensive and slow	Medium — easier if coming from Microsoft environment	Manual — requires development
Real cost vs. website price	2-3x base price if you need Professional	2-3x base price with add-ons	1.2-1.5x if you optimize licenses well	€0 in licenses, but €20-55k/year in real maintenance

Our honest take

We implement Dynamics 365 because we believe it’s the best value for the mid-market. For companies of 15 to 500 people that already use Microsoft, nothing comes close in integration and versatility. And the Teams integration is not a minor detail — it transforms how your sales team works.

But if you’re a 5-person startup, use HubSpot Free. Seriously. It’s free, it’s good, and you don’t need anything more right now.

If you’re a Fortune 500 with large-scale B2C operations and a six-figure annual CRM budget, Salesforce is probably the safer bet. It has the largest ecosystem and the most mature B2C tools.

And if you have technical staff and data sovereignty is key for your business, SuiteCRM is worth a look. It’s free, it’s yours, and nobody charges you per user.

The important thing is to choose the CRM that fits your company today and for the next 3-5 years. Not the one the sales rep pitches best.

Not sure which one fits your company? Get in touch and we’ll give you an honest opinion — even if it’s “don’t use Dynamics 365.”