Vrge vs HubSpot
HubSpot is a cloud CRM your team fills in, priced per seat per month, with a marketplace, deep reporting and marketing automation. Vrge is a desktop app you buy once. It reads your email, calendar, files and bank, proposes the records, and waits for you to approve them. Here is how the two compare, with HubSpot’s prices as published on 5 September 2026.
The short version
HubSpot if you run a sales or marketing team, want sequences and workflows that send email for you, need dashboards your leadership will read, or connect to many other tools. It is the more capable product, and it is priced for teams.
Vrge if you are one person or a small agency, the work already lives in your email, calendar and bank account, and what you resent is typing it into a CRM. Vrge is a one-time purchase that runs on your machine, works offline, and never writes anything you did not approve.
Side by side
Thirteen questions a buyer actually asks. Vrge’s column describes the shipped app; HubSpot’s quotes its own pricing and product pages.
| Question | Vrge | HubSpot |
|---|---|---|
| What fills it in | Reads your email, calendar, a folder, bank feeds and QuickBooks, then proposes records you approve | |
| Pricing model | $79 once | |
| One person, three years | $79 once | |
| Free tier | None · 14-day trial · no card | |
| Where your data lives | On your machine, in one SQLite file you can export any time | |
| Works offline | Yes | |
| AI | Your own Anthropic, OpenAI or Google key; Ollama on your laptop; or optional Managed AI | |
| Team | A server you host with Docker: invites, three roles, live sync | |
| Native mobile apps | No; a mobile web client in team mode | |
| Integrations | The sources above, plus CSV and vCard import. No marketplace | |
| Reporting | Four built-in reports and a Tax Pack | |
| Marketing automation | None | |
| Sends email for you | No. Every source is read-only |
The three differences that decide it
Most rows in the table are details. Three of them are the whole choice.
Who does the typing
HubSpot’s records come from people. You add a contact, import a spreadsheet, or put a form on your website. If you connect your inbox, HubSpot logs the emails you choose: you tick Log in the Gmail or Outlook extension, or BCC a HubSpot address, and an admin can switch on logging for every email by default. When an email you BCC goes to someone who is not yet a contact, HubSpot creates the record, and the extensions offer to. On the paid tiers the Agent Hub agents go further, and they run on HubSpot Credits: 500 a month with Starter, more on higher tiers, then one cent a credit or ten dollars for a pack of 1,000, and unused credits do not roll over.
Vrge starts from the other end. It reads your Gmail, Outlook or IMAP mail; your Google, Outlook, CalDAV or .ics calendar; a folder on disk; your Stripe, Square, Plaid or bank-CSV transactions; and your QuickBooks invoices, all of it read-only. From those it proposes clients, projects, tasks, invoices and expenses into an Inbox, each with the evidence it came from and a confidence score. Nothing is saved until you approve it, and anything you approve can be undone for 24 hours. Open Loops, the replies you owe, the replies you are waiting on and the invoices past due, are worked out from the same facts with no AI at all, and close themselves when the reply or the payment arrives. You can watch it happen without installing anything.
Where it runs, and what you pay
HubSpot is hosted by HubSpot, on AWS in the US East region, with a Frankfurt data centre for new customers who choose the EU. You pay per seat, per month, and the rate depends on whether you commit for a year. On its pricing pages, checked 5 September 2026, Starter is $7 a seat a month paid annually or $20 paid monthly; Sales Hub Professional starts at $90 a seat a month on an annual commitment, plus a required one-time onboarding fee of $1,500; Marketing Hub Professional starts at $800 a month on an annual commitment, plus $3,000 onboarding. Over three years, one Starter seat is $252 paid annually or $720 paid monthly. The free tier is genuinely free: two users, 1,000 contacts, no expiry.
Vrge is a one-time purchase: $79 for one person, or a Team licence from $299 for five seats that runs on a server you host. It keeps everything in a SQLite file on your machine, works on a plane, and exports to JSON or CSV whenever you like, licence or no licence. There is no free tier, only a 14-day trial with no card and no account. Two optional subscriptions exist, Managed AI from $10 a month and Cloud Backup at $6 a month, because both cost us money every month; neither is required. Your own API key or Ollama are free forever. The full table is on the pricing page.
What HubSpot has that Vrge does not
Quite a lot, and it should be said plainly. HubSpot’s marketplace connects to over 2,000 apps; Vrge has the sources named above, CSV import, and no marketplace. HubSpot’s reporting is deeper: a custom report builder that can “analyze any combination of contacts, companies, deals, tickets, and custom objects”, multi-touch attribution at Enterprise, dashboards a leadership team will read. Vrge ships four reports (profitability, utilization, project health, revenue) and a Tax Pack. HubSpot sends email, runs sequences from Sales Hub Professional and, from Marketing Hub Professional, omni-channel marketing automation; Vrge never sends anything, by design. HubSpot has native iOS and Android apps; Vrge has a mobile web client for team mode. HubSpot has a free tier with no expiry; Vrge has a trial.
HubSpot also states that its third-party AI providers “are contractually prohibited from training their models on your data”. That is the right commitment. Vrge’s version is structural rather than contractual: your own key means the data goes to your provider account and never to us, Ollama means it never leaves the laptop, and Managed AI redacts before anything reaches our proxy. If your business is a pipeline that a team works, HubSpot is the better tool. Vrge is for the person whose business already happens in their inbox, calendar and bank account, and who would rather have it read than retyped. The wider comparison covers Notion, Airtable and Monday.
Moving from HubSpot
Moving over? Export your contacts from HubSpot as a CSV and import them into Vrge; it recognises HubSpot’s own column names. Contacts come across as clients. Deals, activity history and custom fields do not; from there the observer proposes new clients, projects and invoices from your email and bank. The steps are in the guide.
Try it next to HubSpot
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