At a glance — how these 3 alternatives compare
Our read on each project's adoption, maintenance activity and commercial-use risk, derived from GitHub signals and SPDX license terms rather than star count alone. Sorted by stars. How we score.
| Project | Adoption | Maintenance | Commercial use |
|---|---|---|---|
| ★ 51,987 · TypeScript | Flagship | Active | Unknown risk No clear SPDX id — treat as all-rights-reserved until verified |
| ★ 10,003 · PHP | Mainstream | Active | Unknown risk No clear SPDX id — treat as all-rights-reserved until verified |
| ★ 2,895 · PHP | Established | Active | High risk Even a hosted/modified deployment can trigger source release |
The alternatives
twenty
The open alternative to Salesforce, designed for AI.
twentyhq/twenty Updated 2026-07-01 mautic
Mautic: Open Source Marketing Automation Software.
mautic/mautic Updated 2026-06-30 espocrm
EspoCRM – Open Source CRM Application
EspoCRM/EspoCRM Updated 2026-04-22 Editor's take
Yusuke Morinaga · last revisited
There is no single open-source HubSpot — leaving it means assembling a stack, and the seams between tools are the real cost.
The honest framing for HubSpot is that you cannot replace it with one thing. HubSpot is a CRM, marketing automation, email, live chat, and helpdesk welded into a single interface — and no open-source project covers all of that. So the editorial question isn’t “which alternative” but “which two or three, and can I live with the seams between them.” Every comparison that hands you a single name is skipping the part that will actually take your time.
That integration overhead is the pitfall. The moment you split CRM from email automation, you own the plumbing that HubSpot hid: keeping contacts in sync, making one tool’s workflow trigger another’s, and rebuilding embedded forms so the leads still land in the right place. None of it is hard individually; collectively it’s the migration.
Here’s how I’d sort the pieces:
- Twenty (50.9k stars, mostly AGPL-3.0, with some enterprise-licensed files) is where I’d anchor the CRM. It’s modern, TypeScript, actively developed, and its UX borrows from Salesforce, so contacts, companies, and pipeline feel familiar rather than retro. If your team’s daily home was the HubSpot CRM view, this is the closest replacement for that surface.
- Mautic (9.9k, GPL-3.0) owns the marketing side — email campaigns, lead scoring, segments. This is the tool you pair with a CRM, not instead of one. If newsletters and nurture sequences were why you paid HubSpot, Mautic is the load-bearing piece.
- EspoCRM (2.9k, AGPL-3.0) is the more traditional, PHP-backed CRM. I’d point a smaller team that wants a stable, conventional system here over the newer Twenty, accepting a plainer interface for fewer surprises.
Two gaps to name plainly so they don’t ambush you: HubSpot’s AI features — content generation, deal scoring — have no open-source equivalent, so budget to lose them. And custom CRM properties won’t map themselves; the field schema is where imports quietly break.
The tell, in the end, is your own workflows. Export them, read them back as a flat list of triggers and actions, and the answer is right there: shallow logic means a two-tool stack will hold, while deep cross-object automation means the integration tax is the dominant cost — pay attention to that, not to the star counts.
Comparison notes
The honest framing for HubSpot is that no single open-source tool covers its full span of CRM, marketing automation, email, live chat, and helpdesk under one roof — you assemble it. On the CRM side, Twenty is a modern, actively developed TypeScript project with a Salesforce-flavored UX, handling contacts, companies, pipelines, and workflow automation; EspoCRM is the more traditional PHP-backed take. For marketing automation, Mautic brings email campaigns, lead scoring, and segments. Stitching CRM, email automation, and analytics together gets you most of the way but adds integration overhead, and HubSpot's AI extras — content generation, deal scoring — have no open-source counterpart.
Migration tips
- Export CRM data (contacts, companies, deals, notes) from HubSpot via Settings → Data Management → Export
- Map HubSpot CRM property types to your target CRM's field schema before importing — custom properties may need manual recreation
- Export HubSpot email lists and import them into your email automation tool (Mautic or equivalent)
- Audit HubSpot workflows and recreate the logic in your OSS tool's automation engine — triggers and actions will differ
- Migrate HubSpot forms (embedded in your site) to your OSS tool's form builder and update the embed codes on your website
Which alternative should you pick?
Replacing HubSpot isn't a single call — it's a trade between license terms, team size, and how much early-stage roughness you can absorb. The 3 projects above split along those lines:
- You want the most active community and the lowest risk of abandonment → twenty. 51,987★ — the largest user base in this list, which usually means more StackOverflow answers, more plugins, and more deployment runbooks online.
- You want a strong-copyleft project that resists vendor capture → espocrm. AGPL-3.0 licensed — downstream forks must stay open, which is what some teams explicitly want.
License & commercial-use notes
With a HubSpot replacement the license usually decides more than the feature list — whether you can modify it, ship it inside a product, or host it as a service. The 3 projects here fall into:
- Network copyleft (espocrm) — AGPL / SSPL — the copyleft trigger extends to offering the software over a network, so a hosted deployment of a modified version can oblige you to publish your changes. Read the exact terms before building a paid hosted product on these.
- Unverified license (twenty, mautic) — GitHub returned no clear SPDX id. Treat as all-rights-reserved until you read the project's LICENSE file directly — do not assume commercial use is permitted.
License fields come from the GitHub API's SPDX classification and can lag a relicense. The repository linked on each card is authoritative — confirm its LICENSE file before any license-sensitive deployment.
Maintenance health of these 3 projects
Of the 3 projects listed, 3 shipped at least one commit in the last 12 months. See how we rank for the full criteria and our self-hosting cost reality check, which apply across every comparison on this site.
Frequently asked questions
What does end-user adoption look like compared to HubSpot?
Expect a 1-2 week dip in productivity while users learn the new UI, especially for power users who rely on HubSpot keyboard shortcuts and integrations. The OSS alternatives below close most of the gap on core features but lag on polish (drag-and-drop interactions, mobile apps, mature search). Pilot with a single team first.
How do these 3 alternatives compare on maintenance health?
3 of 3 have shipped a commit in the last 12 months. At least one project here has 5,000+ GitHub stars, which usually correlates with sustained maintainership. Always check the last-pushed date in the cards above and read the latest 5 closed issues — those two signals together catch 80% of abandoned-project cases.
How this page was compiled
- Repository facts (stars, license, language, last commit) come straight from the GitHub public API and are linked on each card as the primary source.
- Editorial analysis is drafted from HubSpot's use case and the alternatives' repository metadata, then reviewed by hand.
- Maintenance signal: 3 of 3 projects shipped a commit in the last 12 months as of the latest rebuild (most recent activity: ).
- Last editorial review: by Yusuke Morinaga.
- Spotted an error? Email [email protected] with the page URL (subject prefix
[correction]) — we ship corrections within 14 days.