HubSpot Is Closing the Gap on Salesforce: Two Years of Real CRM Data

Salesforce still leads by a wide margin among the companies we track, and that's not changing anytime soon. But absolute numbers only tell part of the story. When you look at penetration rates over two [years](/blog/grammarly-enterprise-growth-analysis), the picture shifts considerably.

Two years ago, 87% of active Torii customers had Salesforce in their stack. Today that sits at 60%. HubSpot moved in the opposite direction, climbing from 23% to 35% over the same stretch. The ratio between the two dropped from 3.8x to 1.7x — a meaningful shift in 24 months that has less to do with Salesforce losing accounts and more to do with where new companies are starting when they come to market.

Source: Torii customer [data](/blog/data-localization). Penetration = share of active Torii customers using each platform that month.

The numbers: where things stand today

In February 2026, Salesforce was active at 60% of companies in Torii's customer base, compared to 35% for HubSpot. Those percentages don't tell the full story on their own, because the base itself has been growing fast.

Torii's active customer base nearly doubled between early 2024 and early 2026. The companies joining the platform more recently are less likely to have Salesforce as their primary CRM than earlier cohorts were. New entrants are choosing HubSpot at a noticeably higher rate, and that dynamic is what's pulling the penetration gap closed. It's not Salesforce churn — it's new business going elsewhere.

HubSpot's rise: penetration, not just headcount

HubSpot's penetration among Torii customers went from 23% in February 2024 to 32% a year later, then 35% by February 2026. The growth is real, and there are specific product moves that explain it.

In December 2023, HubSpot completed its acquisition of Clearbit for roughly $150 million, adding firmographic and technographic data across 20+ million companies. That data was folded into the platform as Breeze Intelligence at INBOUND 2024 in September 2024, giving HubSpot a data enrichment capability that previously required enterprise-tier tools. HubSpot's full-year 2024 revenue grew 21% year-over-year to $2.63 billion, roughly double Salesforce's 11% growth rate over the same period.

The customer count followed a similar trajectory, closing 2024 with 247,939 total customers, up 21% from the year prior. Those customers still skew smaller than Salesforce's enterprise book of business, but the mid-market overlap is growing, and both companies know it. Salesforce noticed the shift early enough to respond: in February 2024, it launched Marketing Cloud Growth Edition, a product explicitly targeting companies with fewer than 200 employees — the segment where HubSpot has historically been strongest.

Salesforce's response — and where it's holding

Salesforce is not losing existing customers — but it is losing new ones. Torii's customer base more than doubled over this period, and Salesforce only captured about a third of those new accounts. That's what a starting point of 87% penetration looks like when the market grows faster than you do: the absolute count goes up, but your share of new business tells the real story.

The penetration drop from 87% to 60% is a function of base growth, not platform loss. Salesforce's per-customer revenue remains far higher than HubSpot's, and its enterprise positioning stayed intact through this period. Alongside Marketing Cloud Growth Edition, Salesforce launched Agentforce in late 2024, its AI agent platform aimed at automating complex workflows for large organizations. The 2024 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Sales Force Automation still rated Salesforce's AI stack as more mature than HubSpot's for enterprise use cases.

What Salesforce is actually losing is not its existing accounts. It's new business at the margin, where companies that might have defaulted to Salesforce five years ago are now starting with HubSpot first and finding less reason to switch later.

What SaaS managers should watch

Both platforms follow a consistent seasonal pattern across the full two-year window: usage dips in July and December, with peaks in October and February. This tracks broader business cycles rather than anything CRM-specific. For SaaS and IT teams, that seasonality is useful. The dip months are the right time to pull utilization reports, compare licensed users against active ones, and flag contracts up for renewal in Q4.

The bigger operational question for SaaS managers is dual-CRM environments. As HubSpot moves upmarket and both platforms expand their feature overlap, the risk of running Salesforce and HubSpot in parallel grows significantly. Sales teams on one platform, marketing on another, no shared source of truth on customer data. Torii data shows a meaningful share of customers actively using both tools simultaneously, which creates redundancy in spend, fragmentation across go-to-market teams, and a governance headache around user access and license assignments.

The CRM question used to be simple: Salesforce for organizations that needed scale, HubSpot for teams that wanted speed. That distinction is blurring. Managing the overlap well, whether that means consolidating to one platform or governing two deliberately, has become a real SaaS management task that doesn't get any easier as both platforms grow.

If your organization runs both platforms, a quarterly license review timed to the July or December usage dips can surface real savings before renewals land. See how Torii helps teams manage multi-CRM environments.