Lumo or HubSpot: what fits your team

HubSpot is built from hubs. There is a hub for marketing, one for sales, one for service, and there are hubs for content, operations and commerce. They share one CRM database, and each hub has its own tiers. You can start small and expand per department. That is a strong setup, and it explains why so many marketing teams use it.

In practice we do see a pattern. A team starts with the marketing hub, sales joins, and a few years later there is a mix of tiers, add-ons and integrations holding things together. Who can see what, and which part does which job, becomes a job of its own. That is not HubSpot's fault. It is what happens when a platform can do a lot and an organization grows.

Lumo is one product. You switch modules on or off per workspace, fourteen in total, and they all work on the same persons, organizations and deals. The centre of gravity is B2B sales: pipelines with win probability and stall warnings, leads, the Today screen and quotes with e-signatures. Next to that sit campaigns, forms, a helpdesk with a customer portal, live chat and customer success.

Sales Surge has done more than 150 CRM implementations, including HubSpot environments. So we will say it plainly: if your growth runs on content, landing pages and extensive marketing automation, HubSpot is strong there. If it runs on a well-followed pipeline and customers you serve well after the sale, read on.

Pipeline and leads

In HubSpot the pipeline sits in the sales hub, with sequences to send follow-up emails in a series. Lumo has no sequences. What it does have: every stage has a win probability and a limit in days after which a deal is marked as stalled. The board shows count, value and weighted value per stage. Leads move through New, Working, Nurturing, Qualified, Disqualified and Converted to deal. The Today screen shows what is open every morning. There is no forecast screen, you build a weighted forecast as a report.

Email and calendar

HubSpot connects to Gmail and Outlook. Lumo syncs with Gmail and Google Calendar today, and the Outlook and Microsoft 365 integration is planned. Only mail involving a known contact is stored, and it is private by default. You send from your own Gmail with variables, up to 30 per hour and 200 per day per user. If you work in Outlook, you use the personal BCC address today: put it in Bcc or forward a mail to it, and it lands on the right person, organization and deal.

Quotes and signing

In Lumo you create the quote on the deal. Lines come from the deal products with quantity, price, discount and billing frequency, and numbering runs per year. The customer signs with a typed name and a six-digit code sent by email. The signed PDF gets an evidence page with time, IP address, device and a SHA-256 hash, and every step sits in a hash-chained audit log. What you should know: the quote documents and the signing page are in Dutch, and it is not a qualified electronic signature.

Service

Both have tickets and a customer portal. In Lumo tickets have six statuses, from New to Closed, with SLA targets per priority, business hours, holidays and a warning at 75 percent. The customer portal uses a passwordless login link and never shows internal notes. The knowledge base has Dutch and English articles that you translate yourself. Live chat turns a visitor who leaves an email address into a person, a lead and an activity. It is not an AI chatbot, the channels use fixed texts.

Marketing and automation

This is where the gap is largest. HubSpot has landing pages, a CMS, extensive workflows and a drag-and-drop editor. Lumo has campaigns to segments, web forms with double opt-in, and a follow-up after a number of days. Automations in Lumo react to triggers such as deal won or lead stale, and then create an activity, a note, a field update, an owner or a label. They deliberately do not send email. That is a choice: no mail goes out without a person having seen it.

Reporting

The report builder in Lumo works on deals, persons, organizations, leads, activities, pipelines, stages, lifecycle stages, lost reasons and members. There are nine chart types, periods up to the fiscal year, goal lines, drill-down to records and CSV export. Dashboards are private or shared. Reports that combine tickets and campaigns with deals are still on the backlog.

AI

HubSpot builds AI features across its hubs. The Lumo AI assistant searches, creates records, and builds segments, campaigns, automations and reports. It has 52 tools, and anything outward-facing or irreversible waits for your approval. It runs with your role, is off per workspace until an admin switches it on, and runs on Google Gemini by default.

Data and security

Lumo has its own login with two-factor authentication, four roles from owner to viewer, separation per workspace and an append-only audit log. For GDPR you export or erase everything about a person, and an erased person does not come back through a form. Data is hosted in London. There is no SSO.

Implementation and switching

Lumo has an import wizard for Pipedrive, not for HubSpot. Sales Surge therefore handles a switch from HubSpot by hand: we bring over your pipelines, stages, fields, persons, organizations and deals and check the result with you. Read how that works under switch from HubSpot.

HubSpot is genuinely good at a few things, and it is fair to name them.

• Inbound marketing. Landing pages, a CMS, blogs and extensive marketing automation sit in one platform. Lumo has no landing pages and no CMS.
• Sequences. Reps can put follow-up emails in a series. Lumo has a campaign follow-up, but no sequences.
• Workflows that send email. HubSpot workflows can send mail. Lumo's deliberately do not.
• Knowledge and ecosystem. HubSpot Academy, a large marketplace and many partners make answers easy to find.
• Mobile app. Lumo is a web app.

If content and marketing automation drive your growth, HubSpot is strong there.