How to Migrate from HubSpot to Zoho CRM (Without Losing the History)
- 9 hours ago
- 5 min read
The decision to leave HubSpot is usually made in a budget meeting. The hard part shows up the next morning, when someone opens the export and realizes the company's entire sales history — every deal, every call note, every owner assignment — has to land in Zoho CRM without breaking, and nobody's sure which pieces actually make it through. That gap between "we're switching" and "the data is trustworthy in the new system" is the whole project, and it's where our Zoho practice spends its time.
Migrating from HubSpot to Zoho CRM is the process of moving your contacts, companies, deals, activities, and product data out of HubSpot and into the matching Zoho CRM modules — using Zoho's native migration tool for the bulk move, then cleaning, mapping, and validating so the records mean the same thing on the other side. Zoho's tool does most of the heavy lifting; the judgment is in what you do before and after it runs.
The full picture: why teams make the move, exactly what the native tool maps, what it quietly leaves behind, the real step-by-step, and how to validate before you cut over.
Why do teams move from HubSpot to Zoho CRM?
Two reasons, mostly, and we'll be honest about both. The first is cost: HubSpot's pricing scales steeply as you add seats and move up the hub tiers, and teams that have outgrown the free tier often find the jump painful. The second is ecosystem — companies already using Zoho Books, Inventory, or Desk want their CRM in the same family, sharing a single customer record across the suite.
It's not a universally correct move. HubSpot's marketing automation and onboarding polish are strong. But for a sales-led team that wants depth, customization, and suite economics, Zoho is a defensible switch — and Zoho itself now reports over 1 million customers and 150 million-plus users as of February 2026 (BusinessWire), so you're not betting on a small platform.
What actually migrates from HubSpot to Zoho CRM?
Zoho's native migration maps HubSpot's standard objects to their Zoho CRM equivalents. This table is the one to print and pin up, because it tells you what "moved" really means (Zoho's HubSpot migration guide):
HubSpot object | Maps to Zoho CRM |
Companies | Accounts |
Contacts | Contacts |
Deals | Deals |
Tasks | Tasks |
Meetings | Events |
Calls | Calls |
Notes | Notes |
Owners | Users |
Products | Products |
Quotes | Quotes |
Quoted Items | Quoted Items |
Deal line items | Deal product relations |
That covers the spine of a sales org. The naming shift catches people off guard — HubSpot Companies become Zoho Accounts, and Meetings become Events — but the relationships hold.
What doesn't carry over (read this before you start)
The native tool is good, not magic. These are the gaps we plan around on every HubSpot migration:
Custom modules aren't supported in the API migration. If you've built custom objects in HubSpot, they don't come across automatically — you need to recreate the module in Zoho and move the data separately.
HubSpot Service Hub tickets aren't among the mapped modules. If support tickets live in HubSpot, plan a separate path (often into Zoho Desk).
Tags get truncated. Zoho caps tags at 10 per record and 25 characters each; anything beyond that is trimmed in migration.
Automations don't migrate — you rebuild them. HubSpot workflows, sequences, and lead scoring are platform-specific logic. They get redesigned in Zoho's workflow engine, not copied.
The migration pauses if 5,000+ records are skipped in a single module — usually a sign of a data-quality problem worth fixing before you continue, not pushing through.
None of these is a dealbreaker. All of them are a surprise if you find out after you've cut over.
The native migration, step by step
The actual mechanics are straightforward once the prep is done (Zoho's guide):
In HubSpot, create a Private App. Go to Settings → Account Setup → Integrations → Private Apps, create one named Zoho-crm-migration, and grant read scopes: contacts.read, companies.read, deals.read, owners.read, quotes.read, line_items.read, and e-commerce. Generate the API token.
In Zoho CRM (as Administrator), open the migration tool. Setup → Data Administration → Import.
Select HubSpot as the source.
Enter your Instance URL and the API token from step 1.
Run it ("Migrate Now"). The migration executes in the backend; you get an email when it finishes.
Use the undo/rerun lever wisely. You can undo or rerun the migration up to 3 times — treat those as your pilot-and-correct budget, not unlimited retries.
That undo/rerun limit is the single most useful detail in the whole process. It's exactly why you pilot first.
The real-world plan: nine steps, not five clicks
A clean migration is mostly the work around the tool. This is the sequence we run.
Audit the HubSpot data. Count records per object, find the custom properties and modules, note what's actually used versus what's noise.
Clean before you move. Remove invalid emails, dead phone numbers, and stale lifecycle stages; dedupe with HubSpot's merge tool first. Migrating garbage just gives you garbage in a new system.
Map fields deliberately. Decide how every HubSpot property lands in Zoho — standard-to-standard, and custom properties to custom fields you create in advance.
Stand up Zoho first. Create the custom fields, custom modules, users, and pipeline stages before the import, so the data has somewhere correct to land.
Pilot with a subset. Run a small migration, using one of your three undo/rerun passes, and inspect the result by hand.
Validate the pilot. Spot-check record counts, owner assignments, deal amounts, and activity history against HubSpot.
Run the full migration. Once the pilot is clean, move the whole dataset.
Rebuild automations and reports. Recreate workflows, scoring, and dashboards natively in Zoho — this is design work, not import work. Our Zoho CRM customization notes cover the traps here.
Reconcile and cut over. Final count reconciliation, then switch the team over with HubSpot kept read-only for a grace period.
Book a free Zoho consultation if you want a second set of eyes on the field map before you spend an undo: start a no-risk discovery.
A field-mapping reality check
The mappings in the table are the defaults. The judgment is in the custom properties, because that's where every company's real process lives. A HubSpot deal property like "Renewal Likelihood (1–5)" has no Zoho equivalent until you create one — and if you skip it, the field migrates as an unmapped orphan or not at all.
On a recent move, one of our engineers found a team had 40-plus active HubSpot custom properties driving their pipeline reports. Mapped blindly, half would have landed as text fields and broken every dashboard. Mapped deliberately — picklists to picklists, dates to dates, number fields preserved — the reports rebuilt cleanly on the Zoho side. That's the difference between a migration that "ran" and one you can trust. When the dataset or the customization is heavy, our Zoho CRM migration services exist for exactly this.
Should you DIY or bring in help?
If you have a few thousand clean records, mostly standard objects, and no critical custom logic, the native tool plus careful prep is DIY-able. Bring in help when any of these are true: large or messy datasets, lots of custom properties and modules, automations you can't afford to get wrong, or a hard cut-over date with no room for a failed attempt. The migration tool is free; a botched migration that corrupts your sales history is not.
The takeaway
Migrating from HubSpot to Zoho CRM is less about the import button and more about the discipline around it: clean first, map custom properties deliberately, stand up Zoho before you load it, pilot inside your three-run budget, and rebuild automations as design work. Do that and the history comes across meaning the same thing it did in HubSpot. Skip it and you'll be reconciling a broken pipeline for a month. If the dataset is large or the customization runs deep, book a free Zoho consultation and we'll map it with you before the first run.
By the CodeStringers Team — Zoho Experts & Custom Software. CodeStringers is a custom software engineering firm with a dedicated Zoho practice, writing from work we've actually shipped for clients.
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