MentionFox CRM vs HubSpot, honestly.
No marketing weasel. Here is exactly what we have on day one of v0, exactly what is coming, exactly what we will not build, and why most solo founders and small teams will be fine with us.
Three sentence version
If you only need a pipeline, a contact database, an email inbox tied to your contacts, lists for segmenting, and reporting on velocity and conversion, MentionFox CRM does that today for ninety-nine dollars a month and includes the whole rest of MentionFox on top. If you also need workflow automation and email infrastructure with tracking, that lives in our Pro+ tier at one hundred forty-nine dollars a month, and switchers get the first three months free along with Saul personally as their migration assistant. If you need a marketing automation platform, a service desk, a knowledge base product, an SMS marketing module, or a landing page builder, HubSpot is genuinely the better choice and we are not going to convince you otherwise.
What CRM v0 has, today
Live the moment you sign up. Not coming. Not roadmapped. Live.
Contacts
A standard table view. Filter by lifecycle stage. Search by name, email, company, title. Click a row, the side drawer opens with full contact detail, the activity timeline, every linked deal, and a one-click Open dossier link to the sixty-section enrichment record we already keep on this person from MentionFox's research engine. Add contact, edit contact, delete contact, bulk-update tags, bulk-change owner. Custom fields are stored as JSONB and can hold any shape you want.
Companies
Same pattern as contacts. Domain-keyed. Linked-contact rollup so the company drawer shows everyone you know at that company. Industry, employee count, annual revenue, technographics blob.
Deals and pipelines
Kanban view by stage with native drag-and-drop. List view alternate. Click a card or row, side drawer opens. Pipeline editor lets you add stages, remove stages, reorder them, and set probability per stage. The default pipeline is created automatically the first time you add a contact or a deal — Prospect, Qualified, Demo, Proposal, Closed.
Activities
Calls, emails, meetings, notes, tasks, SMS. Each activity links to a contact, company, or deal. Showed up in the timeline of every related entity. Used by the reporting layer to compute velocity.
Lists
Static lists where you hand-pick contacts. Dynamic lists where a filter rule re-evaluates on every load. Schema is fully wired today; the visual filter builder UI lands in v0.2. Today you can create lists by writing a JSON filter; in v0.2 it becomes a drag-and-click query builder.
Inbox
Schema fully wired. Gmail and Outlook OAuth flows are deployed. The polling cron that syncs new threads into your CRM lands in v0.1.1. Sending email from the CRM via your connected mailbox works today; the inbox view populates from manual logging plus from sequences started from inside MentionFox.
Reports
Pipeline velocity (days from create to close, average and per-deal). Conversion by stage (how many deals make it to each stage, drop-off rates). Source-of-leads (which sources are sending you the most contacts, lifecycle progression by source). Lifecycle distribution. Owner leaderboard and email-engagement reports land in v0.2.
What is coming, dated
v0.1.1 — inbox sync (this month)
Gmail polling cron. Outlook polling cron. Threaded inbox view. Reply-tracking on outbound mails sent from inside MentionFox. The schema is in place; this is wiring the cron and the view.
v0.2 — workflow engine + visual list builder + owner leaderboard (next month)
Trigger picker (new contact, stage change, list membership, form submit, time delay). Step picker (send email, create task, update field, add to list, send to webhook, wait). Visual filter builder for lists. Owner leaderboard report. Email-engagement report (open rate, click rate, reply rate per template).
v1 — forecast, quota, custom-object support (next quarter)
Forecast and quota tracking, including weighted-pipeline view. Custom objects (build your own entity types beyond contact/company/deal). Multi-currency reporting. Approval workflows for big-ticket deals.
If we miss any of these dates, we will say so on this page in plain English. The displacement bonus extends if v0.2 has not landed by the end of your initial three months.
What we will not build, ever
To be clear about the trade. Telling you what we will not do is part of being honest about whether we are right for you.
- Landing page builder. There are five better ones.
- SMS marketing module. Different regulatory regime, different vendor relationships, not our wheelhouse.
- Service desk and ticketing. We are not Zendesk, Freshdesk, or HubSpot Service Hub.
- Knowledge base product. Notion does this well, Helpjuice does this well, you do not need a third option.
- A standalone marketing automation platform with email blasts. We do outreach sequences for a small audience that you have already qualified. We do not do million-recipient broadcast campaigns.
- A consumer mobile app. Web works. The CRM is responsive on phone.
- An AI-lead-scoring usage-based bolt-on with a separate price meter. The lead score lives in the contact record, free, derived from MentionFox's existing research signals.
The full table
| Capability | MentionFox CRM | HubSpot Starter | HubSpot Sales Hub Pro |
|---|---|---|---|
| Contacts, companies, deals (the basics) | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Custom fields with arbitrary types | Yes (JSONB) | Limited | Yes |
| Pipeline editor with per-stage probability | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Multiple pipelines | Yes | No | Yes |
| Kanban board with drag-and-drop | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Lists, static and dynamic | Schema yes; visual builder v0.2 | Yes | Yes |
| Workflow automation | v0.2 (Pro+ tier) | No | Yes |
| Send email from connected Gmail or Outlook | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Email open and click tracking | Yes (sequences) | Limited | Yes |
| Sequences with token personalization | Yes (Foxify) | No | Sequences |
| Threaded unified inbox | Schema; polling v0.1.1 | Yes | Yes |
| Reporting (velocity, conversion, sources) | Yes | Limited | Yes |
| Owner leaderboard, email engagement | v0.2 | Limited | Yes |
| Forecast and quota | v1 | No | Yes |
| Custom objects | v1 | No | Yes (Enterprise) |
| Forms and lead capture | Yes (Capture Forms) | Limited | Yes |
| Service desk, ticketing | Out of scope | Yes | Yes |
| Marketing Hub style broadcasts | Out of scope | Limited | Yes |
| Mention scanning across 50+ platforms | Yes (this is what we are) | No | No |
| Sixty-section person dossiers (OSINT) | Yes | No | No |
| Den-based research workflows for 27 personas | Yes | No | No |
| Approximate cost solo / small team | $99 - $149/mo | $20/mo | $1,200/mo+ |
The switch offer
Tell us your situation
Want to talk before you commit? Drop your details below and Saul will get back to you within one business day with a real answer about whether we are the right fit for what you are running. No pitch, just a real read.
Form posts to a Saul inbox. We do not subscribe you to a drip. We do not pass your email to anyone. If you change your mind we delete the record on request.
Where this fits in MentionFox
MentionFox is research, lead-finding, enrichment, outreach, and now CRM as one product. The CRM is not a separate app you log into; it is the layer that aggregates all the work you are already doing in MentionFox. The Den system drives daily research-and-action workflows for twenty-seven personas. Each Den's surfaces are wired to push their actions into the CRM activity timeline. The OSINT spine generates dossiers that link directly to CRM contact records. The outreach engine logs every send into the CRM as an activity.
If you came here from the CRM landing page you already saw the feature list. If you came here from pricing the comparison above is the cost story. If you came from a competitor comparison you ran on Google, the short version is: HubSpot Sales Hub Pro is overbuilt and overpriced for almost everyone we talk to, and we built a CRM specifically for people who needed it as a layer on top of their research-and-outreach workflow rather than as a standalone behemoth.