Qivity CRM vs inbound marketing suites: what happens when the free tier ends
The inbound marketing suites offer the best on-ramp in the industry, and their free CRM tiers are genuinely good. The question is what the bill looks like at 20 seats with the professional marketing tier attached, and whether you needed a marketing platform or a sales system.
Last reviewed February 2026
Choose an inbound marketing suite if content marketing is the engine of your business and you want best-in-class landing page and nurture tooling. Choose Qivity if your revenue comes from a sales team working deals, WhatsApp and renewals — and you want the AI to stay in-house.
Feature by feature
| Capability | Qivity CRM | Inbound marketing suite |
|---|---|---|
| Where the AI runs | Qivity servers, or yours if you self-host | Vendor / third-party cloud |
| Full mailbox inside the CRM | Yes | Connected inbox (partial) |
| WhatsApp inbox + campaigns | Native | Integration, higher tiers |
| Cost predictability as contacts grow | Seat-based, flat | Scales with contact tiers |
| Deal value from product catalog | Yes, enforced | Products exist, value editable |
| Sales commission + settlement | Native | No |
| AMC / service contracts | Native | No |
| Audience risk screening before send | Native | No |
| Self-hosting option | Yes | No |
Where inbound marketing suites are genuinely strong
Written by us, about our competition. We mean it — a comparison that only flatters its author is worth nothing to a buyer.
- Outstanding free tiers and onboarding
- Best-in-class inbound marketing tooling
- Enormous template and education libraries
- Genuinely pleasant to use
Where teams outgrow it
- Pricing escalates sharply once contact counts and modules stack up
- Their AI runs on third-party foundation models
- WhatsApp only via third-party integrations, on higher tiers
- No service-contract, AMC or maintenance-visit management
- No native commission calculation
- Deal amounts are typed in, not derived from a product catalog
Migrating
What moving off an inbound marketing suite actually involves
Export
Leads, accounts, contacts, opportunities and activity history as CSV or Excel. We give you the field list to pull.
Map
We map your fields to Qivity with you on a call, including custom fields and stage names. Nothing is guessed.
Dry run
Imported into a sandbox first. You check the record counts and open a dozen records before anyone commits.
Cut over
Mailboxes connected, users invited, and the old system kept read-only for a month as a safety net.
Qivity CRM vs Marketing suites — questions
Is Qivity cheaper than an inbound marketing suite?
At the free tier, no — those free CRM tiers are hard to beat. Once you add a professional marketing or sales tier across a team, Qivity is typically a fraction of the total, because campaigns, WhatsApp and contracts are included rather than sold as separate modules.
Can Qivity replace a marketing automation module?
For outbound email campaigns, list management, A/B subject testing, deliverability warm-up and suppression handling — yes. For inbound content marketing, landing pages, blogs and SEO tooling, a dedicated marketing suite remains stronger; many teams keep a lightweight site and run revenue in Qivity.
Other comparisons
Run them side by side
We will demo against the same dataset you run in an inbound marketing suite today. Bring the report you cannot get out of it.