Salesforce charges US$2 a conversation; HubSpot 50 cents. CRM is now a system of action

01The seat still costs more than the agent

Start with the licence a human needs before any agent can run. Salesforce lists five Sales Cloud editions: Starter at US$25, Pro at US$100, Core at US$195, Advanced at US$395 and Max at US$550 a user a month, billed annually, and states that “AI can be added to Core and above”. The Agentforce for Sales add-on is “from US$125 a user a month”, so the cheapest agent-ready Salesforce seat is Core plus the add-on, US$320. Max bundles the add-on and 2.75 million Flex Credits per org per year.² Salesforce’s India pricing page shows the same figures in US dollars, not rupees.

HubSpot lists Sales Hub Starter at US$20 a seat a month, Professional at US$100 and Enterprise at US$150, in US dollars “subject to applicable tax”, and includes 500, 3,000 and 5,000 HubSpot Credits a month respectively.³ Zoho lists its CRM in rupees for Indian buyers: Standard ₹800, Professional ₹1,400, Enterprise ₹2,400 and Ultimate ₹2,600 a user a month billed annually (US$14, US$23, US$40 and US$52 on the US price list), with Zia Agents, anomaly detection and the prediction tools named on the Enterprise edition page.⁷ Microsoft’s India page lists Dynamics 365 Sales Professional at ₹5,410, Sales Enterprise at ₹8,735 and Sales Premium at ₹12,480 a user a month paid yearly, GST on top; the US page has them at US$65, US$105 and US$150. Sales Enterprise is where “Copilot in Dynamics 365 and agentic capabilities” begin; Premium adds 1,000 Copilot Credits per user per month.^{10 11}

02System of action, mechanically

“System of action” is a phrase every one of the four vendors now uses in some form, so it is worth saying what it means in plumbing terms. A system of record is written by people and read by software. A system of action reverses one of those arrows: software writes to the record, and people read what it wrote. The whole thing is four steps, and the vendors’ own documents name each one.

The reason the third step is the billed one is not technical. Reading a record costs the vendor a database call; writing one creates a unit the vendor can count, and every price list in this piece counts it. Salesforce’s pricing page puts it plainly: standard Agentforce actions cost 20 Flex Credits each and voice actions 30.¹ HubSpot’s knowledge base says credits “are used only when specific actions are performed, like executing a Breeze action in a workflow”, and that unused credits “expire at the end of each usage period and do not roll over”.⁵ Zoho’s Zia LLM, announced on 17 July 2025 in three sizes, is the only one of the four models a buyer can point to a named Indian data centre for.⁹

03The price of the work, in three currencies

Convert the published credit rates into dollars and the agent layer becomes comparable for the first time. One US dollar buys 200 Salesforce Flex Credits, 125 Microsoft Copilot Credits in the standard pack, or 100 HubSpot Credits. Multiply by what each vendor says a unit of work costs and you get a price per action that none of them prints on the page.

The units are not the same unit. A Salesforce “conversation” is an exchange with a customer however many actions it takes; a HubSpot resolved conversation is billed only if the agent closes it. A Salesforce standard action is one step of a multi-step task; a HubSpot Data Agent prompt is one answer about one record. Comparing them is fair only at the level of a budget line, which is where a buyer works. And the included allowances are smaller than they sound.

Zoho has chosen not to play this game. Its Zia Agents page says “Zia Agents are free; you only pay your LLM vendor for the tokens you consume”, that Zoho-hosted models come with up to 30 million tokens a month at no charge, and that agents do not need their own CRM licences.⁸ That is a pricing position, not a charity: it makes the ₹2,400 Enterprise seat the whole bill for most Indian teams, and it is the sharpest contrast on offer to Salesforce, whose agent pricing has moved from US$2 a conversation in 2024 to Flex Credits in 2025 to per-user add-ons, as TechBag’s Agentforce page records.¹³

04Record versus action: what changes in the contract

Put the two models side by side and the commercial differences are not about intelligence at all. They are about who did the writing, how it is billed and who answers for it.

The monthly expiry of included credits is the tell. A vendor that lets allowances lapse is pricing for habit, not for value, and a buyer should negotiate a credit cap, a monthly usage report and the review step as contract terms rather than settings. Of the four, only Zoho’s model has no expiring unit to negotiate over.

05Count the agents, not the adjectives

Our earlier version leaned on analyst phrases about “agentic” platforms. A cheaper test is to count what each vendor is willing to name on its own agent page. Salesforce names seven pre-built agents: Service Agent, Sales Development Representative, Sales Coach, Merchandiser, Buyer Agent, Personal Shopper and Campaign Optimizer.⁶ Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 Sales pricing page names four: Sales Qualification, Sales Opportunity, Sales Research and Sales Close, the last still in preview.¹⁰ HubSpot names three agents, Customer, Prospecting and Data, plus the Breeze Assistant and an agent builder for the rest.¹⁵

None of the four pages publishes a task success rate, a resolution rate or an error rate for its agents. That is the number a buyer would most like to have and the one no price list carries, which is why the review step in Section 2 is not optional: it is the only place the accuracy figure will ever be measured, and it will be measured on your customers.