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Henley Wing
Henley Wing

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I analyzed 100K HubSpot customers - here's what I learned

If you work at a HubSpot agency, build apps on the HubSpot platform, or just want to understand who actually uses HubSpot and how, this article is for you.

I started with the customer list published by Bloomberry, which tracks 108,269 companies running HubSpot. They find these companies by scanning DNS records, the technical config files every company publishes when they set up an email or web tool.

HubSpot leaves specific fingerprints in those records: SPF entries that authorize HubSpot to send email on a company's behalf, CNAME records pointing to HubSpot-hosted subdomains, and tracking pixels tied to HubSpot's servers. If a company is running HubSpot, those records don't lie. I took that raw list and dug in.

Here's what the data shows.


1. Software companies use HubSpot at nearly 10x the average rate.

Ranking by raw customer count is boring. Software Development comes first, then IT Services, then Financial Services. That just tells you which industries have a lot of companies in general.

The more useful metric is a multiplier: compared to all 2 million domains in the dataset, how much more likely is a company in a given industry to be running HubSpot?

Software Development comes in at 9.6x. A software company is nearly ten times more likely to be on HubSpot than the average business. Almost every software company that does marketing eventually ends up here.


2. The other over-indexing industries are more surprising than you'd expect.

After software, the industries most disproportionately likely to use HubSpot are:

Market Research (5.8x). Their entire business is built on educating buyers and building credibility over time. HubSpot's content and nurture tools are a natural fit.

E-Learning (4.9x). These companies attract, educate, and convert prospects over long consideration cycles. That's textbook inbound marketing.

Financial Services (4.4x). Fintech skews this up, but traditional financial services firms are in the mix too. Compliance constraints limit many channels, pushing companies toward owned tools like HubSpot.

Medical Equipment (3.9x) and Biotech (3.7x). Both sell through long, relationship-driven cycles to hospitals and procurement committees. A deal that takes 18 months and involves six stakeholders is exactly what HubSpot is built for.

Marketing and Advertising Services (3.5x each). Agencies use the tools they recommend to clients. HubSpot's partner program also gives certified agencies referral revenue, making adoption a business decision as much as a product one.


3. The typical HubSpot customer is smaller than most people assume.

The single biggest segment, at 42% of all users, is companies with 11 to 50 employees. Companies with fewer than 200 employees account for 86% of the entire customer base. Past 200 employees, adoption drops off as companies move toward Marketo or Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

The breakdown looks very different depending on which HubSpot product you're looking at:

Free CRM. 78% of users have fewer than 10 employees. This is not a customer base. It's a top-of-funnel acquisition strategy: get millions of tiny businesses in the door, convert the ones that grow.

Service Hub (helpdesk, live chat, knowledge base). Over half of users have fewer than 10 employees. At that scale it usually means one chat widget and a basic help center. Only 4 companies with more than 10,000 employees use it at all.

Content Hub (websites, landing pages, blogs). The most even spread of any product. Website needs exist at every company size, so the distribution is flatter across the board.

Sales Hub (CRM, pipelines, deals). Reaches furthest up the size curve. The tail at larger companies is healthier than any other HubSpot product, and 0.8% of Sales Hub users have more than 10,000 employees, compared to just 0.1% for Service Hub.

If you're selling to HubSpot customers, the specific product they run is one of the best signals you have about their size.


4. HubSpot has genuinely caught Salesforce in the mid-market.

I polled 972 sales leaders in March 2026 with one question: what is your company's main CRM?

Salesforce came in at 43% (419 companies). HubSpot at 41% (397 companies). Twenty-two companies separated them. At that sample size, that is a statistical tie.

A decade ago this wasn't close. Salesforce was the default for any company that took sales seriously, and HubSpot was a marketing tool with a free CRM bolted on. That is no longer the case.

Real companies in the poll running HubSpot as their primary CRM include Zapier, Bitwarden, GitKraken, CoinGecko, DataSnipper, UpGuard, Unstructured, and Rinsed. These are not small companies kicking the tires. They are funded, growing businesses with real sales teams operating entirely out of HubSpot.


5. HubSpot and Salesforce are not fighting over the same customers anymore.

The near-tie masks something more interesting: the two platforms have quietly split into different markets.

HubSpot wins at companies with faster sales cycles, technical buyers, and self-serve growth motions. Businesses where a prospect can sign up, try the product, and convert without ever talking to a sales rep. Bitwarden, Unstructured, Flowcode, and Rinsed all fit this profile.

Salesforce wins where deals are complex, contracts are large, and buying involves multiple departments over months. Rippling, Toast, Notion, Superhuman, and Betterment are all in that camp. These are businesses where the CRM needs deep customization and a dedicated admin team.

They're both called CRMs. They're serving increasingly different businesses. That matters a lot if you're an agency deciding which platform to specialize in.


6. Finland uses HubSpot more than any other country.

The US has the most HubSpot users in absolute terms at 48,289 companies. But adjusted for how many total businesses exist in each country, the rankings look very different.

Finnish companies are 5.9x more likely to be running HubSpot than average. Norway is at 5.1x. New Zealand at 4.6x. The US at 4.2x. Australia at 4.1x. Sweden, Denmark, and Belgium all make the top 15.

The Nordics showing up this heavily is striking. Small markets by population, but they produce a disproportionate number of tech-forward businesses that adopt modern marketing tools early.

Japan at 5.1x is the most surprising entry. American B2B SaaS tools typically struggle there due to language barriers and a preference for domestic software. Japan tying Norway suggests HubSpot has made inroads that most US software companies never manage.

Israel at 3.9x makes complete sense. One of the densest startup ecosystems in the world relative to population. Israeli startups adopt modern go-to-market tools early and HubSpot benefits from that disproportionately.


7. HubSpot is third in email marketing by domain count, and that's actually a compliment.

I looked at which email marketing tool each of the 2 million domains in the dataset was configured to use, by reading DNS records. The breakdown:

Third place sounds like a demotion. It isn't. Mailchimp and Brevo users are often just sending a monthly newsletter. HubSpot customers are typically running their entire marketing operation through the platform: forms, landing pages, ad tracking, CRM, chat, support, and email all wired together. Third by domain count likely means first by revenue per customer.


8. Brevo is the story most people in the HubSpot world are ignoring.

16% market share. More customers than HubSpot by raw count. And it barely registers in most marketing technology conversations.

Brevo rebranded from Sendinblue in 2023 and has been quietly winning on price. It costs considerably less than HubSpot at almost every tier. A lot of companies land on Brevo when they outgrow Mailchimp but can't justify HubSpot's pricing, particularly in European and Latin American markets.

For HubSpot agencies and developers, this matters. Brevo represents a large pool of companies that opted out of HubSpot specifically because of cost. They're not on Salesforce. They're one clear value conversation away from switching.


The bottom line

108,269 companies are running HubSpot. It's statistically tied with Salesforce in the mid-market. Software companies adopt it at nearly 10x the average rate. The typical customer is an 11 to 50 person company, probably in tech, probably in the US or Northern Europe.

If you're a HubSpot agency, the clearest opportunity is in industries that over-index but aren't obvious: medical equipment, biotech, financial services. Complex buying cycles, real budget, and not yet heavily targeted by HubSpot-specialized agencies.

If you're a developer building on the platform, Sales Hub and Content Hub users skew larger and are worth approaching differently than Service Hub users.

And if you're just trying to understand the landscape: HubSpot is no longer a marketing tool with a CRM attached. It's a full business platform, and the data backs that up.

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