Migrating from HubSpot to stedd.io: The Honest Walkthrough

HubSpot is a fantastic product. It’s also enormous, expensive, and built for a kind of business that most of you reading this aren’t running. Somewhere between the free tier and the £800-a-month “Sales Hub Professional” tier, a lot of small businesses end up paying for a Mercedes when they need a van.

If you’re at that point — getting useful value from HubSpot but quietly resenting the bill, or drowning in features you don’t need — this is what migrating looks like. No spin.

What you actually need to move

Most HubSpot accounts I’ve helped migrate contain four kinds of data that matter:

1. Contacts — names, emails, phone numbers, companies, custom properties.
2. Deals — open opportunities with values, stages, expected close dates.
3. Notes & activities — call logs, email history, meeting notes attached to contacts and deals.
4. Custom properties — the bespoke fields you’ve added over time.

What you don’t need to move: every email a sequence has ever sent, every form fill from three years ago, every workflow log. That data is interesting historically but it doesn’t power tomorrow’s work.

The export

HubSpot’s export is straightforward. Settings → Data Management → Export → choose the object (contacts / companies / deals). You get CSVs.

Two things to know:

First, properties don’t always export with sensible names. “Date of Last Engagement (Sales)” becomes a column header that breaks half of CSV importers. Rename them in the export or expect to fix them on the way in.

Second, deal stages are HubSpot-specific labels. They won’t match your new pipeline structure unless you map them deliberately. Don’t import “Decision Maker Bought-In” into a system that has no idea what that means.

The import

stedd.io’s import takes contact and deal CSVs directly. The process is:

1. Upload the contacts CSV. Map columns to fields. Confirm.
2. Upload the deals CSV. Map columns. The deal-to-contact relationship is preserved through the email field, so make sure your contacts are loaded first.
3. Skim the first few imported records to make sure nothing’s been mangled.

The whole thing typically takes 20-40 minutes for accounts with up to a few thousand contacts. Bigger imports take longer just for the upload.

What you’ll lose, what you’ll gain

Lose:

• Marketing automation sequences. If you rely on long-running drip campaigns, that’s a real gap. stedd.io has automations, but they’re focused on quote follow-ups, invoice reminders, and pipeline stage triggers — not nurture sequences.
• Email templates with merge tags. You can rebuild these but the migration doesn’t carry them.
• Integrations with marketing-specific tools (ad platforms, content management).

Gain:

• Quotes and invoices in the same system as your CRM. In HubSpot you either pay extra for Quote tools or you use a separate product. With stedd.io, the deal becomes a quote becomes a job becomes an invoice without leaving the system.
• A bill that doesn’t double when you add your fifth user.
• A UI you don’t need to train people on for two days.

What I’d do differently if I migrated again

The mistake I made the first time was trying to move everything. Five years of activity history, every defunct workflow, every test contact someone created in 2021. Half of it polluted the new system before I’d even started using it.

Now I’d do it cleaner: export only contacts that have been touched in the last 18 months, export only open deals, leave the historical clutter behind. If I genuinely need the old data, I’d archive the HubSpot CSVs to a Drive folder and move on.

A migration is a chance to clean house. Don’t waste it.

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If you’re considering moving and want to talk through your specific setup, get in touch — happy to help you scope it before you commit.