Switching from HubSpot to Phloz: the migration playbook

TL;DR

A HubSpot→Phloz migration for a typical agency (10–40 clients) is a one-to-two week project, not a quarter-long ordeal — if you treat it as a tiered move instead of a lift-and-shift. The shape: export companies, contacts, deals and notes from HubSpot (it exports cleanly — credit where due); map companies→clients, contacts→client contacts, open deals→your pipeline notes, and let dead history live in an archived export rather than polluting the new system; migrate active retainer clients first with full context, dormant clients as profile-only; cut over hard on a named date with HubSpot going read-only; and spend the saved per-seat money only after the first invoice cycle confirms nothing fell through. Below is the exact sequence, the field mapping, the gotchas (Marketing Hub contacts, sequences, and workflow re-creation), and the honest list of what you'll miss. Obvious disclosure: this is our migration guide for our product — the structure works for any HubSpot exit, so steal it even if you're going elsewhere.

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If you've read our honest HubSpot review and the TCO math and decided the per-seat curve isn't the tax you want to pay for growth, the next question is brutally practical: how much does leaving hurt?

Less than the dread suggests — provided you respect one principle: a migration is a chance to drop dead weight, not an obligation to carry it.

Phase 0 — Decide what deserves to move (one afternoon)

Before exporting anything, triage your HubSpot data into three buckets:

1. Active — clients with a live retainer or open project, their contacts, open deals, and the last 6–12 months of meaningful notes/emails. This moves with full fidelity.
2. Dormant — past clients you might revive. Company + contacts + a one-paragraph history note move; the 400-email thread archive does not.
3. Dead — lost deals from 2023, contacts from a webinar you ran twice, companies nobody can identify. This bucket goes into the export ZIP and stays there. Migrating it would just relocate the clutter.

Agencies that skip this triage migrate everything, take five times longer, and launch the new system pre-polluted. The triage IS the migration's value.

Phase 1 — Export from HubSpot (an hour, genuinely)

HubSpot's export story is one of its honest strengths:

• Companies, Contacts, Deals: Settings → Import & Export → Export. CSV per object, includes custom properties. Do one export per object type.
• Notes + engagement history: included in a full account export (Settings → Account Defaults → Export All Data) — you'll get a large ZIP; this is your permanent archive regardless of destination.
• Email threads: connected-inbox mail already lives in your Google Workspace / M365 — nothing to migrate; you're only moving the associations, which the notes export covers.
• What does NOT export usefully: workflows/sequences (they're HubSpot-runtime logic, not data), meeting links, and Marketing Hub assets (landing pages, CTAs). Screenshot the workflow logic you actually use — you'll re-create the handful that matter in minutes as recurring tasks.

Keep the full ZIP forever. Storage is free; regret isn't.

Phase 2 — The field mapping

The conceptual shift: HubSpot models a sales org (companies orbit deals); Phloz models an agency (everything orbits the client). The mapping that follows from it:

HubSpot	Phloz	Notes
Company	Client	Name, domain, address, industry come across as profile fields; anything bespoke lands in custom fields.
Contact	Client contact	Attached to their client; flag the ones who should get portal access.
Deal (open)	Client profile note + a task	Phloz is delivery-first; track an open expansion deal as a dated note + a follow-up task on the client.
Deal (closed-won)	The client itself	The retainer amount lives on the profile (budget field); history note for the origin story.
Deal (closed-lost)	Archive bucket	Leave in the export.
Notes / call logs	Internal notes on the client	Paste the meaningful ones; summarize the rest into one "history" note per client.
Owner	Assigned team members	Phloz assignment is per-client and role-aware (owner/admin/member/viewer) rather than a single owner property.
Tasks	Tasks (department-tagged)	Tag by department (PPC/SEO/social/CRO/web) on the way in — HubSpot tasks were flat; this is your upgrade moment.
Workflows/sequences	Recurring task templates	Re-create the 3–5 that earn it; see our recurring-tasks templates for the agency standards.

And one mapping HubSpot has no column for at all: each client's tracking infrastructure. As you touch every client anyway, spend ten extra minutes per active client building their tracking map — GTM container, GA4 property, pixels, CAPI endpoints, who has access. It's the part of the migration that adds something HubSpot never held, and it's why the per-client touch is worth doing by hand for the actives instead of bulk-importing blind.

Phase 3 — Import, actives first (two to four days)

Work the tiers in order:

1. Top 5 clients, fully, by hand. Yes, by hand: profile, contacts, open work as tasks, history note, tracking map. Two reasons: you'll learn the product's shape on data you know cold, and your most important clients get human-verified records. Budget ~30–45 minutes each.
2. Remaining active clients via import from your CSVs, then a 10-minute per-client verification pass (the client onboarding checklist doubles as the verification list — a migration is just onboarding in bulk).
3. Dormant tier: profile + contacts + one history note. No tasks, no maps. Fifteen minutes for the lot via import.
4. Wire the inbound email addresses. Every Phloz client gets a unique inbound address — add it to your team's address books and (optionally) forwarding rules so client email starts threading into the right client from day one. This replaces HubSpot's connected-inbox logging and is the piece that makes the new system self-feeding.

Phase 4 — The cutover week

• Name the date. Friday cutovers are bad (nobody fixes Saturday surprises); pick a Tuesday.
• Parallel-run for exactly two weeks before it — new work goes in Phloz, HubSpot stays open read-mostly for reference. Two weeks is enough to catch the "wait, where's X" gaps; longer than that and the parallel run becomes the permanent state.
• On the date: HubSpot goes read-only. Remove edit permissions, keep one admin login. Announce it the way you'd announce a client launch — the team treats reversible decisions as optional ones.
• Downgrade HubSpot at the next renewal boundary, not before — per the annual-commit asymmetry in the TCO post, removed seats bill until renewal anyway, so time the paperwork to the contract, and keep the account on Free forever after as a second archive.

What you'll miss, honestly

Switching costs include the things HubSpot did well, and pretending otherwise would make this playbook marketing instead of a manual:

• Sequences/automation depth. If your agency genuinely runs outbound sequences for its own biz-dev, keep a lightweight sales tool (or HubSpot Free + a sequencer) for that one job. Phloz is deliberately not an outbound-sales machine.
• The Solutions Partner directory, if you're a partner — that's a lead channel tied to using HubSpot, and only you can price it.
• Muscle memory. Two to three weeks of "where's the thing" friction is real. The skeptical-AM trial from our buyer's guide exists precisely to surface whether the friction settles.

What you stop missing: the per-seat math against every hire, the Marketing Hub contact ratchet, and a CRM that holds your pipeline but has never heard of your clients' pixels.

The checklist version

1. Triage: active / dormant / dead (afternoon)
2. Export everything from HubSpot; archive the ZIP (hour)
3. Hand-migrate top 5 clients incl. tracking maps (day)
4. Import remaining actives + verify; dormants as profiles (1–2 days)
5. Wire inbound email addresses (hour)
6. Two-week parallel run, new work in Phloz only
7. Tuesday cutover: HubSpot read-only
8. Renewal-boundary downgrade; keep Free as archive

If you want the per-client pricing math that usually motivates the move in the first place, it's on the pricing page — and if your situation has a wrinkle this playbook doesn't cover, the comparison page and alternatives guide go deeper on the product-shape differences that decide edge cases.