A HubSpot Service Hub alternative for teams that just want email tickets.

HubSpot Service Hub is the support corner of a much larger platform. Its strength is that a customer record can follow someone from a marketing email to a sales deal to a support ticket, all in one place. Solves does not try to be that. It is a focused, email-first support desk for teams whose real need is an owned inbox with ownership, notes, SLAs and multi-brand, without a CRM attached.

So the honest question is not which tool is better, it is which job you are buying for. If you want CRM and service joined up, HubSpot is built for exactly that and is the better fit. If you mainly need shared addresses like support@, info@ and accounts@ to become owned tickets that nobody drops, Solves does that job directly and you skip the suite you would only half use.

HubSpot does offer free service tools and a permanent Free plan at no cost, so this is not a free-versus-paid argument. It is a focus argument. The free HubSpot tier carries HubSpot branding and a small seat count, and its paid service tiers price per seat with the CRM bundled. Solves prices in GBP team bands, so you size the plan to the team rather than counting heads, and there is no CRM bundled in.

We are not going to pretend a focused desk beats a CRM suite at being a CRM suite. There are clear cases where HubSpot Service Hub is the better choice, and if any of these describe you, stay with HubSpot.

• You want CRM and service in one platform, with a single record that spans marketing, sales and support.
• You already run HubSpot for marketing or sales, and adding service keeps everything in one place you trust.
• You need pipelines, deal tracking and reporting that tie support activity back to revenue.
• Live chat, a phone channel, social inboxes or wider omnichannel support are hard requirements, not nice-to-haves.

Solves does none of those things, on purpose. It is email-first: no live chat, no phone, no social, no CRM. If the joined-up suite is the point, a focused inbox tool is the wrong shape of product, and HubSpot earns its price. We would rather tell you that now than sell you a desk you would outgrow in a month.

The flip side is just as clear. Plenty of teams adopt HubSpot Service Hub for the inbox and ticketing, then find they are paying suite prices and navigating a CRM to do what is, at heart, email triage. If that is you, a focused desk is lighter to run and quicker to learn.

1. Your real job is making support@, info@ and accounts@ into owned, tracked tickets, not managing a sales pipeline.
2. You run more than one brand and want them in one queue, each keeping its own identity to the customer.
3. You want GBP pricing, ex VAT, with VAT-visible invoices, and team bands instead of counting every seat.
4. You want first-response and resolution SLA timers and a simple set of permissions, without configuring an enterprise platform.

For a UK small or medium team that lives in email and does not need a CRM, Solves is the more direct tool. You connect your support address with forwarding-first mailbox setup, run the guided checks, and start working one queue. There is no suite to adopt and no per-seat sticker shock when a colleague helps out on a busy day.

If you decide a focused desk is right, you do not have to wait on a big migration to feel the benefit. Moving off a shared inbox into Solves is forwarding-first and shipped today: you point your support address at Solves, run the plain-English mailbox checks, and new email starts arriving as owned tickets in one queue.

Bulk import of historic HubSpot tickets is a guided, in-pilot process rather than a finished one-click transfer, so we set it up with you as part of early access rather than promising an automatic switch. The honest version is simple: you can start working email in Solves straight away, and we handle history together if and when you need it.