Samfora vs HubSpot: does HubSpot fit a Swedish fundraising organisation?

The short version

Swedish organisations end up in HubSpot for a good reason. The communications team needed newsletters, landing pages and forms, the free CRM was there, and HubSpot is genuinely good at all of that. The problem starts when fundraising has to live in the same system.

HubSpot says so itself. On its nonprofit page it recommends connecting "a dedicated fundraising platform (like Fundraise Up or Donorbox) for payment processing", and renaming "Deals" to "Donations" (hubspot.com/nonprofits, checked 27 October 2026). HubSpot can store a gift as an object. It cannot receive one. The money runs through an American add-on tool, and anything that arrives through Swish, Autogiro or Bankgiro reaches HubSpot only if someone imports it.

Samfora was built in Stockholm for Swedish fundraising and nothing else. Donors, members, volunteers, companies and foundations in one data model. Swish, Autogiro, Bankgiro and card payments matched automatically to the donor profile. Email, SMS and automations included, along with every integration we build. AI in the foundation, not in a separate licence or a pot of credits. Companies are enriched automatically with financials, a contact person and research on their giving, private donors are sorted into ready-made segments, and the foundation module maps Sweden's more than 17 000 foundations. The price is fixed, with no per-user licence and no credits that run out.

If marketing is the main job, with a website to run, search to win and a team that already knows HubSpot, HubSpot is hard to beat. If fundraising is the main job, and you are a Swedish organisation with 5 to 100 employees and 20 to 500 million kronor in annual income, Samfora does the work.

Where the products came from

HubSpot was founded in 2006 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as inbound marketing software. The free CRM arrived in 2014, and today HubSpot is sold as one customer platform for marketing, sales, service and content, with the Breeze AI assistant and a marketplace of more than 2 000 integrations. HubSpot says more than 4 000 nonprofits worldwide use the platform (hubspot.com/nonprofits, checked 27 October 2026). The data model underneath is contacts, companies, deals and tickets. The gift is something you add.

Samfora was founded in 2025 in Stockholm, and the first line of code in the platform was written in January 2026. We started from Swedish reality: Swish gifts with no sender data, Autogiro mandates, Bankgiro files, tax deductions, the 90-account and a fundraising manager spending 20 hours a week on administration. We build the platform together with Swedish organisations such as UN Women Sverige, IM Individuell Människohjälp, Operation Smile, Operation Aid, ALS-fonden, Regnbågsfonden, GAPF, Stiftelsen Expo, Reformaten, Ny Gemenskap, Framtidsjorden and cureFAchildren. The gift is not a renamed sales object with us. It is the first thing we built.

Area by area

Price and total cost

HubSpot, checked 27 October 2026 on hubspot.com/pricing in euros: Free costs nothing for up to two users. Starter costs 7 euros per seat per month at a promotional price (65 percent off, list price higher) for up to ten users. Professional costs 90 euros per seat per month and Enterprise 175 euros, both billed annually, and both require you to buy onboarding. Nonprofits get 40 percent off the platform.

Then come the credits. Every paid plan has a monthly pot of HubSpot Credits, 5 000 on Starter, 10 000 on Professional and 15 000 on Enterprise, consumed by one-to-many email, automations and AI agents. Unused credits vanish at the end of the month, and when you need more you buy packs or pay per credit. For a fundraising organisation sending newsletters to 50 000 donors, that is a variable line in the budget that does not appear on the pricing page.

And then come the gifts. Since HubSpot does not take payments in Sweden, you need a separate fundraising platform, with its own fee on every gift, before a single krona lands in the CRM.

Samfora has a fixed price based on the size of your organisation. Platform licence, every module, Rule for email and SMS, every integration, data storage, support, migration and ongoing development are included. There is no per-user licence, no credits and no consulting hours. The only usage-based charge is SMS, at 0.50 kr each. The sends to your 50 000 donors are included.

The gift as an object: Swish, Autogiro and Bankgiro

HubSpot's own description for nonprofits is clear: donations are tracked as an object on the contact record, payments are handled by Fundraise Up, Donorbox or Stripe, and recurring gifts run through Commerce Hub with Stripe. HubSpot's own payments feature exists only for organisations in the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada; elsewhere you connect a Stripe account for card payments (knowledge.hubspot.com, checked 27 October 2026). Swish, Autogiro and Bankgiro exist in none of these links. A Swish gift with no sender data, an Autogiro mandate or a payment to the Bankgiro account is an Excel import.

In Samfora, Swish, Autogiro, Bankgiro and card payments are part of the product. Payments arrive through Repejo and Stripe, the bank account is read through open banking so that 100 percent of what comes in becomes donor data, and every transaction is matched to the right donor profile on email, phone number or personal identity number. Duplicates are stopped against the external ID, and uncertain matches become review tasks for a human, never guesses. No manual reconciliation.

Marketing and automation

Here HubSpot wins, and it should be said plainly. Marketing Hub is HubSpot's original product and still best in class: email, landing pages, forms, blog, social media, A/B testing, Marketing Studio and, from Professional, advanced automation flows and a Nurture Agent that personalises sends. If you run a content-heavy website and want to be found in AI search, the tools are there (hubspot.com/pricing, checked 27 October 2026).

Samfora's communication runs through Rule, a Swedish marketing automation platform, included in the price: campaigns and automations for email, SMS and RCS, triggered by what happens in the donor data, with consent synced both ways. Ready flows for welcome, thanks, reminders and reactivation are in place, segments drive the sends directly, and we are building the same kind of advanced flows HubSpot has, with one difference: ours start from the gift, not from a form on a website.

Integrations

HubSpot has more than 2 000 apps on its marketplace, including the American fundraising tools Fundraise Up, Donorbox and GoFundMe Pro, and event tools such as Eventbrite. It is a real ecosystem. The Swedish fundraising stack, a payment platform with Swish and Autogiro, the bank, Swedish marketing automation and accounting through SIE, is not part of it.

We see integrations as a moat, not a revenue line. Samfora connects to Repejo, Stripe, Adoveo and samfora.org for payments and campaigns, to the banks through open banking, to Rule for marketing automation, email, SMS and RCS, and to Outlook, with an open API and webhooks for the rest. Support reaches you directly in Microsoft Teams, where you already work. We build the integrations, they are included in the price and we maintain them. When one customer needs a new connection, we build it once and every customer gets it.

AI and automation

Breeze is HubSpot's AI, and it is everywhere in the platform: drafts for email and social posts, plain-language analysis of CRM data, agents for prospecting, customer service, content and nurture. HubSpot also states that it does not use your data to train third-party AI models, which deserves a mention. But the agents are paid for in credits, and they only see what is in HubSpot: the gift data in Fundraise Up, the Swish gifts in Excel and the Autogiro mandates at the bank sit outside. An agent is only as good as the context it can see.

Samfora is built with AI in the foundation. Today: AI field mapping on import, email and SMS drafts written from your own data, segmentation in plain language, and analytics. Agents working with a human in the approval loop are in development. The AI features run on Mistral and other European models, and more European models are launching at speed. No model is ever trained on your data. All of it is part of the licence, not an add-on.

Data storage, security and GDPR

HubSpot hosts on Amazon Web Services in the United States, Canada, Australia and the EU, where EU means Germany. Which data centre you get is decided by your IP address at sign-up, and it can be changed on a paid plan. The same documentation lists when data leaves the data centre anyway: sub-processors, marketplace apps, consulting partners, analytics and usage data sent to the United States, support from other regions, and HubSpot, Inc. as a company in the United States (knowledge.hubspot.com, checked 27 October 2026). HubSpot's own terms say that a chosen hosting location does not warrant that your data residency requirements are met. Encryption of sensitive data requires Enterprise.

A Swedish organisation we spoke with had in practice chosen HubSpot and backed out at the last minute. Not because the data sat in the United States, but because the company does. EU servers were not enough for their board.

Samfora stores all data encrypted in Sweden. Hosting and storage run within the EU/EEA, we only use sub-processors that meet the same requirements, and nothing is transferred to third countries. Your data is never used to train AI models. A data processing agreement is ready, every data subject right is supported and consent is handled automatically per channel and purpose. The whole database is yours: export everything with one click as Excel, CSV or SIE. Larger organisations with special requirements can run Samfora on their own servers. And Samfora AB is a Swedish company under Swedish law.

Data model: donors, members, volunteers, companies and foundations

HubSpot's data model is contacts, companies, deals and tickets, with custom objects from Professional. Nonprofits rename deals to donations and contacts to constituents, and volunteers become contacts with properties and workflows. HubSpot describes itself as "the coordination layer" for volunteers and events, with dedicated tools connected on top. That is honest, and it is a description of a system where fundraising lives somewhere else.

Samfora has five objects at its core: donors, members, volunteers, companies and foundations. Every donation, send and interaction lands on one complete profile. The member module handles memberships, fees and renewals in the same profile as the gifts. The corporate and foundation modules are described in the next section. Through samfora.org, peer-to-peer campaigns, corporate donations, invoices, card donations, monthly giving, matching campaigns and donors' own self-service pages are included as well.

Companies and foundations: enrichment and grants

HubSpot has company data and buying signals for B2B sales in the paid plans, built to find companies that will buy something, not companies that want to give. There is no database of Swedish foundations, and foundation applications are something you configure as a pipeline.

Samfora enriches every company in the register out of the box, with no add-on: revenue, net result, profit margin and headcount from the annual report, a primary contact person, website and social media following, and research on the company's giving with known donations, a giving profile, sourced examples and its ESG report. Ready-made segments for corporate leads and corporate donors are in place. Right now several of our customers are using it in their Christmas campaigns to small and medium-sized businesses. None of the systems we compare ourselves with has this built in.

The foundation module maps Sweden's more than 17 000 foundations from the county administrative boards' foundation register and matches their purposes against yours, so you can see which foundations could fund your work, and it handles the applications in the same system. We are testing it with current customers from November 2026, it is included for Samfora customers in 2026, and in 2027 we open it to every nonprofit in Sweden.

Reporting and donor analytics

HubSpot's reporting is strong on what HubSpot is built for: campaigns, traffic, conversion and attribution, with custom reports from Professional and Breeze answering questions such as "which donors have not given in twelve months". That assumes the gifts are in HubSpot, and they get there through the import or the add-on tool.

Samfora reports on what Swedish fundraising actually measures: monthly donors in and out, reactivated donors, campaign results per channel, corporate income and average gift, all on data that was matched automatically. The analytics module is included, and you can ask the questions in plain language.

For private donors, ready-made segments are there from day one: monthly donors, one-time donors, donors who have given twice, major donors with a 12 or 24 month window, and lapsed donors. The segments update automatically and can drive sends and automations directly. RFM analysis, which scores every donor on how recently, how often and how much they give, launches at the turn of the year, with lifetime value per donor to follow.

Ecosystem and maturity

HubSpot has twenty years, a marketplace of more than 2 000 apps, HubSpot Academy, user groups, agencies in every city and a listed company behind it. Samfora was founded in 2025 and builds the platform together with Swedish design partners. We do not have HubSpot's ecosystem and we will not have it.

What we have instead is a guarantee: at least a 50 percent reduction in administrative time after the first year, or your money back.

Where HubSpot is the better choice

• Marketing is the main job: website, blog, search, social media and landing pages, and fundraising is a small part.
• Your team already knows HubSpot, and you have an agency or an administrator who builds the flows.
• You are two people and get by on the free CRM and a newsletter tool.
• You need a specific marketplace app, or an event tool such as Eventbrite synced into the CRM.
• You are happy for gifts to be handled by Fundraise Up or Donorbox and only want to see them in HubSpot.

Where Samfora is the better choice

• Fundraising is the main job, and Swish, Autogiro, Bankgiro and cards should be matched to the donor profile from day one, without add-ons.
• You want to stop counting credits for every newsletter and every AI feature.
• You want to know exactly where your donor data lives (Sweden), with a Swedish company under Swedish law.
• You raise from companies and foundations and want the companies enriched and Sweden's foundations mapped in the same system, without add-on services.
• You want private donors sorted into ready-made segments that drive the sends, with RFM and lifetime value on the way.
• You have 5 to 100 employees, no IT department, and want to be live in weeks.
• You want a vendor that takes the risk: your money back if administration is not halved.

Samfora and HubSpot at a glance