Finding a HubSpot Partner: Solutions Partner, Agency or Freelancer?

If you want to roll out HubSpot and need someone to do it, you quickly run into three routes that look almost identical at first glance: the official Solutions Partner from the HubSpot directory, the agency with a CRM department, and the individual freelancer. All three promise essentially the same thing. The difference only shows once you know what sits behind the labels and which part of it actually matters for your project.

I build HubSpot setups myself, as a freelancer. That doesn't mean it's the right choice for everyone. What follows is how I'd explain the three options to a friend who's about to make this decision, including the cases where I wouldn't be the right person for the job.

What "Solutions Partner" actually means

The term sounds like a quality seal, and that's where the first misunderstanding starts. A HubSpot Solutions Partner is a company listed in the official partner program. You find these firms in the HubSpot Solutions Directory, often with a tier next to the name: Gold, Platinum, Diamond, Elite.

Those tiers don't primarily measure how well someone implements. They hang mostly on the license volume a partner sells and manages through HubSpot. Bring many clients onto paid HubSpot plans and you climb the ranks. That says something about the partner's size and revenue, but little about whether your sales process ends up cleanly represented in the system.

This isn't an argument against Solutions Partners. Many of them are excellent. It's an argument against assuming a Diamond badge is automatically better for your specific project than a smaller firm or a single person with no program tier. The status answers the question "how much HubSpot does this partner sell", not "does this person understand my business".

One practical side effect of partner status: some partners can co-manage HubSpot licenses or, in rare cases, offer them at a discount. If you're buying a large block of licenses anyway, that can matter. For a standard setup with a handful of users, it's usually secondary.

Agency, freelancer, or both at once

Solutions Partner status and the agency-versus-freelancer question are two separate axes that often get mixed up. An agency can be a Solutions Partner. A freelancer could be one too, in theory, but often works without the status because the program is built around companies with license revenue. So let's sort the two practical options separately.

The agency brings a team. That's its biggest advantage and its biggest source of friction at the same time. You get several roles from one place: someone for CRM architecture, someone for marketing automation, often design and reporting on top. For a large rollout across multiple departments, with parallel work on Sales Hub, Marketing Hub and maybe Service Hub, that's the obvious choice. The price for it is structure: project management, fixed processes, usually higher day rates, and an account manager between you and the people actually building.

The freelancer is the person who builds and the person you talk to. There's no layer in between. That makes the collaboration direct and usually faster in the back-and-forth, and the cost is generally lower because you're not funding agency overhead. The limit is capacity. One person can't deliver a five-person project in three weeks and rarely covers every specialist discipline equally deeply. If you need a focused CRM and sales setup with a clean pipeline and the important automations, you're often better off here than with an agency that would be oversized for the job.

How to spot a good implementer

The directory status won't help you much here. What helps are the answers to a few concrete questions. With any candidate, whether agency, freelancer or Diamond partner, I'd check the same things.

Ask for a real example first. Not a reference list of logos, but a project similar to yours: what the starting point was, what got built, what was hard. Anyone who only talks about features and HubSpot certificates but can't walk through one concrete project clearly has either done little or doesn't think in your processes.

Watch whether someone asks you questions first or sells you a solution first. A good implementer wants to know how your sales team works today before saying what HubSpot should look like for you. If the finished setup is already on the table in the first call, before anyone knows your data or your workflow, that's a warning sign.

Ask what happens after go-live. A setup isn't a one-off that ends at handover. In the first weeks, edge cases surface, questions come from the team, small things need adjusting. Whoever plans for that phase has gone live before. Whoever declares the project finished at go-live leaves the settling-in period to you alone.

And ask specifically who builds. At an agency, the person in the sales call is rarely the one who later works on your portal. That's not bad in itself, but you should know who you'll be dealing with during the project and how experienced they are. With a freelancer the question is moot, because seller and implementer are the same person.

Which option fits which project

Roughly, it comes down to scope. If it's a company-wide rollout across several teams, with marketing campaigns, customer service and sales at once, there's a strong case for an agency or a larger Solutions Partner that covers the breadth with staff. There the extra structure earns its keep.

If instead it's about representing sales cleanly in HubSpot, setting up a working pipeline, migrating data from an old CRM and automating the decisive processes, then an experienced freelancer is usually the more efficient choice. Shorter paths, lower cost, one contact who knows your setup from the first field to the last. I've described how such a rollout runs step by step in a separate post: how a HubSpot implementation works.

There's a third case that often gets overlooked: you already have HubSpot, but the setup has grown messy, the data is unclean, nobody trusts the reports. That's not a new rollout, it's a cleanup and advisory job. For that you don't need someone who mobilizes a large project team, but someone who works into your existing portal and fixes things deliberately. How I approach that is on the page for CRM and HubSpot consulting.

Where I stand, and when I'll say no

So this doesn't read as a disguised sales pitch: I work as a freelancer, not an agency, and I'm not a listed Solutions Partner. For the projects I take on, that's an advantage, because you talk directly to the person who builds and don't pay for overhead. For other projects it's the wrong fit.

If you're planning a parallel rollout across five departments with a fixed deadline, I'm not your person, and I'll tell you so. In cases like that an agency is the better answer, and I'd rather point you elsewhere than take on a project I can't deliver alone in the time it needs. For a focused HubSpot setup around sales and CRM, a freelancer like me is often exactly right.

How I set up HubSpot in general is on the HubSpot implementation page. If you're unsure which of the three options fits your plan, drop me a line about where you stand and what you want to achieve. You'll get an honest read via the contact form – including when the honest answer is that an agency suits you better.

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Written by Joshua Kresse. I set up HubSpot at Pipewave and automate sales and CRM processes on top of HubSpot and n8n.