Introduction: marketing engine vs administration engine

HubSpot is a marketing dream—clean UX, quick setup, strong automation for email and landing pages. But when you try to run a year-end census collection or push payroll data to a testing system, you’ll feel the limits.

Stax.ai is built for retirement TPAs for work before and after the sale. If you want the broader landscape, read our Best CRM for TPAs guide.

Where HubSpot wins

Top-of-funnel work: inbound, email journeys, sales sequences, and deal tracking. If you need an easy way to organize outreach and qualify opportunities, HubSpot’s an excellent fit.

Where Stax.ai differs (and why TPAs care)

• Full lifecycle: onboarding, census collection, compliance workflows, and trust accounting in one place (see the Stax.ai Trust Accounting product).

• Plan Sponsor portal: included and white-labeled - with stellar reviews from TPAs, Plan Sponsors, and Advisors.

• Payroll/census automation: both APIs and upload standardization with AI.

• Event-driven automations: plan-cycle logic out of the box, not bolted on.

When to use both

Lots of TPAs run HubSpot for marketing and Stax.ai for operations. HubSpot handles leads; once the plan is signed, Stax.ai takes over for portal, payroll, census scrubbing, and annual cycles. You sync basic company/contact fields and let each tool do what it does best.

However, if you are using for an all-in-one system, Stax.ai CX includes deal pipelines, email marketing campaigns, and plan proposal and onboarding automation.

Bottom line

If marketing is your only need, HubSpot shines. If you want a CRM that also runs TPA operations, you’ll want Stax.ai—either as your main system or alongside HubSpot.