HubSpot Acquired Warmly: The Best Warmly Alternatives in 2026

On June 30, 2026, HubSpot announced it would acquire Warmly, the San Francisco startup known for person-level website visitor identification and its AI inbound and outbound agents (CMSWire coverage of the deal). Terms weren’t disclosed. The press release talked about “agentic go-to-market,” the customer email said nothing would change, and most Warmly users went back to their pipeline reviews.

Three months later the picture is clearer, and it looks less like a product acquisition than an acqui-hire. The co-founders now hold product roles inside HubSpot and are building HubSpot’s own features. Warmly had roughly 60 employees when the deal was announced, and public LinkedIn profiles and posts from former staff suggest most of that team did not make the move. When a buyer takes the founders and a handful of engineers and lets the rest of the company go, the standalone product is rarely the thing it bought.

If you run Warmly on your website today, this article is for you. It covers what the acquisition means in practice, the signals worth watching, what a good Warmly alternative has to cover, and why the next few months are the cheapest window you’ll get to switch on your own terms.

Table of Contents

• What Actually Happened When HubSpot Bought Warmly
  • Why this reads as an acqui-hire
• What the Acquisition Means for Warmly Customers
  • Scenario 1: Warmly keeps running, slowly
  • Scenario 2: Warmly gets folded into HubSpot
  • Scenario 3: Warmly is sunset
• Warning Signs to Watch in Your Warmly Account
• Why Now Is the Best Time to Switch
• What to Look For in a Warmly.ai Replacement
  • Warmly alternatives compared
• Why Captiwate Is the Natural Warmly Alternative
• Our Offer: We Do the Whole Migration
  • What the migration looks like week by week
• Make the Move While It’s Still Your Decision

What Actually Happened When HubSpot Bought Warmly

Warmly was founded in 2020 by Max Greenwald, Alan Zhao and Carina Boo and went through Y Combinator (Warmly on Y Combinator). Its core product was person-level website intent: a tracking script that tries to name the individual behind a visit, not only the company, and then triggers something, an alert, an AI chat, an email sequence, a LinkedIn touch. Over time Warmly layered two AI agents on top, an Inbound Agent for website conversations and a TAM Agent for outbound targeting.

HubSpot was Warmly’s first integration back in 2023, and by the time of the deal a few hundred paying Warmly customers were running it next to HubSpot. That overlap is what HubSpot paid for. HubSpot’s public framing positions the deal as a step toward an “agentic customer platform,” where AI agents act across the lifecycle inside HubSpot’s own CRM (Sidekick Strategies on what the deal means for HubSpot portals).

The official line for customers was reassuring: existing contracts, pricing, account teams and integrations stay unchanged for now. Warmly’s CEO described the plan as “continuity first, expansion second,” with the longer-term goal of connecting Warmly’s capabilities across HubSpot’s platform.

Read that sentence twice. Continuity first is a promise about the next few months. Across HubSpot’s platform is a statement about where the product ends up.

Why this reads as an acqui-hire

Three facts matter more than the press release.

1. The founders moved to HubSpot product work. Co-founder Alan Zhao now lists product management at HubSpot on his profile (Alan Zhao on LinkedIn), and the founding team’s energy is now going into HubSpot’s roadmap, not Warmly’s.
2. Most of the team didn’t come along. From public profiles and posts by former employees, a large share of the roughly 60-person company was let go or left rather than joining HubSpot. The people who built, supported and sold Warmly are, for the most part, no longer working on it.
3. HubSpot already owns the adjacent products. HubSpot has live chat, chatbots, Breeze AI agents and, since buying Clearbit, company-level visitor identification. It did not need a second chat widget. It needed the know-how and the IP to put person-level intent inside its own tools.

None of this means Warmly switches off tomorrow. It means the incentives have changed. A standalone Warmly roadmap competes for engineering time with HubSpot’s own priorities, and HubSpot’s priorities win.

Practical rule: when the founders go to work on the acquirer’s product and most of the team leaves, plan as if the standalone product has an end date, even if nobody has announced one.

What the Acquisition Means for Warmly Customers

Every acquisition of a point solution by a platform ends in one of three places. It’s worth being honest about each, because each one lands on your pipeline differently.

Scenario 1: Warmly keeps running, slowly

The product stays up, contracts renew, and the login still works. But with a skeleton team, the roadmap stalls. Bugs take longer. Integrations with tools other than HubSpot, Salesforce in particular, get less attention because they don’t help the parent company. Identification match rates drift as data providers change terms and nobody is tuning the models. Support answers come from a smaller queue.

This is the most likely short-term state, and it’s the most dangerous one, because nothing breaks loudly. Your inbound numbers just get a little worse every quarter and it takes a while to notice why.

Scenario 2: Warmly gets folded into HubSpot

This is the stated long-term plan. Warmly’s identification and agent logic show up as features inside HubSpot, most likely around HubSpot’s live chat, Breeze agents and Sales Hub. For teams that are all-in on HubSpot and happy with HubSpot live chat, that might be fine.

For everyone else, it means a forced migration anyway, just on HubSpot’s timeline:

• Salesforce shops lose the reason Warmly worked for them. A HubSpot-native feature is built for HubSpot CRM first.
• Your workflows get rebuilt inside HubSpot’s chat and automation model, which isn’t the same as what you configured in Warmly.
• Pricing moves to HubSpot’s model, which usually means seat tiers, hub bundles and add-on credits rather than a single contract.
• The experience becomes HubSpot live chat. If you chose Warmly because you wanted more than a chat widget, that’s a step back. We covered the gap in detail in Captiwate vs HubSpot Live Chat.

Scenario 3: Warmly is sunset

The standalone product gets an end-of-life date, often announced with 60 to 180 days of notice, and customers are offered a path into HubSpot. This is the classic end of an acqui-hire. Given who moved to HubSpot and who didn’t, there’s a fair chance it happens at some point. The only open question is when.

A sunset notice is the worst time to evaluate vendors. Every other Warmly customer is shopping at the same moment, your renewal leverage is gone, and your team has to rebuild the website engagement playbook on a deadline instead of on a plan.

Warning Signs to Watch in Your Warmly Account

If you’re not ready to move yet, at least watch for the signals. Any two of these together are a strong hint that the standalone product is winding down.

• Your account manager or CSM changes, or disappears. Customer-facing roles are usually the first cut after an acqui-hire.
• Release notes slow down or stop. Check the changelog month by month. A flat line tells you where engineering went.
• Support response times stretch. Track your ticket times. They’re a direct read on team size.
• Renewal terms get shorter or strange. Month-to-month offers, or a push to sign a HubSpot bundle instead of renewing Warmly, point to a planned transition.
• Non-HubSpot integrations degrade. Salesforce sync errors, Slack alerts that lag, calendar tools that stop connecting.
• Identification quality drops. Fewer named visitors on the same traffic, more mismatches, more “unknown” sessions.
• Your HubSpot rep starts talking about Warmly. When the parent company’s sales team has a Warmly slide, the product’s future is being decided in the HubSpot roadmap.

If you have to ask whether your tool is still being invested in, the answer affects your pipeline either way.

Why Now Is the Best Time to Switch

Switching website engagement tools always feels like a project for next quarter. Here is why the next few months are the cheapest time you’ll ever get to do it.

You still have leverage. Your Warmly contract is still honored, which means you’re not under pressure. You can run a replacement side by side, compare results on your own traffic, and switch when you’re sure. After a sunset notice, you lose that.

You avoid the stampede. Warmly had hundreds of paying customers. If a sunset comes, a large number of teams will look for a Warmly.ai replacement in the same few weeks. Vendors get busy, onboarding slots fill, and you negotiate from a weaker position.

Your playbook is still fresh. Your team knows today which pages trigger alerts, which accounts get routed where, and which messages work. That knowledge is exactly what a migration needs. Six months from now, the people who set it up may have moved on too.

You get to fix what never worked. Most teams bought Warmly for identification and automated follow-up, then found that an email sequence triggered after the visitor leaves is not the same as a conversation. A migration is the natural moment to add what was missing, for example live video with a rep while the buyer is still on your pricing page.

Budget cycles line up. Many teams plan 2027 budgets this quarter. Putting the switch in the plan now is easier than asking for emergency budget mid-year.

The key point: switching now is a choice, switching after a sunset notice is a fire drill. The work is the same, but the pressure isn’t.

What to Look For in a Warmly.ai Replacement

Before comparing vendors, write down what Warmly actually does for you. Most teams use three or four of these jobs, rarely all of them.

1. Visitor identification. Company-level, person-level, or both. Check match rates on your own traffic, not a vendor’s average.
2. Intent detection. Which pages, how often, from which target accounts. Signals are only useful if you can set rules on them.
3. Real-time alerts. Slack or Teams notifications that reach the right rep in seconds.
4. On-site engagement. AI chat, live chat, and ideally live video and co-browsing for high-intent visitors.
5. Routing and scheduling. Getting the visitor to the right owner, and booking the meeting in one click.
6. CRM sync. HubSpot and Salesforce, with conversations, meetings and identified accounts written back to the record.
7. Automated follow-up. Sequences for visitors who leave without talking.

Then add the criteria that the acquisition has made newly important:

• Independence. Is the vendor’s roadmap its own, or is it tied to one CRM’s strategy?
• CRM neutrality. Does it work equally well with HubSpot and Salesforce, so a CRM change later doesn’t force another tool change?
• Pricing clarity. Seats, conversations, identified contacts and credits add up quickly. A price tied to one number you can predict is easier to defend.
• Migration support. Will the vendor rebuild your setup, or hand you docs and a login?
• Security and compliance. SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, GDPR and CCPA, plus control over what data you collect.

Warmly alternatives compared

Warmly sat between two categories, visitor identification and conversational engagement, so the alternatives fall into different groups. For a broader view of the identification side, see our guides to website visitor tracking software and buyer intent data tools.

If Warmly was mostly an identification feed for you, a pure identification tool may be enough. If Warmly was supposed to turn website intent into meetings, you need something that can actually start the conversation. That’s where most identification-only replacements fall short.

Why Captiwate Is the Natural Warmly Alternative

We built Captiwate around one idea: the best moment to talk to a buyer is while they’re on your website. Warmly and Captiwate have always aimed at the same outcome, turning website intent into pipeline, but they took different routes. Warmly leaned on automation after the visit. Captiwate puts a person, or an AI agent, in front of the visitor during the visit. We laid out that difference in Captiwate vs Warmly.

Here’s what that means in practice for a team coming from Warmly:

• Visitor identification and intent detection. See the company and person behind a visit, the pages they viewed and how often they came back, before any form is filled (visitor identification and intent detection).
• Real-time alerts to the right rep. Slack and Teams notifications, with traffic segmenting and ABM tiering so target accounts get a human and everyone else gets AI.
• Live video and chat in the browser. No downloads, no links to join. A rep can start a live video chat with a pricing-page visitor in one click, and co-browse the page with them.
• AI chat, 24/7. AI chat handles nights, weekends and routine questions, qualifies, and hands off to a human when intent is high.
• Scheduling and Click-to-Meet. Visitors who aren’t ready to talk now book a meeting in one click, routed to the right calendar.
• Automation flows. The follow-up logic you had in Warmly can be rebuilt as automation flows, so leaving visitors still get the right next step.
• HubSpot and Salesforce, equally. Native sync with both CRMs, so your choice of CRM stays your choice (HubSpot integration, Salesforce integration).
• Enterprise-ready security. SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 certified, GDPR and CCPA compliant, with SSO/SAML and custom data residency on the Unlimited plan (security).

And one thing that matters more after an acquisition than before: Captiwate is independent. Our roadmap is set by our customers, not by a parent company’s CRM strategy.

Pricing is simple. Captiwate is priced on one number, your monthly website traffic. Every plan includes unlimited seats, unlimited calls and chats and unlimited identified companies. Grow starts at $15,000 per year for up to 20,000 monthly visitors, Scale is $30,000 per year for 20,000 to 100,000, and Unlimited is custom above that (pricing). No per-seat math, no credits, no add-ons.

Identification tells you who’s there. The pipeline comes from what you do in the next 60 seconds.

Our Offer: We Do the Whole Migration

Most of the fear in switching tools is the work: re-creating rules, re-mapping CRM fields, re-installing scripts, re-training reps, and doing it all without losing a week of inbound. So we take that work off your plate.

If you’re a Warmly customer, we do the whole migration for you. Not a help-center article and a login, our team does the move end to end:

• Audit. We review your current Warmly setup with you: tracked pages, intent rules, segments, alert channels, routing, sequences and CRM mappings.
• Rebuild. We recreate it in Captiwate, including traffic segments, ABM tiers, routing rules, automation flows and AI chat answers based on your existing content.
• Install. We give your web team one script and verify it on your site, including consent and cookie settings.
• Connect. We set up HubSpot or Salesforce sync, Slack or Teams alerts, and calendars, and map fields so your reporting doesn’t break.
• Run side by side. Warmly and Captiwate can run in parallel while you compare results on your own traffic. You switch Warmly off only when you’re satisfied.
• Train. We onboard your reps and SDRs on live video, chat and co-browsing, and set up the SDR leaderboard so you can see who’s responding and how fast.
• Take care of the money side. You shouldn’t pay twice because your old vendor was acquired. Tell us where your Warmly contract stands and we’ll work out the overlap with you.

What the migration looks like week by week

Most teams are live within two to three weeks. The side-by-side run means you never have a gap in coverage, and you decide based on your own numbers, not ours.

Make the Move While It’s Still Your Decision

HubSpot didn’t buy Warmly to keep running a separate product. The founders are building HubSpot features, most of the team has moved on, and the long-term plan points toward HubSpot’s own chat and agents. Maybe the standalone product runs for a while longer. Maybe it’s folded into HubSpot live chat. Maybe it gets an end-of-life date. In every case, Warmly customers will have to decide what comes next.

You can make that decision now, with leverage, a working setup to copy and time to compare. Or you can make it later, on someone else’s deadline.

A short checklist to start this week:

• List the jobs Warmly does for you today: identification, alerts, chat, sequences, routing.
• Pull your numbers. Identified visitors, conversations, meetings booked and pipeline sourced over the last two quarters.
• Check your contract. Renewal date, notice period, and what the acquisition changes.
• Run a side-by-side trial on your own traffic before your renewal comes up.

If you’re looking for a Warmly alternative that turns website intent into live conversations and meetings, and you want someone else to handle the move, book a 30-minute walkthrough. Bring your current Warmly setup, we’ll show you Captiwate running on your own website, and you’ll leave with a migration plan. Migration included.