HubSpot Projects: The Complete Guide (2026)

Your deal closes.

Someone retypes the account name into a project board. Someone else pastes the scope into Slack. And three weeks later the account manager finds out onboarding never started.

HubSpot Projects is the native fix for that gap — a real CRM object that sits next to Contacts, Companies, Deals and Tickets, with its own pipelines, properties and automation.

But should it replace the project management tool you already pay for?

No. And in this guide I'll show you exactly where the line sits, what the object can and can't do as of August 2026, which features are quietly gated behind seats and betas, and how to build the one automation that makes the whole thing pay for itself.

Let's get started.

What is HubSpot Projects?

Think of it as a Deal record, except the pipeline tracks delivery instead of sales.

Here's the thing though.

Three different things are called "Projects"

This trips up nearly everyone searching for documentation. HubSpot has used the word three separate times:

So when an older partner blog shows you "HubSpot project templates," check the screenshots. It's probably the marketing tool.

Where it came from

The Projects object shipped as part of HubSpot's Fall 2025 Spotlight, announced 3 September 2025 as "over 200 product updates."

Karen Ng, HubSpot's EVP and Head of Product, framed the release around hybrid human-AI teams:

"The companies that win won't be the ones with the most AI tools. They'll have the smartest hybrid teams where AI doesn't replace people, but multiplies their impact."

The Projects API followed in the November 2025 Developer Rollup, which added the ability to programmatically create, read, update and associate projects.

Important: the Projects object also overlaps the Services object HubSpot shipped in 2024. HubSpot's own product manager has described the service object as "a subset of a use case for a project," and HubSpot has been weighing sunsetting or renaming it. If you're on the Services object today, the question is when you migrate — not if.

Features, views and limits

Let's look at what you actually get.

Built-in properties

Every project comes with start date, target due date, target duration, owner and status out of the box.

You also get calculated tags — "Overdue" and "Due soon" — that maintain themselves. No workflow required.

Four ways to view your projects

1. Board — Kanban, grouped by pipeline stage
2. Table — spreadsheet-style, best for bulk edits
3. Calendar — date-based
4. Gantt — timeline view where you drag bars to shift dates

Gantt is still flagged as beta in HubSpot's documentation. Partner reporting puts the public beta at December 2025 with a January 2026 rollout.

Tasks and subtasks

Projects connect to standard HubSpot tasks — so assignees, due dates and workflow triggers all behave the way your team already expects.

Subtasks add a third level. Per HubSpot's Knowledge Base article on subtasks (last updated 22 June 2026): "you can create up to 60 subtasks per main task."

Note: some HubSpot developer documentation still references a 30-subtask limit. Check your own portal before you design a template around the number.

The Customer Success workspace

If you run Service Hub, Projects now appears in the CS workspace. HubSpot renamed the old "Service" tab to "Projects" and made projects the default object for managing customer work.

Quick-facts table

How to activate it

Takes about 30 seconds. You need Super Admin permissions:

Settings → Data Management → Data Model → Edit data model → find Projects → Activate object → confirm.

It then appears under CRM → Projects.

Not sure whether Projects should replace your post-sale process or sit beside it? Book a HubSpot architecture review with Superwork and we'll map your deal-to-delivery handoff before you activate anything.

Is HubSpot Projects free?

Yes. HubSpot's Knowledge Base article "Understand and use the projects object" (last updated 2 July 2026) lists availability as all products and plans, including Free. But the automation that makes HubSpot Projects genuinely useful — workflows that create projects — requires Professional or Enterprise.

Here's where it gets confusing. Several partner blogs say otherwise. PSOhub's guide claims Projects needs Professional. Others say Starter and up.

They're wrong on the base object. Trust the KB.

What does cost money is the useful part:

Bottom line? Yes, it's free. No, the free version isn't the one you want.

Without Professional workflows you're creating every project by hand — which defeats most of the point. And several of the features people get excited about sit behind betas rather than tiers, which is a different kind of waiting.

The hybrid model (not HubSpot vs your PM tool)

Most articles frame this as a cage match. That framing is wrong — and HubSpot says so itself.

Speaking in a December 2025 webinar hosted by Arrows, HubSpot product manager Mark Miller put it plainly:

"HubSpot is never going to have the feature depth that a software like Asana or ClickUp has. We're really solving for a common denominator of requested features that hopefully can enable many customers to use this use case."

HubSpot is building for marketing, sales and service personas. Not product managers and engineers.

Which is exactly why Jira integration isn't planned. As Miller put it: "It will take a lot of change... to say why would a product manager or an engineer use HubSpot instead of Jira."

So the real question isn't which tool wins. It's where you draw the line.

Where to draw it

Keep in HubSpot: anything a salesperson, CSM or account manager needs to see without leaving the CRM. Onboarding status. Implementation stage. Client-visible milestones. Account plans. Renewal-linked work.

Keep in the dedicated tool: billable delivery execution, engineering work, capacity planning — anything with hours attached. Whatever your delivery team already runs on (monday.com, ClickUp, Asana, Wrike, Smartsheet and Teamwork are the ones we see most in mid-market B2B) stays where it is. Engineering work stays in Jira.

Automate the bridge between them. That's the next section.

Integration status (as of the December 2025 roadmap)

Worth knowing on ClickUp: the two companies have partnered since 16 November 2022, including a HubSpot Ventures investment. ClickUp CEO Zeb Evans called it "a true marriage of productivity powerhouses."

And you don't always need a purpose-built integration at all. Native HubSpot workflow actions already create tasks in several popular tools — Asana, ClickUp, Trello and Todoist among them — with no middleware subscription required. For anything else, Zapier, Make and Unito cover the field mapping and two-way sync.

Build it: Closed Won → auto-create a project

This is HubSpot's own documented use case. It's also the single automation that makes activating the object worth your time.

You'll need Professional or Enterprise for workflows.

Step 1: Activate the Projects object. Settings → Data Management → Data Model → Edit data model → Projects → Activate object.

Step 2: Build your delivery pipeline first. Map the stages you actually run: kickoff, discovery, build, UAT, final sign-off. Set a default first stage. If your team skips steps, turn on the "Restrict projects from skipping stages" pipeline rule (Professional or Enterprise). Do this before the workflow — because the workflow has to write into a stage that already exists.

Step 3: Create a deal-based workflow. Enrolment trigger: Deal stage is Closed Won — or whichever stage your team actually treats as won.

Step 4: Add the Create record action. Go to CRM → Create record → Project. Projects is a supported object type in this action. Project name is required, along with pipeline and stage. Build the name from deal tokens — otherwise you'll end up with fifty records called "New project."

Step 5: Copy your deal properties across. Use the "Copy a property" action for scope, contract value, package tier — whatever delivery needs on day one. Two catches:

• Source and target field types must be compatible, or the property won't appear as an option at all
• Personalisation tokens can't be used in number fields (this one bites people on contract value)

Step 6: Check your associations. Records created by a workflow are automatically associated with the enrolled record — so the deal link is free. The company and contacts are the part that bites. Workflows create records and set properties, but they don't natively create arbitrary associations. It's a long-standing community request.

Important: test this before you promise it to a client. It's the most common reason a Closed-Won build looks finished but isn't.

Step 7: Assign the owner. Usually the deal owner. Sometimes a fixed delivery lead. Sometimes a rotating assignment.

Step 8: Create the task set. Today that means adding tasks to the project. When project templates ship, the expectation is that workflows will spin up an entire template at once. (See the roadmap section for why you shouldn't plan around that yet.)

Step 9: Turn it on — and watch for loops. If the created record could re-enrol in the same workflow, HubSpot's loop protection will fire. Test with one deal first.

The alternative: push the project into your existing PM tool

Same trigger, different destination.

Native workflow actions can create a task in the most common tools directly, and every major platform — monday.com, ClickUp, Asana, Wrike, Smartsheet, Teamwork — supports building a project from a template on deal close, with deal properties mapped into project fields. Where there's no native action, Zapier, Make or Unito will do it.

Two gotchas with third-party syncs:

1. HubSpot property values come back as strings via the API. Type-convert before writing to number or checkbox fields.
2. Free/Starter API rate limits are 100 requests per 10 seconds. That will throttle a batch sync.

Whichever route you pick: start with one handoff. One closed deal, one project, one owner. Scale after it survives a week.

Building this for a client portal and want it productised rather than one-off? Talk to Superwork about a deal-to-delivery build — pipeline, workflow and template, documented so your team can run it without you.

What HubSpot Projects still can't do

Be honest with your team about the gaps. They're not small.

Not available today:

• Time tracking against tasks
• Budget or cost monitoring
• Resource planning and capacity management
• Milestone billing
• Invoicing from project data
• Project profitability reporting
• Per-project chat or threaded discussion

Agencies in HubSpot's own community forums consistently report keeping a dedicated tool alongside HubSpot for exactly these reasons — Teamwork, TeamHood, ClickUp and Asana all come up, as do PSA platforms like PSOhub, Scoro, Productive and BigTime when billing is involved.

The 2026 roadmap

Treat everything here as directional. It comes from Mark Miller's December 2025 webinar, relayed through Arrows — a partner that sells onboarding software, so read the framing accordingly.

Why "not confirmed" on templates and dependencies? The July 2026 KB article doesn't mention either. Community feature requests ran through July 2026. And PSOhub's July 2026 update still describes Projects as offering no dependencies.

Verify current beta status in your portal's Product Updates before you plan around any of it.

Watch this benchmark: once templates and dependencies reach GA and native time tracking ships, the threshold for "you also need a dedicated tool" rises considerably. That's the moment to revisit this decision.

Should you use HubSpot Projects?

Here's the decision table.

HubSpot's three prioritised use cases are:

1. Service delivery — software onboarding, professional services, even physical goods
2. Marketing campaigns — task coordination across a campaign
3. Sales and account management — enterprise strategic projects and annual account plans

If your use case is on that list and your team already lives in HubSpot daily, activating it is a low-risk move. If it isn't, don't force it.

Frequently asked questions

Does HubSpot have project management?

Yes. HubSpot has offered native project management since September 2025 through the Projects CRM object, which includes pipelines, tasks, subtasks and Gantt views. A separate, older marketing Projects tool also still exists.

Is the HubSpot Projects object free?

Yes. HubSpot's Knowledge Base lists the Projects object as available on all products and plans, including Free. Paid tiers add project tags (Starter+), pipeline rules (Professional+) and the workflows that auto-create projects (Professional+).

What's the difference between HubSpot tasks and projects?

A task is a single action item on a record. A project is a structured set of tasks with a shared objective, an owner, a timeline and a pipeline stage. Projects can contain tasks; tasks can contain up to 60 subtasks.

Can I automatically create a project when a deal closes?

Yes. Build a deal-based workflow triggered on Deal stage = Closed Won, then add the CRM → Create record → Project action. Requires Professional or Enterprise.

Does HubSpot Projects replace a dedicated project management tool?

No. HubSpot's own product manager has stated it will never match the feature depth of platforms like monday.com, ClickUp or Asana. It covers common-denominator needs for go-to-market teams, so most companies run both and automate the handoff.

Does HubSpot Projects do time tracking, budgets or invoicing?

No. None of these exist today. Time tracking and resource management are roadmapped for late 2026. For billable work you'll need a PSA or dedicated PM tool alongside HubSpot.

How many subtasks can a HubSpot task have?

Up to 60 subtasks per main task, per HubSpot's Knowledge Base (updated June 2026). Some developer documentation still references an older limit of 30.

How do I activate the Projects object in HubSpot?

As a Super Admin, go to Settings → Data Management → Data Model → Edit data model, find Projects, and click Activate object. It then appears under CRM → Projects.

The bottom line

HubSpot Projects isn't a replacement for your project management stack. Treating it as one will end badly.

What it does solve is the seam between sales and delivery — the place where deal context evaporates and account managers lose visibility. That seam has been costing you renewals quietly for years.

So draw the line deliberately. Customer-facing project tracking goes in the CRM, where your revenue team already works. Billable execution stays in whichever dedicated tool your delivery team already runs on. One automated handoff connects them.

Start with the Closed-Won workflow. Run it on a single deal. Then productise it.

Everything still on the roadmap — templates, dependencies, time tracking — is a reason to revisit this decision in six months. Not a reason to wait.

Ready to stop abusing post-Closed-Won deal stages? Get in touch with Superwork to design your deal-to-delivery handoff, or book a RevOps audit to find where your customer data is breaking down.

Sources

• Understand and use the projects object — HubSpot Knowledge Base (updated 2 July 2026)
• Use subtasks — HubSpot Knowledge Base (updated 22 June 2026)
• Create records with workflows — HubSpot Knowledge Base
• Use the updated calendar and gantt views — HubSpot Knowledge Base
• November 2025 Developer Rollup — HubSpot Developer Changelog
• Upcoming Deprecation: HubSpot Projects v2025.1 — HubSpot Developer Changelog
• Usage guidelines (API rate limits) — HubSpot Developers
• HubSpot Projects: Complete Guide to Project Management in Your CRM (2026 Roadmap) — Arrows
• How to Manage Projects From HubSpot in 2026 — PSOhub (updated 27 July 2026)
• HubSpot bets big that hybrid AI-human teams are the future — Forbes, 3 September 2025
• ClickUp and HubSpot announce strategic partnership — PR Newswire, 16 November 2022
• Project Object templates — HubSpot Community