HubSpot added project management. Monday added CRM. Notion added databases and automations. Slack added canvas and workflows. Zoom added email and calendar. Every app is becoming every other app. If you've looked at the feature comparison page for any SaaS product lately and thought "wait, doesn't everything do this now?" you're not imagining it.
The question is whether this is good news (fewer tools, less complexity, simpler stack) or bad news (everything's mediocre at everything, nothing's great at anything). The honest answer, as usual, is: it depends. And the "it depends" is actually interesting if you unpack it.
The Convergence Pattern
Here's what's happening, if you zoom out. Every successful SaaS product started by doing one thing really well. Salesforce did CRM. Asana did task management. Slack did messaging. Mailchimp did email campaigns. They dominated their category, built a loyal user base, and then did what every company with growth targets does: they expanded.
CRMs added marketing automation. Project management tools added document collaboration. Communication tools added workflow builders. Email marketing platforms added CRM features. And now we're in a world where the feature lists are starting to look eerily similar across products that supposedly serve completely different purposes.
Look at HubSpot. It started as inbound marketing software. Now it has CRM, sales tools, customer service, CMS, operations hub, and (as of recently) project management. Monday.com started as a colorful project board. Now it has CRM, dev tools, and a work management suite. Notion went from note-taking to databases to project management to, well, everything.
This isn't a coincidence. It's a pattern driven by some very predictable economic forces.
Why Every Product Becomes a Platform
We don't say this cynically, because we understand the business logic. It makes total sense if you're running one of these companies.
Revenue growth demands expansion. Once you've captured most of the market in your core category, the growth has to come from somewhere. Selling adjacent features to existing customers is the most capital-efficient path. It's 5-7x cheaper to upsell an existing customer than to acquire a new one. So of course every SaaS company looks at what its customers also pay for and thinks "we could build that."
Customers actually ask for it. We hear this from our clients constantly: "We love HubSpot but we're paying for three other tools on top of it. Can't HubSpot just do that?" The demand is real. People are tired of managing ten subscriptions, ten logins, ten vendor relationships. They want fewer tools.
AI makes it faster to ship features. This is the accelerant. Building a basic project management feature used to be a significant engineering effort. With AI-assisted development, teams can ship v1 of adjacent features much faster than they could even two years ago. The barrier to adding features has dropped, so everyone's adding them.
Platform lock-in increases with breadth. This is the part that's strategic rather than altruistic. The more of your workflow that lives inside one tool, the harder it is to leave. If you're using Monday just for project management, switching to Asana is straightforward. If you're using Monday for projects, CRM, and documents, switching means migrating three workloads instead of one. That's the point.
Data gravity is real. The more data you put in a system, the more valuable that system becomes, and the harder it is to leave. Your CRM doesn't just have contact records. It has years of email history, deal notes, meeting logs, pipeline data. Moving that to a competitor isn't just inconvenient. It's terrifying. Every feature that generates more data inside the platform strengthens the gravitational pull.
So yes, this is happening. It's happening for reasons that make sense. And it's not going to stop.
The Case for Convergence (It Might Actually Be Fine)
Before we get to the problems, let us steelman the convergence argument, because it has real merits. Especially for small and mid-size businesses.
Fewer tools to manage. If you're a 15-person company, managing subscriptions, user provisioning, and security for 12 different SaaS products is a real burden. If you can cut that to 5 or 6 by using tools that cover more ground, that's genuinely less overhead. Fewer vendor relationships. Fewer invoices. Fewer passwords. Fewer things to maintain.
Less data fragmentation. When your CRM, project management, and email marketing all live in the same platform, the data doesn't need to be synced between them. It's just... there. Your marketing team can see what the sales team did without anyone building an integration. That's a legitimate advantage. We say this as a team that builds integrations for a living: if you don't need one, don't build one.
Lower total cost of ownership. This one's nuanced, because bundled pricing can go either way. But in many cases, paying $150/month for HubSpot's full suite is cheaper than paying $50/month each for a CRM, a marketing tool, and a project management tool, once you factor in the integration costs to make them talk to each other.
Simpler onboarding. Training your team on one platform's interface is easier than training them on five different ones. The UI patterns are consistent. The terminology is consistent. The learning investment transfers across modules.
For an SMB that doesn't have a dedicated ops team or a big budget for integration work, a "good enough" all-in-one might genuinely beat best-of-breed. Not because it's better at any individual thing, but because the total cost of stitching together a dozen point solutions (in money, time, and complexity) exceeds the downside of using a B+ version of each feature.
This is core belief territory for us: not building is often the highest-leverage decision. If you don't need a best-in-class project management tool because your projects are simple, and HubSpot's built-in version gets the job done, then using it saves you from an integration you don't need to maintain.
The Case Against (It's Also a Mess)
Now for the other side. Because there are real costs to convergence that the "all-in-one" marketing copy doesn't mention.
Jack of all trades, master of none. HubSpot's project management is fine. It's not Asana. It's not Monday. It doesn't have the depth, the flexibility, or the workflow sophistication that purpose-built tools offer. Monday's CRM is functional. It's not Salesforce. It doesn't have the reporting depth, the customization options, or the ecosystem of a dedicated CRM.
▶📋Real example: When HubSpot's built-in PM wasn't enough
Here's what this looks like in practice. One of our clients moved their project management into HubSpot because they wanted everything in one place. It worked for about three months. Then their projects got more complex, they needed custom fields, dependencies, Gantt views, and resource allocation, and HubSpot's PM features just couldn't keep up. They ended up moving back to a dedicated tool and building the integration they were trying to avoid. Three months of migration work, twice.
The "good enough" trap. It starts with "this is good enough." Then you adapt your process to fit the tool's limitations instead of the other way around. Then gradually, without anyone making a conscious decision, your workflows degrade. You stop doing things you used to do because the tool doesn't support them. "We don't really need that report" (you do, you just can't build it here). "Our process is simpler now" (it's not simpler, it's just limited).
Switching costs compound. This is the flip side of the lock-in advantage. Once you've committed your projects, contacts, documents, automations, and workflows to a single platform, leaving becomes exponentially harder. You're not switching one tool anymore. You're unwinding your entire operating system. We've watched companies stay on platforms they've outgrown for years because the migration cost is just too daunting.
Feature bloat creates complexity. More features means more settings, more options, more things to configure, and more things that can go wrong. The simplicity that attracted you to the tool in the first place starts to erode as the product tries to be everything to everyone. Have you looked at Salesforce lately? It can do almost anything. It takes a dedicated admin to figure out how.
Innovation slows at the edges. When a company is trying to be good at eight things, it's hard to be great at any one thing. The purpose-built competitor that focuses entirely on project management is iterating faster, listening to a more focused user base, and shipping improvements that the all-in-one can't prioritize because they're spread across too many product lines.
What This Means for Your Tech Stack
So what do you actually do with this information? How do you build a tech stack when every product is trying to be the only product you need?
Here's the framework we use with clients. It comes down to one question per function: Is this function critical enough to your business that you need a best-in-class tool, or is "good enough" actually good enough?
For a professional services firm, the CRM is critical. Client relationships are the business. You probably want a dedicated CRM with depth. But project management? If your projects are relatively simple (tasks, deadlines, assignments), the PM features built into your CRM might be plenty.
For a product company, project management and dev tools are critical. You need something purpose-built for sprint planning, roadmaps, and bug tracking. But your CRM needs are probably simpler (you're not running a 20-person sales org), so a lighter CRM or the one built into your support tool might work fine.
The answer is almost always a hybrid. Two or three core tools that are best-in-class for your most critical functions, with bundled features handling the secondary stuff. That's the stack that gives you depth where it matters and simplicity everywhere else.
What This Means for Automation and Integration
Here's the part that's most relevant to the automation playbook conversation, and it's somewhat counterintuitive.
You might think convergence reduces the need for integration. After all, if everything's in one app, you don't need to connect things, right? In practice, it's often the opposite.
The data gets richer and more complex. As each platform accumulates more features, the data inside each one becomes more detailed and more varied. Your CRM doesn't just have contact records anymore. It has projects, tickets, marketing interactions, documents, and custom objects. The integration surface area grows even as the number of tools shrinks.
You still have a multi-tool reality. Even the most aggressive consolidation leaves you with at least a handful of tools that need to talk to each other. Your all-in-one CRM still doesn't do accounting. Your PM tool still doesn't do payroll. Your communication platform still doesn't do invoicing. The connective tissue between tools remains necessary.
Native automation has limits. HubSpot's built-in workflows are powerful within HubSpot. But the moment you need data to flow to or from an external system (which is almost always the case), you're back to needing Zapier, Make, or a custom integration. We wrote about this dynamic in Does AI Replace Zapier?: native automations handle the within-platform stuff, but cross-platform orchestration still needs a dedicated layer.
The hybrid stack needs a hub. If you've got three core tools instead of ten, the integrations between those three become more important, not less. There's more data flowing through fewer, higher-traffic connections. Getting those integrations right matters more than when you had a dozen lightweight connections.
The Pragmatic Response
If we had to boil this down to a short decision framework, here's what we'd give you:
Pick your system of record for each core function. One tool for CRM. One tool for project management. One tool for communication. These can overlap (your CRM might also handle marketing), but be deliberate about it. Know what's primary and what's secondary.
Let bundled features handle the non-critical stuff. If your CRM has basic project management and your projects are basic, use it. Don't add a tool you don't need. Every tool you add is an integration to maintain, a subscription to manage, and a system to train people on. The highest-leverage decision might be not adding anything.
But don't force a B-minus tool on a critical function. If project management is core to how you deliver value to clients, don't settle for whatever came free with your CRM. Use the right tool for the job and invest in a proper integration. The cost of the integration is less than the cost of a subpar tool slowing down your team every day.
Reassess annually. The convergence landscape changes fast. The PM feature that was basic last year might be genuinely good this year. The all-in-one that was overpriced might have a plan that makes sense now. Do a quick audit once a year: are the tools still serving you, or are you serving the tools?
Make your tradeoffs visible. This is the part we feel strongest about. When you choose an all-in-one, name what you're giving up. "We're using HubSpot's PM because it saves us a tool, and we're accepting that we won't have Gantt charts or resource management." When you choose best-of-breed, name what it costs. "We're adding Asana because we need advanced PM features, and we're accepting the cost of maintaining the integration with HubSpot." Either choice is fine. The danger is making the choice without acknowledging the tradeoff.
Good systems make tradeoffs visible. The tech stack that works isn't the one with the most features or the fewest tools. It's the one where everyone knows what you chose, why you chose it, and what you gave up.
This post is part of The SMB Automation Playbook, a series on practical automation for small and mid-size businesses.