CRM software provides your sales staff the organizational instruments to better focus their efforts and close more deals more efficiently. They could run the gamut from sales-focused pipeline management applications to complete enterprise solutions that touch on every section of your business. We looked in the most popular options and rising stars that cover the range of alternatives for small companies concerning price, features, and integrations.
Best CRM Summary Table
| Description | Cost From¹ | Free Choice Available² | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Insightly | Best overall mix of price, features, and ease of use | $29/month per user | ✔ |
| Zoho | Recommended if you need customization | $12/month per user | ✔ |
| Pipedrive | Easy to use and sets your sales pipeline and centre | $10/month per user | |
| Prosperworks | Seamless integration with the Google suite and RingCentral | $19/month per user | |
| HubSpot CRM | Free option that’s best for little teams using a CRM for the first time | Free | ✔ |
| Salesforce | Strong enterprise-level CRM with all the cost to suit | $25/month per user |
1Price is listed monthly, but is charged once annually
Two Free alternative has limited users and/or attributes
How We Evaluated CRM Software
When evaluating CRM software, we took these Key factors into consideration:
- Characteristics
- Ease of use
- Pricing
- Customer support
- Are there any key features Which Are missing
Best CRM for Small Businesses: Insightly
We advocate Insightly as the ideal CRM for small companies since it is the system your staff is the most likely to actually use and adopt thanks to its intuitive menus, fast-loading layout, and advanced features that focus on quality over quantity. It is also the system we use here at Fit Small Business.
Insightly Pricing
While Insightly offers a vast selection of versions, Insightly’s Plus plan for $29/month per consumer will meet the requirements of most small companies. The Plus program offers all of the essential CRM features, also additional integrations, scheduled reports, and spiritual branding.
Here’s all Insightly’s editions:
- Free for up to two users, which comprises most features, but restricted storage, automation and integrations
- Plus for $29/month per user, which increases storage space and adds email scheduling
- Professional for $49/month per user which adds lead mission, workflow automation, and role-based permissions
- Enterprise for $99/month per user, which Offers unlimited storage and a dedicated service specialist
Insightly Characteristics
Insightly has a Variety of sales and productivity features that follow the lifecycle of a purchase:
- Webforms on your site (or Facebook) to catch leads
- Lead assignment rules (available in the Professional edition and higher).
- Pre-written email templates
- Opportunities are qualified leads which input your revenue pipeline
- Projects oversee the revenue conclusion
- Reports oversee advancement
Customer Support
Insightly provides email support from 10am to 6pm EST, Monday to Friday, for all paid users.
Insightly also supplies an extensive online knowledge base and also a community-sourced Q&A.
What’s Missing from Insightly?
If there’s any drawback to Insightly, it’s the absence of attributes for larger teams (20+ employees). There’s no territory management, which can be helpful for organizing larger sales teams, nor are there quotations, invoices, or buy orders, which can be provided by Zoho and Salesforce. There’s also a far smaller range of integrations in comparison Salesforce. They do, nevertheless, support many key applications, such as Gmail, Outlook, Mailchimp, Xero, and Quickbooks Online.
See Insightly
Best CRM for Customization: Zoho
If you’d like a larger selection of sales and advertising tools, such as quotes, purchase orders, and website visitor monitoring or whenever you want to have greater control over the layout and information on your own system, then we recommend Zoho CRM.
Zoho Pricing
Zoho supplies a variety of pricing options which are very similar to Insightly. Their Standard edition at $12/month per user includes custom reports, direct scoring, and third party integrations, but we recommend their Professional edition at $20/month per user. The Professional version is where Zoho’s more innovative tools start to be offered. Even though Zoho’s pricing is more aggressive, Insightly’s simplicity of use make it a better value overall.
Here’s a comparison of Zoho CRM editions:
- Free to get up to ten users also includes most standard CRM attributes, but excludes custom accounts, mass emails, invoices, and customer service management
- Standard at $12/month each user, which increases your storage and provides custom reports, bulk mails, direct scoring, and many more integrations.
- Professional at $20/month each client, which provides unlimited documents storage and adds lead mission rules, inventory management, customer service management, and much more
- Enterprise at $35/month each user, which adds email auto responders, territory management, conditional areas, and more
- CRM Plus at $50/month per user, which adds priority service, more advanced personalization options, and much more
- Ultimate for $100/month per user, which comprises everything above and provides a development sandbox, advanced customization options, and a dedicated database cluster
Zoho Characteristics
Zoho offers many of the same characteristics as Insightly, with the exclusion of job management (Zoho provides an standalone project management program, called Zoho Projects). They also offer a range of additional sales tools, such as:
- Invoices, quotations and purchase orders with the Pro edition and higher
- Lead scoring, which automatically identifies your top results predicated on predefined rules
- Site visitor tracking, so you can tell when leads/contacts are in your website and what pages they are looking at
- Revenue signals, which can be pop-up alarms about your leads/customers — for example, you can Get a notification Each Time a customer opens your email, accesses your website, or mentions you at a Social Networking post
Apart from that, you will also find non-sales tools like customer service management and email marketing automation in the Professional edition and greater.
Customer Service
Zoho provides email and phone support 24 hours a day, Monday to Friday, for all users — even those on the free version. Zoho’s support team is based in India in which the business was founded and still largely operates.
Zoho also provides an internet knowledge base and consumer forums.
What is Missing from Zoho?
Where Zoho is lacking is in its ease of setup and administration. It requires more instruction and also has a steeper learning curve than our recommended CRM, Insightly, which is a lot easier to learn and put up all on your own. This makes it more ideally suited if you are just looking to utilize the normal CRM features. But should you will need the excess customization and automation, then Zoho is well worth the effort.
Visit Zoho
Best CRM for Sales Pipeline Management: Pipedrive
Pipedrive is very sales-focused and easy to use from the box. Pipedrive’s home page is a visual representation of your sales pipeline, which sales reps love since it’s exactly how they’d anticipate a sales CRM to look and work. It is also the best, inexpensive alternative for companies to handle only sales using their CRM.
Pipedrive Pricing
Pipedrive offers three pricing bundles — Silver 10/month per user, Gold at $24/month each user, and Platinum at $63/month per user. All plans include sales pipeline reporting and management. Silver includes 2GB of file storage, Gold includes 5GB of file storage, complete email sync including templates, and product management, and Platinum comprises 100GB of document storage, revenue forecasting, and priority support.
Pipedrive Features
Pipedrive is a CRM that is built around the philosophy that all is constructed around activity-based selling. In practice, so that Pipedrive is focused on the productivity of your sales staff and puts their sales pipeline front and center.
- Drag-and-drop interface is intuitive and Simple to Use
- sterile visual design Provides you a high-level overview at a glance
- Total email integration enables you to write and send emails from within the CRM and automatically logs emails to and from your leads
Customer Service
Customer support is available by email and from live chat and phone from 9:00am to 5:00pm, Monday to Friday. Platinum subscribers also have access to priority phone support.
What’s Missing from Pipedrive?
We like that Pipedrive is focused on the requirements of your sales staff, but this benefit is also to its detriment if you want to use your CRM throughout other departments in your business. Additionally it is lacking a few of the more advanced features of its rivals, such as inventory management, job management once a deal is closed, and workflow automation.
Visit Pipedrive
Greatest CRM for Contact Management: Prosperworks
Prosperworks is a CRM that’s designed to integrate easily with the Google suite of applications, going so far as to share many of the same design components. Additionally, it supplies an integration with RingCentral, which allows you to track leads together with your VoIP telephone service, albeit only with their greatest priced bundle.
Prosperworks Pricing
Prosperworks provides three pricing packages ranging from their Fundamental package at $19/month per user to their business enterprise bundle at $119/month per user. More attributes and storage space are offered as you proceed up in package price. Here is how Prosperworks’ packages compare:
- Fundamental package at $19/month per user for up to five users, includes all of the fundamental CRM features your company will need up to 30,000 records and 5GB of storage
- Professional package at $49/month each user, adds email tracking, task automation, and increases your storage to 100,000 records and 200GB.
- Business package at $119/month per user, provides the capability to set and monitor goals for your staff, added metrics and insights, integration with RingCentral, and raises your storage to 500,000 records and 500GB.
Prosperworks Features
Along with the basic features that you would expect from any CRM, Prosperworks offers two additional features that could significantly impact both your user experience as well as how far you can extend the usefulness of your CRM.
- Integrates seamlessly using all the Google suite of business applications, including Docs, Sheets, Slides, Calendar, and Gmail. This allows you to connect all of your files, fields, events, and other information across your company. There is even a Chrome extension to get this.
- Users of RingCentral will locate their VoIP telephone service integrated within Prosperworks, letting them create, receive, and log calls from within the CRM. While we enjoyed this useful feature, it’s only available in Prosperworks’ greatest priced package at $119/month each user.
Customer Support
Prosperworks also provides an extremely comprehensive online knowledge base, including live training webinars and a neighborhood sourced Q&A as well as email-based support.
However, we were disappointed to discover that telephone and live chat support are only available to Business package subscribers.
What is Missing from Prosperworks?
Prosperworks is a fully featured CRM with some advanced design elements and performance that distinguish it from its competitors. However, their Fundamental package at $19/month per user is just that — basic. It covers the majority of the CRM features your business will need, however to get access to more advanced features like email tracking or RingCentral VoIP telephone service integration, you’ll need to subscribe to their higher priced bundles beginning at $49/month per user. This makes it a cheaper option than a number of the other choices we reviewed.
See Prosperworks
Best Low Cost CRM: HubSpot
We advocate HubSpot for businesses using a CRM for the first time, particularly those on a limited budget. It’s a simple and effective selection of features, which includes powerful contact management, lead tracking, and pipeline management. And that which HubSpot may lack in the number of features, it makes up for in simplicity, power, and quality.
HubSpot Pricing
HubSpot is unique among the choices we reviewed in that they offer their foundation CRM support at no cost. Including core attributes, such as client management, deal management, job management, Gmail integration, email scheduling, and email tracking.
On the other hand, the capacity to add prospects, as well as raising the limits on templates, storage, and reporting requires the addition of HubSpot’s Sales Starter package at $50/month per user. More innovative features, like sales automation, predictive lead scoring, product management, and multiple deal pipelines requires HubSpot’s Sales Professional package at $200/month each user.
HubSpot Characteristics
HubSpot’s best attribute is its cost. For very small companies, or for businesses that are employing a CRM for the first time and are not sure exactly which attributes they need, HubSpot’s free program and simple to learn and use interface are an perfect introduction to core CRM attributes.
- Customer direction
- Deal management
- Task direction
- Gmail integration
- Email partitioning
- Email tracking
Updating for their Sales Starter package adds the capability to include prospects, in addition to raising the limitations on templates, storage, and coverage and their Revenue Professional bundle adds revenue automation, predictive guide grading, product direction, and multiple arrangement pipelines.
In addition, we like that Hubspot allows you to pull info from your email and societal networking channels and add it to your contact’s timeline. This may be a significant benefit as it helps you to keep your contact interaction records up to date, and it is otherwise a major annoyance to salespeople.
Client Support
HubSpot offers a comprehensive online knowledge base, such as an extensive library of tutorials known as the HubSpot Academy in addition to an active network of users who provide support to one another.
However, it ought to be noted that email, live chat, and telephone support are only available for users with a paid package. If you’re utilizing their free package, support is limited to self-service choices — inconvenient, however clear.
What’s Missing from HubSpot?
The main disadvantages of HubSpot are some attributes which you get with different CRMs, such as workflow management, and customer support are only available if you subscribe to one of their paid bundles.
Also, if you decide to update to their innovative package, pricing starts at $50/month per user. This puts it in the assortment of fully showcased CRMs.
See HubSpot
Best Enterprise-Level CRM: Salesforce
Salesforce is possibly the greatest CRM solution on the market. It’s powerful, highly customizable, and offers the broadest selection of features — but at a price that will likely place it out of reach for most small businesses.
Salesforce Pricing
Salesforce provides a basic edition, known as Lightning Essentials, for $25/month per user. However, most of the features that Salesforce is known for require at their Lightning Professional version for $75/month each user. Salesforce also offers a Lightning Enterprise edition for $150/month per user plus a Lightning Unlimited edition for $300/month each user.
Salesforce is just one of the more expensive CRMs available on the market. At $75/month per user, the Lightning Professional variant is very similar to Zoho’s Professional, which can be only $20/month each user. Meanwhile, their Business edition at $150/month per user provides workflow automation and land management, similar to Zoho Enterprise, which is only $35/month per user.
Here is the way Salesforce’s variations compare:
- Quad Contest at $25/month per user is an advanced contact manager using email integration and follow-up reminders, but very restricted CRM tools
- Lightning Professional at $75/month per user is the first edition of Salesforce”proper,” which includes opportunity/lead tracking, quotations, customer support management, and much more
- Lightning Enterprise at $150/month per user provides workflow automation, land management, and more
- Lightning Unlimited at $300/month per user adds 24/7 priority support, a development sandbox, and much more
Salesforce Features
Salesforce provides All the same CRM features as Insightly and Zoho. Where it shines is in the degree of integration and customization — both using Salesforce’s schema builder and by integrating add-ons and third-party software.
In particular, there are two powerful Salesforce add-ons for B2B companies:
- Salesforce Einstein at $50/month per user is a direct scoring system that uses artificial intelligence to forecast how you should interact with prospects at any given time. While this requires a little setup first — for example, programming the AI components into your pipelines and workflows — it has the promise to save your team time and effort in the long run.
- Salesforce Pardot starting at $1,000/month is an advanced email and internet marketing system. It allows you to capture and nurture leads with the exact same amount of sophistication as their sales automation. You can define numerous workflows, then automatically send emails or activate alerts based on how a promotion lead interacts with your business.
Client Support
Phone and email support are available to all users from 8am to 8pm EST, except for Lightning Unlimited consumers ($300/month per user) who have 24/7 priority support. Salesforce has U.S.-based support for national customers, and other offices around the globe that support a broad range of languages.
Salesforce also offers a comprehensive online knowledge base with a community-sourced Q&A.
Like Zoho, Salesforce support suffers due to its size. It can be hard finding expert knowledge needed for your particular variant — and this is particularly true once you search their online databases.
What is Missing from Salesforce?
Salesforce isn’t lacking in performance, but it is in affordability. It’s a highly effective enterprise-level solution which may be out of reach for most small businesses, but offers more than most small business would need. Most, if not all, of the primary CRM features a small company will need are available from several other services, including Insightly, Zoho, and HubSpot for much less.
Visit Salesforce
All CRM Options
| Greatest For | Description | |
|---|---|---|
| Insightly | Solo & Small Teams | Easiest”advanced” CRM on the market |
| Zoho | Customization | Use custom fields, layouts & workflow principles |
| Pipedrive | Revenue Tracking | Simple CRM with expert pipeline management |
| Prosperworks | Email & Phone Integration | Great contact management with email-tracking VoIP |
| Hubspot CRM | Free Choice | (almost ) unlimited storage and users to get free |
| Salesforce | Integrations | Huge Assortment of programs integrated into your workflow |
| Nimble | Social Media Users | Combine social media accounts into one system |
| Base CRM | Mobile Users | User-friendly CRM with powerful cellular program. |
| Hatchbuck | Inbound Marketing | Boost revenue with smart email & advertising automation |
| Contactually | Property brokers | Uses automation to build better connections and get more referrals |
| Spiro | Analytics | Integrated CRM tool with AI capacities |
The Bottom Line
CRM software is a solid investment for your organization. Revenue teams in particular can benefit from their lead, sales, and workflow management characteristics, which can considerably increase efficiency and allow them to focus on what they do best — converting leads into customers. There is no lack of CRM options available on the market, from basic and free to fully featured enterprise-level suites. Which one is best for your business will depend largely on the number of users, how big your company, any other software which you want to integrate, and, of course, your financial plan.
