Contact management software helps you to catalog, organize, and manage your list of personal and business contacts. We took a look at 20 contact manager software options and narrowed it down to the six best solutions currently available that are easy to use and economical for small businesses.

Based on our research and experience, we’ve chosen Insightly as the best overall contact management software of 2017.

In our guide, we’ll go into detail as to why Insightly is the best contact management software, as well as what the other contact manager software options are best for when it comes to your small business.

Let’s get started.

All Contact Management Software Options

Here are some options that you may want to consider when choosing a contact management software.

Contact management is usually included as a part of a larger software package that specializes in another function. Some of these can include:

• Customer relationship management (CRM), which helps you track interactions with your prospective and current clients
• Email marketing, which allows you to send mass emails with offers or newsletters to your entire contact list
• Business productivity applications, which can include suites like Google’s or Office 365

For this reason, we’ve organized this guide into these software types then made a recommendation within each type. Which contact manager software you choose will depend on how you expect to leverage your contact lists in the future.

Insightly: Best Overall Contact Management Software

Who Insightly is Best Suited For

Primarily marketed as a CRM tool, Insightly can also be used for task and project management as well as a simple contact manager software. Because of its range of uses, we recommend it as the best overall contact management software. If your business is in its early stages and you haven’t decided how best to leverage your contact list, Insightly provides you with a simple and easy to use solution for storing them and then a range of functions to use them with.

Insightly Costs & Pricing

Insightly offers five levels of plans, with four of them being suitable for small businesses depending on their size and needs. These include a free plan with up to 2,500 records, a Basic plan for $15/month per user with up to 25,000 records, a Plus plan for $35/month per user with up to 100,000 records, and a Professional plan for $59/month per user with up to 250,000 records.

Insightly’s Primary Features

In addition to the CRM, task and project management, and other features that it offers, Insightly includes the following features that are specific to contact management:

• Automatic address books
• Custom fields and filters
• Web to contact automation
• Linking of records (contacts, organizations, opportunities, and tasks/projects)
• Deploy mass emails using included email templates
• Attach and share files
• Fast searching

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Zoho: Best Contact Management Software for Advanced CRM

Who Zoho CRM is Best Suited For

While we recommend Insightly as the best overall contact management software in part for its CRM features, Zoho CRM offers a more specialized CRM with advanced features.

If you plan to leverage your contact list to help you build relationships with prospective customers and nurture those with current ones, then we recommend a specialized and advanced CRM solution like Zoho ContactManager. It gives you a range of sales and marketing tools, like quotes, purchase orders, and website visitor tracking, and gives you good control over the layout and data in your system.

Most notably, Zoho ContactManager has robust automation tools that allow for a refined sales experience. You can auto-assign leads to different sales teams depending on their location. You can also set up notifications for when a sale reaches the final stage or exceeds a certain dollar value — for example, you could automatically send customers a follow-up email one week after delivery. This puts it in the same class as Salesforce, though at a fraction of the cost.

Zoho CRM Costs & Pricing

Zoho is very cost-effective starting at $15/month per user and easy-to-use with a simple and fast-loading interface. The main difference is that Zoho packs in extra features and customization tools, which become available at their $25/month edition and higher.

Zoho has five pricing packages, three of which are well-suited for small businesses. These include a basic Free package for up to ten users, a Standard package for $12/month per user that includes contact, lead, account, and opportunity management as well as calendar syncing and sales forecasting, and a Professional plan for $25/month per user that adds the ability to capture leads through social media.

Zoho CRM’s Primary Features

The table above represents a high-level view of the features included with each pricing plan. You can view a complete list of available features here.

Most notably for contact management, Zoho includes contacts, leads, opportunities, and tasks with every pricing plan. This is on par with Insightly, but where Zoho excels is that it offers a much more comprehensive range of CRM features such as sales forecasting, social media integration, and even basic marketing automation like mass emails, marketing campaigns, and website visitor tracking.

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PipeDrive: Best Contact Management Software for Mobile Devices

Who PipeDrive is Best Suited For

Mobile CRMs equip your sales team to manage their customer relationships on the go. And as the name suggests, PipeDrive CRM is optimized to manage your team’s sales pipeline. Contacts, opportunities, and reports are all accessible from the application’s home screen, making it easy to navigate from a mobile device. While Insightly and Zoho CRM offer a wider range of features, PipeDrive focuses on your sales pipeline and is optimized for mobile to make it accessible on the go.

PipeDrive’s mobile app allows your sales team to access the information and tasks they’re most likely to need in the field, and a simple search function returns the full history of any customer relationship so you’re always informed. Notes can be added and customer calls can be tracked directly from your mobile device as well.

PipeDrive Costs & Pricing

PipeDrive offers three pricing levels, two of which are targeted to small businesses. Their Silver plan for $12/month per user includes pipeline management, over 80 third-party application integrations, sales forecasting and reporting, and live chat and email support and their Gold plan for $29/month per user adds full email integration within the software.

PipeDrive’s Primary Features

PipeDrive’s core features include:

• Contact management
• Interaction tracking
• Lean project management
• Pipeline management
• Over 80 third-party application integrations
• Sales forecasting and reporting
• Live chat and email support

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Office 365: Best Contact Management Software for Business Productivity

Business productivity applications are some of the most commonly used by every business day-to-day, including word processing, spreadsheets, email, and databases. Rather than performing a specific function like CRM, they’re generally part of a suite of applications that offer a wide range of uses.

Who Office 365 is Best Suited For

Office 365 is Microsoft’s subscription-based version of their well-known business productivity software suite, which was previously only available in an installed version. For those businesses who are already, or will be, using applications like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, Office 365 may make sense as a contact management solution as well since it includes Outlook in all versions.

Office 365 Costs & Pricing

Office 365 is available in many different packages, but there are two that are particularly well-suited to small businesses.

Office 365’s Primary Features

The Office 365 suite includes Outlook, which is an email, calendar, and contact management solution in one. As well, the Business Premium plan includes Outlook Customer Manager, Microsoft’s basic CRM application that will be adequate for most small businesses until they need to graduate to the more full-featured (and costly) Microsoft Dynamics.

Outlook Customer Manager automatically organizes customer information, such as emails, meetings, calls, notes, files, tasks, deals, and deadlines, in a timeline next to your inbox for easy access and reference. The information in Customer Manager is automatically imported from the email, calendar, and call log data from elsewhere in Office 365, minimizing the need for manual entry.

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MailChimp: Best Contact Management Software for Email Marketing

Who MailChimp is Best Suited For

If your business plans to leverage your contact list for email marketing campaigns, then MailChimp’s combination of price, ease of use, available templates, and third-party application integrations make it our recommendation for the best contact management software for email marketing.

MailChimp includes dozens of attractive and customizable email templates that you can populate with your business’ content and deploy to up to 2,000 of your contact — all for free. You can then track which of your contacts opened and clicked each email and see an overview of how these rates are tracking over time.

With hundreds of third-party application integrations available, it’s likely that MailChimp will work with your existing systems, such as your website platform, CRM, and social media accounts. And once you’ve outgrown the free package and want access to more advanced features, MailChimp offers plans scaled to the number of subscribers to your list.

MailChimp Costs & Pricing

MailChimp offers two plans that are suitable for small businesses, then sets the prices by the number of emails deployed within each plan.

MailChimp’s Primary Features

MailChimp is a robust email marketing system that includes a wide range of features to help you leverage your list of contacts.

• Embed customizable sign-up forms on your website or social media accounts and manage your list of subscribers
• Marketing automation helps you segment your contacts and target them by demographics, behavior, preferences, and previous actions
• Use any of the included email templates or design your own through an easy-to-use drag-and-drop interface
• Coordinate email campaigns with your Facebook and Instagram accounts
• Support for hundreds of third-party application integrations

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Airtable: Best Contact Management Software for Data Organization

Who Airtable is Best Suited For

Airtable is a cloud-based database application that stores data you input into a spreadsheet-like interface and then makes it easy to create and deploy relational database-driven apps that help your small business manage and share that data. For example, you could create a form with fields for basic contact information for individuals, another form with fields for organizational information, and a third form with fields for opportunities. Then, with all of this data stored in Airtable’s relational database, you can run a report that outputs every record with a unit of data in common that you define, such as open opportunities or testimonials from customers on specific products or services.

Airtable Costs & Pricing

Airtable offers three levels of packages that would be a good fit for small businesses, depending on their needs, including one for free.

Airtable’s Primary Features

Airtable does one thing and it does it well. It enables you to build database-driven apps that help you to store, manage, and relate large amounts of data such as your personal and business contact lists.

Airtable uses an easy to use drag-and-drop interface that helps you to build your database intuitively and with minimal technical knowledge. Multiple users can collaborate on the same database, as well as define workflow actions that trigger notifications. Finally, Airtable allows for third-party app integrations and has an open API to allow you to extend and customize it to your business’ needs.

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Best Contact Management Software Summary Table

Best Contact Management Software for Advanced CRM

Best Business Productivity Suites for Contact Management

Best Contact Management Software for Email Marketing

Best Free Contact Management Software Options

Of the contact management software solutions we reviewed, many included free versions with limited options when compared to their paid packages. Here are the best free contact manager software options.

The Bottom Line

There are an endless number of contact management software options available for your small business and most come included as part of a larger software package. Before selecting which option is right for you, it’s best to plan ahead for how you expect to leverage your contact list — for customer relationship management, email marketing, integration with other business productivity applications, or to organize the data for reporting purposes. Once you have your plan in place, you can narrow your search to one of the primary categories above and find the contact manager software that we recommend.