6 Best CRM for Small Business 2019

CRM software helps businesses efficiently manage relationships with customers and prospects using sales pipelines and other organizational tools. We compared more than 20 products offering a range of options to determine the six best CRMs for small businesses in terms of price, features, customization, integrations, and reporting, arriving at the best overall CRM.

Top 6 CRMs for Small Business 2019

Quiz: Which CRM is Best for You?

How We Evaluated the Best CRM for Small Business

The best CRM for small business should be relatively inexpensive and provide a simple process for managing and tracking customers and prospects. Upgrade plans should allow companies to expand efficiently and include features such as process automation, system integrations, email marketing, customization, and advanced reporting.

Therefore, the criteria we used to evaluate the best CRM for small business include:

• Price – We compared each program’s monthly user fee and any add-on costs that resulted in additional functionality.
• Contact Management – CRMs should have contact management capabilities that make it easy to create, edit, and search for contacts. They should also work well with contact-related activities like email, phones calls, and more.
• Deal and Opportunity Management – We looked into how each tool tracked a deal’s pipeline stages, what deal data was viewable, and how each tool helped prioritize follow-up activities.
• Workflow Automation – We reviewed each tool’s automation capabilities for the sales process, follow-up tasks, and other reminders.
• Reporting Tools – A good CRM should offer data to help sales managers better monitor their teams as well as their sales pipelines.
• System Integrations – We compared each tool’s integrations with cloud-based, third-party programs.
• Customization – We reviewed how each program handles customizations such as contact fields, opportunity fields, and sales processes.
• Customer Satisfaction – Reading through extensive product reviews, we compared technical support offerings and reported ease of implementation.

Based on these criteria, we determined Freshsales is the best CRM for small businesses because it’s a fully-featured and competitively-priced solution that is easy to use and completely customizable. Freshsales also has great lead management capabilities and a built-in phone system, making it particularly best for field sales teams or consulting businesses with longer sales cycles.

Best Overall CRM for Small Business: Freshsales

Freshsales is a fully-featured and customizable CRM offering contact and lead management designed for businesses with long sales cycles. It offers a basic free plan and three paid options for teams of any size, priced competitively with the other CRMs we reviewed. You can even make calls or send emails without leaving the tool, and it’s great for B2B teams that want highly-customizable CRM software or that have remote users.

Freshsales Pricing

Freshsales offers a free forever plan for unlimited users with basic contact management and a built-in phone system. Additional functionality, including deal management, bulk emailing, advanced analytics, and additional integrations with third-party apps, are available in its paid plans, which range from a competitive $12 per user per month to $49 per user per month.

Freshsales Tiered Features

Sprout

The Sprout plan is Freshsales’ free entry-level plan that provides basic sales management functions such as lead, deal, and contact management. It also offers rules-based scoring to help you better prioritize lead follow-up (not often found in the other free plans we compared) and web-to-lead capture forms that can help speed up the data entry process. Its mobile version shows your calendar and appointments at a glance and will even summon an Uber for you.

However, the Sprout plan lacks many of the more robust opportunity management features and email tools found in Freshsales’ other paid plans, like lead routing and customized opportunity fields. While there is no limit on the number of users, the Sprout plan is best for teams looking for an affordable tool that can manage their contact relationship details, tasks, and appointments but don’t require more robust marketing, opportunity tracking, or reporting features.

Blossom

The Blossom plan costs $12 per user per month, which is in line with the other entry-level paid plans we compared. In addition to helping you manage your contact relationships, the Blossom plan offers opportunity management, bulk emails with templates, and email tracking. It also lets you dial contacts and log your phone call activities directly from the tool using either the desktop client or mobile app, which is a feature not found in many CRMs without a third-party integration.

The Blossom plan does not include team management functionality found in the next tier plans. Therefore, the Blossom plan is best for individuals or highly independent sales teams that want to track their calls or send mass emails.

Garden

The Garden plan provides the team management functionality the Blossom plan lacks for $25 per user per month. This plan also automates the lead process by allowing lead assignment and automated routing, which is a feature only offered by Insightly and Zoho CRM. The Garden plan, however, does not allow you to create custom sales activities like you can do with the Estate plan, nor does it provide time-based workflows or include a dashboard.

However, it does include multiple sale pipelines, configurable dashboards, and lead assignment rules. For these reasons, the Garden plan is best for sales teams that have different teams (e.g., inside, outside, renewal) handling multiple leads that want the ability to see sales productivity to make data-driven decisions.

Estate

The Estate plan, which costs $49 per user per month, includes dashboards as part of its reporting features and extends the tool’s contact relationship management and lead scoring functionality, like giving you a way to trace and prioritize a lead based on a contact’s activities on your website. Users also have more ability to customize their sales processes than offered by the lower-tiered plans.

This makes it a good fit for sales teams that want to better utilize their website as part of their lead prioritization strategy. However, while these additional features are great, the plan can be expensive for small teams. Therefore, if you need a highly customizable sales process and don’t need features like call logging, voicemail recording, or website activity analytics, you may also want to consider Pipedrive.

What Freshsales Is Missing

Freshsales lacks the ability to issue quotes, manage orders, and invoice directly in the tool. Nor does it include pricing books, which is a feature Zoho CRM provides, or product statistics, like Pipedrive does. For this reason, Freshsales may not be the best choice for businesses that manage inventory (such as retail or distribution) or offer catalog-style pricing for products or services.

What Users Think About Freshsales

Freshsales users like the deals page and how Freshsales displays the entire sales process. They praise the customer service for technical support and how easy it is to customize the CRM. However, they give the tool lower marks for the quality of the standard reports, and have complained the software can be slow depending on the internet connection. You can read more in-depth reviews on our Freshsales review page.

Where to Find Freshsales

Freshsales is great CRM software for B2B businesses. It can also help you manage your relationships with very little setup time and without the need to employ someone with prior CRM knowledge. It’s why we chose it as our best CRM for small business. While Freshsales offers a free forever plan, you can also give the professional features a try by taking advantage of their free trial.

Visit Freshsales

Best CRM for Visual Pipeline Management: Pipedrive

Pipedrive is a small business CRM designed to simplify the sales pipeline process. Starting at $12.50 per user per month, Pipedrive’s highly intuitive and easy-to-use pipeline management tool gives you the ability to see what is in your sales pipeline at a glance while helping to manage sales of standardized products and services. Pipedrive is best for businesses with a catalog of products or services looking to manage contacts through an interactive sales funnel.

Pipedrive Pricing

Pipedrive offers three tiered plans that range between $12.50 per user and $49.17 per user. This pricing makes the product slightly more expensive than other products we compared, and there is no forever free plan. Pipedrive does, however, offer a free trial, giving you the opportunity to test it out before you buy.

Pipedrive Tiered Features

Silver

The Silver plan costs $12.50 per user per month and includes Pipedrive’s visual pipeline homepage as well as contact management and a configurable report. Like Freshsales, Pipedrive is easy to customize, even in its entry-level plan, giving you the option of creating a unique process to fit the needs of your business. It allows for unlimited storage and unlimited pipelines, a combination not found in any of the other CRM software we reviewed.

There is, however, no lead scoring like what’s found in Freshsales and Zoho CRM. As a result, the Silver plan is best for businesses looking for a way to better manage their leads as well as their contacts, but don’t require lead scoring. It is also best for those who want a software program that is tailored to their individual processes rather than being forced to adapt their process to the tool.

Gold

The Gold plan adds email tracking capability to Pipedrive’s contact management platform as well as the meeting and task scheduler not found in the Silver plan. The Gold plan also provides account insights that can help you better focus your follow-up efforts on the leads who are most ready to buy. Unlike most of the CRMs we compared, Pipedrive also provides insights into your products, such as sales splits and average discount, helping you identify your best performers.

At $24.20 per user per month, the Gold plan is best for teams that want to take advantage of Pipedrive’s visual pipeline with additional analytics. It is also best for those who want to better manage their sales tasks and efforts with its built-in scheduling tool.

Platinum

The Platinum plan offers the same features as the Gold plan but includes additional sales forecasting functionality and advanced reporting features for $49.17 per user per month. The plan also lets you set specific permissions based on roles, which is something only Freshsales also does out of the products we compared, giving you more control over what your team needs to do or see. It also comes with access to live phone support.

As the Platinum’s chief benefit over the less expensive plans is its additional analytics, role-based permissions, and support, it is best for hierarchical teams and those that have truly unique requirements for sales management. However, it is also the most expensive plan on our list.

What Pipedrive Is Missing

Pipedrive lacks lead assignment and lead-based routing, which makes it a less viable alternative for account-based sales requiring multiple points of contacts. While leads can be prioritized based on time since last contact, it does not have lead scoring like what’s found in Freshsales and Zoho CRM. Pipedrive also lacks a mass marketing email feature like those found in other tools we compared, costing it the overall best designation.

What Users Think About Pipedrive

While Pipedrive may not be as feature-rich, what it does, it does well. Users of the software praise its user-friendly interface, its available integrations with other third-party tools, and its short learning curve. However, they have reported that the tool could be improved with additional customer filtering functionality based on past sales and more robust webhooks. You can read more about Pipedrive and what other users are saying on our Pipedrive Review page.

Where to Find Pipedrive

Pipedrive simplifies the sales process while giving you a means of managing your contact relationships. While other tools require several clicks to navigate deals and locate specific customer activities, Pipedrive organizes information in easy-to-digest visual homepages. You and additional team members can try out Pipedrive’s visual pipeline by trying it free.

Visit Pipedrive

Best CRM for Consultants or Freelancers: Dubsado

Dubsado is a CRM and lead management tool designed for solopreneurs and small teams, giving users the ability to manage their contacts and organize tasks related to one-off jobs for $20 per month. Users can share project status through a customer portal, track billable hours, store digital design proof approvals, and manage recurring billing. This makes it great for consultant businesses as well as design or other creative freelance professionals.

Dubsado Pricing

Dubsado is free for three users. Paid plans start at $35 per month, or you can pay for a full year’s service for $350. Dubsado occasionally offers promotional discounts, so you may be able sign up for a lower price. The base paid plan supports an unlimited number of clients and up to three users.

Additional users can be added on to your base monthly plan per the following:

• 4-10 users: $25 per month additional to your main plan
• 11-20 users: $45 per month additional to your main plan
• 21-30 users: $60 per month additional to your main plan
• 30+ users: Contact Dubsado for custom pricing

Dubsado Features

Dubsado offers lead management and tools specifically designed with freelancers or digital creative consultants in mind, such as recurring billing, client portals, contract storage, and digital proof approval. While Dubsado is slightly more expensive than the other products we compared, its ability to process payments, manage one-off jobs, and manage billable project hours from within the tool distinguishes it from other CRM software products we considered.

Dubsado’s key features and benefits include the following:

Contact Management

As a contact management tool, Dubsado allows you to store proposals, quotes, and client questionnaires. It also gives you and your clients the ability to sign and execute legally-binding contracts online and approve digital proof documents without requiring additional third-party integrations, which is unlike the other CRM products we compared.

In addition, Dubsado gives you the ability to issue recurring invoices, process payments, and also lets your clients add tips. This provides you not only with insights related to a client’s potential future deals, but also their existing recurring revenue statistics.

Lead & Task Management

Dubsado includes lead capture forms that you can embed on your website or share elsewhere as a link. The tool then sends automated email responses, including necessary documents required to do the job based on what a lead selects within the form. Jobs-in-process are then tracked using a visual kanban-style task board, which users can keep private or share with clients.

The software also includes a time tracker, giving you the ability to either bill clients based on an hourly rate or issue a flat-rate invoice. While you can adapt the product and price-book features found in Pipedrive or Zoho CRM for a similar blend of quotation and invoice management, Dubsado’s tracker is optimized for this style of billing.

System Integrations

Dubsado syncs with iCal, Google Calendars, and Outlook calendars. In addition, the software works with other G Suite apps as well as Square, PayPal, Stripe, Zapier, QuickBooks, iCloud, and CloudSpot. While the majority of other products we compared offer integrations with automation tools like Zapier, Dubsado’s focus on point-of-sale payment tools reinforces its focus on B2C-focused businesses.

Customer Service & Ease of Use

The user interface and web forms include highly visual elements and easy-to-use drop-down menus or radial buttons, making them easy to use and understand. It also features drag-and-drop functionality, allowing you to quickly and easily customize the layout of job boards.

Dubsado has a Facebook group that lets you connect with other users as well as their customer support. Customer support is also available Monday through Friday from 1 a.m. to 9 p.m. as well as from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. on the weekend. It is also accessible by chat through their website.

What Dubsado Is Missing

Dubsado is designed more for B2C sales with a focus on web-lead and job management rather than marketing. There are no mass marketing email features, email templates, or email tracking. Nor is there a built-in phone dialer or call logging like what is found in Freshsales. As a result, Dubsado is not a good option for businesses with longer sales cycles and larger sales teams—Freshsales is the best option for this scenario.

What Users Think About Dubsado

Dubsado is a relatively new product, but its users love its integrated payment options and how the tool helps them automate their business processes. Users also love how easy it is to collaborate with clients, handle contracts, and set payment schedules.

Where to Find Dubsado

Dubsado is a CRM designed for creative entrepreneurs and freelance consultants, with tools built for collaboration and client management. You can use Dubsado to manage up to three clients for as long as you’d like for free, or sign up for either its monthly or annual plan by visiting its website today.

Visit Dubsado

Best CRM for Project Management: Insightly

Insightly is a competitively-priced, small business CRM with powerful project management functionality, giving you the ability to create custom project pipelines you can use again and again. In addition, it also includes tools to help you manage vendors as well as prospects and customers. Therefore, Insightly is a great solution for businesses looking for CRM software that can help them manage standardized projects from end-to-end.

Insightly Pricing

Insightly’s basic core features, including project management, pipeline tracking, custom CRM fields, and contact management, are free for up to two users. Paid plans cost between $29 (Plus) and $49 (Professional) per user per month, and include lead assignment routing, email tracking, and customizable sales processes. Get started with a free trial.

Insightly Tiered Features

Free

Insightly gives up to two users access to core functionality such as contact records and task, opportunity, and project management, which is a feature not found in the majority of other CRMs we compared. It also offers relationship tracking and voice notes. However, the free plan does not include the business card scanner, calendar syncing, or lead assignment features available with the paid plans.

The Free plan is, therefore, best for solopreneurs or teams of two that manage projects as well as sales. It is also best for users who want to use another program’s calendar tools for managing their appointments or those willing to manually enter contact details from business cards.

Plus

At $29 per user per month, Insightly’s Plus plan gives users the ability to manage contact relationships after the deal is closed by linking a contact with any one of multiple, customizable project pipelines. In addition, users can add and manage 100,000 records and send 2,500 bulk emails a month. Like Freshsales, leads resulting from those contacts and marketing messages are then tracked and managed through a sales pipeline process.

The Plus plan, however, does not include any of the lead assignment rules, shareable account insights cards, dashboards, or the workflow automation found in the Professional plan. It also doesn’t include lead scoring like what’s found in Freshsales and Zoho CRM. For this reason, it is best for solopreneurs, highly independent sales representatives, or those with a sales process that cannot be automated.

Professional

The Professional plan increases the number of records you can manage to 250,000 and doubles the amount of bulk email that can be sent out each month at a cost of $49 per user per month. The Professional plan lets you customize your dashboard, which is a feature not offered by many of the CRM software we compared, and gives you the ability to assign role-based permissions and automate workflow tasks.

The Professional plan is best for teams of more than one that want to send more marketing messages or tailor their dashboard data to fit their unique business needs. It is also a good fit for sales managers who would like to limit what their teams can do or see based on roles.

What Insightly Is Missing

While you can manage your projects within Insightly, the tool does not offer product statistics like those found in Pipedrive or a means for managing quotes and order like Zoho CRM does. This puts the tool at a disadvantage for businesses that sell standardized products and services or those that conduct a lot of retail or product sales transactions.

What Users Think About Insightly

We use Insightly ourselves and appreciate the ease in which contacts can be added to the database directly from a native email client as well as its ability to manage projects in our pipeline. Other users appreciate the ease in which fields can be added and reports can be created. However, use of the tool does require many clicks to navigate to specific record information. You can read more about Insightly on our Insightly Review page.

Where to Find Insightly

You can use Insightly to coordinate internal tasks and vendor relationships as well as the activities needed to close a sale. Insightly knows that relationships continue well beyond a deal’s close, which is why their project management functionality is such a benefit. Even better, they give you a chance to try out their Professional plan for free for 14 days. Give it a try today.

Visit Insightly

Best CRM for Social Media Management: Zoho CRM

Zoho CRM is an all-in-one, small business CRM with contact, lead, and order management. It also allows you to incorporate social media into your relationship management, tracking interactions with its Facebook and Twitter hook. This makes it perfect for sales teams that prospect on social media sites like Twitter and Facebook.

Zoho CRM Pricing

Zoho CRM offers a free plan for up to three users that includes contact and opportunity management along with social media connections. Additional sales and social functionality and customization are offered through its paid plans ranging between $12 per user per month and $20 per user per month, keeping it in line with other products we compared.

Zoho CRM Tiered Features

Free

Zoho CRM’s Free plan supports up to three users and includes lead and contact management like the other CRM products we compared. It also has unique activity tracking features, such as phone logging and social media connections, which are not available on many other free plans. The Free plan, however, lacks the ability to route leads to specific users, manage orders, or customize the interface.

Therefore, the Free plan is best for teams of three or less that require little customization but want to track their social media interactions. It is also best for teams that manage their quotes and orders through another accounting tool.

Standard

The Standard plan costs $12 per user per month and allows users to add custom fields and create custom reports that can then be scheduled and delivered to users. Like the Free plan, the Standard plan integrates with Twitter and Facebook. It also allows you to send bulk emails, track website visitors, and forecast sales, which is a feature not found in any of the other plans at this price.

Email insights provide real-time monitoring of email deliveries, bounces, and opens. The Standard plan is, therefore, best for sales teams that want more insights into a lead’s behavior as well as being able to track emails, social media, and visitor tracking. The Standard plan is also a good fit for groups of more than three sales team members.

Professional

The Professional plan offers product management functionality, like Pipedrive, but also offers purchase order and invoice management and costs $20 per user per month, keeping it in line with similar product pricing tiers. The Professional plan also includes access to Zoho CRM’s proprietary SalesSignals functionality, which automates lead scoring, helps you better prioritize lead follow-up, and lets you add up to 150 custom fields per module.

Its custom field offering and conditional follow-up rules that can be tied to CRM field updates make it great for teams looking for either a tool with a high degree of customization potential or workflow automation. The Professional plan is also best for those who would like to capture leads directly from social media.

Zoho CRM Social Media Tracking

What Zoho CRM Is Missing

Zoho CRM’s included storage of 1GB per user is paltry, and even though you can add additional storage at a cost, that can add up quickly. Pipedrive, by contrast, offers unlimited storage on all of their accounts. While users have the ability to customize contact and opportunity fields, it is not as easy to customize the sales pipeline process, nor does it include the project management capability of Insightly.

What Users Think About Zoho CRM

Zoho CRM users report that the tool makes it easy to customize, track prospects, and set future tasks. They say data is easy to import from existing CRM software, making the switch-over less painful. However, they do say that technical support could be improved. Fixes and new features are slow to roll out and the user interface could be easier to navigate. For more user reviews, you can visit our Zoho CRM Review page.

Where to Find Zoho CRM

Zoho CRM allows you to engage with your contacts on whatever channel works best for them. Its customization and extended integration make it a great solution for teams that depend on being able to adapt their sales techniques to match the next social media trend. Best of all, you can give Zoho a try for as long as you would like by signing up for a free account on their website.

Visit Zoho

Best No-Frills CRM for Small Businesses: HubSpot

HubSpot is known more as a marketing platform, but it offers a free, no-frills CRM that gives businesses a way to manage their contacts and gain insights into recent prospect activity. In addition to providing email and deal tracking, HubSpot CRM offers web forms, live chat, and lead qualification bots. This makes it a great option for budget-conscious businesses of any size needing basic CRM software for contact and lead management.

HubSpot Pricing

HubSpot CRM is free to use and supports an unlimited number of users. As your business grows, you can add additional functionality by signing up for one or more of their other offerings, like their Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, or Service Hub programs, which range from $50 to $400 per month, depending on the plan.

HubSpot Features

HubSpot CRM’s best feature is its simplistic user interface that looks and behaves much like Gmail, making it easy to learn. For very small businesses or for businesses that are using a CRM for the first time, HubSpot’s free plan is an ideal introduction to basic CRM features such as contact management and lead or deal tracking.

HubSpot’s key features include:

Contact Management

HubSpot CRM includes contact management, which gives you the ability to organize contacts by company (with capacity for up to 1 million records), and provides insights such as a newly added contact’s recent activity on your website. You can also see which contacts are opening your emails as well as schedule meetings from within HubSpot. However, its contact management tools, overall, are not as robust as the other products we compared.

Upgrading to their Sales Starter package gives you the ability to add even more records as well as increases the limits on templates, storage, and reporting. Their Sales Professional package also adds custom reporting, product management, automated email campaigns, and multiple deal pipelines, putting HubSpot more in line with products like Freshsales and Pipedrive, but at a significantly higher price.

Lead & Task Management

HubSpot CRM helps you pre-qualify leads that come to your website with live chat and conversational bots that require no programming and very little time to start using. These features, while found in Freshsales’ and Zoho CRM’s add-on products, are built directly into the HubSpot CRM. They can be set up and deployed within a few minutes.

The software gives you the ability to schedule tasks for later follow-up with email reminders. It also gives you the ability to organize your deals by pipeline stage in a visual kanban-style format similar to Pipedrive or Freshsales.

System Integrations

HubSpot CRM integrates with Gmail and Outlook, making it easy to add contacts to the CRM. It also automatically updates contacts with their social media handles. However, it does not automatically log social media interactions like Zoho CRM does unless you pay for the Marketing Hub’s $200 per month Basic plan.

The Chrome email extension automatically pulls in company, contact, and activity data for contacts. HubSpot CRM also integrates with hundreds of other third-party products like Zapier, Mailchimp, SurveyMonkey, UberConference, and Slack. These integrations can greatly extend HubSpot’s functionality without requiring businesses to upgrade to their other Sales, Marketing, or Service Hub plans. However, these integrations may require additional paid subscriptions.

Customer Service & Ease of Use

HubSpot offers a comprehensive online knowledge base, including an extensive library of tutorials called “HubSpot Academy,” as well as an active community of users who offer support and answer people’s questions. However, it should be noted that email, live chat, and phone support are only available to users with a paid package. If you’re using their free package, support is limited to the self-service options.

HubSpot Contact Management

What HubSpot Is Missing

The main disadvantages of HubSpot CRM are that some features that you get with other CRM software, such as workflow management and customer support, are only available if you subscribe to one of their paid packages. Also, if you decide to upgrade to their advanced package, pricing starts at $50 per user per month. This puts it in the range of more fully-featured CRMs.

What Users Think About HubSpot

HubSpot CRM users are highly complimentary of its ease of use but wish the product offered more reports and workflow automation. There have also been complaints that the interface has undergone several changes in recent months, which has upset users’ workflows and required them to relearn how to use the product. You can read more on our HubSpot CRM Review page.

Where to Find HubSpot

HubSpot CRM is a good option for businesses that need a product to help them manage their contacts but don’t want to spend a lot of time learning how to use the features of their CRM. You can get started using HubSpot CRM by visiting their website and signing up for your free forever account today.

Visit HubSpot

Bottom Line

CRM software is a sound investment for your business. Sales teams, in particular, can benefit from their lead, sales, and workflow management features, which can significantly increase efficiency and allow them to focus on what they do best—converting leads into customers. The best CRM software for your small business will depend largely on the number of users, the size of your business, any other applications that you would like to integrate, and your budget.

We recommend Freshsales as the best CRM for small businesses overall due to its affordable price and features like 360-degree customer insights, robust activity tracking, and appointment and lead management capabilities. You can visit Freshsales to give its contact management a try for yourself today by visiting their website and signing up for their free forever plan, or try out their more advanced features by taking advantage of their risk-free, 30-day free trial.

Visit Freshsales