The 10 Best CRMs for Small Business 2020

Customer relationship management (CRM) software helps businesses manage relationships with customers and prospects using sales pipelines and other organizational tools. We compared dozens of products to determine the 10 best CRMs for small businesses in terms of price, features, integrations, and reporting, arriving at the best overall option based on your small business needs.

Top 10 CRMs for Small Business 2020

Which CRM Is Best for You?

How We Evaluated the Best CRM for Small Business

The best CRM software for small businesses 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.

Here are the criteria we used to evaluate the best CRM for small business:

• Price: Monthly user costs should offer multiple price points to meet a range of budgets, and we considered the overall features for the price to determine the best value. We also looked at providers that offer free plans and trials to get started.
• Ease of use: Everyday use should not require advanced technical skills. Therefore, we compared how easy it is to set up and to use each featured CRM.
• Contact management: Creating, editing, and searching for contacts should be simple and integrated with functions such as email, phone calls, and other tasks.
• Deal and opportunity management: Deal and pipeline creation should be customizable, visualize, and easy to manage.
• Workflow automation: These features automate functions such as the sales process, follow-up tasks, and other reminders.
• Reporting tools: Reporting tools track data such as sales, rep activities, and forecasting.
• System integrations: A good CRM will integrate with other software such as accounting, ecommerce, and marketing.
• Customization: Customization of items such as contact fields, opportunity fields, pipelines, and sales processes is typically standard with high-tiered plans.
• Customer satisfaction: Positive user reviews of CRM providers and multichannel customer support options are indicators of a satisfying customer experience.

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.

Freshsales: Best Overall Small Business CRM

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 from $12 to $49 per user, per month. You can even make calls or send emails without leaving the tool, and it is great for business-to-business (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 integrations with third-party apps, are available in its paid plans, which range from a competitive $12 to $49 per user, per month.

Freshsales Tiered Features

Sprout

The Sprout plan is Freshsales’ free entry-level plan; it 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 calendar appointments at a glance and will even summon an Uber for you.

Missing are the reporting and email marketing functions found with Bitrix24’s free plans and with tiered packages from Really Simple Systems. 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 the ability to manage contacts and relationships, this plan offers opportunity management, bulk emails with templates, and email tracking.

The Blossom plan does not include custom reporting features like those found in Zoho CRM and Bitrix24 at similar prices. 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 a monthly price of $25 per user. It also works to improve the lead process by automating lead assignment, a feature only offered by Insightly and Zoho CRM. The Garden plan, however, does not allow the creation of custom sales activities as it does with the Estate plan, nor does it provide time-based workflows or include a dashboard.

Still, the Garden plan does offer multiple sales pipelines, configurable dashboards, and lead assignment rules. Therefore, we recommend it for small businesses with 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 is $49 per user, per month and includes dashboards as part of its reporting features. By extending the tool’s contact relationship management and lead scoring functionality, teams gain the ability to trace and prioritize a lead based on a contact’s activities on your website.

Estate plan users can also customize sales activities, making it a good fit for sales teams that want a system that more closely mirrors its sales processes. While these features are great, the plan can be expensive for small teams. Therefore, teams needing a CRM that reflects a custom sales process and prefer a highly visual experience should consider Pipedrive.

Freshsales contact management
Source: Freshsales

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 that the software can be slow depending on the internet connection. You can read more in-depth reviews on our Freshsales review page.

Zoho CRM: Best Small Business CRM for Social Media Management

Zoho CRM is an all-in-one small business CRM with sales management and a robust social media suite, which allows you to incorporate social media into your relationship management, tracking interactions, and publishing on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram. There’s a free plan and paid plans starting at $12 per user, per month. This makes it perfect for sales teams wanting an affordable way to prospect and connect with leads on social media sites.

Zoho CRM Pricing

Zoho CRM offers a free plan for up to three users that includes contact and opportunity management and social media connections. Additional sales and social functionality and customizations are offered through paid plans ranging between $12 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 a unique activity tracking feature, website visitor monitoring, which is not available on many other free plans.

The Free plan from Zoho CRM, however, lacks the ability to manage email marketing campaigns, unlike the free plans from Bitrix24. Therefore, the Free plan is best for teams of three or less that require little customization but want to track their website engagements. 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. It comes with Social Lite, a social media management suite allowing unlimited publishing on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn.

This plan also enables teams to forecast sales, an uncommon feature 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 insight into a lead’s behavior as well as being able to track emails, social media, and visitor tracking.

Professional

The Professional plan offers product management functionality, like Pipedrive, but also offers purchase order and invoice management. It 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 dashboard
Source: Zoho CRM

What Zoho CRM Is Missing

Zoho CRM’s included storage of 1GB per user is paltry. 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 Zoho alternatives like 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 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.

Pipedrive: Best CRM for Visual Pipeline Management

Pipedrive is a small business CRM designed to simplify the sales pipeline process. Its 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. Starting at a per-user price of $12.50 per month, Pipedrive is best for teams wanting a CRM with unique pipeline views that help reps quickly determine next steps.

Pipedrive Pricing

Pipedrive offers three tiered plans that range between $12.50 and $49.90 per user, per month. This makes Pipedrive slightly more expensive than other products we compared, and there is no free-forever plan. Pipedrive does offer a free trial, allowing you to test it out before you buy.

Pipedrive Tiered Features

Essential

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

There is, however, no lead scoring like what’s found in entry-level plans from Freshsales and Zoho CRM. As a result, the Essential plan is best for businesses looking for a way to better manage their leads as well as their contacts but do not 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.

Advanced

The Advanced package adds email tracking capability to Pipedrive’s contact management platform, as well as contact data enrichment (not found in the Essential plan). The plan provides account insights that can help teams better focus follow-up efforts on the leads who are most ready to buy, and unlike most of the CRMs we compared, provides insights into your products, such as sales splits and average discount, helping you identify your best performers.

At $24.90 per user, per month, the Advanced 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 a tool that leverages the internet to verify information about existing contact records.

Pipedrive contact interface
Source: Pipedrive

Professional

The Professional plan offers the same features as the Advanced plan but includes cumulative revenue forecast and advanced reporting features for $49.90 per user, per month. The Professional package also includes role-specific permissions, giving teams more control over which users can interact with what content or pages and how.

Its chief benefits over the less expensive plans are its additional analytics, role-based permissions, and support. This makes the Professional package a good option for hierarchical teams and those who have truly unique requirements for sales management.

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 Pipedrive alternatives Freshsales and Zoho CRM, or project management as offered by Insightly. Pipedrive also lacks a mass email feature like those found in other tools we compared.

What Users Think About Pipedrive

While Pipedrive may not be as feature-rich as some of the others, what it does, it does well. Users of the software like its user-friendly interface, available integrations with other third-party tools, and short learning curve. You can read more about Pipedrive and what other users are saying on our Pipedrive review page.

HubSpot: Best Lead Management CRM for Small Businesses

HubSpot is a free contact management application with functionality like smart-form lead capture, a chat widget, and customer support ticketing, as well as email tracking and deal management. It can also be integrated with the Sales and Marketing Hubs for additional automation features. This makes it a great option for budget-conscious businesses of any size needing free CRM software for contact and lead management.

HubSpot Pricing

HubSpot is among the best free CRM and supports an unlimited number of users. As your business grows, you can add additional sales and marketing functionality through the Sales Hub and Marketing Hub, which range from $50 per month to $800 per month depending on the specific features added.

HubSpot Features

HubSpot CRM’s best feature is its simplistic user interface, making it easy to learn. For very small businesses or first-time CRM users, HubSpot’s free plan is an ideal introduction to basic CRM features such as contact management and lead or deal tracking. The live chat and bots are a nice customer service and lead generation feature. And with over 200 integration options, it has one of the largest app ecosystems of those we reviewed.

HubSpot’s key features include:

Form-based Lead Capture

HubSpot CRM includes the ability to embed forms on your website or capture data entered into existing website forms using a tracking code. While this feature can be found in other CRMs, most do not offer them in their free versions. Contacts captured as leads can then be entered into automated marketing campaigns, making HubSpot an economical option for businesses that use landing pages to generate leads.

Contact Management

HubSpot CRM includes the ability to organize contacts by company and provides insights such as a newly added contact’s recent activity on your website. As a cloud-based CRM, HubSpot also auto-enriches profiles based on information it pulls from social profiles and information it knows about companies. HubSpot also scores leads based on both profile information and website activity, which is something other free options offer only in a limited manner.

Lead & Task Management

HubSpot CRM gives you the ability to schedule tasks for later follow-up and allows you to create workflows to handle regular marketing tasks. Compared to other free plans available from the options on this list, these tools are more intuitive in moving leads through the sales process. HubSpot also includes a free embeddable chat tool that allows you to use conversational bots to prequalify leads that engage on your website, similar to the Freshchat feature.

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 Mailchimp, UberConference, and Slack. These integrations can greatly extend HubSpot’s functionality without requiring businesses to upgrade to the company’s 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 CRM contact interface
Source: HubSpot

What HubSpot Is Missing

The main disadvantages of HubSpot CRM are that some features that you get with other alternatives to HubSpot, 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 robust CRMs with built-in marketing, project management, and other business applications.

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. Some users complain that it doesn’t sync with Google and Outlook calendars, and that’s a fair criticism that HubSpot is evidently working on. You can read more on our HubSpot CRM review page.

Salesforce Essentials: Best Small Business CRM With Advanced Features

Salesforce Essentials is a powerful small business CRM with features like contact management, sales opportunities, mass emails, and customer service ticketing starting at $25 per user, per month. The Salesforce ecosystem offers an extensive suite of software, including support, marketing automation, ecommerce, and analytics apps, and it is especially suited to small businesses that need advanced features like territory-based lead assignment and reporting.

Salesforce Essentials Pricing

Salesforce Essentials is $25 per user, per month for up to 25 users and includes both sales and service modules. Salesforce also offers the Professional edition for $75 per user, per month, which includes advanced features like lead scoring, forecasting tools, and campaigns.

Salesforce Essentials Tiered Features

Essentials

Salesforce Essentials is $25 per user, per month and includes contact management, sales pipelines, deal management, and mass email features for up to 25 users. It is built on Salesforce’s Lightning platform, which is a much more intuitive and user-friendly interface than the Classic version. The plan also includes case management, allowing small businesses to manage both the sales process and customer support.

Salesforce’s entry-level plan is more expensive than other options on the list, but it includes a comprehensive set of advanced CRM features, including territory management and automated lead assignment. While Salesforce does not offer a free plan, Essentials is ideal for businesses that need a robust set of CRM features to manage sales leads across different geographic territories or industries.

Professional

Salesforce Professional is $75 per user, per month, and offers more of the advanced software as a service (SaaS) features people associate with Salesforce, and is the SaaS CRM platform used by more businesses than any other option. Its advanced features include lead scoring, sales forecasting, and advanced reporting and permission features.

This plan includes more functionality than any of the other options we reviewed, though it is also the most expensive option we considered. As a result, the Professional plan is best for larger sales teams, especially those with territory or industry-specific sales reps, or established B2B sales teams that manage high-level sales opportunities and need a reliable cloud-based application.

Salesforce opportunity management
Source: Salesforce

What Salesforce Essentials Is Missing

The Salesforce Essentials plan does not allow more than 25 users, requiring an upgrade as small teams grow. Plus, rules-based lead scoring, as well as invoicing, are found in other featured tools like Zoho CRM at lower prices than the required Salesforce upgrades.

What Users Think About Salesforce Essentials

Users give Essentials and the Lightning platform high marks for its user interface, saying it is far more intuitive than the legacy interface, and rate it highly for advanced features and customization options. However, users note that Salesforce often requires extensive setup and training, making it less accessible for teams without dedicated tech or administrative support. Visit our complete Salesforce review page for more user reviews.

Zendesk Sell: Best Small Business CRM for Mobile Teams

Zendesk Sell is a fully featured CRM that includes contact and deal management features, as well as a great mobile app with built-in calling functionality with plans starting at a per-user price of $19 each month. Zendesk Sell is also part of the overall Zendesk suite, which includes a help desk, chat, analytics, and IT management. The mobile app makes it the best choice for field sales teams that need built-in mobile calling and call recording.

Zendesk Sell Pricing

Zendesk Sell plans begin at a comparable $19 per user, per month, which includes contact management, deals, and mobile CRM apps featuring click-to-dial calling and call recording. Plans that include tools like bulk emailing, sales forecasting, and lead scoring are available at $49 and $99 per user, per month.

Zendesk Sell Tiered Features

Team

The Team plan costs $19 per user, per month (up to three users) and includes contact management, deals, and one of the best mobile CRM apps of all the options we’ve looked at. It features built-in voice-over-internet-protocol (VoIP) calling and call recording. Other mobile CRM apps allow click-to-call, but use the phone’s dialer and carrier services, where Zendesk Sell uses its own VoIP service.

Zendesk Sell is also a part of the overall Zendesk ecosystem of apps that include help desk, chat, knowledge base, and now a CRM. As a result, users are able to integrate their sales process and contacts within a robust suite of applications that help users manage the entire customer relationship. The Team plan specifically is ideal for small teams such as consultants or service-based businesses.

Professional

The Professional plan is a monthly price of $49 per user. It includes advanced features like sales forecasting, sales goals, and advanced analytics. It also includes mass emailing and unlimited email templates. While the Professional plan is one of the more expensive options on this list, the user interface and setup are more intuitive and updated than many of its competitors, making it much easier to configure reporting and dashboards.

Zendesk Sell is designed to specifically target larger business customers with a complete SaaS service, competing directly with both Salesforce and Zoho. The Professional plan is a good choice for larger teams that want in-app calling and a powerful and well-designed mobile app for their field sales reps, and want to integrate their entire customer relationship within one software ecosystem.

Enterprise

The Enterprise plan provides users with the ability to add additional sales pipelines, a product catalog, and lead and deal scoring for $99 per user, per month. It also includes the ability to create customized call scripts for sales reps to use as they interact with prospects and leads. The Enterprise plan offers some of the most advanced CRM options we looked at and more directly competes with Salesforce Professional than the other CRMs on this list.

Field sales teams will find that the mobile app calling and call scripts are valuable tools for connecting with a large number of prospects. The overall integration with Zendesk makes this a good fit for mid-sized and larger business-to-business sales teams, especially if they currently use Zendesk software for other aspects of managing customer experiences.

Zendesk Sell deal management
Source: Zendesk Sell

What Zendesk Sell Is Missing

Zendesk Sell does not offer a free-forever plan, and lacks additional features like bookkeeping, social media management, marketing automation, and productivity apps that are found in options like Zoho. It also lacks some of the more robust automation tools, including ongoing email campaigns, requiring third-party solutions instead.

What Users Think About Zendesk Sell

Zendesk Sell customers give it high praise for its intuitive interface and easy-to-use mobile app, especially the in-app calling and call recording features. Users also like the highly intuitive reporting and sales pipeline features. However, some users give it negative marks because the software isn’t updated with new features as quickly as other options. Check out our Zendesk Sell user reviews page for more information.

Really Simple Systems: Best Small Business CRM for Service Tools

Really Simple Systems is a CRM tool with built-in marketing and service desk tools like case management and service level agreements (SLAs), giving small businesses CRM, marketing, and service capabilities all-in-one. In addition to a free plan, monthly paid plans start at $14 per user, making Really Simple Systems ideal for small businesses that want an affordable CRM for managing entire customer journeys.

Really Simple Systems Pricing

Really Simple Systems offers a free model and three paid plans that build on its core functionality. Annual customer agreements for the entry-level plan start at $14 per user, per month, and annual agreements for its two upgraded plans are offered at $30 and $46 per user, per month.

Really Simple Systems Tiered Features

Free

Really Simple Systems offers a free plan that enables up to two users to manage contacts and deals. In addition to pipeline management, with the introduction of product lines, teams can view entire product catalogs and quickly verify related information like price and availability. The plan does not offer service desk tools, however, so teams looking for that functionality should consider HubSpot CRM.

The free plan also affords users access to email and chat support, as well as custom fields, custom dashboards, and custom pages. We recommend it for startups and solopreneurs who need to manage pipelines but do not need marketing, service, or advanced reporting functionality.

Starter

The Starter plan from Really Simple Systems costs $14 per user, per month and builds on the features included with its base model by adding lead management and the ability to segment accounts, contacts, and leads by specific properties like geographical location. Not only can users track and nurture new relationships, but administrators can easily assign leads to the appropriate reps.

Teams can also leverage the Starter package to create, manage, and automate email drip campaigns. They can also track responses and even ROI with a built-in tracker. Though the tier lacks case management capabilities, the marketing functionality of this package is strong, and we recommend the Starter plan for teams that want a simple CRM tool that can help improve demand generation.

Professional

The Professional package from Really Simple Systems introduces several help desk features for a monthly price of $30 per user. This includes case management, case level ranking, service desk email integration, and custom service level agreements (SLAs), equipping teams with tools for providing customer assistance post-sale.

Professional plan users can also access quotations and create custom pricing for prospective customers, though it lacks the advanced reporting offered with an upgraded plan. For this reason, the Professional package from Really Simple Systems is our choice for small businesses wanting to manage customer journeys, including quoting, but do not need granular reporting capabilities.

Really Simple Systems case management
Source: Really Simple Systems

Enterprise

The Enterprise plan from Really Simple Systems is $46 per user, per month and builds on the feature sets of preceding plans. Enterprise plan subscribers gain access to an account manager and onboarding trainer, which can go a long way toward ensuring small business users have points of contact for questions or additional needs and for training.

The Enterprise plan from Really Simple Systems is the only featured plan to include this level of new customer assistance at such a competitive price. That is why it is our pick for small businesses looking for a comprehensive CRM that includes advanced service capabilities.

What Really Simple Systems Is Missing

Unlike most of the featured CRMs, Really Simple Systems does not currently offer mobile apps for Android and iOS users. The platform also does not offer the ability to automate workflows. Teams that want a CRM with marketing and service capabilities, as well as mobile functionality, should consider Zendesk Sell, Salesforce, or Zoho CRM.

What Users Think About Really Simple Systems

Our readers say that Really Simple Systems is easy to use, even for people without advanced technical skills. Others, however, share that they are looking forward to mobile functionality and better integration with email. To learn more, visit our Really Simple Systems user reviews page.

Bitrix24: Best Low-cost, All-in-One Small Business CRM

Bitrix24 is a CRM with a free tier that includes all of the basic features needed to run a small business, including contact and project management, invoicing, help desk, telephony, and live chat. Paid plans start at $55.20 per month, with many additional features such as email and text marketing, CRM automations, and unlimited pipelines. Therefore, it is best for small businesses that want an inexpensive, all-in-one CRM.

Bitrix24 Pricing

All three Bitrix24 plans include unlimited contacts, telephony, live chat, and social integration. Teams of up to 12 can opt for the free plan. The CRM Plus plan suits teams of six or more for $55.20 monthly, and the Standard plan costs $79.20 monthly for a minimum of 50 users, including customization and automation features.

Bitrix24 Tiered Features

Free

This plan is free for 12 users and includes contact management, integrated phone system, live chat, project management, and invoicing. Though it lacks the contact data enrichment offered with Zoho CRM’s paid plans, its social media function connects Facebook, Instagram, and Slack, among others, letting you manage all of your social interactions from a single dashboard.

You can create an online store with 100 products and process unlimited orders, a feature not found in any of the other featured free plans. Despite the live chat messenger, which can be configured to send automated replies, this version is missing the email marketing found in their paid plans and with other CRMs like Really Simple Systems. This makes it ideal for small businesses that want a free CRM with chat but have no need for built-in email marketing.

CRM Plus

The CRM Plus plan covers six users, at a minimum, for just $55.20 per month, and adds CRM automation with triggers, bulk email, SMS and text sends, unlimited call recording, and voice broadcasting, which lets you deliver prerecorded phone messages with an auto-dialer. This feature is not found in any of the other CRMs we reviewed.

There is a document builder that allows you to create and share documents with your team, prospects, and customers. Its low price point makes this plan one of the least expensive per-user, all-in-one CRMs we reviewed. This also makes it ideal for very small teams or solopreneurs to affordably manage multiple business tasks within their CRM.

Standard

The Standard plan costs $79.20 per month for 50 users or more, which makes it by far the least expensive per user CRM we reviewed. Many of the main features found in the other two plans are bulked up. For example, you can create 10 online stores with up to 5,000 products and send 50,000 monthly marketing emails.

Plus, in addition to tracking calls, the Standard plan includes a report builder, allowing teams to better understand which activities are driving sales and which are ineffective or wasteful. These varied operations make this a comprehensive yet inexpensive plan, especially for large teams that want to monitor call productivity.

Bitrix24 contact interface
Source: Bitrix24

What Bitrix24 Is Missing

The free plan is missing the email marketing functions found in Really Simple Systems. The user interface—though not missing anything—can feel busy (if not overwhelming) because of its multiple business functions. As a result, it doesn’t feel as ordered and user-friendly as most of the other CRMs.

What Users Think About Bitrix24

Users like the platform’s many business application uses, citing the free version as a great place to start because it includes many of the same features as the paid plans. Some, however, complained about the user interface, saying there’s a steep learning curve to using the software. You can also read more about customer thoughts on our Bitrix24 review page.

Insightly: Best Small Business CRM for Project Management

Insightly is a competitively priced small business CRM with powerful project management functionality and sales pipeline customization options. Monthly plans start at $29 per user, and there is a free starter plan. It also includes tools to help you manage vendors, prospects, and customers and has numerous custom reporting options. Therefore, Insightly is a great solution for businesses looking for CRM software that can help them manage both sales and projects.

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. Monthly paid plans cost between $29 (Plus) and $49 (Professional) per user and include lead assignment routing, email tracking, and customizable sales processes. The two paid plans also have extensive, customizable reporting options.

Insightly Tiered Features

Free

Insightly’s Free plan provides two users access to core functionality such as contact records, task, and opportunity. It also provides them with built-in project management, a feature not found in most of the CRMs we compared. It offers relationship tracking, voice notes, and bulk email campaigns, a feature not found in the free plans of Freshsales, Zoho CRM, and HubSpot.

However, unlike free plans from Bitrix24 and HubSpot, this plan does not include email tracking, which delivers notifications on emails opened and clicked. 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.

Plus

At $29 per user, per month, Insightly’s Plus plan allows users 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 does not include marketing automation and social media management like those found in similarly priced plans from Freshsales, Zoho CRM, Really Simple Systems, and Bitrix24. It also doesn’t include lead scoring like what’s found in Freshsales, Zoho CRM, and Salesforce. For this reason, it is best for solopreneurs, highly independent sales representatives, and those who don’t need marketing automation built in.

Professional

The Professional plan costs $49 per user, per month. It lets you customize your dashboard, which is a feature not offered by many of the CRM software we compared. But its many customized reporting options are where it really stands out from the others. Reporting options include tasks, contacts, leads, opportunities, organization, and others. Each of these has customizable fields to slice down as specifically as you’d want to go.

Dashboards can be created for categories such as lead sources, activities, forecast dates, pipeline, and stages, with several dozen ways to present and share the data using various visual options. It is, however, missing the marketing automation, lead scoring, and social management found in other top CRMs like Salesforce, Freshsales, and Zoho CRM. This plan is best for teams that want dashboard and reporting customization for sales and projects.

Insightly project management
Source: Insightly

What Insightly Is Missing

While you can manage projects with Insightly, Insightly and Pipedrive, for example, offer different user experiences. While Pipedrive’s user experience is highly visual, Insightly’s experience is not. Insightly also fails to provide quotes and order management like Zoho CRM does without upgrading to an enterprise-level plan.

What Users Think About Insightly

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

Streak: Best CRM That Integrates Directly Into Gmail Inbox

Streak CRM resides in your Gmail account’s inbox, where you can create and manage contacts, deals, pipelines, and communications. There is a free plan and monthly paid plans starting at $49 per user. Because of these capabilities, this platform is best for solopreneurs or small businesses that want to manage contacts and deals directly from Gmail.

Streak Pricing

Streak’s free plan integrates with G Suite and has unlimited pipelines. It also includes email scheduling and tracking, a mobile app, and tasks. A monthly Professional plan costs $49 per user and includes permissions, call logs, email filtering, and reporting.

Streak Tiered Features

Personal

Streak integrates with Gmail as an extension populating within the side navigation list of your inbox, where all pipelines and leads are found. Settings, updates, and integrations are found in a drop-down menu at the top right. Visually, the pipelines are color-coded by pipeline or project stage. This is the only free version to allow unlimited pipelines.

Within pipelines, there are templates for support ticket tracking, job applications, event bookings, project management, and other business uses. However, unlike free plans from Zoho CRM, Bitrix24, and HubSpot, this plan does not include reporting. Therefore, the free plan is ideal for individuals who want to work entirely from their Gmail and don’t need the ability to create reports.

Using Streak inside Gmail
Source: Streak

Professional

The Professional plan costs $49 per user, per month and adds integrations, reporting, and email support. Other features include call logs, leads by source, and meeting notes, which can be timed and followed up on easily. Integrations are limited to Google Sheets and Hangouts plus an assortment of options via Zapier. This puts it at a disadvantage compared to all of the other CRMs at this price that offer dozens of integrations.

Streak pipeline view
Source: Streak

Pipeline reporting is highly customizable with filters that can pull in a variety of data such as deal amounts, close rate, interactions, time in each stage, and others. Though you can send mass emails, there is no marketing automation feature, unlike Freshsales, Zoho CRM, and Bitrix24. Therefore, this plan is for teams that need multiple pipeline management with highly customized reporting options, but that don’t need marketing functions built in.

What Streak Is Missing

Because Streak lives in Gmail, it doesn’t have marketing automation features as offered by Freshsales, Zoho CRM, and Really Simple Systems. There’s also no inbound or outbound call feature option that’s also found in these CRMs.

What Users Think About Streak

Users like that their CRM lives in Gmail, especially sales reps who spend lots of time working out of their email. The multiple pipeline features is also appreciated by users. A few users, however, found the import and export feature to be “clunky.” To read in-depth reviews, visit our Streak user reviews page.

Bottom Line

Small business CRM software is essential for managing contacts and the sales process. Most vendors also bundle other business applications such as marketing, project management, and service features into their plans. The best CRM software for your small business will depend largely on the number of users, use needs, and budget.

We recommend Freshsales as the best CRM for small businesses overall due to its affordability and features like 360-degree customer insights, activity tracking, and appointment and lead management capability. Its suite of additional business applications also make it attractive as a do-it-all platform for growing companies. Visit Freshsales and sign up for their risk-free, 21-day free trial.

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