Best CRM for Small Business: 8 Best Platforms (March 2023)

HubSpot CRM is a top pick for the best overall and most simple CRM for small businesses thanks to its highly intuitive interface, strong navigability ratings, and features that require little technical skill to figure out. It has excellent sales capabilities, including contact and deal management, meeting scheduling, and document management features. There’s also built-in payment processing, goal setting and tracking, calling, and sales automation through its automated lead assignment and email follow-up sequences.

In addition to its simplicity and robust sales tools, HubSpot is a candidate for the best CRM for startups. This is primarily because it supports unlimited users on a free-forever plan that includes excellent marketing features. Users can create and deploy mass email campaigns using prebuilt templates and drip automations. Teams can also receive basic search engine optimization (SEO) recommendations, manage a blog, and build free web forms and landing pages. Finally, the free plan includes features for creating contact segments, deploying online ads, and analyzing campaign performance.

Even with HubSpot CRM offering a free and easy-to-use solution that handles sales, marketing, content management, and customer service functions in one platform, there is one issue for small operations looking to scale. Bundled or not, the paid plans get expensive when a personal CRM system isn’t enough and a business enters a growth stage that demands more features, data storage, and user capacity. Zoho CRM and Freshsales are the best free CRM systems with cost-friendly paid plans.

Freshsales is a CRM system with everything a business needs to generate leads and sales opportunities, engage contacts, and automate tasks. It is free for up to 3 users, offers cost-friendly paid options, and is applauded by customers for ease of use.

Small teams can manage contact, account, and deal records, set appointments, create tasks, and track contact activity. Freshsales is also heavy in communication capabilities—letting users engage prospects through a built-in phone, direct and mass email, live chat, or chatbots.

Other top Freshsales features include automation and Freddy artificial intelligence (AI) tools. These are useful for smaller sales operations as it allows teams with limited resources to complete more through activity automation and by having an intelligent bot complete tasks for you. For example, the AI can engage prospects as a chatbot, qualify leads through contact scoring, manage data with deduplication, and analyze CRM data for forecasting and deal insights.

One of the biggest downsides of Freshsales is that generating and sending branded company sales documents, such as quotes, contracts, or business proposals, requires an add-on or a subscription to the paid plans. For free sales document management, we recommend HubSpot, which allows basic custom quotes and proposals on the Free plan.

Zoho CRM is one of the most popular and highly customizable CRM options. The free plan supports three users and offers lead, account, contact, and deal management modules. It has basic reporting, simple workflow automations, and native integrations with other Zoho products. If you upgrade to paid plans, you gain access to modules like inventory management for products, price books, orders, invoices, and quotes. There’s a customer support module for handling customer cases and escalation processes.

Automation is where Zoho CRM stands out the most. Teams can put sales tasks and marketing campaign deployment on autopilot thanks to the high-level workflow customization Zoho offers. Teams can create workflows with rules, conditions, and actions to automatically send sales emails, update records, create tasks, or assign ownership to tasks or deals if an event occurs. Zoho also has macros tools, which let users complete automation actions through one-click execution rather than trigger-based.

Artificial intelligence (AI) tools give teams automated analytics and insights they wouldn’t have discovered without actively evaluating the data themselves. Additionally, AI can act as additional personnel by using it for task automation or to engage with website visitors as chatbots. Unfortunately, Zoho’s Zia AI tool gets expensive, starting at $40 per user, per month. Pipedrive is the best alternative for AI—including its Sales Assistant tool on the Essentials plan for $14.90 per user, per month.

Pipedrive is a sales CRM platform that lets users track and collaborate on opportunities through custom pipelines, product catalogs, and deal rotting notifications. Sales teams can streamline productivity in various ways, one being through workflow automation, which puts repetitive tasks like email sends or data updates on autopilot.

Another solution is Smart Docs, which lets users quickly generate quote or proposal documents using contact data already stored. Additionally, there’s the AI Sales Assistant that analyzes a sales operation to uncover ways to improve.

With everything Pipedrive offers, it’s considered the best lead management software. Users get a complete overview of contact data, files, prior communications, and activity history of leads. They can also easily send and receive lead emails and schedule appointments using the built-in meeting and video conferencing scheduler. To top it off, Pipedrive comes with data duplication detection, merge, and a leads inbox that pools all lead information into one place.

As a free plan is an essential attribute for smaller companies, note that Pipedrive does not offer a free-forever option. Luckily, alternatives like Bitrix24, HubSpot, and Freshsales all have free plans for basic sales and marketing features. Each of those free plans supports an unlimited number of users. Check out our picks for the best free CRM systems to find the best solution at no cost.

Bitrix24 stands out as more than a CRM system for sales and marketing. It also stands out as a robust solution to overseeing HR, customer support, inventory, client management, and ecommerce activity. The platform offers a free plan for unlimited users, which comes with internal chat functions, document storage, tasks, and unlimited deals and contacts management. Users can also create a product catalog, which makes it easy to track products or services and add them to quotes or invoices.

Small companies that engage in project-based services, such as trade contractors, business consultants, content producers, and software developers, get plenty of value from Bitrix24. On its free plan is a project management module in which you can create, assign, monitor, and collaborate on work projects, all in the CRM tool. It offers numerous views, including Kanban, list, and Gantt charts, and gives users the option to store project templates for recurring workflows.

Likely due to its broad capabilities, Bitrix24 has so many modules that it can become overwhelming and tricky to navigate. Additionally, some of the features are difficult to operate, especially for new users with limited technical skills. Really Simple Systems, Freshsales, and HubSpot are excellent alternatives for sales teams needing an easy-to-use platform.

As the name suggests, Really Simple Systems is intuitive, particularly when operating the sales tools and customizing the system. Sales functionality includes contact management, which can be tailored for data storage, timelines, and one-page views on leads, customers, and even vendors. There are also solid pipeline management features with forecasting based on deal-closing probabilities. Additionally, users can store product line data, create quotes, and manage tasks from the platform.

Another great aspect of Really Simple Systems is the pricing. Small and startup businesses can access most of the sales features for free, then upgrade to the paid plans and marketing and service desk add-ons as their business grows. The free plan also offers robust system customization for data fields, tables, lists, dashboards, pages, and reports.

Really Simple Systems has two primary issues. One is that marketing and customer support require paid add-ons. The other is how restricted the automation features are—not allowing automation scheduling or conditional logic until the Enterprise plan, and only up to 20 total automations on the Professional plan.

Zoho CRM is an alternative that addresses both of these challenges. It includes case management and marketing campaign features within the CRM and robust automation tools on the Standard plan for $14 per user, per month.

Close is a sales-specialized platform that comes with lead, contact, and opportunity management, as well as task tracking tools. Users can manage all stages of the sales pipeline and incorporate custom activities, which record events or actions specific to their sales process, such as calling a lead or taking a prospect out to lunch. This CRM solution also offers email tools for sending direct or bulk emails. Those campaigns can be automated, scheduled, and tracked for opens and response rates.

Based on its standout features, Close has a specialized use case for small operations. Its calling and short message service (SMS) texting features make it an excellent CRM for call center operations or teams that engage leads through the phone.

Through integration with voice-over-internet-protocol (VoIP) phone provider Twilio, teams can place and receive phone calls, forward them to other reps, and record conversations. It also streamlines activities with sequences that automatically assign call tasks to reps and a power dialer for hands-free dialing down a call list.

Close does not have a free plan, and the paid plans start at a relatively expensive price—not ideal for smaller teams. HubSpot offers the best free CRM option for small businesses looking for a no-risk, no-cost option.

Salesforce Essentials is the CRM plan specifically built for small teams to manage sales and customer support operations—making it cost less per user than the Professional sales or service cloud plans. Because of Salesforce’s stronghold on the CRM market, the platform offers more CRM integrations than any other product on this list.

The Essentials plan comes with account, lead, contact, and opportunity management and features for direct and mass email campaigns. Plus, the robust mobile app has nearly equivalent functionality to the web app.

Where Salesforce Essentials stands out is its customer support management. It has modules for receiving, organizing, assigning, and resolving customer cases to handle complaints or inquiries. Users can store resources, such as articles, guides, or FAQ pages, in the CRM to use when assisting customers. Any business that requires solid service quality for customer retention, such as small insurance agencies, financial advisers, healthcare, or retail businesses, finds plenty of value from the case modules.

Salesforce Essentials is both a CRM product and a particular plan within the Salesforce sales or service clouds. However, it doesn’t offer some of the advanced features that help sales reps streamline their sales operations, such as workflow automation, quote and contract management, or lead scoring, without an add-on or upgrade. Zoho CRM is the best alternative for these kinds of capabilities—all included on the free plan or paid options for no more than $40 per user, per month.