6 Best Free CRM Software for Small Business for 2022
Jess served on the founding team of a successful B2B startup and has used a wide range of sales and marketing tools over the course of her 15-year career. She uses her industry knowledge to deliver the best answers to your questions about sales tools and sales management.
Jill is a writer at Fit Small Business specializing on Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software.
This article is part of a larger series on CRM.
Free customer relationship management (CRM) software provides small businesses with basic tools for streamlining sales processes as you start and grow your business. Some of the best free CRMs include contact and lead management, sales pipeline monitoring, email marketing tools, reporting, and chatbots. We compared the free plans of a dozen platforms to determine the best free CRMs and their best use cases.
- HubSpot CRM: Best overall free CRM for contact management and lead generation
- Freshsales: Best free CRM for teams wanting built-in dialing and extensive customer support
- Zoho CRM: Great choice for businesses wanting a free CRM with team collaboration tools
- Bitrix24: Solid option for users looking for a system that can manage an unlimited number of deals
- Agile CRM: Ideal for customer service teams needing free ticket management and lead scoring tools
- Apptivo: Great option for solopreneurs wanting to automate basic sales tasks
While all of these options have their benefits, their free plans are typically limited to a specific number of users or lack their more robust functionalities for engaging with prospects, nurturing customer relationships, or tracking closed deals. This is why we also discuss reasons why you might want to eventually upgrade to a paid plan in our closer look at the best free CRM systems.
Best Free CRMs Compared
Provider | Free Plan | Free Trial for Paid Plans | Starting Price for Paid Plans* | Help & Support |
|---|---|---|---|---|
 | Yes (unlimited users) | 14 days | $45 per month, includes 2 users | Email, chat, and phone (7 a.m. to 8 p.m. Eastern Time, Mon-Fri) |
 | Yes (unlimited users) | 21 days | $15 per user, per month | 24/5 email, live chat, and phone support |
 | Yes (up to 3 users) | 15 days | $14 per user, per month | 24/7 email, 24/5 phone and live chat |
 | Yes (unlimited users) | 30 days | $39 per month (up to 5 users) | Live chat and email (8 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Coordinated Universal Time) |
 | Yes (up to 10 users) | N/A | $9.99 per user, per month | 24/5 email support; phone support for paid plans |
 | Yes (1 user) | 30 days | $8 per user, per month | 24/7 email and live chat; 24/5 phone support |
*Based on annual billing.
It can be difficult to transition from one CRM platform to another as your team grows or your processes expand. Implementation of a new platform often involves extensive training and may also require customization or manual data entry. This is why you should also check out our guide on the best CRMs for small businesses to find additional options with low-cost entry-level plans that are designed to grow with you. You can also take our quiz to find out which free CRM is the best fit to help grow your business.
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HubSpot CRM: Best Overall Free CRM With Sales, Marketing & Service Tools
HubSpot CRM
Overall Score: 4.04
OUT OF 5
What We Like
- Unlimited user allocation
- Has email marketing tools like email blasts, email health tracking, and list segmentation
- Offers live chat and basic bots
What's Missing
- Customer support on the free plan is limited to community support
- No workflow automation in the free plan
Pricing Summary*
- Free: Unlimited user allocation
- Starter Sales Plan: $45 per month for 2 paid users
- Professional Sales Plan: $450 per month for 5 paid users
- Enterprise Sales Plan: $1,200 per month for 10 paid users
- Free trial: 14 days
*Based on annual billing. Monthly subscriptions are also available at higher rates.
HubSpot CRM offers a robust set of sales, marketing, and service features not usually found in similar free CRM solutions. These include unlimited users, 1 million contacts, live chat and chatbots, landing pages, and customizable dashboards. You can also call prospects directly from the in-app phone, send bulk emails, and generate productivity reports.
However, HubSpot CRM doesn’t have workflow automation functionality in its free plan, unlike Zoho CRM. Its customer service is also limited to community support and self-help resources, unlike Freshsales, which offers 24/5 support through live chat, email, and phone.
HubSpot CRM Free Features
HubSpot CRM offers a wide range of sales, marketing, and service tools to help users grow and nurture customer relationships. Check out some of its free standout features below:
- Contact management: Provides an overview of your communication history with your contacts and leads. It also logs sales activities like active deals and customer service tickets.
- Landing pages: Create landing pages to help convert leads to customers with HubSpot CRM’s drag-and-drop editor.
- Live chat and chatbot: Live chat function is accessible via the desktop and mobile app so you can communicate with your website visitors anywhere. You can also set up a chatbot to answer customer queries outside business hours.
- Mobile app: Access customer data on the go, as well as helpful features like business card scanning, email, and caller ID.
Saves and logs all pertinent lead and contact information inside the CRM, including personal details and activity history. (Source: HubSpot CRM)
Create professional-looking landing pages that help you capture your leads’ contact details. (Source: HubSpot CRM)
Ensure your customers can always reach you through live chat or chatbot. Chatbots can capture contact information during offline hours. (Source: HubSpot CRM)
Why You Might Want to Upgrade
HubSpot CRM offers a robust set of CRM tools. However, it puts a cap on several features like quotes, calling hours, documents, reporting dashboards, and pipelines. Its limited capabilities may not be sufficient once your business starts scaling up.
HubSpot offers paid solutions that give you access to additional features in sales, marketing, and service areas. For sales, these include lead scoring, sales forecasting, and analytics. For marketing, these include content strategy, search engine optimization (SEO) optimization, and omnichannel marketing. For service, these include ticket routing, knowledge base, and customer surveys.
Check out our HubSpot CRM review to discover if it suits your business needs.
Freshsales: Best Free CRM for Telesales
Freshsales
Overall Score: 4.02
OUT OF 5
What We Like
- Supports an unlimited number of users
- Built-in phone is included in the free plan
- 24/5 customer support through phone, email, and chat
What's Missing
- Free plan does not allow document management and file attachments
- No free reporting tools
Pricing Summary*
- Free Plan: Supports unlimited users
- Growth: $15 per user, per month
- Pro: $39 per user, per month
- Enterprise: $69 per user, per month
- Free trial: 21 days
*Based on annual billing. Monthly subscriptions are also available at higher rates.
Freshsales offers an intuitive interface that is easy to learn and use, and has no user cap. It helps you streamline your sales processes with its tools for managing contacts, accounts, deals, and activities. It also adds an in-app dialer, which enables more efficient telesales, as well as a chat widget and website integration to its list of free features.
Another remarkable feature is its 24/5 support via phone, live chat, and email—even on the free plan. It is rare for a free CRM plan to include these three support channels, especially having 24-hour access to customer service. Most providers only offer self-help resources and community support in the free plan.
However, Freshsales’ free plan lacks workflow automation and file attachment capabilities, which Zoho CRM offers. Aside from that, its free plan doesn’t include customer list segmentation and reporting tools, which you can get from Agile CRM.
Freshsales Free Features
Freshsales is an easy-to-use CRM that provides extensive tools to directly engage prospects, close more deals, and monitor sales growth. Check out some of our favorite free features from the platform:
- Contact and account management: Create and manage a list of qualified contacts and get complete context about them with 360-degree profile views. You can also create tasks, appointments, and notes for each.
- Activity timeline: Get a chronological view of all customer engagements, including email activities, subscriptions, page views, form actions, and filter contacts based on them.
- In-app phone: Make calls directly from your CRM dashboard using local or toll-free numbers. You can receive notifications for inbound calls and get to see your caller’s name, company, and phone number.
- Customer support tools: Offers tools such as a live chat widget and team inbox, making it easier for users to monitor customer inquiries.
Users can monitor the progress of all their lead outreach in their deal management dashboard. (Source: Freshsales)
Its activity timeline provides users with a detailed historical background on lead activities. (Source: Freshsales)
It also allows users to make calls straight from their CRM dashboard. (Source: Freshsales)
Why You Might Want to Upgrade
Freshsales’ free plan offers limited capabilities for sales activity management, customization, pipeline management, and calling. Upgrading to higher tiers gives you access to more features, such as visual and multiple sales pipelines, identification of inactive deals, sales forecasting, and predictive contact scoring.
Learn more about what this software can do for your business in our comprehensive Freshsales review.
Zoho CRM: Best Free CRM for Team Collaboration
Zoho CRM
Overall Score: 4.01
OUT OF 5
What We Like
- Extensive team collaboration tools like follow-ups and file sharing
- Offers workflow automation tools
- Customizable CRM interface
What's Missing
- Free version is limited to 3 users
- No third-party integrations
Pricing Summary*
- Free plan: Up to 3 users
- Standard: $14 per user, per month
- Professional: $23 per user, per month
- Enterprise: $40 per user, per month
- Ultimate: $52 per user, per month
- Free trial: 15 days
*Based on annual billing. Monthly subscriptions are also available at higher rates.
Zoho CRM offers free, simple automation features that provide users with basic customization options. This enables you to set workflow automation triggers to follow through with tasks and accounts accordingly. The platform also offers collaboration tools like team messaging, follow-up rules, status updates, and file sharing to improve sales team productivity. You can also get access to customer support via email during business hours.
While Zoho CRM is a good starting point for small businesses because it supports up to three users, other providers allow more users. Aside from that, it doesn’t allow for any third-party integrations. Try HubSpot CRM or Bitrix24 if you want a free CRM that supports an unlimited number of users and third-party app integrations.
Zoho CRM Free Features
Apart from its team collaboration and basic reporting features, Zoho CRM provides easy-to-use tools to manage leads, monitor deals, and track sales growth. Below are some of the standout features in its free plan:
- Task management and reminders: Shows all your upcoming tasks, like following up with a lead, sending an email, meeting with your team, and moving a deal in the pipeline.
- Lead management: Monitor updates related to all active leads and identify those who need follow-ups. Communicate with leads using phone or email.
- Email marketing: Access a library with predesigned email templates. Manually send emails to contacts with an option to opt out. (Free plan doesn’t allow bulk email sending.)
- Document library management: Access and share files with your team using tools like folder sharing and document attachments with 1GB storage allocation.
Pipeline for lead management is laid out in a Kanban board, enabling users to follow through with their lead management tasks easily. (Source: Zoho CRM)
Free plan subscribers can access a template library with 10 designs and draft marketing emails they can manually share with their contacts. (Source: Zoho CRM)
Users are allowed to upload a maximum of 1GB per account. (Source: Zoho CRM)
Why You Might Want to Upgrade
Zoho CRM’s paid plans offer a wider range of features that include sales forecasting, multiple pipelines, and custom reports. Other essential functionalities included in the paid plans are social data enrichment and management, marketing campaigns, and inventory management. Higher-pricing tiers also provide you with access to its AI-powered sales assistant, Zia, who can pull up any information you need from the system instantly.
To learn more about its features and functionalities, read our Zoho CRM review.
Bitrix24: Best Free CRM for Pipeline & Deal Management
Bitrix24
Overall Score: 3.44
OUT OF 5
What We Like
- Unlimited users, leads, and contacts
- Offers up to 5GB storage
- Extensive project management tools
What's Missing
- Free plan has no reporting tools
- Limited customer support for free plan users
Pricing Summary*
- Free: Basic features for unlimited users
- Basic: $39 per month for up to 5 users
- Standard: $79 per month for up to 50 users
- Professional: $159 per month for unlimited users
- Free trial for paid plans: 30 days
*Based on annual billing. Monthly subscriptions are also available at higher rates.
Bitrix24 is a free CRM that provides unlimited user allocation—giving all team members sufficient access to your CRM data. It also offers unlimited deals, and there’s no cap on contacts in the customer database, making it a great option for teams managing a high volume of active deals. It lets users manage their projects and tasks using a Kanban-style board with an allocation for one pipeline.
Despite its unlimited capacity for contacts and tasks, Bitrix24 lacks lead management features, an in-app caller, and reporting tools in its free plan. If you need lead management and reporting features, try Zoho CRM. For a free CRM with telephony and document management capabilities, we recommend HubSpot CRM.
Bitrix24 Free Features
Bitrix24 provides free basic sales tools that help users manage contacts and deals in a centralized dashboard. Some of its best free features include:
- Data migration: Import CRM data (CSV file) from other CRMs and migrate contact information from external sources like Gmail, Outlook, and Yahoo! Mail.
- Live chat: Communicate using a live chat widget with customers visiting your website in real time. This also allows you to capture contact information such as name and email.
- Telegram, Instagram, and Facebook Messenger integration: Engage directly with your customers in select social media channels from your dashboard.
- Task and project management: Manage unlimited tasks and projects, including subtasks, reminders and notifications, as well as checklists.
Why You Might Want to Upgrade
Upgrading to a paid Bitrix24 subscription gives you access to a vast set of tools for lead generation, reporting, document creation, and team collaboration. Higher tiers also include advanced analytics, workflows, marketing automation, and payment processing. Moreover, you get more allocation for online storage, custom sales pipelines, and emails sent per month.
To learn more about what it can do for your business, read our in-depth Bitrix24 review.
Agile CRM: Best Free CRM for Customer Service Teams
Agile CRM
Overall Score: 3.30
OUT OF 5
What We Like
- Extensive customer support tools like a help desk, canned responses, and reports
- Unlimited deals, tasks, and documents
- Includes lead scoring in the free plan
What's Missing
- Free plan is limited to 1 third-party software integration only
- Has a cap of 10 users in the free plan
Pricing Summary*
- Free: Supports up to 10 users
- Starter: $9.99 per user, per month
- Regular: $39.99 per user, per month
- Enterprise: $64.99 per user, per month
*Based on annual billing. Monthly subscriptions are also available at slightly higher rates.
Agile CRM offers users a range of free customer service tools, including help desk functionality, that enable users to manage tickets, automate customer service workflows, and associate them with relevant contacts. It provides users with canned responses, customer service activity records, and CRM reports that show the overall customer service activities in a month, including the total number of active and resolved queries.
Another standout feature of Agile CRM is its lead scoring functionality, as it is rare for this feature to be included in a free plan. Its lead scoring tool awards points to leads for certain actions taken in conjunction with your company, including opening and clicking emails, visiting important web pages, or completing a sales lead form to download high-value content.
A couple of setbacks of Agile CRM’s free plan are its 10-user limit and 1,000-cap on saved contacts and companies. It also allows only one third-party integration, limiting your options to extend its capabilities. HubSpot CRM, on the other hand, enables you to integrate it with other apps from its Marketplace, supports an unlimited number of users, and can store up to a million contacts and companies.
Agile CRM Free Features
Agile CRM offers lead and contact management features for free, as well as helpful tools like email marketing and deal milestones. Below are some of the features we like most from the system that users can access for free:
- Customer deal milestone: Alerts users when a lead moves to certain stages, such as new, prospect, proposal, and won and lost stages, so agents have an overall view of their lead pipeline health.
- Email campaigns: Provides users with essential tools like templates, email tracking, contact-level analytics, and web engagement tools.
- Landing page builder: Build professional-looking landings pages that capture essential customer information, including name, email, and other contact information, to build your customer database.
- Web-to-lead: Capture leads visiting your website through forms and automatically record them as potential leads.
Users are alerted whenever their leads reach an important milestone, such as won and lost deals. (Source: Agile CRM)
Apart from a lead’s professional profile, quality is assessed based on the level of engagement and historical investments in your business. (Source: Agile CRM)
Users can choose ready-made landing page templates from Agile CRM’s library. (Source: Agile CRM)
Why You Might Want to Upgrade
Agile CRM’s paid plans include more extensive sales, marketing, and customer service tools like in-app calling, marketing automation, social monitoring, and a knowledge base. Aside from that, they have higher limits on campaign workflows, automation rules, and third-party integrations.
Check out our in-depth Agile CRM review to explore this platform’s rich feature set and use-case scenarios.
Apptivo: Best Free CRM for Task Automation
Apptivo
Overall Score: 3.20
OUT OF 5
What We Like
- Basic sales automation function, including lead and contact management
- 500MB storage allocation
- Includes email support
What's Missing
- Free plan does not allow third-party integrations
- Only 1 user allocation for the free plan
Pricing Summary*
- Starter: $0; supports 1 user
- Lite: $8 per user, per month
- Premium: $12 per user, per month
- Ultimate: $20 per user, per month
- Enterprise: Contact sales for pricing
- Free trial of paid plans: 30 days
*Based on annual billing. Monthly subscriptions are also available at higher rates.
Apptivo’s free cloud-based CRM system offers access to basic sales automation features, including lead list and contact management, as well as notes, tasks, and appointment management. It provides tools to manage data, including a 500MB storage allocation to store files in the system, as well as data backup. It also offers free plan users with customer support via email.
The downsides of Apptivo’s free plan include its one-user limit and lack of workflow automation, deal management features, and third-party integrations. As an alternative, you can subscribe to Freshsales, which has no user cap and offers basic deal management features. For a free solution that allows third-party integrations and unlimited users, try HubSpot CRM.
Apptivo Free Features
Apptivo offers a range of tools to help users sell and market their business efficiently. Below are some of our favorite free features:
- Task management: Create tasks under an opportunity or project, so no step is missed and follow-up actions are completed on time.
- Lead management: Track the progress of all active leads and identify those who need follow-ups; communicate to leads using phone, email, and social media.
- Reports: Generate performance reports on lead outreach and sales performance to have an overall view of the health of your business.
Why You Might Want to Upgrade
Apptivo’s free plan offers only the most basic contact management capabilities and does not include access to its mobile app. Upgrading to a paid plan gives you access to more features like deal management, lead generation, workflow automation, email marketing tools, and reporting.
To learn more about its capabilities and best-for scenarios, read our Apptivo review.
How We Evaluated the Best Free CRM Software
The best free CRM software makes it easy for businesses to nurture customer relationships by organizing contact databases, deals and opportunities, customer communications, and tasks. They should also be customizable and provide access to customer support.
We chose HubSpot CRM as the best overall free CRM. It offers extensive tools not only for sales, but marketing and service as well—making it a well-rounded tool to manage the different aspects of your customer relationships. It also offers an unlimited user allocation, virtually unlimited allocation for contacts (up to 1 million), and credits for free calls.
The tabs below offer more insight into our evaluation process for selecting the best free CRM:
40%
Pricing
20%
General Features
15%
Ease of Use
15%
Support
10%
Expert Score
40% of Overall Score
While we’re primarily looking for CRM solutions that offer a free plan with unlimited users, we also factored in the cost of upgrading to a paid subscription. We considered the pricing of plans, CRM customizations, onboarding, and maintenance fees.
20% of Overall Score
We evaluated the availability of essential CRM features that many small business owners are looking for, which these providers offer for free. They typically prefer a solution with reporting and analytics tools, customizable pipelines, third-party integrations, and mobile app access.
15% of Overall Score
The best free CRM solutions for small businesses do not require technical skills to understand and use. Moreover, they should have an intuitive interface. Each solution in this list was evaluated on how easy it is to set up and operate as well as to integrate with other apps.
15% of Overall Score
We assessed the solutions to see the quality of help and support they offer to their users. Small business owners favor CRMs with 24/7 customer service, but most free solutions provide access only to self-help resources. Some include customer support via phone, live chat, and email during business hours.
10% of Overall Score
We checked customer reviews on reputable sites to learn how satisfied their customers are. We also noted common issues that the users had. Apart from reviews, we weighed the features that stood out, their value for money, and their popularity to narrow down the best free CRM recommendations.
*Percentages of overall score
