Okay, time to come clean. How many of you still use excel to organize your buyer and seller leads? Don’t worry, the very fact that you’re reading an article ranking the best free real estate CRM means that you’re willing to admit you have a problem. You’re taking the first step.
Sure, you can still use Excel if you want. But it’s 2017. We have electric cars and a reality TV star as president now so it should come as no surprise that there are dozens of free real estate CRM options out there. A few will make you 10x more efficient at building and maintaining the relationships you need to grow your business organically. To make your life easier, we ranked 5 of the best free real estate CRM on the 10 criteria that matter most to busy real estate agents. We also included customer reviews from our readers and around the web.
Before we dive into the details on each free real estate CRM, here’s a quick breakdown of what they offer Realtors:
Best Free Real Estate CRM Comparison Table
| Best for | Pricing | |
|---|---|---|
| HubSpot CRM + Sales Tool | Best overall free real estate CRM + sales tool | Free - $50 per month |
| Insightly | Lightweight CRM with project management features | Free - $99 per month |
| Bitrix24 | Great free CRM with tons of features | Free - $199 per month |
| Zoho CRM | Free real estate CRM that works with other Zoho products | Free - $100 per month |
| Agile CRM | Great free CRM, but limited functionality for Realtors | Free - $47.99 per month |
Best Free Real Estate CRM for 2017: 5 Options for Exponential Growth
HubSpot Screenshot
1. HubSpot CRM: Free CRM Leader Offers Compelling Features for Realtors
Cost: Free
Number of users: Unlimited
Number of contacts: Unlimited
Capture leads from: Webforms,Gmail, Outlook
Call/text/email logging: Calls and emails
Lead/Deal pipelines: Yes
Email Marketing: Yes. Email templates (5 templates), track open/CTR, (up to 200 per month), email scheduling
Ease of Use/Interface: Easy
Custom fields/custom pipeline stages: Yes
Unique Features: Automatically populates contact info from 20 million businesses.
Hubspot User Reviews: ★★★★✰ Click here for all Hubspot user reviews
One of the original software companies to offer a free CRM, Hubspot is used daily by millions of sales professionals to organize contacts and keep track of outreach efforts.
On the positive side you do get unlimited users and can add an unlimited number of contacts to the CRM. A nice feature, but unless you’re running a large team, probably not something you’re going to need from a real estate CRM, even a free one.
You can also create custom sales pipeline, automatically log calls and emails from the CRM, and take advantage of basic email marketing features. Since Hubspot is so widely used in other industries, they even auto populate contact info from more than 20 million professionals in the United States. That means if you only say, get a name and email, Hubspot might fill in their office line for you.
What’s Missing
There are very few things that you’d want from a free real estate CRM that Hubspot doesn’t offer. You can quickly and easily create custom fields for contacts and create custom pipeline stages. The interface is clean and easy to use, and since Hubspot is so widely used, there is a ton of documentation and help articles online.
Insightly Screenshot
2. Insightly CRM: Enough Insight for Your Real Estate Business
Price: Free
Number of users: 2
Number of contacts: 2500
Capture leads from: Webforms,Gmail, Outlook
Call/text/email logging: No
Sales/Deal pipelines: Yes
Email Marketing: 5 user created email templates + 10 mass emails per day
Ease of Use/Interface: Moderate, Interface is a bit finicky
Custom fields: Yes (limited to 2 per record type)
Unique Features: Quickbooks integration, Xero integration
Insightly User Reviews: ★★★★✰ Click here for all Insightly reviews
If you’re an individual agent just looking for a simple, lightweight, easy to use CRM, then you could do worse than choosing Insightly. Insightly’s free version offers lead capture from webforms, contact management, Gmail and Outlook, the ability to create custom sales pipelines, custom fields for contacts (e.g. buyer lead or seller lead), as well the ability to create up to 5 email templates and send 10 mass emails per day.
Full disclosure, we actually use Insightly here at Fit Small Business to manage contacts and manage SEO and writing projects. While it may not have some of the bells and whistles some of the other free CRM options have, it gets the job done.
What’s Missing
The only real drawbacks to Insightly for real estate agents is the fact that their free version only supports 2 users and 2500 contacts, and doesn’t offer automatic call, email, or text tracking so you can keep track of your outreach efforts to your leads. Some may find the interface a little bit finicky as well. For example, you can drag and drop a contact through pipeline/deal stages in Hubspot, but in Insightly you need to click on several menus to change stages. Not the end of the world, but annoying if you’re dealing with a large number of contacts.
Bitrix24 Screenshot
3. Bitrix24: Feature Packed Free Real Estate CRM
Price: free
Number of users: 12
Number of contacts: Unlimited
Capture leads from: Webforms,Gmail, Outlook
Call/text/email logging: Call and email logging only
Sales pipelines: Yes
Email Marketing: Yes
Ease of Use/Interface: Moderate, interface is a bit cluttered
Custom fields/custom pipeline stages: Yes
Unique Features: Business card scanner (12 per mo), Live Chat, can record up to 100 phone calls per month, 30 days free customer support
Bitrix24 User Reviews: ★★★★✰ Click here for all Bitrix24 user reviews
With over three and a half million users worldwide, Bitrix24 is a powerful and feature rich free CRM that offers some very useful tools for busy real estate agents. Right out of the box, you can add 12 users and an unlimited number of contacts. If you’re running a new team, boutique brokerage, or want to loop in vendors and subcontractors into your workflow, then Bitrix24 is a great choice.
Bitrix24 also offers call and email logging in their free version, which means you can call or email your lead from the app and have it automatically added to their record. You also get email marketing features, custom fields for contacts and custom pipeline stages, and a free business card scanner and live chat ability for your website.
What’s Missing
One thing that we’d like to see from Bitrix24 in the future is better Zillow integration using Zapier. We also found the interface a bit overwhelming at first, but this is largely due to the large amount of features they offer.
Zoho Screenshot
4. ZOHO CRM: Free Office Tools Make ZOHO Competitive for Real Estate Teams
Cost: Free
Number of users: Up to 10 Users
Number of contacts: 5,000
Capture leads from: Webforms,Gmail, Outlook
Call/text/email logging: No
Sales/Deal pipelines: No
Email Marketing: 10 email templates, No mass email or drip campaigns
Ease of Use/Interface: Moderate
Custom fields/custom pipeline stages: Yes
Unique Features: None
ZOHO CRM User Reviews: ★★★✰✰ Click here for all ZOHO CRM user reviews
Zoho allows Realtors to create custom fields for leads as well as custom pipeline stages to follow the deal from initial contact to closing.
What’s Missing
While ZOHO can accommodate up to ten users and a respectable 5,000 contacts, other free CRM we tested offer more. We also found Zoho a little bit confusing to work with. For example, we found it much easier to create custom fields for contacts and create custom deal/pipeline stage in Hubspot. After twenty minutes digging through menus in Zoho, we still couldn’t set up a custom sales pipeline or deal stages.
That said, we named ZOHO our number one pick for the best free small business CRM for small businesses. We just didn’t feel it offered enough features or ease of use to get our top spot for Realtors.
Agile CRM Screenshot
5. Agile CRM: Free But Limited Functionality
Price: Free
Number of users: 10
Number of contacts: 1,000
Capture leads from: Webforms,Gmail, Outlook
Call/text/email logging: No
Custom Sales pipelines: No
Email Marketing: Yes Email templates
Ease of Use/Interface: Easy, interface was intuitive and easy to use
Custom fields/Pipeline stages: No
Unique Features: Lead Scoring, unconfirmed: appointment sharing (share calendar online), landing page builder, document signing.
While Agile CRM offers a lot for salespeople, unfortunately their free version is not great for Realtors. Like ZOHO, they don’t allow you to create custom fields for contacts, or custom pipeline stages for deals. Instead, you only get the option to choose “New, prospect, proposal, and won”. You can add tags to contacts and sort your view that way, but a custom field at the very least to sort buyer and seller leads would be nice.
They also seem to offer a landing page builder, but it was unclear from our account how to access it, and Agile did not respond to requests for confirmation. They also claim to offer custom milestones for deal pipeline, but again, we were unable to figure out how to create them and Agile did not respond to our repeated inquiries.
One thing we loved about Agile was the user interface. It was clean, spare, and fairly intuitive to get up and running. A shame they won’t clarify what you’re getting in the free version though.
How to Use Zapier to Connect Leads from Zillow to Your Free Real Estate CRM
Just because you’re using a free real estate CRM doesn’t mean that you’re stuck in the office doing data entry for all your leads. Even though none of the free real estate CRM’s we tested offer direct Zillow integration, you can use a handy app called Zapier to automatically send leads from Zillow into your CRM.
Hubspot, Insightly, Agile, and Zoho offer direct integration with Zillow using Zapier. That means you can set up a trigger using Zapier that will send your new leads from Zillow right to your CRM. Bitrix24 on the other hand, doesn’t yet have an integration with Zapier.
Taking the Next Step: Upgrading to a Purpose Built Real Estate CRM Like Contactually
While all the free CRM in this article will work better than Excel, at some point you’re going to want to take the next step and upgrade to a more powerful CRM. For agents, brokers, and team leaders, we recommend Contactually. They’re one of the only real estate CRM that focuses on relationship marketing, which is the key to building referrals, which is by far the best way to grow your business exponentially.
To learn more about full featured CRM, check out our in-depth buyer’s guide comparison between Contactually, Top Producer, and REthink here.
Start Building Better Relationships with Contactually
Bottom Line: Best Free Real Estate CRM
The best software advice I’ve heard is that the “best” CRM is the one you actually use. Yes, you will have more purpose built features from a CRM like Contactually, but a free real estate CRM like Bitrix24, Insightly, Zoho, Hubspot, or Agile, is better than excel.
Nate White
Thank’s for the post. Bitrix24 is a real gem, never seen a free CRM that powerful.
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Hey Nate,
Bitrix does have a ton of features considering it’s free. That said, their interface can be a bit too complicated for some users. I always say that the “best” CRM is the one you actually use! A very simple system might actually work better if you can get your agents to actually use it regularly. If you’re working on your own, then whatever works best for your own work flow is the way to go. Fighting your technology means that you’re less likely to take full advantage of it.
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