7 Best Personal CRM Software for Single Users in 2023
This article is part of a larger series on CRM.
Personal customer relationship management (CRM) software helps users, often solo-operated businesses, develop strong relationships with their leads, referral partners, and customers. They come at an affordable price and offer features for a personalized business relationship, like communication tools, keep-in-touch tracking, activity monitoring, record notes, relationship linking, and appointment scheduling.
Based on our evaluation, the seven best personal CRM software products include:
- Best for contact management: HubSpot Sales Hub
- Great CRM for engaging on all channels: Freshsales
- Best CRM for single users who need to keep profiles enriched: Zoho CRM
- Excellent tool with custom relationship-linking features: ClickUp
- Solid specialty CRM for managing personal relationships: UpHabit
- Best for revenue operations: EngageBay
- Simplest CRM option: monday Sales CRM
Best Personal CRM Software Compared
Provider | Starting Monthly Price per User* | Free Plan | Our CRM Rating Out of 5 |
|---|---|---|---|
 | $18 (up to two users) | ✓ | 4.75 |
 | $15 | ✓ | 4.48 |
 | $14 | ✓ | 4.48 |
 | $5 | ✓ | 4.46 |
 | $119.99 per year | ✓ | 4.44 |
 | $13.79 | ✓ | 4.42 |
 | $10 | ✕ | 4.15 |
*Unless otherwise indicated, pricing is based on annual billing per user. Monthly billing is also available for slightly higher rates.
Pro tip: Is your sales operation scaling and needs new tools to manage leads and customers? Check out our guide on the best CRM for small businesses, which evaluates various providers based on affordability, user experience, and features relevant to growing teams.
HubSpot Sales Hub: Best for Contact Management
Overall Score:
4.75 / 5
Pros
- Free plan includes 1,000,000 stored contacts to track and organize customers, partners, and leads
- Personal features for emailing, calling, monitoring, and scheduling appointments with customers
- Highly intuitive CRM for individuals needing easy-to-use tools to build customer relationships
Cons
- Paid plans get expensive on the higher tiers
- Email sequences for auto-deploying emails require Professional plan
- Video messaging to leads or customers gets expensive
- You need to store a lot of contact records for free: HubSpot Sales Hub offers one of the most robust free CRM systems available. It’s highly useful if you need to manage a lot of contact records of customers, leads, and referral partners, as its data capacity allows up to 1,000,000 stored records. From there, you can send email campaigns, schedule meetings, and track activities to enhance personal relationships for free.
- You want a CRM that’s easy to operate: If you prioritize the “people” side of the business but don’t have much experience with a CRM system, HubSpot Sales Hub is a great product option. It’s widely considered a simple CRM with a modern interface design and simple navigation system without a steep learning curve. Additionally, operating each of the sales tools comes naturally to most users as the system guides you on how to use each feature while you’re accessing them.
- You need more affordable sales sequences tools: HubSpot’s higher-tiered plans are expensive compared to other products. Additionally, deploying sequences, which can be used to send automated email follow-ups to customers and partners periodically, isn’t available until the Professional plan for $450 per month.
- Alternative: EngageBay offers automated sales email sequences starting on its Free plan.
- You want free tools for keep-in-touch queues: Recurring and automated task queues allow users to have tasks created for them periodically. These tools are especially useful in scheduling keep-in-touch tasks or acknowledging customer birthdays to maintain a strong relationship. However, this capability is not included in HubSpot’s free plan.
- Alternative: UpHabit is a specialty personal contact manager software that lets individuals manage keep-in-touch activity for free.
HubSpot CRM Monthly Pricing Plans*
*Pricing is based on annual billing on a per-month breakdown. Monthly billing is available for a higher cost. Each plan offers a 14-day free trial. Pricing reflects pricing info available at the time of publishing. While we update pricing information regularly, we encourage our readers to check current pricing here.
**Pricing uses the monthly Sales Hub costs for individuals and small teams. The provider also offers Enterprise-level products for larger sales teams and the CRM Suite, which includes sales, marketing, customer service, content management system (CMS), and operations software in one product for a higher price.
HubSpot creating new contact (Source: HubSpot)
Our Expert Opinion
HubSpot is a great personal CRM if you’re a solopreneur, salesperson, or business development rep who needs plenty of data storage. Its massive capacity for records lets you manage vital contact data and track activity at a high volume. Plus, the contact management features are intuitive to new users and are available starting on the Free plan to ensure you understand and keep in touch with leads, customers, and colleagues.
Freshsales: Best for Omnichannel Engagement
Overall Score:
4.48 / 5
Pros
- Users can build relationships through phone, email, chat, text, and third-party messaging tools
- Robust free plan that lets individuals manage contacts, track activity, monitor accounts, and engage contacts on phone or live chat
- Automated sequences are available on the Growth plan, which is free for three users
Cons
- Automated profile enrichment gets expensive
- No record linking or hierarchy tracking in contacts for monitoring family relationships or connections to other leads
- Relatively expensive contact and account assignment tools
- You want to leverage various channels to engage customers: Freshsales is the best CRM for individual sales users who want to utilize omnichannel engagement to build personal relationships. The free plan includes a built-in phone and live chat system. Users can also upgrade to the Growth plan for email, text, chatbot, and integrated channels like Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp to stay in touch with customers and partners.
- You need solid account management features: Individuals who run account-based businesses and are highly reliant on strong relationships, such as insurance agencies or financial advisers, can get tons of value from Freshsales. It’s a top pick for the best account management software as it has a dedicated accounts module, meeting scheduler, activity tracking, and a phone system.
- You need affordable enrichment tools: Automated profile enrichment is useful in a CRM as it keeps contact and customer data up to date automatically using online information. Unfortunately, this capability requires the Enterprise plan for $69 per user, per month.
- Alternative: While typically an advanced feature that’s expensive for most CRMs, Zoho CRM can offer data enrichment for just $40 per user, per month.
- You need relationship linking capabilities: While you can store contacts in Freshsales, there are no granular features for linking records to one another to either indicate a family or work hierarchical relationship—something useful for keeping up with personal details of clients or partners.
- Alternative: ClickUp is a great alternative that includes free item linking of CRM records.
Freshsales Monthly Pricing Plans*
*Pricing is based on annual billing on a per-user monthly breakdown. Monthly billing is available for a higher cost. Freshsales offers a 21-day free trial and optional paid add-ons for additional workflow automations and phone credits starting at $5. Pricing reflects pricing info available at the time of publishing. While we update pricing information regularly, we encourage our readers to check current pricing here.
Freshsales sending an SMS text (Source: Freshsales)
Our Expert Opinion
Freshsales can support many of those saturated industries where relationships dictate who wins and keeps the business. Financial advising, accounting, real estate, and insurance businesses, for instance, can leverage robust communication and activity-tracking tools to build strong customer relationships. We like the range of engagement capabilities that let you meet your clients wherever they wish via phone, email, chat, text, or video conferencing appointment.
Zoho CRM: Best for Profile Enrichment
Overall Score:
4.48 / 5
Pros
- Free and affordable plans available
- Offers artificial intelligence (AI) tools for data enrichment of contact profiles to keep information up to date
- Unique inventory management module for maintaining relationships with vendors
Cons
- Decent learning curve required to operate the features
- Expensive record linking tools
- Email communication not available for free
- You need solid enrichment features: Zoho is a great CRM for artificial intelligence (AI) features as it offers broad capabilities. These include Zia functions to update or pull data on command, predictions for forecasting sales and deals, and automation recommendations to improve performance. Individuals can benefit from Zia’s enrichment tools that auto-update records using online data to ensure you build relationships with the most up-to-date insights.
- You want to maintain vendor relationships: Zoho is a multi-functional CRM system that comes with sales, marketing, and service features, plus other capabilities through native integrations like Zoho Projects and Finance. Additionally, a notable use case of Zoho is managing relationships with vendors. Zoho has an inventory management module to store vendor data, track activity, and process orders.
- You need a simpler CRM: While Zoho is one of the best CRMs for individuals in terms of capabilities, users find the interface somewhat clunky and that there’s a steep learning curve required to operate the tools.
- Alternative: monday Sales CRM and HubSpot Sales Hub are great CRM alternatives that are super-easy to use.
- You want free email tools to keep engaged with customers: Zoho includes email integration with Gmail and Outlook to send and receive emails and track engagements from the CRM. This feature, however, is not included for free—something often desired for individual business users on a tight budget.
- Alternative: Freshsales, HubSpot Sales Hub, and EngageBay all offer free email tools.
Zoho CRM Monthly Pricing Plans*
*Pricing is based on annual billing on a per-user monthly breakdown. Monthly billing is available for a higher cost. Zoho CRM comes with a 15-day free trial for the paid plans. Pricing reflects pricing info available at the time of publishing. While we update pricing information regularly, we encourage our readers to check current pricing here.
Zoho CRM profile enrichment through Zia (Source: Zoho)
Our Expert Opinion
Zoho CRM stands out as a unique solution for managing the data side of personal relationships. It’s highly customizable and lets you store contacts and organizations relevant to your business, including prospects, customers, partners, and even vendors. In addition to its versatility, we like its incorporation of artificial intelligence (AI). The Zia tool is a powerful and cost-friendly feature to constantly auto-enrich your contact profiles with up-to-date information.
ClickUp: Best Personal CRM for Relationship Linking
Overall Score:
4.46 / 5
Pros
- Unique record linking tools to indicate relationships between records (e.g., company hierarchy)
- A custom work management system tailorable for any relationship like leads, customers, clients, partners, and vendors
- Solid free-forever plan with email access and task management to keep up with personal relationships
Cons
- Not a traditional CRM; users must design their boards from scratch or through templates
- Tough product to navigate with many software modules and tools
- No telephone integration to use a phone system from the platform
- You need to link records to indicate relationships: ClickUp sticks out as one of the best CRMs in terms of identifying personal and professional relationships. The free-forever plan has a tool for data and task linking where you can connect one record, such as a client, to another, based on family relationships, organizational hierarchy, or simply just to show colleagues in the same network.
- You want a custom solution to handle all sorts of relationships: ClickUp is a work management tool and one of the best CRM alternatives. This makes it highly customizable for individuals and teams to create data fields and boards for managing all types of personal relationships. With ClickUp, you can store information and track activity for leads, clients, customers, referral partners, vendors, and suppliers.
- You want to leverage telephonic tools: Calling someone is a great way to stay connected on a personal level and maintain that relationship. Unfortunately, ClickUp does not have any built-in or integrated phone capabilities in the CRM.
- Alternative: Freshsales is our favorite small business CRM primarily thanks to its built-in phone system, which is available for free.
- You prefer a traditional CRM: Some individuals may not like the idea of using a work management platform and having to customize their own modules for relationship tracking. If that’s the case for you, you should look elsewhere since ClickUp is not a traditional CRM.
- Alternative: HubSpot Sales Hub and Zoho are popular traditional options for personal CRM apps. UpHabit is another solid pick if you prefer a specialty product designed for establishing excellent relationships with clients.
ClickUp Monthly Pricing Plans*
*Pricing is based on annual billing on a per-user monthly breakdown. Monthly billing is available for a higher cost. ClickUp comes with a 14-day free trial. Pricing reflects pricing info available at the time of publishing. While we update pricing information regularly, we encourage our readers to check current pricing here.
ClickUp creating relationship link (Source: ClickUp)
Our Expert Opinion
Being able to track contact relationships helps give insights into someone’s personal life and network—setting a solid foundation for retention and referral opportunities. ClickUp has the most customizable record-linking tools for users to indicate relationships and connect data records, including clients, partners, leads, or prospects, to one another. The best part is this capability is available starting on the Free plan.
UpHabit: Best for Relationship Management Features
Overall Score:
4.46 / 5
Pros
- Free plan available
- Specialty product built specifically for contact and relationship management
- Offers built-in keep-in-touch reminders for users to remember to send emails based on intervals, birthdays, or other triggers
Cons
- Only allows email communication
- Free plan limited to just 10 relationships and five email introductions
- Minimal number of third-party integrations
- You need a cost-friendly solution for managing personal relationships: UpHabit is a specialty software designed for individuals and teams to store contacts and build strong personal relationships. It includes niche features like contact data management, activity timelines, record tagging, and personal notes, plus email engagement for sending individual and automated scheduled email follow-ups.
- You want to receive keep-in-touch reminders: In addition to its contact management capabilities, UpHabit sets itself apart as a solid solution to always staying engaged with clients, leads, or partners. It has keep-in-touch reminders that will notify users when they need to send an email follow-up or check-in. These can be created based on time intervals or triggers, like when it’s someone’s birthday.
- You need a more robust free plan: While it offers a freemium plan, UpHabit is relatively limited in that you can only manage up to 10 different relationships and send five introduction emails.
- Alternative: EngageBay is a great alternative if you need free sales, marketing, and service tools on one platform. ClickUp is another great option for managing various relationships, thanks to its free workboard customization. Finally, HubSpot Sales Hub and its free plan come with 1,000,000 contacts and email engagement tools.
- You want to leverage omnichannel engagement: A key downside of UpHabit is that you can only reach out to your customers and partners via email through Outlook and Gmail integrations.
- Alternative: We recommend Freshsales as the most robust CRM software for omnichannel engagement—letting you connect with contacts on the phone or through email, text, live chat, and messaging apps.
UpHabit Monthly Pricing Plans*
*Pricing is based on annual billing on a per-user monthly breakdown. Monthly billing is available for a higher cost. Pricing reflects pricing info available at the time of publishing. While we update pricing information regularly, we encourage our readers to check current pricing here.
UpHabit mobile relationships search
(Source: UpHabit)
Our Expert Opinion
UpHabit sets itself apart from the general-use CRMs by offering specialty tools specifically for relationship management. In other words, the platform is geared toward storing contact information, cleaning up duplicate records, and engaging customers and leads via automated email outreach. The main value stems from the keep-in-touch reminders that give automatic updates for when you should reconnect with an important contact.
EngageBay: Best for Revenue Operations Management
Overall Score:
4.42 / 5
Pros
- Solid free plan with highly affordable paid plans
- All-in-one sales, marketing, and service management platform
- Offers relationship-building tools like appointment scheduling, personal notes in records, and email engagement
Cons
- Only 250 contact records allowed on Free plan
- Telephonic capabilities not available for free
- No proposal generation tools until Growth plan
- You function as a revenue operations structure: EngageBay is unique in that it has sales, marketing, and service modules in one platform—free. That said, if you’re selling software, consulting service, or other business that can benefit from a revenue operations structure, EngageBay makes the most sense. It allows teams to use the same contact and activity data across all their revenue-producing teams, plus schedule appointments, store personal notes, and engage contacts.
- You need free email sequences: Another relevant feature that makes EngageBay a solid CRM is the free email sequences. Email sequences let you send automated emails on a schedule based on preset criteria or time intervals. These are useful for maintaining strong customer, lead, and partner relationships by constantly staying in touch without any manual input for each message.
- You need more data capacity for free: EngageBay’s Free plan, while it offers sales, marketing, and service modules in one platform, only lets you store and manage up to 250 contact records.
- Alternative: For single users looking to build relationships with hundreds of leads, customers, and referral partners at no cost, we recommend HubSpot Sales Hub, which allows 1,000,000 records for contact management on the Free plan.
- You want free telephone features: While EngageBay has telephonic options to use for reaching out and reconnecting with CRM contacts, users must be on the Basic plan for $13.79 per user, per month.
- Alternative: We recommend Freshsales as the best CRM for one person or small teams who need a free built-in telephone system.
EngageBay Monthly Pricing Plans*
*Pricing based on annual billing on a per user, per month breakdown. Monthly billing is also available for a higher cost, and biennial billing is available for a lower cost. Pricing reflects pricing info available at the time of publishing. While we update pricing information regularly, we encourage our readers to check current pricing here.
EngageBay adding new contact (Source: EngageBay)
Our Expert Opinion
EngageBay is a complete platform that lets you manage sales activity, marketing campaigns, service tickets, and contact data in one system. That said, we recommend EngageBay for software and technology businesses because of its features geared toward revenue operations teams. The ability to enhance relationships while tracking leads and deals, automating outreach, and providing quality support to customers all combine nicely for a reasonable price.
monday Sales CRM: Best for Product Ease of Use
Overall Score:
4.15 / 5
Pros
- Highly customizable CRM to store any data fields and create automations relevant to enhance a personal relationship
- Easy to use through spreadsheet-style data management and changeable viewing options
- All-around affordable CRM
Cons
- No free plan
- Data deduplication requires Enterprise plan
- Relatively expensive to store email templates; starts at $24 per user, per month with a three-user minimum
- You need an easy-to-use CRM: monday Sales CRM is the easiest product to operate. It leverages a familiar spreadsheet format for users to enter and edit records. That same table view also allows you to create data fields and properties to store any information that can help track and boost your relationships. Once records are in, you can switch back and forth between different views like Kanban, calendar, and timeline.
- You want to create keep-in-touch automations: Another component of monday Sales CRM’s usability to the workflow automation tools. The premade templates and suggested inputs allow users to easily design if/then automations, which are especially useful for keeping in touch with contacts. For example, you can set a workflow where if it’s a customer’s birthday or a certain amount of time has passed, then send an automated email.
- You need a free CRM: monday Sales CRM, unfortunately, discontinued its free-forever plan—preventing users from getting personal relationship management tools at no cost.
- Alternative: HubSpot Sales Hub is the best alternative for data capacity—letting you store 1,000,000 contact records at no cost. Freshsales is another solid option if you primarily want communication tools to engage your leads, customers, and partners.
- You want a cheaper way to spot duplicate records: Duplicate detection features ensure you’re working with the most accurate and up-to-date data by identifying duplicated records. These features, while useful for staying organized, are not available on monday Sales CRM until the Enterprise plan.
- Alternative: UpHabit is a great alternative that includes duplicate detection and merges on its free-forever plan.
monday Sales CRM Monthly Pricing Plans*
*Pricing is based on annual billing on a monthly per-user breakdown. Monthly billing is available for a higher cost. There is a 14-day free trial for the paid plans. Pricing reflects pricing info available at the time of publishing. While we update pricing information regularly, we encourage our readers to check current pricing here.
monday Sales CRM leads (Source: monday.com)
Our Expert Opinion
monday Sales CRM combines as an excellent contact management and automation platform. Ease of use is the top attribute of this product because of its use of premade board templates, spreadsheet-style data management, and no-code design for workflow automations. Whether you’re evaluating a list of contacts or individual records, monday Sales CRM makes it easy to stay up to date on relationship activity and engage leads via phone or email.
How We Evaluated the Best Personal CRM Systems
To determine the best personal CRM system, we evaluated the specific features relevant for single users or small teams to build, maintain, and track their relationships with business contacts. These can include anyone you may have a professional relationship with, including prospects, leads, customers, clients, vendors, or referral partners. We wanted to see features such as notes in contact records, as well as solid product affordability, ease of use, and customer support by the provider.
The tabs below offer insight into our evaluation process of the best personal CRMs:
30%
Niche/Advanced Features
25%
Pricing
15%
General Features
15%
Help & Support
15%
Expert Score
30% of Overall Score
Niche features specifically for managing personal relationships held the highest-scored criteria. For example, contact and keep-in-touch reminders ensure you always know when to reach out to someone for their birthday, contract renewal, or other notable event using automated task reminders. We also looked at the broad range of data capabilities within contact records like notes, history tracking, and relationship linking to other contacts.
25% of Overall Score
Many single-operated businesses rely on solid relationships in order to get referrals and retain current customers. That said, these types of users are often on a tight budget and, therefore, need a CRM that’s affordable. Freemium plan options and low-cost paid subscriptions were heavily evaluated for this criteria. We also looked at billing flexibility and the specific niche features included in the free or low-tiered plans, like record linking or appointment scheduling.
15% of Overall Score
In addition to the features focused on developing personal relationships with customers, leads, and partners, we evaluated general features crucial for a CRM, regardless of industry or primary use case. Customizable pipelines, for example, let you accommodate any sales process unique to your operation. We also looked at the mobile CRM capabilities to handle on-the-go sales, reporting and analytics tools, and the availability of third-party integrations.
15% of Overall Score
Customer support allows users to get the best possible experience while using these CRM systems. This was evaluated in terms of channel availability via phone, email, and live chat, as well as the self-service resources included by the provider, like a knowledge base and community forum. Finally, we looked at the hours of availability of the service teams and whether or not you can access them 24/7.
15% of Overall Score
The expert score was the final criteria we usedm which supplemented our firsthand evaluation with online user reviews. This helped us get a better understanding of how real users perceived the CRM in terms of feature popularity and value for the price paid. Most importantly, however, we were able to see how users felt about the product in terms of ease of use and whether there was a steep learning curve required.
*Percentages of overall score
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
A personal CRM can have two intertwined definitions. In most cases, it is software that lets you manage contact data and develop strong relationships with leads, customers, and partners to boost referrals and customer retention. It can also refer to a CRM that’s particularly excellent for single users for its basic features and affordability.
While many personal CRMs on this list offer a free-forever plan, different plans will be better suited for single users than others. If robust data storage and free email outreach are important to you, then go for HubSpot Sales Hub. If you need a wide range of free communication tools, like phone, chat, email, and text, to develop personal relationships, then Freshsales is the best option. If you want a free specialty CRM for managing personal relationships, then UpHabit is the best pick.
A personal CRM has features specifically useful for developing strong relationships that let you best understand your leads, customers, and partners—allowing you to improve retention, referral, and deal-closing rates. Some of the main features included are notes in CRM records, appointment scheduling, calendar sync, and record linking to indicate a relationship with another person, such as family or organization hierarchy.
Bottom Line
Personal CRM software helps solo users maintain strong business relationships with their leads, customers, and referral network. Depending on your budget and feature priorities, various products could be a better fit than others. For example, HubSpot Sales Hub offers a great free plan with high data capacity to manage tons of contact records. Alternatively, monday Sales CRM is easy to operate, while Freshsales gives users robust communication capabilities.
