Freshsales Review: Is It Right for Your Business in 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.
Freshsales is our second-most recommended customer relationship management (CRM) system for small businesses. In our evaluation of the best CRMs, Freshsales scored high in the areas of pricing, general features, and ease of use. It scored lower in some areas, however, particularly specialized features, as it requires users to subscribe to higher-priced plans to access features like multiple sales pipelines and territory management.
Freshsales
Overall Score: 4.53
OUT OF 5
What We Like
- Easy to set up and use
- Offers a free plan
- All plans include built-in phone dialer
- Supports an unlimited number of users
What's Missing
- Per-user limit on file storage
- AI-powered insights available only in more expensive tiers
- Free plan lacks crucial features like email marketing and file storage
When to Use Freshsales
- Pipedrive alternative: Freshsales ranked #1 in our guide for the best CRM alternatives to Pipedrive
- HubSpot alternative: Freshsales ranked #1 in our guide for the best CRM alternatives to HubSpot
- Free CRM: Freshsales is our second top choice for the best free CRM, after HubSpot
When to Use an Alternative
- Outlook integration: Check out this guide for top CRM options to integrate your Outlook account
- Ecommerce CRM: Read this guide for top CRM options to manage your online store
Freshsales is a CRM system that helps sales teams attract quality leads, engage with prospects, and nurture customer relationships. It features artificial intelligence (AI)-powered deal insights that you can use for revenue and sales forecasting. It is best for growing businesses looking for a scalable CRM and sales automation solution with a sophisticated built-in phone dialer.
Freshsales Deciding Factors
Supported Business Types | Small sales teams to enterprise-level companies, depending on the plan chosen |
Standout Features |
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Pricing Plans |
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Contract Duration | Monthly and annual plans are available |
Key Integrations | |
Customer Support | 24/5 phone, chat, and email support |
Are you interested in learning more about the best CRM options for your organization? Check out our guide on the best CRMs for small businesses.
Freshsales Alternatives
If Freshsales doesn’t meet your business needs, below are some alternatives you can consider:
 |  |  | |
Best For | Businesses that need a robust free CRM with advanced email marketing tools | Companies that need visual representations of their sales pipelines | Businesses that want an affordable CRM with excellent analytics tools |
Starting Price | Offers a free plan while paid plans start at $50 per month for two users | Starts at $14.90 per user, monthly | Offers a free plan while paid plans start at $14/user/month |
Freshsales earned a pricing score of 5 out of 5 in our evaluation. Freshsales’ CRM subscription has a free plan and three paid tiers that support an unlimited number of users. Fees start at $15 per user, every month. The Free plan offers basic contact and account management, sales pipeline management, a built-in phone dialer, website integration, a mobile app, and customer support. You can sign up for a 21-day free trial for the paid tiers.
Plans | Free | Growth | Pro | Enterprise |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Best For | Small sales teams | Growing sales teams | Mid-sized businesses | Large companies and enterprises |
Monthly Pricing ($/User/Month) | $0 | $18 | $47 | $83 |
Annual Pricing ($/User/Month) | $0 | $15 | $39 | $69 |
File Storage | N/A | 2GB per user | 5GB per user | 100GB per user |
Workflows | N/A | 20 | 50 | 100 |
Personalized Bulk Emails (per User) | N/A | 250 per day | 1,000 per day | 5,000 per day |
Reports & Dashboard | ✕ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
Deal Insights | ✕ | ✕ | ✓ | ✓ |
24/5 Customer Support (Phone, Chat & Email) | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ (with dedicated account manager) |
Freshsales CRM pricing add-ons:
- Additional workflows: $5
- Phone credits: Starts at $25
- CPQ (Configure, Price, Quote): $19 per user, monthly
Free
Freshsales’ Free plan comes with basic CRM features like contacts, accounts, deals, tasks, data import and export, and mobile apps. You can rename existing modules, set up a chat widget on your website, create forms, and track website visitors. It offers a built-in phone dialer with a caller ID and an option to buy local and toll-free numbers.
Growth
The Growth plan adds basic segmentation, custom fields, product catalogs, workflows, visual sales pipelines, reports, and sales emails on top of the features included in the Free plan. For each user, it allocates 2GB for file storage, five sales sequences, 500 sales sequence emails per day, and 250 personalized bulk emails per day. In addition, it gives you access to SMS and Facebook Messenger integrations, predictive contact scoring, and the Freshworks Marketplace.
Pro
Freshsales’ Pro plan is equipped with everything in Growth plus behavioral segmentation, custom sales activities, an activity dashboard, time-based workflows, and custom fields. It enables you to create multiple sales pipelines, goals, and teams. In addition, it has higher limits for file storage and sales emails. Other features include offline access for mobile apps, conference calling, chat campaigns, lead generation, and deal insights.
Enterprise
The Enterprise plan offers more advanced capabilities, including auto-profile enrichment, extensive CRM customization options, sales forecasting, and territory management. The built-in phone has holiday routing and queue callback features, while custom reports include advanced metrics, such as won deals and emails delivered. Moreover, there’s a dedicated account manager to help resolve any issues you encounter.
In addition to the tiers listed above, Freshsales offers a subscription that includes marketing-specific tools called Freshsales Suite. It has the same pricing plans the sales CRM, but has marketing features that include:
- Marketing contacts
- Email marketing campaigns
- Custom domains for marketing emails
- Marketing journey builder
- Landing pages
- Dedicated IP address add-on (Enterprise only)
Freshsales Features
Freshsales offers a wide range of essential tools sales teams need to attract quality leads, engage with customers, and close deals based on AI-powered insights. It streamlines sales processes to reduce manual labor and allows your agents more selling time. This solution has the features to manage the entire customer journey—from lead generation to relationship nurturing.
We gave Freshsales’ features a score of 5 because of the extensiveness of tools available to help sales agents manage and close deals. Some of its primary features include contact and account management, sales activities, automated workflows, and deal management. Each tier has a different level of capability for customization, automation, data administration, cloud telephony, communication, data security, and reporting.
Below are general features of Freshsales:
- Contact management
- Deal management
- Lead management
- Sales pipelines
- Sales reporting
- Analytics
- Mobile app
Freshsales’ main dashboard shows all the pertinent information about active leads. (Source: Freshsales)
Freshsales earned a score of 3.75 out of 5 for its specialized features as we saw some areas that need improvement, such as the availability of multiple sales pipelines only available in more expensive tiers. As this feature is crucial, we would like to see it across all plans. Meanwhile, some of the standout features that we like include customizations, automations, artificial intelligence (AI) tools, and pipeline management.
System Customizations
You can customize your Freshsales account and settings to fit your business needs and requirements. The system allows you to create and track custom sales activities so you can monitor your customer interactions, appointments, and performance. Other aspects you can customize are contact fields, contact lifecycle stages, business modules, roles and permissions, currencies, and language.
Here are some functionalities under Freshsales’ system customization feature:
- Custom sales activities
- Custom fields
- Custom modules
- Contact lifecycle stages
- Multicurrency and multilanguage
- Custom roles and access permissions
Users are able to customize custom fields on their lead management page. (Source: Freshsales)
Workflow Automation
Freshsales helps improve your team’s efficiency and productivity by automating routine manual tasks. It automatically assigns leads, contacts, and even chat conversations to the right salespeople based on relevant criteria like skill level and bandwidth. Its CRM automation features also include sales sequences, web forms, email templates, workflows, and an activity timeline.
Here are some functionalities under Freshsales’ workflow automation feature:
- Auto-assignment rules
- Web forms to capture contact information and generate leads
- Route calls during holidays
- Auto-profile enrichment
- Automate repetitive tasks within your sales process
- Automated sales sequences and customer interaction
- Email templates
- Activity timeline displays all customer interactions with your business
Users can set conditions in the system to automate their workflows and reduce manual tasks. (Source: Freshsales)
Pipeline Management
With Freshsales, you can create, manage, and track sales pipelines of various teams. You can set probabilities for deals and get sales revenue forecasts for each deal stage. In addition, the software allows you to set up your product catalog, define and track sales goals based on closed deals and revenue, and use Slack to communicate with your sales team about ongoing deals. Its CPQ add-on gives you editable templates for documents like contracts and quotes.
Here are some functionalities under Freshsales’ pipeline management feature:
- Multiple sales pipeline
- Product catalog with pricing structure, discounts, and taxes
- Deal stage probability and revenue forecast by deal stage
- Sales goals setting
- Collaborate with your team on deals via Slack
Sales pipelines are displayed on a Kanban-style board for easier tracking. (Source: Freshsales)
Freddy AI
Freshsales’ artificial intelligence (AI)-powered assistant, called Freddy AI, enhances your productivity by offering smart suggestions for deal closure, upcoming meetings, and tasks. You can use its custom bots to generate leads and send welcome messages to your visitors. Furthermore, it lets you know which contacts should be prioritized, predicts the likelihood of success of your deals, and gives you sales and revenue forecasts.
Below are some functionalities under Freshsales’ AI assistant feature:
- Suggested next action for deals
- Auto-detect duplicate entries in contacts and accounts
- Predictive contact scoring
- Calendar event suggestion
- Deal insights
- Out-of-office detection for contacts
- Lead generation bot
- Sales forecasting
Freddy AI recommendations are clearly displayed on lead pages to provide actionable insights to users. (Source: Freshsales)
Third-party Integrations
Freshsales has integration capabilities with many third-party applications, giving you the ability to synchronize all your customer data into the platform. These include its native integrations with other Freshworks products, and tools for email marketing, document management, and accounting.
Some of its most popular integrations include:
- Freshdesk
- Freshmarketer
- Freshchat
- Freshcaller
- Mailchimp
- HubSpot CRM
- Zapier
- DocuSign
- QuickBooks
- PandaDoc
- Xero
Freshsales earned a 4.88 out of 5 score for its support because it provides users with 24/5 customer support via phone, chat, and email across all its plans. You can also use its knowledge base to find out how to use specific functions and learn about the best practices for the software. There are around 30 topic categories that contain various how-to articles, such as account management, deal and pipeline management, and phone settings.
In addition, Enterprise plan subscribers have access to a dedicated account manager. Dedicated account managers help you resolve issues with the software or relay your feedback to the Freshsales management.
We scored Freshsales a perfect 5 out of 5 for ease of use because it is simple to use and implement for beginners to mid-level users. It has an intuitive interface that displays all the main menu selections. There are also automatic prompts that pop up to guide you through the implementation and customization processes. If you need additional guidance on how to use the system, you can refer to its knowledge base or schedule a complimentary onboarding session.
We scored Freshsales 4.63 out of 5 for expert scores as most of its existing customer reviews online are positive. The majority of the users like its easy-to-use interface and high customizability. However, some find its pricing scheme to be more expensive than its competitors. Below are existing Freshsales CRM reviews from other popular review sites:
- Capterra: 4.6 out of 5 based on 503 reviews
- G2: 4.6 out of 5 based on 990 reviews
- TrustRadius: 4 out of 5 based on 106 reviews
Methodology: How We Evaluated Freshsales CRM Reviews
To evaluate Freshsales against other CRM software, we tested each system ourselves. We looked at different and crucial areas, such as pricing, the core set of features every CRM should have, as well as the level of customer support and ease of use. We also looked through existing CRM ratings about Freshsales from credible review sources.
Click through the tabs below for our Freshsales CRM review evaluation criteria:
10%
Pricing
10%
General Features
30%
Niche Features
20%
Ease of Use
20%
Support
10%
Expert Score
10% of Overall Score
Cost is typically an important criterion for any business, so it was one of our considerations when evaluating the cost-effectiveness of Freshsales. We usually give a high score to providers that offer a starter plan that costs $30 or less. We also check the availability of a free plan, scalable pricing options, and options to pay monthly or annually.
10% of Overall Score
We looked at overall features we feel are necessary for any CRM system, such as integration options, reporting, and analytics tools. We also considered the availability of a mobile app—which is important for sales reps who are always on the go.
30% of Overall Score
We also looked at the niche and targeted features of the software to see the value a user can get by subscribing. For Freshsales, we checked if they offer specialized features such as lead scoring, workflow automation, and analytics.
20% of Overall Score
We evaluated Freshsales’ platform usability and the level of technical experience needed to use the system. This was analyzed in terms of the expertise needed to set up an account, the learning curve for learning to use its features, and the ease of integrating with other third-party applications.
20% of Overall Score
Support is a critical part of running any CRM tool, especially for small businesses that don’t have in-house technical support. We analyzed the types and availability of support offered by these providers through live chat, email, and phone.
10% of Overall Score
We looked through existing and best CRM reviews on credible sites to measure the level of satisfaction current users have and any problems they typically encounter. We also added our thoughts and expert opinion on key features, value for money, and popularity.
*Percentages of overall score
Freshsales Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
Who will benefit most from using Freshsales?
Freshsales can be used by various businesses—from startups to enterprise-level teams. It offers a free CRM plan and three paid subscription options that cater to varying business needs and sizes.
When should I use a Freshsales alternative?
- Users who want document storage in their free plan. Free plan users who need to upload documents on their CRM dashboard, including customer documents, can consider Zoho CRM instead. It offers an allocation of 1GB in its free plan.
- Users who want a more robust free plan can consider HubSpot CRM, which tops our list of the best free CRMs for small businesses. This is because Freshsales lacks some essential features in its Free plan, including email marketing.
Bottom Line
Freshsales is a powerful, scalable sales CRM filled with features for contact, account, sales pipeline, and deal management. Its standout feature is its built-in cloud phone, allowing you to make calls directly from within the app. It also has an AI-powered assistant that automates and enhances tasks like contact scoring, customer communication, and forecasting.
Visit Freshsales’ website to sign up for a 21-day free trial or get started with its free plan to discover the full feature set.
