Freshsales Review: Is It Right for Your Business?

Freshsales (formerly Freshworks CRM) is a sales automation tool that helps sales teams attract quality leads, engage with prospects, and nurture customer relationships. It features artificial intelligence (AI)-powered deal insights you can use for revenue and sales forecasting. It is best for growing businesses looking for a scalable sales customer relationship management (CRM) solution with a built-in phone dialer.

Freshsales

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
• Highly customizable workflows

What's Missing

• Per-user limit on file storage
• Limited email integration options
• AI-powered insights available only in more expensive tiers
• Limited direct software integrations
• Upgrades can be expensive

Freshsales Is Recommended For

• Small businesses needing a free customer relationship management (CRM) tool
• Sales teams with mobile field agents
• Companies looking for a CRM with call management features

Visit Freshsales

What We Recommend Freshsales For

Freshsales offers free and affordable solutions for managing your team’s sales pipelines. It streamlines the lead nurturing process using automation and provides insights to help you close more deals. There are multiple tiers with varying customization levels, making it easy for growing companies to scale up. This CRM system is also equipped with robust mobile capabilities and in-app cloud telephony.

Who Freshsales Is Good For

• Small businesses needing a free CRM: Freshsales offers a free plan for unlimited users that comes with basic sales automation and contact management features. It is included in our list of the best free CRMs.
• Sales teams with mobile field agents: Freshsales has a mobile app that comes with contact, account, and deal management, as well as a built-in dialer and geolocation. For this reason, it is one of our picks for the best mobile CRM apps.
• Companies looking for a CRM with call management features: In addition to sales tools, Freshsales also offers unique call center features like virtual hold and Bring Your Own Carrier (BYOC). It is our top choice for the best call center software provider.
• Real estate professionals seeking a free and easy-to-use CRM: For agents and brokerages that are searching for a simple dashboard and features for marketing, appointment management, and webform lead generation, Freshsales is an excellent option for your team. For that reason, it is the top free real estate CRM.

Freshsales Is Not a Good Fit For

• Small businesses that rely heavily on email campaigns: Freshsales’ free option does not include sales emails, and its lowest tier offers limited email tracking and bulk emailing capabilities. Check out Pipedrive if you need a CRM solution with extensive email management and tracking features.
• Teams that focus on social media marketing: Freshsales does not integrate with social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. If you are looking for a solution with robust social integrations, consider Zoho CRM.
• Companies looking for a white label CRM: Freshsales does not offer white label solutions, so you cannot customize or resell it under your own brand. If you need a solution that you can rebrand or bundle with your own services, check out Bitrix24 or take a look at our list of the best white label CRM systems.
• Real estate agents and brokerages that want to integrate with third-party sales listing websites: Freshsales does not integrate with major listing websites like Zillow, Trulia, and Realtor.com. Agencies or individual agents who advertise heavily on those websites will have difficulty organizing and automatically capturing leads using Freshsales. Consider IXACT Contact instead or visit our list of the best free CRMs for more options.

Not exactly sure what to look for? Take a look at our ultimate CRM guide to deepen your understanding of how CRMs work and why it’s an essential tool to grow your business.

Freshsales Pricing

Freshsales’ pricing scheme includes a free plan and three paid tiers that all support an unlimited number of users. Monthly fees start at $15 per user, per month (or $18 per user, per month, billed annually). 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 may sign up for a 21-day free trial for the paid tiers.

Free

The Free plan comes with basic CRM features like contacts, accounts, deals, tasks, data import and export, and mobile apps. You can also 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 integration, 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 also 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, deeper CRM customization options, sales forecasting, and territory management. The built-in phone has holiday routing and queue callback features, while custom reports already include advanced metrics, such as won deals and emails delivered. Moreover, there’s a dedicated account manager who can help you resolve any issues you encounter.

Freshsales Features

Freshsales is packed with 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 to allow your agents to have more selling time. This solution has the features you need to manage the entire customer journey—from lead generation through relationship nurturing.

Take a closer look at Freshsales’ most essential features:

General Features

Freshsales’ 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. Every plan, however, comes with a built-in phone dialer, 24/5 customer support, website integration, and mobile apps.

Customization

• Custom sales activities
• Custom fields
• Custom modules
• Contact lifecycle stages
• Multicurrency and multilanguage
• Custom roles and access permissions

Freshsales’ custom sales activities (Source: Freshsales)

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.

Automation

• 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
• Territory management
• IntelliAssign (auto-assign chat conversations)
• Email templates
• Activity timeline displays all customer interactions with your business

Freshsales’ workflow automation feature (Source: Freshsales)

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 available bandwidth. Its automation feature also includes sales sequences, web forms, email templates, workflows, and an activity timeline.

Communications

• Two-way email sync
• Chat software for real-time customer support
• Apple Business Chat
• Zoom
• Built-in phone dialer
• WhatsApp
• Short Message Service (SMS) integration

Freshsales’ built-in phone dialer (Source: Freshsales)

Freshsales’ email integration feature allows you to create and track email communications with leads and customers. At the same time, its chat software serves as a real-time customer support line for your website visitors. It also features a built-in phone that lets you make calls in one click and record conversations. You can also schedule Zoom meetings as well as interact with customers directly from within the CRM via WhatsApp, Apple Business Chat, and SMS.

Pipeline Management

• Multiple sales pipeline
• Product catalog with pricing structure, discounts, and taxes
• Deal stage probability and revenue forecast by deal stage
• Sales goals
• Collaborate with your team on deals via Slack
• CPQ

Freshsales’ sales pipeline management feature (Source: Freshsales)

With Freshsales, you can create, manage, and track sales pipelines of various teams. You can also set probabilities for deals and get 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.

Freddy AI

• 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’s insights and recommendations (Source: Freshsales)

Freshsales’ artificial intelligence (AI)-powered assistant, called Freddy AI, helps enhance your productivity by giving you smart suggestions for deal closure, upcoming meetings, and tasks. You can also use its custom bots to generate leads and send welcome messages to your visitors. Aside from that, it lets you know which contacts should be prioritized, predicts the likelihood of success of your deals, and gives you sales and revenue forecasts.

Reporting & Analytics

• Standard reports
• Custom reports with charts
• Sales activity reports
• Sales cycle and velocity reports

Freshsales’ analytics feature and sales dashboard (Source: Freshsales)

Freshsales helps you make data-driven decisions by giving you actionable insights into your sales performance. This data lets you know how long it takes to convert leads into customers, the roadblocks to conversion, and which campaigns, teams, territories, or sales agents bring in the most revenue. You can generate reports on these metrics using prebuilt templates or customized dashboards.

Mobile App

• Add voice notes
• Check-in and checkout features for sales activities
• View analytics dashboard
• Real-time notifications
• Zoom meetings
• QuickLinks (add up to 10 website links that you visit often)
• Individual and bulk messaging via Twilio, Zipwhip, and ClickSend
• Automatic call logging
• Google Maps and Uber
• Bulk emails
• Custom apps
• Offline mode

Adding leads and tasks using the Freshsales mobile app (Source: Freshsales)

Freshsales’ mobile app allows you to move deals through the sales pipeline when you’re on the go. You can access and edit CRM data even when offline, then sync it once you’re online. You can also view the analytics dashboard, send bulk SMS and emails, add voice notes to records, and join Zoom meetings from within the app. Its geolocation feature enables you to record a client visit, find your contact’s location, and book a ride for your meetings.

Integrations

• Application Programming Interface (API) access
• Freshworks Marketplace
• Zapier
• DocuSign
• QuickBooks
• PandaDoc
• Xero
• Outlook

Popular Freshsales integrations in the Marketplace

Expand the core functionalities and capabilities of Freshsales by integrating other apps you frequently use. You can connect your CRM with third-party apps via API access, Marketplace, and Zapier. Some of Freshsales’ most popular integrations include Mailchimp, HubSpot, PandaDoc, DocuSign, Trello, Xero, QuickBooks, and Outlook.

Customer Service

Freshsales offers 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. Topics include contact and account management, deal and pipeline management, custom modules, predictive contact scoring, and phone setting.

Enterprise plan subscribers have access to a dedicated account manager who can help you resolve issues with the software or relay your feedback to the Freshsales management.

Ease of Use

Freshsales is easy 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.

Freshsales Alternatives

Best for: Organizations that need a CRM with social media marketing tools	Best for: Business-to-business (B2B) companies with simple sales models that focus on direct selling	Best for: Small ecommerce businesses looking for a CRM with order and inventory management features
Starting price: Free or $14 per user, per month	Starting price: $12.50 per user, per month	Starting price: Free or $24 per month
Zoho CRM Review	Pipedrive Review	Bitrix24 Review

If you’re not sure Freshsales is right for you, check out our guide to the top six CRMs for small businesses.

What Users Think of Freshsales

As of the date this article was written, the recent online reviews are directed to Freshworks CRM (Freshsales’ former name). The majority of the users like its easy-to-use interface and high customizability. It has earned the following scores from the most popular review sites:

• Capterra: 4.6 out of 5 based on 500 reviews
• G2: 4.6 out of 5 based on 903 reviews
• Gartner: 4.5 out of 5 based on 192 reviews
• TrustRadius: 8.4 out of 10 based on 58 reviews

Users said Freshsales efficiently tracks their contacts, pipelines, tasks, and calls. They also appreciate how its AI capabilities streamline lead scoring and customer communication. However, some find its pricing scheme to be more expensive than its competitors. Others mentioned that they experienced delays in technical support.

Bottom Line

Freshsales is a powerful and scalable sales CRM that’s packed with features for contact, account, sales pipeline, and deal management. Its standout feature is its built-in cloud telephony, 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 see how it works.

Visit Freshsales

You Might Also Like…

• Check out our list of the top CRM solutions for startups.
• Do you need a specialized CRM solution for your industry? Read our guide on how to find industry-specific CRMs.
• Are you ready to create your own CRM strategy? Read our guide on how to formulate one and download our free CRM strategy worksheet.