8 Best Salesforce Alternatives for Small Business in 2023

While there are other free Salesforce alternatives on this list, none do it better than HubSpot. Sales teams can store contact, lead, and deal data, schedule meetings, create quotes, manage documents, and view prospect website visitors for free. Additionally, the free CRM lets marketing teams design and deploy email campaigns with up to one automated action, manage a blog, engage web visitors through live chat, and create digital ads and web forms. Finally, there are free customer support ticketing features and user access management.

HubSpot CRM and Salesforce are both popular CRM systems with robust integration options. HubSpot primarily fills in the Salesforce product gaps of free plan availability and a simple-to-use product. While each offers many of the same features, such as lead and deal management, customer case tracking, and campaign deployment, Salesforce offers slightly more cost-friendly automated lead assignment, lead scoring, and sales team management features.

Neither Salesforce nor HubSpot are ideal for paid plan scalability. HubSpot’s starting paid plan begins at $45 per month and Salesforce starts at $25 per user, per month, then jumps to $75 per user monthly. For teams needing a solid CRM that can grow in data storage, user, and feature capacity as the business scales, we recommend Zoho CRM and Freshsales as the best options.

Freshsales is the best overall Salesforce alternative, particularly for businesses seeking a solid account management CRM system. The platform has a predesigned account management module for users to store point-of-contact data, activity and communications history, and tasks associated with a specific account. The higher-cost plans allow for automated data enrichment on those profiles. Freshsales is also solid for account and contact engagement—providing a built-in phone system, email, and live chat channels.

Many of the pros of Freshsales compared to Salesforce involve pricing and ease of use. Overall, the free-forever plan and low-cost paid plans of Freshsales are better than Salesforce. Users also agree that Freshsales is far more intuitive to operate than Salesforce. Plus, specific features, such as account management, phone communications, sales team management, workflow automation, live chat, and email, are less expensive with Freshsales.

Freshsales and Salesforce provide a wide range of data management modules, including accounts, contacts, deals, and opportunities. Each provider also offers a solid mobile application, automated lead assignment, and plenty of third-party and native integrations. Salesforce, however, provides a stronger mobile application compared to Freshsales, lower-priced lead assignment automation, and a broader range of integrations that extend to industry-specific products.

Automated profile and data enrichment features are useful for keeping contact records clean and up-to-date. Unfortunately, both Salesforce and Freshsales have expensive profile enrichment features. Pipedrive offers its Smart Contact Data tool for automated enrichment and insights from LinkedIn and online sources starting at $24.90 per user monthly.

Salesforce is known for its advanced artificial intelligence (AI) and automation features. That said, Pipedrive is the most comparable competitor, particularly for its intelligent sales tools for insights and data management. The AI Sales Assistant gives teams suggestions on opportunities and tasks to prioritize and on how to improve performance. There’s also deal rotting detection, Smart Docs to auto-fill business proposals and quotes for faster document generation, and Smart Contact Data that pulls LinkedIn information for profiles.

Similar to Salesforce, Pipedrive does not offer a free-forever option. However, it has more cost-friendly paid plans and lower-priced AI, automation, email, product catalog, and lead management tools. On the other hand, built-in features for account, customer case, and social media management are some of the Salesforce capabilities not found in Pipedrive. Salesforce has a wider range of third-party and native integration options.

Neither Salesforce nor Pipedrive offer a built-in project management module for sales teams to collaborate and track work outside the scope of the usual operation, such as content development, data migration, or client gift delivery projects. Bitrix24 is the best alternative to both products, and offers free project management tools in the CRM.

Copper CRM is a great alternative to Salesforce for small businesses that have adopted Google Workspace apps in their operation. All plan tiers let teams integrate the CRM software with Gmail, Google Contacts, Calendar, Drive, and Sheets. There’s a Chrome extension that lets users access Copper to view lead or contact records, pull CRM documents, and monitor sales tasks while in Gmail or Calendar apps. Plus, Copper also comes with excellent project management, bulk email, and automated campaign features.

Copper has comparable pricing to Salesforce, and neither provider offers a free plan. Alternatively, Copper is better in the usability category than Salesforce, particularly for data and lead management. This is because Copper is designed to be a Google CRM with a familiar interface and feel to Google apps. Salesforce offers more integration options and analytics capabilities than Copper. Salesforce also has lower-priced features for lead scoring and email campaign deployment.

Neither Copper nor Salesforce are ideal for generating and tracking sales documents to send to leads, like product books, quotes, proposals, contracts, or invoices. Copper does not offer any sort of quoting or invoicing capabilities and Salesforce requires either an add-on or subscription to the Professional cloud for $75 per user, per month. Zoho CRM is the best alternative for those functions—offering them in the inventory management module starting at $23 per user monthly.

Though Salesforce has an unbeatable number of integration options, Zoho CRM is the next-best and much cheaper alternative to Salesforce, with a comparable range of third-party and native connections. With thousands of options, teams can connect popular apps to Zoho, like LinkedIn, Slack, Google, and monday.com, to keep data synchronized in multiple systems and get more functionality from their tools. There are many native apps for Zoho for integration, including the Finance Suite, Writer Add-on, Zoho Desk, and Projects.

Zoho and Salesforce are both powerhouses in their own regard—Zoho is just the cheaper option. Each provides extensive CRM automation capabilities, AI analytics tools, customer case tracking, and inventory management with quotes and invoicing tools. They both offer modules specific for lead, contact, deal, and accounts management and have sales forecasting features. On the negative side, neither stands out for product simplicity.

In addition to being somewhat difficult CRMs to set up and operate, there’s another problem with Zoho and Salesforce. While they have project management integrations available on a third-party or native connection, neither offer the module built into the CRM. Bitrix24 is the best alternative with free, built-in project management.

Salesforce does not offer a project management system within its CRM—requiring users to integrate with its native Project Management app or a third party. Bitrix24 fills in that product attribute with its built-in project management module, including project template storage, task management, and multi-view capabilities on Kanban, Gantt, and list views. Additionally, the CRM solution stands out for its wide range of use cases, including lead, deal, and contact management, human resources tools, an ecommerce CRM module, and a contact center.

Each product offers tons of data management capabilities for storing and tracking lead, contact, and deal data, as well as quotes and invoices. Additionally, each has various communication options with customers and contacts through phone integrations, email, chat, and social media channels. Bitrix24 separates itself from Salesforce by having a free plan for unlimited users, built-in ecommerce capabilities, and human resource management tools.

Both Bitrix24 and Salesforce score poorly in the product usability category—requiring a solid level of skill to learn and operate the interface. HubSpot, Freshsales, and Really Simple Systems, depending on your specific feature requirements, all have excellent reviews for platform intuitiveness.

Businesses that conduct referral marketing for lead generation should look to Apptivo. Unlike Salesforce and many other products on this list, Apptivo has a specific tool meant for referral tracking. Within lead or contact records, teams can add data for where the person, company, or opportunity came from a lead source or “referred by” field. They can then generate reports to see which partners or customers generate the best sales leads.

Neither product offers a free-forever plan nor are either well-acclaimed for product ease of use. Apptivo, however, is one of the best cheap Salesforce competitors and has built-in project management with the CRM system. On the other hand, Salesforce dominates in third-party integration options, sophisticated AI analytics features, automation capabilities, and social media management functionality.

Freelance, startup, and small businesses find it valuable to adopt a free-forever CRM plan to try out the features risk-free until they’re ready for an upgrade. Unfortunately, Apptivo and Salesforce do not offer a free option (other than a trial). HubSpot CRM is the best free CRM on this list, with free sales, marketing, service, and content management features.

Really Simple Systems is the best Salesforce alternative for those looking for a basic tool to use as a contact or customer database. The system is intuitive to set up for customizing the pages, data fields, and tables for any sales operation. Its minimal menu buttons and clean color palettes make the CRM easy to navigate—especially for newer users. Finally, each data management, communications, and reporting tool is simple to operate and yields an excellent user experience.

The comparison comes down to whether you want a simple CRM for basic data management or an advanced platform for sophisticated automation and analytics. Really Simple Systems is cost-friendly and easy to operate, but is mostly limited to data storage with some communication tools. Some capabilities, like automation and case management, however, are more expensive on Really Simple Systems. Salesforce’s Lightning automation builder and customer case tools are on the Essentials plan for $25 per user monthly, while Really Simple Systems requires the Professional plan or an add-on.

Neither product is suitable for automating workflows and sales processes. Really Simple Systems requires the Professional plan starting at $30 per user, per month, and Salesforce requires the Essentials plan for $25 per user monthly for basic process automation. Zoho CRM is the best alternative with free workflow automation features.