11 Best CRM Software for Small Business

CRM software helps businesses manage a company’s valuable clients from the very first interaction to closing the deal and maintaining a long-term relationship with the customer.

Companies using CRM systems have seen increased lead conversions, customer retention, and improved agent productivity.

To help you choose the right solution, I’ve tested and listed the 11 best CRM tools ideal for small businesses.

• 1. monday.com CRM – Best for Small to Medium Businesses
• 2. Zoho CRM – Best to Integrate with Zoho Suite
• 3. Freshsales CRM – Best to Integrate With Freshworks Products
• 4. Pipedrive CRM – Best CRM for Lead Management
• 5. Zendesk Sell – Best for Helpdesk Integrations
• 6. HubSpot CRM – Best for Sales Funnels
• 7. Salesforce CRM – Best Overall
• 8. SugarCRM – Best for Marketing and Sales Automation
• 9. Capsule CRM – Best for Customizable Sales Pipelines
• 10. Bitrix24 – AI Assistance Included
• 11. Close CRM – Best for Integrated Communication Tools
• Show moreShow less

CRM Software Comparison Table

Below is a summary table showing a comparison of features of the top CRM tools like automation capabilities, integration with 3rd party apps and mobile access. These features will be discussed in detail later in this article.

1. monday.com CRM

monday.com CRM lets you track and manage all aspects of your customer journey—from pre-to post-sales. I could easily customize the CRM’s look and feel with flexible column types, customizable views, robust sorting, and more options.

Custom dashboards make tracking real-time data on deal progress, sales figures, and team performance easy. While advanced CRM features such as sales forecasting, team activity tracking, contact management, and no-code automations—streamline the entire relationship management.

Receive real-time alerts when you enter a duplicate lead or account. Or switch to automated lead scoring to organize and prioritize high-value leads accurately.

monday.com CRM integrations with email providers and social and communication apps allow you to send and receive communications without switching apps. monday.com CRM hosts a dedicated app marketplace with one-click integrations to 150+ apps.

Above is a view of monday.com CRM, showing a deal tracking interface, featuring an organized table for managing active deals and closed deals. It displays details such as deal stages, owners, contacts, priorities, deal values, and creation dates, allowing you to manage your sales pipeline.

monday.com CRM has a user-friendly, clean interface that’s easy to navigate. The automation features save time by handling repetitive tasks, and the platform integrates smoothly with other tools.

monday.com Features

• Consolidate your sales rep and customer data, status, and interaction history into one view
• Use AI to compose, personalize, and analyze emails sent for lead nurturing and follow-ups
• Built-in sales forecasting module analyzes each deal value and closes probability
• Use automated lead scoring to organize and prioritize high-value leads
• Drag-and-drop automation builder to automate any tasks–from email sequences to customer routing and more

monday.com Pricing

monday.com CRM offers a 14-day free trial to explore its features and functionalities before you go ahead with their paid plans.

• Basic: £10/seat per month
• Standard: £14/seat per month
• Pro: £24/seat per month
• Enterprise: Custom pricing

Try monday.com CRM

2. Zoho CRM

Zoho CRM is a flexible and scalable solution with over 250k+ customers across 150 countries. Especially for startups and small businesses, Zoho is easy to use and secure, and it has demonstrated a 300% improvement in lead conversion rate.

If you’re already part of the Zoho app ecosystem, you will find this the best option. The software integrates well with other Zoho apps, making data importation quick and easy.
With the help of Zoho AI (Zia) and robust automation tools, you can accomplish almost all monotonous and analytical tasks. Think about deal predictions, sales forecasting, composing emails, automated routing and workflows, contact management, and more.

On top of AI and automation, I liked Zoho’s journey orchestrations. With a drag-and-drop visual editor, I could define my customer’s cross-platform journeys and develop personalized brand responses.

The dashboard of Zoho CRM offers a clear overview of the user’s open tasks, upcoming meetings, today’s leads, and deals closing within the month. It provides a centralized view to effectively manage customer interactions and sales activities.

Zoho CRM Features

• Control all communication channels, including email, social media, live chat, and telephony, from a centralized hub
• Use Journey Maps to visualize customer journeys in real-time and gather insight into your customers’ preferences
• Automate management processes like lead routing, follow-up emails, review processes, and more
• Enterprise-grade security with role-based access control, audit logs, vaults, real-time data backups, and encryption

Zoho CRM Pricing

Zoho CRM is free for up to three users and essentials like lead and contact management, documents, standard reports, and mobile apps. However, Zia and advanced CRM features are only available at premium subscriptions.

• Standard: £12/user/month
• Professional: £18/user/month
• Enterprise: £35/user/month  (Zia – AI Assistant)
• Ultimate: £42/user/month

Try Zoho CRM

3. Freshsales CRM

Freshsales is a balanced sales CRM with a fairly low pricing point. I recommend it for businesses with moderate customer interactions (50-100 messages/calls per day) who need powerful sales pipeline management and basic marketing automation.

You can choose from different views —Kanban, List, Grid, Calendar—to view your sales pipeline. Simple drag-and-drop cards across stages and keep your sales funnel in motion.
Most

Use Freddy AI to autofill customer information or automate any sales process, from writing emails to routing calls to the right sales rep. Freshsales spreads AI across various functions rather than centralizing it.

The contact management interface of Freshsales CRM displays detailed information about the contacts and sales statuses. It allows users to categorize contacts with tags like “Decision Maker” and “Influencer” while tracking their progress through the sales pipeline.

Freshsales users are positive about ease of use and reliable customer support.

Freshsales Features

• Enrich contacts with relevant information from social media and public sources
• Track prospects through their buying journey with unique contact lifecycle stages and substages
• Gain insights into sales performance and customer interactions via detailed dashboards and reports
• Appoint Freddy AI for lead scoring, prioritization, sales forecasting, and deal predictions
• Use IntelliAssign to auto-route conversations to the right customer expert or team based on skill level, conversation limits, and other factors
• Integrate LinkedIn’s extensive network of professionals and businesses right within your Freshsales workflow

Freshsales Pricing

There is a free plan for up to three users. And three premium plans:

• Growth: €9/user per month
• Pro: €39/user per month
• Enterprise: €59/user per month

Try Freshsales CRM

4. Pipedrive CRM

Pipedrive is a sales CRM solution helping 100k+ companies boost sales momentum and conversion rates. It has a real-time progress tracker, sales automation tools, procession forecasting, and an entire set-up for relationship management.

With a built-in lead database, you can automatically find and fill in information about customers available to the public on the web. It also has web forms and chatbots for efficient lead capturing.

Pipedrive has an AI interface, with features like an AI-powered sales assistant and AI email creation, which generate personalized emails based on user-defined criteria as you can see below.

My two cents—I like the visual clarity of Pipedrive. It’s easy to use and implement. However, you will find limited customization options.

Pipedrive CRM Features

• Built-in lead information system that scans the web for contact details, such as email address, industry, job profile, and more
• Access to multiple views, colour-coded labels, and other customization options for easy visibility into your sales pipeline
• Tools like forecasting, goal-setting, team monitoring, and preset sales metrics help you to make swift, informed decisions
• Automate lead scoring on any pre-defined criteria and optimize your pipeline for better conversion rates
• View, reply, and manage messages from Whatsapp or Facebook directly within Pipedrive

Pipedrive CRM Pricing

While Pipedrive CRM targets small to medium businesses, it does not offer a free plan. A 14-day free trial is available for the premium subscriptions.

• Essential: £14/seat/month
• Advanced: £39/seat/month
• Professional: £49/seat/month
• Power: £64/seat/month
• Enterprise: £99/seat/month

Try Pipedrive CRM

5. Zendesk Sell

Zendesk is a revenue driver CRM focusing on data transparency, easy sales, and support management. It streamlines customer support operations through its live chatbots and robust ticketing system, which allows businesses to manage inquiries efficiently.
You can create a searchable Knowledge Base with content about your products or services in multiple formats.

This allows answering common customer questions and helps customers self-troubleshoot problems. Turns out 51% of consumers prefer quicker answers via product FAQs over human intervention, so brownie points for this feature.

Whether you want to support customer support with AI or manage multiple sales pipelines, Zendesk provides a strong foundation with its sales forecasting, automatic price regulation, and smart quotations, which factor into your profitability.

The Funnel Report feature in Zendesk CRM, as shown above, provides a detailed breakdown of deals across various sales stages such as Prospecting, Qualified, and Won. It offers insights into deal values, progression rates, and ownership, helping sales teams track performance and optimize their pipelines effectively.

However, the many features can be a bit overwhelming initially, and I’ve sometimes experienced slowdowns. Customization options, like creating brand-specific email templates, are also limited in certain areas.

Zendesk Sell Features

• Centralized ticketing system management of customer requests across multiple communication channels
• Mobile-first interface helps your team log calls, messages, notes, or access information on the go
• Offers a self-serve knowledge base for customers to find answers independently
• Reporting and analytics provide accurate data modelling and pipeline diagnosis

Zendesk Sell Pricing

Zendesk Sell offers per agent per month plan. It offers a 14-day evaluation trial before you activate your paid plans. The paid plans are as follows:

• Sell Team: £15/month
• Sell Growth: £45/month
• Sell Professional: £89/month

Try Zendesk Sell

6. HubSpot CRM

HubSpot helps 200k+ teams across Reddit, DoorDash, AND WWF—organize, prioritize, and engage new and existing customers.

You can store and access all lead-related information and past journeys from a single pane of glass view. HubSpot also has a robust contact management system. It has tools for daily prospecting, smart send times, and automatic lead rotation.

I like how my sales activities are in sync with my Gmail and Outlook. I could integrate over 1,500 other apps into my sales pipeline – including Google Contacts and LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

HubSpot’s company management interface lets users filter and organize company records with advanced options like close dates, domain names, and regions. On the right, the Copilot feature assists by automating tasks such as creating new company records, providing real-time confirmations, and offering actionable follow-up suggestions for seamless customer management.

HubSpot Features

• Automatically prioritize leads with custom scoring criteria
• Grow your database with smart segmenting and nurturing features
• Build a library of sales content for your team to share, and track which documents close deals
• Use contacts’ histories to create segments based on website visits, email interactions, and more touchpoints
• Built-in reporting tools that allow users to track lead generation performance and analyze conversion rates
• Set up workflows to route leads to the right reps and trigger personalized marketing content and email campaigns

HubSpot Pricing

You can start with a free version (up to two users). The free version includes unlimited data and the ability to store up to one million contacts for as long as you want. Other plans include:

• Starter: £14/seat per month
• Professional: £1,017 per month (five seats)
• Enterprise: £3,740 per month (seven seats)

Try HubSpot

7. Salesforce CRM

Salesforce is a dominant CRM solution when it comes to enterprise SaaS. With huge community backing and never-ending event marketing, Salesforce has positioned itself as the customer-first CRM.

Enterprises primarily choose Salesforce when they have a boatload of internal workflows and procedures that need custom-building and future modification. It’s known for handling enormous amounts of data and rendering insights and correlations in a simple yet sophisticated way, the way enterprises like it.

With an array of first and third-party tools ready to be integrated – Slack, Atlassian, Google Suite, Microsoft, and any tool you might want to plug it with.

Salesforce CRM’s lead management interface offers detailed insights into a lead’s status, contact information, and campaign history.

A lead status progress bar visually tracks the lead’s journey, currently in the “Working” stage, with options to update it to “Nurturing” or “Converted.” On the right, the activity panel lists upcoming tasks, such as follow-up calls, and previously logged activities, enabling users to manage deadlines and interactions effectively. This comprehensive layout ensures sales reps can access all necessary data and guidance for successful lead conversion.

Hands down, I like how it provides the best advanced customer profiling, sales pipeline management with efficiency insights, and AI-powered customer relationship management.

Automating tasks like lead management and follow-ups saves time and lets the team focus on strategic activities. However, the customization process can be tedious and time-consuming. Sometimes, finding specific information is tricky, depending on how the system was initially set up.

Salesforce CRM Features

• Use predictive AI for sales forecasting and lead opportunity management
• Revenue Cloud helps you deliver the right product quotes and upsell opportunities to boost deal size and value offerings
• Service Cloud makes customer service a delightful experience with self-service tools and conversational intelligence based on FAQs

Salesforce CRM Pricing

Salesforce CRM offers pricing plans for both SMBs and enterprise and are listed below.

• Starter: £20/user/month
• Pro: £80/user/month
• Enterprise: £132/user/month
• Unlimited: £264/user/month
• Einstein 1 Sales: £400/user/month

Try Salesforce CRM

8. SugarCRM

SugarCRM positions itself as the ‘Mid-Market CRM,’ meaning it is for companies larger than small businesses but smaller than MNCs. This smart segmentation gives SugarCRM the advantage of designing features for a specific business segment. It is also on the pricier end, like the extremely pricer end.

SugarCRM emphasizes time and customer awareness. You’ll find more features on customer documentation, such as events, activity, goals, interactions, and historical behaviour. It also stresses the importance of building complete customer metadata over time.

SugarCRM does not offer a free trial. Users have reported a steep learning curve, rigorous integration, and implementation cycles. But the effort pays off when you understand how feature-rich the CRM is.

SugarCRM Features

• SugarSell enables your sales teams to focus on boosting win rates and helps shorten the average sales cycles
• Use SugarCRM’s predictive AI engine for reporting and forecasting
• Dubbed revenue intelligence, SugarCRM also locates difficult-to-reach prospect data
• Leverage automation and design workflows to chart campaigns and engagement strategy
• Provides smart self-service and knowledge base support with AI-powered customer support management

SugarCRM Pricing

SugarCRM offers four different pricing plans to choose from based on its feature set.

• Essential: £15/user/month
• Standard: £47/user/month
• Advanced: £68/user/month
• Premier: £108/user/month

Try SugarCRM

9. Capsule CRM

Capsule is an award-winning CRM software trusted by more than 40,000 customers. It stands out because of its easy setup, user-friendly interface, and customization options. 

It’s possible to customize fields, tags, objects, and even white-label the interface with your brand logo and colour scheme. With Capsule’s Kanban-style view, you can drag and drop deals as they move through the sales pipeline.

Capsule allows you to create multiple sales pipelines for different projects simultaneously and manage everything with a centralized pipeline dashboard.

Use built-in sales automation tools to streamline pipeline processes based on pre-defined sequences or custom triggers. For example, you can automate candidate management, customer onboarding, and other marketing and sales tasks.

Capsule CRM Features

• Choose from pre-built email templates or use AI to generate high-quality email copy that converts
• Auto-enrich contacts with the latest data—including job title, seniority, LinkedIn profiles and missing contact information
• Integrates with 70+ apps, including Quickbooks, Xero, Zapier, Whatsapp, and Slack
• Connect Capsule with Data Studio to create your own bespoke reports on your sales progress

Capsule CRM Pricing

Capsule offers a generous free plan, limited to two users and 250 contacts. Other than that, it has four premium plans:

• Starter: £14/user per month
• Growth: £27/user per month
• Advanced: £42/user per month
• Ultimate: £60/user per month

Try Capsule CRM

10. Bitrix24

Bitrix24 is an all-in-one SaaS with tools for project management, customer support, internal communications, and even website building.

The beauty of Bitrix24 is that all of these otherwise individual tools are packaged in one platform, seamlessly integrated, and available to you via web, desktop, or mobile app.

Manage tasks from a Kanban, Scrum, or Calendar style view. Use customizable triggers to automatically move leads/deals down the sales pipeline, view conversion rates, and bar chart analytics, such as deal and lead lifespan averages.

Ask AI to create compelling marketing text, brainstorm ideas, autofill fields, predict sales, and use cases. In contrast to many of the other CRMs on our list, Bitrix24 has attractive pricing for small businesses, but be ready for a steep learning curve. The user interface can be quite complex and tricky for beginners. Importing new data is more challenging compared to other CRM tools, and adding data manually feels inefficient.

The deal management interface in Bitrix24 CRM lets users can track ongoing deals, including their stages (e.g., “Create papers,” “Final invoice”) and associated activities. The left sidebar offers access to features like inventory management, collaboration tools, and automation rules, making it a comprehensive solution for managing sales and customer relationships.

Bitrix24 CRM Features

• Omnichannel communication via forms, live chat, WhatsApp, Instagram, Email, and more channels
• Create invoices and receive payments from customers
• Use time tracking, Gantt charts, and Kanban boards for effective pipeline management
• Integrated help desk allows for email ticketing, live chat support, and phone assistance
• Has over 100+ ready-made templates to create websites and landing pages for lead-capturing

Bitrix24 Pricing

Bitrix24 CRM offers free forever for unlimited users with limited features. For paid plans, the pricing is listed below:

• Basic: £36/month (5 users)
• Standard: £74/month (50 users)
• Professional: £149/month (100 users)
• Enterprise: £299/month (250 users)

Try Bitrix24 CRM

11. Close CRM

Close CRM is an excellent choice for small to midsize sales teams. It’s easy to use and has built-in communication tools for calling and SMS, like a VoIP power dialer. You also get automation features like Call Assistant, Predictive Dialer, and Call Coaching.

The interface is intuitive, and importing leads is easy with 100+ native integrations to popular data sources and marketing tools. But it may lack customization options for larger teams, despite the expensive pricing.

However, Close CRM compensates for this with Close AI. You can use Close AI as a conversational assistant to answer customer-related questions or transcribe and take notes in during calls.

Close CRM Features

• Enable Smart Views to segment contacts and create separate automations around them easily
• With an easy-to-view, Kanban-style board, you get complete visibility into every stage of your sales pipeline
• Over 100+ native, no code, and Zapier integrations
• Send and receive emails directly in your Close Inbox with a two-way email sync
• Use the visual automation builder to employ email, call, and task automation via automatic or manual triggers
• Ask CloseGPT, a conversational AI, to generate prospecting lists, extract agendas from calls, and summarize customer relationships via simple prompts

Close CRM Pricing

Close offers a 14-day free trial and the following paid plans:

• Base: $19/user per month
• Startup: $49/user per month
• Professional: $99/user per month
• Enterprise: $139/user per month

Try Close CRM

Which CRM is Free?

Zoho CRM, Freshsales, HubSpot, Bitrix24, and Capsule CRM offer a free forever plan.

Which CRM is Cheaper for a 5-Person Team?

Bitrix24 allows unlimited users in the free plan, making it the cheapest option for a 5 person team. Then we have Freshsales premium, starting at €9/user and costs <€50 per month for a five-person team.

References

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