In today’s business, CRM systems are an absolute must-have. These key platforms come at a variety of costs and feature sets, yet an increasing number of CRM solutions provide cost-free options. Whether you’re beginning from scratch or switching to a new platform, there are various advantages to using a free alternative.
These free CRM solutions are available as a feature-limited or time-limited version of a paid edition. Deciding on a CRM can be challenging; hence premium vendors offer this option to help evaluate the right tool for your business.
Tips to consider before choosing a free CRM for small business
Choosing free CRM software is similar to selecting a paid version without the cost commitment. Before purchasing, “test-drive” or review several systems that meet your needs. Here’s how we evaluated our top seven free CRMs:
- The best features for small businesses
- Benefits for your business
- Review sites to help you choose the best CRM
- Breakdown of pricing tiers
Many free options limit the number of features available in their basic package. It’s worth noting when comparing various paid solutions for sales and marketing needs. The following is a list of essential elements:
- Contact management
- Pipeline management and sales forecasting
- Reporting and analytics
- Process standardization
- Email integration
- Email tracking
- Call recording
- Interaction tracking
- Software integrations
A new CRM should boost your productivity and allow your team to increase efficiency. The system should automate some existing operations and mitigate human error, where possible. To help identify the right CRM, leverage data from comparative websites to get a detailed description, user reviews, CRM rating, alternatives, or comparison tools, like G2, Capterra, FindMyCRM, and GetApp.
Finally, familiarize yourself with various pricing tiers for the CRM you’re considering to ensure the option to upgrade is feasible and within budget.
Review the top free CRM for small businesses
EngageBay is an all-in-one marketing, sales, and service CRM for small businesses and startups. It’s one of the most affordable CRMs on the market with a free forever plan that covers up to 15 users.
Main Benefits: EngageBay provides users with a 360-degree view of their customers, helps close more deals faster, and offers insights to improve customer retention rates. The product also has an A/B testing tool to help optimize marketing campaigns.
Key Features: EngageBay’s key features include lead capture and management, contact management, deal pipeline, email integration, activity tracking, visual sales reports, website visitor tracking, live chat support, and knowledge base. It also offers webforms, an intuitive sales dashboard, and multichannel support.
Pricing
- Free forever plan: Yes
- Basic: $14.99/month
- Growth: $49.99/month
- Pro: $99.99/month
Free Features:
- Email marketing
- Autoresponders
- Sequences
- CRM
- Helpdesk
- Landing pages
- Lead capture and management
- Email broadcast and sequences
- Contact management
- Deal pipeline
- Email integration
- Activity tracking
- Visual sales reports
- Website visitor tracking
- Live chat support
- Knowledge base
- Webforms
Agile CRM is a platform that is designed for small to medium-sized companies. It builds one unified platform for your customer data, analytics, and marketing. This cloud-based program focuses on combining revenue, marketing, social media, and other engagement areas.
Main Benefits: Speeds up marketing and sales operations, which can lead to better consumer interactions. Agile also provides transparency into every deal stage.
Using a drag-and-drop design in some of its plans, marketing operations are both smooth and effective. A simple social media integration streamlines the use of different channels.
Key Features: Agile is a fully integrated CRM with a modern interface for sales monitoring, contact management, marketing automation, web analytics, 2-way emails, telephony, and helpdesk. The centralized framework streamlines activities and increases performance KPIs.
Pricing
- Free trial: Yes
- Starter: $14.99 per user per month
- Regular: $49.99 per user per month
- Enterprise: $79.99 per user per month
Free Features:
- 50,000 Contacts & Companies
- Custom Data Fields
- Lead Scoring
- Unlimited Deals, Tasks & Documents
- Appointment Scheduling
- Custom Deal Milestones
- Email Tracking
- Two Way Email Integration
- Custom Deal Tracks
- Two Way Telephony
With a relationship focus, HubSpot CRM provides users with an inbound marketing methodology. The tool offers a robust approach to monitoring and engaging customers and prospects at every buyer journey stage.
Main Benefits: HubSpot CRM incorporates the central “hubs” of your company: marketing, sales, service, and operations. HubSpot syncs the working process of your entire team using the inbound approach through three phases of your flywheel: attract, engage, and delight.
Another great benefit of HubSpot is the free edition. If you want to invest in more advanced features, you can select among different plans for Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, Service Hub, Operations Hub, or CMS.
Key Features: HubSpot CRM has an intuitive interface and is perfect for varying sizes of business. HubSpot is created for companies to quickly scale their rivals by automating data integration from startup to established.
Pricing
- Free trial: Yes
- Marketing Hub: $50 – $3,200 per month
- Sales Hub: $50 – $1,200 per month
- Service Hub: $50-$1,200 per month
- Operations Hub: $0 – $800 per month
- HubSpot CMS: $300 per month
Free Features:
- Contact management
- Contact website activity
- Companies
- Deals
- Tasks & activities
- Company insights
- Gmail and Outlook integration
- App Marketplace integrations
- Custom support form fields
- Prospects
- Ticketing
- Forms
- Ad management
- Shared inbox
- Reporting dashboard
- Email tracking & notifications
- Email templates
- Canned snippets
- Documents
- Calling
- Meeting scheduling
- Messenger integration
- Custom properties
Capsule is a simple, flexible, powerful web-based, free CRM for small businesses. A no-nonsense system for companies performing lead management and customer segmentation, it’s perfect for people who need to organize contacts and make calls.
Main Benefits: Capsule CRM offers comprehensive features, accessibility, security, and great integrations. A cloud-based framework provides mobile applications through software for both iOS and Android, catering to enterprises of all types, providing organized, robust contact management, sales pipeline, and business organization operation.
Key Features: Capsule implementation is straightforward and requires no onboarding. The free version offers 250 contacts before charging. Track critical milestones, and produce company updates or reports from the sales pipeline.
Pricing
- Free trial: Yes
- Professional: $12 per user per month
- Teams: $24 per user per month
- Enterprise: $36 per user per month
Free Features:
- 250 contacts
- Unlimited custom fields
- Unlimited sales opportunities
- Unlimited cases
- Unlimited tracks
- Calendar
- Task management
- Customizable sales milestones
- Kanban visual pipeline
- Customized filtered list
- Sales pipeline dashboard
- Email integration
- Security & user permission
- API access
- Add-ons & integrations
- Customer Support
Zoho is an award-winning CRM trusted in 180 countries by a global network of over 150,000 organizations. Zoho serves as a single board for all of your departments and streamlines your working processes.
Main Benefits: Zoho CRM provides robust solutions, increased market presence, and exceptional customer experience. According to a PCMag survey, Zoho is highly recommended, and the only CRM with a positive NPS score among other successful vendors.
Key Features: Zoho CRM can be easily customized, from startups to large enterprises, it’s one-size-fits-most customer relationship management platform provides companies the ability to increase revenue, communications, and customer service efforts.
Integrated with Google Apps, ConstantConnect, QuickBooks, MailChimp, Microsoft Outlook, Zoho provides everything under one roof, often saving money. In addition, businesses access customers via various channels such as telephone, live chat, email, and social media and get real-time notifications with customer interactions. Zoho’s AI-powered sales assistant Zia is a business helping hand. With Zia, companies can easily find needed data getting advanced deals and lead predictions.
Pricing
- Free trial: Yes
- Standard: $12 per user per month, billed annually.
- Professional: $22 per user per month, billed annually
- Enterprise: $35 per user per month, billed annually
- Ultimate: $45 per user per month, billed annually
Free Features:
- Leads, deals, contacts, and accounts management
- Tasks, call logs, events, and notes
- Advanced filters
- Standard reports
- Email templates
- Email authentication
- Web-to-lead and web-to-contact forms
Bitrix24 is a platform for free collaboration. Manage leads and deal with a high degree of automation. Bitrix24 allows companies to build a free website and landing pages directly connecting to the CRM from inside your account without HTML coding.
Main Benefits: Direct calls to clients using Zingaya VoxImplant. Built-in integration with VoxImplant.com makes web phone calls directly from a website or Desktop App. Also, email marketing is free. Send emails to a list of leads, contacts, or businesses individually or in groups.
Key Features: With Bitrix24 CRM, open channels link the most common social networks and messengers. Client messages from Facebook, VK, Telegram, Skype, and other networks are spread according to set rules.
Bitrix24 CRM allows businesses to set immediate goals and targets for each sales agent, pipeline, and the entire company. Generate custom invoices quickly, with automated data entry.
Pricing:
- Free trial: Yes
- Free version available for unlimited users
- Paid plans start at $24 per user per month
Free Features:
- Collaboration (chat, video calls, calendar, drive, feed, knowledge base)
- Sales funnels
- Tasks & projects
- Quotes with custom fields and statuses
- Unlimited deals
- Unlimited contacts
- Unlimited companies
- Invoicing
- Contact center
- Sales targets and quotas
- Web forms
- Data import/export and integration
- Mobile app
- Access rights and roles
- Marketing automation
- Website builder
Freshworks is a comprehensive CRM solution for companies with functionality in 30 languages while providing a free CRM for small businesses. It draws, handles, and closes leads via its intuitive interface, built-in phone, email monitoring, and lead-based scoring.
Main Benefits: Prioritize sales opportunities and improve performance via sales insight tools. Businesses can level up their capacity by leveraging a visual deal pipeline, charts, dashboards, and intelligent workflow automation.
Key Features: Freshworks is one of the few CRMs that allow calls to be transmitted directly without the need for external hardware or applications. CRM enables you to track previous conversations and use them to schedule future interactions.
Freshworks delivers a 360-degree view of related data and interactions through all funnel stages: Visual Distribution Funnel, Transaction Predictability, and Deal Rotation. It comes complete with a suite of default reports such as territory, email reports, pipeline, and more.
Pricing
- Free trial: Yes
- Growth: $29 per user per month, billed annually
- Pro: $69 per user per month billed annually
- Enterprise: $125 per user per month, billed annually.
Free Features:
- Unlimited users
- Lead capture
- Lead, customer, and deal tracking
- Notes, tasks, and appointments
- Website visitor tracking
- Mobile app access
- Live chat and chatbots
Test-drive before you buy.
A free CRM is a transparent way to start prospecting, sales, and marketing automation, while quickly integrating it as a growing part of your company. To put it simply, it’s an opportunity to put one of the top-selling CRM through its paces to determine if its features are a fit for your company’s goals. Ready to make the switch? Upgrade your subscription with a knowledge-based decision on which system is right for you.
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