CRM software helps you get the most out of business interactions and relationships, by tracking your contacts. Whether you’re looking to become more effective at email, ensuring you follow-up with your most important contacts, or automating your sales process, Inspector Jones can help find the CRM tool for you.
Our buyers’ guide for CRM software compares the best simple CRM tools available, for small businesses, freelancers, and small sales teams.
The best CRM software makes you more effective at the things you do today - like keeping in contact, checking and writing email, making telephone calls, and following-up on sales opportunities.
Here’s what you can do with good CRM tools:
We’ve reviewed the top CRM software against the most important features for small businesses and individuals. Here’s what we looked for:
Some CRM software is free for limited use - usually 1-3 people, and a few hundred different contacts. While there are some great options, you might feel limited by the free CRM features, and want to upgrade to a paid version.
We recommend Zoho CRM as the best free CRM available. Zoho provide one of the best-value feature-packed (paid) CRM’s on the market, and they also offer a generous free tier. Their free CRM is limited to 3 users, 5,000 records, and basic features.
Beyond Zoho, the other options you might want to review are:
For the best value-for-money, we recommend aiming under $10 per user per month, or looking for a flat-fee which is the same cost regardless of how many users you have.
Our favourites for best value are:
All of the CRM tools listed in this review offer great contact management features, a solid sales pipeline, plus calendars, tasks, mobile access, data import and team collaboration.
If Pipedrive and Highrise aren’t for you, the other good-value CRM tools that we like are Salesforce Contact Manager, Insightly, Capsule CRM, Nimble, Nutshell, Zoho, and Batchbook.
For making your sales as effective as possible, we recommend looking for some more advanced sales features.
Look for comprehensive sales-pipeline features with configurable pipeline stages, sales performance reporting, dashboard, sales goals, sales forecasting, team collaboration, plus team and individual reports.
Our favourite CRM’s to maximise your sales performance are:
If you work with a lot of telephone sales, you might also be interested to look at Zoho CRM, Base CRM, and Close.io.
If you spend a long time in front of your email, we recommend you look for a CRM that automates your email as much as possible.
We looked for tools with deep email integration - those which sync your inbox and outbox, automatically linking emails to the right contacts. The best CRMs have plugins for Outlook, Google Apps, Office 365, and more. We also looked for functionality to send bulk emails, and template emails.
Our favourite tools for automating email are:
You might also be interested in Sugar CRM, which has a great set of plugins for more features.
Some CRM software tools help to reduce your workload by automating tasks. This includes things like rules which automatically create tasks, send emails, or raise alerts; programs for drip email marketing campaigns; or automatically routing jobs to the right people.
This is a feature that is more common at higher-end CRM tools that are beyond the prices we’ve reviewed here. However, if you do need automation, the best options are:
The CRM services we’ve reviewed here are at the simple end of the market - they are all under $50/user/month, and have foundation features.
If you are a growing organisation, it makes sense to choose a CRM which has an upgrade pathway to bigger and better things. That includes more enterprise levels of security, support and integration, plus expanded features for customer-service and marketing. We also looked for a solid enterprise customer base.
Our recommendation is Salesforce Group Edition, which is a good CRM, with plenty of room to grow to more fully-featured Salesforce editions. You might also want to consider either Zoho CRM or SugarCRM.
