Best Free Crm Tools For Small Business

There is a long list of CRM software you can pick from. You can use Google’s forms or Microsoft’s Outlook. You may even go for Salesforce or any other paid CRM software. But can these alternatives offer the same features and functionalities? Is it necessary to spend thousands on a CRM system when there are free tools you could be using which will do the job just as well?

A well-written CRM software is the perfect weapon that small businesses could use to grab the attention of their customers easily.

Freshworks

Freshworks CRM  »

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Best Free CRM of 2021360 OVERALL RATING

At the top of our rating is Freshworks CRM, designed for small to midsize businesses. Freshworks CRM offers CRM and marketing tracking in its Forever Free plan. Freshworks CRM’s free plan includes access for unlimited users, contact management, and lead management through lead capture forms and website tracking. Users can leverage the built-in phone system and web chatbot to extend their customer communication touchpoints. As needs grow, businesses can upgrade to a paid program starting at $35 per user per month (billed monthly).

Learn more in our Freshworks CRM Review.

Agile CRM

Agile CRM  »

Agile CRM

360 OVERALL RATING

Agile CRM offers a free CRM solution for up to 10 users, allowing businesses to manage up to 50,000 contacts and companies. Agile CRM also offers email tracking, custom sales pipelines, and lead scoring – making it a robust free solution for small businesses.

Agile CRM also offers paid tiers for companies with more extensive needs. Features in paid tiers include landing page builders, marketing automation, and customer support. Agile CRM paid programs start at $14.99 per user per month.

Learn more in our Agile CRM review.

Zoho CRM – Best Budget Small Business CRM

Zoho  »Zoho

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Best Budget Small Business CRM360 OVERALL RATING

3.8 out of 5MONTHLY PLAN COST$9/User & UpSUBSCRIPTION PLANMonthly or AnnualMOBILE APPMORE DETAILSSEE REVIEW

Zoho CRM offers free CRM tools for up to three users. The free solution offers basic sales management tools for leads, contacts, and accounts as well as call logs, workflows, and standard reports. Users can also leverage basic email templates to streamline communication and implement website forms to collect new prospects.

Small businesses considering purchasing a CRM or that will soon outgrow a free CRM should consider Zoho CRM’s paid subscription. You can upgrade the free version of Zoho CRM to a paid subscription of Bigin, Zoho’s small business CRM, for more customization options and additional functionality. Prices for Bigin start at $9 per user per month, which is why this is our pick for the best budget small business CRM.

Learn more in our Zoho review.

Insightly CRM

Insightly  »

Insightly

For teams of two, Insightly offers a free version of its CRM. The free version allows businesses to manage up to 2,500 records, including contacts, leads, and accounts. Users can also add up to two custom fields for each type of record, allowing the business to customize the tool to work for their own business. With five email templates, companies on the free plan can streamline and standardize communications. The dashboard analytics can display up to 10 custom reports.

Businesses with more advanced needs can upgrade to a paid plan to unlock additional storage, integration, sync capabilities, and more support options. Insightly paid plans start at $35 per user per month when billed monthly.

Learn more in our Insightly review.

Apptivo

Apptivo  »

Apptivo

Rounding out our rating is Apptivo. It offers a free starter CRM plan for one user. The CRM helps businesses manage leads, contacts, tasks, appointments, and notes. The selection of features allows a user to track the most important details about their prospects and customers in one simple system. Apptivo Starter CRM also includes tools to manage other key business contacts including suppliers, distributors, and employees.

Businesses with more users and more complex needs can upgrade to paid plans for $10 per user per month with a monthly subscription.

Learn more in our Apptivo review.

Capsule

Benefits: 

Capsule works to bump not just your customer relationships, but all your business relationships, to the next level. And this it does ever so simply, with a clean user interface and zero learning curve.

Rather than piling on extended features, Capsule quite simply hones in on being really good at managing daily work. You can instantly find out what’s going on with your sales pipeline (bids, lead generation, proposals, customer data, etc.) and what your team needs to do and when.

It also makes it easy to find key information—contact lists can be imported from Gmail, Outlook, and your CSV spreadsheet and database files.

If you run a business solo or with a partner, you can get by with Capsule’s free version (the cap is two users). The Professional version features Zapier, G Suite, Zendesk, Twitter, and Mailchimp integration, helping you collect information and capture leads from across your apps.

Drawbacks: 

The free plan is capped at 250 contacts, so you may find yourself suddenly hitting a glass ceiling and having to commit to a paid plan. To keep using the product you’ve invested in for your day-to-day business, you may go from paying nothing to dishing out $18/month (or exponentially more). 

Apart from that, in order to track and auto-generate contacts from email, you’ll have to remember to BCC them to your Dropbox, which is quite easy to forget.

Pricing:  

  • Free, basic version of Capsule is available for up to 2 users. 
  • Professional version is priced at $18 per user/ per month, billed monthly.
  • Teams version is priced at $36 per user/per month, billed monthly. 

A 30-day free trial is available for Professional and Teams.

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BenchmarkONE 

Benefits:

BenchmarkONE is a very comprehensive CRM system for sales and marketing. It’s also great for email marketing automation to gather and qualify prospects. The sales automation features manage your pipeline and help win more successful conversions.

It’s great for small to medium businesses like agencies, private practices and consultants. It also offers very detailed analytics and reporting.

Drawbacks:

Teams with more than 5 people will need to take a more expensive plan. There are no customer support tools, so it’s not a truly all-in-one CRM.

Pricing:

  • Free version is good just for 1 user
  • Core $70 is for 2 users per month, billed semi-annually
  • Pro $139 is for 5 users per month, billed semi-annually
  • Enterprise $199 is for unlimited users per month, billed semi-annually

There are also 2 premium onboarding services valued at $199 (included with Core Plans) and $399 (included with Pro and Enterprise plans).

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eWay-CRM

Benefits:

eWay-CRM is a Microsoft Outlook plug-in that provides you with all the tools necessary to manage customer relationships. It’s embedded right into Microsoft Outlook, which is a great plus for those teams who want to work in a familiar environment.

You can:

  • Manage leads and deals
  • Track projects and tasks
  • Collaborate with your team

All without leaving Microsoft Outlook!

This CRM has a lot of great features that make it highly effective for any small or medium-sized business. In short, it provides you with a range of good-to-have tools, including email marketing, lead management and more! Whatever you want to do, eWay-CRM has a way to do it.

The system is very easy to use as it can be customized for your specific needs. You can customize the user fields, the workflows, and design form layouts in a way that helps your productivity and efficiency.

In short, eWay-CRM is a top pick if you’re looking to improve your sales and customer connections—especially if you’re a Microsoft Office user. Smaller companies that need a CRM integrated with Microsoft Outlook will want to give this software a try.

Drawbacks:

The free plan is quite limited while the paid plans might be high-priced for small and medium-sized companies. Considering the plugin is integrated into Outlook, there’s no option to download it onto a Mac. Luckily, there’s a web-based version Mac users can use.

Pricing:

The good news is that eWay-CRM comes with a free plan that you can use for an unlimited period of time. The drawback is that it only supports one user and comes with 200 MB Cloud Storage. The other great news is you can opt to pay for the software on a subscription basis (cloud version) or purchase a lifetime license (host it on your own server). The cheapest monthly plan stands at $24 user/month, while the most affordable lifetime license starts at $369/user + 15% annual support.

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HubSpot

Benefits:

HubSpot is one of the biggest vendors out there (up there with Salesforce), and they offer a free CRM for unlimited users with basic features. 

The free HubSpot CRM allows you to assign and track leads, manage the sales process, manage workflows for better project management, and record customer interactions across every channel in one place. It also has pretty comprehensive email marketing, as well as inbound marketing tools (the latter is quite useful for getting search engine hits for blog posts).

The platform works with G Suite and Microsoft Office, making implementation and data syncing seamless. Integration with Zapier facilitates easy information sharing and task management across apps like Google Sheets, Facebook Lead Ads, Slack, and more). 

The non-free, paid add-on packages for HubSpot CRM boost data storage, generate more sophisticated reports, and incorporate new AI and advanced automation tech.

Drawbacks:

The free CRM has many features, but a lot of them aren’t that robust, which means you may find yourself having to shell out for Marketing, Sales, or Service Hub products. Customizability is limited, which might make the CRM hard for certain niche small businesses to tweak and meaningfully implement.

Pricing: 

  • HubSpot CRM is free and the number of users is unlimited.
  • Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, and Service Hub add-on packages are $50 each per user/per month, billed monthly.
  • HubSpot CMS starts at $300 per month, billed monthly. 
  • All-inclusive Starter Growth Suite starts at $113 per user/per month, billed monthly.

Learn More: HubSpot

Bitrix24

Benefits:

Based on number of users, Bitrix24 is one of the most popular free CRM in the world. Bitrix24 provides a cloud CRM solution that’s free for up to 12 users, with a cap on data storage of 5 GB. Features-wise, it provides largely the same range as paid plans, albeit scaled-down. Everything you need is there: pipeline management, lead management, sales tracking, reporting, task automation, and more. 

The user interface helps make Bitrix24 easy to use (the Kanban view is especially good). There’s voice, email, chat, and video channel access in-app, and mobile apps for iOS and Android to ensure your team can clinch deals and defuse issues at critical moments.

Drawbacks:

While the UI looks nice, it’s sometimes a bit confusing to navigate through different modules. Customization possibilities may not be robust enough for complex and/or specialized business applications. The app can lag sometimes. 

It should also be said that Bitrix24’s learning curve is firmly in the ‘moderate’ category. 

Pricing:

  • Free starter business tool suite for up to 12 users.
  • CRM+ plan for up to 6 users is $55 per user/per month billed annually, and $69 per user/per month billed monthly. 
  • Project+ plan for up to 24 users is $55 per user/per month billed annually, and $69 per user/per month billed monthly.
  • Standard plan for up to 50 users is $79 per user/per month billed annually, and $99 per user/per month 
  • Professional plan is $159 per user/per month billed annually, and $199 per user/per month for an unlimited number of users. 
  • The prices above are for the cloud-based version. On-premise solutions are also available.

Learn More: Bitrix24

Streak

Benefits:

Streak provides a fully integrated Gmail CRM built into your inbox. Piggybacking off this familiar everyday software tool, the app makes CRM adoption easy for new users. 

The free version of Streak, intended for personal use (i.e. freelancers and solo entrepreneurs), includes basic CRM tools and pretty comprehensive email features. Email templates allow you to personalize emails and send them out at high volume, a far more effective alternative to generic mass-blast email marketing. 

To populate your mail lists, you can effortlessly pull contact information and data from Google Sheets using the Streak CRM Importer add-on, or import offline CSV files. This means it’s no longer necessary to fill in the blanks and email everyone one-by-one.

Email tracking gives you a heads up on who read your email, and where on earth they read it (thanks to a handy map view), as well as how many times. This is excellent for increasing visibility across your team, but particularly sales⁠—when you know someone read your message and understand their behavior a bit more, you can move the sales process along by following up in a way that’s both well-timed and appropriate. You’ll be able to avoid repetitive email practices and nurture the correct customer relationships.

Call logs and meeting notes, meanwhile, help keep an easy-to-find record of your non-inbox interactions, organized chronologically and by type. You’ll also be able to manage leads and sales by creating any number of pipelines you might need (the free version provides for unlimited pipelines too). Keep in-app notes, centralize record-keeping, utilize data tracking on your contact correspondence, and find out if leads have or haven’t opened your emails. 

Drawbacks:

Streak is a browser extension, which is inconvenient when it comes to changing devices, as it’ll be necessary to download the extension and log in again on every new device you access. Given that Streak is a lightweight CRM, it might not work for more complex business processes. 

Pricing:

  • Personal version is free for individual users.
  • Professional plan is $49 per user/per month, billed annually.
  • Enterprise plan is $129 per user/per month, billed annually. 

Learn More: Streak

Conclusion

Wrike is also a great CRM software. It is 100% free, and offers plenty of features for small businesses alike. Wrike is a cloud-based solution that has been popular for quite some time. The business plan of the organization costs $300 per month, while the Unlimited plan is at $600.

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