Are you looking to find the best free crm for startups? You’re in the right place! I’ll introduce you to three free CRMs that are perfect for small businesses. Do you have a small startup to manage? You might need a help from a team that knows how to use a free crm software. Are you looking for the best free crm software to run your startup efficiently?
There are a plethora of free CRM software on the Internet, so many in fact, that it may be difficult to decide on a platform. The first factor a small business will need to consider is if they actually need a CRM platform. This will be driven by how your sales model works and whether or not you have any sales people or an extensive sales team. In this article I’ll discuss the best free CRM for startups.
In this post, we will provide you with information to make an informed buying decision when comparing top five free CRM software.
Here’s a quick overview of how a CRM can help your startup.
- Accurate Reporting
A good CRM will help you track your activities and generate reports to show your data, so you can make informed decisions.
- Ease of Use
Since CRM software offers lots of options, it’s easy to get lost. It’s crucial to look for a CRM that’s user-friendly and you and your team can use it with ease.
- Integration
The best CRM software is the one that easily integrates with other tools and services, allowing you to automate multiple processes.
- Customization
Since every business is different, you have to make sure it lets you customize workflows and processes. Customization helps in tailoring the tool according to your business needs.
An integrated CRM can be your best bet while starting a business. Also, it’s important to note that, as you’re are just starting out, the best CRM for your business should be mobile-friendly, best yet, a mobile CRM. So that you can interact with your customers on the go and track your progress along the way. For that, you can definitely try using a mobile CRM like NeoBiz. This app can help with creating leads for the business and offer a simple organization and routing starting with contact management to measuring sales productivity. Also, as per your requirement, it is free to use.
With early access, you can start storing customer information, track sales productivity, set sales reminders and notifications so that you never miss a follow-up again. The best thing is, you don’t have to worry about the language aspect too. It has a multi-lingual interface where you can also choose which platform you want to connect with your prospects – be it SMS, WhatsApp or by Phone.
Free CRM for Startups
Bitrix24
Are you a startup, looking for a free CRM solution? Bitrix24 offers everything you need in a CRM system plus much more. Take a look and see why 8+ million people have chosen Bitrix24 as the best free CRM for startups.
Bitrix24 is absolutely free for unlimited users and features 35+ business tools. Leads, contacts, companies, deals (opportunities), quotes, invoices – Bitrix24 has them all. You’ll be able to reach your customers by email (both incoming and outgoing emails are stored in our CRM) or phone (incoming/outbound, call forwarding, call recording). You can integrate Bitrix24 CRM with your website. And of course, API is available both for cloud and self-hosted versions.
HubSpot CRM (Web, Mac, Windows, iOS, Android)
If you use multiple apps within your company and want a CRM to integrate with them, there’s no better choice than HubSpot CRM. The mammoth App Marketplace has over 600 integrations available to various levels of HubSpot plans (e.g., Marketing Hub) with free-plan CRM users able to choose from over 150 apps in categories such as eCommerce, analytics, events, finance, project management, and customer success. Not only that, but many of these apps also provide free editions, which provides greater accessibility for small businesses with limited resources.
The CRM is forever free and includes unlimited users and room for up to one million contacts. Included are deal tracking, landing pages, live chat/chatbot, basic email marketing, and a ticketing feature for tracking service requests. All of these are designed to provide a taste of their meatier Sales, Marketing, and Service Hubs, which provide advanced features at tiered pricing.
For many, the CRM will be all that’s needed to track deals and manage relationships, especially if you’re integrating with other business apps in your stack. For example, a good first step is to connect your Outlook 365 or Gmail account so you can email directly from a contact record, track conversations, and use the sales templates to quickly respond.
HubSpot makes managing relationships easy with a contact record showing all sales, ticketing, and website activity with a timeline of pages viewed if the tracking code is installed. It will also show activity from your integrations. For instance, if you use Mailchimp for email campaigns, the contact record will show sends, opens, clicks, and bounces. Similarly, an Eventbrite integration will show an event registration in the contact’s timeline.
Connecting apps was straightforward for the handful I connected, but if you get stuck, each app’s integration page has a setup guide and resources to help. Also note that not all of the integration features will be available to free CRM users because they require features from the advanced paid plans.
Zapier adds thousands of more integration options for HubSpot. For example, you can automatically add new leads or email marketing contacts to HubSpot as contacts. Learn about five of the most popular ways to automate business operations in HubSpot.Copy new lead responses from Facebook Lead Ads to a HubSpot formUse this ZapCreate or update HubSpot contacts from new Mailchimp subscribersUse this ZapSee more HubSpot integrations powered by
HubSpot CRM Price: Free for unlimited users; from $50/month if you add on the Marketing, Sales, or Service Hub
Zoho
Benefits:
Zoho CRM provides a small business-friendly platform with a simple user interface, customizable modules, pragmatic automation, and social media features.
If you’re seeking free-ness, their unpaid plan for up to three users is a good place to start. The platform will allow you to build up and define specific workflow, manage leads, and start rationalizing day-to-day operations. It integrates with Twitter, Google+, and Facebook too, so you can reach out to leads with superhuman perfect timing.
Once you outgrow the free CRM, you can upgrade to the reasonably priced Standard version of Zoho, which pumps up the usability factor with robust sales forecasting and KPI tracking. The Enterprise version piles on more features like stage-by-stage sales funnel tracking, data comparisons across users, teams, regions, products/services, and much more.
Drawbacks:
Zoho has no email tracking or individual lead notifications, which might be a problem if one-on-one, long-term engagement with specific users is integral to your business. UI can be a bit laggy. Paying for Zoho add-on modules to give the CRM more mileage can shoot up operational costs quickly.
The free version lacks mass emailing features and overall the CRM has pretty limited customizability.
Pricing:
- A free version is available for up to 3 users. 15-day free trial for paid versions.
- Standard edition is $14 per user/month, billed annually.
- Professional edition is $23 per user/month, billed annually.
- Enterprise edition is $40 per user/month, billed annually.
- Ultimate edition is $52 per user/month, billed annually. Exclusive 30-day free trial.
Really Simple Systems
Benefits:
Really Simple Systems (RSS for short) doesn’t shy away from touting their marketing automation, sales and service platform as simple—but that doesn’t mean it lacks sophistication, it’s just really easy to use. This is especially handy for companies with distributed offices and remote workforces.
While they have paid-for versions, their free option is more than just a temporary trial offer for companies up to two users, so budding businesses and solo entrepreneurial ventures can use the CRM without watching the calendar. It allows for unlimited contacts and up to 100 MBs of document storage. The free version includes many of the core features including sales automation and customer service.
Free users will be able to access distinct management tools for both contacts, which updates in real time all relevant info and related tasks for contacts, vendors and suppliers; and leads, which aims to convert contacts into eventual sales. RSS also does reporting their own way, dividing up the action in two parts.
For one, there’s ‘Listing reports’ for quick stats on simple questions like, “how many hits did we get this month?” (you can formulate more complex questions too). Then there’s ‘Forecast reports’ which focus on expected sales numbers in a variety of time frames.
For small businesses in the B2B game, RSS makes moving into the CRM zone a snap.
Drawbacks:
Generating reports is probably more complex than it needs to be. Opportunities system can be a bit clunky to use. Email marketing could be better; the email templates are fairly basic.
Also, if you’re using Outlook, you can’t link tasks to trigger active reminders in your inbox.
Pricing:
- Free plan for up to 2 users.
- Starter plan is $14 per user/per month billed annually, and $15 per user/per month billed monthly.
- Professional plan is $30 per user/per month billed annually, and $33 per user/per month billed monthly.
- Enterprise plan is $46 per user/per month billed annually, and $50 per user/per month billed monthly.
What makes a great free CRM?
CRM vendors change their plans every year. While new features are always being added, it’s the free plans that usually experience the chopping block. In other words, features once included are now only available in paid versions. Fortunately, companies are still providing these entry-level apps to use “as-is” or as launching pads to better-equipped plans.
Though all the platforms we selected are top-notch in their own ways, there’s no perfect free CRM. For example, an app that seems to have few limitations upfront may have expensive upgrade options. Another may seem stingy with their features but have inexpensive upgrade plans that make them more appealing as needs change.
Here’s how we evaluated the CRMs in our research:
- Contact management. When creating contacts, you should have some flexibility in the type of information you can add. Features like custom fields let you collect what info is important for your business. Also, a free app should provide room for at least several hundred contacts to get you started.
- Ease of use. CRMs should make it relatively easy to perform repetitive actions (e.g., contact creation), input information, and provide a system with some customization options.
- Deal management. Tracking deals is a must-have feature for any CRM, and those that provide a visual (e.g., Kanban) pipeline with the ability to customize stages based on your sales process are ideal.
- Integration with other apps. We valued CRMs that provide integrations with third-party apps, whether natively or with Zapier, since a CRM is just one part of your business’s tech stack.
Conclusion
A free CRM can help you do a lot of things. This is why it’s vital to have the best free CRM for your startup business. When it comes to planning and managing your startup project, giving attention to detail plays a critical role. This is the reason why you need the best free CRM solution to help you out.
Free CRMs tend to have little more functionality than Google Sheets. They will charge you for just about any feature that will actually help you make sales. If you want to quickly grow your startup, that might not be enough.