There is no denying the importance of a good CRM (Customer Relationship Management) Software. As a company owner, you can never underestimate the value that such software will bring to your business.
A good CRM software will definitely help you manage and organize all of your contacts more efficiently. That’s why it is really important to do proper research before deciding on the best free CRM software for small business.
Insightly
Insightly is a CRM platform that’s designed for small- and mid-size business (SMBs) looking to improve their lead management and boost sales capabilities. Insightly offers a forever-free plan that provides everything users need to manage projects, record sales, and track contacts.
Insightly specializes in ensuring your business offers customers the best possible customer support. The platform is aesthetically appealing, with easy-to-use dashboards, cloud-based deployment, and it’s own superb customer service.
Do more with less for free with Insightly CRM for sales and marketing automation. (via the Blueprint)
If you graduate to a paid plan, you have three to choose from. The Plus plan is $35/month per user and builds on the free plan with additional features and 100 pre-designed email templates.
The Professional plan is $59/month per user and adds the ability to assign leads to individual salespeople. The Enterprise option is $129/month per user and provides unlimited components for all the main features you need.
Agile CRM
Agile CRM is built for SMBs as well as freelancers. It’s one of the CRM leaders in terms of ease of use. Agile CRM developers have optimized the usability to deliver a logical, easily navigable layout.
Most all major features are just a click away at any time. These features include streamlined customer data intake, lead tracking, appointment scheduling, email tracking, and call-tracking tools to make and record calls directly in the platform.
Agile CRM provides all your CRM needs for free. (via the Blueprint)
If you ever need to graduate from the free option, Agile CRM offers three affordable pricing options. The Starter tier is $15/month per user and adds more marketing levers.
The Regular tier is $50/month per user and builds in help desk tools and reporting capabilities. The final option is their Enterprise tier at $80/month per user and includes extensive integrations and even more reporting capabilities.
HubSpot CRM
HubSpot is the free software stalwart for CRM and marketing software. The free HubSpot option is a combination of HubSpot’s CRM, marketing, sales, and services tools.
It’s as well suited for sales teams in need of CRM, as it is suited for marketers to automate communications. Key features include contact management, deal tracking, form builder, email and ad management, live chat with site visitors, ticketing support for customer service, and more.
Build workflows that automate communications based on lead behavior. (via the Blueprint)
If you decide to graduate from HubSpot’s free CRM to one of their hubs, you’re looking at a baseline price of $50 per month for two users. The marketing hub goes up from there to $800 per month then $3,200 per month.
The sales hub is similar at $500 per month and $1,200 per month. There is an option to bundle paid plans, similar to the free CRM bundle. But you can see that it’s a huge commitment to go from the free option to a middle or top tier for one of the paid hub plans.
There’s no doubt these are powerful tools, but it will likely be some time before you need to graduate to all the features, users, and more that are offered with those expensive options.
EngageBay (Web, iOS, Android)
It’s getting harder each year to find a free CRM that provides sales, service, and marketing functions. Understandably so. That’s a lot to ask for a freemium app. EngageBay, a relatively new kid on the block, is one of the few gratis all-in-ones left. Not only that, the company makes upgrading to paid plans very affordable.
The app comes with 500 contacts, and each contact record shows a 360-degree view. Visible (when applicable) are activities, emails, deals, tasks, notes, workflows, chats, events, and other touchpoints that allow users to see how a contact has interacted with your company over time.
Create multiple—one of the few to allow this option—customizable pipelines for different sales processes or products. Sales sequences, which let you create, schedule, and track a series of automated, personalized emails for following up with contacts and leads, is another feature usually not found in a free plan. Sequences are also found under the marketing module, with the same setup process and functionality.
The marketing suite includes lead scoring, forms, pop-ups, email templates, landing pages, newsletters, and other tools to both capture and nurture contacts. EngageBay offers a nice selection of templates for these tools, or you can create your own from scratch. I created a newsletter pop-up for my personal website using one of the templates and launched it by adding some code to the HTML.
While creating automated workflows is only available in the two highest-tiered paid accounts, you can design and send emails and videos to your segmented lists. The social suite lets you add and monitor your Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram accounts. I connected my Twitter account, and within a few seconds, my feed, mentions, and retweets popped up on the screen. From here, you can also schedule posts for channels.
For basic support management, the service suite provides ticket creation, automated assignment, and a dashboard for tracking ticket priority, first response time, and ticket count. With the live chat feature, you can create an additional support or sales channel and then track total chats, chat duration, and first response time in the dashboard. I tested the chat tool on my site, and while it’s fairly basic, for those new to chat and/or those running a small business, it should be adequate.
Stretch EngageBay’s functionality even more by connecting it to Zapier. For example, you can add new EngageBay contacts to your email marketing tool or add new customers from your eCommerce site to EngageBay. Add new Engagebay contacts to a Mailchimp list as subscribersUse this ZapAdd new Shopify customers to EngageBay as contactsUse this ZapSee more EngageBay Marketing integrations powered by
EngageBay Price: Free for 15 users; all-in-one paid plans from $10.79/month/user
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).
Capsule CRM
Capsule CRM is a fit for individual business owners as well as SMBs. Users focused on B2B sales are best served by the platform. It’s a cloud-based option with a reliable mobile app as well.
Features include lead management, contact organization, customer segmentation, and call support. The free version offers all the features, but it’s limited to only two users, 10MB of contact data, or 250 contacts, whichever comes first.
This does severely limit the scalability of Capsule’s free option, even relative to other free CRMs.
Manage contacts and leads with Capsule CRM. (via the Blueprint)
Capsule CRM is a relatively low cost if and when you’re ready to upgrade. The Professional tier is $18/month per user for 50,000 contacts, 10GB of storage, a ton of useful integrations, and more.
There’s also a Team tier that is $36/month per user for 100,000 contacts, 20GB of storage, advanced sales reporting, role definitions and team task assignments, and more. It’s unique to see limits on the storage, so be sure to keep that in mind when making your decision.
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.
Zoho CRM
Zoho CRM is part of a vast ecosystem of business tools. It’s meant to be the single platform from which to operate all components of your business. It offers pricing tiers and capabilities that suit businesses of all sizes, from sole proprietors to enterprises.
Zoho CRM offers a streamlined, user-friendly interface for both browsers and mobile. Key features include lead management, sales pipeline management, and in-depth reporting and analytics.
Zoho has three pricing tiers to go along with its free option. The free option includes social media management, sales task management, event tracking, call logging, and up to 10 pre-built email templates.
Automate follow-ups to boost your deal wins. (via the Blueprint)
Paid options for Zoho start at $12/month per user for the standard option, which includes workflows, forms, and custom reporting dashboards in addition to everything in the free version.
The Professional option is $20/month per user and adds real-time customer tracking and other features to the standard plan. Zoho Enterprise is next at $35/month per user and comes with AI tools, advanced reporting customization, and prioritized lead tracking.
The final Zoho CRM tier is $45/month per user and includes advanced AI and predictive analytics and maximum feature counts. The solution packs a punch at a great price, assuming you don’t have too many users.
Bitrix24
Bitrix24 is a unique solution that stands out in the CRM space. It’s a fit for SMBs that need help communicating and operating efficiency across silos.
It offers everything you’d expect for some typical CRM features, including pipeline management, lead scoring, deal tracking, landing page and form creation, email marketing, and pre-built workflows to automate outreach.
Unusual features provided by Bitrix24 include task manager tools, project management, basic e-commerce capabilities, and more. The free option is capped at 5GB and 1,000 emails per month, as well as a few other restrictions.
Jump into Bitrix24’s many features through their robust dashboard. (via the Blueprint)
A large majority of Bitrix24’s features are included in its free option. If you get to a point where you need to graduate to a larger plan, prices start at $24/month for two users and 10GB. It climbs up to $69/month for six users and 50GB.
There’s also a Business plan for $99/month for 50 users, 100GB, and an unlimited number of users per month for $199 and unlimited data.
Conclusion
Every small business owner faces the same problem: where to store the contact information. With every client and partnership you acquire, you’re faced with a choice: either hire another employee to manage this information, switch to a third-party solution, or do everything yourself.