Every company needs a good customer relationship management system to keep a tab on their customers and prospects.
If you are in the UK, it is really hard to choose the best CRM for your business. And not just because there are so many crm platforms around! One day, you will wake up with the need for CRM. Your business may be great but you’ll realize that there are so many opportunities out there that you’re missing … Let me present to you the most popular free CRMs!
Capsule (Web, iOS, Android)
Most CRMs do more than just managing contacts and deals, adding major functions such as marketing and helpdesk to their platforms. So far, Capsule has mostly resisted this trend, which is nice if you want to keep relationship management straightforward.
Using Capsule is a breath of fresh air if you’ve ever worked in anything more involved than an email inbox. The user interface is uncomplicated and, in fact, provides little in the way of customization—you can change the color scheme and add a logo, but that’s it. Six small icons on the left provide access to the main features with account settings on the far right. On every screen is a dropdown to add people, organizations, opportunities, and cases. This means lots of white space in between.
Capsule provides customization options for the fields for people, organizations, and opportunities, which is handy to tailor data capture to your business. In several minutes, I created a decision-maker checkbox field and a dropdown menu for customer types such as vendor, supplier, VAR, and end-user for people and opportunities.
Another nice feature is called Tracks. This lets you create a repeatable set of activity reminders for opportunities. For example, a standard process for a new inbound lead might have five steps for follow-up, spread over two weeks, using a combination of emails and calls. Tracks applied to these leads automatically populate the opportunity record as a list of to-dos to be checked off.
If you’re a Gmail or Outlook user, be sure to download Capsule’s email add-on. This lets you add contacts, opportunities, and tasks right from your inbox with a few clicks. It will also automatically save (unless you disable) all ongoing email threads into that contact’s record. Missing, however, is the ability to send emails directly from a contact’s record. This is a feature available in all of the other free CRMs reviewed here.
Finally, if you’re coming into Capsule with hundreds of contacts, you’ll either need to do some scrubbing (usually a good idea) or look elsewhere because the free plan only allows 250. Upgrading to the first paid tier ($18/mo/user) bumps the contact limit to 50,000.
Zapier opens up more opportunities to use Capsule with other apps, such as posting won opportunities in Slack and creating new sales opportunities in Capsule when they’re entered in a spreadsheet.Post won Capsule CRM opportunities to SlackUse this ZapImport sales opportunities from Google Sheets into Capsule CRMUse this ZapSee more Capsule CRM integrations powered by
Capsule Price: Free for 2 users; paid plans from $18/month/user
Salesforce
Salesforce is one of the best-known CRM solutions out there. Although you might associate it with big businesses, there’s a “Small Business Solutions” option for SMEs. Salesforce is cloud-based so you can access it from anywhere. The platform has a fully customisable dashboard and easy navigation, so you can get to grips with it quickly.
The contact management system allows you to capture past activities and communications for each customer, as well as contact details and social media accounts. You can track leads back to specific marketing channels, and assign them to sales reps for follow-ups. You can use the platform to generate quotes, forecasts and reports. Salesforce also offers comprehensive support, so there’s help on-hand if you need it.
However, some small businesses may decide Salesforce does far more than they need it to, and it’s one of the pricier options available. The starter package begins at £20 per user per month, although you can try it out with a 14 day free trial.
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
Best free CRM software with unlimited users and contacts
Bitrix24 (Web, Windows, Mac, iOS, Android)
With most CRMs, especially free versions, you are limited to a certain number of users and contacts. Bitrix24 is the lone exception in our selection to offer unlimited for both (HubSpot offers unlimited users and 1 million contacts). This, combined with its other features, makes it stand out from the crowd. Aside from contact and deal management, the app also has team collaboration tools such as workgroups, chat, internal activity streams, and polls.
Bitrix24’s many features make it feel a bit overwhelming at first, but you can hide, delete, and change the order of the various menu items. Then, from inside each menu item (e.g., CRM), you can configure the order of items (e.g., deals, contacts, companies, analytics). If you ever want to see everything at a glance, click the Sitemap icon toward the bottom-left of the menu.
With unlimited users, you can invite your entire team to use Bitrix24, slotting them into the app departments you create. Once your employees accept the invite, they’ll be given access to their own customizable version of the app. However, you must upgrade to the paid versions to assign permissions to each user for viewing and making changes.
In a contact record, you can configure the menu to show only what’s important to your company, and you can add fields or rearrange them while you’re in a record just by dragging and dropping. For each record, you get all the details and functions (email, call, notes, etc.) at-a-glance with no need to click around a record just to see activities. Clicking on the Profile tab toward the top of a record shows you various reports related to the contact, such as sales, calls, emails, and activities. The entirety of these activities is calculated as a “communication load” or the number of activities per deal that’s acceptable to your company. This can show you how specific customers like to communicate to better understand them for future opportunities.
Within the Activity Stream, you can chat internally, assign tasks, design and distribute a company poll, and make announcements to your entire team. Clicking on Workgroups lets you create private or public spaces to collaborate on work, assign tasks, share a calendar, and develop knowledge bases. Invite employees or external contacts to each group.
You could spend weeks learning all the available features, so to make good use of your time, pick a few goals (e.g., get my team communicating only using Bitrix24), focus on these, become proficient, and move on to a new set of goals.
Bitrix24 Price: Free for unlimited users and unlimited contacts; paid plans from $34/month for 5 users
Zoho CRM
Zoho is a favourite with small businesses, partly because there’s a free version for up to 10 users.
Zoho’s features include contact management, social media integration and marketing and sales automation. There’s lots of personalisation available – you can customise the way information is organised, for example, and build custom apps. You can also extend Zoho by integrating other apps, so that you can use it to manage other things like accounting and analytics.
Bear in mind that the free version of Zoho CRM doesn’t include all the features, so it may be worth considering the paid version. There’s a 15 day trial so you can test drive the CRM.
Insightly
Insightly focuses on project management as well as CRM, so it will help you track project activity and performance as well as helping you manage leads, customers, partners and suppliers. It offers configurable reporting, social media integration, and integration with other applications like Google Drive.
Insightly has a mobile app, so you can use it on the go, and there’s a customer support team on-hand if you need help or training. The pricing is a bit complicated, with five tiers to choose from. There’s a free version for up to two users, and then the basic paid version starts at \$12 (about £9) per user per month. There’s a 14 day free trial to get you started.
Apptivo
As well as contact management, Apptivo can help you with project management, invoicing and other tasks, so you can use it to generate invoices and track orders and get a ‘360 degree view’ of your customer.
Apptivo offers a web help desk so that you can deliver customer support, and it integrates with other apps like Google Apps, Dropbox and PayPal. It gives you the ability to create email templates and send emails to your contacts, and you can create targeted lists for mass email marketing.
Apptivo was given an ‘Editors’ Choice’ badge by PCMag, who praised its “customizable yet broad functionality”. The starter package is free, and gives you up to three users and 500MB of data storage, with the paid version starting at \$8.33 (around £6.45) per user per month. You can get a 30 day free trial.
Pipedrive
Pipedrive’s CRM software is described by PCMag as “quick to set up, easy to understand, and downright intuitive”.
You can use customisable web forms to get leads into the CRM, and there’s a ‘visual pipeline’ so that you can see which stage your deals are at and move them forward. Email integration means you can see the emails related to a customer in their contact entry, and the live dashboard shows your deals and a summary of activity.
The design and layout of Pipedrive is deliberately minimalist and simple, so it may be a refreshing choice for some small businesses. You can start off with a free trial, but all plans are then paid, with prices starting at \$10 (about £7.70) per month per user for the silver tier.
Conclusion
Most of us know how important it is to stay organized in business. Managing customer data, leads, tasks, etc. can be also overwhelming. That’s where CRM software comes in to play. Whether you have a small business or are planning to start one, keeping your clients organized with the help of CRM software can be a great investment.