There are many software available in the market to manage your business activity. It is important to choose the best free crm software for your business or office work.
A free CRM or Customer relationship management software allows you to manage the information about your clients, prospects, and employees on a single platform. Hubspot, Zoho and Engagebay seem to be a leading provider of CRM software that includes different features for managing contacts with complete freedom of adding or removing fields as per requirement of your business. Let’s compare!
HubSpot CRM vs. Zoho CRM vs. EngageBay:
HubSpot’s CRM platform offers all the features you would want from a top-tier CRM at no cost at all. Their free CRM software is used to lure customers in, after which they are likely to pay for additional products from the HubSpot suite, including their Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, Service Hub, and Growth Suite. In sum, while you don’t pay for their CRM, you might end up paying for use of any of their additional products.
Zoho CRM and EngageBay have limited free plans alongside paid versions. Naturally, HubSpot CRM dwarfs Zoho CRM and EngageBay for features and power, so it is more useful to pit their rivals against each other.
Zoho CRM and EngageBay have similar feature ranges. They both offer lead and contact management, custom lists (Zoho CRM offers 5 and EngageBay 2), basic reporting functions, email templates, and more. Zoho CRM offers customer support during business hours only, while EngageBay only offers support via email.
There are features unique to Zoho CRM, such as page customization and team collaboration and communication tools including a calendar, status updates, direct messages, and file attachments; features missing from EngageBay.
Conversely, EngageBay offers some features absent from Zoho CRM’s free plan, including integrations with Gmail, Outlook, and Office 365. Zoho CRM’s free plan does, however, include website visitor tracking through its Zoho SalesIQ integration.
Zoho CRM is capped at 3 users, while the number of users for EngageBay is unspecified.
HubSpot CRM vs. Zoho CRM vs. EngageBay Comparison:
| Offer | HubSpot CRM | Zoho CRM | EngageBay |
|---|---|---|---|
| Users | Unlimited | 3 | Unspecified |
| Reporting and Analytics | Yes | Standard | Standard |
| Social Media Integrations | Yes | No | Yes |
| Email Cap | 2,000 per month. | 150 emails per day | 1,000 branded emails per month |
| Lead and Contact Management | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Google Apps Integration | Yes | No | Gmail |
| Teamwork and Collaboration | Yes | Yes | No |
| Customer Support | 24/7 | Business Hours | Email Only |
| Customizations | Yes | No | No |
HubSpot
Primarily a marketing tool, HubSpot free CRM gives you the basic functionality you need to get started. This may seem like the best option for start-ups without having to worry about upgrading due to limited users. Nevertheless, limitations are in place such as customization, one canned report and no email or phone support. As a user of the free plan, you’ll need to access support through the HubSpot academy articles, tutorials and community forums. HubSpot allows for add-ons on the Free plan at an additional cost per month. However, they’ll be looking to lure you into their marketing and sales modules which come at a considerably higher cost.
Compare Hubspot Free CRM Features
- Unlimited Users
- 1 Million Contacts
- Deals
- Tasks
- Contact Management
- Gmail and Outlook Integration
- Email Templates
Zoho
Once upon a time Zoho were the market leaders for Free CRM software. The plan included up to 10 Users, 25,000 Records and the capability to integrate with third party apps via API. Recently the maximum number of users on the free plan has been reduced to 3 users, so still more than the competition but much less compelling. The free version Zoho offer is basic but you can integrate with the numerous other products Zoho offers.
Compare Zoho Free CRM Features
- 3 Users
- 1 GB Storage
- 25,000 records
- API integration
Engagebay
Engagebay prides itself on its ease of use and affordability. This software provides an all-in-one platform for marketing, sales, automation, and customer relationship management. It’s incredibly intuitive. So much so, you don’t need any technical know-how to hit the ground running.
Engagebay is ideal for small businesses and startups looking to obtain, nurture, and transform prospects into paying customers. So, if you’re looking to score more leads, you can create and launch lead generation forms and popups to collect the names, email addresses, and/or contact numbers of your leads.
You can also create and publish engaging landing pages, send customized email campaigns, and design an automated marketing funnel.
On top of that, Engagebay also provides the tools you need to identify high-quality leads so that you know where to prioritize your time and resources best. Engagebay makes it easy to filter through your leads and determine their quality based on varying parameters, including consumer engagement, behavior, location, etc.
In terms Engagebay’s set up, it’s a modular suite made up of three products:
- Marketing Bay
- Sales Bay
- Service Bay
Each module boasts its own feature set explicitly designed to help streamline specific processes and workflows. That said, all modules work seamlessly with one another.
Free CRM Software Features
With Engagebay’s freemium package, you get the following features for free:
- Email Marketing
- Autoresponders
- Email broadcasts
- Sequences
- Lead grabbers
- Landing pages
- CRM
- Helpdesk
- Live chat
More specific to CRM and sales, you get the following for free:
- Contacts and companies
- 360-degree contact view
- Tag management
- Deals
- Tasks
- Appointment scheduling
- User activity
- Email tracking
- Email scheduling
- Gmail integration
- Outlook integration
- Office 365 integration
- Social suite
- Reports dashboard
- Predictive lead score
What CRM Features You Pay For
When you upgrade to one of Engagebay’s paid-for plans, you unlock the following functionality. However, the scope of the features you get access to depends on your chosen pricing tier:
- Email templates
- Web pop-ups
- A landing page builder
- Lead scoring
- SMS marketing
- Third-party integrations
- A social suite
- A tag manager
- Marketing automation
- Push notifications
- Site messages
- Broadcast A/B testing
- Landing page A/B testing
- Custom domain
- Call records
- Service automation
- Products
- Proposals
Who Should Consider Using Engagebay?
Engagebay is best suited to small to medium size business owners. This is the perfect platform for entrepreneurs looking for an affordable all-in-one sales and marketing software. This provides plenty of tools for helping merchants acquire, engage, nurture leads in the hopes that they’ll become fully paying customers.
Really Simple Systems
Really Simple Systems free CRM software includes everything you need to get started with CRM. The CRM is primarily designed for small and medium size businesses operating B2B. It’s easy to set up and simple to use. The free version of the software helps you work smarter, managing and tracking your leads and customers so you can get on with growing your business. There’s no commitment period, no credit card required, and you can continue using it for free for as long as you like.
We’re also pleased to be listed in these independent reviews of the best free CRM systems:
Compare Really Simple Systems Free CRM Features
- Up to 2 Users
- 100 Company Accounts
- Unlimited Contacts
- 100MB Document Storage
- Contact Management
- Lead Management
- Tasks & Activities
- Custom Reports
- Customization
- Free Email & Online Chat Support
- API Integrations
Capsule
Capsule’s free CRM software differentiates itself from its competitors by focusing on the contact management side of CRM. The Free plan includes limited customizable features and customer support is available via email Mondays to Fridays. Feedback from Capsule’s clients note the poor reporting module with limited flexibility. As with Really Simple Systems, you can continue using the free version for as long as you like.
Compare Capsule Free CRM Features
- 2 Users
- 10 MB of Storage
- 250 Contacts
- Unlimited Opportunities
- Unlimited Cases
- Accounting Integrations
- Social Media Integrations
- Email Support
Insightly
Insightly is designed for B2B although it is flexible enough to use for either B2B or B2C. However, the Free plan is “no frills” with very limited features. Unlike most Free CRM software solutions, Insightly doesn’t offer custom reporting functionality, but does have some standard reports you can use. The advantage of having custom reporting is to give you access to information which can be analysed to produce extremely valuable insights.
Compare Insightly Free CRM Features
- Up to 2 Users
- 2,500 Records
- 200MB of storage
- 2 Custom Fields
- 10 Scheduled Reports
- 5 Custom Email Templates
SendinBlue CRM
SendinBlue is not your regular CRM software. In fact, it’s not even a CRM software per se. It is, instead, fundamentally recognized as an email marketing software. And just like MailChimp, CRM only happens to be a supplementary function within its toolset.
But, don’t let that fool you. Although SendinBlue is principally a digital marketing solution, it doesn’t neglect its CRM side. As a matter of fact, it’s one of the strongest candidates in our best free CRM compilation since it doesn’t limit itself to just the basic customer relationship management features. Rather, SendinBlue extends beyond the standard trends to offer extra premium features.
Consider its workflow automation capabilities, for instance. While most free CRM tools leave out even basic automation, SendinBlue free CRM goes ahead and facilitates advanced marketing automation workflows for up to 2,000 contacts.
It further provides a workflow editor for intuitively customizing the whole automation system, as well as page tracking tools for keeping tabs on the target audience.
In the end, you get to interact with your leads and contacts via email, SMS, web forms, and landing pages.
SendinBlue is also great at sending automatic transactional messages through email and SMS texts. It even gives you the privilege of personalizing them accordingly.
Now, if you’d want to set up such a campaign, the tool you could start with is the SendinBlue drag-and-drop email editor. This is where you get to create elegant email designs by simply tweaking responsive email templates from SendinBlue’s templates library.
Unfortunately, there’s a caveat. While the premium plans on SendinBlue provide unlimited email sends, the free pricing option can only go up to 300 emails a day.
When you come to think of it, however, 300 is quite a solid volume of emails to a typical small business. That should be enough to form lasting bonds with a sizable group of contacts.
And speaking of which, SendinBlue Free CRM manages to make up for its email sends limitation by accommodating an unlimited number of contacts. You can also customize their accompanying fields based on your specific sales pipeline parameters.
Then to help you organize the resultant information, SendinBlue additionally comes with high-level contact management features like advanced segmentation. It essentially gives you the freedom to group your contacts based on social demographics like company position, residential area, gender, or age, as well as behavioral parameters like email engagement levels, past purchases, web page visits, page clicks made, etc.
All that particularly comes in handy when you start creating automation workflows. And to be more specific, SendinBlue allows you to personalize your automated messages using advanced “If/Then/Else” logic.
That means you can extensively customize the whole automation framework by applying multiple layers of rules to achieve deep personalization. You then get to engage your contacts and leads with the right messages at the right time.
What’s more, you don’t have to manually update your contact groups and segments. You can leave that to SendinBlue and it’ll auto-update everything in real-time based on your contacts’ qualification conditions.
SendinBlue Free CRM Software Features
SendinBlue’s free plan offers email support, API and integration plugins, real-time reporting, marketing automation workflows, web page tracking, workflow editor, advanced templating language, transactional email and SMS sending, sales CRM, customizable signup forms, advanced contact segmentation, unlimited contacts and details, A/B testing, SMS marketing, email and SMS personalization, email template library, mobile-friendly email designer, plus up to 300 email sends per day.
What SendinBlue CRM Features Do You Pay Extra For?
SendinBlue has three premium plans that cost between $22.50 a month and $173 a month (Lite, Essential, and Premium), plus a custom Enterprise option.
Some of the advanced features they offer include multi-user access, a dedicated account manager, phone support, advanced open and click stats, heat map reporting, geography and device reporting, dedicated IP, unlimited daily email sends, landing page builder, retargeting ads, live chat, Facebook ads, send-time optimization, priority sending, dedicated infrastructure, managed setup and priority support, plus 40,000 to over 350,000 email sends per month.
Who Should Consider Using SendinBlue Free CRM Software?
SendinBlue isn’t exactly a dedicated CRM system. It’s more of an email marketing automation solution that offers CRM capabilities. So, you won’t find advanced CRM features like lead management, project management, and sales pipeline management.
Instead, you’ll get one heck of a workflow automation system, advanced page tracking, plus comprehensive contact management tools. These give you the benefit of leveraging SendinBlue’s workflow editor plus its advanced contact segmentation to launch well-personalized lead engagement campaigns.
Therefore, in a nutshell, SendinBlue Free CRM is suitable for small ecommerce sites, dropshippers, email sales teams, and SMS sales teams that seek to harness the power of advanced contact management and workflow automation, for comprehensively personalized email and SMS campaigns.
Conclusion
Let’s face it, there is no such thing as a free lunch these days. If anything sounds too good to be true, it probably is. However, the free CRM software companies promise you just that. Free and low-cost CRM software with advanced features, and no hidden fees. A perfect solution for all those startups with a shoestring budget and great ideas that need a helping hand to grow into successful companies.