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Top 10 Free CRM Software for Small Businesses in 2023

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Customer relationship management (CRM) software helps sales teams manage their customer relationships. To help you make the best decision for your business, we’ve compiled a list of the Top 10 Free CRM Software for Small Businesses in 2023.Free CRM Software for Small Businesses

It enables salespeople to track their interactions with customers, including contact information, phone calls, emails and meetings.

CRMs also provide features for managing deals and opportunities. This may sound expensive, but there are actually a number of affordable and even free options available.

The Best Free CRM Software for Small Businesses in 2023Free CRM Software for Small Businesses

  • Freshsales: Best free CRM software for small businesses overall; great for sales teams needing a free solution with a built-in phone system
  • Zoho CRM: Best free small business CRM for teams wanting to streamline their operation with workflow automation features
  • HubSpot CRM: Best free CRM software for small businesses; Excellent for growing teams that want marketing tools and content management capabilities in a CRM for free
  • EngageBay: Best free CRM software for small businesses; for all-in-one business capability
  • Capsule: Best free CRM software for small businesses; for project management

  • Streak: Best free CRM software for small businesses for adding a CRM to Gmail

  • Apptivo: Best free CRM software for small businesses; Solid choice for solopreneurs who need basic, free contact management software
  • Agile CRM: Best free CRM software for small businesses; Great for businesses that want to manage sales, marketing, and customer service in one CRM software for free
  • Bitrix24: Ideal free software option for businesses that want to manage projects and sales on one platform
  • BenchmarkONE: Best free CRM software for small businesses

 

Freshsales

Freshsales offers an easy-to-use and powerful CRM system for managing sales activities and leads. Freshsales is the best Free CRM Software for Small Businesses. The Free subscription includes essential features such as contact, lead, account, and deal management, as well as the ability to organize activities and notes associated with specific records. Freshworks, the provider of Freshsales, also gives its users 24/5 support on live chat, email, and phone—including those on the Free plan.

Part of the platform’s appeal involves the free communication features. For instance, its live chat widget tool lets reps directly interact and message website visitors to help them navigate the site or convert them into leads. There’s also a built-in phone system that lets team members place calls from contact records and receive all calls directly in the CRM.

Freshsales Free Feature Summary

  • Built-in phone system: Voice-over-internet-protocol (VoIP) phone within the CRM for placing and receiving calls.
  • Contact and account management: Users can add, view, and edit data records for leads, customers, and other contacts in the CRM.
  • Contact lifecycles and activity timelines: Teams can view previous activity associated with leads and customers as well as where they are in the sales cycle.
  • Task management: Ability to create and organize tasks and notes associated with lead and account records and set appointments with contacts in the CRM.
  • Deal tracking: Users can manage deals and sales opportunities from the CRM to stay up-to-date on progress.
  • Website chat widget: Reps can create a live chat widget for their website to directly interact with web page visitors and generate leads.
  • Mobile app: Free mobile app for on-the-go contact, account, and deal management plus voice notes, ability to book Uber rides and use Google Maps from the app.

Benefits:

Freshsales is a full-fledged sales force automation solution for sales teams. It provides everything a salesperson needs to— attract quality leads, engage in contextual conversations, drive deals with AI-powered insights, and nurture customer relationships.

With built-in email, phone, chat, and telephony, Freshsales empowers sales teams with more time for selling by automating the sales process and increases efficiency and productivity in their daily activities. With Freddy AI, salespeople can get insights into the best deals to go after and what actions to take and predict revenue with sales forecasting. Businesses can take the next step forward towards powerful pipeline management with Freshsales. Also, the option to use native CPQ makes generating and sharing quotes and other vital sales assets hassle-free.

Drawbacks:

Like many vendors, some of the better features are reserved for premium packages. Among these for Freshworks CRM are time-based workflows, some chatbot tools and advanced metric reporting. But overall, the free and basic plans are a decent place to start, and you can always upgrade.

Pricing:

  • There is a Free Forever Startup plan
  • Growth plan is $15
  • Pro plan is $39
  • Enterprise plan is $69

Zoho

The free Zoho CRM option allows small teams to manage their lead, contact, account, and deal data in the system and customize up to one sales pipeline to monitor deal progress. Teams can also store up to 10 email templates in the CRM for email campaigns. For users who need product assistance, the Free plan gives them access to online resources as well as email customer support.

Many CRMs require users to subscribe to higher-tiered plans, such as Professional or Enterprise levels, if they want to automate some of their sales activities, data entries, and tasks. Zoho differentiates itself by offering some workflow automation tools on its Free plan. These capabilities include up to 10 automation rules per module and five tasks per action that will trigger after events, such as a new lead generated or change of deal status, or a specific task gets completed. Additionally, users can get up to five email notifications per action to stay on top of what’s happening and what they need to do next.

Zoho CRM Free Feature Summary

  • Email campaigns: Teams can use up to 10 email templates to construct email campaigns.
  • CRM customization: Businesses can tailor their CRM to their operational needs, including one pipeline, 30 personal data fields per module, and up to five custom list views per module.
  • Workflow automation: Ability to automate tasks and recurring sales activities; Free plan includes 2,000 active workflow rules per organization and five per module.
  • Email notifications: Users can receive up to five automatic notifications through email for workflow actions or activity by customers. It also includes real-time alerts for users based on CRM record creation or ownership.
  • Webforms: Teams can create up to one form per module for leads and contacts to submit data into the CRM system.
  • Lead, contact, and account management: Users can store and organize data for their leads and customers, store their documents, and track their activity.
  • Deal monitoring: Teams can track and collaborate on pending deals and sales opportunity progress from the CRM system.

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 CRM, 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
  • Professional edition is $23
  • Enterprise edition is $40
  • Ultimate edition is $52. Exclusive 30-day free trial.

EngageBay

EngageBay is a CRM at heart, packed with sales, marketing, customer support, and chat features, all on a freemium plan. There is a drawback to this flexibility, though: you can only add 250 contacts to the platform on the free plan, so consider archiving inactive contacts to keep using it for longer.

Adding contacts is easy, with all the fields you’d expect. I particularly liked the smart lists feature: you can segment your contacts by picking a set of filters, and the list updates itself with all the contacts that fit those conditions in the future— automatically. The visual sales pipeline is equally easy to use, letting you drag and drop deals forward as sales advance. You can also add more pipelines to keep track of everything, which isn’t something all platforms let you do.

Benefits:

EngageBay bills itself as a HubSpot alternative, and sells three business process-orientated suites: Marketing Automation, Live Chat & Helpdesk, and CRM & Sales Bay. The last of these, CRM & Sales Bay, provides contact management tools designed for simplicity and company growth.

The platform provides multi-channel listening, aggregating contact info from across all your customer touchpoints. Track contact activity, web activity, email response, open and click rates, and more.

Integrates with Gmail, Office 365 or any other IMAP service, with two-way sync capabilities. Zapier, SendGrid, Mailgun, Xero, and Mandrill integrations allow you to connect your CRM with your other business processes and further streamline your operations.

Drawbacks:

Could use more native integrations with third-party apps. Email template options are limited in number and simplistic in style.

Pricing:

  • A free plan is available, limited to 1,000 contacts and 1,000 branded emails
  • Basic plan is $12.99
  • Growth plan is $24.99
  • Pro plan is $49.99

Capsule

I didn’t know you could fall for an app at first sight, but that’s what happened when I started testing Capsule. Capsule is one of the best Free CRM Software for Small BusinessesThe interface looks great and works even better. And the fact that it doesn’t have a ton of features like some of its competition keeps the navigation simple and to the point.

This ease of use supports Capsule’s “best for” label too. The project management functionality resembles that of a true project management platform, with enough depth to keep everything on track. It has a calendar view, Kanban view, and list view, and a dashboard that shows you the tasks for the day and what’s coming next—it really takes the overwhelm out of your daily tasks.

There’s only one sales pipeline on the free plan. It comes with a Kanban view for visual tracking, a filterable list view, and a dashboard view displaying pipeline forecast, status by milestone, conversion rate, and a grouping of pipeline tags. In the end, the metrics that Capsule offers make up for some of the limitations.

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
  • Teams version is priced at $36

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

What makes the best free CRM software?

How we evaluate and test apps

All of our best apps roundups are written by humans who’ve spent much of their careers using, testing, and writing about software. We spend dozens of hours researching and testing apps, using each app as it’s intended to be used and evaluating it against the criteria we set for the category. We’re never paid for placement in our articles from any app or for links to any site—we value the trust readers put in us to offer authentic evaluations of the categories and apps we review.

CRM software keeps track of your contacts—both their personal and business information. It lets you classify each one based on your contact history and the deals you’re building and negotiating.

The more basic free CRM apps help you organize your contacts, have a sales pipeline to keep track of the deal process, and provide simple reports and dashboards to let you know how you and your team are performing. More advanced platforms pack extra functionality in areas like project management, marketing, help desk, content management, and SEO; offer automation and integration opportunities to save time and streamline processes; and let you create your own reports and access game-changing analytics.

With that in mind, here’s what I was looking for as I tested each free CRM app:

  • Ease of use. Using your CRM system should be as easy as using your email client. It should also make repetitive actions easier to carry out—things like adding new contact details or tracking deals shouldn’t be a time suck.

  • Contact and sales management. For contacts, I was looking at how many fields there were and if you could create filtered lists for segmentation; for sales, I was looking out for at least one visual sales pipeline that you could customize for your particular sales process.

  • Reporting and analytics. I paid attention to how the dashboards work: how informative they are, how many reports you can run (and if you can create your own), and any analytics that give you insight on how to improve your processes.

  • Integration with other apps. The more integrations and the more seamless they are, the better. Your CRM is your information hub, so it needs to be able to send data to and receive information from your other business-critical apps.

  • Unique features. I tested anything that’s not strictly tied to CRM functionality but that could be an interesting advantage—things like traffic analytics, project management, or internal team collaboration features.

To test these CRMs, I signed up for each one and followed the suggested onboarding procedure. Then I added a few contacts and businesses, created deals, and advanced them through the pipeline. I then took a look at the reporting and analytics features to see what had changed with my data. Where available, I tested marketing features by sending out an email campaign to myself; managed projects, adding tasks and milestones; asked myself for help in service desk portals; and tested some integrations with other apps. I spent anywhere from 40 minutes to several hours with each app, depending on the breadth of features.

How To Choose a Free CRM

There are several considerations to make when choosing a free CRM for your business.
Consider what type of business you have and what your specific needs are. If you have a small business with a limited sales team, you may not need all the bells and whistles that come with a more robust CRM. If you need sales automation or email tracking, make sure the CRM you’re considering has those features.

Another consideration is how easy the CRM is to use. You don’t want your sales team to waste time trying to figure out how to use the software. Look for a CRM with a user-friendly interface that’s easy to navigate.

Finally, consider what integrations the CRM has. If you use other software programs, you’ll want to make sure the CRM you choose can integrate with those programs. This will make it easier to manage your contacts and deals and avoid duplicate data entry.

Methodology

When analyzing the best free CRM software available, Forbes Advisor considered hundreds of factors, including features, customer support, ease of use, user experiences and integrations. Assigning a weighted score to each value, we then narrowed the field to the seven best free CRMs on the market.

Important features in a free CRM include:

  • Pipeline management
  • Integrations
  • Contact management
  • Sales automation
  • Email tracking
  • Meeting scheduler
  • Prospect tracking

While not every CRM on this list includes each of these features, many do, or have enough value-added benefits to make up for the feature that’s missing.

In addition to features, we considered how user-friendly the CRMs were and what kind of customer support they offered. We also analyzed user reviews, to get a sense of what real users thought of the CRMs.

HubSpot

HubSpot is the best CRM software for small businesses looking for a cost-effective solution to get started. It offers free plans for its CRM, Marketing, Sales, and Sevice hubs.

The free HubSpot CRM comes with unlimited users and unlimited contacts. It is also free forever.

However, many of the features are limited or unavailable in the free plan. To access the powerful features, you will need to upgrade to one of their paid plans under the Growth Suite.

HubSpot is quite easy to use, and you can connect marketing, sales, and service hubs to your CRM software. This provides you with a wide range of tools to efficiently manage the customer journey.

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 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
  • HubSpot CMS starts at $300 per month
  • All-inclusive Starter Growth Suite starts at $113

Streak

If Gmail is the base for all your business communication, you’re in luck. You don’t have to install a separate app or even give up the interface you’ve grown so used to. Streak doesn’t just integrate with Gmail: it fits seamlessly into the original interface, adding the buttons and features of a powerful CRM.

To get started, you have to download and install the Streak browser extension. With that out of the way, all you have to do is give Streak permission to access your Gmail account—necessary to enable all the features—and walk through the simple configuration process, with an introductory video to all the features sitting at the end.

Unlike other options on this list, Streak’s interface feels more like Google Sheets. The sales pipelines have the stages at the top, and below the graphical representation, there’s a spreadsheet where you can see your contacts, add relevant details, and move them through the pipeline. This approach may feel a bit strange at first, but after you add your first contact and see how the app handles it, things will click into place quickly.

You can add new contacts from emails in your inbox and assign them to any active pipeline you have. From that point on, all future emails will be labeled as a lead or deal, and the information about tasks/notes/activity will appear on a column to the right. If you click on the contact’s email on that column, the entire history will appear, letting you take a look at the whole relationship so far.

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
  • Enterprise plan is $129

Apptivo

Apptivo is a simple CRM system with features that are easy to navigate and operate. For those using the Free option who need assistance, email support and online resources are available. Price-wise, the paid plans are cost-friendly and scalable for those who want to upgrade and gain access to more features and integration capabilities.

This CRM is the best solution if you are a solo-operated business looking for a basic way to manage your data. It includes a wide range of information management capabilities for storing, organizing, and viewing contact, lead, and customer records. There are even modules for storing information on partners in the supply chain, such as suppliers and distributors.

Apptivo only lets one user on the Free plan, which only comes with basic data management features. Users looking to add more users and access to more advanced CRM capabilities should look into Freshsales as a more robust alternative.

Apptivo Free Feature Summary

  • Tasks and appointments: Users can create and track tasks or meetings associated with contact records.
  • Notes: Teams can stay organized on lead or customer progress through activity notes within the CRM profiles.
  • Lead data management: Lead information such as contact details, activity, and pipeline status can be stored and tracked in the CRM.
  • Customer profiles: Users can monitor customer and client records and organize their data in the system.
  • Supply chain data: Teams can store data and records for other businesses in their supply chain, including suppliers and distributors.
  • HR tracking: Businesses can store employee data records, assign them to teams, and associate them with a department.

Benefits:

Apptivo’s cloud-based suite of business solutions focuses on customizability. They dish out their starter version free of charge for up to three users. which offers a lot of the core tools included in paid plans, as well as 500MB of storage.

Apptivo’s contact app (for contact management) makes it easy to import data from emails and websites, allowing you to harvest lead, client, and customer data without any tedious manual entry. Apptivo’s management apps provide team and individual organization tools.

Apptivo’s Cases app helps you manage customer issues and interactions, automatically turning customer emails into tickets. It integrates with CRM, project supervision, invoicing, and every other app in the Apptivo universe, meaning all pertinent information is always available to team members.

If you outgrow the free plan, you’ll find that Apptivo’s pricing plans are very reasonable, and all the features are bundled together (rather than sold separately), which is refreshingly simple.

Drawbacks:

The free version of Apptivo has no marketing tools and does not support third-party integrations, limiting is usefulness. Meanwhile, the app’s user interface does the job, but can be a bit unintuitive.

Pricing:

  • Starter plan is free for up to three users.
  • Premium plan is $8
  • Ultimate plan is $20

Agile CRM

Agile CRM arguably has one of the most outstanding set of free features on this list. In addition to standard modules for tracking leads and accounts, its lead scoring capabilities enable teams to prioritize sales opportunities based on custom and preset criteria that indicate sales potential. There’s also appointment scheduling and the option to customize data fields and deal milestones. Free CRM Software for Small Businesses.

What stands out the most, however, is the platform’s customer service module. Not only can businesses handle sales and marketing activities for free, they can also manage an entire help desk and customer support system. These tools allow them to receive inquiries and tickets, add them to groups, associate them with labels, and use saved, canned responses to help efficiently fulfill customer needs.

If your business uses many outside integrations, Agile CRM is a poor free CRM choice as it only gives users up to one integration or plugin. HubSpot is the best option for free integrations, simultaneously offering many different options, including Slack, Google Workspace, Microsoft Exchange, and many more.

Agile CRM Free Feature Summary

  • Custom data fields and milestones: Users can customize data fields within the system to track specific lead or customer information relevant to them. They can also create a custom pipeline for deal milestones.
  • Contacts and companies: Businesses can store data records for contacts, leads, customers, and accounts, including associated deals, tasks, and documents.
  • Lead scoring: Teams can qualify leads quantitatively based on their profile and behaviors to determine which ones to prioritize.
  • Email marketing: Email campaigns, including up to 5,000 emails with a template builder.
  • Website content: Ability to create website landing pages with embedded forms, and facilitate web-to-lead form submissions to add new records in the CRM.
  • Automation rules: Up to one campaign workflow and five nodes per workflow, which initiate functions such as sending an email, waiting a certain amount of time, or tagging a contact. System includes up to one automation rule that triggers an action after an event takes place.
  • Customer service module: Free help desk and case management for teams to view, track, organize, and collaborate on customer service requests.
  • Appointment scheduling: Teams can schedule appointments with customers or leads through the CRM system.

Benefits:

Agile CRM offers a free all-in-one business platform with project supervision, contact view, reporting, support/service, and timeline features.

Customer ticketing for support teams offers feedback forms, helpdesk, knowledge database, and everything else you need to keep churn down and boost the customer experience. Integrations with RingCentral and Twilio enhance the built-in telephony features of Agile CRM, ensuring conversation tracking, call recording, and deal-making over the phone lines is organized and super effective.

You can automate upcoming voice calls and follow-ups by putting your appointment calendar online. You can also attach documents in-app within the deal process, company and contact profiles, and emails.

Drawbacks:

If you upgrade from free to the Starter plan, the price jump is totally reasonable, but if you scale up again to Regular, you’ll find yourself paying over 3x more per user. This feels somewhat unfair, and it creates a notable financial obstacle for using the platform as your business scales. Customization options are limited.

Pricing: 

  • Free version available for up to 10 users.
  • Starter version is $8.99
  • Regular version is $29.99
  • Enterprise version is $47.99

Bitrix24

Bitrix24 is free to an unlimited number of users, and includes unlimited data storage for contact, deals, and products within a catalog. Bitrix24 is the is the best Free CRM Software for Small Businesses. There’s also the ability to customize record data fields and pipeline stages to meet your unique needs, and options for automatic duplicate detection to ensure the database is clean and up to date all the time.

In addition to free CRM tools, Bitrix24 comes equipped with a project management module. This lets teams create, collaborate, assign, and monitor long-term initiatives within the company, such as marketing campaigns, product development initiatives, and even projects related to a service deliverable for a customer.

Bitrix24, unfortunately, is a complex CRM to set up and only has self-service options for customer service on the Free plan. Freshsales is the best alternative when it comes to user experience. The system is all-around easy to use and they offer 24 hour support, Monday through Friday, on all channels for free users.

Bitrix24 Free Feature Summary

  • Deals and contacts: Unlimited records allowed to manage data for contacts, customers, and deal opportunities.
  • Product catalog: Teams can create and use a built-in catalog to track an unlimited number of products or services from the CRM.
  • Project management: Users can manage and collaborate on long-term projects, assign project owners, create templates, and do time tracking for specific tasks.
  • Custom data fields: Businesses can tailor data fields for contact, deal, pipeline stages, and project records to meet their operational needs.
  • Social media contact center: Teams can receive messages from connected social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram and convert incoming messages into new deals.
  • Duplicate detection: Ability to automatically identify records that are similar or identical to other records in the CRM to keep the database clean.
  • Ecommerce: Online retailers can manage a store, unlimited products, and up to 100 orders through the CRM.

Benefits:

Based on a 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 / month
  • Project+ plan for up to 24 users is $55
  • Standard plan for up to 50 users is $79
  • Professional plan is $159
  • The prices above are for the cloud-based version. On-premise solutions are also available.

BenchmarkONE

BenchmarkONE is an all-in-one sales CRM and marketing software. It’s convenient, it’s a great value and has an impressive ‘free forever’ plan.

Formerly called Hatchbuck, they were founded in 2012 and helped lots of agencies, SaaS companies, and financial services grow.

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
  • Pro $139 is for 5 users per month
  • Enterprise $199 is for unlimited users per month

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

Free CRM Software for Small Businesses

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

What is a CRM?

A CRM, or customer relationship management software, is a tool businesses use to manage their sales and marketing relationships with customers and prospects.

What are some benefits of using a CRM?

Some benefits of using a CRM include sales automation, contact management, email tracking, prospect tracking and pipeline management.

How does a CRM work?

A CRM works by tracking and managing customer and prospect interactions in one central location. This can include contact information, sales interactions, meeting notes and more.

What is an open-source CRM?

An open-source CRM offers businesses a high level of customization. Instead of being developed and controlled by one company, it consists of a source code published publicly and shared by users and developers all around the world. What makes an open-source CRM beneficial is that anyone with the know-how can “open up” the software themselves and change features, interface elements and virtually anything else as they see fit.

The fun (and useful application) in using public source code is that businesses can tweak and update it however is seen fit based on the design and growth of the company. Open-sour

Does CRM require a large IT investment?

No. There are plenty of cloud CRM solutions that information technology (IT) novices can employ. You don’t have to make a large investment in physical IT infrastructure or hire IT staff to manage your CRM. Many CRM solutions are available as software as a service (SaaS), which means that you only pay for what you use and can stop using it at any time.

 

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