Are you looking for the best CRM software for your business? CRM software, which stands for customer relationship management, is an all-in-one software solution that allows you to easily manage your business’s prospects, leads, and customers.
You can store all of your prospects, leads, and customers’ contact information, add notes, make calls, send emails, schedule appointments, manage your pipeline, create reports, and much more — all without having to leave the CRM software. With a CRM system in place, the chances of erroneous errors are offset. This eliminates the use of spreadsheets and manual tasks.
There is a lot of outstanding CRM software out there, as well as a lot of CRM software that’s lacking the features you need to manage your business contacts. So, how do you know which CRM software is the best for your business?
In this article, we’ll compare the best and most popular CRM software for business, so you can find the one that works for you.
Let’s get started.
1. HubSpot – Best CRM Software for Beginners
- Pricing: Free
- Devices Supported: Android, iOS, Linux, Mac, Windows
- Best for: Beginners & Small Businesses
- Website: HubSpot.com
Arguably one of the most popular CRM software is HubSpot. HubSpot CRM is a simple, easy to use CRM software that’s perfect for beginners, solopreneurs, and startups. The web-based CRM for small businesses allows you to easily manage your contacts and recent contact activity.
With HubSpot, you can organize your contacts and get an up-to-the-minute view of your entire sales funnel with their clean, visual dashboard. You can easily sort your contacts by deals won and lost, appointment scheduled, specific time period, and more. You can even create your own customized filters to sort your contacts exactly to your needs.
The filtering mechanism in HubSpot CRM lets you slice and dice contacts pretty easily. And this comes handy when dealing with large databse of leads.
HubSpot CRM also comes with a number of features straight out of the box. Aside from contact management, HubSpot CRM offers email scheduling, tasks, deals, ticketing, team email, live chat, and more. You’re also able to connect HubSpot with Gmail or Outlook in order to log every activity automatically. This means HubSpot CRM can capture every email as it happens.
HubSpot is 100% free customer management software, with no time limit, which is great for small businesses trying to stay on budget. This CRM tool is free of cost even if you have unlimited users and you can store as many as 1 million contacts and companies.
But, if you want more advanced CRM features such as calling, meetings, email tracking notifications, contact activity, and conversational bots, you’ll have to upgrade to one of HubSpot’s paid plans. HubSpot CRM easily integrates with most of the popular services like Constant Contact, ActiveCampaign, Gmail, RingCentral and more.
The only problem with Hubspot is that as your company grows you might gradually want to opt-out because of its limited features for larger organizations. Another drawback of Hubspot is that the technical support they offer is a paid one. But this lead management software has one of the best customer support services. Besides many of its paid features are available elsewhere without paying a penny. And many of them aren’t as advanced as offered by some of its competitors.
Get Started with HubSpot CRM Today »
2. Constant Contact – Best CRM for Email Marketing
- Pricing: Starts at $12
- Devices Supported: Android, iOS, Linux, Mac, Windows
- Best for: Any size
- Website: ConstantContact.com
You might know Constant Contact as an email marketing service but this software can be used as a CRM as well. So, with Constant Contact not only can you easily send great-looking email campaigns to your subscribers, but you can manage all of your contacts too.
With Constant Contact, you can easily upload your current lists of contacts and use tags to categorize your contacts. For instance, you can create mailing list categories for contacts that are “VIP customers”, “leads”, or “Twitter follower”. They also offer segmentation tools, list cleaning, email list building tools, and more. Plus, Constant Contact seamlessly integrates with numerous other popular CRM software.
Constant Contact offers a number of different pricing plans depending on how many email subscribers you have as well as what features you want access to. You can get started with a free trial.
Constant Contact is a wonderful resource for business owners. But it has its own limitations too. For example, if you need advanced automation, this might not be your best choice. It doesn’t let you identify duplicate individuals, so you have to screen them manually if you want to purge them. Besides if you want to embed videos to your emails, it can only be a YouTube link. It doesn’t support any other video links.
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3. PipeDrive – Inexpensive Sales CRM
- Pricing: $9.90 per user, per month
- Devices Supported: Android, iOS, Linux, Mac, Windows
- Best for: Small to mid sized businesses
- Website: Pipedrive.com
PipeDrive is a CRM software that’s designed with simplicity in mind. They want to simplify the sales pipeline process so you can zero-in and double down on actions that will win you more sales. This CRM software is easy to use — just log in, fill up your pipeline, and start selling.
PipeDrive includes features such as pipeline management with a clear, visual interface, email integration, activities and goals, sales reporting, and sales forecasting. They also offer mobile apps so you can access your CRM from anywhere.
Compared to the other CRM software on this list, PipeDrive isn’t as feature-rich. For instance, it doesn’t offer any separation between lists of new leads and contacts. But, its simplicity makes it easy to identify promising leads and maintain relationships.
PipeDrive offers 3 different pricing plans: Silver, Gold, and Platinum. The Silver plan is the least expensive plan and includes basic features such as drag and drop calendar view, goals, smart email BBC, customizable dashboard, and chat and email support. If you want more advanced features like workflow automation, smart contact data, and scheduler, you’ll need to upgrade to the Gold plan. Lastly, the Platinum plan includes multiple dashboards, teams, and revenue forecast reports.
However, PipeDrive does offer a free trial, so you can test out the CRM before you buy it. Overall it’s a good option. But its extensive feature list might be a bit overwhelming for you if you’re a beginner. You might also have issues if you try integrating it with Outlook. But it’s just an occasional thing, so you can take a chance.
Get Started with PipeDrive Today »
4. GreenRope – All-in-One CRM
- Pricing: $99/month
- Devices Supported: Android, iOS, Linux, Mac, Windows
- Best for: Small to large sized businesses
- Website: Greenrope.com
GreenRope is a complete CRM software that includes marketing automation, sales pipelines, and customer service. This CRM software allows you to manage your email marketing, social media, sales, events, and project management right from this cloud-based CRM platform. GreenRope also includes marketing automation which helps in getting 6-10 times more engagement. This even allows you to create sales follow up to ensure consistent flow of engagements.
GreenRope is broken down into 3 main sections: sales, marketing, and operations. Sales features include a complete CRM, workflow manager, booking calendar system, lead scoring tool, predictive analytics, and much more.
With their marketing suite, you get access to features such as email marketing software, customer journey mapping, landing page builder, email tracker, and more. Finally, their operations suite boasts features like project, event, and contact management, ticketing system, live chat, and more.
Since GreenRope is packed with so many features and capabilities, there’s a slight learning curve involved. Once you find your way around though, this CRM software can handle all of your business needs.
GreenRope’s pricing plan depends on how many contacts you have. As your business grows, you’ll have to upgrade your plan. This is the most costly CRM software on the list, but you’re paying for the all-in-one solution, not just a CRM.
But before purchasing GreenRope, you should know that it involves a learning curve. The software is not very user-friendly in terms of handling it. It also offers a lot more than just the basic features. So sometimes you won’t even know that a feature exists.
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5. Zoho CRM – Best CRM Software for SMB and Enterprises
- Pricing: $20 per user per month
- Devices Supported: Android, iOS, Linux, Mac, Windows
- Best for: Small Businesses and Enterprises
- Website: Zoho.com
Zoho CRM platform is among the widely used systems across the industry. This web-based customer relationship management software is ideal for both small and enterprise-level businesses. Zoho CRM offers lead scoring, lead segmentation, real-time sales alerts, social CRM, sales reports, and much more.
With Zoho Social CRM, you can monitor customer feedback on social media, keep track of customer’s social media interactions, and more. A social CRM tool helps in bringing insightful data about your audience. Zoho easily integrates with G Suite, Slack, MailChimp, Facebook, GetResponse and more.
Zoho offers different pricing options that cater to the needs of businesses of all sizes. You can choose from their 4 pricing plans: Standard, Professional, Enterprise, and Ultimate.
Get Started with Zoho CRM Today »
6. Freshsales – CRM for Small Businesses
- Pricing: $15 per user, per month
- Devices Supported: Android, iOS, Linux, Mac, Windows
- Best for: Small to large sized businesses
- Website: Freshworks.com
Freshsales by Freshworks is an easy-to-use CRM software that’s built mainly for small businesses. This CRM solution allows you to automatically capture your website visitors as sales leads and group them based on their engagement with your site. Plus, their 360-degree customer view gives you access to customers’ social profiles, identify customer touchpoints, and more, from a single screen.
Some of their other standout features include lead scoring, auto profile enrichment, auto lead assignment, appointment booking, smart forms, and more. Freshsales also offers a number of event tracking features, built-in online phone service features, email features, etc. so you can manage and get to know your customers in a variety of ways.
But if your database is heavily loaded, then the software might take some time to load. It also misses some key features like setting automatic alarms. And because of its advanced interface, you might need to spend some time learning how to use it.
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7. Drip – Best eCommerce CRM
- Pricing: $39/month
- Devices Supported: Android, iOS, Linux, Mac, Windows
- Best for: Businesses selling online courses & info products
- Website: Drip.com
Drip is another company known for its email marketing service but Drip is also a powerful CRM tool you can use to manage your contacts and learn more about your customers. Drip CRM is built with eCommerce websites in mind, but many types of businesses with a website can take advantage of these tools.
This CRM software offers automation workflows, email builders, email campaigns, segmentation, content customization, custom conversion tracking, purchase intent marketing, and much more. Plus, with tags, custom fields, and events you can learn each of your customer’s personal stories. You can apply custom tags to customers in order to keep track of all of their activities so that you can act on them as fast as possible.
The email templates of Drip are somewhat basic. So if you want to use some advanced templates you might be disappointed. You can bring in your own custom HTML responsive email templates. But with Drip, working with your own HTML codes is slightly difficult if you’re not a programming expert.
8. SalesForce – Best Sales CRM
- Pricing: Custom
- Devices Supported: Android, iOS, Linux, Mac, Windows
- Best for: Mid sized businesses to large enterprises
- Website: Saleforce.com
SalesForce is a very popular CRM software on the market, in fact, it’s the #1 CRM platform worldwide. Since this CRM software has been around for such a long time it includes a ton of advanced features and offers solutions to manage everything from sales, customer service, marketing, commerce, productivity, engagement, and so on.
Focusing on the Sales Cloud, in particular, it offers features such as account and contact management, opportunity management, lead management, sales data, mobile, and more. These features will help you grow accounts faster, find new customers faster, and close deals faster.
The only drawback of this software is that if you really want to get the most out of it, you need to purchase the addons. That way it becomes a little too expensive. Also, the configuration and setup are a bit complex and time-consuming. That’s probably because of its cluttered interface that unnecessarily complicates things. The customer support too doesn’t have a very good reputation, so if you’re stuck somewhere, it might be a problem.
Get Started with SalesForce Today »
9. Streak – Free CRM in Your Inbox
- Pricing: Free to 15/month
- Devices Supported: Android, iOS, Linux, Mac, Windows
- Best for: Small businesses
- Website: Saleforce.com
Streak is a CRM software that’s built straight into Gmail, making it easy-to-use for even complete beginners. This tool allows you to automatically capture data from your contacts and emails, receive notifications as things progress through the pipeline, and set follow-up tasks and reminders. You can also automatically share emails, notes, and more with your team so that everyone is on the same page.
Streak comes with features to manage workflows such as sales, business development, hiring, support, project management, and more – or you can completely customize your exact needs. They also offer features to supercharge your inbox including view tracking, mail merge, send later, snippets, and more.
Streak overall has nothing much on the negative side. But the only thing we don’t like about it is that you can’t have your emails in multiple boxes. You also don’t have an option to merge the boxes. If you want all your mails to be at one place you’ll have to delete the previous ones and then recreate them.
Get Started with Streak Today »
10. Agile CRM – Yet Another Sales CRM
- Pricing: $8.99/month
- Devices Supported: Android, iOS, Linux, Mac, Windows
- Best for: Small businesses
- Website: Agilecrm.com
Agile CRM is another all-in-one CRM software that’s easy to set up and use to automate your sales, marketing, and service.
They offer single-page contact management, deal tracking, 1-click calling, voicemail automation, appointment scheduling, project management, and much more — and that’s just for sales. They also offer marketing features like a landing page builder, email tracking, and social suite. Service features include helpdesk, ticketing, and more.
Agile CRM is free for up to 10 users, this includes sales features such as lead scoring, appointment scheduling, email tracking, etc.
The only thing we don’t like about Agile CRM is its customer support. If they try and improve that area, there won’t be much that you can complain about Agile CRM.
Get Started with Agile CRM Today »
We hope this article helped you discover the best CRM software for your business. Now you can start managing your prospects, leads, and customers, as well as get to know them better, in order to boost your conversions. If you enjoyed this article, check out our other posts:
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