So, you’ve successfully started and established a small business. Great!
But are you still using Excel sheets to manage your contact data? Well, that’s not sustainable, not to mention tedious.
You need a good customer relationship management software platform to streamline various customer-centric processes.
A good CRM system can help you better manage customer interactions, streamline sales activities, and improve the overall experience for your customer base.
Luckily for you, we have a long list of the best CRM software for a small business that you can use to find the right option for your business.
We’ve done thorough research and chosen some of the best CRMs available in the market today. Also, we’ve ensured that there are different types of CRM software for different types of businesses and their unique requirements.
Whether you want a basic CRM for contact management, a sales-focused one for pipeline management, or an all-in-one solution, you’ll find something you like.
So, go through our curated list of the best CRM software for small businesses and find the perfect solution for yours.
Here you go.
The benefits of CRM software are many, but you need a good platform to help you realize these benefits.
If you’re looking for a good CRM for your small business, your search ends here. We’ve done all the groundwork for you and curated a list of some of the best CRM software for small business needs.
Go ahead and compare the various CRM solutions available and take your pick.
Image via Freshworks
Freshsales CRM is a robust AI-powered CRM system for small businesses. It offers tons of features to help sales and marketing teams engage with prospects and close deals.
It offers a 360-degree view of customers to help businesses personalize outreach and improve the customer experience. Freshsales CRM achieves this by providing valuable insights in the form of customer activity timelines, highlight cards, and in-depth customer profiles.
Apart from that, Freshsales CRM integrates with other apps and business software to provide a seamless overall experience.
Finally, with its intuitive interface and advanced reporting capabilities, Freshsales CRM is a top choice for small business owners seeking a comprehensive CRM platform.
Key Features
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Price
It offers a 21-day free trial. Here are the various plans that it offers:
Image via Freshworks
Usability
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Image via Bigin
Bigin is Zoho CRM’s solution and it is the perfect starter CRM for small businesses, catering specifically to the needs of small business owners.
This small business crm helps automate tasks, manage customer information, and communicate with prospects across multiple channels. Zoho CRM offers a simple solution for businesses looking to upgrade from spreadsheets to a CRM system.
This CRM solution even provides ready-to-use CRM templates for different industries that you can use to get started right away. Or you can start from scratch and customize your CRM just the way you want it.
As far as features are concerned, it covers contact management, pipeline management, customer service features, and more. One of its standout features is “team pipelines”, which allows you to include multiple customer-facing teams, other than the sales team.
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It provides a 15-day free trial period. Here are the plan details:
Image via Bigin
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Pro Tip: The CRM can get expensive if your business needs exceed the given contact limits. Use it as your first CRM as a small business, but switch to an advanced software solution as your business grows.
Image via Capsule
Capsule CRM is a powerful small business CRM software that combines contact management, sales pipeline management, and project tracking seamlessly.
Apart from all the essential features, you also get advanced CRM features like workflow automation. And its AI Content Assistant automates the process of creating emails, further freeing your time for more important tasks.
What makes Capsule CRM stand out among the best CRM software for small business use is that it offers project management capabilities with CRM while still being affordable.
With its advanced reporting features and customization options, Capsule CRM is an excellent choice for small business owners seeking an affordable, all-in-one CRM solution.
Key Features
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It offers a 14-day free trial and the following plans:
Image via Capsule
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Pro Tip: Capsule is one of the best CRM software for a small business to start with. You can choose it as your first CRM platform and upgrade to a more powerful platform after a few years when your business starts growing.
Image via Keap
Keap is an all-in-one CRM system that combines sales, marketing, and customer service features, making it an ideal small business CRM software. It’s great for small businesses that are in the growth stage and want a platform that will scale with the business.
What makes Keap stand out from other CRM software is that it offers several marketing features as well. These include email and SMS marketing, landing pages and forms, and sales funnels.
What’s more?
It’s especially known for its great invoice management and payment processing features. You can use it to easily set up recurring payments and automatically generate invoices.
Key Features
Pros
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Price
It offers a 14-day free trial (no credit card is required). It’s worth noting that Keap offers an add-on coaching service for new users at an additional cost. Here are the plans that it offers:
Image via Keap
Usability
Tool Level
Pro Tip: The prices can rise rapidly if you exceed the contact limits, so if you have a large contact list, Keap might not be the best option for you.
Image via Vtiger
Vtiger CRM is one of those CRM platforms that is just perfect for a small business looking for an affordable all-in-one solution. This software comes equipped with lead generation, contact management, and marketing campaign features that make your CRM system more effective.
Vtiger crams a lot of features into one platform but still manages to keep its user interface fairly user-friendly and not too complex. Apart from that, it seamlessly integrates with other apps and business software, allowing you to manage your CRM data in one place.
Want to know the best part?
The various functions it offers are not disjointed but connect seamlessly. Your sales, marketing, and customer service teams can use this and collaborate effectively, with a unified view of all customer interactions.
Overall, it’s one of the best CRM software for small business needs. Not only that, it can scale up as your business grows.
Key Features
Pros
Cons
Price
It offers a 15-day free trial and the following paid plans:
Image via Vtiger
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Pro Tip: If you’re willing to invest a little time learning how to use a CRM to its full potential, then this is an excellent option for you. It is affordable and offers tons of useful features.
Image via Salesmate
As the name suggests, Salesmate is a sales-focused CRM software solution that offers useful solutions to help sales teams close more deals. From sales activity tracking to pipeline management and automation, it has everything you’d expect from a sales CRM for a small business.
With its third-party integration options, Salesmate helps small business owners track leads, manage sales activities, and personalize outreach to potential customers more effectively.
It also offers various marketing tools, such as an email builder, web forms, messaging, built-in calling, and more. You can use Salesmate to run email and SMS marketing campaigns to bring in new leads and then use its sales tools to close the deals.
Despite the affordable price tag, Salesmate manages to offer advanced features, such as automation and sales forecasting. This makes it one of the best CRM software for small business operations and a worthy addition to this list.
Let’s check out its features, pros, cons, and pricing.
Key Features
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Image via Salesmate
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Image via Marketcircle
Daylite by Marketcircle is one of the best CRM software for small business operations that exclusively uses Apple products. It combines sales, CRM, and project management tools into one powerful software suite for small businesses.
Want to know the best part?
If you don’t want sales and project management features, you can opt for the core CRM feature. And if you want CRM + Sales or CRM + Project bundles, you can choose those too. Basically, you can choose the right set of tools based on your unique needs.
Daylite markets itself as premium Mac CRM software and the price tag reflects that. Still, if you primarily use macOS and iOS for your business, this is one of the best CRM software for you.
Key Features
Pros
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Price
It offers a 14-day free trial and the following plans:
Image via Marketcircle
Usability
Tool Level
Image via Agile CRM
This is an all-in-one sales, marketing, and customer service software with multiple tools for various customer-facing teams. It is one of the best CRM software for small business operations in need of a feature-packed, affordable solution.
What makes it stand out?
The fact that it allows 10 users even with its free plan while other software solutions often allow only one user and charge extra for additional users.
Also, its free plan has a generous limit of 50,000 contacts and offers unlimited deals, which is more than what most software solutions offer in their paid plans.
Key Features
Pros
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Here are the various plans that it offers:
Image via Agile CRM
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Pro Tip: If you want a CRM with robust email-related features, this is not the best option for you. But if you want an affordable CRM software solution with all essential features and a few add-ons, then this is a great choice.
Image via Pipedrive
Looking for a simple, yet powerful sales CRM to manage your sales pipelines and close more deals? Look no further than Pipedrive—one of the best sales CRM software for sales pipeline management.
It helps you visualize your entire sales process and gives you insights on how to best engage with prospects and close deals. It’s known for its intuitive and user-friendly interface and is one of the best CRM software for small business needs in that regard.
Is that all?
Well, apart from being a sales CRM, Pipedrive is also a tool that helps you with email marketing. It offers an email builder, along with features like audience segmentation and email analytics.
Key Features
Pros
Cons
Price
It offers a 14-day free trial with no credit card information needed. Here are the details of its plans:
Image via Pipedrive
Usability
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Image via Insightly
This is a great option for a small business looking for an all-in-one CRM with sales, marketing, and service capabilities. Not to mention that it also offers project and task management features to streamline your day-to-day operations.
But it offers CRM, marketing, and service as separate solutions and the all-in-one bundle costs a lot. The good thing, though, is that you can choose affordable options if you don’t need a particular set of features.
For the scope of this review, we’ll focus on the CRM solution that it offers and the features available within it.
Key Features
Pros
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Price
Insightly offers five pricing bundles—CRM, Marketing, Service, AppConnect, and Insightly All-in-one. Here are the plans it offers as part of its CRM bundle:
Image via Insightly
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Pro Tip: Insightly is great for a small business if you choose its free or low-tier CRM plans. But if you want to unlock its full suite of features, then you need to go for the Insightly All-in-one bundle, which is expensive. So, start with an affordable plan and upgrade once your business grows.
Image via NetHunt CRM
Looking for a CRM solution that seamlessly integrates with Gmail and that you can use while browsing your Gmail inbox?
Well, NetHunt is one of the few CRM software programs for small businesses that you can use for that purpose. It even updates contact records based on your Gmail communications.
You also have a web app and a Chrome extension. So, you can create or update contacts, check on deal status, etc. while performing your day-to-day tasks.
Overall, it’s a useful CRM for small businesses that prefer function over form and need something they can seamlessly integrate into their existing business processes.
Key Features
Pros
Cons
Price
It offers a 14-day free trial (no credit card is required) and the following plans:
Image via NetHunt CRM
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Image via Less Annoying CRM
This is a CRM designed specifically for small businesses and offers one affordable, all-inclusive pricing plan. No tiered pricing, no product bundles—nothing that complicates your decision-making process when choosing a CRM for your small business.
Sounds great, right?
Well, we think it’s great. Less Annoying CRM simplifies the whole process and offers a single solution that caters to all the needs of a typical small business.
The best part is that you get unlimited contacts, pipelines, and custom fields, which is more than what most CRM solutions offer.
Key Features
Pros
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Price
It offers a single plan for $15 per user per month and a 30-day free trial.
Image via Less Annoying CRM
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Pro Tip: If you just want an affordable core CRM with all the essential features, then this is probably the best option for your small business. As the name suggests, it’s not annoying and is quite easy to use.
Image via monday sales CRM
This is a cloud-based CRM that offers unlimited contacts, boards, and pipelines with all its plans. If that doesn’t make it one of the best CRM software for small business settings, then we don’t know what does.
It’s an affordable platform, power-packed with both basic and advanced features. The only downside is that you need to buy a plan for at least 3 users, but it’s still more affordable than many other tools on this list.
Apart from core CRM features, it also offers collaboration features for teams, making it a great option for teams that need to work together on several projects.
Key Features
Pros
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Price
While the pricing starts at $12.5 per seat (user), a minimum of 3 seats must be purchased for each plan. So, the prices mentioned below are for 3 users.
Image via monday sales CRM
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Pro Tip: If you want a single-user account for a very small business, this is not the best option. But if you have a growing business and want 3 or more users to access the CRM, then this is one of the best CRM software for small business use.
Image via Flowlu
This is an online CRM software solution that offers project management, financial management, invoicing, and many other additional features. It goes beyond the basic CRM capabilities and helps with various aspects of a small business.
If you’re looking for a robust CRM + project management platform for your small business, then look no further. Flowlu has all you need to empower your customer-facing teams to generate leads and close deals.
It will also help your teams work together to attract, engage, and convert customers across various stages of their buyer’s journey.
Key Features
Pros
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Price
Here are the various plans that Flowlu offers:
Image via Flowlu
Usability
Tool Level
Pro Tip: Flowlu is a CRM built for teams and allows 8 users even in its basic plan. So, if you don’t need team collaboration features or are looking for a single-user account, this is not the best CRM for you.
Image via Salesflare
Looking for a specialized CRM tool that caters to B2B businesses? Salesflare is the perfect CRM solution for your small business.
It’s a simple, yet feature-packed CRM that offers powerful automation options. From automatic data enrichment to automated address book creation, it can automate a lot of routine, time-consuming tasks.
It has received several awards for the best CRM software in various categories, such as fast implementation, ease of use, best support, best value, and more. Overall, if you run a small or medium-sized B2B business, you can choose Salesflare.
Key Features
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Price
While Salesflare does offer monthly plans, the prices mentioned on its website are for annual billing. Here are the plans it offers and their prices:
Image via Salesflare
Usability
Tool Level
Pro Tip: If you want to be able to find unlimited email information for leads, then you’ll need to go for the Enterprise plan. So, keep that in mind when comparing various tools as this can be one of the more expensive options.
Image via Nutshell CRM
This is a simple and intuitive CRM for small businesses that offers an easy way to capture leads, manage contacts, and optimize sales pipelines. It makes sales pipeline management a breeze and helps sales teams perform better.
It will automatically move leads through the various stages of your pipeline by auto-assigning leads to sales reps. It also scores leads and provides a lead confidence score to help sales reps prioritize the most important ones.
Apart from contact and pipeline management, it also offers basic email marketing features. These include email templates, list segmentation capabilities, and trigger-based automated email sequences.
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On its pricing page, Copper highlights that it offers a free 14-day trial with no credit card required. Here are the pricing plans that it offers:
Image via Nutshell CRM
Usability
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Image via Copper
If you extensively use Google’s suite of tools for day-to-day business purposes, then Copper is the perfect CRM tool for you. It offers direct integration with Gmail and the entire G-Suite, so your CRM can work together with your existing tech stack.
It enables easy collaboration between your team members and also offers project management features. These include Kanban boards, dashboard syncs with Google Workspace, and more.
Apart from customer relationship management, Copper also offers some marketing features, including email marketing and LinkedIn marketing.
Check out this in-depth Copper CRM review to learn more about this platform and all that it offers.
Key Features
Pros
Cons
Price
On its pricing page, Copper highlights that it offers a free 14-day trial with no credit card required. Here are the pricing plans that it offers:
Image via Copper
Usability
Tool Level
Q1. Is CRM suitable for a small business?
Absolutely! CRM software solutions help businesses manage customer data and get a 360-degree view of each contact to help them better connect with their prospects and customers.
This is a basic business need, irrespective of whether you have a small business or a large enterprise. No business, small or large, should manage contacts using outdated and tedious methods like maintaining sheets of contact data.
CRM tools make contact management easier and provide valuable insights that can help a small business grow by better serving its customers.
As for the cost, there are entry-level CRM software programs for small businesses that offer free plans and affordable paid plans. So, you can choose an affordable CRM software solution to get started and switch to an advanced one as your small business grows.
Q2. Which is the #1 CRM for small business?
There is no definite answer to that, as it’s subjective. The best CRM software for small business use depends on its unique needs and requirements.
Here’s a comprehensive list of CRM software that a small business can consider:
Q3. What is the easiest CRM to use?
A. If you’re new to using a CRM system, you’ll want to choose one that’s user-friendly and intuitive. Some of the easiest CRMs to use include Freshsales, Zoho CRM, and Capsule.
These platforms offer simple, clean interfaces that make it easy to navigate and find the features you need. When selecting a CRM, look for one with an intuitive dashboard, customizable fields, and automation features that can save you time and effort.
Q4. Is there a free CRM for a small business?
A. Yes, there are many CRM software programs for small businesses that offer free forever plans. Some of these include:
Please note that many CRM vendors offer limited features with their free plans, so you should choose one that offers the most features for your needs. Agile CRM, for example, offers a generous free plan with all essential CRM features.
Q5. How much does CRM software cost for a small business?
The cost of small business CRM software varies depending on the features and pricing tiers. While many of the best CRM systems listed above offer free plans, you will need to upgrade to paid plans as your business needs grow.
For instance, some CRM platforms offer affordable entry-level plans for small businesses, while others provide more advanced CRM features suitable for midsize businesses at higher price points.
Q6. How do I choose a CRM provider for my small business?
While we have chosen the best CRM software solutions for a small business, you should still do your own in-depth research before investing in one.
Here are some of the factors you should consider when choosing a CRM solution for your small business:
Q7. How do I know if my small business needs a CRM?
If you’re struggling to keep track of your customer interactions, sales leads, or client data, then it might be time to invest in a CRM. A CRM can help you centralize your customer information, automate repetitive tasks, and gain insights into your sales process.
Even if you have a small team, a CRM can help you work more efficiently and ensure that nothing falls through the cracks.
Q8. How long does it take to implement a CRM system?
The time it takes to implement a CRM system depends on the size and complexity of your business, as well as the specific CRM you choose. Some cloud-based CRMs can be set up and running in just a few days, while more complex implementations may take several weeks or even months.
To achieve a smooth implementation, it’s important to have a clear plan in place and to involve all stakeholders in the process. Thankfully, many CRM service providers offer onboarding and training resources for newbies to get started. Some even go as far as providing dedicated support to ensure your success.
Also Read:
A customer relationship management solution is a must-have for all businesses, big or small, as there are many advantages to using a CRM. However, choosing the right CRM system for your business is key to achieving the desired results with your CRM.
This post lists some of the best CRM software for small business operations like yours. While any of these is a good option for you to consider, the ultimate choice depends on your unique requirements and budget.
We recommend you make a list of requirements for your small business and set a budget before you compare the various platforms listed here. Also, consider the level of support offered, ease of use, and implementation of a platform before choosing one.
What are you waiting for? Go ahead and start comparing these options to find the best CRM software for small business use. Good luck!
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