Best Free CRM Software in 2023

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Are you looking for the best free ecommerce software? You’re in the right place.

If you want to make great sales online, then you need to understand your target audience. Getting to know your customer makes it easier to create a selling experience that’s perfect for them. Unfortunately, it’s difficult to get to know your customers one by one.

CRM technology can help. With Customer Relationship Management tools, you can gather and assess useful information about your target audience, therefore making better decisions about the future of your business. CRM solutions are packed full of tools to help you increase your sales and delight your customers. However, you will usually need to pay for these services too.

Fortunately, there are a handful of free services available for companies that are keen to start discovering the benefits of their own CRM, without the initial expense.

That said, you might want to stick with me to the end for comprehensive info about each of the top free CRM solutions. However, in case you happen to be in a hurry, here are brief details about our overall best pick.

No time to read? Here’s our no.1 pick when it comes to the best free CRM software in the market:

🏁 Our pick:

hubspot crm

HubSpot CRM, to begin with, is entirely free of charge. This alone sets it apart from the rest of the free CRM tools, which usually offer a free plan with limited functionalities alongside fully-featured premium plans.

Now, despite not paying even a single cent for the service, HubSpot still manages to throw in pretty much all the basic features you’d expect from a CRM solution. Apart from sales pipeline management, it facilitates deal tracking, lead management, contact insights, live chat interactions, meeting scheduling, prospect tracking, email tracking, team management, and email campaigns.

Therefore, in a nutshell, Hubspot CRM is a perfect blend of simplicity, omnichannel marketing, the core CRM functionalities, ultimate accessibility, extensive scalability, unlimited team support, affordability, plus flexible customization. You can call it the best free CRM recipe.

» Try HubSpot CRM «

What Is the Best Free CRM?

That’s a very fair question, I must admit.

But, get this. While HubSpot CRM is our overall best pick, make no mistake. It’s not necessarily the best free CRM for everyone.

It would be wrong to name HubSpot the overall best free CRM for all businesses because although it’s incredibly popular, the accompanying features are not ideal for every single person.

Businesses are very different, with varying sales processes, customers, and needs. So, what might be the best solution for one entity could turn out to be a poor option for another.

With that in mind, the best approach here would be evaluating each option comprehensively based on your needs. And to help you with that, here’s a quick guide on how to choose the best free CRM solution.

Choosing The Best Free CRM Solution

All things considered, a good CRM is expected to offer support, scalability, mobility, and productivity. These ultimately provide a well-integrated framework for not only engaging leads and customers, but also organizing their accompanying information, generating actionable sales insights, managing team members, coordinating sales deals, as well as streamlining all your marketing and sales operations.

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Thankfully, multiple free CRM software solutions come with just the right features for that. And while some of them are entirely free, there are a couple of solutions that choose to offer a free version with limited (but decent) features, alongside fully-featured premium versions.

Now, to identify the best CRM from all these possible options, here are the principal elements you should consider:

  • Number of Users, Contacts, and Storage Size: You can think of the volume of users, contacts, and storage as the three forms of currency when it comes to CRM software. These are the elements that largely determine the overall value you should expect from your free CRM solution.

Now, most of them cap either the number of contacts or users you can have in your free account, while others choose to limit the amount of data storage you can use. The best-case scenario is, of course, having unlimited users, unlimited contacts, and unlimited storage on your free CRM tool.

But, since you might not find all three of them unrestricted, you’ll have to make a wise compromise. Settling for a tool that combines unlimited storage, unlimited contacts and a limit of 10 users, for instance, could be a thoughtful start for a small business. Unless, of course, your sales team happens to be much larger.

  • Lead Management and Sales Pipeline Management: The best free CRM systems come with decent tools for managing your leads and customers, as well as coordinating your sales pipelines. You should be able to customize multiple pipelines, assign tasks effectively, link leads with their respective sales deals, automate workflows and prospecting, plus identify the most promising leads and sales deals.
  • Record Management: As your free CRM software continues to form a logical network that holistically links all leads to their sales deals, it should give you the power to organize everything accordingly. All the records relating to your deals, accounts, leads, and contacts should be neatly structured and segregated for seamless management.
  • Reports and Analytics: Customer relationship management relies heavily on insights. You need accurate and timely reports to come up with effective engagement strategies for boosting your sales.

That can only come from a CRM tool that comprehensively tracks all the KPIs across multiple engagement channels, while at the same time keeping tabs on your contacts’ behaviors- particularly when they browse through your website. A built-in AI system could further analyze the resultant metrics before acting based on your automation rules.

In the end, you should be able to access advanced reports about every single engagement channel, lead, team member, conversion, ROI, and possibly even future sales projections.

  • Integrations: Your free CRM software is bound to form part of your digital business ecosystem. Regardless of how good its tools are built, the CRM software’s efficacy over the long haul depends substantially on how well it syncs with other business tools.

So, pick a free CRM solution that comes with an extensive array of relevant third-party integrations, along with an API.

  • Mobile CRM: Customer relationship management is a continuous process that never stops. That means you should consistently keep tabs on everything, even when you’re away from your business premises.

Well, only a good mobile CRM system can provide such capabilities. It ought to follow you everywhere you go by syncing all the core parameters in real-time. So, pay attention to the native mobile app features that come with each free CRM software.

  • Value: It goes without saying that Free CRM tools are affordable to everyone. However, that shouldn’t exempt them from value analysis.

The best CRM solutions provide just the right balance of tools you need to convert their zero pricing into real value. With time, you should strategically use their customer relationship management functionalities to boost your sales numbers progressively. Hence, focus on the tools that have what it takes to generate the best possible ROI.

8 Top Free CRM Software in 2022

Best Free CRM Software #1: HubSpot CRM

hubspot crm

Considering it has been around since 2005, HubSpot is a veteran in the ecommerce industry.

For the most part, however, the company has been focusing on digital promotions by providing all-in-one marketing software for online-based businesses.

It was only until 2014 that it ventured beyond that and went into the world of sales. HubSpot basically changed its strategy by introducing a free CRM tool to supplement its marketing solutions. And as you’ve probably guessed, it took the market by storm.

Consequently, HubSpot CRM is now one of the most established customer relationship management solutions. The cloud-based system continues to service a heck of a lot of businesses and enterprises across both B2C and B2B scenes in a wide variety of segments. Real estate, retail, construction, accounting, you name it- every business segment you can possibly think of is now leveraging Hubspot CRM.

And yes, its users don’t pay anything at all. HubSpot CRM is a permanently free CRM software. But, that’s not the only reason businesses are exceedingly adopting it.

Large enterprises, for instance, are particularly liking the fact that HubSpot accommodates an unlimited number of users. This allows them to bring in all the workers that contribute directly to their customer relationships. They can as well add even their entire marketing departments to work hand in hand with their sales teams.

The system will, in turn, give everyone a neat visual dashboard with comprehensive real-time tracking of the sales funnel. Then as contacts advance through the funnel, you could engage them via email, along with social media, and phone calls. Every single engagement instance is subsequently saved automatically in a lead timeline for future follow-ups.

Those are not the only channels though. It turns out you could also interact with your leads and customers through HubSpot’s live chat tool. And the best thing is, you don’t need a full-time team of responders. The live chat tool comes with an intelligent chatbot that you can capitalize on to automate some of the replies.

Another automatic feature here is tracking. HubSpot CRM goes ahead and monitors all interactions to generate accurate insights into your leads’ behaviors. As a result, you get to find out when and how best to approach them during subsequent follow-ups.

Make no mistake though. HubSpot doesn’t limit its tracking to the messages you send from its system. It extends to cover third-party integrations like Gmail and Outlook. That means you can rely on it to keep tabs on how your email recipients are opening and clicking on your email content.

Besides that, HubSpot CRM is pretty handy when it comes to monitoring website activity. It tracks every individual contact to generate accurate behavior and interest insights in real-time.

It’s worth noting, however, that the free CRM’s tracking history only stretches as far as 7 days of site activity. If you want additional details, you’ll have to dig into your pocket and purchase HubSpot’s premium sales and marketing hub solutions.

But, don’t get me wrong. You won’t be forced to drop HubSpot CRM and replace it with tools from the sales and marketing hub. Instead, you could seamlessly embed all of them to capitalize on their collective capabilities.

Setting up such integration should be a breeze since HubSpot CRM is natively linked with its premium tool suite. They even share the same database. So, of course, you should expect a smooth flow of your contact data between all the tools, which then translates to more campaign insights.

However, that’s not to say the CRM tool cannot comprehensively handle a campaign by itself. As a matter of fact, HubSpot CRM allows you to customize pretty much anything to align your campaigns, plus the entire CRM framework with your specific sales processes.

You can, for instance, tweak its prebuilt email templates or create your own from scratch. Then after the design process, HubSpot CRM offers you scheduling tools to help you auto-send bulk emails at the most appropriate times.

Other than that, you could also schedule meetings with leads. Simply share a link with them and they’ll proceed to pick a good time for your sales pitches.

HubSpot Free CRM Software Features

HubSpot Free CRM facilitates marketing campaigns with:

  • Messenger integration
  • Meeting scheduling
  • Reporting dashboards
  • User roles
  • Mobile optimization

HubSpot free CRM features

What HubSpot CRM Features Do You Pay Extra For?

HubSpot offers its Sales Hub tools at a starting price of $500 a month, Marketing Hub for at least $50-$3,200 a month, and Service Hub tools at a starting price of $400 a month.

Who Should Consider Using HubSpot Free CRM Software?

HubSpot CRM offers really simple systems that beginners and startups exceedingly enjoy working with. Small to medium-sized businesses, sole service-providers and vendors should have an easy time leveraging HubSpot CRM for well-customized omnichannel campaigns.

They get to interact with leads via email, social media, in-app calling, plus live chat, after which the app proceeds to track everything accordingly.

Then when businesses begin expanding, users can easily push their activities to the next level by simply upscaling HubSpot. The only problem, however, is that such a move might turn out to be costly for small businesses. HubSpot Sales Hub, for example, starts at $500 per month.

👉 Read our comprehensive HubSpot CRM review.

Best Free CRM Software #2: 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.

sendinblue pricing

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.

Further reading:

Best Free CRM Software #3: Freshworks CRM

freshworks crm - best free crm software

Freshworks CRM is a product from Freshworks, which happens to be the same company behind the renowned cloud-based customer service solution called Freshdesk.

And just like its sibling, Freshworks CRM is a cloud-based system. But, while Freshdesk is optimized for customer service, Freshworks is all about enhancing customer relationships. And to be more specific, it focuses on attracting, managing, nurturing, and converting leads.

It achieves this through web forms, sales activity management, email tracking, event management, deal management, lead management, customizable visual dashboards and reports, intelligent workflow automations, visual deal pipelines, AI-based lead scoring, as well as built-in email and phone.

In a nutshell, that’s basically everything businesses need to flexibly manage their sales processes. Hence, you can think of Freshworks as a comprehensive sales force CRM.

Now, as you’ve probably guessed already, not all these features are available for free. Freshworks comes in four paid plans with varying functionalities, plus a permanently free CRM package to help you get started.

Well, that’s according to the Freshworks website. The free CRM option is even officially known as “Freshsales Free Forever Startup Plan”.

But, I like to think of it differently. While Freshworks intends to use it as a startup bridge to the paid plans, the free package can sufficiently cater to your customer relationship management needs for the long haul, without necessarily forcing you to upgrade.

Believe it not, Freshworks Free CRM is essentially a fully functional customer relationship management system for small businesses. It even comes with a separate Freshworks CRM mobile app, which you’ll find to be extremely helpful in coordinating all your salespeople, plus following up on leads.

And speaking of which, Freshworks Free CRM is just as generous as HubSpot CRM when it comes to the volume of account users and contacts. Yes, that’s right, it’s yet another solution in our best free CRM collection with an unlimited number of users and contacts. This gives you unrestricted freedom to expand your sales processes.

The other thing you’ll love about Freshworks Free CRM is its surprisingly intuitive interface. Freshworks seemingly took advantage of its extensive software development experience, and came up with a pleasant user-friendly CRM system.

The whole layout is elegantly designed- from the menu options and pop-ups to the corresponding notifications and navigation framework.

Even the sales funnel viewer, as you’ll come to notice, offers a simplified but visually enticing interface for coordinating and tracking your sales deals. Freshworks has built it like a Kanban board to help you manage the deals in their respective stages, as well as establish their accompanying values right off the bat.

In the event you’re handling numerous deals at once, you should be able to filter them based on value, assigned sales rep, lead, etc. Then if you need to organize them, Freshworks Free CRM allows you to drag and drop them between various categories.

The default stages you’ll find on the system include “Won”, “Under Review”, “Follow-Up”, and “New”. I bet they are all self-explanatory.

Another benefit that comes with Freshworks Free CRM is seamless contact management. Apart from providing a smooth navigation framework, the system proceeds to make your work much easier by handling some of the essential stuff. You just need to enter a contact’s basic details and Freshworks will automatically fill their profile with info from the contact’s social media accounts, plus their company website.

From that vantage point, therefore, you should be able to keep tabs on every single lead interaction, contact social media posts, plus overall lead value.

Freshworks Free CRM even keeps histories of all the emails you send and receive from your contacts. Each email is linked automatically to its corresponding contact. And that includes messages you send from third-party integrations like Gmail.

Freshworks Free CRM Software Features

Freshworks Free CRM essentially comes with lead, contact, account, and deal management, mobile app for Android and iOS, 24×5 support, role-based access, record scope, insights based on lead scoring, migration from other CRMs, data export, data import, file storage, unlimited records, filters and custom views, tasks, appointments, and notes.

What Freshworks CRM Features Do You Pay Extra For?

The premium Freshworks CRM editions takes things up a notch by offering advanced features like bulk emails, dedicated account manager, marketplace, SMS integration, Google Contact Sync, cross module reporting, sales trendline reports, sales forecasting reports, sales velocity reports and many more.

In addition to that, you can expect more features like: sales sequences, real-time email alerts, email tracking, email templates, email scheduling, bulk email metrics and email forwarding.

Who Should Consider Using Freshworks Free CRM Software?

Since the Freshworks Free CRM software offers unlimited contacts, unlimited users, and unlimited support, there are no restrictions on the ideal business size. Although it primarily targets startups and small businesses, it can comfortably host even large businesses and enterprises.

Freshworks is one of the best free CRM software such users could leverage for prospecting, plus attracting and maintaining leads.

Best Free CRM Software #4: Insightly

Insightly CRM happens to be a direct competitor to HubSpot CRM since it targets pretty much the same market segment. And to be more precise, Insightly is a cloud-based customer relationship management system that offers small to mid-sized businesses a range of tools for marketing campaigns, managing their sales processes, project management, as well as facilitating integrations with relevant apps like Microsoft Outlook and Gmail.

Such capabilities have attracted more than 1.5 million users to Insightly, who continue to leverage it for call management, advanced reporting, project management, workflow automation, quote generation, sales opportunities management, lead management, email tracking, contact management, and relationship linking.

Its mobile CRM app further supplements these functionalities with audio notes and business card scanning.

Sadly, however, not all these features are accessible for free. They are, instead, distributed across three different versions of Insightly CRM.

The one we’re interested in is, of course, Insightly Free CRM, which is a permanently free tool for managing sales, contacts, and projects. But, here’s the kicker- it restricts not only some functionalities but also the number of users and records.

The only way you can unlock the limitations is by purchasing a premium version. It’s available in three optional subscription plans, whose costs are calculated per user based on either monthly or annual billing rates.

That said, the third one is the free trial version, which offers all the premium features for a limited period of time. And come to think of it, you might want to start off here since Insightly won’t force you to commit. You’ll be free to proceed without submitting your credit card credentials.

But, don’t let it discourage you from trying out the free version. While it might not be as powerful as the corresponding premium version, Insightly’s Free CRM is still one of the best free CRM tools on the market.

Its tools essentially allow you to manage tasks and projects, build and launch email campaigns, link the CRM system to your customer’s social media accounts, convert leads into sales opportunities, coordinate proposals, as well as streamline your entire sales funnel.

But, unlike HubSpot CRM, Insightly Free CRM can only accommodate a maximum of two users. On the brighter side, however, at least they get an impressive set of project management capabilities, combined with task management, sales management, and lead management.

In addition to that, this free CRM solution comes with accounting integrations, custom reports and charts, mass email and custom email templates, as well as self-service support. The number of records you can store here is 2,500, with two custom fields for each record type.

And in case you’re wondering, Insightly’s records refer to reports, comments, events notes, emails, tasks, projects, opportunities, organizations, leads, and contacts

You get to manage all that from a pleasantly straightforward interface. Insightly has designed its system with a focus on ease of use, a smooth user experience, and intuitiveness.

Insightly Free CRM Software Features

Insightly Free CRM provides OAuth Single Sign-On (SSO), accounting integrations, custom reports and charts, mass email and custom email templates, task and project management, lead and sales management, self-service support, 2,500 record limit, 2 custom fields per record type, 10 mass emails per day, plus up to 2 users.

What Insightly CRM Features Do You Pay Extra For?

Insightly CRM offers its premium features through three pricing plans – Plus, Professional, and Enterprise- for $29 per user per month, $49 per user per month, and $99 per user per month respectively.

Some of the additional features they provide include:

  • Developer API support and professional services at an extra cost
  • Schedule serverless lambda functions, dynamic page layout rules
  • Lambda function authoring and execution
  • Deploy custom apps on any platform
  • Calculated fields on any object
  • Custom validation rules

Who Should Consider Using Insightly Free CRM Software?

Insightly Free CRM is optimized for users that need simple project management, sales management, and contact management capabilities. SMBs with basic dynamic sales projects would especially like it here, as they’d be able to extensively customize their dashboards, reports and data fields.

That said, the best users of Insightly Free CRM are sales teams dealing with service-based businesses. The system allows them to manage their service projects and sales under one streamlined CRM software.

Best Free CRM Software #5: Engagebay

engagebay - best free crm software

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:

  1. Marketing Bay
  2. Sales Bay
  3. 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

engagebay pricing - free crm software

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.

👉 Read our comprehensive Engagebay review.

Best Free CRM Software #6: Zoho CRM

Zoho CRM is a lot like Freshworks.

No, scratch that. In all honesty, Zoho is much bigger than Feshworks. While the latter has so far developed about 13 business applications, Zoho has more than 60 tools to its name.

Now that, for starters, is enough proof that Zoho is no joke when it comes to cloud-based applications. Its extensive portfolio means it’s well-experienced and it comprehensively understands the intricacies of business processes.

Then secondly, leveraging any of Zoho’s tools means you have a wide range of solid business applications you could integrate. Zoho has built all its solutions to link seamlessly with each other.

And Zoho CRM happens to be one of the core tools. This is where you go with you need advanced customer relationship management functionalities, since it offers pretty much all there is to CRM.

Its sales force automation function, for instance, features workflow automation, account management, contact management, deal management, and lead management. It then supplements that with team collaboration, marketing automation, predictive sales, performance management, partner relationship management, sales enablement, and intelligent insights.

But that’s not all. Zoho CRM is the mother of omnichannel customer relationship management. Apart from the standard email automations, it allows businesses to capitalize on web conferencing, social media, customer self-service portals, web forms, phone calls, and live chat.

It’s worth noting, however, that the Zoho Free CRM edition doesn’t support social channels. But, when you look on the bright side, at least you can rely on it for email automation, plus web form and phone call customer interactions.

If you dive deeper, it turns out Zoho Free CRM is one of the best free CRM tools for third-party app integrations, team collaboration, workflow automation, contact management, and lead gathering.

However, from Zoho CRM’s pricing comparison page, you might notice that the free version seems to leave out quite a number of advanced functionalities. There are many blanks on the plan’s feature chart.

But, don’t let that deceive you. Zoho Free CRM is actually a robust tool for small businesses with up to 10 sales team members. You’ll particularly appreciate the fact that it grants you an unrestricted real-time view of all the key sales parameters.

Consequently, you can expect an easy time organizing, streamlining, coordinating, tracking and monitoring your sales cycles, sales pipelines, sales opportunities, and contact information.

Another notable thing about Zoho’s free CRM is its workflow automation capabilities, The whole framework is built to ease pressure on your salespeople by automating some of the core processes.

It helps you boost productivity and efficiency from the ground up by facilitating a wide array of task automations- ranging from site visitor tracking and lead generation to email marketing, contact management, and deal follow-up.

In the meantime, the system goes ahead and monitors the corresponding results to measure performance not only at the business level, but also when it comes to individual employees.

Although it can’t match up to the number of attributes tracked by the paid versions, Zoho Free CRM manages to cover all the critical performance analytics.

It doesn’t stop there though. The CRM system further attempts to help teams improve their sales performance through seamless collaboration.

Salespeople can, for instance, interact with each other using built-in social tools like instant messaging. You even get a newsfeed that resembles the Facebook social platform, complete with file sharing and status updates.

As team members continue engaging and collaborating on multiple levels, the chief admin retains the veto power to control everything. Zoho Free CRM gives you the freedom to add team members, apply account restrictions, allow and revoke access, as well as specify individual account roles.

You could also choose to manage your entire sales pipeline remotely or on the go. The trick here is simply linking your web-based system with either the Zoho CRM Android or iOS mobile app. They both come free of charge, and each of them provides access to calls, messages, contacts, tasks, accounts, opportunities, leads, etc.

Then get this. You don’t need a stable internet connection to use any of the Zoho CRM mobile apps. They are surprisingly capable of running on offline mode in the event of network unavailability.

That said, another way you could extend your free CRM functionalities is by simply integrating Zoho CRM with third party tools. For the past decade and a half, its developers have been busy building integrations with numerous applications.

So, chances are, you’ll probably be spoilt for choice. Zoho Free CRM has what it takes to pair seamlessly with collaboration apps like Google Tasks and Google Calendar, messaging solutions like Gmail, other CRM software especially open source CRM, etc. Zoho Free CRM can indeed easily fit anywhere.

Zoho Free CRM Software Features

The free version of Zoho CRM comes with basic customer support, 5,000 API credits per day per organization, 5,000 modules, 1 GB free storage, 10 email templates, , standard reports, 5 task actions, 1 workflow rule per module.

What Zoho CRM Features Do You Pay Extra For?

The Zoho CRM paid plans offer more privileges like: classic customer support, 1000 email sends per day, or the ability to synchronize with Google Contacts.

Who Should Consider Using Zoho Free CRM Software?

Growing small and medium-sized businesses on the web would enjoy using Zoho Free CRM because of its comprehensive sales force automation, combined with detailed analytics, lead management, web visitor tracking, team collaboration, and email marketing automation.

It’s especially suitable for retail and service-based businesses that are already leveraging other Zoho applications. Embedding them with Zoho CRM would form one heck of a dynamic commerce ecosystem.

Best Free CRM Software #7: Bitrix24

If you’re the type that would fancy a customer relationship management solution that doubles up as a social collaboration app, then Bitrix24 is certainly worth checking out. This is an exceptional tool that manages to not only facilitate sales automation, but also actively enhance communication within small and medium-sized businesses.

Then guess what? Although you can only access the full Bitrix24 feature set from its paid Business plan edition, the free version isn’t that badly off. I’d say it offers about 70% of all the functionalities.

Now that’s quite impressive, especially when you compare it to the rest of the options in our best free CRM guide.

The surprises don’t end there though, because here’s the most interesting part- while the bulk of CRM solutions today are distributed as either cloud-based or self-hosted systems, Bitrix24 happens to belong to both worlds.

Yes, that’s right. Believe it or not, Bitrix24 is not your average CRM software. You can use it as a cloud-based tool, or have the whole system installed on your local server. Then when you need to integrate them, you’ll notice that the cloud edition is accompanied by a REST API while the self-hosted one is an open-source CRM with an API.

Sadly, here’s the bad news. Apparently, you won’t have these two options if you’re on a budget. The self-hosted Bitrix CRM solution is a costly affair with a one-off price of at least $1,311.20. And no, it doesn’t offer free packages.

On the flip side, however, the cloud-based Bitrix24 CRM is not only substantially cheaper, but also offers a permanently free option. So, in other words, you can bet Bitrix24 Free CRM is entirely cloud-based.

Now, when we go to its specifics, Bitrix24 Free CRM is fundamentally described as an open-source CRM system that’s optimized for sales team management, sales automation, marketing automation, customer support, email marketing, online payments, quotes and invoicing, plus pipeline management.

Social collaboration between team members is one of the chief functions here. And in fact, Bitrix24 is arguably the best free CRM solution for holistic team collaboration. It offers all the essential tools your team would need to interact freely, streamline sales tasks and projects, plus share files and assets.

Then to build a solid team, Bitrix24 Free CRM has a flexible admin system that helps you set up additional user accounts, as well as control their corresponding privileges. You get to assign user roles, manage account access permissions, determine data visibility, plus allocate leads to different team members.

The only drawback is, you can only register a maximum of 12 users per account. If you want an unlimited number of users, you’ll have to purchase Bitrix24’s Professional plan for about $199 a month.

But if 12 sounds good enough for you, then you’ll be pleased to learn that Bitrix24 Free CRM makes up for its user limitation in several different ways.

All the team members you bring on board, for instance, should be able to collaborate extensively thanks to the systems’ task management functionalities, which come along with project management, website building, time tracking, workload management, human resource management, document management, and communication tools.

Bitrix24 Free CRM further allows team members to engage contacts across multiple channels to speed up the conversion process. Apart from emails, you get to interact with leads via video conferencing, instant messaging, and phone calls.

Then to keep all the resultant customer interactions organized, the CRM system will automatically save the emails, messages, and phone recordings in chronological order. Each contact is eventually linked to their respective interaction history.

Another area where Bitrix24 Free CRM really stands out is system customization. It happens to be an extensively flexible customer relationship management tool that’s open to numerous dynamic tweaks.

The platform itself is an open-source CRM system. That means it provides access to its underlying source code, which you could customize by reworking the code. But if programming is not your forte, you should at least be able to configure reports, contact channel parameters, the sales automation rules, etc.

Bitrix24 Free CRM Software Features

The free version of Bitrix24 CRM provides two factor authorization (OTP), project knowledge base, company knowledge base, employee list synchronization with Outlook and CardDA, export employee list to Excel

What Bitrix24 CRM Features Do Your Pay Extra For?

bitrix24 pricing

Other functionalities include bulk messaging (contact center), voice broadcasting, bulk SMS, business process automation in CRM, web hooks for rules/triggers, CRM analytics, sales plan, plus document generator.

Who Should Consider Using Bitrix24 Free CRM Software?

Bitrix24 Free CRM is predominantly recommended to small and medium-sized business teams that consistently work closely. Its multiple collaboration tools facilitate seamless communication, human resource management, document sharing, workload management, project management, and task management.

Plus, considering it’s an open-source CRM solution, you should have an easy time reconfiguring the entire system as your sales processes and team operations change.

Best Free CRM Software #8: Capsule CRM

Capsule Free CRM homepage

For over ten years now, Capsule CRM has enjoyed a huge following in the SaaS CRM space, thanks to its smart simple approach to customer relationship management. It remains one of the simplest CRM tools on the market that can effectively handle sales pipeline management, task management, contact management, reports and analytics, plus integrations with third-party applications.

But what exactly does “simple” mean here?

Well, for starters, you can forget about all the CRM hullabaloo we’ve seen on the best free CRM tools we’ve discussed so far. Capsule CRM isn’t about all that noise. Instead, it chooses a more laid back approach when it comes to enhancing customer relationships.

So, in other words, you can think of it as the direct opposite of advanced platforms like Zoho CRM. This one is much more straightforward, with just the basic tools.

But, make no mistake. We’re not suggesting it can’t do much. On the contrary, Capsule CRM is almost as powerful as its advanced counterparts.

Its free version, for instance, comes with data segmentation capabilities. You can capitalize on that to prepare your own custom contact lists based on specific grouping parameters. This form of organization ultimately makes it easier to spot and maximize sales opportunities.

And speaking of contacts, Capsule Free CRM accommodates up to 250 contacts. The number of users, on the other hand, is limited to two per account, with a maximum of 10MB storage space for each user.

Ok, I know what you might be thinking at this point. Aren’t these figures a bit too low compared to what other best free CRM tools provide?

Well, that’s a valid point, I admit. But, here’s the thing about Capsule Free CRM. Unlike the customer relationship management systems we’ve explored, Capsule Free CRM has its own unique target market.

While others go for small to mid-sized businesses, Capsule Free CRM focuses on solopreneurs, beginners and startups. These are the types of users who’ve never used a CRM system before and are just getting started.

Think about it. A volume of 250 contacts would, admittedly, be enough for them. Besides, when they ultimately exhaust this allowance, upgrades here are as cheap as $18 per user per month.

You probably won’t need an upscale anytime soon though, because while the contact numbers might seem to be a bit too low, there are multiple features that beginners enjoy here.

Let’s start with the most outstanding thing- Capsule CRM’s user experience. One benefit you ought to expect from a CRM tool that offers only the essentials is an incredibly simple interface. And Capsule CRM doesn’t disappoint when it comes to that.

While most of the modern CRM systems would take even an experienced professional some time to learn the ropes, Capsule CRM is unbelievably straightforward. Its intuitive interface has been designed to offer the quickest and easiest methods of managing sales pipelines. So, of course, you should be able to grasp all the basics right off the bat.

Then when it comes to contact management, you’ll notice that the contact data here is extensively customizable. The software accommodates an unlimited number of cases and custom fields per contact. Plus, you can proceed to attach notes, proposals, agreements, and documents.

As you begin reaching out to various contacts via email and phone calls, Capsule Free CRM allows you to specify the accompanying sales tasks via its calendar and tasks feature.

You could, for example, schedule tasks like submission deadlines, phone calls, meetings or appointments. Then you might want to connect them with their respective contacts, cases, or sales opportunities.

Now, this is where Capsule CRM’s sales pipeline comes in. By displaying all the sales opportunities along with their accompanying parameters, it provides a dashboard for tracking all your sales processes. You get to quickly view details like the deal value plus all the upcoming tasks for each sales opportunity.

And while you’re it, Capsule allows you to collaborate securely with your team member by simply sharing the sales opportunities.

Capsule Free CRM Software Features

The free version of Capsule CRM offers API access, more than 1,000 integrations and automations via Zapier, mobile app (for iOS and Android), add-ons marketplace, single sign-on via Google Suite, two-factor authentication, Gmail add-on, email drop box, sales activity dashboard, user-defined filtered lists, Kanban visual pipeline, configurable sales milestone, task management, calendar, unlimited tracks, unlimited sales opportunities, unlimited custom fields, 250 MB storage, plus 250 contacts.

What Capsule CRM Features Do You Pay Extra For?

Capsule CRM offers two paid plans- Professional for $18 per user per month, and Teams for $36 per user per month.

They stretch things further by facilitating premium add-ons, restriction of users to their own records, restriction of team access to records, organization of users into teams, custom reports via Google Data Studio, custom activity types, reporting by team, advanced sales reporting, activity reporting, up to 20 GB storage per user, plus up to 100,000 contacts.

Who Should Consider Using Capsule Free CRM Software?

The Capsule Free CRM software was built for anyone beginning their customer relationship management journey. Its simple user-friendly system makes it easy for solopreneurs, startups, and beginners to learn the ropes, as well as develop basic CRM skills.

The Best CRM Software

Choosing the best CRM platform for your business ensures you can build a more effective connection with your target audience. CRM tools place all of the information you need about your customers into one space, so you can customize campaigns, and make the most of your sales tools.

There’s no one-size-fits-all for finding the ultimate CRM, but with so many free and low-cost options out there, there’s also no excuse for failing to experiment for with your options. After all, fail to properly organize your support ticketing, customer information and sales strategies, and you could miss out on essential conversions.

Good luck finding the solution that drives the best customer data outcomes for your needs.

Rebekah Carter

Rebekah Carter is an experienced content creator, news reporter, and blogger specializing in marketing, business development, and technology. Her expertise covers everything from artificial intelligence to email marketing software and extended reality devices. When she’s not writing, Rebekah spends most of her time reading, exploring the great outdoors, and gaming.

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