Best CRM Software for Small Businesses | Top 10 Reviewed for 2023

The best CRM software for small businesses streamlines customer relationship management by providing a powerful and intuitive platform for tracking leads, nurturing prospects, and ultimately converting them into customers.

Here, we’ve reviewed and compared the best CRM software for small businesses and narrowed down ten of the best solutions on the market. Each app provides powerful yet easy-to-use features to help you build strong relationships with your customers and maximize sales. Read on to find out how the likes of Salesforce, Pipedrive, and Zoho CRM can help take your small business to the next level.

Best Small Business CRM Software | Top 10 Shortlist

There’s no shortage of CRM tools on the market, but they’re not all equally well suited to your company’s needs. To help you cut through the weeds, we’ve rounded up the top 10 CRM solutions for small businesses. Overall, we settled on Salesforce as our number-one pick. Here’s a quick look at each contender:

1. Salesforce — Our top overall pick for the best CRM software for small businesses. It provides a platform that will grow with you thanks to its AI-based Trailhead application. Try it for 30 days and see the difference.
2. Pipedrive — A user-friendly CRM platform designed with small businesses in mind. Easy to set up and navigate, Pipedrive helps you make the most of your customer relationships. Try it free for 14 days.
3. Zoho CRM — Affordable solution that provides a range of features, including lead scoring and automated workflow capabilities. Get started with your free trial now.
4. Monday Sales CRM — A powerful sales automation tool offering analytics, tracking, and reporting capabilities to help you stay on top of all your customer relationships.
5. Zendesk Sell — Cloud-based CRM app that integrates with other popular business software so you can access all the data you need quickly and easily.
6. HubSpot — Offering a full suite of services from marketing automation to sales enablement, HubSpot is the perfect choice for companies looking for an all-in-one solution for free.
7. Freshsales — This intuitive CRM system has been designed specifically for small businesses, allowing them to customize their setup according to their needs.
8. Maximizer CRM — Comprehensive CRM system that provides a range of features to help you build better customer relationships.
9. Less Annoying CRM — Excellent for businesses looking for a simple, no-frills CRM solution with excellent customer support.
10. Oracle NetSuite — Complete ERP system that offers an integrated suite of applications to manage your business more effectively.

Best CRM Software for Small Businesses | In-Depth Reviews

Our top CRM picks offer specific advantages for small businesses. Let’s take a closer look at each one.

1. Salesforce — Overall Top Pick for Best CRM Software for Small Businesses

Salesforce is the leading CRM software for small businesses. It offers many features, including customer management, lead generation, and analytics.

With its intuitive interface, Salesforce makes it easy to manage your contacts, track leads, analyze data, and more.

Salesforce makes contact management simple, allowing you to store and organize customer data in one centralized place. You can easily segment customers based on different criteria, such as location, interests, or gender.

This ensures that your sales team targets the right people with the right message. To help you maximize engagement, Salesforce enables you to track leads and create automated follow-up campaigns.

With it, you can easily identify trends and insights from customer behavior and make informed decisions about your marketing and sales strategies. This helps you boost efficiency and optimize your sales process.

If your team struggles to monitor customer engagement and measure ROI from your campaigns, you’ll benefit from Salesforce’s Trailhead app.

Designed with small businesses in mind, Trailhead has a built-in AI that helps sales teams generate leads and manage customer relationships.

Trailhead also allows you to track key performance indicators (KPIs) in a streamlined way, making it easier to measure the success of your sales efforts.

Pricing

When it comes to pricing for Salesforce, there are four plans to choose from:

• Essentials Plan — All Salesforce’s core features, such as account, contact, lead, opportunity management, and email integration with Gmail or Outlook.
• Professional Plan — Advanced contact and lead management, custom objects and apps, unlimited API calls to extend Salesforce functionality, forecasting, reporting capabilities, and user access control.
• Enterprise Plan — All features of the Professional Plan, plus multiple currencies, team calendars and events management, customizable dashboards and analytics capabilities, and a service cloud console for customer service teams.
• Unlimited Plan — Unlimited storage space and API calls, as well as access to Salesforce’s full suite of features and applications.

Salesforce ties together powerful features such as contact management, analytics, and lead generation in an easy-to-use interface.

It’s not the cheapest solution, but its ability to help optimize sales processes and maximize efficiency makes it well worth the price for many small businesses.

2. Pipedrive — Easy-to-Use CRM Software for Small Businesses

Pipedrive CRM software is an excellent choice for small businesses looking to streamline their sales processes. It’s easy to set up and use, making it an excellent option for busy entrepreneurs who need to get up and running quickly.

If you don’t want to miss out on important opportunities or lose valuable time trying to sort through all your data manually, Pipedrive’s dashboard system is right for you. One of the best features this software offers is the ability to add custom columns and filters.

This allows you to tailor your view to see only the most relevant data at a glance, making it easier to keep track of your sales pipeline. With this feature, you can quickly identify which leads are ready for follow-up or need more attention.

Pipedrive makes this process much easier with its email templates feature. You can create templates for various situations, such as follow-up emails after an initial call, thank-you emails after a sale, and more.

This ensures that your emails are always professional and consistent, which will help build trust with customers and increase the chances of getting more sales. In addition, Pipedrive makes it easy to forecast your future sales and revenue with its built-in calculator.

This helps you plan and better manage your resources, so you can focus on the areas that’ll give you the best return on investment. With this feature, you can also quickly identify trends in customer behavior and make adjustments to your sales strategies as needed.

Pricing

Pipedrive is one of the most affordable and feature-rich CRM software solutions on the market. With four plans available, you’ll find one that suits your specific needs and budget:

• Essentials — This plan is perfect for small teams looking to get organized with an intuitive CRM tool. It includes a suite of features, including contact management and sales funnel tracking.
• Advanced — For larger teams seeking more powerful features, such as full email sync with templates and scheduling. It also includes a workflow builder to help you manage leads and close deals faster.
• Professional — An excellent choice for companies looking to extend the capabilities of their CRM further with revenue projection tools and contract management.
• Enterprise — Designed with larger teams in mind, this plan comes with all the features of the Professional plan plus additional heightened security preferences and better scalability support.

Overall, Pipedrive is an excellent CRM software for small businesses. It’s easy to set up and use, with powerful features such as custom columns and filters, email templates, and revenue projection.

The only downside compared to other providers is that it doesn’t have the same automation capabilities – but this shouldn’t be a deal-breaker for most small businesses looking to streamline their sales processes.

3. Zoho CRM — Budget-Friendly CRM Fit for Small Businesses

Zoho CRM is an affordable and easy-to-use CRM software program that can be tailored to fit the unique needs of any small business. It helps users manage contacts, track sales opportunities, automate marketing campaigns, and more.

Lead management is one of the key features of Zoho CRM. It allows small businesses to streamline their lead acquisition process, helping them identify and nurture new leads quickly and effectively.

With lead management, you can effortlessly track leads from initial contact to conversion to better understand the customer journey and optimize campaigns for maximum ROI.

Businesses that stay on top of lead management can monitor sales opportunities and measure campaign performance accurately, resulting in more conversions. CRM marketing automation is another great feature of Zoho CRM.

It helps users automate repetitive tasks such as sending emails, creating quotes, and generating invoices – saving time and ensuring accuracy.

This feature also enables you to set up automated triggers that respond to customer behavior to stay ahead of the competition by proactively engaging customers based on their preferences.

Last but not least, Zoho’s deal management features help users organize and track deals from initial contact to close. Businesses can keep an eye on the progress of each deal and take proactive steps if any issues arise, increasing their chances of success.

This feature makes it easy for small businesses to remain organized and ensure that all deals are properly handled.

Pricing

As one of the most affordable and reliable CRM software solutions, Zoho CRM has four plans to choose from:

• Standard — Perfect for startups as it provides all the basic features needed to manage customers.
• Professional — Offers more advanced features such as robust customer management capabilities, including macros and SalesSignals tools (real-time customer activity notifications).
• Enterprise — This plan takes customer management further by providing support for multiple scoring rules, personalized dashboards, and more.
• Ultimate — Gives you access to all available features. Best for those who need a robust and scalable solution.

Zoho CRM is a popular choice for small businesses looking for an affordable and easy-to-use CRM solution.

It offers a range of features to help users manage leads, automate tasks, and track deals, making it easier to increase customer engagement and boost sales.

The only downside is that, unlike Salesforce and Pipedrive, Zoho reserves some of its advanced AI features for its most expensive plans.

4. Monday Sales CRM — CRM That Provides Powerful Automation

Monday Sales CRM is designed to save time and money by automating tedious sales tasks. It provides a comprehensive suite of tools to help small businesses increase their overall efficiency.

If you spend too much time trying to keep up with customer requests or onboarding new customers manually, Monday is perfect for you. You can quickly and easily create rules that trigger actions based on customer behavior or data points without writing code.

This means less time is spent manually managing tasks and more time focusing on other areas of your business. Monday also makes it easy to keep track of all your customer emails in one place.

With email sync and tracking, you can quickly see who has opened your emails and which links they’ve clicked on. This allows you to tailor relevant follow-up communications and increase engagement with customers.

With Monday, you can easily predict future sales by analyzing customer data and trends. These insights will help you better manage your resources and understand how much work is needed for each sale.

Pricing

Monday Sales CRM offers an individual free-forever plan, which includes basic CRM tools like webforms to capture leads. If you’re interested in the more advanced tools, there are four paid plans to choose from:

• Basic — This plan includes unlimited contacts, tasks, deals, and pipelines.
• Standard — Has additional features like advanced reporting and analytics, custom fields and forms, and automated workflows.
• Pro — Boasts features like customized reports and dashboards, API access for integration with other apps, and role-based permissions.
• Enterprise — This plan is superb for larger organizations and offers custom pricing, tailored onboarding and training, and dedicated account support.

If you’re looking for a CRM that’ll make your life easier, Monday Sales CRM is a great choice. It allows you to quickly automate tedious tasks and track customer emails, as well as provide powerful forecasting capabilities.

5. Zendesk Sell — Cloud-Based CRM App With Robust Integrations

Zendesk Sell is a powerful, cloud-based CRM app for small businesses. It integrates with various other programs to create an all-in-one customer relationship management solution.

Zendesk is known for its email integration capabilities, allowing you to send and receive emails directly from the app. This makes it much easier for small businesses to communicate with their customers in a timely manner.

Without this feature, many businesses could find themselves struggling to keep up with customer inquiries and requests. Zendesk Sell also provides a centralized platform to store customer data and all interactions with them.

This means that businesses can quickly access any information about their customers, including past orders and communication history. Having this kind of data at your fingertips is essential for providing the best possible customer service experience.

The Zendesk Sell CRM app is also mobile-friendly, allowing users to manage their customer relationships on the go. This makes it quick and easy to respond to customer inquiries from anywhere in the world – something that’s becoming increasingly important in today’s fast-paced, global economy.

Pricing

Recently, Zendesk announced they’re offering a 14-day free trial for subscribers. That means you can explore Zendesk Sell’s powerful CRM software and amazing features at no cost.

If you decide to continue using the software after the trial period, you can choose from three different plans that best fit your needs:

• Team —This plan is perfect for small businesses or start-ups, and it’s highly affordable. You’ll get all of Zendesk’s essential features, like contact management, sales pipeline tracking, and email integration.
• Growth — Get access to Zendesk’s more advanced features.
• Professional — Comes with a wide array of features that’ll help you increase productivity and close more deals faster. This includes up to 20 customizable sales pipelines.

Zendesk Sell’s robust integrations, email capabilities, centralized platform, and mobile-friendly design make it an excellent choice for streamlining customer interactions and providing the best possible service experience.

However, unlike some of its competitors, Zendesk Sell has a limited automation pool. If that doesn’t concern you, give the free trial a go.

6. HubSpot — Free CRM Software for Small Businesses

HubSpot is a well-rounded CRM software that is perfect for small businesses. It offers a range of free features and tools, from sales enablement to email integrations.

HubSpot’s Live Chat feature is an invaluable tool for small businesses. It enables them to respond quickly to customer inquiries and service requests in real-time, ensuring that customers feel heard and valued.

Without the ability to instantly engage with customers, businesses will miss out on potential sales opportunities and risk damaging their reputation by not providing quick response times.

Easily stay on top of customer interactions with HubSpot’s email tracking and notifications feature. This tool allows you to track emails sent from the CRM, receive delivery and open rate notifications, and even get insights into which links were clicked in the email.

Finally, businesses of all sizes can benefit from HubSpot’s Calling SDK feature. SDK is an acronym for “Software Development Kit”, and it allows businesses to embed voice and video calling directly into their websites and applications via VoIP.

This is incredibly important in providing a seamless customer experience, as customers can quickly connect with customer service agents without having to leave the website or app.

Check out our best internet phones to integrate into your CRM software.

Pricing

HubSpot CRM’s core software is free, forever. With it, you can manage contacts, track deals, and even customize fields.

You’ll have access to features like email tracking and sales automation to help prioritize your conversations with prospects and keep your team on track. Plus, you can collaborate with colleagues to close more deals faster.

If you upgrade to one of the paid plans, you’ll get access to features like custom dashboards and reports and advanced analytics.

If you’re just getting started with CRM software, HubSpot is a great choice. Its free features are incredibly useful and provide valuable basic tools for your small business.

However, its paid plans can be expensive for smaller businesses, especially when compared to other available providers.

7. Freshsales — CRM Software With Customizable Sales Pipeline

Freshsales is an entry-level, cloud-based customer relationship management software program. Part of Freshworks’ suite of products, Freshsales is designed to help small businesses manage their sales process from start to finish.

Not only does Freshsales allow you to track your contacts through their customer lifecycle, but it also enables you to set up and customize a sales pipeline based on your business’s specific needs.

This feature allows you to easily see where each contact is in the sales cycle so that you can assign tasks and manage deadlines. On top of this, Freshsales also makes it easy to automate tasks in your sales process.

You can set up automated emails and reminders, assign tasks to team members, or add notes to customer records as a reminder for later. This frees up time spent on manual processes and allows you to focus more on the customer experience.

This is absolutely essential for small businesses. And from highlight cards to the summary section, Freshsales gives you a holistic view of your customers.

This feature is handy, as it allows you to quickly and easily keep track of customer information such as interactions, notes, deals, and more in one place.

Pricing

Freshsales offers a free plan that includes contact and account management, plus a built-in chat support system. For its paid plans, you can choose between these three:

• Growth Plan — Offers basic contact and account management along with lead scoring, email tracking, and reporting.
• Pro Plan — Includes all the features in the Growth Plan plus advanced features like automation rules, custom fields, and visual pipelines to help you increase sales efficiency.
• Enterprise Plan — Everything in the Pro Plan plus additional resources like single sign-on (SSO) integration and enterprise-level support for larger businesses.

If you’re looking for entry-level CRM software for your small business, Freshsales is an excellent choice. Just keep in mind that while it syncs easily with other Freshworks products, it has limited integrations with other programs.

8. Maximizer CRM — Feature-Rich CRM Software for Small Businesses

Maximizer CRM is new cloud-based and on-premise software designed to monitor your sales and customer relationships. It uses SQL reports and analytics to help you manage your customer relationships.

Maximizer CRM is the perfect choice for small businesses looking to track and optimize their campaigns. With its intuitive dashboard and SQL reports, you can easily monitor your sales activities, customer relationships, and campaign progress.

You’ll also have access to valuable insights into customer behavior, so you can make informed decisions about how to best reach out to them. After evaluating this data, you can quickly and easily resolve customer cases with the help of Maximizer’s case management feature.

The software enables you to manage customer tickets, send automated emails and messages, and track each case from start to finish. This allows your team to provide faster response times, ensuring that customers are satisfied with their experience.

Lastly, Maximizer CRM’s pipeline management feature makes it easy to monitor sales progress and identify which deals are most likely to close. You can easily:

Pricing

There are only two plans to choose from when subscribing to Maximizer CRM — and we can’t say that it’s cheap.

• Base Edition — This plan comes with all the features you need to manage your customer relationships, from contact management and lead tracking to sales automation and reporting.
• Sales Leader Edition — Includes additional tools for managing complex sales processes, team collaboration, customer feedback surveys, and more.

With its many features, the software can be a little expensive for some small businesses. Overall, however, it’s a fantastic solution for teams looking to manage their customer relationships and track their campaigns.

9. Less Annoying CRM — No-Frills CRM Software Perfect for Your Business

Less Annoying CRM is a low-cost, simple CRM software with plenty of advantages for businesses. It’s designed to be straightforward so you can keep track of your customers without getting bogged down in complicated features.

If you’re a small business looking for an intuitive and straightforward CRM solution, Less Annoying CRM is a perfect choice. With its customizable sales pipeline, you can easily manage leads and track progress through each stage of the sales process.

This makes it easy to stay organized and know when a customer should be contacted or followed up on. The great thing about this feature is that it’s completely customizable, so you can tailor it to fit your needs.

Less Annoying CRM also offers task reminders and automation. You can set up tasks for yourself or your team members and get notifications when they need to be completed.

Finally, Less Annoying CRM provides API documentation so you can integrate it with other software and services. This means you can collect data from different sources, streamline customer service processes, and even automate certain tasks across systems.

Pricing

Less Annoying CRM’s “no frills” approach is reflected in its pricing. For just $15, you get access to all its features. No hidden fees or extra charges — just an easy-to-understand package at a great price.

Less Annoying CRM is an excellent option for small businesses seeking an easy-to-use, straightforward CRM solution.

It’s simple enough that it won’t take too much time to learn but comprehensive enough that you can manage your customers and their data effectively.

The only downside is that it lacks the helpful email tools, such as segmentation and templating, that you’ll find in more comprehensive CRM solutions like Zendesk Sell.

10. Oracle NetSuite — Complete ERP System for Growing Small Businesses

Oracle NetSuite is an all-in-one Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software solution that allows small businesses to manage their complex operations in one central system.

With Oracle NetSuite’s Sales Force Automation, small business owners can streamline their sales process by tracking leads and customers. It allows them to collect data, track customer engagements and follow up on opportunities with ease.

Meanwhile, the Marketing Automation feature helps small businesses to craft effective campaigns and target the right customers.

Businesses can easily track customer engagement with their products/services, allowing them to adjust marketing strategies as needed.

In addition, Oracle NetSuite’s Partner Relationship Management feature helps businesses build and maintain relationships with their partners. You can easily keep track of partner agreements, manage communication channels, and ensure that both parties are on the same page.

Pricing

Unfortunately, Oracle Netsuite doesn’t publish its pricing information on its website, so you’ll need to contact them directly for more details.

Overall, Oracle NetSuite is a great ERP software for growing small businesses that need to manage complex operations. The only downside is that you can’t buy it as a stand-alone CRM tool.

However, having an omnichannel solution like NetSuite provides more value for money than buying multiple separate services from other platforms.

Best CRM Software Tools | Top 10 Compared

Take a look at our comparison table for a head-to-head comparison of the top 10 CRM software tools for small businesses:

The Key Benefits of CRM Software for Small Businesses

Running a small business can be a challenge in today’s competitive market. But with the right CRM software, small businesses can increase their efficiency and profitability.

Tech tools like CRM systems provide several key benefits that can set small businesses on the path to success.

1. Enhanced Customer Service

CRM software helps small businesses keep track of their customer interactions, enabling them to provide better customer service. The system stores important contact information and purchase histories so customers can be serviced quickly and accurately.

This is especially useful for small businesses with limited staff resources who may not have the time to search through paper records or manually update a spreadsheet.

2. Improved Sales Performance

By using CRM software, small businesses can easily identify sales patterns and trends, leading to improved performance in closing more deals and increasing revenue.

The system also allows business owners to assign tasks to team members and monitor their progress, helping them to stay on top of their sales goals.

3. Streamlined Business Processes

CRM software can help small businesses automate mundane tasks such as data entry and customer follow-ups. This frees up valuable human resources that can then be used more strategically to improve the overall efficiency of the business.

Moreover, by utilizing CRM automation tools, companies can ensure that all customer interactions are standardized and consistent across the board.

4. Increased Insights

One of the most important benefits of using CRM software is that it provides small businesses with detailed insights into their customers’ behavior.

This helps them to better understand customer needs and preferences, which can then be used to tailor their marketing initiatives for maximum effectiveness.

Additionally, the system can gather data from various channels such as email, social media, and website visits to provide a more comprehensive view of customer behavior.

How to Choose the Best CRM Software for Your Small Business

When choosing the best CRM software for your small business, there are a few key elements to consider. It’s important to select a system that can help you streamline customer-related tasks and processes while also helping you grow your business.

Here’s what to look for in the best CRM apps:

Comprehensive Customer Profiles

The right CRM software will provide you with comprehensive customer profiles that include contact details, purchase history, account activities, and more.

This information is essential for providing personalized service, creating targeted campaigns, and managing customer relationships over time.

Automation Capabilities

A good CRM system should also offer automation capabilities, such as automated customer service emails, appointment reminders, and order fulfillment. Automation can help you save time and effort while improving customer satisfaction.

Integrations

Many CRM systems are designed to integrate with other business applications, such as accounting software or marketing automation platforms. This helps you manage multiple aspects of your business from a single platform.

Ease of Use

The best CRM software should be easy to use so that it doesn’t take too much time away from running your small business. Look for features like drag-and-drop interfaces, customizable dashboards, and mobile access.

Scalability

As your small business grows, you’ll need a CRM system that can grow with it. Look for a system that can accommodate more users, data, and features as your company expands.

CRM Software FAQs