The 5 Best CRMs for Marketing and Creative Agencies

The top CRM software platforms for marketers are Freshworks’s Freshmarketer platform and Hubspot. Freshmarketer comes with a landing page builder and conversion and revenue tracking, allowing businesses to accurately measure campaign success and build upon it.

Hubspot, on the other hand, offers a generous free plan and cheap starter plan that includes 1,000 contacts, plus an email template and webform builder, allowing small teams to get access to a functional CRM platform without spending much.

Overall, marketing and creative agencies can use CRM platforms to track campaign success, automate workflows, and integrate with popular social media platforms. Read on for our recommendations or use our free comparison tool to find the best CRM system for your needs and receive tailored quotes.

Top 5 Marketing and Creative Agency CRMs: Overview

We analyzed 13 top CRM providers and whittled them down to our top five favorites for marketing and creative teams based on marketing features, user experience, customer support, and value for money.

Here’s a quick overview of the top five marketing CRMs:

1. Freshmarketer: Easiest Platform to Use

Taking the top spot for marketing features in our independent analysis is Freshmarketer by Freshworks. We found the software overall easy to use, making it a highly accessible option for businesses with limited CRM experience, or ones that want to train up staff quickly. Its plentiful email templates and preset dashboards also make it a great tool for creating and analyzing the success of your campaigns.

Why should you choose Freshmarketer’s marketing CRM?

As well as offering extremely user-friendly campaign builders and accessible reporting systems, Freshmarketer also boasts the best customer support of all the CRM systems we looked at. You’ll have expert support on hand who can build your CRM in 30 minutes, as well as 24/5 phone and live chat service, plus all the email and social media support you’d demand from any self-respecting CRM.

There’s also an impressively extensive knowledge base available online, where you can watch tutorials, read articles, and participate in tutorials to make sure you’re getting the most out of Freshsales’ system.

At just $15 per user, per month for the paid Enterprise plan, Freshmarketer is also an affordable mid-tier solution that will fit the budget of most businesses.

Freshmarketer’s marketing features

• Email design editor: Freshmarketer’s email marketing design editor stood out in our testing as it allows you to assemble campaigns with headings, footers, images, and videos. We found the drag-and-drop style makes it approachable for users without much prior design experience. If your creative juices aren’t flowing – or you simply want to save time – you can choose from Freshmarketer’s 169 templates, categorized by newsletter, offers, promotions, and transactional.
• AI assistant: “Freddy” can help take the guesswork out of lead management by scoring the quality of contacts based on a number of factors, e.g. email open or click-through rate. While it offers the flexibility of segmenting your audience into separate ‘lists’ it does not offer an A/B testing feature for its email platform, so you cannot test your designs as you can with Keap.
• Landing page and webform builder: An entire section of the platform dedicated to building landing pages and web forms. With a similar, user-friendly drag-and-drop editor you can change the font, color, and layout of any of the numerous design templates including categories such as webinar, ebook, lead gen, e-commerce, events, newsletter sign-up, free download, customer success, and B2B.
• Drip campaigns: We appreciated the 24 drip campaign templates provided but it’s easy to create your own as you’ll be walked through a short tutorial at the start to get the hang of the different functions needed to set up a workflow.

Where Freshmarketer could improve

Although Freshmarketer integrates with key social media platforms, such as Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn, it has fewer integrations overall than competitors Zoho CRM. Freshmarketer has 1,000+ integrations while Zoho CRM has over 3,000, meaning the latter is more likely to work with your company’s existing software.

Freshmarketer also has limited scalability, since it only has two marketing CRM tiers, the free plan and the $15 per user per month Enterprise plan. This means that if you outgrow the enterprise plan you’ll need to switch platforms. Hubspot, on the other hand, can accommodate very large enterprises, as well as small businesses, thanks to its four marketing CRM pricing tiers, ranging from $0 to $3,600 per month.

2. HubSpot: Best Value for Money CRM

HubSpot offers a highly functional free plan that includes key marketing features such as 2,000 email sends per month, reply tracking, and even an AI assistant, a rarity on free plans. Its Starter plan is also highly affordable, at $15 per user, per month making HubSpot an excellent place to start for businesses that don’t want to spend an arm and a leg on marketing CRM.

Why should you choose HubSpot’s marketing CRM?

If you’re a small business owner or freelancer looking to upscale your marketing efforts with a dedicated CRM system, HubSpot Free Tools and its $15 per user per month Marketing Hub Starter plan are great options.

Our testing proved that the features on Hubspot’s free plan are objectively generous and geared toward marketing teams. It includes features that aren’t available on some competitor’s paid plans, such as a chatbot builder and an AI assistant, “Breeze Copilot.” Hubspot’s wide range of tiers also means if you outgrow the capacity, you’ll easily be able to upgrade without experiencing too much upheaval.

HubSpot’s free plan does not offer social media integration or drip marketing campaigns, so if they are especially important, we recommend that you consider an alternative paid plan, such as HubSpot Professional or Freshsales.

HubSpot’s marketing features

• Contact segmentation: HubSpot’s free plan allows you to segment your contacts according to certain characteristics and easily switch between your segmented view and full list.
• Email campaign building: While we loved that there is a fully customizable editor, only five templates are provided which is far fewer than some of the paid plans (Freshsales and Keap). Nevertheless, the email builder is intended for marketing purposes as the templates are split into 3 categories: welcome, promotion, and newsletter.
• Integrations: If you’re Canva-savvy, you’ll be happy to learn that HubSpot can integrate with Canva so you’ll also have the option to design your emails directly within HubSpot using Canva design features.
• Webform builder: Build fully customizable web forms, albeit with a few limitations for free users around changing fonts and colors and a pesky watermark, which is removed on the paid plans.
• Chatbot: With HubSpot’s free plan you can also create chatbots to offer customer service, qualify leads, and book meetings – which is a rare feature, for a paid plan, let alone a free option.

Where Hubspot could improve

Although Hubspot’s free plan and its Starter plan offer great value for money, they do have some shortcomings. For example, contact scoring and WhatsApp integration are only available for $800 per month on the Marketing Hub Professional plan, while you can get these from $15 with Freshmarketer.

There’s also a very steep price increase from the $15 per user per month Starter plan to the $800 per month for the Professional plan, which could make scaling difficult for small businesses. Zoho CRM and monday CRM offer more measured price increases between plans.

3. Keap: Best CRM for Small Teams

Keap’s focus is all on automation, which means it takes over monotonous actions that can easily be outsourced to software, such as sending emails, segmenting leads, and following up on invoices. While Keap is considerably more expensive than the other providers, our testing showed that its unlimited automation saves a ton of time, so it’s worth it for teams with busy pipelines.

Why should you choose Keap as a marketing CRM?

Keap works best for smaller teams since its baseline $224 per month plan only includes 2 users. Each additional user bumps up the price, with five users costing $483 per month, and 10 costing  $2,067. As these figures show, Keap is a little pricier than the other providers, but for small businesses willing to spend more on an excellent CRM system, Keap can act as an invaluable extra pair of hands and allow you to focus on more important affairs.

That’s because Keap offers an extensive library of pre-built automations, which for marketing, include lead magnet offers, one-time re-engagement email series, and quizzes, to name a few.

We noted that Keap does not offer integrations with communications apps such as social media platforms and is also not the most suitable platform for marketing teams that also require customer support features from their CRM software.

Keap’s marketing features

• Unlimited automation: Keap is the automation MVP, with a wide range of pre-built automation, and unlimited potential to create automated workflows based on specific events and triggers. While we sometimes found it complicated and time-consuming to set up automations, it’s one of the biggest benefits of using CRM software due to the amount of time you can save and reallocate to more important matters.
• One-on-one coaching: To ensure you squeeze the most out of your CRM platform, Keap provides you with a dedicated CRM expert to help set up your software and answer any questions you may have. Keap is the only platform that offers onboarding help at no extra cost, which really stood out to us. If you’re investing in software, you want to be sure you’re using it to its maximum potential so this is a huge plus.
• Email design editor: Keap’s email design editor allows you to create personalized campaigns and send them out to contacts, who are segmented based on criteria that you assign them. This ensures that you don’t lose the human touch in your email marketing.
• AI Assistant: Since Keap only offers one plan, you’ll get access to its AI assistant no matter how large or small your team is. The AI assistant can be used to write content and design email campaigns, speeding up the launch process.

Where Keap could improve

As we’ve noted, Keap is more expensive than other marketing CRMs, starting at $224 per month for just two users, with no free plan or cheap starter plan. This means it’s not the best option for businesses on a budget, who’ll be better off with cheaper alternatives like Zoho CRM and monday CRM.

Keap also isn’t a dedicated marketing CRM platform. It’s an all-in-one solution that comes with customer service and sales features, alongside marketing features. If that’s not what you’re looking for, Hubspot and Freshmarketer are better options since they offer dedicated CRM marketing software.

4. Zoho CRM: Best CRM for Integrating with Sales and Customer Service

Zoho CRM offers an all-in-one CRM software called Zoho CRM Plus, which is a great all-rounder for marketing teams that need one platform that will integrate well into the sales funnel along with sales and customer service teams. It tops the rankings for its features, doing solidly across the board for marketing, sales, and customer service teams.

Why should you choose Zoho CRM for marketing?

If you’re part of a marketing team that is seeking a one-size-fits-all platform that can easily integrate with sales and customer service teams further down the sales funnel — Zoho CRM’s CRM Plus plan is your best bet.

At $57 per user, per month, it’s cheaper than Keap’s all-in-one CRM solution but still comes fully stocked with marketing, sales, and customer service features. It has an unlimited user limit, integrates with 11 social media channels, including, and allows for 2,000 mass email sends a day. This makes it an excellent choice for a centralized, cross-departmental hub.

Zoho’s marketing features

• Social media integration: A key area of marketing is social media, so it’s incredibly helpful when your CRM integrates with your social accounts. Zoho stood out to us for this feature during testing, as it integrates with 11 social media platforms, including X, Facebook, Pinterest, and Instagram. This allows you to stay on top of customer interactions, get alerts within your CRM, and monitor and post on your accounts.
• Website visitor tracking: Included in the Zoho CRM Plus plan is Zoho Sales iQ, which allows you to track visitors to your website, and gives you the option of creating a chatbot.
• Email design editor: During our testing, we enjoyed using Zoho’s user-friendly email template designer to easily achieve professional email campaigns and replicate them by creating stored templates.
• Zia AI: The platform also comes with an AI assistant, Zia, which can analyze emails for intent, emotion, and sentiment, and use the data it collects to score contacts. The AI assistant can also be used to summarize emails and enrich email copy.

Where Zoho CRM could improve

Although Zoho CRM is by no means a difficult platform to use, it can be tricky for novice users, since it sometimes lacks clear signposting, and we found ourselves having to do a little digging to find features. By contrast, monday CRM was more intuitive.

Zoho CRM’s CRM Plus plan also isn’t a dedicated marketing CRM software. Like Keap, it’s an all-in-one solution, so teams that aren’t looking to use sales or customer service tools might prefer Hubspot or Freshmatketer.

5. monday CRM: Best CRM for Customizable Lead Management

monday CRM is highly customizable and is ideal for teams who want to tailor their CRM to their unique processes. Its flexibility extends to being suitable for remote and hybrid teams since it provides handy mobile apps to stay connected on the go.

Why should you choose monday CRM for marketing?

Much of monday CRM’s customizability is owed to its layout, which resembles an Excel spreadsheet, since it’s a series of editable rows and columns. You can also edit items and create automation directly from the page you’re working on without having to go into a separate settings page, an aspect we appreciated when testing monday CRM.

With an unlimited user limit, customizable sales visual sales pipeline, custom objects, fields, and fully editable contact fields, you can make this CRM your own.

That said, since monday CRM’s CRM system is mainly designed with sales teams in mind, it’s not our number one recommendation for marketing teams, even if it’s possible to make it work for marketing purposes with customizations.

monday CRM’s marketing features

• Collaboration and sharing documents: During our testing, we noticed that monday CRM offers a generous storage limit of 100GB, which allows ample space for document sharing. It further enables team collaboration by allowing annotation within the system.
• Email segmentation: We liked that you can add a personal touch to your marketing emails by segmenting your customers based on purchasing behavior, customer preferences, or other criteria. This can be done manually or automated by your software and means that your emails will be tailored to their recipients.
• Email marketing: monday allows for mass email sends, and has an AI tool that can help you write compelling destined for campaigns. Once the emails are sent, you’ll be able to track their status and see open rates and conversions, so it won’t feel like you’re sending emails out into the void.
• Mobile app: Multi-tasking managers, this one’s for you. With monday CRM’s mobile apps, you can stay connected to your team, leads, and campaigns while on the train, plane, you name it.

Where monday CRM could improve

Since monday CRM isn’t specifically designed for marketing purposes, it lacks some key marketing functionalities such as drip email features, website visitor tracking, lead scoring, and social media integration. This means it’s not suitable for businesses with a large customer base that need advanced automation and tracking tools. For these, Freshmarketer and Hubspot are better options.

Problems CRM Can Help Resolve

CRM can help streamline your operations and resolve common problems your team might be running into. Here are a few problems to which CRM may offer a solution:

• Not enough time to get things done: Perhaps you’re just getting started or you don’t want to invest in hiring extra team members. With a CRM platform, you can outsource time-consuming, repetitive tasks to software and leave your team free to work on more complex matters.
• Missed opportunities: If leads seem to be slipping through the net, employing a dedicated CRM platform ensures that data is stored securely in one place. With scoring and tracking features, leads will be analyzed and actions will be suggested to offer you the best chance of conversion.
• Unsuccessful email campaigns: Email marketing is notoriously thankless, with the average click-through rate often confined to single figures. With CRM’s tracking capabilities, you’ll get a better idea of what works and what doesn’t. With contact segmentation, you’ll also be able to send personalized emails with minimal extra effort.
• High drop-off rate or low conversion rate: If you’re noticing your website visitors are not converting, or perhaps you’re experiencing abandoned carts, a CRM system can help track leads to see where changes need to be made.

What are the Most Useful Features of CRM Marketing Software

The possibilities are near-endless with CRM software as many offer a hugely broad range of features and can be highly customizable. Here are a few of the top features to look out for when choosing CRM software for marketing.

• Automated Workflows: Outsource repetitive marketing tasks like sending emails, posting on socials, and more by choosing a CRM platform that offers ample automated workflows. This saves time and allows you to upscale your operations without hiring extra hands.
• Campaign Management: CRM platforms provide tools to easily create, execute, and track the results of personalized marketing campaigns across channels all in one place.
• Lead Management: Sophisticated lead scoring, routing, and nurturing features allow marketers to focus energy on hot prospects primed for sales.
• Analytics & Reporting: Detailed metrics on performance, lead quality, and ROI can be tracked within the CRM platform to optimize marketing efforts.
• Personalization: Customer segmentation, profiling tools, and tracking in the CRM enable more personalized, 1:1 marketing experiences as well as tailored sales efforts.
• Software Integration: CRMs smoothly integrate with other software tools used by marketing like email services, messaging apps, social platforms, and web analytics.
• Centralized Data: A dedicated CRM software platform offers a central space for marketing, sales, and customer service teams to collaborate and share data.

How We Ranked the Best CRMs for Creative and Marketing Agencies