The 7 Best CRM Systems for Small Businesses

If you’re in the early stages of business, you might not need a comprehensive CRM system, especially if your client list is relatively small. But, as your business grows and your client base expands, having a system to help you organise contacts and nurture leads will become necessary sooner or later.

Based on our experience testing and researching CRM platforms, Zoho CRM is our top pick for small businesses. It’s one of the best cheap CRM out there, offering a full set of tools for a low price, but it’s not the only great provider out there.

With affordability being the most important factor for small business CRM, we’ve made sure to only feature CRM software providers that offer low-priced plans in our top seven picks.

The Best CRM Systems for Small Businesses: Overview

For a quick overview of the best CRM systems for small businesses, see the table below:

1. Zoho: Best Value for Money

Zoho’s mid-tier pricing, ranging from £12 to £42 per user per month, makes it a great option for small businesses. Plus, with features such as lead scoring and options to customise the platform on all plans, it offers great value for money.

Why we like Zoho CRM

With a price range of £14 to £42 per user, per month, the only provider with a smaller range than Zoho CRM is monday CRM (£10-£24). However, Zoho offers much more than its counterpart, including lead scoring and 250 mass email sends per day, both features included on Zoho’s lowest pricing tier.

At this price point, you’ll also get access to platform customisations, such as building 100 custom reports, 10 custom dashboards, and 10 custom fields.

Upgrading to Zoho’s more expensive plans opens to door to more customisations and for just £35 per user, per month, you get access to “Zia”, Zoho’s AI assistant. Considering that the equivalent at Salesforce is only available – at no extra cost – on its £400 plan, that’s a bargain.

Zoho’s Zia can score leads for you, predict churn, and advise on the best time to contact leads based on its analysis of calls and emails, to name a few functions. It’s one of the most affordable ways to use AI in customer service we’ve come across in our research.

Where Zoho could improve

While Zoho offers great value for money, that doesn’t mean it isn’t missing any tools. For example, its webform creator doesn’t come with spam prevention, meaning your carefully crafted forms could end up in your contact’s spam bin, never to be seen. There’s also a maximum file storage of only 100 MB per user, much less than the limits offered by Freshales, Zendesk, or monday CRM.

Lastly, although Zoho’s affordability makes it great for small businesses, during testing, we found that it wasn’t the easiest platform to navigate. The onboarding process was quite short, so total beginners might get stuck when they first start using Zoho. For a more intuitive option, we recommend Freshsales.

2. Freshsales: Easiest CRM to Use

Affordable, straightforward, and easy on the eye, Freshworks CRM is a great sales CRM for beginners and was the easiest to use during our testing.

Why we like Freshsales

Part of what made Freshsales so easy to use during our testing was its onboarding process. We were guided through every step of the process, including the data import, which is the step we struggle the most with when setting up other CRM platforms. If you’re a small business using a CRM system for the first time, we think you’ll appreciate the support.

Another useful feature was Freshsales’s “launchpad” tool, essentially a search bar for looking up features in the CRM. Salesforce has a similar tool, and in both cases, this feature helped speed up our work.

Besides ease of use, Freshsales gives small businesses a decent set of tools for managing their sales pipeline. Like Zoho, Freshsales offers AI tools for a low price, with its “Freddy AI” assistant available from £29 per user, per month, £6 less than Zoho. That said, Freshsales AI assistant is a little more limited than Zoho’s – it doesn’t offer email and call summaries for example.

That said, Freshsales has a leg up in the AI department with its AI chatbot builder, available on all plans. It can be used to answer questions from contacts and collect conversations. Not quite as advanced as the AI agent offered on Zendesk plans, it can still speed up lead nurturing for your business by acting as an extra agent.

Where Freshsales could improve

While Freshsales is a great platform for small business sales teams, it’s not an all-in-one solution the way Hubspot is and lacks tools for other CRM use cases, especially customer service teams.

For example, you can’t rank tickets by urgency on any plan, or set predefined responses to tickets. If you’re looking for a CRM platform that’s rich in customer service tools, Zendesk is a better bet.

Freshsales is also light when it comes to third-party integrations, especially in comparison to competitors Zoho and Salesforce, which offer thousands of them. It doesn’t for example, integrate with popular social media platforms like Facebook, so if you use these channels to capture leads, this will be an issue.

3. Pipedrive: Best for Detailed Lead Management

Pipedrive is the best CRM system for small businesses that need detailed lead management. It’s got a mid-tier price range, and offers automation building and unlimited customisable pipelines, which appear in an easy-to-read Kanban view.

Why we like Pipedrive

Pipedrive offers users between 30 and 180 preset workflow automation, depending on the plan. This allows your team to move leads through the pipeline automatically, without wasting time. Other platforms like Zoho and Freshsales require you to build these yourselves, which can be a hassle if you’re not tech-savvy.

The platform also integrates with popular workplace communication apps Slack, Trello, and Teams, allowing you to action tasks based on conversations had within the apps. If you’re a highly collaborative team, this feature can ensure nothing gets lost in the chat.

From £49 per month, you’ll also get access to Pipedrive’s AI sales assistant, which is more than you’d be paying for AI with Zoho and Freshsales. But, it does come with some compelling features not available with competitors, such as third-party app recommendations based on your commonly encountered problems.

Pipedrive is also one of the best CRM systems for security, allowing you to set up custom user permissions, MFA, two-factor authentication, and custom security rules. These are stricter measures than those offered by most competitors.

Where Pipedrive could improve

Pipedrive’s main downside is that a lot of its best features are only available from £49 per user, per month, on its third-most expensive plan. This includes its AI assistant and some of its automation tools. You can get similar features for cheaper with Zoho.

The platform is also only suitable for sales teams, lacking any features for marketing or customer service teams. Pipedrive also only offers sales CRM, so you don’t have the option of integrating two CRM variants as is the case with Freshsales.

4. HubSpot: Best All-in-one Solution

Hubspot isn’t usually the first provider that comes to mind for small businesses, but it does offer one of the best free CRM systems, and a very affordable all-in-one sales, marketing, and customer service solution for just £11 per user, per month.

Why we like Hubspot

Hubspot offers a free all-in-one CRM tool that includes features for sales, marketing, and services teams.

Its free plan offers particularly great CRM marketing features. These include 2,000 email sends per month, which can be optimised for mobile, forms creation for websites completed with automated emails when a contact completes one, and email reply tracking, so you can measure how successful a campaign has been.

On the sales side, the free plan offers features such as list segmentation, and a prospecting tool which allows you to see what companies are visiting your website and are potential leads. On the Hubspot free plan, you also get access to Hubspot’s AI “copilot”, which can give sales teams recommendations and insights on leads based on activity.

Currently, Hubspot is one of the few CRM providers that offers AI on its free plan, which is part of what makes its free tool functional. Unfortunately, to get access to useful features such as lead scoring or task automation, you’ll need to upgrade to the cheapest paid plan. But, at £11 per user, per month, the Starter Customer Platform is still cheaper than Zoho (£12) and Salesforce’s (£20) entry-level plans.

Where Hubspot could improve

One of Hubspot’s main downsides is that its paid CRM software can get expensive very quickly, especially when it comes to its all-in-one and marketing solutions. For its all-in-one Customer Platform, after the £11 per user, per month Starter plan, pricing jumps to £1,017 per month for five users. For its marketing hub, pricing jumps from £14 per user, per month to £702 per month for three users.

HubSpot also charges onboarding fees for its paid plans, which can quickly go over £1,000. You can find examples in our interview with Luke from TopLine Comms.

For smaller price jumps when upgrading plans, we recommend Zoho or monday CRM.

5. monday CRM: Best for Customisation

monday CRM is more or less a blank slate when you start, allowing you to fully customise everything from dashboards, to contact fields, to tasks and automation. This makes it a great option for businesses with niche operational needs.

Why we like monday CRM

The main reason why monday CRM is so customisable is that the platform is structured similarly to a spreadsheet, it’s a series of customizable rows and columns. In addition to this, there are no fixed separate dashboards, for leads and contacts for example, so you can combine information and items as you see fit. This gives businesses a lot of control over how they display data.

It’s also extremely easy to customise a dashboard on monday CRM. During testing, we were able to make changes directly on the page we were editing by clicking on an element, whereas in competitor platforms we often needed to sift through the settings to do this. monday CRM is impressive because it opts for this “blank canvas” approach, yet remains really easy to use.

We also liked the platform’s use of colour-coding to distinguish different pipelines, statuses, and actions from each other, since it made mistakes less likely.

Where monday CRM could improve

Unfortunately, since monday CRM is designed to be a one-size-fits-all platform, that means it is lacking some specialised features. It doesn’t, for example, have lead scoring for sales teams. It’s also missing marketing features such as drip emails or social media integrations.

A similarly priced alternative would be Zoho CRM, which has a great set of both sales and marketing tools.

6. Zendesk: Best for Services Teams

Zendesk is one of the best CRM tools for customer service teams out there. It starts at just £15 per user, per month, integrates with several VoIP systems and comes with an AI support agent, making it a great value choice for small businesses.

Why we like Zendesk

Zendesk’s cheapest plan, the £15 Support Team comes with some impressive features, such as automatic ticket routing based on agent status and capacity and an AI support agent that can resolve customer issues independently.

You get five automatic AI resolutions per agent per month on the cheapest plan, but this increases to 15 on the most expensive plan. You can also pay for more if you need them, either on a pay-as-you-go basis or in bulk. This gives you the flexibility to utilise AI as little or as much as you like or need.

With Zendesk, you can also offer your customers several channels for initiating tickets, including Whatsapp and X (formerly known as Twitter). This gives your customers the ability to contact you easily and have their issues resolved more efficiently. Plus, Zendesk integrates with popular VoIP providers’ systems, such as RingCentral, Dialpad, and GoTo, making a crossover between your phone lines and CRM possible.

Where Zendesk could improve

Zendesk offers services and sales CRM, however, neither system comes with any real marketing features, so it can’t be used as an all-in-one CRM provider, unlike Zoho or Hubspot.

Its reporting features are also a little limited. AI-driven insights are only available as a £40 per user, per month add-on, even on Zendesk’s most expensive plan. Other providers like Pipedrive and Freshsales offer this feature at no extra cost on their top-tier plans. There’s also no custom reporting on the cheapest plan, or live agent activity views.

7. Salesforce: Best for Reporting and Analytics

Salesforce can be an expensive option for small businesses, but it’s one of the most popular CRM systems out there for a reason. It offers excellent reporting and analytics tools, and a high level of automation, which can speed up lead conversion.

Why we like Salesforce

Salesforce opens on a dashboard that gives you quick summaries of all your data and activities in the form of doughnut charts. This relatively new feature was only introduced during Salesforce’s June UI updates, but it’s a great tool for interpreting complex data in a short amount of time.

The Salesforce platform also has a custom report-building functionality that’s separate from its dashboard creator. This means you can combine data from different dashboards, such as income and contact data, into one single spreadsheet.

All reports can also be easily viewed as a chart with a simple click of a button, and Salesforce gives you the option to choose between different visualizations, including doughnut, funnel, line, bar, and dot charts. It offers far more data visualizations than competitors such as monday CRM.

When it comes to automation, Salesforce has an AI software tool called ‘Einstein Copilot’ that can automate tasks for you, based on activity, without you having to lift and finger, as well as generate content for your sales, marketing, commerce, and customer service teams. Unfortunately, to get full access to this tool you need to be at least on the £400 per user, per month Einstein 1 Sales plan. That’s far more than competitors such as Zoho CRM and Pipedrive charge for AI features.

Where Salesforce could improve

Like Hubspot, Salesforce’s biggest downside is its price. Although it has a plan for small businesses, at £20 per user, per month, it’s still almost twice as expensive as most competitor starter plans. The price also quickly jumps to over £100 per user, per month in just a few tiers.

Salesforce also isn’t the easiest platform to use, despite making strides this past year to make the platform more accessible. In this case, Salesforce is a victim of its own brilliance. The platform is packed with so many features that it can be very hard to find your feet when you first start, an issue highlighted by Laura Hogan from JellyBean, who we interviewed about her businesse’s experience using Salesforce.

Buying Guide: What to Look for In CRM Software

CRM software can quickly get expensive, so we recommend that small businesses look for affordable yet functional solutions when searching for the right CRM software. Here are our tips for what factors to consider when choosing a CRM platform:

Pricing

When considering CRM software costs as a small business, it’s important not to choose a system that’s out of budget. Remember that most CRM providers charge not just by month but also by user, so factor that into your budgeting, and carefully consider what team members actually need access to the CRM.

It’s also important to consider which features are a must-have for your business and check that these are included in your chosen plan. The most important thing is value for money. A more advanced system that allows you to outsource simple functions to automation will save you money in the long run, so it can be worth investing in a more high-end system.

Another factor to consider is your payment terms. Some providers charge less if you commit to them yearly, so this can be a great way to score a better deal.

Ease of use

If you’re a fairly new business, or your employees don’t have much experience with CRM systems, you should try to choose CRM software that isn’t too hard to use and can easily be picked up.

In general, an intuitive interface that is easy to navigate will allow all employees to thrive in their respective roles. A difficult-to-use CRM system can reduce morale as staff struggle to adopt the technology.

If your existing staff has previous experience using CRM software, it’s more likely they can handle a more complex platform. But don’t overlook new recruits, since you want to minimize onboarding time.

A big factor that affects how easy CRM software is to use is its level of customisation. A highly customisable platform can take some time to set up, however, once you’ve organized it to perfectly match your needs, it’ll be much easier to use.

Make sure to take a look at the onboarding support, or check out the free trial version before taking the plunge, since this can also help you determine a software’s suitability.

Scalability

Even if currently your small business only needs a simple and low-cost CRM solution, it is worth considering what your future business needs could entail. That’s because if you commit to one CRM system, changing software systems – and moving over all your work data as a result – can be a pain, and even cost you time and money as a result.

Consequently, we recommend picking a CRM that allows you to expand when you need to, whether that’s catering to an increased number of users, customers, new features, or greater data. You’ll also want to consider the relative costs for these upgrades.

In the reviews above, we’ve listed the prices of each provider’s plans so you can see for yourself. However, many providers also allow for a variety of add-ons that can be added to any plan, which could save you money if you are looking for specific feature upgrades.

Industry-specific features

There is a vast array of tools and features that can be included (or not) in CRM software. Double-check that your team will be able to fulfil all of its actions within your chosen software.

Some CRM providers, like Hubspot, offer all-in-one solutions, while others only offer software for a specific type of team, such as sales or marketing.

Testing a CRM software using a free trial or plan can help you easily find out if it has features that meet your needs. For example, you may want to check how well you can create a sales pipeline, or how well you can create and test campaigns or perform multi-channel lead capture.

Customer support

With any technology, you may occasionally run into hurdles, especially when you first start out using the software. That’s why we recommend that you check the availability of your chosen provider’s customer support.

Most are open during standard business hours, but if you operate out of those hours you might want to find a CRM provider with more generous customer support availability.

You should also consider the contact channels at your disposal. Some support teams only operate online, whereas some can be reached via telephone too, which can be crucial if you’re somebody who prefers to speak to another human being rather than a chatbot.

Integration capabilities

Another area to consider, depending on your business needs, is how well the CRM integrates with the tools you already use. That could be any tool your preferred CRM can’t cover, such as email platforms, accounting systems, and e-commerce platforms. If you have specific needs or custom applications, check whether the CRM offers robust API access for deeper integrations and custom solutions.

With a more seamless integration across platforms, you can reduce the number of annoying headaches you and your team face, as well as lower the amount of valuable time lost at work.

Our Methodology: How We Ranked CRMs for Small Businesses