7 Best CRM systems for small businesses in 2023

Finding the best CRM system for your small business depends on your specific priorities. You might want to focus on value for money, functionality, ease of use or the ability to scale as you grow.

Our latest round of research, carried out at the end of last year with an independent analyst, takes into account all of these factors to find the top CRM software options for small businesses.

Overall, we recommend HubSpot as the best CRM software for small businesses. Today's bad economy is causing SMEs to look at their bottom line as never before. HubSpot is a slick, modern tool that has a near unbeatable free tier. It's also our top choice for email marketing and management, and a great affordable option to adopt as the cost of living crisis continues.

No two small businesses are the same. We've been working with SMEs for more than two decades, and we know that every firm has a unique process when it comes to engaging new customers and retaining existing ones.

To help you find the best solution you can compare these most popular CRM tools for SMEs on pricing and key features in the guide below.

What is a CRM System?

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems are a type of software that stores, organises, and manages data about your customers – and how they interact with your business. A CRM system is an integral tool for modern sales or marketing teams, or for customer support and IT services.

At its most basic level, CRM software is a digital version of an address book – a place to securely store all contact information. Your CRM database stores all of the valuable data you have about your customers, which is produced through every action and interaction. This data includes:

• Name, title, and email address
• Date and nature of last interaction
• Visits to your website and engagement with your brand
• Their previous orders and spend
• Even personal information such as their interests and hobbies, or the name of their dog (for the sake of small talk)

A CRM database is your foundation for success. And yet, for teams focused on crunching the numbers to analyse performance, increase revenue, and drive growth, it’s so much more – it's the building blocks of scalability and sustainable success.

That's because CRM software allows you to not only store your business' crucial client, lead, and prospect data, but to use it, too.

For sales teams, that means:

• Convert more leads – benefit from complete lifecycle management, from a customer's first interaction, all the way to a purchase
• Get a 360-degree view of your pipeline – easily monitor and track targets with drag-and-drop pipeline management
• Don't miss out on a deal – review historic, current, and projected deals, and engage lapsed prospects
• Plan for the future – engage with the data that matters most to your business to produce accurate sales forecasts and reports

For marketing teams, CRM will help you:

• Create effective emails – use templates to craft communications that get results
• Boss your campaign management – document ideas and delivery methods, and target the right audience with the best message
• Coordinate events and projects – advertise for, register, and manage attendees for events, and push projects forward more effectively
• Understand the customer journey  – chart customers’ interactions with your business, and engagement with your emails and phone calls

For customer services teams, CRM allows you to:

• Manage customer interactions – store all conversations with your clients in a central, easily-accessible location
• Unify your communication channels – pull info from email, social media, phone calls, SMS, and live chat into a single, digestible stream
• Detail preferred communication methods – record how and when customers like to be contacted, and catch them at the right time
• Get better at handling complaints – receive a notification whenever someone mentions you on social media or complains, so you can deal with it instantly

How to choose the best CRM solution for your small business

Having a smooth and efficient CRM system is becoming an increasingly important way to drive sales. However, with a recession looming, small business owners also have to contend with rising costs.

Our team of researchers – including independent CRM expert, James Macey – has worked with SMEs for over two decades; and we've been carrying out extensive research into the CRM market for five of those. Our most recent round of testing was in late 2022.

In this guide, we'll outline our results to show you the seven best CRM platforms available for small businesses, including their costs (up-front and hidden) and how well each app performs against specific priorities for small businesses.

HubSpot

Best CRM for new startups wanting to onboard customers with email marketing

Gold medallist HubSpot tops our research as an excellent choice for budget-conscious small businesses in the early-stages of growth. It has an competitive free plan, short setup time, and impressive functionality – particularly for email marketing, for which we scored it 5/5.

HubSpot Contact File

What type of small business is HubSpot best suited for?

As we mentioned in our full guide to the HubSpot platform, HubSpot’s humble origins are as an inbound marketing company. Even if a business is operating at a very small scale, the HubSpot free plan makes sourcing leads and onboarding new customers painless.

Marketing automation is available to handle all of those repetitive, lead generation tasks, such as emailing customers. Users even get access to a chatbot tool to help stretch out resources and handle requests at scale. For £0 per month, you'll also get:

• 500 emails per day
• 1 million contacts
• Lead reports for sales teams
• Paid ad tracking
• Social media integration
• Task reminders
• Website visitor tracking

HubSpot's weak points aren't many, but they are significant. Unlike more customisable options like monday.com and Zoho, the app doesn't have a lot of tailorable features (it comes in last place for this category in our ranking). Your sales process might need changing to fit with your business operations, rather than the other way around.

HubSpot pricing

In terms of paid-for plans, HubSpot has three. These are all strategy-specific: Marketing, Sales, and Service. Compared to HubSpot Free, they offer users more control over what they want to prioritise.

monday.com

Best CRM for client-focused industries, like marketing, and building customisable dashboards

monday.com is a Work OS which means it can be used to enact lots of different work tasks thanks to its fantastically customisable interface and a wealth of creative tools – perfect for building bespoke dashboards to measure different CRM metrics.

monday.com Kanban board view

What type of small business is monday.com best suited for?

Our research team identified monday as an incredibly flexible system (it achieved 4.7 out of 5 in our research, compared to HubSpot's score of 2.2) that is also very wallet-friendly. We recommend it to teams with a lot of account managers, like PR agencies, as a way to build informative dashboards that meet specific client needs.

The app is organised around a simple traffic-light system that categorises your workflow as either green (it’s completed), orange (I’m working on it), or red (I’m stuck), helping you to design a system that personalises the status of every customer relationship.

During sign up, we were prompted to fill out a user-profile. This includes identifying an area you’d like to focus on with each client (contact management, sales pipeline etc.). Other customisable elements, include:

• Custom fields
• 200+ dashboard templates
• Full mobile CRM
• Document management
• Custom apps
• Unlimited contacts
• Unlimited users

monday.com pricing

monday.com has a distinctive payment structure which is based on a set number of seats, starting at £7 per user and rising to £14 per seat. Depending on your team size, this can end up saving or costing you money. For more information, read our monday.com pricing guide.

Freshsales Suite

Best CRM for offline industries that need something easy for staff to train on, like retail

Freshsales combines both sales and marketing strategies to make one easy-to-use platform for small businesses. As a result, we gave it a usability score of 4.7 out of 5 for usability (compared to Salesforce which scores 3.8 out of 5).

Freshsales dashboard view

What type of small business is Freshsales Suite best suited for?

Firms that are new to CRM software and maybe not as logged-on as other sectors, such as retail, will appreciate Freshsales intuitive backend that takes care of the most complicated CRM tasks for you.

Set up is near instant as the platform guides users with tutorials on everything from making a template to building automations. Because you’re effectively signposted and given step-by-step direction, other tasks like email connection, adding users, and customising the pipeline, also become a quick process.

For example, data import takes just 6 and a half minutes (during our testing, HubSpot took almost 18 minutes). This excellent usability is also helped along by an impressive list of convenient and smartly-designed features:

•  Drag-and-drop journey builder
•  20 workflows 
•  5 sales sequences 
•  Custom reports and dashboards 
•  Freshworks marketplace for add-ons 
• Automatic lead scoring for new customers

Freshsales pricing

Freshsales Suite is competitively-priced. It offers a free version suitable for solo users, but only 100 contacts are permitted. One tier up is the Growth plan which, at £12 per user, per month when billed annually, gives you access to a wide array of sophisticated tools.

You get what you pay for with the platform's long list of features, but we would recommend you try the free version before committing to Freshsales CRM long-term.

Zoho

Best CRM for sectors with complex reporting and analytics requirements, like accountancy

Our latest round of research shows that Zoho CRM is the best CRM system for features. Surprisingly for its low-cost, Zoho boasts lots of sophisticated sales, service, and marketing tools for you to create a bespoke CRM solution for your firm, gaining a massive score of 4.7 out of 5 for features (HubSpot gets just 3.7 out of 5 in comparison).

Zoho CRM leads dashboard view

What type of small business is Zoho CRM best suited for?

We recommend the Zoho CRM system to those operating in a niche industry, for example, those with specialist reporting requirements like finance. Zoho also took the crown specifically for sales features, achieving 4 out of 5 in this area.

Using Zoho, your sales representatives can create separate workflows to function independently – handy if you're a business that needs to protect sensitive data to comply with GDPR. Similarly, Zoho also has custom fields to create unique task lists for each customer. Most impressively, all of these are available with the free plan.

There's really not much that Zoho can't do, which makes it good for those wanting lots of functionality without needing to splash out on budget. On Zoho's lowest-priced tier, Zoho Standard, you'll get:

• Visual sales pipeline
• Automated lead scoring
• Calendar
• Reminders
• Meeting scheduling
• Activity, lead, custom, and deal reports
• 250 emails per day (half the amount of HubSpot)

Zoho CRM pricing

In terms of pricing, Zoho CRM is a very scalable option with five plans available overall ranging from £12 to £42.

There is a free plan available. However, this is fairly generous for features, and includes a calendar view. However, you'll miss out on a few attractive CRM functions, including workflows and the ability to have multiple pipelines.

Pipedrive

Best CRM for telemarketing firms with long client books

Pipedrive is an excellent CRM system for usability – its highest-scoring category in our research. Pipedrive is not got quite as many handy tools as Freshsales (why it scores 0.3 lower than the latter). But during our testing, we found the app's clean interface supports a tidy contact database, making it our top platform for contact management.

Pipedrive dashboard view

What type of small business is Pipedrive best suited for?

Thanks to its huge list of integrations, Pipedrive users can install almost any add-on to the system to customise your CRM process to your teams’ specific client base. This makes Pipedrive an excellent choice for a variety of small firms, but we'd most recommend it to teleamarketing teams with long client books.

Contact management is not just kept to an ugly list format. Viewable from the ‘deals’ screen, every lead has an easy-to-build dashboard for you to quickly edit their name, add, or remove them to create a custom pipeline that accurately reflects your unique customer relationships.

And, thanks to its user-focussed design, you won't have to suffer through complicated set up processes for new functions. When researching for our review of Pipedrive, it took our testing team just over 1 minute to set up a chatbot, and 2 minutes to design a webform to attract new client sign-ups.

Other features include:

• 150+ integrations, including Google Meet, Zapier, Slack, and Microsoft Teams
• Pipeline management 
• Email integration
• Calendar integration 
• Activities and goals 
• Data import and export
• Sales forecasting 

Pipedrive pricing

Pipedrive does not have a free option, although there is a 14-day free trial available for newcomers. Its lowest paid-for plan is Pipedrive Essential, which costs £14.90 per user when billed annually and is the most affordable plan for small business users.

Zendesk

Best CRM for those organising tickets and/or customer support, such as IT helpdesks

Zendesk Service is our top choice for organisation (achieving a score of 5/5 in our testing) which makes it excellent for helpdesks. It's an all-in-one solution that monitors client bugs, and also analyses your performance fixing them, helping you keep on top of demand and keep clients happy.

What type of small business is Zendesk Service best suited for?

If your business provides a specialist service, such as software engineering, Zendesk Service is the smart way to manage customer issues and requests in one database. The platform’s ticketing system allows users to record, organise, and track these in one dashboard accessible to the entire team for a clear and up-to-date ticket pipeline.

Making your database is also simple with Zendesk. HubSpot, which gets just 3.3 out of 5 for organisation, makes data import needlessly complicated. Zendesk Service's robust import process enables you to first check whether the fields in your data match the system’s to ensure the data import is accurate before it even takes place.

Other features include:

• Triggers and automations
• Staff management
• Pre-built analytics dashboards
• Google Analytics for help centres
• Data exports
• Messaging tool

Zendesk Service pricing

Below, we’ve outlined the pricing information for Zendesk Service. It's worth noting that the platform also has a 30-day free trial available if you want to try before you buy.

The Suite Growth plan, which costs around £26 more per month than Suite Team, does offer more advanced features, including the ability to create multiple ticket forms. We think if you're looking to grow your customer list then Suite Growth is the best plan to purchase.

Salesforce

Best CRM for larger firms with 20+ sales representatives and a long sales pipeline

For speciality sales functions, Salesforce can truly serve as a one-stop-shop for small to large businesses looking to improve their customer outreach. This makes it an excellent choice for scaling businesses – as we highlighted in our full guide to the Salesforce platform.

Salesforce customer card

What type of small business is Salesforce best suited for?

Recording sales opportunities is a big responsibility for today's businesses and Salesforce makes this incredibly simple to monitor. We gave the platform 5/5 across categories like organisation, email, and contact management, while Pipedrive gets just 3.7/5.

Onboarding is also super easy with Salesforce. The ‘chatter' function on the sales opportunity information screens is an excellent feature for collaborating with other departments to move leads down the sales pipeline.

SMEs that are looking to expand their company will want a system that can develop alongside them. Salesforce comes in three cloud-based editions: Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, or Marketing Cloud. Salesforce Essentials is the most basic paid-for tier in each of these products and gives you:

• Account and contact management 
• Opportunity tracking 
• Lead management 
• Task and event tracking 
• Customizable reports and dashboards 
• Mobile access
• Email integration

Naturally, more sophisticated capabilities equals a longer setup time. Some users have reported that Salesforce can lag when used with bad broadband connections. If you don't think Salesforce is for your small business, you can always read our guide to the top Salesforce alternatives.

Salesforce pricing

Salesforce is a splurge compared to budget-friendly CRM systems like HubSpot. However, you can purchase extra features as an add-on at any point in your plan (such as PRM – Partner Relationship Management for an additional £30 per user, per month) which means that Salesforce can be excellent value for money if used wisely.

How did we choose the 7 best CRM systems for small businesses?

Having worked with SMEs for over twenty years, we know they have to contend with different issues compared to larger or mid-sized companies. Today's small business owners also have less time and money to spend on CRM due to the current economic challenges.

With this in mind, we’ve picked out the top CRM systems on the market, and compared them using five specific metrics that small businesses need to think about when purchasing a CRM system:

• Pricing – what are the best low-budget CRM system?
• Functionality – what features will you get for your budget?
• Usability – is it something you can easily learn how to use?
• Customisation – will you have more creative control over your CRM system?
• Help and Support – will you get guidance on setting up your CRM system?

How do the CRM costs compare?

Budget is always an important factor for SMEs looking to purchase new technology. To help our small business readers find the best CRM deal, we've designed a specialist Startups' online comparison tool, that matches you with the most suitable provider based on your business's specific ways of working.

Unsurprisingly, HubSpot is our top budget option as it's completely free to use. monday.com is the most affordable paid-for option on this list at £8.50 per seat, per month. At the higher end of the list is Salesforce at £20 per user, due to its capability for mid-sized businesses.

Which is the best CRM for small businesses?

Based on months of exhaustive research examining tens of CRM solutions, we’ve picked out the seven best CRM systems for today’s SMEs and reviewed them against five common small business priorities to produce our final ranking.

Some are more expensive than others (Salesforce costs £20 per month compared to the freemium HubSpot) but all boast a unique specialism that will make it worth the cost depending on your specific business needs.

1. Hubspot CRM specialises in email marketing and is the best tool for growing your customer base. Plus, it's 100% free.
2. monday.com is our top-rated CRM system for dashboards as a fantastic colour-coded method for organising activities, projects, and information.
3. Freshsales is best for usability. Its clever automation features do half the work for you so that setup and data input is quick and cost-efficient.
4. Zoho CRM is best for features. An endless amount of CRM tools will manage your business’ unique needs – handy for specialist industries, like insurance.
5. Pipedrive is best for contact management. Its strong list of integrations means it can be easily tailored to create bespoke lead dashboards.
6. Zendesk is best for helpdesks thanks to its unrivalled organisational capabilities that makes data importing and management quick and controllable.
7. Salesforce is geared towards managing large sales volumes, so it's perfect for SMEs with ambitious growth targets wanting to engage in a lot of new customer outreach.

Our recommendation is based on thorough research carried out with an independent analyst. For a more personalised approach, fill out our free Startups' online comparison tool to be matched with provider quotes and plans tailored to your small business.