The 7 best CRM systems for small businesses in 2025

Best for: small agencies, ecommerce businesses and dropshippers

Freshsales is an all-in-one sales and marketing product that’s available across Web, iOS, and Android. During the CRM implementation process, Freshsales will send you a pop-up that asks you to sign into Gmail or Outlook. Once done, your account is made, and it’s really that simple to get started.

Image credit: Startups.co.uk / The Freshsales ‘Activities’ dashboard is a useful view if you want a top-level update of what your team has been up to each week.

Freshsales: best features

We’d recommend Freshsales to small agencies and online stores, thanks to:

• Brilliant lead scoring capabilities, letting agencies tailor their sales pitch to specific subgroups, increasing a customer’s lifetime value, and boosting conversions. For ecommerce businesses, this means being able to identify high-intent shoppers – like those with abandoned carts – and automatically trigger targeted offers or follow-ups.
• Its Freddy AI feature – a clever algorithm which automatically scores your leads based on historical sales data. It shows you which leads are most likely to convert, helping you focus your time and energy on the right prospects while filtering out the ones that probably won’t go anywhere.
• Its own email campaign builder, as well as its “drip campaigns”, where chasers and follow-up emails are auto-scheduled. You can schedule chasers, follow-ups, and personalised content based on user behaviour, such as email opens, link clicks, or form submissions.
• Its built-in phone, which you can use to make calls within the platform. For small agencies, this centralises communication, automatically logs call details under each contact, and even lets you record conversations for future reference or training.
• Its AI-powered Account and Contact summaries, which generate quick overviews of recent activity – like emails, notes, and open deals – so sales reps can get up to speed fast without digging through records.

Who shouldn’t use this CRM?

For niche sectors, Freshsales may not be the ideal choice. For example, we found we couldn’t input custom fields during the data import. As a result, adding any bespoke information about my customers (e.g. their injury history, if you’re a seller of medical or therapeutic devices) became instantly complicated.

In terms of industry, it wouldn’t suit regulated sectors or those requiring specialised workflows. Specifically, UK legal firms need case management, document automation, and secure, GDPR-compliant client information – features that Freshsales doesn’t offer out of the box.

Similarly, construction companies need robust project management, on-site coordination, and resource tracking tools, which are beyond the platform’s core capabilities. In these cases, industry-specific solutions tend to be a better fit.

Best for: established businesses with large client lists, such as SaaS businesses and B2B service providers

When it came to finding Zoho CRM’s USP, all we had to do was count. Zoho boasts easily the largest feature library on the market, making it ideal for software-as-a-service (SaaS) businesses and B2B service providers with a big audience base that need deep customer insights and a custom CRM.

Image credit: Startups.co.uk / The Zoho CRM dashboard can be tailored to your company’s specific KPIs and objectives using the customisable widgets.

Zoho CRM: best features

At the risk of this turning into a list of Zoho’s features, we have to show Zoho’s ample feature library to demonstrate how competitive its offering is. The cheapest tier, Zoho Standard, has five features that aren’t offered by the majority of other rival platforms on this list. Most notably, these are:

• Customisable dashboard, giving you a personalised view of data reports and metrics that you can tailor to your specific needs and preferences. This means you can prioritise key metrics like churn rate or pipeline value, so every rep sees the most relevant insights at a glance.
• Automated lead scoring, which assigns a score to each lead based on their current behaviour and engagement. This is perfect for identifying sales-ready leads in long, complex B2B sales cycles.
• Activity, lead, and deal reports to track and analyse sales performance, helping SaaS teams track trial-to-paid conversion rates, how quickly deals move through the pipeline and how well each rep is performing.
• Custom reports and fields for tailored insight into your data. Ideal for tracking unique B2B metrics like contract value, renewal dates or onboarding status.
• Social media integrations, particularly useful for SaaS companies doing outreach or brand building on LinkedIn, or for retargeting warm leads via social platforms after initial engagement.
• Its Team Selling feature that allows multiple team members to collaborate on a single deal by sharing access, adding notes, and tracking progress.

Who shouldn’t use this CRM?

Zoho CRM isn’t designed for businesses that need real-time inventory management, order tracking, or tools to handle high-volume retail sales. While it can be adapted to some ecommerce workflows, it lacks the deep integration and automation that fast-moving online stores typically need.

Also, a lot of it comes with a learning curve. If you’re looking for something quick and easy to set up, you might find it frustrating.

And while even the cheaper tiers get access to a good amount of features, there are limits to Zoho’s generosity. For example, you can only send 250 emails per day on the Standard plan, and its web form builder can’t prevent email spam.

Best for: businesses with a simple sales process

For small sales teams or growing startups, we’d recommend Pipedrive to anyone who needs a clear, simple way to prioritise and manage their sales pipeline. While many systems on this list have exceptional lead scoring, once your prospect is secured, Pipedrive moves customers swiftly and efficiently through the sales journey, from quote to invoice.

Image credit: Startups.co.uk / Pipedrive boasts lots of impressive reporting features that you can use to view complex data in a bitesize format.

Pipedrive: best features

Pipedrive is a solid sales platform with a few nifty tricks that help it to stand out. Chiefly, it has some bespoke features, including:

• The ability to send automatic email notifications if a user acts suspiciously. This can help teams respond quickly to potential fraud or unusual behaviour.
• A very easy-to-use customer service chatbot builder that acts as a valuable member of the team by vetting leads before they are passed to a human rep. This saves time by handling common questions and qualifying prospects 24/7, so sales reps can focus on high-quality leads and close deals faster.
• AI features that analyse sales data to provide personalised recommendations. These insights can help sales teams prioritise opportunities, tailor pitches, and forecast more accurately.

Who shouldn’t use this CRM?

Pipedrive might be a sales rep’s dream, but it isn’t the best choice for businesses with complex sales processes or those needing multi-team collaboration. Its simplicity and straightforward pipeline management can feel limiting if you need deep customisation or cross-department workflows.

Moreover, businesses that want built-in marketing automation or advanced lead nurturing may find Pipedrive lacking, as it mainly focuses on sales activities and requires additional tools for marketing campaigns.

Best for: building customisable dashboards

For a generalist organisational tool, monday.com demonstrates impressive CRM functionality. Unlike some CRM giants, such as Salesforce, monday doesn’t force you into a rigid sales process. You can design custom, colour-coded pipelines to reflect your unique workflow.

Image credit: Startups.co.uk / Colour-coded task cards mean that monday.com CRM users can immediately spot potential bottlenecks when planning customer campaigns.

monday.com: best features

Newbies will find monday CRM very easy to use, with almost no training required. Here’s what I liked about it specifically:

• Being able to click on tasks to edit them, rather than diving into the settings menu.
• Its drag-and-drop functionality allowed me to set up and modify my dashboards quickly.
• It’s useful for gaining a clear visual of your sales or marketing funnel, letting you identify bottlenecks and track progress at a glance.
• It can upload and integrate data from Google Sheets and Microsoft Excel, which is particularly useful if you find yourself switching from another project management platform.

Who shouldn’t use this CRM?

monday.com isn’t the best fit for very small businesses or solo entrepreneurs who need a simple, straightforward CRM or task manager, since it can feel a little overwhelming and costly for minimal use. If you’re looking for a lightweight CRM that’s focused solely on sales or contact management, monday.com might be too complex and feature-rich for your business.

Best for: building email marketing campaigns

Unlike other platforms on this list, we limited our review to HubSpot Free, one of the most popular free CRM systems on the market. This plan acts as the ‘starting tier’ of HubSpot’s specialist paid products. As a result, it can act as an all-in-one sales, marketing, and customer service tool.

Image credit: Startups.co.uk / HubSpot’s contact file feature stores all of your customer information in one place, providing the perfect cheat sheet for sales representatives.

HubSpot Free: best features

If you’re a small consumer-facing business, such as an ecommerce craft seller, and want to build brand awareness, there’s a lot to like about HubSpot Free’s marketing features. For example:

• Marketing automations are available to handle repetitive, lead generation tasks, such as emailing customers.
• Users can build a chatbot to help them stretch out resources and handle requests at scale (technophobes don’t worry, it took us just 3m 50s to build a bot).
• Users are given three marketing email templates to use; Welcome, Promotion, and Newsletter (there are also two text-based formats, which are slightly clunkier).
• Social media integrations for monitoring and publishing on Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram.
• Email tracking and notifications so you know when contacts open your emails and click links.
• Forms and pop-ups to capture leads from your business website.
• Its latest deep research connector powered by ChatGPT that instantly pulls up the answers you need from your CRM simply by asking (e.g. “Which customers haven’t been contacted in 90 days?”), but this is only available for customers who have a paid plan with OpenAI.

Who shouldn’t use this CRM?

HubSpot has a generous amount of features available on its free plan, which is great for small businesses that are looking to ramp up their marketing efforts at a low cost.

That being said, its most powerful marketing and sales tools are locked behind pricey paid tiers, which can quickly add up as your team grows.

It also isn’t suitable for companies that need deep customisation or industry-specific workflows, especially in highly regulated sectors like healthcare or finance. Moreover, it won’t suit businesses that need to work offline or want to host their own CRM on their own servers, as HubSpot only works online and is fully cloud-based.

Best for: fast-growth startups with large sales teams

Salesforce has an incredibly complicated library of plans, most of which are overkill for SMEs. However, its small business product, Salesforce Starter, rolls all Salesforce marketing, sales, and customer service tools into one simplified package that costs £20 per month.

Image credit: Startups.co.uk / Salesforce has a duplicate tracking feature that will tell you if a contact has already been uploaded into the system.

Salesforce Starter Suite: best features

With Starter Suite, there’s an impressive array of lead management features to help you manage the sales pipeline, including:

• Its clever value add-ons, such as its lead routing feature, which lets users forward potential sales to the right reps.
• The ability to create email campaigns and a customisable sales path.
• It offers guided onboarding, which walks you through how to import your company data and use its CRM tools properly.
• Provides a ready-to-use setup, so instead of starting from scratch, you can use its preset workflow to get started right away.

Who shouldn’t use this CRM?

If you’re looking for a super simple, low-cost CRM without the extra bells and whistles, then unfortunately, Salesforce isn’t the right match. Its features and setup can feel overwhelming if you just need basic contact and deal tracking.

It’s also less suitable for businesses with highly specialised workflows that need deep customisation or industry-specific tools beyond what Salesforce Starter provides. Additionally, if you want built-in advanced marketing automation, you might find the Starter plan limiting, as it lacks many marketing features and would require additional tools.

If you don’t think Salesforce is for you, read our guide to the top Salesforce alternatives.