7 Best CRM Systems for small businesses to use

1 of 3

Zoho CRM - best for established businesses

4.5

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2 of 3

Pipedrive - best for managing partners & clients

4.3

Try Pipedrive

3 of 3

Salesforce – best for growing sales teams

3.8

Try Salesforce

In the early days of running a business, it’s easy to keep track of your client list and priorities. But as your audience grows, so does the number of customer queries, complaints, and sales leads, and it can be overwhelming. At this point, most businesses will invest in a CRM system to help them log customer data and better service valuable client relationships.

I’ve collaborated with independent research expert, James Macey, to test the top CRM options for small businesses. Our results show the best CRM is Freshsales. It’s both simple to use and has a full set of features (the superb automatic lead scorer especially stands out).

That said, the right CRM depends on what you need in your business. Some SMEs prefer Hubspot’s email marketing features, or monday.com to build customisable sales funnels.

Below, you’ll find our analysis of the best CRM systems for SMEs. Each one excels in the seven most important factors that small businesses sales and marketing teams need to consider, and could be the key component for crafting a winning customer strategy.

Our top 7 CRM systems for small business: at-a-glance

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BEST CRM
Freshsales	Zoho CRM	Pipedrive	monday CRM	Hubspot	Zendesk	Salesforce CRM
Best for: Small agencies	Best for: Established businesses with long client lists	Best for: Managing partners and clients	Best for: Building customised dashboards	Best for: Building email marketing campaigns	Best for: Businesses with fast-paced sales cycles	Best for: Large sales teams
Price per month (billed annually): Free plan, or £7 per user	Price per month (billed annually): £12 per user	Price per month (billed annually): £14 per user	Price per month (billed annually): £10 per seat	Price per month (billed annually): Free Plan, or from £18 (flat rate)	Price per month (billed annually): £15 per user	Price per month (billed annually): £20 per user
Free trial? ✓	Free trial? ✓	Free trial? ✓	Free trial? ✓	Free trial? ✓	Free trial? ✓	Free trial? ✓
Start Free Trial	Start Free Trial	Start Free Trial	Start Free Trial	Start Free Trial	Start Free Trial	Start Free Trial

1. Freshsales: best for small agencies

Freshsales is an all-in-one sales and marketing product that’s available across Web, iOS, and Android. During setup, 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.

Freshsales dashboard view

Is Freshsales right for your business?

I’d recommend Freshsales to small agencies, thanks to its brilliant lead scoring capabilities. With lead scoring, agencies can tailor their sales pitch to specific subgroups, increasing the relevance and effectiveness of their communication, and boosting conversions no-end.

Previously only available on the Pro plan, Freshsales has since rolled out a lite version of its AI lead scoring tool, and it’s a really welcome change for SMEs. Known as Freddy AI, it’s a clever algorithm which automatically scores your leads based on historical sales data, to tell you which opportunities to prioritise and waste less time on unqualified prospects.

Marketers will be happy to note that Freshsales has its own email campaign builder. You can also create ‘drip campaigns’ (where chasers and follow-up emails are auto scheduled).

For niche sectors, Freshsales can be less ideal. I wasn’t able to input custom fields during my data import. As a result, adding any bespoke information about my customers (for example, their injury history, if you’re a seller of medical or therapeutic devices) became instantly complicated.

I must also warn businesses that sell through Facebook and Twitter/X that Freshsales doesn’t integrate with either. Zoho, which can qualify leads on both, may be the better option for you.

What did researcher James Macey say about Freshsales?

“Freshsales has one of the best small business offerings, and provides a great level of functionality in a straightforward package. It also enables a good degree of customisation and is reasonably priced.”

Freshsales pricing

• Freshsales Free – £0
• Freshsales Growth – £7 per user, per month (billed annually)
• Freshsales Pro – £29 per user, per month (billed annually)
• Freshsales Enterprise – £49 per user, per month (billed annually)

Freshsales Free: a good ‘taster’ option for sole traders to build CRM confidence. Freelancers could use this plan to organise their client list, for example (you can only add up to 100 contacts, but this shouldn’t be an issue in your first year of operation).

Freshsales Growth: has AI-powered contact scoring, sales sequences, and custom workflows. These extra features make it best for firms with long-term client contracts, such as digital marketing agencies, offering bespoke customer service with regular check-ins.

Freshsales Pro: the Pro plan will be overkill for most SMEs, though it does have useful features for customer industries, such as call centres. Honorary mentions go to the AI-powered contact scoring feature that predicts if a deal will be won or lost.

Freshsales Enterprise: a big business product for 250+ employees. I’d warn SMEs away from this plan; you’ll get plenty with Freshsales Growth.

2. Zoho: best for established business with large contact lists

We carried out extensive testing in our CRM research, but 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 firms with a big audience base and after deep customer insights.

Zoho CRM leads dashboard view

Is Zoho CRM right for your business?

At the risk of this turning into a list of Zoho’s features, I 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:

• Customisable dashboard
• Automated lead scoring
• Activity, lead, and deal reports
• Custom reports and fields
• Social media integrations

This reporting functionality is especially handy for companies with a large contact base, such as ecommerce websites. You’ll need a CRM to manage customer interactions, track purchasing decisions, and provide personalised experiences. Zoho allows users to build instant and complex sales reports for a complete breakdown of buyer behaviour.

There are limits to Zoho’s generosity. It can only send 250 emails a day, against Hubspot’s 500. Plus, there’s a contact cap of 100,000 (though this is more than enough for SMEs).

Another detail I’m not a fan of is that Zoho’s web form builder can’t prevent email spam. This is a real pain if you expect high quality leads and are lumbered with hundreds of bot emails.

What did researcher James Macey say about Zoho?

“Zoho CRM is low-cost, feature-rich, and comes with a good support package, and is easy to customise. It can cope with the demands of a small business very well due to this level of functionality.”

Zoho CRM pricing

• Zoho CRM Free – £0
• Zoho CRM Standard – £12 per user, per month (billed annually)
• Zoho CRM Professional – £18 per user, per month (billed annually)
• Zoho CRM Enterprise – £35 per user, per month (billed annually)
• Zoho CRM Ultimate – £42 per user, per month (billed annually)

Zoho Free: available for up to three users, this plan offers essential CRM tools for micro teams. It’s best thought of as a slight upgrade to Google Sheets; you’ll be able to record and organise your customer interactions, but not much beyond that.

Zoho Standard: this plan notably improves on Zoho Free by adding workflow automation. I used it to create a sales sequence so that Zoho would automatically record the lead as unresponsive after three days. Ideal for boosting efficiency, it’s best for scaling firms.

Zoho Professional: best for established businesses, this plan offers multiple Sales Pipelines, for firms with more than one department; Auto-assignment Rules, for those with dedicated account managers; and AI-powered Deal Insights, for instant analytics on sales reports. Oh, and you can send 500 emails per day (compared to 250 on the Standard plan).

Zoho Enterprise: as it caters to large firms, I wouldn’t recommend this one to SMEs. After the ability to send 1,000 emails a day, it doesn’t improve much on Zoho Professional.

3. Pipedrive: best for partner collaboration

Whether you’re a business consultancy or affiliate marketer, I’d recommend Pipedrive to any teams that need to prioritise partner relationships. 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.

Pipedrive dashboard view

Is Pipedrive right for your business?

Pipedrive is a solid sales platform with a few nifty tricks that help it to stand out. Chiefly, it has strong security features, including the ability to send automatic email notifications if a user acts suspiciously. As well, there’s a very easy-to-use chatbot builder, who acts as a valuable member of the team by vetting leads before they are passed onto a human rep.

I spoke to George Troop, a Partnerships Specialist, who says Pipedrive’s automated activity feature has made his team more productive. “As soon as we add a prospect to a pipeline, reminders are set to screen them, reach out to them and then follow up,” he tells me.

So what’s wrong with Pipedrive? Well, it might be a sales rep’s dream, but it lacks core marketing abilities, such as webforms, which are only available on the Professional tier.

Similarly, Troop highlights the Pipedrive inbox as a flaw. “Sending emails from Pipedrive itself still feels a little clunky compared to Gmail – that could definitely be improved,” he adds.

What did researcher James Macey say about Pipedrive?

“Pipedrive is a 'premium' option with a competitive level of functionality and a good user experience. This is backed up by our testing which found that tasks can be completed quite quickly within the platform.”

Pipedrive pricing

• Pipedrive Essential – £14 per user, per month (billed annually) or Free Trial
• Pipedrive Advanced – £34 per user, per month (billed annually) or Free Trial
• Pipedrive Professional – £49 per user, per month (billed annually) or Free Trial

Pipedrive Essential: as Pipedrive’s prices start high, it’s hard to put its tiers into context with rivals. I’d say it’s on par with Zoho Standard, and best for teams smaller than ten. It provides a clear (if basic) pipeline overview. Task mentions and comments allow for simple teamwork.

Pipedrive Advanced: for sales teams needing features like email syncing for securing “closed-won” deals. Custom pipelines let you tailor the CRM to your specific workflow, while basic automation helps streamline repetitive tasks – although reporting features are limited.

Pipedrive Professional: this is where Pipedrive’s automations live, such as its AI Sales Assistant. It’s potentially a smart way for busy SaaS companies or IT consultancies to save time. Unless your phones are ringing off the hook, though, it’s not the best value for money.

4. monday CRM: best for customising dashboards

monday.com might not be the first name that comes to mind for CRM software. But as a generalist organisational tool, it demonstrates impressive CRM functionality.

Unlike some CRM giants, such as Salesforce, monday also doesn’t force you into a rigid sales process. You can design custom, colour-coded pipelines to reflect your unique workflow, whether it’s in sales, marketing, or another department.

monday CRM Kanban board view

Is monday CRM right for your business?

Newbies will find monday CRM very easy to use, with almost no training required. I liked being able to click on tasks to edit them, rather than diving into the settings menu. Its drag-and-drop functionality also allowed me to set up, and modify, my dashboards quickly.

This adaptability means that monday is useful for gaining a clear visual of your sales or marketing funnel, letting you identify bottlenecks and track progress at a glance. I spoke to SEO specialist Amy Irvine, who uses monday CRM to plan her team’s workload and track ongoing projects. This, she says, is helpful for stakeholder management.

“We use the platform to log results, and I have created a dashboard to have one overview of all our input and output,” she tells me. “Simplifying how we see our results makes it much easier to communicate to the wider business how we are doing.”

The all-rounder USP does have drawbacks. monday doesn’t offer specialist features such as lead scoring, a definite flaw for sales teams. A DIY-approach also means that customer support isn’t as robust as rivals, with no live chat or phone help available on any tier.

What did researcher James Macey say about monday CRM?

“While it wasn't built from the ground up as a CRM, monday provides a suitable level of CRM functionality for a small business. Being a productivity app also gives it an advantage in terms of customisation as you can edit almost anything.”

monday.com pricing

As explained fully in our monday.com pricing guide, monday has a unique pricing model. Instead of charging per user, its payment structure is based on the number of people in your team. Seat numbers increase in the following increments:

3, 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, 40, 50, 100, 200+

For example, if you had six people on your team, you’d have to round up to 10 seats for monday Basic (costing £100 per month).. The closer you are to the upper limit, the more value for money. This can be beneficial or frustrating, depending on your team size.

• Basic – £10 per seat, per month (annual billing, minimum 3 users)
• Standard – £14 per seat, per month (annual billing)
• Pro – £24 per seat, per month (annual billing)
• Enterprise – bespoke pricing

monday Basic: a budget-friendly plan for those wanting to level up sales. It has the basics covered with customisable dashboards and contact management, but no integrations. It’s a solid choice for those in competitive industries hoping to widen their audience reach.

monday Standard: a smart option for managing larger sales pipelines and contact databases. With features like email integration, activity management, and invoicing, it’s ideal for more established businesses who have a solid customer base.

monday Pro: for B2B sales companies with between 15-25 employees, such as small recruiters. It boasts a fair number of sales features, such as lead forecasting and workflow automations. But equivalent plans (ie. Zoho Professional) do the same for a cheaper price.

5. Hubspot CRM: 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.

HubSpot Contact File

Is Hubspot Free right for your business?

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 email marketing features.

Marketing automations are available to handle repetitive, lead generation tasks, such as emailing customers. Users can also 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 also given three marketing email templates to use; Welcome, Promotion, and Newsletter (there are also two text-based formats which are slightly clunkier).

I found this builder to be very responsive (it took our testing team just over 2 minutes to create a campaign) although every email is watermarked with unattractive HubSpot branding. Doubtless, this is intended to encourage users to upgrade to a paid plan.

HubSpot’s flaws are few, but they are significant. Unlike customisable apps like monday CRM, HubSpot doesn’t permit users to customise task types, and you can only set up to ten custom fields. You’re also not allowed to import more than five documents into the software.

What did researcher James Macey say about Hubspot?

“Hubspot Free is a comprehensive package that competes with paid products. Standout areas are its thorough onboarding and tidy interface. But it has basically no customer support options aside from forums.”

Hubspot Free pricing

As mentioned, HubSpot Free is a functional freemium tier that gives freelancer, consultant, or microbusinesses a cost-effective way to manage their contacts and communication.

For those who want to explore HubSpot’s paid-for tiers, however, there are three options:

• HubSpot Marketing Hub Starter Plan – £18 per user, per month
• HubSpot Sales Hub Starter Plan – £18 per user, per month
• HubSpot Service Hub Starter Plan – £18 per user, per month

HubSpot Marketing Starter: removes HubSpot branding from emails and forms; suitable for firms wanting to ramp up their outreach with more professional-looking, branded comms.

HubSpot Sales Starter: with basic automations and goal setting, this plan is the ideal upgrade for sales teams wanting to monitor representative’s performance.

HubSpot Service Starter: improves on the free tier with conversation routing (customer messages from every channel are directed to the appropriate inbox in your CRM).

6. Zendesk: best for fast-paced sales cycles

If your business has so far been dealing with large Excel spreadsheets and messy paper notes, Zendesk’s sleek interface will be ideal for organising your large contact databases and customer profiles. It was also the fastest platform in our testing for data import.

Zendesk Service messaging tool

Is Zendesk right for your business?

Any firm that requires its employees to input and access information frequently, such as real estate firms or auto traders, would benefit from Zendesk. These types of companies need to store large datasets, which is no problem for Zendesk’s exceptional organisational features.

Using custom fields, you can view each contact’s details, notes, appointments, tasks, and documents in one click (monday CRM makes you open a pop-up to view this information).

I also like that, if you’re importing CSV files, Zendesk Sell will automatically check whether the fields in your data match those in the system before the import takes place for greater accuracy.

As well, Zendesk can produce lead reports and activity reports (to track internal tasks and meetings); useful for gathering insights that might otherwise be lost in a mountain of data.

The app falters for customer service. Zendesk cannot log queries or list open cases, unlike Zoho and monday CRM. You’ll need to install Zendesk Support to access these functions.

What did researcher James Macey say about Zendesk Sell?

“Testing found it to have a sleek and responsive interface which is easy to navigate and makes for a very good user experience. It also has a good level of customisation features.”

Zendesk pricing

• Zendesk Sell Team – £15 per user, per month (billed annually)
• Zendesk Sell Growth – £45 per user, per month (billed annually)
• Zendesk Sell Professional – £89 per user, per month (billed annually)

Zendesk Sell Team: this tier has everything to satisfy most small sales teams, including two preset sales dashboards. That said, it does lack marketing and service features.

Zendesk Sell Growth: with everything on the Team plan, plus sales forecasting and goals tracking, this tier is expensive compared to equivalent plans such as monday Pro. I would only recommend it to dedicated sales teams that want Zendesk as their virtual workspace.

Zendesk Sell Professional: complete with hierarchy management features and advanced user permissions, this option is for large businesses with 250+ employees.

7. Salesforce: best for large sales teams

Securing a deal isn’t a solo effort; it often involves many team members to find the lead, win them over, and onboard them. Salesforce is a sophisticated CRM offering that will be overkill for most SMEs, but could prove worth the added cost and training time for large sales teams.

Salesforce customer card

Is Salesforce right for your business?

To get the best use out of Salesforce, business users should have long sales cycles that require input from multiple collaborators. For example, large-scale consultancy projects will typically involve C-suite executives, department heads, and project sponsors.

That’s because Salesforce provides a lot of collaboration features. For example, if you want to talk to accounting about invoicing a new client, the ‘chatter’ function permits agents to message other departments from inside the platform, in order to streamline the sales cycle.

Data visualisation options and features give managers consistent updates on progress, including five types of charts. And, unlike Zendesk Sell, Salesforce has a dedicated service case function, so service agents can be swiftly brought in to deal with any customer issues.

Added sophistication equals a longer setup time, however. I found onboarding very time-consuming with Salesforce, and was repeatedly shown error messages. Despite its price tag, it’s also missing key features that less expensive rivals are just giving away.

I was also frustrated by Salesforce’s poor customisation. I wasn’t able to remove any of the app’s 29 preset custom fields, so I was stuck with a lot of white space in my contact list. If you don’t think Salesforce is for you, read our guide to the top Salesforce alternatives.

What did researcher James Macey say about Salesforce?

“Salesforce markets 'Essentials' for small businesses but it works more like a stripped back version of their enterprise products. Still, Salesforce provides a competitive level of functionality and pricing for SMEs.”

Salesforce pricing

• Salesforce Essentials – £20 per user, per month (billed annually)
• Salesforce Professional – £64 per user, per month (billed annually)
• Salesforce Enterprise – £132 per user, per month (billed annually)

Salesforce Essentials: packed with collaboration features for small companies with large sales teams, such as SaaS providers, this plan is nonetheless lacking core marketing features available for free with Hubspot. It’s also too sophisticated for its own good, with its huge number of preset fields resulting in a crowded interface and a slower data import.

Salesforce Professional: adds customisable reports and a quoting function. But if you want these features, you can also save £57 per user by installing Freshsales Growth instead.

Salesforce Enterprise: costing almost £50 more per month than the second most expensive plan on this list, this pricing tier is not suitable for SMEs.

How to choose a CRM system

All CRM systems store, organise, and manage data about your customers and how they interact with your business. But, the way that each tool goes about doing this varies considerably, and that’s where it can be useful to get more of an understanding of your particular industry and business needs when it comes to choosing a CRM system.

Choosing a CRM for sales:

Ultimately, sales teams want a CRM to convert more leads. CRM software such as Salesforce can give larger teams a 360-degree view of your pipeline, to easily monitor and track targets with drag-and-drop pipeline management. Smart automations and custom alerts can also ensure busy employees don’t miss out on a deal.

Choosing a CRM for marketing:

Marketers need a CRM that can manage campaigns. Tools like Hubspot can be used to create effective email communications, as they offer ready-to-use templates that can help to advertise sales events, and push projects forward more effectively. Data analytics tools can also be used to chart engagement and measure selling effectiveness.

Choosing a CRM for customer service:

Service teams need constant access to customer interactions. They need a platform like Pipedrive, which can pull info from all channels and store it in one central location. This is not only helpful for tracking sales performance, but also for handling queries or complaints. Staff receive a notification when someone mentions them, so they can deal with it instantly.