10 Best CRM Software Tools for Australia in 2023

The best CRM software can help you understand every customer interaction, keep track of sales, and improve your time management. CRM tools achieve all this by allowing you to monitor, review, and evaluate customer relationships from the top of the funnel to the bottom and beyond. They can also help you drive your sales by improving your email marketing campaigns, team collaboration, and optimizing your sales pipeline.

However, there are a dizzying number of CRM products available today, and it’s hard to know which one might be the best for you. That’s why we’ve ranked and reviewed the best CRM software providers in Australia for 2023 in this guide. Keep reading to discover why Pipedrive and Monday are ahead of the pack, and learn how each provider can benefit your business.

Top CRM Systems for Australia Ranked

Here’s our list of the best CRM systems for small businesses, enterprises, and everyone in between, ranked based on their features, pricing, integrations, and compatibility, among other crucial factors.

1. Pipedrive — Overall, the best CRM software for visualizing and accomplishing personal and company goals.
2. Monday — Excellent solution for SMBs and teams working on complex projects thanks to its lead and task management tools.
3. Maximizer CRM — Impressive reports and analytics for marketing, sales, and customer support departments.
4. Bonsai — Superb collaboration tools that allow you to assign tasks to freelancers and contractors and track time.
5. Less Annoying CRM — Ideal for beginners and small businesses because of its ease of use and excellent customer support.
6. Salesforce — Feature-rich, all-in-one CRM solution with integrations with over 1,000 other platforms.
7. Oracle NetSuite — Superb customer service tools and a 360-degree customer view that helps you provide a consistent service experience.
8. HubSpot — Comprehensive free CRM solution with well-designed dashboards and a premium plan with tons of features.
9. Act! — Automate repetitive tasks and marketing, reduce overheads, and track opportunities through its intuitive interface.
10. Zoho — Popular solution for large businesses that can help deepen customer relationships and create a loyal customer base.

Top 10 Best CRM Tools in Australia Reviewed

Let’s dive into the details and find out what each provider excels at to help you make an informed decision. We’re confident you’ll find a solution that fits your business without breaking the bank.

1. Pipedrive — Overall, the Best CRM Software for 2023

Pipedrive is a cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) program with an intuitive layout that focuses on productivity and leads.

With Pipedrive, you get a fully customizable platform you can tailor to your needs and your team’s unique preferences. It also offers customizable reports, a well-designed calendar, automations, and excellent email integrations.

Pipedrive is a sales-focused CRM that allows your team to create and track contacts through the sales pipeline. It helps you customize each step of the process, eliminate repetitive tasks with automation, and follow leads until the first sale is closed – and beyond.

Pipedrive offers an intuitive platform that’s easy to use and master, making it ideal for first-time CRM users. Its clutter-free layout and helpful tools make it easy for your sales reps to coordinate and fill out reports, allowing them to focus on sales and working with prospects.

Besides helping your sales reps save time, Pipedrive lets your teams share information relevant to sales campaigns, improving their collaboration and customer experience.

This CRM platform provides Kanban-style boards for lead tracking and workflow automations. These boards assist your sales team in tracking the chances of a lead turning hot or cold, ensuring your sales reps are focusing on the most valuable leads and minimizing cases of lost sales.

Once a team member selects a lead from the board, they immediately have access to all the relevant data and notes for that lead.

Thanks to its ease of use, this CRM system allows you to create an email campaign in a few minutes, estimate sales for the month, and project future sales. No wonder it’s a CRM Australia loves.

Pricing

Pipeline’s cheapest plan costs just AU$14.90/month on an annual basis and lets you seamlessly import data, create advanced sales pipelines, create comprehensive reports, and more.

Large businesses and enterprises will find its more expensive plans attractive, especially because they offer some of the best task management features. You can try any Pipeline plan risk-free today, thanks to its 14-day free trial.

2. Monday — Excellent Solution for SMBs

Monday helps you and your teams get a full 360-degree view of your customers, centralizing client communication and keeping track of all your customer interactions and sent emails.

Besides emails, Monday will log calls and SMS interactions, and its excellent mobile apps allow your sales reps to read and create reports while on the move. In addition, it lets you import your contact lists, emails, and other client-related information, neatly sorting it on your new CRM dashboard.

Monday is the best customer account management software for small business owners who want to improve team collaboration.

It’s also a reliable solution for sales reps, thanks to its Kanban boards, charts, and timelines. The platform provides an excellent Map view that shows the physical location of customers, which can save your reps time while on the move.

The CRM provides a wide range of integrations that let you sync data with programs such as Google Calendar, Gmail, and Microsoft Teams. This embeds Monday in your technology stack, prevents data from needing to be duplicated, and means you can fast-track your processes by accessing your tools from a single platform.

The product naturally integrates closely with the company’s project management tools – and if you subscribe to these as well, then you can get access to some of the best task management tools out there.

Pricing

Pricing starts at AU$13.65 for three seats on Monday’s cheapest plan and increases in price for every seat you add. However, there’s no free plan available for testing, and you’ll have to contact the sales department if you need more than 40 seats.

You can try Monday risk-free today, thanks to its 14-day free trial.

3. Maximizer CRM — Impressive Reports and Analytics

Maximizer CRM helps you better understand what your top performers are doing right to drive revenue with its in-depth analytics and customizable dashboards.

Besides sales, it also gives you detailed reports of your marketing campaign performance, helping you understand your prospects and improve your segmentation. In addition, you can use its dashboards to survey your ticket resolution times and customer success to optimize your operations for high efficiency.

Maximizer excels at combining your reports for marketing, sales, and customer support, allowing you to measure their overall effectiveness within the CRM system. This alignment helps ensure your marketing and sales teams target the right audiences, improving their deal closing rate.

It also lets you maintain detailed customer profiles and track purchase history, which can help you up-sell and cross-sell to your existing customer base by leveraging the CRM’s reporting capabilities. Because of these advanced features, Maximizer CRM is ideal for larger businesses that can benefit from a platform that centralizes customer information and helps multiple teams collaborate.

However, its service comes at a higher price than most of its competition, especially if you opt for its sales leader edition, which helps you track, monitor, and coach sales reps.

Pricing

Maximizer CRM offers two plans, with the cheaper one starting at AU$75/per user/month for an annual subscription.

It offers no free plan or trial, but you can try its services by booking a free demo before committing to a subscription.

4. Bonsai — Superb Collaboration Tools 

Bonsai promotes effective teamwork and communication between your team members and staff, such as freelancers and contractors.

It offers an excellent sales pipeline management solution that lets you create and assign tasks, monitor their progress, and set reminders. Besides tracking work progress, it helps you monitor and manage billable hours and review real-time reports on where you and your team spend time.

Bonsai can help you drive your sales and improve communication, but it’s renowned for its templates and business reporting. It provides templates for invoicing, forms, proposals, agreements, briefs, and lawyer-vetted contracts. That makes it ideal for small businesses, freelancers, or agencies.

Although it lacks some advanced features offered by its competition, Bonsai has a user-friendly and well-organized interface, ensuring all its features are easy to find without navigating multiple menus.

It features a comprehensive dashboard that offers an overview of crucial figures and opportunities. Its dashboard lets you view your total income, upcoming tasks, recent activities, project timelines, and more.

We were impressed by its in-app customer support live chat option and a search feature that helps you locate tasks and other information.

Pricing

Bonsai prices its plans competitively, with its cheapest plan priced at AU$25.70/month.

It offers a 7-day free trial that grants you full, unlimited access to all its features. That allows you to try its services risk-free and decide if it’s right for your business.

5. Less Annoying CRM — Ideal for Beginners

Less Annoying CRM is an affordable solution with a single subscription plan, receives constant free updates, and backs your data up using Amazon Web Services (AWS).

It’s a web-based platform, which means it has no dedicated iOS or Android apps, but your sales reps will have no issue accessing it via a browser while on the go. Its low-cost yet high-performing service is ideal for small businesses, first-time users, and startups.

With its affordability in mind, Less Annoying CRM offers a surprising amount of performance and flexibility. It allows you to add contacts, track workflow in the form of pipelines, and add notes and tasks. That means it lets you track relevant information about leads and customers without the complexity of having advanced features.

While it offers fewer integrations than some of its competition, Less Annoying CRM has a few native integrations. For example, it allows you to sync calendar events with Google Calendar and manage all your tasks and calendar events on one page.

It also offers a four-layer data backup system that archives data you delete or lose, allowing you to protect your sensitive information from accidents. While this process happens in real-time, you can also export your data manually for extra peace of mind.

Pricing

Less Annoying CRM has a single pricing plan that costs AU$22.60/per user/month. It also offers a 30-day free trial, which allows you to try its services for a month.

6. Salesforce — Integrations With Over 1,000 Other Platforms

Salesforce focuses on lead management and workflow automations, but it doesn’t stop there. You’ll find email marketing, contracting, quoting, forecasting, and many more features on its all-in-one platform.

Salesforce helps you manage and track marketing campaigns and review their progress and impact on your sales pipeline. You can create mass email lists and track which contacts receive and interact with your marketing strategy.

Its opportunity and lead-scoring features help you better understand your audience, allowing you to focus on leads that are more likely to convert.

Although intuitive, its platform is one of the most complicated to use because of the sheer amount of features it offers.

Pricing

Salesforce isn’t cheap, as its entry-level plan costs AU$37.74/per user/month. However, it offers more features than most of its competition and more than a thousand integrations to complement them.

It offers a 30-day free trial, allowing you to try it out.

7. Oracle NetSuite — Superb Customer Service Tools

Oracle NetSuite helps you drive sales by generating a single view of your customers, prospects, vendors, and partners. In addition, it ensures your sales, marketing, and customer support teams receive the real-time data they need to deliver a satisfactory customer experience.

Oracle NetSuite helps you speed up case resolution by automating case assignment and escalation processes. That means your customer service teams will always have access to complete customer data updated in real-time.

It offers several sales forecasting tools to help your team succeed in a competitive environment. With access to calculated forecasts, your team can examine customer data to determine the weighted amounts, projected amounts, and close probabilities for opportunities and quotes in the pipeline.

However, its CRM is part of a larger business system that works best if you invest in the vendor’s entire suite of business apps, which can be expensive.

Pricing

Oracle NetSuite prices its services based on the size of your business, your needs, and the number of users. That means you’ll have to contact its sales department to schedule a consultation for a price based on your requirements. In addition, you’ll have to make a one-time payment for the initial setup.

8. HubSpot — Comprehensive Free CRM Solution

HubSpot lets you create a free account in less than five minutes without using a credit card, making it easy to test before committing to a subscription – making it the best free CRM solution.

HubSpot offers a lightweight platform to help small-to-large businesses with managing leads, marketing, sales, and customer service tools.

It has some of the most well-designed dashboards in the industry that can help you gather and review data at a glance. It also lets you create activity reports that your team members can find by searching for assigned employees, customer engagement levels, or other filters.

While its free plan can help you organize and automate marketing and sales tasks, it comes with limited customer support, making its premium plan a superior choice.

Pricing

While its free plan is ideal for SMBs, freelancers, or solo workers, paying AU$20 for its entry-level premium plan offers more features and scalability.

9. Act! — Automate Repetitive Tasks and Marketing

Act! offers integrated email marketing features and a marketing automation workflow builder to help you promote your business and attract and retain customers.

Act! ‘s email marketing features let you configure digital marketing campaigns complete with email autoresponders, templates, a visual workflow designer, and mass per-month sending schedules to automate every step.

It offers 30 prebuilt report templates that are customizable and easy to use. However, you can’t edit every part of its templates, only the parts that affect the data.

Its powerful search options help your sales reps quickly find information and organize similar contacts into dynamic groups.

Pricing

The cheapest Act! plan is cloud-based and costs AU$36/per user/month, which is ideal if you don’t need offline access. Its desktop version costs more but grants offline access, making it ideal for office-based businesses.

10. Zoho — Popular Solution for Large Businesses

Zoho offers impressive team collaboration, relationship management, and marketing campaign features, making it an excellent pick for large businesses which focus on growth.

Zoho simplifies your business processes by helping your sales and marketing teams with customer profiling and personalized marketing campaigns. Using Zia, Zoho’s AI-powered analytics engine, can help your employees better understand sales anomalies and trends.

You can also give team leaders administrative roles, which allow them to set up users, define roles, kick off data importing, and configure single sign-on. In addition, each user can configure Zoho’s interface to customize the experience.

Although it’s not the most feature-rich service on the market, Zoho offers competitive pricing and numerous third-party integrations.

Pricing

You can start using Zoho for as little as AU$22/per user/month. However, large businesses with massive customer data sets and multiple teams might want one of its more expensive plans.

Best CRM Platforms Compared

Let’s look at how the providers from our list compare head-to-head based on their pricing, compatibility, and other factors.

How to Find the Best CRM Solution For Your Business Needs

Choosing a customer relationship management system is a significant investment that requires thorough research. It can be challenging if you don’t have a set goal for your company and a deep understanding of your team’s needs.

Picking a CRM provider that doesn’t suit your team can negatively impact your productivity, making it essential to inform yourself before committing to a subscription.

Here are some crucial factors to consider when choosing the best CRM software for your business:

Customization and Scalability

Look for a CRM solution that offers flexibility to adapt to your unique business processes. That means your team should be able to customize fields, workflows, layouts, and automation rules.

A scalable CRM solution will allow you to upgrade to a different plan as your business grows. Your CRM solution should be able to accommodate your growth by handling increasing user loads, data volumes, and complex operations.

Choose a CRM that fits your existing processes and aligns with your future goals for the company.

Integrations

Most high-end CRM providers offer hundreds or even thousands of integrations with popular apps. Integrations allow a seamless data flow between your CRM software and other business-related apps. Besides making it easier for your employees to access information, integrations are vital for time management.

Look for CRM software with integrations for apps your team members are already using. For example, if you plan your meetings using Google Calendar, ensure your CRM won’t change that.

Interface and Setup

The best CRM software for small business owners should be easy to set up and use, as small businesses often have a limited budget. However, medium and large-sized companies should also look for straightforward solutions that are easy to set up to avoid dependency on IT resources and to leverage the benefits sooner.

Look for a CRM solution with a user-friendly, intuitive interface with clear menus, search bars, and a logical flow. That reduces the learning curve for your employees and helps with onboarding, ensuring higher productivity.

Automation and Workflow Management

Choosing a solution with automation capabilities can help your team streamline repetitive tasks and workflows, increasing productivity. Automation can also help with consistency with features such as email templates, task reminders, approval processes, and assignment rules.

Look for CRM software that lets you design and customize workflows. They allow you to map out the stages and actions involved in various processes, such as sales pipelines, lead nurturing, or customer support. It also simplifies decision-making and ensures efficient collaboration and consistent execution across multiple teams.

Advanced Features

The best CRM tools should offer advanced features such as reporting and analytics, forecasting, or AI-powered sales assistants.

Look for CRM software that lets you create customizable dashboards that show personalized views of crucial charts, metrics, and reports. These allow you to track pipeline progress, sales targets, customer satisfaction, or other relevant data.

Forecasting features can leverage historical data, algorithms, and trends to forecast future performance, sales, and customer behaviour. That can help you strategize, make accurate sales projections, and capitalize on opportunities.

High-end CRM software offers AI-powered assistants with their most expensive plans. These assistants provide intelligent recommendations based on customer data, which include upselling, cross-selling, or suggesting relevant products.

They can also use algorithms to analyze the quality of leads and assist your sales team. That means your sales team will have increased conversion rates, which leads to better performance and utilization of resources.

However, these features shouldn’t necessarily be a priority when looking for the best CRM for small business in Australia, whether you’re a business owner, an agency, or a freelancer.

Pricing

Most CRM providers have multiple plans for businesses of different sizes and needs. You should carefully consider their pricing models and pick one that best suits your company based on its size, requirements, and budget.

However, consider its more expensive plans if you expect company growth, as switching to another CRM could be counter-productive. In addition, review the CRM’s add-ons and potential hidden costs to avoid surprises later on.

Should You Consider a Free CRM?

While free CRM solutions can be viable for small businesses, freelancers, and agencies, they have limited features and customization options.

Some of these limitations include storage capacity, data access, and number of users, making them unsuitable for most companies. In addition, they may have fewer integrations with other business tools that could improve your quality of work.

Choosing a free CRM requires careful consideration of your growth potential, business requirements, and company goals. However, most free CRM solutions are easily upgraded to a premium plan, allowing you to unlock all the bells and whistles its provider offers.

CRM Software Australia FAQs

Ilijia Miljkovac

Ilijia Miljkovac

Ilija Miljkovac is a Technopedia writer with 7 years of experience covering all things tech. He writes about everything from cybersecurity to ISPs, ensuring businesses and customers are educated about the latest products and services. He's written for publications such as Business2Community, TheTechReport, Comparitech, and more. When he's not maniacally hacking away at his keyboard, Ilija spends his time either hiking in nature or holed up in his apartment gaming.

All Posts by Ilijia Miljkovac