Comparison of the Best Sales CRM Solutions for 2023

The best sales CRM solutions have the potential to transform the way you do business. By giving you access to key information on existing and potential customers, letting you visualize and optimize your sales pipeline, and allowing you to streamline your workflows, CRMs can significantly shorten your sales cycle, improve customer retention, and maximize your profits.

In this guide, we’ve reviewed and compared the best sales CRM software, looking at their features, pros and cons, and pricing to help you make an informed decision and choose the one that’s the best fit for your organization.

The Best Sales CRM Solutions Ranked

If you’re looking for a robust, fully customizable CRM solution, Salesforce is a no-brainer. Here’s our complete top 10 CRM list, so you can see how it stacks up against other CRMs on the market:

1. Salesforce — Robust CRM that tracks lead activity and sales agent performance. Save valuable time and boost productivity with simple point-and-click sales automations.
2. Monday Sales CRM — Intuitive, easy-to-implement and simple CRM with professional email templates and no-code automations. Easily integrates with your existing software stack.
3. Pipedrive — Simple Kanban-based platform that lets you create custom web forms and segment your leads. Features built-in email open and click-through rate tracking.
4. HubSpot Sales Hub — Powerful sales CRM software that tracks all outgoing emails and calls. Offers free CRM tools for individuals and small teams.
5. Act! — Advanced marketing automations and a rich email template library. Records every customer interaction, ensuring you never miss a sales opportunity.
6. Bonsai — Client management software with built-in collaboration tools and time tracking. Hundreds of templates for different lead gen, invoicing, and client intake forms.
7. Zoho CRM — Fully customizable, feature-rich CRM that lets you maintain an omnichannel presence. Powerful workflow automations and in-depth sales analytics.
8. Freshsales — AI-powered platform with predictive lead scoring and auto-enrichment of contact profiles. Automate all your workflows and set up an incentive structure for your sales teams.
9. Maximizer — Popular CRM for sales leaders. Monitor your team’s performance in real-time and unlock coaching opportunities with actionable insights.
10. Zendesk Sell — Intuitive CRM with email and call tracking, rich template library, and advanced trigger-based automations. Track every contact interaction and follow up at the right time.

The Best CRMs for Sales Teams Reviewed

Customer relationship management software is a long-term investment that you shouldn’t make lightly. Read our in-depth reviews to get a better understanding of what each provider offers and what their advantages are, so you can choose the CRM that has all the functionality you need that fits within your budget.

1. Salesforce — Highly Customizable Cloud CRM With Automatic Lead Activity Tracking

Salesforce offers a comprehensive, cloud-based sales CRM — the Sales Cloud — that lets organizations leverage the power of AI, real-time data, and CRM to grow their businesses and maximize their revenue.

The Sales Cloud provides you with a 360-degree view of every contact, giving your sales, marketing, and customer service teams all the information they need to personalize marketing messages, convert leads into customers, and provide an excellent customer experience.

When it comes to sales, the platform automatically tracks all lead activities, so you’ll know the instant a customer visits a particular page on your website, opens a marketing email, or clicks on one of your ads. This helps you identify sales opportunities, so your sales agents can engage the prospects at the right time with a personalized message or offer.

You can also leverage sales automation to optimize your workflows, visualize every step in your sales pipeline, automatically assign and track tasks, and set up email alerts and reminders for different stages in your sales process. This saves a ton of valuable time and helps your sales agents stay productive by letting them focus on sales rather than on admin tasks.

As a robust CRM – which has its place among the best CRM software overall – Salesforce lets you generate in-depth sales reports with actionable insights and leverage the power of AI to make accurate sales forecasts and data-backed business decisions based on key metrics.

Pricing

Here are the available Salesforce Sales Cloud pricing plans:

• Starter — $25/user/month (account, contact, lead, and opportunity management, process automation, Gmail/Outlook integration)
• Professional — $75/user/month (Starter + pipeline and forecast management, quotes, and invoicing)
• Enterprise — $150/user/month (Professional + advanced reporting features and unlimited process automation)
• Unlimited — $300/user/month (access to all features + advanced sales insights)

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2. Monday Sales CRM — Best Sales Automation Software That Integrates With Over 50 Third-Party Apps

Monday Sales CRM is a simple, easy-to-use CRM that can easily be tailored to your specific workflows and business processes and comes with a simple drag-and-drop UI.

You can use it to simultaneously manage multiple pipelines, add deal stages, prioritize tasks, and estimate deal close probability.

Monday’s strength comes from the fact that it centralizes all customer communications. You can integrate your business inbox with the platform to automatically track all email conversations and leverage professional email templates to craft engaging, personalized messages and move prospects further down your sales funnel with ease.

Another key feature of Monday Sales CRM is its no-code automation, which let you utilize simple if/then statements and set up triggers to automate tedious administrative tasks. This includes everything from real-time notifications when an email gets opened to assigning leads to specific sales reps and creating reminders for upcoming activities and events. We’ve also previously reviewed Monday’s project management solution in detail.

Pricing

Monday Sales CRM offers several pricing plans to choose from:

• Basic — $10/seat/month, minimum of 3 seats (unlimited pipelines, contacts, boards, unlimited free viewers, iOS and Android app)
• Standard — $14/seat/month (Basic + email integration, activity management, quotes, and invoices, up to 250 custom CRM automations)
• Pro — $24/seat/month (Standard + sales forecasting, email tracking, and automations, sales analytics, 25,000 automations, integrations)
• Enterprise — Custom quote (Pro + lead scoring, team goals, advanced analytics, GRC, HIPAA compliance, multi-level permissions)

Try Monday Sales CRM Today

3. Pipedrive — Kanban-Based CRM With Lead Generation and Audience Segmentation

Pipedrive is a Kanban-based sales CRM designed to help facilitate team collaboration and help you focus on the leads that are most likely to convert.

With Pipedrive, you can optimize every aspect of your business operations, starting with lead generation.

The platform enables you to create high-converting web forms and connect them to your website to reliably generate qualified leads. You can then segment, categorize, filter, and sort leads to create highly targeted mailing lists and personalize your email marketing messages to boost click-through rates and conversions.

Once a lead enters your pipeline, you’ll have complete visibility of all of their information, as well as access to a comprehensive contact history — including calls, emails, meetings, and relevant notes.

With Pipedrive, you can easily visualize your entire sales pipeline using Kanban boards. The boards can be tailored to your unique sales cycle with custom stages and fields.

Additionally, you can set smart reminders for all your sales activities to ensure you never miss a meeting or forget to send a follow-up email to a red-hot lead.

Pricing

Here are the available Pipedrive pricing plans:

• Essential — $9.90/user/month (Lead, Deal, Calendar, and Pipeline management, data import, and 300+ integrations)
• Advanced — $19.90/user/month (Essential + email sync, email grouping, and templates)
• Professional — $39.90/user/month (Advanced + revenue projections, forecasts, and custom reporting)
• Enterprise — $59.90/user/month (Professional + advanced user permissions, security, implementation program, and priority phone support)

Try Pipedrive Today

4. HubSpot Sales Hub — Best Free Sales CRM With Email and Call Tracking

HubSpot Sales Hub is an excellent option for organizations that want to track all marketing emails and sales calls – and its free plan might make it the best CRM for small business.

The platform automatically tracks all outgoing emails and sends real-time notifications whenever a lead opens an email. One thing to note is that it doesn’t track clicks, so it’ll be up to your agents to follow up with the leads and close the deals.

In addition to emails, Sales Hub tracks and records all calls your agents make. This helps you prioritize your daily sales calls, allows you to easily convert specific calls to opportunities, and lets you gauge the performance of individual sales agents.

You can also utilize Sales Hub to create sales enablement documentation, such as phone scripts and sales management tools and playbooks, and easily share documents with every member of your team.

Other key features include a live chat function that lets you connect with customers on your website, branded quotes, and account-based marketing that lets you identify and focus on high-value accounts in your pipeline.

Pricing

HubSpot Sales Hub has different pricing plans for individuals/small teams and businesses, and enterprises. Besides the price, the plans differ in terms of access to features and the number of users allowed on each plan. The free plan arguably makes it the best sales CRM for small business, but others may want to look elsewhere for extra functionality.

Individuals and Small Teams:

• Free Tools — Free forever, no credit card required (Free marketing, sales, service, CMS, and operations tools)
• Starter — From $18/month (Simple automation, tasks, and task queues, conversation routing, multiple currencies)
• Professional — From $450/month (Forecasting, eSignatures, email sequences, sales playbooks, advanced automations)

Businesses and Enterprises:

• Professional — From $450/month for 5 users (Product library, eSignatures, email sequences, sales playbooks, automations)

• Enterprise — From $1,200/month for 10 users (Advanced permissions, predictive lead scoring, conversation intelligence, recurring revenue tracking)

Try HubSpot Sales Hub Today

5. Act! — Easy CRM and Marketing Automation Platform With Comprehensive Contact Relationship History

Act! is a great fit for organizations that do most of their selling via email and want to leverage marketing automations to turn more of their prospects into customers.

As a CRM and marketing automation platform, Act! gives you easy access to all contact information, centralizes calls, emails, notes, and activities, and lets you leverage that data and contact relationship history to craft highly personalized, engaging email marketing campaigns.

When it comes to sales process management, Act! lets you utilize out-of-the-box solutions or create your own fully custom sales pipelines with clearly defined deal stages and custom fields. You’ll also have smart filters at your disposal, which let you quickly assess your sales pipelines by product, territory, stage, agent, or region.

Another advantage of Act! CRM is that it easily integrates with your business inbox and calendar, ensuring you never miss a sales opportunity or forget a key meeting, thanks to real-time notifications and reminders.

Pricing

Here are the available Act! pricing plans:

• Act! Premium Cloud — $30/user/month (Customer management, task and activity management, relationship timelines, notifications, and alerts, email templates, drip campaigns)
• Act! Premium Desktop — $37.50/user/month (Same functionality as Cloud, but on-premise with self-managed security and advanced control)

Try Act! Today

6. Bonsai — Client Management Software With Advanced Collaboration Tools and Built-in Time Tracking

Bonsai is a great solution for organizations that need help managing multiple sales pipelines and projects, want to keep all of their data organized and need to streamline communication and collaboration with internal teams and external contractors.

In addition to helping you centralize all contact information, Bonsai also lets you neatly organize all projects with associated documents, contracts, payment info, tasks, and timesheets. Your clients can even get their own project views, so they can monitor project progress and easily handle outstanding payments or review contracts.

Bonsai also features built-in project collaboration tools, allowing you to invite collaborators with a single click, assign tasks, share notes and documents, and track time spent on each task.

Another area where Bonsai excels is form templates. There are hundreds of professional templates in Bonsai’s library, covering everything from lead generation and client intake forms for specific industries to contract and invoicing templates.

Pricing

Here are the available Bonsai pricing plans:

• Starter — From $17/month (Access to all templates, unlimited clients and projects, task and time tracking, client CRM, forms and questionnaires, up to 5 project collaborators)
• Professional — From $32/month (Starter + custom branding, workflow automations, client portal, integrations, up to 15 collaborators)
• Business — From $52/month (Professional + subcontractor management, 3 team seats, accountant access, unlimited project collaborators)

Try Bonsai Today

7. Zoho CRM — Fully Customizable CRM That Lets You Build an Omnichannel Presence and Personalize Communications

Zoho CRM is an extremely feature-rich CRM platform that helps you deepen customer relationships, deliver tailored experiences, maximize your team’s productivity, and streamline every aspect of your business with rich analytics.

With Zoho CRM, you can orchestrate every step of the customer journey, from initial contact to order fulfillment. You can also connect the platform with all of your communications channels and easily follow up with customers wherever they engage your business — via email, phone, live chat, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn.

You’ll also have full information on each contact, including previous interactions across all touchpoints, their level of interest, job and title, preferences, and more. This lets you craft personalized marketing messages and tailor your approach to each potential customer, so you can reliably close more sales.

Zoho CRM also lets you automate your workflows with simple condition-based triggers and rules, so you can save time on task assignments, reviews, and post-email activities and ensure you never miss an opportunity or a deadline with real-time notifications and smart alerts.

Another key aspect of Zoho CRM is that it can be fully customized through Canvas — a CRM design studio. You’ll also have access to a developer platform that lets you build custom functions and make the CRM truly your own.

Pricing

Here are the available Zoho CRM annual pricing plans:

• Standard — $14/user/month (workflow automation, scoring rules, sales forecasting, email templates, reporting, and analytics)
• Professional — $23/user/month (Standard + real-time notifications, blueprints, webhooks, customer reports, and dashboards)
• Enterprise — $40/user/month (Professional + customer portals, full product customization, anomaly detection, web form analytics, channel attribution, audience segmentation)
• Ultimate — $52/user/month (Enterprise + Zoho Analytics)

Try Zoho CRM Today

8. Freshsales — AI-Powered CRM With Contact Profile Auto-Enrichment

Freshsales is a modern sales CRM that allows you to leverage AI to identify high-intent leads and close deals faster.

In addition to centralizing all contact data, Freshsales auto-enriches all prospect profiles with their publicly available information, giving your sales agents the relevant information they need to convert prospects into customers. You’ll be able to see their job title, the company they work for, interests, and full activity timeline.

Another key feature of Freshsales is the ability to create an incentive structure for your sales agents across multiple sales pipelines based on the number of deals they close and the processes they follow. This helps boost productivity and lets you accurately gauge your team’s performance.

Workflow automations Freshsales offers enable you to create rules for assigning leads, creating tasks, setting reminders, moving deals to different stages, and more. By automating administrative work, you’re saving a ton of valuable time and letting your sales agents focus on what they do best — closing the deals.

Pricing

Here are the available Freshsales pricing plans:

• Growth — $15/user/month (contact, account, and deal management, AI-powered lead scoring, up to 2,000 chatbot sessions per month)
• Pro — $39/user/month (Growth + multiple sales pipelines, time-based workflows, sales team, and territory management, up to 3,000 chatbot sessions)
• Enterprise — $69/user/month (Pro + custom modules, AI-based sales forecasting, audit logs, up to 5,000 chatbot sessions)

Try Freshsales Today

9. Maximizer — Top CRM for Sales Leaders That Enables Performance Monitoring and Sales Coaching

Maximizer CRM is the best option for sales leaders who want more insights into their agents’ performance and unlock coaching opportunities to ensure they follow the best practices and close deals faster.

The platform also provides you with a full suite of productivity tools and enables you to easily create and share sales enablement documents with your team, including phone scripts, email templates, and process docs.

You’ll also have full visibility and control over each lead, prospect, and deal. This includes comprehensive contact profiles, full relationship history, activity tracking with real-time alerts, and relevant notes.

Maximizer also offers customer health analytics, which allows you to proactively reach out to “at risk” accounts and take action while they’re still listening to increase customer retention and maximize recurring revenue.

Pricing

Here are the available Maximizer pricing plans:

• Base Edition — $55/user/month (sales pipeline management, lead, and opportunity management, 100Gb online storage, reporting, and analytics)
• Sales Leader Edition — $75/user/month (Base Edition + sales coaching and performance monitoring)

Try Maximizer Today

10. Zendesk Sell — Award-Winning Sales CRM With Built-in Email and Call Tracking

Zendesk Sell is another robust CRM platform that lets you customize your sales pipelines, centralize business communications, and enhance team productivity.

The platform offers built-in email and call tracking, ensuring that every interaction between leads, prospects, and customers and your sales team is logged. You can then leverage smart lists to segment your audience, as well as utilize a rich library of email templates to personalize your messages and boost click-through and conversion rates.

Zendesk Sell also lets you build trigger-based automations to reduce administrative work, automate your workflows and task assignments, and save valuable time so you can focus on your prospects and customers.

Pricing

Here are the available Zendesk Sell pricing plans:

• Sell Team — $19/user/month (up to two customizable sales pipelines, email and calendar integrations, task and appointment setting, pre-built sales dashboards)

• Sell Growth — $49/user/month (Sell Team + up to 10 sales pipelines, call tracking and recording, custom sales reports, sales forecasting, and goals tracking)

• Sell Professional — $99/user/month (Sell Growth + up to 20 sales pipelines, lead and deal scoring, task automation, permission-based access)

A CRM Comparison of Our Top 10 Picks

Here’s a quick reference table of the best sales CRM software on our list so you see how they compare head-to-head:

What is a Sales CRM and Why Do I Need One?

If you’re wondering what is CRM in sales from a technology viewpoint, it’s a platform that enables you to centralize contact communication, personalize your marketing messages, automate your workflows, and facilitate sales pipeline management.

Put simply, CRM software gives you quick and easy data to all the contact information you need to convert leads and prospects into customers. It also lets you visualize every step of your sales process, automate task assignments, monitor your team’s activities, and leverage marketing automations to increase your conversions – and it may well sit in your technology stack alongside a project management solution.

Here are the main benefits of implementing the best CRM for sales into your business:

Easier Contact Management

Since all of the contact data is in one place, they can easily find all the pertinent information they need to personalize the message and effectively close the deal.

In addition to basic contact information, like their name, email, and phone number, CRMs give you information regarding the communications channel they engaged your business on, their level of interest, preferences, and interests in different products/services you’re offering, and more.

You also get easy access to the complete relationship history, so you can see every interaction across all your different touchpoints, including emails, calls, and live chat messages. All this helps you better understand your customers so you can tailor your offers according to their specific needs and land the sale.

Unified Business Communications

The best CRMs can be integrated with all your communications channels, including email, live chat, self-service portals, and social media. This lets you see every message exchanged between leads, prospects, and existing customers and your business, all in one place.

Having quick and easy access to the full relationship history with each contact lets your sales agents know exactly where a particular lead is in your funnel, what they’re interested in, and how they should approach them to maximize the chances of closing the deal. Ultimately, it should become a key piece of business management software.

Workflow Automation

The best CRM for sales should save you a ton of valuable time by allowing you to set up rules and triggers to automate the bulk of administrative work. Workflow automations can include everything from lead assignments and email open notifications to task reminders and deal status updates.

Personalized Email Marketing Campaigns

Organizations that use email marketing to drive sales can greatly benefit from CRM marketing tools most solutions offer, such as audience segmentation, email tracking, and professionally created email templates.

With smart mailing lists and trigger-based email sequences, you can easily tailor your marketing message according to the specific interests of different sub-segments of your audience, their level of interest, and the stage of your sales funnel they are in.

This approach is much more effective than sending blast emails to your entire contact list, and it leads to much higher email open rates, better click-through rates, and higher conversions.

Advanced Reporting and Analytics

The best sales software takes the guesswork out of your business decisions by providing you with a wealth of real-time, actionable data.

A CRM system lets you generate in-depth reports, monitor the performance of your team and individual sales agents, see your average close rate, and leverage that data to make smarter business decisions, boost productivity, and maximize your revenue.

How Do I Choose a Sales CRM? Key Factors to Consider

While there are many excellent CRM management software solutions out there, not all of them are going to be the right fit for your business. Here are the key factors that will help you compare CRM options at your disposal and ensure you choose the right one:

• Customizability — The best CRM applications are highly customizable and can be fine-tuned to perfectly fit your sales processes and workflows. You should look for a CRM that can be adapted to your business rather than having to tweak your processes around a rigid CRM
• Functionality — Some CRMs offer an overwhelming amount of features, while others might lack the key functionalities you need. Carefully consider what you’re going to use the CRM for, so you don’t end up overpaying for something you won’t use or missing crucial features. You should consider what features you need and whether you need an industry-specific package, such as a construction CRM.
• Scalability — To future-proof your investment, it’s best to opt for a CRM that’s easy to scale, both in terms of functionality and the number of users.
• Ease of use — If you don’t have previous experience with CRM systems, it’s best to opt for an intuitive one that’s easy to use. Complex CRMs offer more tools and customization options but require technical knowledge, experience, or intense training to fully utilize.
• User reviews — If you’re unsure whether a particular CRM is the best option for your business, you can always read reviews left by other users. This will give you a much better idea of how the software performs in practice and what its strong suits and drawbacks are

What’s the Best Free Sales CRM?

Not many CRMs offer free plans, and understandably so. Developing such complex platforms requires a lot of time, effort, and money, so it wouldn’t make much sense for the companies that develop them to just hand them out for free.

Out of all CRMs we reviewed, only HubSpot Sales Hub offers a free forever plan. That said, while the free plan includes a variety of CRM, sales, and marketing tools, it’s still quite limited. You won’t have access to advanced features like lead scoring and workflow automations or in-depth analytics and reporting.

All in all, if you want to streamline your workflows, gain full control over your contacts, boost productivity, and ultimately generate more sales, you’ll need to opt for a premium CRM. The good news is that most of them offer free trials, so you can try them out in practice before committing to a monthly or annual plan. You may also want to check out free project management tools.

Sales CRM FAQs