11 Best Free CRM Software Products For 2023

The best free CRM software helps small businesses streamline their customer relationship management and sales processes without breaking the bank. With robust features like contact management, lead generation, automated workflows, and reporting capabilities, these tools are designed to make it easier to attract prospects, convert leads into customers, and retain those customers.

We’ve compared dozens of CRM software solutions and made a list of the 11 top free CRM software tools available today. Our top three picks are Zoho CRM, Monday Sales CRM, and HubSpot. Read on to see how they compare in terms of features, pricing, and customer service.

Best Free CRM Software Packages

We researched and compared the best free CRM software packages, and Zoho came out as the clear winner. Zoho has all of the features you need to manage customer relationships, such as contact management, lead scoring, sales automation, and more. Now let’s see how it compares to other options.

1. Zoho CRM — Comes with all the essential features of an outstanding CRM, including process management, journey orchestration, and sales automation – making it the best free CRM software for 2023.
2. Monday Sales CRM — An excellent option for agile teams as it is designed to streamline communications, help plot roadmaps, and provide real-time activity tracking.
3. HubSpot — Ideal choice for mid-size businesses, with its centralized dashboard for providing deep insights and tracking contacts, deals, and tasks.
4. Freshsales — An omnichannel CRM solution that provides businesses with a variety of communication options, including email, phone, and chat.
5. EngageBay — From landing pages to web forms, this is an all-in-one marketing automation platform that automates high-velocity team marketing processes.
6. Insightly — Scale up your small business with lead routing, product quotes, and integrations.
7. Bitrix24 — A popular option for remote teams, providing a variety of communication tools, including live chats and a unified workspace.
8. Capsule — An easy-to-use CRM solution that is ideal for startups, with a quick and easy setup process.
9. BenchmarkONE — Comes with features such as pre-designed email templates, lead follow-ups, and an ROI tracker, making it easier to manage customer relationships.
10. Streak — Robust CRM solution that integrates directly with Gmail for teams that rely on email communication.
11. Salesforce — A popular CRM solution that includes features such as sales forecasting, opportunity tracking, and sales tracking and analytics, making it easier for businesses to manage complex sales processes.

11 Best Free CRM Software Products Reviewed

Let’s now dive into the top 11 best free CRM software products that are available to use in 2023.

1. Zoho CRM — Best Free CRM Overall 

Zoho CRM is suited for all kinds of businesses, big or small. It offers plenty of features to help you manage your customers and sales pipeline.

What sets Zoho CRM apart from other systems is its extensive feature set, which provides small businesses with a comprehensive solution for managing their customers and sales pipeline.

With Sales Force Automation, Lead Management, Deal Management, Contact Management, and Workflow Automation tools, it takes care of everything from capturing leads to accelerating your sales process.

In addition to its comprehensive suite of CRM tools, Zoho CRM also offers Journey Orchestration. This feature allows businesses to create personalized customer journeys with CommandCenter, visualize them with maps, and provide customers with a seamless brand experience.

With detailed reports that identify delays or loopholes in the different stages, organizations can gain valuable insights into their customer’s preferences and make improvements accordingly.

Finally, with the Sales Process Builder, Zoho CRM allows you to bring your offline sales processes into the digital world. This feature helps ensure that all your sales reps are following a unified process at every turn and provides an additional layer of transparency and control over your customer service operations.

With this tool, you can rest assured that there will be no discrepancies in how different teams handle customer inquiries or requests.

While there may be minor imperfections in some areas – such as some missing features and slight user interface issues – this is not uncommon, as no single system can have every feature on the market.

Pricing

Upgrading from the free plan in Zoho CRM offers access to additional features such as sales force automation, advanced filters, multiple pipelines, scoring rules, sales forecasting, email insights, and portals. Zoho CRM offers four pricing plans: Standard, Professional, Enterprise, and Ultimate, each with varying levels of features and pricing. It’s important to carefully consider which plan aligns with your business needs and budget.

Zoho CRM is a fantastic marketing automation platform catering to small businesses. It’s budget-friendly and has everything needed for an effective program, making it an ideal starting point for companies new to using customer relationship management software.

2. Monday Sales CRM — Best CRM for Agile Teams

Monday Sales CRM will handle everything, from customer relationship management to sales team operations and beyond.

A CRM isn’t just about managing customers – it’s also about streamlining your business operations. That’s where Monday Sales CRM excels. Its Roadmap Planning feature allows you to easily map out your product roadmap and track progress across different teams.

With the ability to assign tasks, access real-time reporting metrics, and collaborate with stakeholders, this is a must-have for agile teams looking to make better decisions faster.

Monday Sales CRM also helps you stay organized and on top of things with its Activity Management feature. This makes it easy to keep track of customer interactions, emails, meetings, notes, and other activities all in one place – giving a deeper insight into the customer’s perspective and needs. It also allows you to set reminders and alerts so nothing slips through the cracks.

Last but not least is Monday Sales CRM’s Merge Duplicate Data feature. This makes it simple to combine duplicate customer records and create a single view of the customer in one place. This helps make sure that your team is always working off of up-to-date information, eliminating any confusion or discrepancies between different sources.

Pricing

If you opt to upgrade from the free plan of Monday Sales CRM, you can choose from several plans that offer varying levels of features and customization. The Basic CRM plan includes unlimited, customizable pipelines and boards.

The Standard CRM plan offers advanced account and contact management and the ability to merge duplicate data. The Pro CRM plan includes sales forecasting and customizable email signatures, and the Enterprise CRM plan offers advanced analytics and compliance features.

Some users have reported difficulty in navigating and customizing the platform to their specific needs. However, with features like Roadmap Planning and Activity Management, the learning curve can be worth it to make sure nothing falls through the cracks.

3. HubSpot — Ideal for Team Management For Mid-Size Businesses 

HubSpot’s free CRM is a powerful software tool for mid-sized businesses looking to manage their team and customer relationships.

With an easy-to-use deal pipeline, you can add deals, assign tasks to your team, and track your most lucrative prospects in one place so that your deal flow never stops.

You can also add company and contact records, log sales activities automatically, and keep records up to date at all times. Plus, with reporting dashboards, you can predict revenue and identify roadblocks in your sales process.

HubSpot allows you to get powerful insights populated automatically. The CRM will retrieve prospect details automatically from a database of over 20 million businesses.

All you need is a prospect’s corporate email address, and voila – you’ll have more time to focus on selling.

Lastly, HubSpot’s dashboard and reporting software is a game-changer for mid-sized businesses. This feature enables your team to have analytics powerful enough for an analyst but accessible enough for everyone. With it, you can access marketing, sales, and service data in one place and create customized reporting dashboards that keep private data secure with advanced permissions.

Pricing

The cost of using HubSpot can be a significant consideration for businesses on a budget. Paid plans for Hubspot CRM can be expensive, and it’s important to consider the value of the features offered in the Professional and Enterprise plans before upgrading from the free plan.

The Professional plan provides comprehensive software for marketing, sales, customer service, CMS, and operations. The Enterprise plan offers an even more powerful version of these features, with larger capacities for marketing contacts and paid users.

HubSpot is a solid CRM software option for mid-sized or larger businesses looking to manage their team and customer relationships with ease. It’s arguably one of the best alternative CRMs for Salesforce.

4. Freshsales — Omnichannel Communication Solutions For Financial Firms

Freshsales from Freshworks is a free and comprehensive CRM software that helps financial services companies to manage, track and grow their customer relationships.

Freshsales from Freshworks offers a comprehensive CRM solution that helps banks, financial services companies, and other firms manage customer relationships. The platform’s Table and Kanban View feature provides users with a visual representation of their data, which can help them better understand and take faster actions at scale.

However, users who don’t utilize this feature may find managing data like contacts and leads to be time-consuming, as Freshsales doesn’t excel in this area.

Freshsales’ Chat Campaign feature is ideal for businesses that need to communicate with customers in a more personal and efficient way. With trigger-based campaigns, users can send personalized messages on chat and generate qualified leads. Additionally, custom chatbots are available to reduce customer drop-off and keep conversations going even when there’s no one available to respond.

And finally, with Freshsales’ Sales Sequences feature, firms can set up engaging outreach campaigns that are triggered on a schedule or by a customer’s behavior. This helps them ensure consistent and timely contact with their customers.

Users can also keep track of follow-ups and reminders so they never miss an opportunity to connect with potential leads.

Pricing

Freshsales CRM offers three plans: Growth (free for up to 3 users), Pro, and Enterprise. The Pro plan has advanced features like multiple sales pipelines and AI-powered insights. The Enterprise plan includes customization options, AI-based forecasting, audit logs, and a dedicated account manager. Prices vary based on the billing cycle and the number of users.

Freshsales is the perfect free CRM software for firms looking to manage, track, and grow their customer relationships. With its Table and Kanban View, Chat Campaigns, and Sales Sequences features, users can easily visualize data for better understanding, deliver personalized messages on chat, and set up engaging outreach campaigns with triggers.

5. EngageBay — Automates High-Velocity Team’s Marketing Processes

EngageBay is a free CRM software meant to help high-velocity teams automate their marketing processes.

While it may not have as robust a feature set as some other CRM solutions, it still provides an excellent option for small to mid-sized businesses on a budget. For example, it enables teams to quickly build campaigns and launch them in a matter of minutes.

Marketers can also use this tool to easily manage customer data, segment their audiences, track customer engagement with their products or services, set up automation tools such as email notifications, and schedule follow-up tasks.

Additionally, EngageBay provides businesses the ability to monitor customer engagement in real time and make informed decisions on how to best reach their target audience.

And with EngageBay, businesses have the power to launch multi-channel campaigns that provide a holistic view of customer engagement. It allows users to easily track and measure campaigns across email, web, SMS, and social media platforms. This makes it easier for teams to identify key trends in customer behavior, develop more effective strategies for reaching their customers, and grow their business.

Pricing

EngageBay CRM offers a free plan with basic features such as contact management, deals, and email tracking. If you need more advanced features like calling, predictive lead score, and 3rd party integrations, you can upgrade to the Basic plan at a reasonable cost per user per month.

The Growth plan offers more contacts, an email scheduler, sales automation, and proposals. The Pro plan is the most advanced, with features such as an auto-dialer, custom reporting, and conversational inbox. The pricing plans increase in cost as you move up in features and contacts.

With its powerful features such as Landing Page Builder, Web Engagement tools, and Multi-Channel Campaigns capabilities – all packed into an easy-to-use platform with no cost attached – it’s a must-have for any high-velocity team looking to automate their marketing processes.

6. Insightly — Best Way to Scale Up Your Small Business 

Insightly helps you scale up your small business with its powerful CRM software. When checking out Insghtly, don’t just look at its price point. This feature-rich CRM can help small businesses to take their sales and delivery process to the next level.

It provides powerful lead tracking and opportunity management tools that ensure sales velocity and help identify risks quickly. Insightly’s customizable pipelines enable you to track, manage, and nurture leads efficiently.

And if you’re looking to ensure data integrity and capture quality information, Insightly has got you covered. With its advanced permissions and validation rules, it helps you maintain accuracy and compliance while giving the right people access to the right data at all times. This ensures teams stay on track and perform efficiently, making your CRM even more valuable for your business.

Finally, Insightly helps you close the deal with its products, price books, and quotes features. It provides an easy way to drive process improvement and clarity by helping teams add the right products at the right prices to opportunities.

With its ability to configure and price quotes directly from opportunity records, as well as quickly generate PDFs or emails for quotes using branded templates, it makes closing deals a breeze. We’ve also separately reviewed some of the other great CRM options for small businesses.

Pricing

Insightly CRM offers three different pricing plans: Plus, Professional, and Enterprise. The Plus plan is the most affordable and offers lead management, email templates, customizable sales processes, and real-time sales insights.

The Professional plan is the most popular and includes additional features such as native marketing tools and service integration, opportunity management, and mobile business card scanning. The Enterprise plan offers all the features of the Professional plan, as well as role-based permissions, custom objects, and comprehensive audit logging.

Insightly is an essential tool for small businesses looking to scale up their operations. With comprehensive lead tracking and opportunity management tools, validation rules and advanced permissions, and products, price books, and quotes features, this powerful CRM software is the perfect choice for taking your business to the next level.

7. Bitrix24 — Remote Team’s Go-To CRM

Bitrix24 is suited for businesses that have teams scattered in different locations. It helps them remain connected and organized with its powerful suite of tools.

It is an excellent CRM solution for teams that are spread out across different locations. It helps them stay connected and organized with its powerful suite of tools, including an online time clock, video conferencing, online tasks, and project management capabilities.

Bitrix24 streamlines the document management process for remote teams. It allows you to create, edit, and share all your documents and files in a single space. This makes it easy to collaborate with other team members from different locations, as everyone can access the same workspace and make edits simultaneously.

Pricing

Bitrix24 offers a free plan with essential features. Paid plans come in Basic, Standard, and Professional tiers, with varying features and benefits. Prices are not specified but offer a 20% discount when paying for a year.

However, Bitrix24’s reporting customization features may be limited, which could be a drawback for teams looking for more advanced reporting options. Nonetheless, for remote teams looking for a comprehensive CRM solution to streamline their workflows, Bitrix24 is an excellent option.

8. Capsule — Quick & Easy Setup CRM For Startups

Capsule is an easy-to-use CRM software offering a simple, intuitive, and effective way to manage your pipeline.

For startups looking for a CRM solution that relies on a desktop and doesn’t need a mobile app, Capsule is an ideal fit. With multiple sales pipelines available to set up different processes for products and services you offer, as well as different markets you sell to, it helps you keep your pipeline organized in one place.

With Capsule’s advanced sales reports, you can get the insights you need to optimize your sales process. It offers 10+ reports with won/lost opportunities, pipeline growth, and average time to win. This helps you track the progress of your team’s performance so that you can make informed decisions on how to maximize revenue.

Pricing

Capsule CRM offers four different pricing tiers to meet the needs of businesses of all sizes. The free plan is a great starting point for small businesses with basic needs, allowing up to 250 contacts and two users.

For those looking to upgrade, the Professional plan includes key features like sales pipeline, project management, and email sending. The Teams plan is best for growing businesses, offering more advanced reporting and user roles and restrictions.

For larger businesses, the Enterprise plan provides premium onboarding, dedicated account management, and priority support. Each plan includes a 14-day free trial and is priced per user, per month, with the ability to cancel anytime.

Capsule is an ideal choice for startups looking for an easy-to-use CRM solution that offers multiple pipelines and advanced sales reports. With its auto-enriched contact profiles feature, it helps you gain insights into customers for more personalized interactions.

9. BenchmarkONE — Outstanding CRM For Educational Institutions

BenchmarkONE manages your students and prospects with ease. The platform’s email builder with drag-and-drop functionality and pre-designed templates are great tools for schools looking to create beautifully designed emails quickly and effectively.

However, some schools may find the software’s feature set to be limited, with fewer options for customization and plugins compared to other solutions on the market.

Nonetheless, for schools that prioritize ease of use and simplicity, BenchmarkONE provides an excellent option for creating professional-looking emails without the need for advanced technical skills or extensive training.

Most importantly, during enrolment season, BenchmarkONE makes it easy for educational institutions to stay in touch with their students, alumni, faculty, and donors. With automated follow-up tools, schools can increase engagement and enrolment in their programs with ease.

Pricing

BenchmarkONE CRM offers a free plan with limited features. If you require more, you can upgrade to the Lite or Pro plan. The Lite plan is suitable for Marketing Specialists who need basic features such as contact management, email marketing, marketing automation, and landing pages.

On the other hand, the Pro plan is for Business Leaders who need more advanced features like a full CRM, deal pipeline management, Gmail and Outlook integration, and user permissions. The pricing for both plans depends on how many contacts you need. 

BenchmarkONE is an outstanding CRM for educational institutions looking for a way to manage their students and prospects with ease. With its email builder and automated follow-up tools, it’s easy to execute brilliantly designed emails quickly and effectively to increase engagement and enrolment in your program.

10. Streak — Robust CRM For Gmail 

Streak is not your typical stand-alone CRM software. It is a powerful CRM that integrates with Gmail and Google Workplace apps, making it easy to manage customer relationships from the comfort of your inbox.

The platform is an excellent free CRM software solution for small business. Combining robust features with integration within Gmail makes managing customer relationships much easier than ever before.

The platform offers intuitive drag-and-drop pipelines that enable you to easily track deals and tasks as they move through each stage in the sales process.

Finally, Streak’s seamless integration with Google Calendar allows for scheduling meetings quickly and efficiently.

Pricing

The free plan is great for those wanting to try out the service without any commitment. If you need more features, upgrading to one of the paid plans will give you access to more advanced CRM capabilities, including mail merge, email tracking, and shared pipelines.

It’s worth noting that Streak’s capabilities are limited to the Google environment, which may make it less suitable for businesses that rely heavily on other tools and platforms outside of Google. Nonetheless, for businesses that use Gmail as their primary email client and need a simple, effective CRM solution, Streak provides a great option.

11. Salesforce — Large Enterprise CRM

Salesforce is arguably the best CRM for large enterprises. It offers a full suite of features to help businesses manage their customer relationships, sales, marketing, and service delivery.

Let’s start by stating that Salesforce is not free. However, it offers a very long 30-day free trial, so you can experience all the features this CRM software offers.

We can’t just leave Salesforce behind while talking about large enterprise CRM software. It offers an impressive array of features, such as Forecast Management, Mobile CRM Solutions, and Salesforce Engage.

The Forecast Management feature helps you to plan for future sales opportunities, the Mobile CRM Solutions allow you to manage your customer relationships from anywhere, and Salesforce Engage allows you to engage your customers in real-time conversations.

Pricing

As stated, Salesforce is not free – but it offers a 30-day free trial for its paid plans, which include Essentials, Professional, Enterprise, and Unlimited. Each plan varies in features and benefits, with prices starting at $25/user/month for Essentials and going up to $300/user/month for Unlimited.

Overall, Salesforce is a great choice for large enterprises that want the best free CRM software with all the bells and whistles. The long 30-day free trial gives you plenty of time to test out every feature before deciding if it’s the right CRM software for your business. Even if you don’t decide to stick with Salesforce in the end, you’ll still get a lot of value out of their free trial.

Top 11 Free CRM Software Packages Compared

Here’s a summary table of the top 11 free CRM picks. Given these great options, it’s little wonder that CRMs are becoming ever more popular. Check out their best features, starting prices, and more.

What are the Benefits of a Free CRM?

First of all, for small businesses, the added features of more advanced CRM systems may not be necessary or beneficial to their specific needs and goals. That’s why having a free CRM can be incredibly helpful for small businesses and startups that are just beginning to build out their customer database and sales and marketing process.

And that can apply across sectors, whether a firm is looking for free real estate CRM software, free sales CRM software, or free CRM software for nonprofits.

The benefits of a free CRM can include the following:

Cost-Saving

Since the software does not require any upfront costs or ongoing subscription fees, you can save money and have more capital to invest in other areas of your business.

Easy Accessibility 

A free CRM is often very easy to access, set up, and use. This makes it ideal for businesses that don’t have the resources to hire a technical specialist or are new to using customer relationship management systems. What’s more, these services are typically online solutions that don’t require a free CRM software download.

When CRM strategies fail, it is often because the solution is too complex or because users lack the proper training and resources to succeed. As such, it’s important to choose a CRM solution that is easy to use and provides comprehensive customer support.

Comprehensive Data Management 

With a free CRM, you can store all of your customer data (e.g., contact information, order history) in one place, allowing you to easily track and manage your sales, marketing, and customer service efforts.

How We Evaluated the Best Free CRM Products

Experts anticipate that the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software sector will experience an impressive 14% growth rate between 2022 and 2025.

When evaluating the best free CRM solutions, we looked at a variety of factors, including:

Ease of Use 

We evaluated each product for its user-friendliness and how intuitive it was to set up and use. We also considered the amount of time needed to learn how to navigate through the system and make changes or updates.

Features & Functionality 

This is where some of the free CRM solutions outshine their more expensive counterparts. We looked at the features that were included in each free CRM and how they could benefit customer service, sales, marketing, or other areas of your business.

Scalability & Customization Options 

For businesses that plan to grow and expand in the future, we evaluated each product for its scalability and customization options. We also considered if they offered add-ons or integrations with other tools like email services or accounting software.

The Limitations of Free CRMs

CRMs are what they call RevTech (Revenue Technology) and provide a lot of value to businesses. And if you want to generate revenue, you need to invest in the right technology. Unfortunately, free CRMs have some limitations. Here are a few of them:

Limited Functionality

Free CRMs often lack many of the features and functions that more advanced products offer. This means they may not be able to handle complex tasks such as analytics or data mining or provide sophisticated customer segmentation options.

No Customization Options 

Most free CRMs do not allow for any customization, which can limit your ability to tailor it to suit your specific needs or integrate it with other tools and systems you use.

No Customer Support 

Many free CRMs do not offer customer support, so if you run into any difficulties or have questions about how to use the product, you may be out of luck.

Free CRM Software FAQs