11 Best Sales CRM Software in 2023 [SalesForce Alternatives]

The best CRM software should automate and supercharge the sales process where possible, not create more extra manual work for employees. 

It should include multi-channel outreach and automated workflows to support your business scaling (including integrations).

The entire customer relationship management should be included under one umbrella, where you can have an entire overview of each of your customer’s communication, progress, wishes and lifecycle.

We’ve reviewed the top CRM platforms with keeping that in mind.

Our Top Picks for the Best Sales CRM Tools

Best CRM for sales driven SMBs

Small and medium sized businesses whose growth is very sales-driven will benefit most from Pipedrive. The totally customizable sales pipeline and process make it vary adaptable. The deal management in a spreadsheet-like format and email outreach make it a valuable sales-focused CRM.

Best all-in-one multi purpose CRM tool

HubSpot is an award-winning grandfather of CRMs. The best part of the HubSpot ecosystem is that all their products are interconnected. All your business processes, including sales, marketing and customer support can be managed with HubSpot products, which are all seamlessly integrated. 

Best CMR for sales coaching businesses

The multi-channel outreach, workflow automation and sales pipeline management make Close one of the top CRM systems for sales-focused businesses. The call coaching functionality makes it perfect for sales coaching businesses. It includes in-call whisper, listen and barge features. 

How to Choose the Best CRM Software?

Choosing a CRM software is a critical step in your business. It’s the main tool that you and your team is going to use to support the business growth, customer support and sales.

Since a CRM platform will eventually be deeply rooted with integrations and your business processes will be tied to it, the switching cost can be quite high. That’s why it’s crucial to make the right choice when choosing the best customer relationship management software for your specific needs.

When choosing a CRM solution , answer these questions first:

  1. How many people will be using it?
  2. Are you focused on sales, marketing or customer support?
  3. Would you need multi-channel communication tools, like live chat?
  4. Which integrations are must-haves and nice-to-haves?
  5. Are your sales reps going to perform cold email outreach?
  6. Would your sales reps be needing cold calling features?
  7. Do you need a mobile app and what would you use it for?
  8. What kind of reporting needs do you have? 
  9. Do you want to share reports with customers?
  10. What is your price range?
choosing the right crm software

For all of these questions, consider your needs today and where you’ll be in a year or 3 years from now. Ask your internal teams and gather input as to what’s important to them. Make a list of essential features.

And most importantly, try them out. All of these CRM platforms have either a free plan or a free trial. Below, we’ve carefully researched all of the most popular CRM software and we’ve looked in depth:

If you’re on a tight budget, check out the best free CRM software below. 

What are the Best CRM Software for Sales?

Read the full Close review

Overall rating

4.8/5

4.8

14 day trial for free

Pros

Cons

Best or unique feature

Close is a simple, yet powerful sales CRM, built by salespeople for salespeople. It’s sophisticated sales pipeline management, multi-channel outreach capabilities and workflow automations make it a sales productivity machine. The call coaching feature make it a perfect tool for sales coaching companies.

Close is best suited for bigger and more structured sales teams, with 20 sales reps who do a lot of calling and cold email outreach. Companies who get the most benefit out of Close.io are typically start-ups who are looking to scale up fast.

close sales pipeline
close sales pipeline

Close features

close smart calling
close smart calling

Close.io pricing

Read the full HubSpot review

Overall rating

4.7/5

4.7

Free plan available

Pros

Cons

Best or unique feature

There is a good reason why HubSpot is titled the best CRM tool for SMBs. If you’re using the HubSpot marketing platform, you can seamlessly import all the lead data, website visits, lead’s social media feed and all the interactions into one central place. This way sales reps can focus on outreach and communication, instead of data entry.

It’s really the best all-in-one sales CRM with an aggregated and organized view on sales, marketing campaigns and customer support. There is a clear benefit of having all the contact and activity data in one application, instead of having to integrate with and pay for several supportive products.

Hubspot workflow
hubspot workflow builder

HubSpot features

Hubspot reporting
hubspot reporting

HubSpot pricing

Read the full Pipedrive review

Overall rating

4.5/5

4.5

14 day trial for free

Pros

Cons

Best or unique feature

Pipedrive is created by salespeople and has quickly grown into one of the most loved and best CRM software on the market. It’s quite possible the easiest CRM to adopt, but still robust enough for tailoring more advances sales processes.

The clear focus on sales process customization, workflow automation and insightful sales reporting while keeping a clear and intuitive user interface is what makes Pipedrive one of the best sales CRMs.

pipedrive deals pipeline
pipedrive deals pipeline

Pipedrive features

pipedrive analytics
pipedrive analytics

Pipedrive pricing

Read the full Monday CRM review

Overall rating

4.3/5

4.3

14 day trial for free

Pros

Cons

Best or unique feature

The main benefits that speak for Monday Sales CRM is flexibility and customizability. The whole interface is utilizing the spreadsheet format allows you to customize your CRM to exactly fit your needs. This allows to tailor the CRM system to fit your processes in any industry, without any coding.

Furthermore, the flexibility of Monday Sales CRM enables you to change your processes without too much hassle as your business scaling up. These rich configuration and flexibility features make it one of the best CRM software out there.

monday sales crm pipeline
monday sales crm pipeline

Monday Sales CRM features

monday sales crm automations
monday sales crm automations

Monday Sales CRM pricing

Read the full EngageBay review

Overall rating

4.1/5

4.1

Free plan available

Pros

Cons

Best or unique feature

EngageBay is a CRM that focuses on multi-channel communication and high-converting landing pages. As opposed to most other CRMs on this article, EngageBay is more oriented towards inbound sales.

There is a lot you can achieve with automations and workflows, especially considering the landing pages can be built natively inside the CRM. This makes it highly effective CRM for capturing leads visiting your website, assigning lead score and triggering automated actions

The free and affordable pricing plans make EngageBay one of the best CRM software on the market for price sensitive companies.

engagebay workflow builder
engagebay workflow builder

EngageBay features

engagebay landing page builder
engagebay landing page builder

EngageBay pricing

Read the full Zoho CRM review

Overall rating

4/5

4.0

15 day trial for free

Pros

Cons

Best or unique feature

Zoho CRM is a powerful, full-fledged CRM platform for larger teams. It includes sales workflow automation, email outreach and detailed sales reporting. It seamlessly integrates with Zoho Campaigns (email marketing), Zoho Books (for book keeping) and Zoho Meeting (for conferencing). It is a clear choice if you’re already using some of Zoho’s products to align your teams.

Zoho CRM is an established player in the CRM field and therefore includes tons of integrations in the Zoho Marketplace for finance, quote management, lead generation and management, marketing automation, SMS messaging, storage, document management and signing, events and more.

zoho crm workflow automation
zoho crm workflow automation

Zoho CRM features

zoho salessignals
zoho salessignals

Zoho CRM pricing

Read the full Salesmate review

Overall rating

3.8/5

3.8

15 day trial for free

Pros

Cons

Best or unique feature

Salesmate, as the name suggests, is a CRM software focused on sales activity. It is an excellent CRM software because of its multi-channel communication features and easy-to-use automated workflow builder. The multi-channel features include built-in inbound and outbound calling, SMS text messaging and email outreach.

Salesmate also shows an overview of you sales pipeline, plus you can build custom reports to really understand your revenue growth and sales outreach efforts.

salesmate pipeline
salesmate pipeline

Salesmate features

salesmate calling
salesmate calling

Salesmate pricing

Read the full Capsule CRM review

Overall rating

3.7/5

3.7

30 day trial for free

Pros

Cons

Best or unique feature

Capsule is a simple and intuitive CRM for small businesses with basic needs. It covers the main sales pipeline, customer communication, task and team management features. The best part of Capsule CRM is that there’s a totally free plan. That free plan is actually completely usable, not just a glorified trial.

If the contact and sales volume is still quite low in your company, but high enough that you need a structured and shared central environment to manage all that, then Capsule could be the best choice for you. Especially, considering its cost-effectiveness.

capsule sales pipeline
capsule sales pipeline

Capsule CRM features

capsule lost opportunities by reason
capsule lost opportunities by reason

Capsule CRM pricing

Read the full Gist CRM review

Overall rating

3.5/5

3.5

21 day trial for free

Pros

Cons

Best or unique feature

Gist is a CRM software that has grown out of a live chat tool. It focuses on customer engagement, either with a chat bot or a live sales rep taking charge over live chat. But it features much more – automated workflow builder, inbox automation, email marketing, event tracking and analytics.

If your company aims to be hyper customer centric, then Gist is the best CRM software for you.

The focus is on customer conversations via chat. Even if a visitor doesn’t enter their email address on your website, you can still engage with them via the live chat tool or chat bot. This focus on engagement really helps in turning leads into customers.

gist chat bot setup
gist chat bot setup

Gist CRM features

gist conversations
gist conversations

Gist CRM pricing

Read the full Streak CRM review

Overall rating

3.3/5

3.3

14 day trial for free

Pros

Cons

Best or unique feature

If you’re looking for a solution that is deeply focused on GMail integration, then Streak is probably the best CRM software for you. Its built specifically to fit into your sales workflow on GMail and Google Workspaces.

When opening an email exchange in GMail, it shows all the details about that lead, including their pipeline stage, assigned sales rep, tasks, notes and contact’s recent activity.

It includes all the details about the lead and it’s easy to schedule next actions, all without even leaving the email exchange view. Streak is a simple CRM that is focused on doing one thing well.

streak email actions
streak email actions

Streak CRM features

streak reports
streak reports

Streak CRM pricing

Read the full DashClicks review

Overall rating

3.2/5

3.2

Free plan available

Pros

Cons

Best or unique feature

DashClicks is a white label marketing software and CRM. A true 1-stop shop for marketing services. The CRM feature is built especially for PPC agencies. If you’re running Google Ads or Facebook Ads for several customers, then DashClicks is probably the best CRM software for you.

One of the more unique features is the InstaSites app, which allows you to use a template to build a new website for your customer is a matter of seconds. Super helpful when outreaching new prospects or running specific campaigns.

DashClicks InstaSites
DashClicks InstaSites

DashClicks features

DashClicks white labelled dashboard
DashClicks white labelled dashboard

DashClicks pricing

What are the Best Free CRM Software Platforms?

Your business might be in a pre-revenue stage or just on a tight budget. But you still need a central CRM tool to manage all your contacts, sales, marketing and support activities.

Luckily, a there are a lot of free CRM software platforms available, which really support your business growth. All of these free CRMs have the most basic free plan. Once your volume increases, you still need to upgrade to a paid plan.

Although many limitations apply, these are the best free CRM software that have a forever free plan.

Includes 1 million contacts, unlimited free users, no time limit. Integrations with GMail, G Suite and Outlook are also included. There is no dedicated support, but free users can get general support from their Knowledge Base, Community or HubSpot Academy.

Monday Sales CRM is one of the top CRM tools with a free plan. It includes up to 1000 contacts and 2 team members. Also, embedded forms on website and lead capturing are included. 

Includes up to 500 contacts, 1000 branded emails, email marketing with newsletters, autoresponders, live chat, helpdesk, landing page builder, predictive lead scoring, reporting dashboard and much more.

Includes up to 3 users and features like lead and contact management, deal management, tasks, calling, website visitor tracking, workflow rules with email follow-ups, up to 10 email pre-saved email templates and up to 1 GB of file storage.

Includes up to 250 contacts and 50 MB per account. It also includes the GMail and Outlook add-ons. Custom form fields and over 1000 Zapier integrations, along with the API access are also available with the free plan.

Includes features like Gist messenger, automated chat triggers, shared inbox, 1-on-1 meeting planner. The free plan even includes the mobile apps and more.

Key Takeaways for the Best CRM Software

Regardless of which stage your business is in, choosing the CRM is a long-term choice and probably the most important software decision you’ll have to make within your business.

To choose the best CRM software specifically for your needs and goals is a tough task. So, we’ve made it easier for you.

If you’re looking for the best all-round CRM that is really future-proofing,
go with HubSpot.

If you’re looking for the most sales and outreach focused CRM,
go with Close.

If you your CRM to include landing page builder integrated with lead generation,
go with EngageBay.

If your business is really focused on customer conversations and live chat,
go with Gist CRM.

If your sales processes are in GMail and you want to build your CRM around that,
go with Streak.

Erkki Muuga

Erkki Muuga

Erkki has over 10 years of experience as a software product manager and a proven track record in building and growing SaaS products. He has a keen eye for key differentiating factors and spotting truly valuable software features that enable business use cases.

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