11 Best CRM Software for Sales
[Pros, Cons, Pricing, Screenshots]
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.
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 CRM software
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:
- How many people will be using it?
- Are you focused on sales, marketing or customer support?
- Would you need multi-channel communication tools, like live chat?
- Which integrations are must-haves and nice-to-haves?
- Are your sales reps going to perform cold email outreach?
- Would your sales reps be needing cold calling features?
- Do you need a mobile app and what would you use it for?
- What kind of reporting needs do you have?
- Do you want to share reports with customers?
- What is your price range?
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:
- What are the pros?
- What are the cons?
- What makes them unique or special?
- What does the pricing structure look like?
If you’re on a tight budget, check out the best free CRM software below.
What are the Best CRM Software for Sales?
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.io pros
- Fast and easy setup requires little to no training
- Customized email sequences and sales pipeline management
- Custom fields and automatic workflow triggers
- Sync and import emails from existing Gmail, Microsoft or any other email provider
- Super easy team management with email sharing
- Responsive and helpful customer support
- Global calling straight from the app, with clear audio quality
- Easy to record calls and manage call playbacks
- Centralized SMS inbox allows to send SMS with one click
- Native Zoom integration for video calling
Close.io cons
- Lacking in features to schedule outgoing emails
- Some shortcomings with analytics and deeper data exporting
- Complex analytics can be a bit hard to understand
Close.io unique or best feature
- Next level call automation with Predictive Dialer, which allows to dial multiple numbers at once and route the call only when a human answer
- Smart Views shows email opens and allows leads scoring
- Built-in call coaching – use the call recordings of your sales rockstars to train new sales reps
Close.io pricing
- Cheapest plan starts from $29 per user/month (includes up to 3 users)
- Bulk email sending becomes available from “Professional” plan, which start from $99 per user/month
- Built-in global calling available on all plans
- Free 14-day trial, no credit card required
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 pros
- The CRM with the most integrations available on the App Marketplace
- Lively ecosystem of users and support documentation
- Rich lead contact cards with activity report, notes and scheduling
- Smooth lead data enrichment with custom properties and rich integrations
- Multi-channel tools like live chat, email scheduling and calling
- Create landing pages using the integrated drag-and-drop page builder
- Automated workflows allow you to easily set up marketing funnels
- Generate permanent links for documents (like PDFs), even if you do file changes
- Award-winning reactive and helpful customer support
- Tons of free courses available in the HubSpot Academy for sales and marketing trainings
HubSpot cons
- Bigger learning curve to set up at first
- Leads and opportunity tracking can be a bit clunky and can make customization difficult
- The numerous reports that HubSpot generates can make it hard to navigate at first
HubSpot unique or best feature
- Having the full ecosystem (sales, marketing, customer support, website) on a central platform has the benefit of smoothly integrating everything and supporting scaling up
- Aggregates all the marketing and customer support data onto a central contact card
- Rich and highly customizable reporting and analytics
HubSpot pricing
- Has a free plan, which includes contact management, deals pipeline, live chat and a reporting dashboard
- Starter plan starts at $45 per month and includes automations and productivity performance reporting
- Cost can scale up noticeably when upgrading to Professional and Enterprise tiers, but the total cost is still cheaper because of its interconnected all-in-one ecosystem
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 pros
- One of the easiest CRM software to set up and get started with
- Beautiful and intuitive user interface
- Sophisticated leads dashboard with custom filtering
- Automated personalized email workflows and notifications of lead activity
- Pre-made sales email templates with customizable short codes
- Sales activity calendar for sales reps and an overview for sales leads
- All the contact activity and email conversations aggregated to the contact card
- Integrated chatbot and live chat to capture leads on your website
- Targeted lead generation with the Pipedrive Prospector with a database of 400 million profiles
- Deal management on a spreadsheet-like list view with detailed filtering and bulk edits
- Automatic deal prioritization according to next scheduled activity
- Tracking for lost deals, which generate detailed analytics for improvements
- 24/7 responsive customer support live chat
- A variety of sales training courses and product training videos in the Pipedrive Academy
Pipedrive cons
- Lacks a shared inbox functionality
- The task management feature can be too simplistic for complex use cases
- Functionality for managing quotes and invoices could be improved
Pipedrive unique or best feature
- Focused on sales and clearly showing the dollar value on each deal in the pipeline
- Contract eSigning for up to 10 signatures per document
- Robust and customizable sales analytics dashboards
Pipedrive pricing
- The cheapest “Essential” plan starts at $18 per user/month, which makes it a very affordable CRM
- Call tracking and eSigning become available from the “Professional” plan at $59 per user/month
- LeadBooster add-on for automated lead gathering can be included to any plan
- The Web Visitors add-on can also be added to any plan for extra lead insights
- Free 14-day trial with no credit card required
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 pros
- Really small learning curve to set up and start using
- Easy to use and visually intuitive to understand
- Pulling in leads from custom forms which can be embedded in your website
- Includes lead management, project management, meetings (internal or external) and notes – all under one CRM roof
- Flexible email automations to trigger follow-ups on certain events or actions
- Highly customizable sales dashboard to show your most important sales metrics across the company
- Lead filtering and segregation based on lead source, deal value and other criteria
- The deals dashboard can be viewed in table format, as a graph or as a Kanban board
- Deal stages can be customized and transitioning can happen manually or automatically based on actions
- Comprehensive analytics dashboard which gives a complete sales progress overview
Monday Sales CRM cons
- No native integration with Gmail that assigns deals automatically
- No easy way to generate reports to send directly to customers
- When there’s massive amounts of data in the CRM, it sometimes lags or freezes
- Invoice tracking for multiple projects could use some improvements
Monday Sales CRM unique or best feature
- Incredibly fast and helpful customer support – they can even send you a personal video explaining how to overcome your obstacles
- The user interface utilized the spreadsheet format and field values can be based on formulas and automated triggers
Monday Sales CRM pricing
- Has a forever free plan with up to 1000 contacts and 2 team members
- The cheapest “Basic” plan costs $13.65 per user/month and includes unlimited contacts and customization
- The automations, deal and activity management features become available from “Standard” plan, which costs $19.30 per user/month
- Also includes a 14-day free trial, which includes the “Pro” plan features. The trial has no credit card requirement
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 pros
- Sales pipeline visualization across entire team (customize different pipelines for different products)
- Sales meeting scheduling calendar with detailed availability and settings
- Shared calendar to view aggregated activities across all sales reps
- Set up email sequence scheduling and automatic responses
- Set up automated workflows based on user behavior triggers and conditions
- Email template builder (tons of templates by use case) with A/B testing
- Sales proposal templates and personalization using Deals
- Automatic assigning to sales rep based on actions or lead score
- Overview of all the leads based on score to identify hot leads
- Multi-channel outreach, including calling (Twilio integration), SMS and a built-in live chat tool
- Create dynamic smart contacts list and segmentation by defined conditions
- Lead generation via LinkedIn integration
- Opt-in form creation and dynamic displaying based on page criteria and user behavior
- Email campaign performance statistics on email open rates, CTR and unsubscribes
- Call analytics for call duration and call outcomes by sales reps
- Sales ep based automatic reports daily, weekly or monthly
EngageBay cons
- Can’t use a visual block builder for emails when creating a workflow
- Hard to navigate between automations and workflows
- Multi-selecting images is not possible for social media posts
- Not enough product documentation and guides available for specific use cases
EngageBay unique or best feature
- Lead scoring based on behavior (pageviews, email opens, clicks) and automated triggers
- Landing page builder for campaigns to create a high converting sales funnel (tons of templates included)
EngageBay pricing
- Has a free plan that includes email marketing, landing pages, live chat and help desk features
- The next cheapest “Basic” plan includes up to 1000 contacts, integrations and lead scoring starts at $14.99 per user/month
- The main sales CRM features like automated workflows, and call reporting start with the “Growth” plan for $23.99 per user/month
- Has many free email tools that can be seamlessly integrated
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 pros
- Create workflows that automatically trigger actions based on pre-set conditions
- View detailed sales performance metrics, sales trend analytics and pivot charts
- The workflow automation allows for complex triggers, including for integrated systems
- Highlighting anomalies in your sales process to identify errors in the process or in reporting
- Suggests the ideal time to contact a customer by using engagement data
- Sales and revenue predictions powered by AI forecasting logic
- Native mobile app to deep dive into sales metrics on the go. The app also includes a “Near me” search, which locates your nearby contacts
- You can also create, modify or delete records while offline. Data will be synced when you’re back online
Zoho CRM cons
- Bit steep learning curve due to so many features
- The user interface has become a bit bloated and outdated compared to the newer CRM software
- The abundant features can make it a bit slow at times
- Customer support can be a bit slow at time when responding
Zoho CRM unique or best feature
- Sophisticated mobile app featuring sales analytics breakdown and even performing actions while offline
- SalesSignals feature gives you notifications when your customers interact with your brand on any channel
Zoho CRM pricing
- Has a forever free plan for up to 3 users, which includes some sale force automation
- Can’t test out the full workflow automation with the free plan
- The cheapest “Standard” plan includes multiple pipelines, email insights, sales forecasting and custom/scheduled reports and costs $20 per user/month
- The sophisticated AI prediction builder and workflow suggestions become available on the “Enterprise” plan, which costs $50 per user/month
- Considering the abundant features available, Zoho CRM is one of the best “bang for buck” CRMs out there
- Includes a free 15-day trial for any plan
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 pros
- Beautiful and easy-to-use interface
- Capture new leads from website form, emails or import from CSV file
- Automate lead assignment by any criteria using the automated workflows
- Real-time email tracking shows when recipient opened the email or clicked the link
- Cold outreach campaigns with bulk email sending
- Include a custom-made signature in all emails
- Automatic call recordings, voice recordings and storing text messages
- Automatically create tasks and assign to sales rep, based on trigger action
- Includes a GMail Chrome extension to keep using Gmail for sales outreach
- Extremely helpful and fast customer support, they even do video
- Allows to build custom reports and sales overview dashboards
Salesmate cons
- The automated texting is a bit hard to set up at first
- There’s a limit to how many emails per day you can send
- Sometimes have to re-authorize access for integrations
Salesmate best unique or best feature
- Activity feed across the business showing all the activity in real time
- Built-in inbound and outbound calling directly from the CRM platform
Salesmate pricing
- The cheapest “Starter” plan starts at $15 per user/month and includes the workflow management, built-in calling, email sync and more
- The next “Growth” plan also includes product management features, shared inbox, SSO, custom reports and dashboards
- Some of the features like Messenger, Automation Journeys and Dedicated IP address can be purchased through plan-agnostic add-ons
- Includes a 15-day free trial with all Salesmate features with no credit card requirement
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 CRM pros
- Very easy to set up and start using and really fits perfectly for basic needs
- The main updates section shows a feed of all activities across your company
- Includes over 50 integrations with marketing, account and other software
- Sales pipeline gives a very clear overview of ongoing sales opportunities with assignees and deal values
- Sales forecasting based on ongoing deals and historical data
- Custom fields for better categorization and filtering for contacts
- Sending email directly from CRM, with attachments, signatures and short codes in email body
- GMail and Outlook extensions make adding tasks quick and easy
- Has native Android and iOS mobile apps
Capsule CRM cons
- Somewhat lacking in calendar features for managing leads by date
- There is no stage prior to “Opportunity” in the sales pipeline
- The search functionality could be improved
- The analytics dashboards could feature more reports
Capsule CRM unique or best feature
- Gives a comprehensive overview of the lost sales opportunities by reason
Capsule CRM pricing
- Has a forever free plan with up to 250 contacts and supports all integrations
- The next cheapest “Professional” plan supports up to 50,000 contacts, reporting, a shared mailbox and much more for $18 per user/month
- Hybrid plans allow to have your company users on different pricing plans
- All plans include a 30-day free trial with no credit card requirement
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 CRM pros
- Very easy to set up – just paste the code snippet to your site
- Includes chat bot functionality to support your website visitors on autopilot
- You can also take control and directly chat with your website visitors
- Ability to customize which pages the chat appears on
- Automatically enrich your contacts with detailed personal and company data
- Lead scoring algorithms can identify your most engaged contacts
- The shared mailbox includes automatic replies, satisfaction ratings, open rate tracking and more
- The 24/7 customer support promises a 5-minute response time and 97% satisfaction rate
- Functionality to create your own knowledge base for your customers, which you can integrate with the chat tool
- Interaction and event tracking for detailed visitor analytics
Gist CRM cons
- No sales stages overview
- Product includes a lot of branding
- Lack of webhooks can hinder setting up automations
Gist CRM unique or best feature
- Visual workflow builder for automated workflows with detailed segmentation and rules
- Engagement focused view that has a complete overview of customer conversations
Gist CRM pricing
- The CRM is divided into 3 – Support Suite, Marketing Suite and All-in-One Bundle, so it’s possible to start with either only support or only with the marketing side
- There is a forever free plan, even on the All-in-One Bundle, which features 200 contacts and 2 support seats
- The next “Professional” plan includes 5 support seats and costs $48 per month (with 1000 contacts)
- The next “Professional” plan includes 5 support seats and costs $48 per month (with 1000 contacts)
- Includes a 21-day free trial
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 CRM pros
- Very small learning curve for GMail users
- Easily accessible sales leads pipeline overview integrated directly into your GMail
- Send emails, make calls or schedule invites with one click
- Includes email tracking for opens and link clicks in the email
- Mail merge allows to send emails to multiple recipients by uploading contacts in a CSV format
- Use pre-made snippets in email outreach and add a personalized touch before sending
- Includes variables and short codes that can pull any contact details, like name or custom fields
- Add however many columns into the leads overview in a table format
- Lead activity action history overview
- Automatically populated columns in the lead overview
Streak CRM cons
- Not connected to social media or your website
- Not many integrations, have to use Zapier for automations
- Doesn’t really work for the GMail Android app
- The customer support can be a bit slow in responding
Streak CRM unique or best feature
- Organize customer communications and workflows directly from your GMail inbox
- Create different types of pipeline visualizations based on the pipeline data
Streak CRM pricing
- Has a completely free plan with 500 contacts and 50 mail merge per day
- The next cheapest plan includes 5000 contacts, 800 mail merge per day and all the email tracking functionality for $19 per user/month
- If you want to invite your team and use the shared contacts feature, you’d have to upgrade to the “Pro” plan for $59 per user/month
- Includes a 14-day free trial with the “Pro” plan features
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 pros
- Easy to use once it’s all set up
- More than a dozen powerful apps to create a solution exactly for your use case
- White labelled content marketing services, where a team will write blog content for you
- White labelled Ads, social media, TikTok and SEO campaigns
- The Reputation aggregator allows to manage reviews across many channels
- 24/7 responsive live chat support
- There are abundant videos, live demos, and other resources in the DashUniversity
- The real-time dashboard is super useful for insights
- White labelled API
DashClicks cons
- Onboarding can be long and tedious, depending on your use case
- Some limitations with 3rd party integrations
- The funnel builder could use some usability improvements
DashClicks unique or best feature
- Use InstaSites app to build a completely custom and personalized website in seconds (includes a bulk-builder to build many sites based on the client contact information)
- Ability to fully white label the platform
DashClicks pricing
- There is a forever free package, which includes 2 seats and 50 emails/month. Most of the apps are available with the free package as well.
- The next cheapest package includes 5 seats, 1000 emails/month, 50 GB of storage and costs $97 per month
- The most popular “Plus” package costs $297 per month and includes 10 seats, 5000 emails/month and 100 GB of storage.
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.