Best CRM Software Tools — Top 11 CRMs Reviewed and Compared for 2024

79% of leads don’t convert without a CRM. With one of the best CRM software tools, you can not only convert more leads but improve your ROI by as much as 245% — all this comes from a reliable study done by Thomson Data. These stats show just how important CRM software is to businesses — but finding the best one for yours is certainly no easy task.

To help, we’ve rounded up and reviewed the best CRM software and ranked them based on criteria like ease of use, pricing, and features, amongst others. Read on to discover how leading tools like Zoho CRM, Freshsales, and Salesforce can help you improve your customer experience and skyrocket your business.

The Best CRM Software Tools – Quick Answer

The market is loaded with incredible CRM tools, but each one is unique and caters to different needs better than others. With that said, Zoho’s custom rules and automation, paired with client portals and affordable plans, make it the one to beat. Here are the market’s top CRM software tools:

1. Zoho CRM – The best CRM overall, which serves as a powerful omnichannel communication platform and comes with custom analytics and a wide range of dashboards and reports.
2. Freshsales – A great solution for personalized customer engagement that accelerates your processes with auto-assignment rules, AI-powered scoring, and contact profiles that are automatically enriched.
3. Salesforce Sales Cloud – An industry leader that offers a comprehensive and highly scalable end-to-end solution and everything from advanced activity tracking and workflow automation to contact data management.
4. PipeDrive – Intuitive, Kanban-based offering that’s great for sales teams, with pipeline management and performance tracking built in.
5. Act! – An easy-to-use product with a customizable interface that enables you to personalize email campaigns and better identify sales opportunities.
6. Zendesk Sell – Sales package intended to enhance customer service and boost results and productivity – and a great option for companies already using the Zendesk platform.
7. HubSpot CRM – The best free CRM, with features for scheduling meetings, capturing leads, and generating quotes, which is great for small businesses.
8. Maximizer CRM – Great business intelligence features to help sales managers review performance and iterate on and improve their sales processes while simplifying customer management.
9. Monday Sales CRM – Highly customizable platform, which is nevertheless easy to use and comes with lots of features to track customer activity and to fast-track projects.
10. Less Annoying CRM – Easy-to-use platform for those wanting top-notch core capabilities across client communications, project management, scheduling, and data collection.
11. Keap – The best CRM for email marketing, with rich marketing automation features, as well as an extensive library of 2,500+ apps and third-party integrations, and 24/7 support.

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The Top CRM Software – In-Depth Reviews

To help you narrow down your options, we’ve reviewed each of our top 11 in more depth below. We explore their key capabilities, pricing, and leading pros and cons as expressed by customers. Let’s dive right in.

1. Zoho CRM – The Most Comprehensive CRM and Best Overall

Zoho CRM is a top CRM platform equipped to manage your sales, marketing, and customer support services altogether and impeccably well. With that said, what we love most about Zoho’s CRM is the built-in currency calculator that simplifies working with international clients.

No more manually converting your payment to dollars or wondering how much you’re actually receiving if the client is paying in a different currency — Zoho CRM will automatically convert all the numbers to your primary currency.

Speaking of its automation capabilities, Zoho CRM will help you automate many major but repetitive processes, such as lead follow-up, updating records, and scheduling sales activity. 

For example, you can set a custom rule that if a client doesn’t respond to your email in three days, you’ll send an automated follow-up email to check on them.

Imagine the time you’ll save — instead of manually checking who hasn’t responded and then typing plus sending a follow-up email, this entire process will be taken care of by Zoho.

What’s more, Zoho CRM’s custom scoring rules deserve special mention. Almost every renowned CRM software scores the leads based on their probability of closing the deal.

But Zoho lets you create your own scoring rules so that the probability is based on parameters that are more relevant to your business model — a great way to get more accurate forecasts on your leads. 

More information about Zoho CRM:

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Pricing

Zoho CRM’s Standard plan, available at $14/user/month, is suitable for small to mid-size businesses and includes features like predefined reports and dashboards, email templates, and custom fields.

To access advanced features such as assignment rules, email parsers, data entry wizards, segmentation, premium security, marketing automation, and product customization features, you can upgrade to Zoho CRM’s Enterprise or Ultimate plan.

These plans are priced at $40/user/month and $52/user/month, respectively. Without any risk or hassle, determine if Zoho CRM is the right choice for you with the 15-day free trial.

2. Freshsales – Best for Personalized Customer Engagement

Freshsales is a highly-awarded CRM platform best known for giving you a 360-degree view of your customers, helping you create a personalized experience for them, and automating mundane tasks through their AI-powered bot Freddy.

Freddy is quite literally a godsend. For starters, it keeps your customers engaged on the live chat box on your website, answering their initial queries while your team is away, preventing them from looking for other options. 

It also guides you on the next best action and helps you identify the potentially high-value clients to direct your focus on. In short, Freddy will be your virtual CRM expert. 

To help you understand a customer’s journey better, Freshsales also comes with an activity timeline where each action taken by a lead and their interactions with your team are listed chronologically. 

This way, you’ll be able to check the most important parameters of your sales funnel, the areas that are managed the best, and those that need a little help to retain more leads.

There’s no better way to get real feedback on your service than following your leads on their journey. The best thing about Freshsales is you can manage multiple mediums of communication, such as calls, emails, chats, and SMS, all from one place.

Connect your inbox with Freshsales, create custom templates for bulk messaging, automatically record and log calls, route them to your preferred numbers, and get actionable insights — Freshsales is the complete package for communication management.

More information about Freshsales:

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Pricing

Freshsales offers a free forever plan that includes contact and account management, 24/5 support, and a mobile app for on-the-go usage at no cost. However, Freshsales’s key attraction, its bot Freddy, is only available with its paid plans that start at $15 per user per month.

This plan includes a visual sales pipeline, AI-powered contact scoring, sales sequences, and much more. Try Freshsales CRM for free now with the free plan to see if it is a good fit for you without any financial risk. No credit card information is required, so you won’t lose money.

3. Salesforce Sales Cloud — Best for End-to-End CRM Management

Salesforce is a global leader in customer relationship management software and one of the original innovators of CRM today. Their Sales Cloud app is loaded with features and functionality that make it suitable for businesses of all sizes.

The Salesforce platform comes with all the desired core features that any business needs.

These features include things like being able to track the customer journey from the lead stage to signed contracts, integrate email campaigns with Gmail and Outlook, and pull up highly detailed and customizable reporting.

This cloud-based CRM solution is built to scale with any business. It is also packed with social collaboration tools and a healthy third-party app marketplace. This means you get tons of integrations to fit nearly any workflow or operational process that suits your fancy.

The platform features plenty of workflow automation for managing and closing leads. There’s also AI assistance for nearly all customer interactions. More advanced features of the Sales Cloud platform include:

More information about Salesforce Sales Cloud:

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Cons

Many providers like SaleForce offer trials of 30 days or less. In these situations, it’s almost always best practice to start the free trial. This lets you and your team break yourselves into the app before committing to the wrong platform.

4. Pipedrive — The Most Sales-Focused CRM Tool

PCRM services have evolved to do a lot of things these days. However, Pipedrive is one of the platforms that focus on what it does best: sales.

The platform comes with support for up to 16 languages and is used by more than 90,000 businesses.

With Pipedrive, you get all the tools to manage your leads. For lead management, you can track everything from forms to signups and more in real-time. A visual sales pipeline where you can manage, track, and customize each stage for each rep.

One of the big capabilities that sets Pipedrive apart from the rest is advanced chatbot capabilities. Create intelligent and customized chatbots for your website that can qualify leads and promote engagement.

The chatbots can answer customer questions and get them to the right people effectively and promptly. Also featured is a full suite of communication tracking for contacts that include calls, emails, and chats.

You and your team can also schedule contacts from the same interface. Other shining features are unlimited custom fields for information gathering and comprehensive lead source data reports. This is also one of the best CRM software in Canada.

More information about Pipedrive:

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5. Act! — Easy-To-Use Software with a Customizable Interface

Act! has over three decades of experience and provides exceptional marketing automation and sales pipeline management solutions.

It assists you with projects and priorities via its advanced customer management features, including notifications, alerts, call lists, and more. That means you can equally commit to all your customers and never miss an opportunity, an email, or a call.

This CRM software features an easy-to-use interface that you can tailor to your needs by customizing its layout. Besides interface customization, Act! allows you to customize your email marketing using one of its 170+ templates or create your own via its interactive template editor.

Its pipeline management features help you assess your sales by region, agent, sales stage, product, territory, and more. Thanks to its advanced mobile apps with opportunity tracking features, you can get actionable insights into your sales while on the move.

Act!’s customer management solutions feature a centralized customer database that stores your customers’ emails, notes, activities, and documents in one well-organized place. You can instantly locate required customer data, create groups of customers with similar interests, review their engagement and activity history, and much more.

More information about Act!:

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6. Zendesk Sell — Great Sales Package and Ideal for Zendesk Platform Users

Zendesk has been one of the providers leading the way when it comes to customer service tools and products.

Zendesk Sell is their CRM offering that focuses on boosting collaboration between sales and other departments. They call their product a “modern sales CRM to help accelerate revenue.”

Of course, Zendesk Sell comes with built-in interoperability with other Zendesk apps, such as Zendesk Service and Zendesk Talk. Users can expect all the bells and whistles when it comes to features, including:

Two of the more unique Zendesk features are its sales email intelligence suite and the native dialer. The email intelligence tools allow for tracking, notifications, and automation with email templates.

You also get out-of-the-box reporting tools to examine metrics and improve your email outcomes. The native dialer makes it easy for your team to make customer calls and send texts without having to leave the app.

While working through contacts, they can just click on any phone number to make a call! Any outgoing or incoming call can also be automatically logged and recorded.

More information about Zendesk Sell:

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7. HubSpot CRM — Easy-to-Use Tool for Those Wanting Top-Notch Core Capabilities

HubSpot has been a major player in boosting customer service and engagement for businesses all over the world.

While they have many paid options with much more features, the forever-free plan comes with a lot of the core functions solopreneurs and SMBs may require.

With HubSpot CRM, you get full visibility of the sales pipeline with real-time contact management. This is boosted with activity tracking, individual performance metrics, and other types of detailed reporting.

Other features include call tracking, email tracking, and a meeting scheduler.

You can also connect your calendar and email through Gmail and Outlook integrations and use the intuitive email template builder to automate interactions.

There is a lot here for managers, reps, marketers, customer service teams, and even business owners. Other features included in the free plan are:

Best of all, perhaps, you can add unlimited users with unlimited customer data usage. However, you only get up to 1,000,000 contacts in the free plan.

The good news is that you can always opt to upgrade to a paid plan if you decide to implement more advanced features like AI and automation.

More information about Hubspot CRM:

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8. Maximizer CRM — Strong CRM for Business Intelligence

Maximizer CRM is a capable CRM with all of the features businesses need to make smart decisions.

At the core of this software is a business intelligence module that includes in-depth analytics, coaching tools for sales employees, dynamic dashboards, and more.

Maximizer CRM also enables businesses to set up and track progress toward goals, making it easy to see whether sales are on track in the short run and in the big picture. As businesses would expect from one of the best CRM platforms, Maximizer CRM is packed with marketing features.

The software includes its own email marketing tools and supports integration with MailChimp. Businesses can easily segment their contacts and build custom web forms to generate new leads.

Maximizer also helps sales teams build custom pipelines, complete with forecasting and alerts, so deals never fall behind schedule. Sales reps have access to an integrated document management system, templates, and even email automations to make their lives easier.

Maximizer CRM isn’t cheap, with plans starting at $35 per user per month. Most businesses will need the Business Edition, which costs $55 per user per month.

More information about Maximizer CRM:

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9. Monday Sales CRM — Simple and Capable Solution for New Sales Teams

Monday Sales CRM is a highly customizable yet easy-to-use CRM that’s ideal for new sales teams.

The platform has a rich set of features for everything from managing deals to communicating with prospective leads to centralizing internal communications.

Everything in Monday’s software can be tailored to a business’s specific needs. Our favorite thing about Monday Sales CRM is how easy the software makes it to automate routine sales processes.

Monday’s software can import data from almost any format, including Excel or APIs. The software also includes simple no-code automations that can be used to pass tasks between employees, set up alerts, or even send out follow-up emails to leads.

Monday Sales CRM also stands out for its huge range of integrations. The software works with Gmail and Outlook for communicating within teams and with clients.

It also integrates with most major email marketing providers, services like DocuSign, and cloud storage platforms like Dropbox and Google Drive. It’s pretty impressive how much sales reps can do without ever leaving Monday’s platform.

Monday Sales client management software platform is free for up to 2 users. Paid plans start at just $10 per user per month with a minimum of 3 seats.

More information about Monday Sales CRM:

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10. Less Annoying CRM — Easy-to-Use Tool for Those Wanting Core Functions

Implementing new tools for your business can reap great benefits. But the adoption of new tech can sometimes be frustrating and downright annoying to learn.

You can avoid hair-pulling by going with Less Annoying CRM (LACRM). This platform has been designed for ease of use with individuals and small teams in mind. But don’t let its simplicity fool you.

The UI has been recently designed and is now even more intuitive. It’s not flashy, but just about anyone should be able to find what they need with minimal guidance.

Adding new contacts is a breeze from within the app, but you can also import spreadsheets or forms from your Google account. Other than initiating your contact management, there isn’t much to set up here.

LACRM expects users to be up and running within an hour or less. As part of the central team hub, you can view and manage all events and tasks on one calendar, which can be synced with Google Calendar.

You also get straightforward lead reporting, email logging, daily agenda emails, and one-click exporting. And because the app is web-based, your team can get full functionality on any device of their choice with no installs required.

More information about Less Annoying:

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11. Keap — The Best CRM for Email Marketing Automation

With 20 years of experience and more than 200,000 customers, Keap knows CRM as well as any. Their CRM platform is all about helping businesses and individuals make the most of their time.

How does it accomplish this? Through clever automation of customer interactions and team workflows.

Your sales team will find every feature for tracking leads and managing the pipeline is intuitive yet powerful. The Keap playbook will help guide reps through optimal tactics for collecting and converting leads.

There is plenty of marketing focus in the Keap application as well. These tools help your team to create and implement advanced marketing campaigns while automation takes care of the boring stuff.

You can automate and personalize text messages to customers while tracking open rates. But the real marketing power of Keap lies within its email marketing automation.

The platform comes packed with beautiful templates for newsletters and broadcasts. You can automate the email triggers and personalize every single one. Additionally, you get loads of tracking metrics, including behavioral data and seamless A/B testing and reporting.

More information about Keap:

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11 Best CRM Software Compared

Directly comparing details like pricing, USPs, free trials, and more can help you narrow down your options and find the one best suited to your business. Here’s a table to help:

Which CRM Tool is Best for You?

The expectations of what CRM software can do have evolved for years. These types of tools were originally developed with large businesses and enterprises in mind. Fortunately, today, there are many options to fit any type and size of business.

When deciding which solution is best for large and small business CRM, you need to take into consideration several factors. These include:

What Size Business is the Software Designed for?

Many of the most trusted providers have honed their products to suit businesses of any size. Others may be focused on solopreneurs and small teams or only the largest of organizations.

This is important to know because you may be getting or missing the features most relevant to your business needs.

What’s Your Budget, and What Does the Quoted Price Include?

First and foremost, any provider you go with should have a plan that fits your budget. You’ll need to have a good idea of this beforehand. But if a plan is priced attractively, it doesn’t necessarily come with all the features and functionality you want.

Read the feature list carefully and make sure none of them come with hidden fees or require upgrades.

What’s Customer Support Like?

Customer support options can range from email and contact forms to 24/7 live chat and email support. If you and your team are self-starters, you may be more interested in a knowledge base, FAQs, and other self-service options.

If you know that the CRM comes with a steep learning curve, does the provider supply tutorials and/or onboarding services? And do they come at a cost?

Do You Want More Than Contact and Lead Management?

There’s a long list of features you can look for in a modern CRM. Marketing tools for email and ad management are just the tip of the iceberg. Do you want workflow automation?

Do you want analytics and predictive AI with your reporting? You should decide what you expect the software to do for your business and then focus on options that meet those needs.

It’s All About the Cloud

Most modern CRMs will be cloud-based to provide your business with ultimate flexibility in how you operate. And it also helps you eliminate the costs of hardware and the IT maintenance involved in such a process.

For security and compliance, have a look at the fine print or ask the provider reps for more information. You don’t want to jeopardize customer data or risk violating something like the EU’s GDPR.

What is CRM Software?

CRM software is built to help you track contacts and nurture leads. Typically, the usefulness of the application doesn’t end there, as you can monitor and tailor after-sales activities to enhance customer loyalty and bring in repeat customers.

CRM solutions accomplish this through manually created databases and/or scraping customer account details and history from other applications via integrations and cross-platform capabilities.

This allows you to access all important customer data in one place. And it also facilitates comprehensive reporting for things like performance, sales goals, and lead generation.

Today, businesses of all industries and sizes reap the benefits of CRM software. Those that remain ignorant will get left behind.

According to Market Research Future, the global CRM software market is expected to maintain a 6% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) and reach 35 billion in revenue. For more, here’s what CRM software is.

What Are the Key Functions of CRM Software?

Modern CRMs come with a range of capabilities that help you and your team work smarter. These are things like seamlessly integrating with your existing systems or automation of manual and repetitive tasks.

Many of these CRM functions save you time, so you can focus on closing deals and qualifying leads. A CRM also encourages collaboration between team members and departments for a painless customer journey.

This also helps to ensure optimal and effective work, as task and activity tracking gives full transparency and accountability. It also ensures no one is doubling or initiating a redundant task.

In addition, the wealth of customer data pooled into a CRM is any manager’s dream. Highly detailed and customized reporting brings valuable insights. This gleaned knowledge means better decision-making and better performance.

AI and machine learning are also being incorporated into many CRM offerings. In the future, it will soon become the norm. This means you can expect cutting-edge when it comes to predictive analytics and AI-assisted guidance to nurture leads and close deals.

Benefits of CRM Software

There are many benefits for businesses that use CRM software. Here are the key ones:

Better Customer Relationships and Interactions

CRM software makes it easy for your team to stay on top of your best leads and also retarget waning potential customers. Besides organizing a multi-pronged attack, you and your team will have access to a goldmine of information to improve the customer journey.

Improved Teamwork and Collaboration

Every interaction is tracked and recorded, and this information is available to everyone. This makes it easy for a different sales rep to pick up where someone left off.

It also lets leads and customers get handed off painlessly to other departments like customer service and customer success teams.

Engage Employees

Happy employees can perform their job better. And nothing makes your employees happier than giving them the right tools for the job. Empowering your employees with a CRM solution, it’s a win-win for all involved.

Work More Efficiently

CRMs help you optimize the business with automation and task management. And each team member can access what they need from one central hub. This lets your sales teams and marketing teams focus on what they do best.

Remember, a CRM should work for you, not the other way around!

Save Money

Sure, implementing a CRM requires some investment. But it will only be a matter of time until the ROI pays huge dividends. By working smarter and more efficiently, your team will get more done in less time. This lets you maximize your labor costs.

Why Your Business Needs CRM Software

Your business needs CRM software for several reasons. These are mainly if you want to:

If your business doesn’t need any of those things, then you have officially won at CRM. Barring that, you can always stick with spreadsheets and notebooks full of contacts if you like.

But the next time you see your revenue stagnate or watch your rockstar sales team members resign, don’t act like we didn’t warn you.

Business Sizes Using CRM Software

CRMs have come a long way since they first hit the scene. Today, they are for anyone looking to enhance and streamline their customer relationship management. This applies to:

Integrate With Your Existing Systems

CRM software makes it easy to integrate with your existing systems. This is accomplished by cross-platform functionality via apps and custom integrations. These connections allow you to collect all customer data and view it from one place.

Some CRMs make this process even more painless. Platforms like Zoho CRM and Zendesk Sell are essentially modules that connect seamlessly with existing platform applications.

There is a great amount of diversity when it comes to platforms and integrations. Any business can find a combination that gives them the flexibility to operate as they wish.

How Do I Get My Team to Adopt CRM Tools?

The easiest way to get your team to adopt a CRM is to pick the simplest tool for the job. You know how your teams operate and conduct business daily. Don’t overwhelm them with a state-of-the-art enterprise solution if they’re a team of 10 people.

Or don’t give them too much customization and option if this is the first time you’ll implement CRM software. With that being said, often, the more features available, the more potential that can be unlocked.

It would be best if you and your leadership fully understand the CRM yourselves. Only then will you convince the rest of the team of its benefits to them and the company. To help, do this:

This will ensure that those who will be affected the most will have a voice and be heard. When done right, adoption will be mostly painless. And as soon as the first reps start making better and increased sales, adoption rates will cascade like Niagara Falls.

How to Choose the Right CRM Software

With a sea of options, choosing the right CRM software for your business may seem a daunting task. Well, it doesn’t have to be. Decide the most important things first, such as:

After that, it’s time to do your due diligence and start the research process. Once you have narrowed the search down, start with a free trial or demo to see how it goes.

In the case of options like HubSpot or Keap, you may find that the free forever plan does exactly what you need.

How CRM Software is Priced and Hosted

With CRM software, everything is hosted in the cloud. This means no upfront costs for equipment and infrastructure. Users can access the software through the web or on desktop and mobile apps on any device of their choice.

As a SaaS product, CRM software is priced per user per month. Most providers will offer the option to pay this upfront annually or monthly. You can expect the monthly fees to be around 20% higher than the annual fees.

You’ll also find several options for free plans that allow for unlimited users but with only basic features and limited functionality. Most plans can be upgraded in a tier system where costs can rise more than threefold.

While other times, specific features and services can be added on for individual users and teams for a fee. Most basic plans start around $10-20 per user per month.

More advanced platforms or packages featuring AI and automation are likely to be around $40-80 per user per month.

With some providers, enterprises can opt for custom-built solutions where the sky’s the limit (but so is the budget). Otherwise, packages aimed at large organizations will typically cost anywhere from $50-$150 per user per month.

Scale Your Business With a CRM Platform That Grows With You

Like many cloud-based solutions, CRM platforms can scale your business as you grow and expand. However, not every product is built to scale in every situation.

So if you are a startup or looking for rapid growth, it’s best to implement software that has lots of scalable qualities. The most scalable CRM platforms will have:

Conclusion — What’s the Best CRM Software in 2024?

There’s undoubtedly no shortage of CRM apps on the market. However, the right one for you will largely depend on your specific needs and budget. Thankfully, with ample options, you’ll have no issue finding the perfect CRM for your business.

Freshsales and the almighty Salesforce are fantastic options that are well worth exploring. With that said and all things considered, we’re confident in placing Zoho CRM as the clear winner for the best CRM software in 2024.

From ease of use to affordable pricing and a boatload of functionality, Zoho has it all and more to improve your customer service, automate processes, and ultimately skyrocket your business.

Unsure? Try Zoho CRM risk-free now to see why many are confident it’s the best on the market. Click the button below to start your 15-day free trial now.

Best CRM Software FAQs