The 10 best CRMs for small businesses

A customer relationship management (CRM) system can help your small business nurture leads, close sales, and provide excellent customer service to existing customers. As you shop for a CRM system, you’ll find that these platforms can vary widely in their design, function, and pricing. 

To choose the right option for your business, you need to understand what to look for and what features matter most for your needs.

What to look for in a CRM solution

When researching the right CRM solution for your small business, look for the following top features:

• A simple, fast setup that easily imports your existing data from spreadsheets or from your current CRM system
• An easy-to-use interface with a minimal learning curve that requires minimal coding
• Helpful features, like report and metrics generation, lead-generation monitoring, email templates, sales forecasting, task management, marketing tools, AI tools, and customer segmentation
• Integrations with your favorite apps, like your email service, Jotform, LinkedIn, and Google Workspace
• Simultaneous access for multiple team members so everyone stays up to date on the latest changes
• Customization options to streamline the process of providing personalized correspondence
• Affordable pricing and plans that support all staff on your team

Below are some of the best CRM software options for small businesses.

HubSpot CRM

HubSpot CRM is a versatile option for sales leaders, marketers, business owners, customer service teams, and more. 

This platform offers many CRM tools, including real-time views of your sales pipeline, valuable metrics and quote tracking, unlimited users and data, up to 1 million contacts, and automatic tracking of calls, emails, and meetings. It’s a very useful small business CRM system — in part because it’s completely free — and is a top option for startups.

Salesforce

Salesforce, one of the most well-known CRM platforms, can be customized for any company of any size. 

Salesforce can help you to track every customer interaction, use AI for better customer personalization, trigger messages in response to customer actions, use drag-and-drop tools to create apps, and more. Salesforce also easily integrates with your existing data sources.

Zoho CRM

Zoho CRM provides valuable real-time data — like notifications when customers interact with your business — so you can monitor every stage of the customer experience. Automation helps streamline your lead nurturing process, and real-time analytics help you make smarter business decisions. 

Flexible month-to-month contracts are ideal for small businesses, and Zoho’s migration wizard helps to get you set up quickly and easily.

Freshsales Suite

Freshsales Suite, part of Freshworks, records the customer experience in one location for powerful lead and customer management. It’s equipped with valuable tools like AI-based lead scoring, customer segmentation, a built-in email tracker, actionable insights, and more.

Agile CRM

Agile CRM is an all-in-one solution for sales, marketing, and service teams. It’s both user-friendly and mobile-friendly, so it’s easy to set up and integrate. It’s full of valuable sales features, like appointment scheduling, email tracking, marketing automation, social media integration, and more. Agile CRM is free for up to 10 users.

Pipedrive

With Pipedrive, you take control of the setup from the start, customizing this CRM platform to the specific needs of your business. You can name the steps required at each stage of your sales process or use a template to simplify the setup. 

As you schedule and complete sales actions, Pipedrive tracks your progress and your conversion data. It also offers metrics customized for your business.

Jotform Tables

Jotform Tables is a valuable CRM solution for small and large businesses. With Jotform Tables, you can track and manage data with easy-to-use spreadsheets. One-click sharing ensures seamless collaboration across sales teams. 

Jotform Tables is equipped with several views, including cards, calendars, and reports, so you can stay on top of every element of your sales process and workflow.

Insightly

With Insightly, you can keep all of your customer information in one central CRM platform for ideal customer relationship management and customer support. And you can customize your business processes and customer interactions. Insightly also converts closed sales leads into projects so your support team can follow up.

Zapier

Zapier, a popular workflow automation platform, also functions as CRM software. Zapier integrates with popular apps like Gmail, Microsoft Outlook, Jotform, Microsoft Excel, and Google Drive, acting as an all-in-one center for your lead management, email marketing, email campaigns, project management, and more. 

With Zapier, you can save time on follow-ups by automatically sending personal messages or adding new leads to a spreadsheet. With Zapier’s free plan, you can automate up to 100 tasks per month.

Nimble

Designed specifically for small business teams using Office 365 and Google Workspace, Nimble builds itself for you, so there’s no need to worry about a time-consuming setup. 

Nimble offers valuable pipeline management benefits, organizing your contact information, unifying contacts from more than 160 apps into one central location, tracking your sales process activities, and even working with Android and iOS apps.

Choosing the right CRM solution

CRM systems vary widely in their design and functionality. To find the right fit for your business, consider your budget and how you intend to use the platform. Many CRM services offer free trials, so you can get a sense of how they will work for you before committing to a plan.