Customer relationship management (CRM) doesn't have to be costly and complicated.

Start with the best small business CRM software we've tested.

Freshsales CRM

Freshsales specializes in ease of use. Interface elements (including reporting and analytics dashboards) are both intuitive and attractive. Creating a new account takes just minutes, and the setup process lets you specify the type of business you run. Freshsales' AI assistant, called Freddy, can analyze your contact profiles and make suggestions about how to close deals. Support and help resources are plentiful, too.

If you're looking for a CRM that's simple to set up and use, check out Freshsales. It offers a good mix of features without being overwhelming. The service's base plan is very affordable for small teams, though pricing becomes less attractive beyond that.

Pros

• Affordable base plan
• Intuitive interface
• Excellent onboarding support
• Lots of integrations

Cons

• Base plan lets you create just one sales pipeline
• Other CRMs offer more advanced features

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Pipedrive CRM

SMBs should appreciate how easy Pipedrive makes it to get started. The CRM integrates with over 400 third-party software packages, so it's easy to align with your existing workflows. You can further customize your experience with add-ons for tasks such as managing projects and issuing digital contracts. Pipedrive also features an AI assistant that can help you nurture leads and generate emails. Best of all, it offers an extensive library of self-guided training videos.

Pipedrive's no-nonsense approach is ideal for companies looking to adopt CRM with as little friction as possible. Its AI features can be helpful for keeping track of leads, particularly for small teams and new hires. Just be aware of its slightly high costs and that you might need to spend some time tailoring it exactly to your needs.

Pros

• Works with more than 400 integrations
• Excellent video tutorials
• Straightforward interface

Cons

• No Kanban view for Contacts section
• Few options for customizing analytics displays
• Limited customer support for lower-tier plans

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Monday.com

Although CRM isn't Monday.com's primary focus, it advertises a number of CRM features, all set within the context of a broader online collaboration platform. You can think of it as a general "work management" tool that's designed to help teams stay on task and keep projects running smoothly, which overlaps with key CRM functions.

Monday.com will never replace a full-featured CRM platform, but it doesn't try to. Give it a look if your organization has grown past the stage of using spreadsheets to manage contacts, and could benefit from basic CRM capabilities (especially if you have pressing team-collaboration fish to fry).

Pros

• Modern user interface
• Customizable
• Offers in-app automations
• Includes templates

Cons

• Confusing pricing and plans
• Inconsistent and Byzantine navigation options
• Free plan isn't designed for serious business use

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Less Annoying CRM

This entry prides itself on not annoying its customers—or not as much as the competition, anyway—but its most outstanding feature might be its price, which is among the lowest of all the products we tested. Although "less expensive" can sometimes mean "low value," Less Annoying CRM has an ample feature set that's worth your consideration.

If you're unsure how much budget you're ready to commit to CRM, look this way. You'll gain the contact management and business-process features you expect from a larger CRM vendor at a very affordable price, and hopefully, its ease of use and friendly UI won't annoy you.

Pros

• One affordable plan
• Plenty of support and help options
• Looks great on mobile

Cons

• Limited reporting capabilities
• No way to add dedicated leads

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Salesforce Starter

Salesforce rewrote the book on CRM when it debuted in 1999, and today it's widely considered the industry leader. Salesforce Starter is the company's entry-level tier, aimed squarely at SMBs. It does a great job of walking new customers through the setup and training process while providing the robust functionality and customization the Salesforce platform is known for. Although its predecessor, Salesforce Essentials, was limited to small teams, Starter supports up to 325 users per instance. And when you're ready to grow beyond that, Salesforce is more than ready to accommodate you.

If you insist on a world-class CRM system backed by world-class support, Salesforce is for you. Salesforce Starter is your SMB-friendly onramp to the Salesforce platform and ecosystem. However, it has a few drawbacks. For example, it has limited third-party software integrations and reporting capabilities. It's true that Salesforce scales to meet the needs of any business; just prepare yourself for the price tag.

Pros

• Affordable, feature-rich CRM
• Many customization options
• Minimal setup
• User-friendly interface

Cons

• Few third-party integrations
• Adopters should still anticipate a slight learning curve

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Bigin by Zoho CRM

Bigin, the smaller sibling of Zoho CRM, targets start-ups and SMBs. As such, it sets aside some of the advanced capabilities of Zoho's full-featured offering in favor of ease of use. But it still puts all the CRM features a growing business needs in one place, even including basic voice over IP (VoIP) capabilities. Bigin also integrates with other Zoho software and many third-party apps, making it simple to implement into your workflow.

If you don't have much experience with CRM and don't want a complex UI, a huge menu of features, or a commensurately steep learning curve, Bigin by Zoho is an excellent choice. And when your needs grow, Zoho makes it easy to upgrade to its full-featured CRM product.

Pros

• Highly affordable
• Intuitive interface
• Supports payment collection
• Integrates with other Zoho software and third-party tools
• VoIP capabilities

Cons

• No AI features
• Lacks a dedicated app for Windows

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EngageBay for all-in-one business capability

EngageBay is a CRM at heart, packed with sales, marketing, customer support, and chat features, all on a freemium plan. There is a drawback to this flexibility, though: you can only add 250 contacts to the platform on the free plan, so consider archiving inactive contacts to keep using it for longer.

Adding contacts is easy, with all the fields you'd expect. I particularly liked the smart lists feature: you can segment your contacts by picking a set of filters, and the list updates itself with all the contacts that fit those conditions in the future— automatically. The visual sales pipeline is equally easy to use, letting you drag and drop deals forward as sales advance. You can also add more pipelines to keep track of everything, which isn't something all platforms let you do.

EngageBay sits at the top of this list because of the CRM features it offers for free and because it comes with all sorts of extras. There's a full marketing suite, including lead scoring, landing pages, pop-ups, email templates, newsletters, and tools to capture new contacts; a service suite that lets your customers create support tickets and assigns them to your team automatically; and a basic live chat module you can integrate on your website, with stats to help you see first response time, chat duration, and total chats. It's a lot—all for free.

There are dashboards for each of these features, too: marketing, sales, service, and live chat. Each one gives a good overview of how the area is doing, and you can show or hide data depending on what you do or don't want to see. The generosity of the free plan ends at advanced analytics, though: you can only get deep insights into profitability analysis and integrated multi-channel analytics if you subscribe to the paid plan.

You can connect EngageBay to Shopify, six bulk email-sending platforms, 14 SMS providers, Jotform, Docusign, and reCAPTCHA, all natively. If this isn't enough, by connecting EngageBay to Zapier, you can integrate it with thousands of other apps to be sure your information is flowing in and out of your CRM automatically.

Pros

• All-in-one with lots of extras
• Automation is easy to set up

Cons

Free plan is somewhat limited

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Bitrix24 for businesses with a lot of users and contacts

If you know Bitrix24, you know that it isn't technically a CRM app. It's an all-in-one business app where you can collaborate with your team on basically everything. But the feature set that it offers, coupled with the fact that it allows for unlimited users and contacts on the free plan, makes it really powerful for this particular use case.

This power comes with a need for a heavy dose of patience. Bitrix24 is a very deep app. Start slowly: first, get your team on the platform and start collaborating there; then, add your contacts and set up your sales pipeline and deals; after that, explore the reports and integrations. Trying to do everything at the same time will be overwhelming, but going step by step will build momentum. Once you and your team get a good grasp of the basics, you can organize the menus just the way you want them to be, hiding or showing buttons for total customization.

On the contacts page, you have the ability to rearrange fields, so you can move what's relevant to the top—I found this super handy. And with the contact card open, click the Profile button to access a set of reports about your relationship with this client, including a graph of the current communication load.

In addition to everything you'd expect from the sales pipeline, the platform has other some useful extra features. For example, you'll get a notification if a deal has no tasks, prompting you to get someone on it. If you have a particular sales objective in mind, you can set it on the platform and work toward it. And at the end of the quarter, you can take a look at the pipeline trends and run comparisons with past reports.

Bitrix24 is deep in reporting, even on the free plan. The analytics page has dozens of tabs tracking numbers on employee performance or activities reports. The screenshot you see above scratches the surface, and it's surprising to see a free plan offer so many options as far as reporting and analytics go.

And since Bitrix24 is also about team collaboration, it offers loads of collaboration features. There's an activity stream—kind of like a social media feed for your company, making tasks and achievements more visible. You can add your team members to the platform, distributing them by departments and organizing them by hierarchy. You can also collaborate with teammates via chat, audio, and video calls, and create workgroups to help employees focus on projects. Add to that project management features, a file drive, and a website builder, and this is a massively robust free tool.

With hundreds of native integration options spanning multiple app categories, there's a lot of freedom to create connections and empower your team. If you don't find your apps in the marketplace, you can connect Bitrix24 to Zapier to automate all your business workflows: trigger important emails when new contacts are added or create new contacts from your lead gen tool—and that's just the tip of the iceberg.

Pros

• Business software suite
• Wide range of features

Cons

Potentially high configuration time

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Zoho CRM for scaling your business

Zoho's software suite expands into the CRM territory with Zoho CRM. It's great for scaling your business because the free plan is generous, and as you grow, you can connect more features by integrating other Zoho apps—which also have decent free plans. Because you can mix and match a la carte, you don't have to pay a bulky subscription package for enterprise software features that you'll only use a few years down the line (or never).

This CRM app gives you 5,000 records for free. Records here means contacts, deals, accounts, and campaigns, so bear in mind that every time you create something new, it counts against the limit. One nice feature: it offers an option to get rid of untouched records, which may increase the lifespan of the free plan.

The user interface has an enterprise vibe with a big top-level menu for easy access to all the app sections. You can click on your contacts to see a 360-degree view of all their data, and even add the best times to email or call, helping you reach your customers when they're most available. Zoho CRM is also impressive in its reporting and analytics. You can see data quickly by clicking on one of the 60 pre-made reports available.

The free plan is a bit limited as far as integrations go, mostly connecting you to other Zoho tools (but they're robust!). Getting on the paid plan unlocks hundreds of other integrations with third-party services via the marketplace—and you can make that thousands by connecting Zoho CRM to Zapier. For example, you can automatically add leads you generate from Facebook lead ads or connect your eCommerce store to the CRM to power all your business's workflows.

Pros

• Great free plan
• Unique AI features on the paid plans

Cons

Interface and navigation could be better

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HubSpot CRM for integration with your other apps

HubSpot is where your tech stack comes together. With nearly 1,000 native integrations available for free CRM users, you'll be able to connect most of the other apps you use to your CRM. And if you connect them via HubSpot's Operations Hub, you can make the data bi-directional, pulling it into HubSpot and pushing out updates if you make changes, keeping information current wherever it is.

If you don't find the app you want in HubSpot's marketplace, you can always connect HubSpot with Zapier to open the doors to thousands of other integrations. You can learn more about how to automate business processes in HubSpot, or start with one of these examples.

HubSpot's CRM is free forever for unlimited users and unlimited contacts. Those "unlimited contacts" come with an asterisk: due to technical limitations, each account can only have up to one million contacts. Still, going through all those could take a nice decade or two, depending on how much lead gen goes on at your company.

There's just one pipeline on the free plan, and you can't create more, but HubSpot makes it up to you by letting you create your own customized dashboards and tailored reports. You can take a peek into analytics like marketing campaign stats, traffic analysis of your website, contact analysis on your CRM activity, and form performance.

The extent of HubSpot's free plan is pretty remarkable—it's far from limited to the CRM. There's an entire marketing suite, including email marketing, landing pages, and basic forms. You can create and manage your own website using HubSpot's content management system, handle support tickets and set up live chat and chatbots with the service suite, and review traffic analytics and SEO tools to optimize your channels. There are a range of AI tools that'll help you save time at each step by generating emails, blog posts, and chat messages. Some of them are available on the free plan, so you can definitely take a tour to get a feel of the power.

Pros

• Generous free plan
• Wide range of well-designed features

Cons

When you need to upgrade, paid plans are confusing

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Capsule for project management

I didn't know you could fall for an app at first sight, but that's what happened when I started testing Capsule. The interface looks great and works even better. And the fact that it doesn't have a ton of features like some of its competition keeps the navigation simple and to the point.

This ease of use supports Capsule's "best for" label too. The project management functionality resembles that of a true project management platform, with enough depth to keep everything on track. It has a calendar view, Kanban view, and list view, and a dashboard that shows you the tasks for the day and what's coming next—it really takes the overwhelm out of your daily tasks.

There's only one sales pipeline on the free plan. It comes with a Kanban view for visual tracking, a filterable list view, and a dashboard view displaying pipeline forecast, status by milestone, conversion rate, and a grouping of pipeline tags. In the end, the metrics that Capsule offers make up for some of the limitations.

You can connect Capsule to thousands of apps via Zapier (no coding skills required) so that all your important business workflows run in the background. Import sales opportunities or projects, send automatic notifications, and more.

Here's how this love story ends: Capsule will only let you use its free plan as long as you stay below its 250-contact limit. But when you're willing to invest, getting on the lowest-paid plan will bump that to 50,000, as well as lift the limit on your sales pipelines and project views. P.S. If you can't figure out how to create your free account, that's because it's a little hidden: scroll down on the pricing page and click Get started.

Pros

• Very intuitive
• Dashboard focuses on tasks to do

Cons

Not as feature-packed as others on the list

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Vtiger for inexpensive upgrade options

As a free CRM for small business, Vtiger has a robust feature set wrapped in an easy-to-use and speedy user interface. And it's free for 10 users, 3,000 contacts, and 1,000 email sends per month—pretty generous for a free plan.

Of course, there will come a time when Vtiger brings in decent ROI, and you'll want to double down on your CRM strategy, moving to a paid plan. When that happens, you'll pay per user depending on the privileges they have: users with full access to all functions cost more; users with read/write access to one app (Sales, Marketing, etc.) and read-only access to other apps get a discounted price. If your team is expanding and is organized by departments, it makes sense to set up these privileges and save based on what they need to do or access.

As for the platform itself, Vtiger had the most detailed onboarding checklist of any app I tested, assigning me a total of 32 simple tasks that, when complete, gave me a pretty good idea of everything I could do. The help doesn't end there: every time you visit a new screen for the first time, a help video pops out at the bottom-left: click play, and you can explore the features yourself.

Vtiger doesn't have a big top-level menu with lots of buttons, opting instead for focusing on what's happening on the current screen. So, where are the other features? When you click on the hamburger icon on the top-left of the screen, you can access everything:

The entire CRM section, with contacts, leads, and conversations

The marketing suite, offering a landing page builder and a full email marketing platform, with campaigns, contact segmentation, and basic email analytics

Sales features, offering a dashboard, deal view, quotes, and inbox

Service help desk, including a list of cases and a place to handle appointments

Inventory tracking for products and services

Vtiger comes with 18 pre-made reports you can generate with a couple of clicks. If these don't yield the insights you're looking for, you can build your own reports in a step-by-step wizard. You can also set up a lead scoring feature called Profile Score, letting you give points to a contact based on their characteristics.

Connect Vtiger to Zapier so it can talk to all the other apps your team uses. Do things like automatically add an opportunity when someone posts to your company's Facebook feed or completes a lead form.

Pros

• Well-organized mega menu
• Robust features across the board

Cons

Mobile apps are hard to use

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Snov.io for prospecting and cold outreach

When you're just starting out or trying to get established in a new market, you can't leverage referrals or inbound marketing as much. This is when prospecting and reaching out to leads is crucial to securing new business.

Snov.io packs all the features of a CRM with prospecting, letting you search for companies, see their employee rosters and respective titles, and then verify if their emails are valid and active. If you use LinkedIn on a daily basis, Snov.io even offers an extension to let you add search result pages or individual profiles to your prospecting lists.

So now you have a good list of people you want to reach out to. What's next? Snov.io lets you send direct emails to these contacts, and you can start from one of their many email templates or build your own. Alternatively, you can set up a drip campaign built on a visual editor, with customizable rules on how many emails to send, how much time to wait between each one, and conditional triggers for when the recipient clicks on a link.

Since there's no previous relationship between you and your prospects, there's a possibility that your email may get caught in spam filters. Snov.io offers a basic email warm-up feature on the free plan, allowing you to optimize your emails to land in the inbox, not in spam or promotions. It also has lots of tips on the platform to improve your deliverability, and to keep your sending reputation intact—for example, not sending to invalid email inboxes and not repeating sends for email addresses that bounced your message. Even with all that, everything throughout the app feels pretty straightforward.

Snov.io's pricing puts most of the limitations on the prospecting and email verification features with a credit system. You get 150 credits per month, and each new lead or verification costs 1 credit. There's also a 100-recipient limit on email drip campaigns per month, but that only applies to the first email sent to a contact—all subsequent ones for the month are free.

Do more with Snov.io by connecting it to Zapier, so you can automate all your prospecting and lead management workflows.

Pros

• Plenty of company data available
• Chrome extensions for prospecting

Cons

Very focused on the outreach use case

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Streak for adding a CRM to Gmail

If Gmail is the base for all your business communication, you're in luck. You don't have to install a separate app or even give up the interface you've grown so used to. Streak doesn't just integrate with Gmail: it fits seamlessly into the original interface, adding the buttons and features of a powerful CRM.

To get started, you have to download and install the Streak browser extension. With that out of the way, all you have to do is give Streak permission to access your Gmail account—necessary to enable all the features—and walk through the simple configuration process, with an introductory video to all the features sitting at the end.

Unlike other options on this list, Streak's interface feels more like Google Sheets. The sales pipelines have the stages at the top, and below the graphical representation, there's a spreadsheet where you can see your contacts, add relevant details, and move them through the pipeline. This approach may feel a bit strange at first, but after you add your first contact and see how the app handles it, things will click into place quickly.

You can add new contacts from emails in your inbox and assign them to any active pipeline you have. From that point on, all future emails will be labeled as a lead or deal, and the information about tasks/notes/activity will appear on a column to the right. If you click on the contact's email on that column, the entire history will appear, letting you take a look at the whole relationship so far.

In addition to the standard pipeline, there are multiple pipeline templates for use cases spanning sales to HR. You can start from one of those or create your own. This is great if you do more than sales—for example, if you're also hiring or looking for partnerships. Another useful extra is email tracking. When your recipient opens the email, a message pops up on your screen. It even keeps a record of the tracking history, showing the email views by date and location.

Streak doesn't offer any integrations on the free plan; it also doesn't have any deep reporting and analytics features, which is a definite drawback. If you ever upgrade to a paid plan, you can integrate Streak with Zapier to be sure all your CRM info is up to date and all your critical workflows are running in the background.

Pros

• Seamless Gmail integration
• Multiple pipelines available

Cons

Lack of deep reports

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eWay-CRM for adding a CRM to Outlook

It's not fair that Gmail users get all the love with their own integrated CRM, is it? Faithful Outlook users rejoice: eWay-CRM will augment your email inbox with plenty of useful features to keep track of contacts, projects, deals, and notes. And it's free for unlimited users and contacts.

To use eWay, you have to create your account and download the installation file—it's meant to be used as an Outlook add-on for the desktop version. (If you use Outlook on the web version, you're out of luck.) After you complete the installation, you'll notice some top menus on Outlook change to accommodate the new features that eWay offers. When you click to create a contact, a new window appears with all the fields ready to be filled. After you type in the details, your contacts will sit on a list accessible from within Outlook, with an Excel-like look and functionality. You can then customize which fields you want to see in columns, and filter, sort, or reorganize as you want. eWay also has a company view, letting you add details and then connect the individual contacts with their respective employers.

One of things I liked most is how it improves the right-click menu in Outlook: you can convert anything in your inbox to a contact, task, project, or note, saving you the time of tabbing out to your project management or enterprise platform to enter the details manually. This is a testament to how eWay isn't setting out to impose a new working logic—it's instead building on the things you actually do every day on Outlook.

eWay also has a board view, improving the sales pipeline experience. You can add your own colors to categories, helping you distinguish them and making your work more intuitive.

There are no sparkling dashboards, but you can use your Excel skills to Group by then sort and filter to create your own reports. If that's not enough, eWay can export the data to the actual Excel app so you can put the data magicians in your department to work. eWay also integrates with Word, and you can start a chat in Teams with a right-click. It even has an offline mode—a nice touch.

For more integrations, connect eWay-CRM to Zapier, and you can automate a lot of the power of eWay.

Pros

• Adds new features inside Outlook
• Great free plan

Cons

Interface isn't very up-to-date

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Zapier for building your own simple CRM

Zapier (whose blog you're on right now) is an all-in-one automation platform. Its Interfaces product that lets you build your own apps using pre-made components or a set of elements such as input fields and buttons.

With the Interfaces CRM template, you start with a form to add new contacts and a sales pipeline view. You'll have to build the rest, but that's not a disadvantage: it means it's really customizable. You can keep expanding your CRM to display data in new ways, let your team interact with it, and trigger automated workflows from anywhere. Interfaces works in tandem with Tables, another Zapier product that takes care of your data. It can hold up to 2,500 records on the free plan, so it'll keep you floating for a long time.

Since it's so easy to connect Zapier to thousands of other apps, and since the CRM is usually the data backbone of a company, it makes Interfaces a very strong choice to use as a central point to manage your sales. You can add extra features by signing up for other apps to do SMS, email marketing, analytics, or anything else: there are over 7,000 integrations available. Moving data in and out of each of them is easy, so you'll be more agile if you like to switch software frequently.

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Clay for a personal CRM

Clay—not to be confused with the data enrichment platform of the same name—stands apart from other options on this list. It focuses on a more personal approach to relationship management, helping you keep in touch with people as you remember their birthdays, check in on important life events, and schedule catch-ups when you discover they'll be in your city.

While this is a different vibe from traditional sales work at scale, it can work better for solopreneurs or highly personalized outreach processes.

It runs a bit like a cross between a CRM and a social media feed. As you add new contacts, they're automatically enriched with their work information and social media channels. It grabs information from your calendar, iMessage, and your email contacts into the platform. With that information, it starts tracking people to see what they're doing, and it populates a feed for major life moments or career changes. So, instead of setting an interval for reaching out to people, you can instead connect every time something major happens in their lives, which helps put the focus on them.

Beyond this activity feed, Clay also sets up reconnect reminders so you can check in with people you haven't talked much with recently. As you chat with your contacts, add notes and details to their page about anything that's important to you. Later, when it's time to find someone to collaborate with or the best match for a product or service, you can use the Nexus AI feature to find people using natural language prompts. For example, you can ask for people who speak a certain language or are in a specific city. The AI engine will comb through your data and give you all the best matches.

As you're focusing on nurturing these relationships, you can leave the rote work to computers. Connect Clay to Zapier and automate all your relationship management workflows.

Pros

• Regular prompts to update relationship details
• AI-powered contact search engine

Cons

Missing core CRM features like a sales pipeline

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Flowlu for an affordable all-in-one solution

Flowlu brings decent power at a decent price, as long as you have at least eight people working with you. With a sharp user interface and a thorough onboarding task list, you can combine sales with projects, financial features, collaboration, client portals, and knowledge bases. It's an all-in-one CRM leaning toward the project management and business side of things.

When you log in every day, you'll see a feed of recent messages. You can run a quick poll or type in announcements to get everyone on the same page. From there, the menu on the left side can take you anywhere you need, with shortcuts to create new tasks, deals, or contacts without having to click two or three times to get it done.

The contact and sales management features are all here. There's a filterable list view for all activities that you can use to organize your work or see how your team is performing. Another detail I like is how you can set automations for each stage of the sales pipeline: set the rules, and focus on your sales tasks, not on admin.

As an all-in-one, Flowlu focuses on project management, helping you connect projects with the contacts you're building them for, and keeping all the information in one place for easy access (with both waterfall and Agile methodologies available).

Pros

• Includes invoicing and finance features
• Good match for teams that work with the Agile framework

Cons

Limited sales-focused reports

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folk for simple, ultra-personalized emails

Heads up: folk has a different vibe when compared with others on this list. It doesn't do complex sales pipelines or flashy reports with pie charts. It doesn't want you to think about your business relationships as numbers on a dashboard. Instead, it offers a simple way to handle all your contacts and send ultra-personalized emails to your lists at scale, replacing robotic templates with the unmistakable charm of the human voice.

If you use Notion, you'll feel right at home. On the left side, you can click to start a search of your contacts database, see a breakdown of your emails, and access the settings. A little further down, you can see all your contact lists. folk is useful for keeping track of multiple kinds of relationships: you may deal with clients on a classic sales pipeline, but also with investors who have different relationship stages. If you need more ideas, you can explore the template gallery, as there are 50 different templates you can start from.

So what are these ultra-personalized emails? Click on a contact list and, on the top-right, click to compose a new dynamic email. As you write, type a forward slash to add any of the contact's data fields to the body of the email. You can add their name, company, or any other custom text field that you have for your contacts. Once done, you can review your work to make sure that the static parts of the email fit with the dynamic tags, and click to send to the entire list.

But you can't personalize a lot if you don't have data. That's why folk has a contact enrichment feature, automatically filling the gaps in contact information to give you a more complete picture of who you're talking to. It can find companies, job titles, and phone numbers, among other bits of information.

The simplicity, support for multiple relationships, and personalization tools are so robust that they compensate for the lack of advanced analytics and reports. Think of folk as more of a rank-and-file, close-quarters sales tool, not so much a manager-level, boardroom-dweller enterprise software.

folk is hanging out wherever you are: you can take it with you to Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Gmail by installing the Chrome extension. That's a nice collection of integrations to start the party, but if you want to keep it going, you can connect folk to Zapier and bring thousands of other apps in too.

Pros

• Supports multiple pipelines
• AI available for personalization

Cons

No mobile apps

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Kommo for multi-channel sales

Instead of sticking to the traditional emails and phone calls, Kommo helps your messages land in multiple platforms, so you can connect with people where they like to be. This includes Meta's big 3—Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp—Viber, Skype, Telegram, WeChat, and Apple Messages. To pad this varied list, you can also send messages via SMS or to Slack channels.

As you connect them, you'll see the conversations line up in the Chats section of the app. You can talk 1-on-1 with any of your leads on this screen. If you want to send a marketing message to a lot of people at the same time, you can use Broadcasts to fire it out and track performance. Your CRM updates with actions and signals as comms come and go, saving you the time of having to retype information as you keep talking.

With so many texts flying around, you have to automate to stay sane. Kommo offers Salesbots, which let you set up automatic replies to new messages, notify a member of the team if a client is left on seen for more than five minutes, or set up actions based on keywords in the message. And these are just a few of the existing templates: you can browse others or create your own.

Most of the feature set is built around multi-channel sales. That's particularly clear in the dashboard, where you'll see stats like median reply times and number of active conversations. For deeper sales reports, head to the Stats tab to find screens that'll show you win-loss analysis and call reports, among other useful insights.

If you love chatting with your leads but not the admin work, you can connect Kommo to Zapier to automate your CRM workflows.

Pros

• Supports multiple configurable pipelines
• AI keyword detection to automate conversations

Cons

Limited task management tools

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Salesmate for phone and SMS outreach

Emails are the standard for a lot of CRM communication. But what about the good old phone call? Or that well-timed SMS? Salesmate offers the tools to connect those channels to your CRM, building features around them to make sure you get a lot out of these interactions.

The user interface is appealing, topped off by a great onboarding sequence and useful mini-tutorials on each page. Salesmate explains itself well, so it won't take you a long time before you're on the phone with your next lead. It doesn't completely shun emails; in fact, it rounds them up in a Team Inbox. You can route any emails you get at hello@yourbusiness.com to it and have your team work through them together.

The good stuff starts happening when you connect the phone. You have to fill out a form and submit your company for consideration before unlocking these features (and remember that call rates apply on top of your regular subscription). Once you jump through those hoops, though, you can start sending and receiving SMS messages right on the platform, having them appended to the activity log of each contact. You can also start calls from the dashboard or—I find this really handy—from your sales pipeline's deal cards. And when you get an incoming call, that contact's page opens up on the screen so you can start the conversation without hesitating.

Salesmate also integrates with Zapier to expand its capabilities even further.

Overall, Salesmate is a well-rounded tool, with a dedicated interface to set up marketing automation, another for customer support chats, and a reports section that helps you create as many viewing angles over your data as you need. If you end up consulting a few of these reports many times a day, you can add them to your dashboard.

Pros

• AI chatbot assistant included
• Customizable screen layouts

Cons

Call costs could be better

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NetHunt for managing your Gmail inbox

What if there was a CRM that you could use while you go about your day in Gmail? You know where this is going: it's NetHunt. And unlike most other CRMs for Gmail, NetHunt has a separate dashboard you can access to make big-picture decisions and fine-tune the controls.

Getting started is easy: sign up with the Gmail account you're working with, and NetHunt instantly sorts itself out. You can then access it when on Gmail (make sure to install the browser extension first), or fire up the web app, which has a similar user interface to Gmail, so you won't be bothered by the seams. The web app lets you check deals, update and create contacts, fire email campaigns to your lists, and create workflows to automate the repetitive stuff.

There are simple reports available for user activity, pipeline, and time in stage. If you want to take a dip in the business intelligence software category, you can feed your data to Looker Studio via the available integration. This will let you build interactive dashboards and reports that update in real-time, helping you keep a finger on the pulse. Or you can connect NetHunt to Zapier and bring thousands of other apps in.

Pros

• Connects to LinkedIn
• Supports chatting on multiple channels such as WhatsApp or Telegram

Cons

Steep price scaling from plan to plan

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#Best #Small #Business #CRM #Softwares #2025

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