If you landed here, you might be using Excel, Google Sheets, or the humble notebook to keep track of your sales, contacts, and even projects. If so, your life is about to become a lot easier. With customer relationship management (CRM) software, you'll be more organized and productive and better able to serve your clients. And it won't cost you anything.
Dozens of companies offer free CRM plans in the hope that you'll like using their product so much, you'll eventually upgrade to a paid plan, or at the very least, recommend it to others.
We considered over two dozen free CRMs, and after extensive testing, we narrowed the final list down to eight that will serve a variety of businesses and use cases. The best free CRM software
EngageBay for all-in-one business capability
Bitrix24 for businesses with a lot of users and contacts
Zoho CRM for scaling your business
HubSpot CRM for businesses wanting lots of integration options
Insightly for project management
Capsule for an easy-to-use free CRM
Vtiger for inexpensive upgrade options
Streak for managing contacts from a Gmail inboxWhat makes a great free CRM?
The best CRM companies don't try to reinvent the wheel—they just try to make it roll a little smoother. This means keeping things like the user experience fairly conventional so that anyone—even if they've only ever operated an email inbox—can get up to speed quickly. The CRMs featured here are all relatively easy to operate for first-time users and provide enough resources (support or self-help) to assist when and if issues arise.
And while the versions reviewed are all free, each company offers different levels of upgrade plans to accommodate businesses with evolving needs. These paid plans are affordable for most small and medium businesses, especially when the capabilities are expanded enough to take the place of additional standalone software such as marketing and support.
Below are the features we looked at when researching and evaluating free CRMs. While not every one of our picks checked off all five boxes, the ones that didn't offered enough compelling features or highly specific use cases to make the final cut.
Contact and sales management. When creating contacts, you should have some flexibility in the type of information you can add. Features like custom fields let you collect what info is important for your business. Also, a free app should provide room for at least several hundred contacts to get you started. Tracking deals is a must-have feature for any CRM, and those that provide a visual (e.g., Kanban) pipeline with the ability to customize stages based on your sales process are ideal.
Ease of use. CRMs should make it relatively easy to perform repetitive actions (e.g., contact creation), input information, and provide a system with some customization options. We also looked for features that help automate actions such as performing tasks (emails, calls, etc.) as part of a sales process.
Unique feature(s). If a product included a unique (or atypical) feature not usually found in free plans, we highlighted that in the review.
Reporting and analytics. At the very least, you should have reporting to track total pipeline, deals by rep, and activities such as calls, emails, and meetings. Some of the apps we selected also had forecasting, leads by source, and average sales cycle duration.
Integration with other apps. We valued CRMs that provide integrations with third-party apps, whether natively or with Zapier, since a CRM is just one part of your business's tech stack.Best free all-in-one CRM software
It's getting harder each year to find a free CRM that provides sales, service, and marketing functions. Understandably so. That's a lot to ask for a freemium app. EngageBay, a relatively new kid on the block, is one of the few gratis all-in-ones left. Not only that, the company makes upgrading to paid plans very affordable.
The app comes with 500 contacts, and each contact record shows a 360-degree view. Visible (when applicable) are activities, emails, deals, tasks, notes, workflows, chats, events, and other touchpoints that allow users to see how a contact has interacted with your company over time.
Create multiple—one of the few to allow this option—customizable pipelines for different sales processes or products. Sales sequences, which let you create, schedule, and track a series of automated, personalized emails for following up with contacts and leads, is another feature usually not found in a free plan. Sequences are also found under the marketing module, with the same setup process and functionality.
The marketing suite includes lead scoring, forms, pop-ups, email templates, landing pages, newsletters, and other tools to both capture and nurture contacts. EngageBay offers a nice selection of templates for these tools, or you can create your own from scratch. I created a newsletter pop-up for my personal website using one of the templates and launched it by adding some code to the HTML.
While creating automated workflows is only available in the two highest-tiered paid accounts, you can design and send emails and videos to your segmented lists. The social suite lets you add and monitor your Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram accounts. I connected my Twitter account, and within a few seconds, my feed, mentions, and retweets popped up on the screen. From here, you can also schedule posts for channels.
For basic support management, the service suite provides ticket creation, automated assignment, and a dashboard for tracking ticket priority, first response time, and ticket count. With the live chat feature, you can create an additional support or sales channel and then track total chats, chat duration, and first response time in the dashboard. I tested the chat tool on my site, and while it's fairly basic, for those new to chat and/or those running a small business, it should be adequate.
Stretch EngageBay's functionality even more by connecting it to Zapier. For example, you can add new EngageBay contacts to your email marketing tool or add new customers from your eCommerce site to EngageBay.
EngageBay Price: Free for 15 users; all-in-one paid plans from $10.79/month/userBest free CRM software with unlimited users and contacts
Bitrix24 (Web, Windows, Mac, iOS, Android)
With most CRMs, especially free versions, you are limited to a certain number of users and contacts. Bitrix24 is the lone exception in our selection to offer unlimited for both (HubSpot offers unlimited users and 1 million contacts). This, combined with its other features, makes it stand out from the crowd. Aside from contact and deal management, the app also has team collaboration tools such as workgroups, chat, internal activity streams, and polls.
Bitrix24's many features make it feel a bit overwhelming at first, but you can hide, delete, and change the order of the various menu items. Then, from inside each menu item (e.g., CRM), you can configure the order of items (e.g., deals, contacts, companies, analytics). If you ever want to see everything at a glance, click the Sitemap icon toward the bottom-left of the menu.
With unlimited users, you can invite your entire team to use Bitrix24, slotting them into the app departments you create. Once your employees accept the invite, they'll be given access to their own customizable version of the app. However, you must upgrade to the paid versions to assign permissions to each user for viewing and making changes.
In a contact record, you can configure the menu to show only what's important to your company, and you can add fields or rearrange them while you're in a record just by dragging and dropping. For each record, you get all the details and functions (email, call, notes, etc.) at-a-glance with no need to click around a record just to see activities. Clicking on the Profile tab toward the top of a record shows you various reports related to the contact, such as sales, calls, emails, and activities. The entirety of these activities is calculated as a "communication load" or the number of activities per deal that's acceptable to your company. This can show you how specific customers like to communicate to better understand them for future opportunities.
Within the Activity Stream, you can chat internally, assign tasks, design and distribute a company poll, and make announcements to your entire team. Clicking on Workgroups lets you create private or public spaces to collaborate on work, assign tasks, share a calendar, and develop knowledge bases. Invite employees or external contacts to each group.