Zoho offers an extensive suite of SaaS business software, and its CRM offering is a standout tool. Its feature set rivals even behemoth Salesforce. Its latest additions include Zia, an AI-powered analytics engine for spotting sales trends and anomalies; and Canvas, a drag-and-drop interface editor. It doesn't hurt that Zoho CRM is priced within reach of smaller teams.
Zoho CRM has a lot to recommend to any business. If you're already using other products in the Zoho portfolio, it's practically a no-brainer. Only Salesforce will give you more features with a more polished UI. Then again, if you like the idea of the Zoho suite, but feel daunted by Zoho CRM's feature set, you should consider Bigin by Zoho, the company's lightweight CRM designed specifically for small businesses.
Document Library Live Chat Chatbot/Conversational AI Multi-Currency Support Pipeline Management Integrated Marketing Analytics Custom Dashboards Routing REST API 24-Hour Support Support User Forums GET IT NOW Learn More Zoho CRM ReviewSalesforce rewrote the book on CRM when it debuted in , and it remains an industry leader today. 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 for which the Salesforce platform is known. 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 Starter is your SMB-friendly onramp to the platform and ecosystem. Just keep in mind that it has limited third-party software integrations and reporting capabilities. It's true that Salesforce scales to meet the needs of any business, but you should prepare to spend a bundle.
Document Library Live Chat Chatbot/Conversational AI Multi-Currency Support Pipeline Management Integrated Marketing Analytics Custom Dashboards Routing REST API 24-Hour Support Support User Forums GET IT NOW Learn More Salesforce Starter ReviewApptivo CRM is a highly configurable software platform. It splits its wealth of features into multiple modules, allowing you to combine and arrange them to meet your company's unique needs. In addition to its core CRM capabilities, the platform supports multiple other business tasks, such as accounting, invoicing, and project management, making it a one-stop shop for all your business software needs.
If you aren't content with the flexibility of other CRMs you've tried, Apptivo is worth a look. Its extensive collection of features allows for near-endless customization. However, the sheer number of possibilities also comes with a drawback: complexity. If you lack the time, knowledge, or resources to set up and customize the software, you are likely better off with another service that focuses squarely on CRM. Keep in mind, too, that Apptivo lacks the AI-powered tools of competitors.
Document Library Live Chat Chatbot/Conversational AI Multi-Currency Support Pipeline Management Integrated Marketing Analytics Custom Dashboards Routing REST API 24-Hour Support Support User Forums GET IT NOW Learn More Apptivo CRM ReviewCreatio is a no-code platform with highly customizable CRM capabilities within its Sales product. Aside from providing granular customer and lead management features, Creatio has advanced management, process automation, and reporting tools that you can deploy however you need for your business. Meanwhile, its AI assistant can provide detailed answers to questions about opportunities and generate communications based on those you have already sent out. Creatio organizes all of these features in a slick interface.
If your business can afford its seriously high price and fill the required minimum number of seats, Creatio should be on your short list of CRM solutions. It handles all the CRM functions we expect quite well and is flexible enough to store and show you the exact information you need.
Document Library Live Chat Chatbot/Conversational AI Multi-Currency Support Pipeline Management Integrated Marketing Analytics Custom Dashboards Routing REST API 24-Hour Support Support User Forums GET IT NOW Learn More Creatio CRM ReviewHubSpot offers a fairly full-featured version of its easy-to-use Smart CRM at no cost for up to two users. This tier doesn't have any time limits, so it's an excellent choice if you are just starting out with CRMs. HubSpot also makes it easy to upgrade to a paid plan as your business grows. Paying more gets you customizable reports, expanded support options, first-party payment processing, HubSpot's Breeze AI (which can generate reports and blog posts and summarize contact and company data), and more.
If you're new to CRMs, HubSpot Smart CRM's free version is difficult to beat. And when you're ready to upgrade, HubSpot's robust ecosystem of sales, marketing, and service tools will serve you well. Just be prepared to spend a lot if you want all the features Smart CRM offers because they require a subscription to HubSpot's premium software products, such as Sales Hub.
Document Library Live Chat Chatbot/Conversational AI Multi-Currency Support Pipeline Management Integrated Marketing Analytics Custom Dashboards Routing REST API 24-Hour Support Support User Forums GET IT NOW Learn More HubSpot Smart CRM ReviewInsightly scales well depending on the size of your business, even if its costs are somewhat high. We especially like its intuitive setup process and friendly user experience. Otherwise, it more than competently handles all components of the sales pipeline, including leads, contacts, opportunities, and projects, with sufficient detail. Insightly's reporting and analytics tools are approachable and customizable, while its advanced automation builder allows you to tailor the sales pipeline exactly to your needs.
If you don't need cutting-edge AI tools and want to get up and running with a comprehensive CRM service fairly painlessly, Insightly is a good choice. Its ease of use means that you and your team members should have no trouble grasping how it all works.
Document Library Live Chat Chatbot/Conversational AI Multi-Currency Support Pipeline Management Integrated Marketing Analytics Custom Dashboards Routing REST API 24-Hour Support Support User Forums GET IT NOW Learn More Insightly CRM ReviewLess Annoying CRM is positioned as an affordable turnkey system for small businesses and sole proprietors. It offers a good collection of essential features, combined with flat-rate pricing that's among the cheapest of all the products we tested. Ease of use is its key selling point, which is great for companies with limited CRM experience. Its user interface is straightforward and approachable. Also, Less Annoying's responsive web UI works as well on mobile devices as it does on desktop browsers.
Budget-conscious companies should give Less Annoying CRM a look, but it's also a good choice for businesses that want a stripped-down, easy-to-use CRM that doesn't require a lot of complicated setup and configuration. Just be aware that its design simplicity means it's less feature-rich than more enterprise-ready solutions. For example, Less Annoying's reporting functions are relatively weak compared to those of more sophisticated systems. Although you can extend the system's capabilities with Zapier integrations, that added complexity might negate some of what makes it "less annoying."
Document Library Live Chat Chatbot/Conversational AI Multi-Currency Support Pipeline Management Integrated Marketing Analytics Custom Dashboards Routing REST API 24-Hour Support Support User Forums GET IT NOW Learn More Less Annoying CRM ReviewOne component of the larger SugarCRM sales platform, Sugar Sell handily covers all the CRM features that businesses need for B2B and B2C interactions. The entire user experience is extremely flexible; for example, you can customize employee dashboards (even down to the individual level) with relevant data and Dashlets (widgets). Profiles for contacts, opportunities, and tasks allow for copious amounts of detail, too. One standout aspect of Sugar Sell's business profiles is the AI Summary section, which analyzes data to characterize your overall relationship and outline steps for increasing the likelihood of future deals. We also like the Smart Guides feature for building visual training materials that help employees learn your processes.
If your company works with both other businesses and customers, Sugar Sell can give you all the tools and data you need to maintain and grow those relationships. Just keep in mind that it's not the most welcoming CRM we've tried; it's best to go into it with some level of experience or at least be willing to spend some time learning its ins and outs.
Document Library Live Chat Chatbot/Conversational AI Multi-Currency Support Pipeline Management Integrated Marketing Analytics Custom Dashboards Routing REST API 24-Hour Support Support User Forums GET IT NOW Learn More SugarCRM Sugar Sell ReviewFreshsales is an easy-to-use, entry-level CRM that's particularly suitable for small businesses and startups. Although it lacks some features of competitors, it does a good job of building integrations with other business software, such as calendars, marketing services, and tools like DocuSign. It now includes an AI assistant that can analyze your contact profiles and help assess the likelihood of a sale.
Give Freshsales a look if you want a functional CRM that won't overwhelm your sales team with features. Its lightweight approach makes it especially good for organizations with limited or no prior CRM experience. If you already use some of the software on its integrations list, you should also appreciate its interconnectivity.
Document Library Live Chat Chatbot/Conversational AI Multi-Currency Support Pipeline Management Integrated Marketing Analytics Custom Dashboards Routing REST API 24-Hour Support Support User Forums Learn More Freshsales ReviewCRM software helps you track and nurture contacts to build customer loyalty and repeat sales. A good CRM makes the information it gathers accessible to other business platforms via integrations. In this way, CRM becomes the epicenter of how you manage your customers' journeys, from the first marketing touch to a closed sale and on to the next engagement.
Some small businesses use spreadsheets to mimic a CRM's functionality. However, this type of home-brewed solution delivers just a tiny subset of the features you get with a CRM and isn't ideal once your customer list starts to grow. The best CRM solutions are easier to use than spreadsheets and do more than just retain user and contact information. They also automate processes, such as creating calendar events, identifying new sales opportunities, prioritizing the sales pipeline, and setting appointment reminders. They can even rank opportunities by the likelihood of success. Integrating your other customer data so the CRM can access it, such as from your help desk, makes that possible.
This information is a goldmine of opportunity. It lets you identify prospects for up-sell or cross-sell, convert existing customers to new products or services, target new marketing, and track invoices. The software is also a fail-safe because it prevents multiple salespeople from chasing the same prospect. The ultimate goal of these systems is to help you increase sales.
CRM software is constantly evolving. Sometimes, that means adding new features and technologies, and other times, it means presenting familiar features in a new light.
One current trend is a preference for cloud-based CRM systems. All the CRM systems in our most recent tests are available as cloud-based subscriptions, and many aren't available any other way. This model, also called software as a service (SaaS), has several advantages over traditional, on-premises software, including lower up-front costs and greater scalability and flexibility.
Zoho CRM's Zia AI assistant (Credit: Zoho/PCMag)Another recent development is social CRMs, which help businesses engage, manage, and monitor their social media presence and interactions. Social CRM software can also help companies leverage social media data to generate leads, identify influencers, and measure customer satisfaction.
Taking the concept of social CRMs even further, omnichannel CRMs allow businesses to interact with customers across multiple channels and devices, including , messaging apps, mobile, , and web. These aim to provide a unified view of the customer journey and preferences across all touchpoints.
Customer data platforms (CDPs) are another emerging concept. These systems collect and unify customer data from various sources, such as online and offline transactions, social media, third-party platforms, and web browsing. CDP can help businesses create a singular, 360-degree view of a customer.
Finally, artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly prevalent. Over the past few years, CRM vendors have increasingly used AI to automate tasks, generate insights from data, and provide personalized recommendations. AI can also enhance customer interactions through chatbots, sentiment analysis, and voice assistants. More recently, some vendors have begun experimenting with generative AI to steer your communications.
The most challenging part of choosing a CRM is understanding what the product can do and what your salespeople need. Sales is a difficult and often fast-paced profession, which means the tool you choose could actually burden your employees. That'll kill adoption rates, so you must understand what they need before tossing more technology into the mix.
It's tempting to forgo this homework and simply pay for one of the big, all-inclusive CRM software packages. That approach will almost certainly wind up costing you more in both time and money while probably delivering less flexibility than you expect. That's because large CRM software packages are often platforms rather than tools. The numerous features they advertise are the product of integrations with various third-party solution providers, not merely options you can turn on. All these features can add cost.
Instead, think about what tools your team is currently using and what processes they follow. Figure out how those tasks map to the CRM software you're evaluating. For example, if a tool forces users to dig through menus and submenus every time they want to log a call or , it will complicate their jobs instead of simplifying them. An increasing number of CRM tools combine the and sales experience into a single, smart inbox or centralized dashboard to manage all or most daily communications and tasks.
The ways in which companies interact with customers are shifting rapidly. Most customers still expect to interact with you via , but social media is fast becoming a game-changing technology. Understand how your company engages with customers over and make sure your CRM software complements that relationship. A fully optimized CRM should automatically capture data from interactions, not force your employees to do that manually.
After you look at the requirements from the sales team's perspective, flip it around and think about your customer. Maybe even run an online survey or focus group. What is their best sales experience? Once you know that, you can tailor your CRM to fit.
As with any software, it's critical to take advantage of free trials. No matter how many reviews you read or demos you watch, you can't fully understand how CRM software works until you use it yourself. Be sure to have colleagues from different departments try out the software, too, so you know how it works in various situations. Most vendors offer at least a trial. Some, including Zoho CRM, offer free plans, albeit with limited features or users. These can either serve as a full-time solution for small companies or a long-term trial for larger ones.
Data quality should be a key focus of that tailoring process. You need to pay attention not only to customer information that originates inside the CRM but also to the supporting data from other systems, such as finance or service desk tickets. Ensuring this data is "clean" means it needs to be directly on-target to the CRM's queries, in the proper format, and verifiable.
A study from Validity surveyed more than 600 global organizations that use CRMs. Of the respondents, 24% of CRM admins said less than half of their data is accurate and complete, while 31% reported that poor-quality data costs them at least 20% of their annual revenue.
Less Annoying CRM contacts and company data (Credit: Less Annoying CRM/PCMag)Ensuring good data quality is a matter of testing and constant vigilance. You need to run regular and repeatable tests on your system. Depending on the size of your staff and your CRM investment, the Validity report recommends appointing a data management professional as the lead in keeping your CRM data clean. That person should manage the entire data flow, including your CRM and any connected apps. They should also handle the full spectrum of data management tasks, including automating data workflows, backup, and data protection. If you feel such a hire is in your future, you should pull that person in as early as possible, preferably at the evaluation stage.
Whether it's a software bug or simply some difficulty with a particular feature, you will likely need support from your vendor at some point. That's why it's important to use your free trial period to evaluate the responsiveness and efficacy of your potential vendor's support team. Some tips:
Make sure to understand the level of support you get with your pricing tier and whether you can modify it.
Research the provider's support forum. See what questions other customers ask and how long it takes for the company to respond.
Check for DIY resources. Are there self-service tools for specific issues if there's a support site? If there are, be sure to run through them to see how effective they are. Search the knowledge base to see what kinds of articles are there and whether they are in a useful format.
Investigate the product's training options. Complex tools usually require some training, so see what your service vendor provides. Is on-site, in-person training your only option, or are there online resources, such as well-organized blogs, recorded webinars, and videos?
Take a close look at the CRM solution's mobile app. This should ideally be a separate app, not just a mobile-optimized version of the desktop website.
Make sure your CRM software of choice supports the mobile device platform your team uses. Are you providing every employee with an iPhone, or is yours a bring-your-own-device (BYOD) environment, which inevitably means supporting multiple OSes? Next, carefully evaluate what the app can do. Some apps offer a read-only view of your sales pipeline or contacts, but don't let you make updates until you get back to a computer. Others offer a seamless and responsive experience, letting you do everything on a mobile device that you can on a computer. Don't commit to CRM software until you try the mobile app in a way you and your team would do on a day-to-day basis. For many SMBs and their agents, the mobile component of a CRM app might be more critical than the desktop version.
Salesforce and other larger CRM platforms have huge feature stacks that are available as modules with related features. If the features are what you need, you can configure your entire solution simply by accessing the right modules. But if something is missing, or your sales staff is simply more comfortable using something else, you might need to turn to software from third-party vendors.
Integrations take two basic forms. The easiest is if the CRM system or the system to which you're trying to connect supports the other natively. That means that the company has a pre-built integration you can just download and use as necessary. You'll have the best luck with big-name targets here.
Less Annoying CRM integrations via Zapier (Credit: Less Annoying CRM/PCMag)The other method is rolling your own integration. This is easiest if both systems have an open application programming interface (API). The most common standard here is representational state transfer (REST). With a REST API, you can have developers build a custom integration for you. That option certainly provides the most flexibility and customization, but it can also add significant costs depending on the level of your coding talent.
It's also worth looking at any third-party software you're considering, or indeed any software you already use, to see if there are integrations available from that side. For example, maybe you already have marketing software that you love, or you want to connect your help desk system to your CRM. It's entirely possible those vendors provide integrations with the CRM you're considering.
When you work with the sales pipeline and customer data, security should be top of mind—especially if you're using a SaaS CRM solution (which means a big chunk, if not all, of your customer data resides in the cloud). You should feel comfortable with the company's security requirements. It's a warning sign when your CRM software doesn't generate an audit trail whenever someone changes a password, or if it doesn't let you define access controls for each user. Customer data is an extremely valuable commodity, especially now that customers are more reluctant to part with it. Securing it isn't just about maintaining privacy; it's about protecting profitable relationships that directly impact your bottom line.
You can ensure your CRM software integrates with as much of your current IT security software as possible, such as your identity management system, so your employees can take advantage of single sign-on (SSO) authentication. But you also need to dig deep into the vendor's SLA and ascertain exactly where your data resides, who is responsible for its safety, and what happens if there's a problem. Search for any past breaches and how the company responded, too.
Gadjo Sevilla contributed to this story.
Using great software is the first step toward great results. This is true for any app category, and more so for your CRM (customer relationship management) software. As the backbone of your sales, having a robust CRM platform tailored to your processes and clients helps improve results in the long run. But out of so many options out there, which CRM is the best for your business?
I considered a grand total of 140 CRMs, from basic solutions to enterprise-ready suites. The 12 you'll find below can fit any business at any stage, whether you're just starting or growing fast. They offer a wide range of features covering everything the best CRMs should do, adding specialized tools and interfaces to optimize parts of your sales and business processes.
I know it's tough to switch systems or adopt a new one, so I'm hoping this selection can help you zero in on the best CRM without too much work. And when you finally switch, you'll start seeing promising results.
Salesforce Sales Cloud for extensibility
HubSpot for versatility
Zoho CRM for AI features
Pipedrive for ease of use
Ontraport for automating online transactions
Nimble for prospecting
Membrain for designing sales processes
Salesmate for customizability
Nutshell for managing a sales team
Close for inside sales teams
Copper for Google Workspace users
Keap for automation
Customer relationship management software is simple at heart. It keeps track of contact information, the deals you're building for them, and the relationship activity as you do so. Then, on top of these basic features, each CRM offers different productivity shortcuts to help you and your team. That means integration, marketing, and customer service, just to name a few from a long list of possibilities. All these tied together with helpful reports and time-saving automation.
What does this mean when talking about the best CRM programs for all businesses? I prioritized apps that offer all the contact, deal, and activity tracking as a baseline. Then, I selected those that have a good implementation of the extra features I mentioned, offering a user experience that supports the processes you already have in place.
This means you won't find niche CRM platforms on this list: the ones that do one thing extremely well but are light in other departments. At the same time, I don't have a cap on subscription price, as more expensive platforms can sometimes give you a much more powerful set of tools—after all, ROI isn't about how much you spend; it's about how much you can gain from your initial investment.
With that in mind, here's what I looked for in the best CRM software:
Ease of use. These CRM applications make complex operations and tasks easier to manage. Bonus points for thorough onboarding tutorials, multimedia knowledge bases, and fantastic support teams.
Contact and sales management. Tracking contacts, activities, and deals in a visual pipeline is a must.
Customization. Your CRM adapts to you, not the other way around. The way you do business is unique, so these apps must be flexible enough.
Reporting. If you can't measure it, you can't manage it. And if you can't manage it, how can you grow? High-quality reports are essential to show you how your decisions impact the results.
Automation and integrations. More work doesn't always mean better outcomes, so automating workflows and integrating your CRM with your other apps frees up time to dedicate yourself to critical decisions.
Over the course of a few weeks of research and testing, I narrowed in on several dozen viable CRMs from the 140-strong list. As I signed up for each, I managed a fictional marketing agency: I added my contacts, scheduled activities, and tested the extra features to understand how they improved the experience. Here are the best CRM platforms based on all that testing and research.
Salesforce pros:
Wide range of AI features available in its Einstein Platform
Heavily focused on rounding up customer data for increased clarity
Salesforce cons:
It can be hard to migrate out of Salesforce if you ever want to
It's hard to place Salesforce anywhere other than the first spot on this list. After all, it holds a massive part of the CRM market. Hundreds of thousands of companies big and small rely on this software to run all their sales operations. The best part about it is how much you can build upon the base features with add-ons and custom-built extensions. This flexibility is great if you're scaling fast or feel your current software isn't keeping up.
The Starter Suite offers the basic CRM features with useful twists. You can upload your tried-and-tested templates onto the platform and set up nurture sequences to warm up relationships. When you set up the marketing and customer service features, you can track signals as your leads interact with your pages and sales reps. This is great for segmenting your audience, enabling higher personalization or tailored deal-building.
Salesforce has many enterprise-grade users, so it's natural that the product is built to solve bigger problems. This shows when configuring some settings that can save a lot of time and trouble later, even if you're a smaller business. One example is setting up labels for each data field to guide newer sales reps through their deals. For example, if you have a discounts field, you can add a label saying they can only give up to 20% discounts. Anything higher than that has to be run via management.
This is just the surface of everything the platform has to offer. When you click the products section on the Salesforce website, you'll discover how deep you can go:
Data Cloud acts as digital infrastructure so you can connect all your external data sources and make data-driven decisions by setting up Tableau.
Agentforce lets you build agentic AI chatbot experiences with deep integration and strict guardrails, useful for customer service and internal use.
You can enable service, marketing, B2B commerce, app-building, and more to keep everything inside the Salesforce suite.
If you want to do even more with the CRM, connect Salesforce to Zapier and start customizing and automating right away, so Salesforce can become your source of truth across your entire tech stack. Learn more about automating Salesforce, or try one of these pre-built templates.
Salesforce AI features:
Einstein GPT (integration with OpenAI and native models for chat functionality)
Einstein Copilot (AI side tab offering a chat experience with suggestions, action plans, and task automation; fully configurable with prompt, skills, and model builder)
Einstein Trust Layer (privacy, security, trust, and observability features)
Agentforce (agentic AI chatbot builder)
Call summarization, case classification, automatic AI draft responses, lead scoring, and forecasting
Salesforce price: From $25/user/month
HubSpot pros:
Intuitive user experience
2-way data sync with other apps available
HubSpot cons:
Steep pricing in enterprise-level plans
HubSpot is versatile on two fronts. It has a collection of Hubs spanning sales, marketing, customer support, content management, operations, and commerce. And it also has a mix of pricing plans and bundles to fit every kind of budget—or even no budget at all.
HubSpot has one of the most generous free plans around. Offering unlimited CRM contacts, HubSpot unlocks basic features across all its Hubs. It does impose a lot of ceilings in terms of how much you can use each tool, that's true. But you can go a long way without ever having to pay a dime for the baseline, which is great for scoring quick wins and getting the first few thousand in the bank.
Then, when you're growing, you'll have to brew your favorite hot drink and sit down in front of the pricing page—it's a bit overwhelming. HubSpot offers a range of pre-made bundles based on what you need most. If you prefer to tailor it to your needs, you can upgrade or downgrade any Hub's features, meaning you can combine an Enterprise Sales Hub with a Starter Operations Hub, for example. Be sure to also toggle between "For businesses & enterprises" and "For individuals & small teams" at the top of the page to see different offers based on your current stage.
The platform itself is a breeze to use and easy to navigate, which is surprising considering the mountain of tools you have at your disposal. You can quickly move from posting to your company blog to tracking support tickets, accessing useful reporting dashboards along the way.
Want AI in the mix? Breeze Copilot (formerly known as ChatSpot) goes beyond the chat experience: it can run actions on your CRM, creating and updating records, generating emails and messages, and performing native contact enrichment (formerly Clearbit). Always ready to go as a side tab chatbot, you can use AI to interact and manage your CRM.
With a thorough knowledge base and one of the best educational blogs in the industry, HubSpot hits all the requirements here with flying colors. The cherry on top is its Zapier integration, so you can automate everything and have it run without a fuss. Learn more about Zapier's HubSpot integration, or get started with one of these templates.
HubSpot AI features:
Generative AI for content creation, editing, SEO optimization, and images
AI agents for content, social media, prospecting, customer service, and knowledge base management
AI-powered data enrichment, buyer intent analysis, and form optimization
Website generator and content remix
AI-powered sales reporting
HubSpot price: Free plan available; paid plans from $20/user/month.
Zoho CRM pros:
All-in-one CRM solution
Enterprise-ready
Zoho CRM cons:
Could be easier to use
Zoho CRM's resident AI, Zia, is one of the best implementations of AI in the CRM space. It works in the background as well as in a dedicated chat window, a place where you can ask questions about your data to keep your finger on the pulse.
Zia will look through your contacts to clean them, identify the ones more likely to become customers, and detect anomalies in the sales process, flagging unusual drops in closed deals. It suggests new products and services to offer to your customers and predicts how likely they are to do business with you again. It even figures out when your prospects are more likely to pick up the , so you can hop on a call at the right time. And if you're overwhelmed, it suggests workflows and macros to keep work moving without the pain.
Don't know what to do next? Want to know which channel your leads are coming from? Want a forecast of your pipeline for the next months? Zia can do it all from the chat window, replying with a combination of text and graphs to help you and your team understand what's going on as it does. It's especially useful for large teams, where everyone is pushing the needle forward at the same time.
This wouldn't be very useful if Zoho CRM wasn't a powerful app at its core. The user interface isn't one of the best, but that's compensated by the impressive feature set: apart from sales, it does marketing, help desk, social, and multichannel marketing. Plus, it integrates seamlessly with a range of other Zoho products—a massive software suite with accessible pricing plans—so you can keep expanding it based on your needs.
Zoho CRM also integrates with Zapier, connecting it to thousands of other apps to maximize your team's time. Here are a few ways to automate Zoho CRM, or you can start with one of the templates below.
Zoho CRM AI features:
Data: enrichment using data, automatic classification of uploaded files to CRM records using OCR
Predictive analytics: conversion likelihood for leads and deals, churn, next best action, best time to contact, historical-based forecasting, custom predictive model builder
: sentiment and intent analysis, summarization, activity extraction, competitor mention alerts
Automation: workflow, macro, and record assignment suggestions
Insights and analytics: data anomaly detection, real-time data change alerts, sales strategy analysis
Zoho CRM price: Free plan available; paid plans from $20/user/month. (Zoho CRM Plus starts at $57/user/month.)
Pipedrive pros:
Easy workflow automation
Plenty of educational content
Pipedrive cons:
Can become expensive quickly
When an app is hard to use, a deadly brain fog settles in and kills your productivity—and your mood. Pipedrive does the opposite: designed by salespeople, it offers a smooth user experience that helps you consistently hit it out of the park.
How does this translate into practice? The main menu on the left has icons that direct you to every part of the app. Some main screens offer a sub-menu with icons and text labels, providing clear direction on where each setting or action button lives. Overall, none of the pages feels cluttered—there's never the "this is too much" feeling.
The sales pipeline is another example of this principle. Each deal card has a dynamic icon that changes based on the deal's status. At a glance, you can tell if it doesn't have activities scheduled or if they're overdue. The colors in the interface pop out with good contrast, helping your brain quickly assess if you should start problem-solving or if everything's flowing.
Easy mode doesn't end with a well-designed interface. Pipedrive adds a range of tweaks to the sales experience. When you hop off a call, you get a quick list to help you note the outcome. The call is recorded, added to the contact's page along with your note, and you can move on to the next one with a single click (you can start calls straight from your deal pipeline).
If you're worried you're putting a lot of pressure on a lead, you can take a look at the contact timeline to help space out each touchpoint. And if one of your teammates already added that new contact from the trade show, the app will stop you from adding a duplicate.
Beyond sales, Pipedrive has a range of add-ons when you're ready to expand. These add prospecting, chatbots, website traffic analysis, marketing, documents, and project management to the mix. In terms of AI, they've grown from modest notifications-based suggestions to a broader feature set covering the basics of what a future-facing CRM should have—take a look at the list below for a full breakdown.
If you're looking for increased automation power, Pipedrive's Zapier integrations let you add new people as subscribers, add new deals to a spreadsheet, and send emails when new deals are added to a stage, among many other possibilities. Learn more about how to automate Pipedrive, or take a look at these pre-built examples.
Pipedrive AI features:
AI Sales Assistant: pattern identification for next actions, finding high-potential deals in the pipeline, CRM insights, and deal win prediction
AI generation and summarization
AI-powered recommendations and natural language search to find third-party integrations to improve your sales tech stack
AI-generated reports based on CRM data and a prompt
Pipedrive pricing: From $24/user/month. Add-ons priced separately.
Ontraport pros:
High-quality support team
For more information, please visit Daulfinld.
Adapts to multiple use cases and industries
Ontraport cons:
Realizing its full potential takes time and experimentation
If you sell online, the path to higher conversion is paved with funnels and automation. Ontraport has a smart way of handling all the assets and pages needed to set up everything you need to slowly build a business that runs on autopilot—or as close as it gets.
Ideally, you want to set up methods to grab new leads from all your channels: traffic from your website, people who hit up your social media profiles, newsletter subscribers, and more. These people need to travel through your content, learning more about the problems you solve and how your products and services are ideally positioned to do that. Depending on what you sell, that could lead to conversions on your payment page straight away or a scheduled call with a prospect who's ready to buy.
Ontraport helps you build the infrastructure for these journeys using Systems. When you click that tab, you'll add all your sales assets and string them together in sequences. There are a number of templates to start with, like recapturing abandoned carts or setting up a lead magnet. And there's an element of modularity here that's super useful: you can add pages with your copy, input fields, and custom rules. As leads get added to your CRM, you can keep track of their progress and contact them at any point during their journey.
Automate to your heart's content, or add personalization by routing a few of these flows to your sales reps. As they exchange emails with prospects, they can easily attach case studies or other files to threads, great for adding more context about the topics of the conversation.
When compared with others, Ontraport captures more specific data about your leads: it keeps track of campaign engagement history, actions taken, purchases, and memberships, to name a few. These stats are also available from each of your automations, so you can track performance—useful to add or remove steps from your systems as you optimize.
In terms of AI, it's more manual than the competition, and there isn't a lot happening overall. You can add AI Assistant actions to workflows, acting as if you placed a ChatGPT action inside the logic.
Ontraport integrates with payment and eCommerce platforms natively, and you can get more out of the software with Ontraport's Zapier integrations. Here are some examples to get you started, or you can learn more about how to automate Ontraport.
Ontraport AI features:
AI Assistant actions available in the workflow automation section. You can add system instructions and prompts as steps in the automation to transform data based on a trigger.
Ontraport price: From $29/month for 1 user. Additional users at $9/user/month.
Nimble pros:
Plenty of controls for viewing and interacting with data
Strong enrichment features
Nimble cons:
User interface can be slow from time to time
The internet is a deep, sprawling mine of opportunities. In the quest for gold, having a tool that helps you find your mineral veins easily is the difference between a clunky ancient dwarven epic and a high-tech planet mining operation.
Fantasy aside, Nimble is great for prospecting because its browser extensions help you fill your CRM with new prospects and their data. You can have an entire field day on social media finding new leads and registering the actions you're taking as you go.
Looking at a company page on the web? Open the extension, and get an enriched view, with data such as employee headcount, date founded, and revenue. This can save you searching the web for this data, so you can quickly understand if they're a good target or not. Now that you're not wasting time on bad fits, you can invest in chasing the prospects that are more likely to want to connect with you. All this without having to tab into the Nimble web app interface at any time.
When you finally come back to the app, hit the Contacts tab. All your leads are here. You can filter the list with a range of handy options on the left side—recently added, marked important, or recently contacted, among others—or you can further segment the list to get a more manageable group or assign it to a specialized team.
In addition to the sales pipeline, Nimble offers workflows. This is a way to visualize relationship progress with your contacts, which is useful if you do more than sales. There are templates for fundraising, job applicants, and orders, each with unique fields and stages. You can also create a new one from scratch and funnel your contacts into each of these as needed.
AI here is very focused on prospecting activities, which makes sense considering what Nimble is best for. It'll crawl the contact databases and web sources to find potential leads and enrich their profiles; it'll build sequences to help you engage and nurture them; it'll score and prioritize follow-ups based on engagement. And, wrapping it up, it can scan physical business cards to import data into your CRM. If you love manual data entry, I'm truly sorry: Nimble is here to end that.
Nimble's Zapier integrations let you automatically turn new subscribers into Nimble contacts, send new contacts wherever you need them, and anything else you need to do in the apps you use most. Here are a few templates to get you started.
Nimble AI features:
AI prospecting and data enrichment tool to find more details about contacts
sequences optimized with AI
AI-powered OCR to scan business cards
Lead scoring and follow-up prioritization
Nimble price: From $29.90/user/month
Nutshell pros:
Unlimited contacts
Very intuitive
Nutshell cons:
Occasional minor user interface glitches
In larger sales teams, smart management maximizes efficiency. It helps people focus on the tasks they need to do, leverage their specializations, and collaborate with others. Nutshell has three tools that help you achieve this.
The first one is territory-based management. For example, if you want a group to handle every lead within a 25-mile radius of New York, you can set these rules to automatically assign leads. You can go as micro or macro as you need with postal code, state, and country selectors. If your leads usually have similar needs based on location, getting specialized reps or teams to handle them will make it easier to address their needs or objections.
Next, you have a deep report screen with the stock reports in place for main pipeline metrics, as well as reporting by territory, team member, or source. Take a look into the future with forecasts, so you can see how present performance may influence what's in store and direct your team to that vision accordingly. With this information at hand, you can tailor your teams to the objectives you've set.
Lastly, as a manager, you can turn on or off notifications about nearly anything. Choose whether to get them only in the app so they only poke you while you're at your desk, or also via if you're working in the field. This helps you step in whenever anything important happens, so you can steer a deal, coach a teammate, or weigh in on a decision.
Apart from this, Nutshell has all the features of a top-tier CRM, so it's not a one-trick pony in sales management. It grabs the social media profile links of your contacts. It offers drip campaigns to naturally raise interest in your products and services. It can also connect to your website to follow your prospects as they browse, so you know how aware they are as they move through your funnels.
The platform doubles down on one of AI's major powers: summarization. It'll do this for people, companies, and leads timelines, helping you get an overview of all activities in a paragraph. Your Zoom calls will also be transcribed, saved, and summarized here, turning hours of sales action into short snippets. And, unique on this list, a voice-to-text note-taker to save you from typing.
Boost your business capabilities with Nutshell's Zapier integrations. You can do things like automatically creating contacts from new Nutshell leads and adding people to Nutshell from new form submissions. Here are some templates to show you how it works.
Nutshell AI features:
Timeline summarization for people, company, and leads
Zoom call transcription and summarization
Voice-to-text note-taking
Writing assistant for creating and editing emails
AI data enrichment
Nutshell price: From $19/user/month for unlimited contacts.
Membrain pros:
Complex B2B focus
High-quality reports
Membrain cons:
Pricey
Winning deals has a lot to do with understanding your prospect's problem and offering the best solution to solve it. The complexity and price of this solution determine how long this takes—you need more content, more touchpoints, more people involved in the process. Membrain helps you track all of this information, making it simple to design and manage a multi-step sales flow.
Here's how it happens: in each deal view, you have a list of tasks grouped by stage. For example, in the discovery stage, you want to hop on a call and understand who the decision-makers are. Later, when presenting a solution, you want to track if the client is looking to invest aggressively to solve this problem or is taking a conservative approach. In the later stages, you'll need to handle objections and reach a verbal agreement before making the sale.
As you and your team move forward, tick these tasks as complete and add the relevant information about each. If you're already completing tasks in a later stage without having completed earlier ones, Membrain flags it with a color label in your pipeline: if you're skipping it, you're operating on assumptions. That's dangerous.
To help build the perfect deal, you can record key insights about it below the task list:
The what section gathers the deal's details, such as challenges, competition, and urgency.
The who lets you add stakeholders and decision-makers, tracking their sentiment.
The why adds extra insights on the customer, why your solution is better now, and top concerns.
This ensures you and your team always have all the context you need to offer tailored solutions to your prospects—this means you can command higher prices, too, so be sure to position yourself as a custom-fit solution.
Membrain goes deep on these features, while having all the other core CRM features in place. I spent my time in the Active Pipeline module, which concentrates all these tools in easy-to-digest screens. There are also modules for prospecting and for optimizing the best accounts already in your system.
And with so much to do, be sure to connect Membrain to Zapier to automate parts of the sales process. Here are some examples to get you started.
Membrain AI features:
Membrain's AI Insight Engine is still in development, taking a cautious approach that's "anti-mindless-automation and pro-human-effectiveness" according to its announcement post.
Membrain price: Free plan available for the Active Pipeline plan. Paid plans from $69/user/month.
Salesmate pros:
Wide range of features
Intuitive user interface
Salesmate cons:
Building new modules comes with a learning curve
When you have a unique way of doing sales or if you operate in a niche, your tools have to keep up. Salesmate offers plenty of customization, so you can shape it in the way that's most powerful for you.
Everything on the interface is drag and drop. You can move things around as you wish, putting the important information at the top and the extras out of view. You can save layouts for your deals, contacts, companies, and activities screens, so if something doesn't work out, you can always roll back to the earlier good version.
You can also move things around in the forms you use to add information to your CRM, adding or removing fields as needed. This is possible even on a role basis, so managers can have extra input fields while junior employees handle less, for example.
Deep customization continues through custom modules inside Salesmate, which help you manage other data types beyond contacts or deals. When creating a new module, set the data type and fields you want to keep track of. This lets you manage your projects inside Salesmate, too, since you can add all your project details—name, due date, assignees, and so on—and see them inside the app.
If you've got a tech team in house, they can grab the API endpoint for this module and build custom integrations with your other apps. If you don't, you can connect Salesmate to Zapier and do it anyway, no tech skills required. Here are some examples.
Salesmate is more like a no-code CRM builder than your traditional fixed sales software. AI features are in line with what's expected in , with conversational intelligence and chatbots for customer support differentiating it from the competition. And apart from customizability, it offers , texts, marketing, live chat for multiple channels, and plenty of workflow automation opportunities for all of these. If tinkering is a synonym for winning at your company, definitely pick up Salesmate.
Salesmate AI features:
Sales call transcription with conversation intelligence features (keyword tracking, sentiment, custom tracking, coaching features)
Summarization of conversations, calls, and chats
AI recommendations and insights for contact actions
Generative AI for writing and editing
AI chatbots for customer support
Salesmate price: From $29/user/month.
Close pros:
Plenty of native integrations
Good range of workflow automation options
Close cons:
Reports aren't very customizable
When you're handling dozens or even hundreds of leads, you may lose track of the next best action you should take. Close helps you keep your eye on the ball, so you always know what to do.
When you look to the left side of the main menu, you'll find Smart Views. This divides your leads based on status. It helps you see:
Which leads you need to contact
Those you haven't called or emailed yet
Leads that opened one of your emails
Leads with no touchpoints in more than 30 days
Follow-up opportunities
Why is this useful? Whenever you come back from lunch break, a meeting, or an in-person event, you can take a look at these lists and quickly see which lead you should contact next. At the same time, if you see a list that's getting too long, you can process the contacts there to keep the relationships active.
Close handles natively through a Twilio partnership, so you get new numbers and manage your billing within the app. You can quickly scale up or down your call center as needed. The Power Dialer helps you ring your prospects automatically at the best possible moments during the day—just be sure to record the greeting message in case someone from your team can't hop on the call; otherwise your lead will just hear the confusing sound of silence.
As you're in each call, you can take notes that'll be automatically connected to the contact's record. Once it wraps up, you'll have a recording attached too. If you have new reps on the team, you can sit in on each call and coach them through talking to their leads, so they get up to speed quickly. And if your target audience doesn't like to pick up the , you can use the texting features instead.
Close implemented generative AI well and across all CRM workflows that benefit from it—full list below. No predictive features yet, but seeing this set, I bet that's where they're moving next.
You can accomplish even more with Close when you connect it to the rest of your tech stack with Zapier. Do things like automatically adding new leads to Close, posting Slack messages for new Close leads, or anything else you need to do in the apps you use most. Learn more about how to automate Close, or get started with one of these pre-made templates.
Close AI features:
Close GPT, a chatbot to interact with your CRM data
Call Assistant to transcribe and summarize calls
AI Rewrite Assistant for creating and editing emails and messages
AI Lead Summaries to summarize interactions, actions, and lead events
Close price: From $49/user/month (or $19/month for solo users)
Copper pros:
Full CRM feature set integrated with Google Workspace
Great setup, help content, and user experience
Copper cons:
No integration at all with the Microsoft ecosystem
You know what Google Workspace is missing? Yes, a CRM. Google knows it and considered buying HubSpot, but that ultimately fell through. Because of this, there's a whole range of software that seamlessly integrates with your workspace, with Copper being the frontrunner in the best-for-all-businesses class.
A Google Partner, the app integrates with your inbox as a side-tab in Gmail, Drive, and Calendar to offer contextual help wherever you need it. When you connect your account for the first time, it pulls all your existing conversations, adding people as contacts straight away. I was surprised to see my threads already on the feed after initial setup.
For thoroughness, it also imports contacts you might have saved in Google Contacts. Whenever you're exchanging emails with a lead, you can hit the Related tab on the side to reveal connected Docs, Slides, or Sheets so you can quickly attach them. And you can export Copper activity to Google Sheets and Looker Studio to extract those deeper insights.
Even though the intention is to reduce tab switching, the experience extends beyond the inbox, with a web dashboard to help you interact with the CRM in depth. When you're not reading and slinging emails, you can come here to take a look at your pipeline, catch up on tasks, and take a look at the feed as you move through your work day.
Copper's AI rollout has useful tools that are mostly strategic and insights-based, such as scoring, predictive sales, and sentiment analysis. There isn't generative AI, but Google is pushing Gemini into Workspace anyway, so it'd feel weird having two chatbots in your Gmail inbox fighting to write your emails—though potentially cool to see how they'd square up.
All in all, Copper feels like it was tuned to extend Google Workspace with the CRM feature set, not a clunky bolted-on piece of software. If you want to keep expanding it, connect Copper to Zapier so it can seamlessly talk to and act with the rest of your stack. Here are some templates to get you started.
Copper AI features:
Lead scoring and prioritization based on history, communication analytics, and behavioral patterns
Automated data entry
Predictive sales insights
sentiment analysis
Copper price: Plans start at $12/user/month
Keap pros:
Good feature breadth
Implementation services available for perfect-fit feel from day one
Keap cons:
High entry price
Automation is a little like "Look, Mom, no hands," but this time in your office, keeping those hands as far as possible from your mouse and keyboard. Keap is a heavy-hitter here, with a rich automation builder that'll increase productivity without extending the work schedule.
When you open the Automations tab, you'll notice you can choose the level of complexity. Use Easy Automation for simpler workflows, starting with a when condition, setting what happens with the then action, and holding it at the right spot with the stop property. This is useful for quick actions like updating your pipeline and notifying your team when a quote is accepted, for example.
Ready to ditch the training wheels? Advanced Automation adds an extra layer of depth. Instead of a form-like builder interface, you get a canvas where you can drop your triggers and configure each step in depth. You can determine what happens when someone buys a product, books an appointment, or clicks a link on a landing page—and create that page right there in the flow.
Then you can graduate into the AI age: Keap's AI Automation Assistant takes your business data, offer details, and audience pain points to generate funnels with sequences and data collection forms. The generated copy is pretty good, but you'll still want to run a few tweaks to make sure it's accurate, precise, and drives conversion. Once you're happy, activate it and paste the generated CTA snippets into your channels, and watch the leads get on the list. This is a unique end-to-end experience—I haven't seen anything like it in other CRMs on my test list.
Automation giants play better together, which is why Keap integrates with Zapier, expanding its native capabilities to interface with thousands of apps you use for work. Learn more about how to automate Keap, or get started with one of these templates.
Keap AI features:
AI-powered funnel and sequence builder (Automation Assistant)
AI Content Assistant for writing emails based on contact data based on a starting prompt
Keap price: $299/month for all features, for 2 users and 1,500 contacts
Do you prefer crafting your own system and expanding it as you need? With Zapier Interfaces, you can start from the CRM template and build an automation-first platform that saves time as you sell. Save your data in Zapier Tables and create as many Zaps as you need to bring your tech stack together in a storm of productivity and wins.
This category of apps—CRMs—has the highest number of options out of all other categories I've tested as a writer. I can understand your pain when choosing the perfect one, with such a long, long list of viable options.
I hope this selection helps you narrow down the options and find the best CRM for your needs today—and those you can see peeking at you in the future. All of them offer free trials or have a free plan that'll let you test. If you're still undecided, you can reach out to their sales teams. They'll walk you through the specifics of their app, which can be helpful to find the perfect match.
Related reading:
How to automate your CRM
The best free CRM software
CRM automation to boost your team's productivity
The best ERP software
The best client management apps
The best Pipedrive alternatives
Want more information on Custom CMR Solutions? Feel free to contact us.