VIDEO: Favorite Free CRMs

CRM software can do a lot of good for a business, but some of the more impressive solutions have pretty hefty price tags. There are free options, but what is the best free CRM? HubSpot is likely to find itself on any list of “top CRMs for X.” It’s a major player in the space, offers industry-leading functionality, integrations, and has some of the best organic presence on the entire internet. The HubSpot suite of tools include CRM, marketing automation, customer service, CMS, and more.

Zoho is the second of three comprehensive tech suites in this list. The full toolset covers a lot more than just CRM and sales enablement. Thankfully, you can get just the core CRM functionality with a free plan. Unlike most free plans, you get up to three user licenses you can use. Zoho’s biggest advantage is the internal cross-functionality the suite offers. You can get nearly everything you need in a single tool, Finally, we have ClickUp. Yes, it’s a project management tool, but it can be a lot of other things as well.

In many ways, it’s the choose-your-own-adventure of SaaS business tools. While the core functionality is that of project management, with a little setup, this dog can be taught a number of very useful tricks. ClickUp offers a free plan, and several very affordable plans beyond that, though enterprise plans are by quote only. It’s one of the best ways to get a flexible free CRM tool, and if your team needs help keeping track of responsibilities and workloads, ClickUp is hard to beat.

Mailchimp is another major brand in the sales/marketing enablement space. It’s more widely known for its marketing automation tools, but the CRM aspect is more useful than you might expect—particularly for smaller operations. It might not be obvious from the available features in the free plan, however. While it still brings the core CRM functions to the table, Mailchimp’s free plan severely limits tools and options that your team either desperately needs, or has already come to depend on.

In addition to fully free options, we’ve included a couple others that have a particularly impressive free trial to consider. Insightly does not offer a free plan, however they do offer a free trial for every subscription tier. It’s a bold decision, but one that demonstrates confidence in their product. If they insist that their product is paid for, they likely believe it’s worth the price of admission. Beyond that, the absence of a free plan means that even the lowest pricing tier provides nearly all of the tool’s functionality.

If budgets are tight, and you can only afford the bottom tier, you’re still getting a full Insightly feature set (instead of digital table scraps with a lackluster free version) PipeDrive similarly doesn’t offer a free plan, every pricing tier comes with a free, 14-day trial. What’s more, no credit card is required, so there’s no risk of missing the trial end date and having to deal with a charge you intended to avoid. Between Insightly and PipeDrive, there are a lot of similarities, and a lot of overlap in the advantages to their free trials for economy plans.

Where PipeDrive sets itself apart, at least on the subject of limiting subscription costs, is that their entry-level subscription is half the price of Insightly’s. Since SaaS vendors are hoping you’ll convert from a free CRM client to a paid subscription, there are certain areas they’ll typically squeeze to encourage the switch. After all, if the free plan is aimed at army-of-one sales teams, they don’t need multiple user licenses, right? A solid CRM can provide significant returns in reduced overhead and improved sales results.

The more time that’s spent finding the right match, the longer it takes to see that return, and the more resources that are spent along the way. Hopefully, this list will provide a solid place to start your search.