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What is CRM software?
Customer relationship management (CRM) software stores, organizes, and analyzes business contact and customer information. Within the CRM platform, sales, marketing, and customer service teams automate the collection and organization of customer, lead, partner, and key business relationship data.
The processes and systems that help improve a business’s relationships with their contacts may also be called customer relationship management.
Best CRM platforms
Which brings us to this list. Below are some of the top CRM providers in the market, each with unique features and functions that make them best suited to various use cases. While not exhaustive, the details below should help guide your research.
- Salesforce is the best CRM for SMBs.
- Oracle NetSuite CRM is the best all-in-one solution.
- Less Annoying CRM is the best for companies on a budget.
- Copper CRM is the best for security.
- HubSpot is best for companies needing many integration options.
- Insightly is best for analytics and reporting.
- Keap CRM is best for sales and marketing synergy.
- Pipedrive is best for pipeline management and optimization.
- Zoho is best for decentralized teams.
- ClickUp is best for project management.
Featured Partners
Salesforce – Best for enterprises
Pros
Cons
- 360-degree customer view: Salesforce’s Sales Cloud brings together every interaction and piece of customer data, presenting a complete view of each client’s journey. This holistic perspective enables businesses to understand their customers better, enhancing relationship-building.
- Einstein AI-powered analytics: Harnessing the power of artificial intelligence, Salesforce’s Einstein AI delivers insightful predictive analytics. This technology provides proactive lead scoring, trend analysis, and accurate sales forecasts, driving strategic, data-informed decision-making.
- Extensive customization and integration: Salesforce is lauded for its vast customization capabilities. It offers a range of modules and a flexible API for seamless integration with other tools, ensuring Salesforce adapts to your specific business needs and tech stack, not vice versa.
- Scalability and cloud-based structure: Salesforce is built with scalability in mind, making it suitable for businesses of all sizes. Its cloud-based architecture enables secure, anywhere-access to your CRM data, facilitating collaboration and boosting productivity across your team.
Free trial available
Essentials: $25/user/month
Professional: $75/user/month
Enterprise: $150/user/month
Unlimited: $300/user/month
*All plans billed annually
TechnologyAdvice selected Salesforce as the top CRM for large enterprises due to its expansive, scalable feature set. Salesforce’s multi-layered approach —combining advanced sales forecasting, intricate automation workflows, and customizable dashboards— is a boon for complex, multi-departmental operations. Its robust API, seamless third-party integrations, and high-level security practices further empower enterprise-wide collaboration and data protection. While the learning curve is steep, Salesforce’s sophisticated functionality justifies the investment, truly enabling large businesses to navigate their customer journeys with precision and intelligence.
Salesforce has long been a heavy-hitter in the CRM space. A premier option with mid-range pricing, the software can suit a variety of needs at a variety of organization sizes. What we’d like to highlight here, however, is how it can give growing small and mid-sized businesses a major leg up.
As one of the foremost options on the market, Salesforce brings with it a lot of the benefits that global corporations are capitalizing on: massive integration libraries, first-class functionality and user interfaces, and a trusted name (building confidence in the brand that uses them).
Beyond this, upfront, tiered pricing makes it easy to limit costs by paying only for the functionality you need, adjusting as the headcount and needs of the team grow.
Oracle NetSuite CRM – Best all-in-one solution
Pros
Cons
- 360-Degree customer view: Provides a comprehensive, real-time view of customer interactions across all channels, enhancing customer insight and service.
- Sales force automation (SFA): Automates and streamlines the entire sales process, reducing errors and saving time.
- Marketing automation: Enables businesses to streamline campaign management and track marketing ROI effectively.
- Customer service Management: Enhances customer satisfaction by providing tools for managing customer support and improving service delivery.
Starting from $499/user/year
This powerhouse, cloud-based solution provides a 360-degree customer view, enabling businesses to see a full spectrum of customer interactions in real-time. Its efficient sales force automation and marketing automation streamline operations, reducing manual tasks and enhancing accuracy. With robust customer service management tools, it empowers firms to deliver top-notch service. The combination of these features makes Oracle NetSuite a holistic and versatile CRM tool, leading the pack for all-in-one solutions.
To kick our list off, we have NetSuite CRM from Oracle. If that name sounds familiar, it should: NetSuite was an internet pioneer back when the internet still ran on dial-up. These days, the brand (now owned by Oracle) continues to offer advanced software and digital technology solutions to businesses around the world.
NetSuite is noteworthy for numerous reasons, but above all else, they are a comprehensive solution. The CRM portion is only a fraction of the platform—the suite handles enterprise resource planning (ERP), accounting and financials, inventory tracking, and more. Organizations looking to use a single system to manage and optimize their entire business infrastructure need look no further.
That said, its greatest strength is also its biggest caveat. NetSuite is a package deal. Signing up for the CRM (or any individual business function) means signing up for the whole platform, so it works best for brands that stand to benefit from an entire workflow overhaul.
Less Annoying CRM – Best for companies on a budget
Pros
Cons
- Simplicity: Less Annoying CRM prides itself on its user-friendly design that makes it easy for small businesses to manage contacts and track leads without unnecessary complexity.
- Customizability: The platform allows businesses to tailor the CRM to their specific needs, with customizable fields, layouts, and reports.
- Collaboration features: The system is designed for team collaboration, allowing multiple users to share contacts, calendars, and notes.
- Affordability: The CRM offers straightforward and low-cost pricing, making it an accessible solution for small businesses.
Free trial available
$15/user/month
Celebrated for its simplicity, this CRM caters specifically to small businesses, demystifying CRM with a user-friendly design. Customizability allows the platform to mold to unique business needs, with bespoke fields and layouts. Its collaboration features foster teamwork, seamlessly sharing contacts and notes. Plus, with its straightforward, affordable pricing, Less Annoying CRM has carved a niche in providing a high-quality, budget-friendly CRM solution. In the ever-complex CRM jungle, Less Annoying CRM emerges as a refreshing antidote.
With a low per-user cost, and intuitive functionality, it’s a perfect choice for teams that don’t have complex criteria for a CRM or sales software vendor to meet.
If you’re looking to deploy quickly, onboard staff with minimal training, and want to limit your cloud software overhead, Less Annoying CRM fits the bill. And while the list of available customizations and pre-built integrations is smaller than other CRMs in this list, there are no contracts or limitations, making this CRM a strong choice for up-and-coming brands.
Learn more about the best Simple CRM options here.
Copper CRM – Best for security
Pros
Cons
- Google workspace integration: Copper CRM integrates seamlessly with Google Workspace, allowing users to manage contacts, deals, and tasks directly from Gmail or other Workspace apps.
- Sales pipeline management: This feature provides a visual sales pipeline that makes it easy to manage opportunities and track progress towards sales goals.
- Automated data entry: Copper CRM uses automation to reduce the burden of manual data entry, automatically populating contact and company details.
- Lead and opportunity management
Larger, more established organizations often rely on Microsoft’s suite of apps and platforms to ensure secure collaboration. But Google Workspace is often a much more familiar space for newer brands with younger staff (many of whom used Gmail and Gsuite for their personal accounts). And Copper CRM is unmatched when it comes to Google Workspace interoperability.
That alone would be enough of a selling point for any business that depends on Google Workspace for other processes and functions. Further consideration is due to the increased security it offers (which in many ways rivals what Microsoft’s products offer), as well as the ease of use it can provide.
Depending on your use case, your current workflow, and the level of tech literacy in your organization, Copper CRM could very well be the fastest time-to-value option available.
Copper excels in seamless pipeline management, offering a visually appealing and intuitive platform to track progress and manage sales goals. Its robust automated data entry feature expedites processes, eliminating the hassle of manual inputs. The platform shines in lead and opportunity management, ensuring no prospect falls by the wayside. With its firm foothold in Google’s ecosystem, Copper CRM stands as a paragon of integration, streamlining operations in a way that feels native to Gmail and Google Workspace users. A true champion for CRM automation and user convenience.
HubSpot – Best for CRM integration options
Pros
Cons
- Contact management: HubSpot CRM provides a detailed view of contacts, tracking every interaction automatically and allowing users to easily manage customer relationships.
- Email tracking and notifications: This feature enables real-time notifications when a contact opens an email, allowing sales teams to follow up effectively.
- Pipeline management: HubSpot CRM offers a visual dashboard for managing sales pipelines, helping teams to track deals and stages effectively.
- Meeting scheduling: HubSpot CRM provides a tool to simplify meeting scheduling by syncing with your calendar and allowing contacts to book time directly.
HubSpot’s Contact Management excels in maintaining detailed, automatically tracked customer relationships. The CRM’s Email Tracking and Notifications system alerts users when a contact opens an email, maximizing timely follow-ups. Its visual dashboard simplifies Pipeline Management, providing a bird’s eye view of deals and stages. Add the convenience of its Meeting Scheduling tool, and it’s clear how HubSpot skillfully streamlines business processes. In the world of CRM, HubSpot stands out as a comprehensive, user-friendly solution, making it a prime pick for businesses.
Another big league name in the space, HubSpot has been a “household” name for sales and marketing teams for roughly two decades. And, much like Salesforce, there are numerous key selling points for the platform, not the least of which is the way it puts sales, marketing, and website management in a single toolbelt.
For now, though, we’d like to highlight an equally critical, but much less celebrated part of their software: the way it integrates into nearly everything.
Companies that use HubSpot are hard-pressed to find a software tool they’re using elsewhere in the organization that doesn’t already have plug-and-play interoperability with HubSpot. All other features aside, the available integrations make Hubspot hard to beat for any team bringing a backpack full of other SaaS solutions to the table.
Insightly – Best for analytics and reporting
Pros
Cons
- Advanced reporting: Insightly’s advanced reporting allows users to create customized, detailed reports, offering valuable insights into business performance.
- Dashboard visualization: Insightly provides dashboards for a quick visual representation of business health and metrics, aiding in swift decision-making.
- Sales forecasting: Insightly’s CRM includes sales forecasting features, enabling businesses to predict sales revenue using historical and real-time data.
- Integrations: Insightly integrates with popular software like Power BI and Excel, enhancing its reporting and analytics capabilities.
Insightly boasts Advanced Reporting, allowing users to generate custom, in-depth reports revealing key business performance indicators. Its Dashboard Visualization serves up crucial metrics at a glance, aiding quick, informed decisions. Coupled with precise Sales Forecasting, Insightly paints an accurate picture of future sales revenue. Plus, with smooth integration with platforms like Power BI and Excel, Insightly’s analytics game is seriously amplified. For businesses seeking a sharp eye on their data, Insightly CRM is a standout choice.
Insightly might be a brand name you’re unfamiliar with, but rest assured, it has a quiver of features that’s just as full as some of the bigger names on this list. Automation options, project management, and plentiful integration options are just the beginning. What’s not a common bragging right is their robust analytics and reporting capabilities.
In many ways, Insightly doubles as business intelligence, providing extensive flexibility and functionality regarding data discovery and scrubbing; organizing and visualization; powerful analytics insights; and intuitive reporting options.
For teams that want to dig deep into the data, find and leverage customer trends, and otherwise prove the value that the sales pipeline has to offer the organization as a whole, Insightly should be at the top of the shortlist.
Keap CRM – Best for sales-marketing synergy
Pros
Cons
- Smart client management: Keap’s CRM excels in organizing and updating client information, along with capturing new leads, all in one centralized, searchable database.
- Advanced email automation: Keap’s CRM not only offers email marketing but also delivers personalized, automated follow-ups that nurture client relationships and keep businesses top-of-mind.
- Integrated appointments: Keap seamlessly syncs calendars and sets up reminders, turning the scheduling of appointments with clients into a hassle-free process.
- Billing and payment solutions: Keap stands out with its invoicing features, which provide the ability to create, send, and track invoices, accept credit cards online, and automate payment reminders.
Keap excels with its Smart Client Management, keeping sales and marketing in sync through a centralized database. With Advanced Email Automation, it connects the dots between sales and marketing, automating personalized follow-ups to nurture leads. Integrated Appointments harmonize sales calls and client meetings, while Billing and Payment Solutions make transaction processes a breeze. Keap CRM uniquely combines sales and marketing functions, creating a seamless, automated system that drives growth and saves time. In the CRM arena, Keap is a force for unified business strategy.
Keap CRM is a bit of an oddity in this list. While it’s fully capable of providing top-tier service to larger brands the way Salesforce or Hubspot might, its positioning tends to focus more heavily on solopreneurs and other small businesses.
To be fair, these are often the professionals who need the most support to keep their sales pipelines flowing. Certain “hats” have to be worn in every business—accounts receivable, sales, marketing, operations, logistics, project management, etc.—even when that business is a business of one. The fewer the heads there are in the crew, the more hats on a single head.
Keap aims to help these professionals by giving them somewhere else to put some of those hats, so to speak. Via robust sales, marketing, and financial automation tools, Keap streamlines some of the most difficult, tedious, and repetitious parts of the sales lifecycle.
Solopreneurs especially tend to be specialists in their product, with non-billable tasks being secondary skills at best. Keap gives these individuals and teams a way to get back to the work they do best, and rest easy about the duties that stress them out the most.
Pipedrive – Best for pipeline management and optimization
Pros
Cons
- Pipeline management: Pipedrive offers a visual sales pipeline which allows users to effectively manage deals at different stages and streamline the sales process.
- Sales reporting: Pipedrive includes comprehensive sales reporting features to provide insights and monitor sales performance over time.
- Email integration: Pipedrive provides seamless email integration, allowing users to send and receive emails directly from the CRM, track correspondence and automate follow-ups.
- Activity and goal tracking: Pipedrive allows users to set and monitor goals and activities, keeping sales efforts aligned with business objectives.
Free trial available
Essential: $14.90/user/month
Advanced: $27.90/user/month
Professional: $49.90/user/month
Power: $64.90/user/month
Enterprise: $99/user/month
Pipedrive’s visual sales pipeline breathes life into deal progression, streamlining the sales process in a digestible, visual format. Complemented by comprehensive Sales Reporting, users glean valuable insights into performance trends. With seamless Email Integration, tracking correspondence and automating follow-ups becomes effortless. Pipedrive’s Activity and Goal Tracking further keep sales efforts aligned, optimizing pipeline progress. For businesses seeking a clear view and control over their sales pipeline, Pipedrive has the right formula, making it a top recommendation in the CRM domain.
PipeDrive is also a bit of an oddity in the CRM and sales software space, in all the best ways. PipeDrive is designed to help teams make the most of their leads, and focus on the ones most likely to convert. It does this through a variety of non-conventional CRM capabilities, including AI analytics, intelligence software, and prescriptive data insights.
The interface is also carefully crafted to present the most relevant information in a visual, easy-to-digest manner. Properly implemented, PipeDrive can dramatically reduce the number of leads that slip through the cracks, and the number of dead ends chased by sales staff.
Zoho – Best for decentralized teams
Pros
Cons
- AI-Powered Sales Assistant (Zia): Zoho CRM offers an AI-powered sales assistant called Zia that can predict trends, anomalies, and conversions, making sales forecasting smarter.
- SalesSignals: This feature provides real-time notifications from across multiple channels like phone, email, social media, and live chat, ensuring you never miss an interaction.
- Blueprint: Zoho’s Blueprint feature helps businesses design and automate their sales processes, ensuring that salespeople know exactly what to do at each stage of the deal.
- Multi-Channel Support: Zoho CRM offers multi-channel support for phone, email, live chat, social media, and in-person meetings, keeping your team connected no matter how you communicate.
Free trial available
Free plans available for Mail and Projects
Standard: $14/user/month
Professional: $23/user/month
Enterprise: $40/user/month
Ultimate: $52/user/month
Zoho’s AI-powered Sales Assistant, Zia, offers smart sales forecasting, crucial for coordinating dispersed teams. SalesSignals keeps teams in sync with real-time, multi-channel notifications. Blueprint guides remote teams through each deal stage, providing process clarity. Zoho’s unique Multi-Channel Support covers everything from email to social media, ensuring all team interactions are captured, irrespective of location. Zoho CRM, with these powerful features, makes managing decentralized teams a streamlined affair, standing tall as a top choice in the remote-working CRM landscape.
Zoho: Best CRM for decentralized teams
Zoho CRM is part of a larger platform that includes HR, accounting, operations, and more, placing it in a similar bracket to NetSuite. It’s accomplished this while still maintaining low overhead costs, thanks to its remote-first work environment.
That prioritization of decentralized collaboration carries over to their suite of software solutions, including their CRM. With features and tools comparable to its peers in this list, but with the added bonus of designing the platform to function across time zones and national boundaries.
ClickUp – Best for project management
Pros
Cons
- Task and project management: ClickUp excels in organizing tasks, allowing you to create, assign, prioritize, and track tasks all within a single platform.
- Collaboration detection: ClickUp’s unique feature helps avoid duplicate work by showing who’s working on what in real-time.
- Goal tracking: With ClickUp, you can set, track, and achieve goals across different teams and projects, ensuring everyone is aligned and focused.
- Custom views: ClickUp allows you to customize how you view your tasks and projects, whether that’s in a list, board, box, calendar, or Gantt chart view.
Free trial available
Free plan available
Unlimited: $5/user/month
Business: $12/user/month
Business Plus: $19/user/month
Enterprise: Contact ClickUp for a customized quote
ClickUp’s robust Task and Project Management tools bring a fresh perspective to CRM, prioritizing organization and tracking. The Collaboration Detection feature ensures that no work is duplicated, vital in customer relationship management. Goal Tracking aligns teams with overarching objectives, and Custom Views offer flexibility in visualizing client interactions. ClickUp is breaking down the silos, showing that project management and CRM can coexist and flourish in one platform, making it an unexpectedly fitting CRM choice.
This last vendor may come as a bit of a surprise, as ClickUp is primarily known as a project management platform. That reputation is well earned (and why it takes the title it does in this list). ClickUp also has a CRM platform, one that fills many of the needs discussed here.
ClickUp already has a noteworthy share of the PM market, and picking up the CRM module can amplify the amount of benefit those teams get out of the vendor. Seeing as most other major brands in the PM space cost significantly more, it’s an excellent way to get powerful software tools without paying enterprise-level subscription fees.
Find your new CRM software
Key CRM features to consider for your use case
While there are certainly software solutions that are objectively “bad,” the majority of options in any given vertical will be valued by how well they satisfy the intended use case. Trying to apply the tool outside the parameters it was designed for may fail to meet expectations, but that does not necessarily mean the software itself is of poor quality. It’s just a bad match.
Below are some core areas of concern for CRM consumers to consider when shopping around to help them find a tool that aligns with their needs.
ALSO READ: The Different Types of Roles & Responsibilities in a CRM
Contact management
For CRM tools, the most foundational functionality is that of collecting and organizing contact information. At the very least, it needs to be a step up from simply dumping leads into a spreadsheet only to immediately be forgotten. Spreadsheets have their place, but they aren’t optimized for automation or to serve as living records. If a CRM can’t improve on manual data entry, manual data scrubbing, and manual retrieval, then it’s just Excel with extra steps.
Contact management features in CRM and sales software, it should be noted, vary widely from system to system. But the common upgrades to functionality will likely look familiar to anyone who’s been using digital devices in the past two decades:
- Automated data importing
- Data export flexibility (via EDI, CSV, or other formats)
- Integrations with other platforms, apps, and databases
- Filters and search functions
- Analytics and reporting functions
Communication records
By now, nearly everyone is familiar with the “This call may be recorded for quality assurance purposes” line spoken to customers calling in to a business for support. Having a record of customer/client/lead interactions can be indispensable. And not just for maintaining excellent service, either.
Using recorded calls, chats, and other communication, businesses can achieve a multitude of important objectives, including:
- Improving effectiveness of staff training, onboarding, company policies, and more
- Compiling data for analytics (which can help identify patterns, predict trends, and even recommend strategies)
- Providing evidence to help navigate legal concerns and protect against loss
If benefits like these factor into your CRM and sales software choices, then be aware that some software includes functionality to support it, while some does not.
Integrations
Implementing new software systems can be difficult, and onboarding users only becomes more problematic when the system doesn’t play well with existing solutions in the workflow.
Some CRMs are built as part of a larger platform of business solutions, and are intended to be used as a holistic unit. This is a bit of a trade-off, and some cost-benefit evaluations will be needed to determine if a complete workflow overhaul will net positive or negative returns for the trouble.
However, if maintaining the stability and functionality of other systems is of equal importance, then finding a CRM that can integrate with them successfully. Depending on what integrations are needed, there may be plug-ins or add-ons available already to users of the tool.
For less common integrations, some more code-heavy API customization may be necessary. In these cases, it’s a good idea to ask which side of the client-vendor partnership will be building the integration.
What should be avoided is the addition of a CRM that only further complicates workflows and requires additional manual processes to hold the system together.
Marketing automation
Marketing automation is a specific example of the integration concerns above, but it merits its own spot on this list due to the amount of overlap between marketing and sales efforts. Like other sales-adjacent functions, there are a lot of advantages to having the CRM trigger automatic tasks such as sending confirmation emails, email nurture campaigns, and more.
Worst-case scenario, similar to what’s mentioned above, is that the new CRM complicates already existing processes, rather than integrating or replacing them. If your CRM or sales software adds another step in the process of, for example, sending outreach emails because staff members have to manually dig for contact info in the database, that’s a net loss.
At the very least, the CRM should leave any existing processes intact and unhindered. Most likely, however, your organization will benefit from some form of integration, or a CRM that includes marketing automation features natively.
Quotes and invoicing
Next in line for important functions in the sales process that may or may not be handled by sales team members are financials, such as quotes, invoices, and other AP/AR responsibilities. The same philosophy applies here as above. If an all-in-one solution upgrades your workflow, prioritize that aspect in your research.
If integration will suffice, then double-check with vendors for the specific platforms you need to be interoperable. Even if your current process is efficient enough currently, be sure that the CRM doesn’t create additional headaches for anyone in the workflow.
Data privacy
Cybersecurity is, arguably, a priority for every organization (or, at least it should be). Some verticals deal with higher risk than others, however, and may need additional security protocols for their CRM to protect themselves or even to comply with industry mandates.
This is one that may require consulting with IT, InfoSec, or other I&O staff in the organization. Many of the technical details that factor into whether or not a CRM is sufficiently secure may be outside the expertise of anyone without a background in computer systems, and it’s not one to leave to chance.
Check with internal SMEs, and leverage their experience to further vet your shortlist of CRMs. It may even be worthwhile to have a 3rd-party vendor risk assessment done for any that meet all other criteria, just to cover your bases.
Project management
This list of supplemental functions that might be relevant would be pretty long if it were comprehensive. All-in-one systems, analytics and reporting, ease of use, pipeline management, and many more might fit here. Many of these have been touched on above, and others are likely known quantities already.
So instead, this part of the list will finish with one final consideration: project management.
Organizations that have, until now, used less formalized workflow processes may not realize how much of an upgrade a well-designed project management strategy can be. As teams grow, workloads become heavier, and processes become more intricate and complex, tracking things on paper proves a substantial challenge.
With effective implementation, project management tools can provide visibility and accountability across the board. Better still, it can help staff achieve greater levels of autonomy by giving them the tools needed to stay organized and on top of their responsibilities.
Some CRM and sales software tools include project management (PM) features in their toolset, while others can integrate with popular platforms via APIs. Either way, for any team larger than a handful of employees, it’s worth discussing the potential value a CRM with PM enablement might bring to the table.
Choosing the right CRM and sales software
Picking the right software, let alone the right CRM and sales software, is a far cry from guesswork. It takes extensive research and vetting of available options, which can drag the process out for weeks or months.
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- Which CRM software is right for your business?
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