10 Best Client Database & Customer Database Software 2023

Monday sales CRM is a complete Work OS software featuring robust client management and database capabilities. The platform lets you manage all client and customer-related data: from contact details and recording communications to setting up automatic reminders and assigning tasks.

The platform provides a 360° view of all customer interactions and communications in one organized view, giving you and your team full visibility into all important data at any time. The intuitive interface makes it easy to visualize every part of your client database without having to switch between multiple tabs or screens.

Managing and recording interactions with customers is also made easy using monday.com: send emails directly from the platform, schedule calls, and instantly log all communications in one place. Whether it’s emails, meetings, notes, or other events, log and connect every interaction to your larger sales pipeline.

Best of all, you can connect your monday sales CRM customer database with many of the tools you already use, including Hubspot, Zendesk, Slack, Google Drive, and others. These integrations can be set up alongside automations to seamlessly trigger actions, like “If customer does not respond in 3 days, automatically send follow-up email.

monday sales CRM costs from $10/user/month and comes with a free 14-day trial. They offer a free plan for up to 2 users.

Salesforce CRM is a cloud-based CRM system that helps businesses of all sizes improve their customer service, sales processes, and marketing campaigns. It allows users to store all their customer data in one secure location and access it from anywhere with an internet connection. This allows them to easily track customers, analyze data, create reports, manage accounts, monitor leads, and more. It includes features such as lead management, contact management, account management, report generation, and analytics. Other features include mobile access so users can access the system from any device, email integration so users can send emails directly from the system, and activity tracking which keeps track of activities such as calls and emails sent.

Salesforce enables businesses to effectively manage large amounts of data, including customer contact information and sales records. Data can be organized into custom fields, allowing users to quickly search for specific items or view summaries of data across multiple fields. Additionally, it provides powerful analytics tools that allow users to identify key trends in their data. Salesforce's segmentation feature allows businesses to group customers based on different criteria such as location, purchase history, and demographics. This makes it easier for businesses to target specific groups with tailored marketing campaigns and special offers.

Salesforce offers advanced segmentation features such as dynamic segmentation which automatically updates segments based on new customer information. As the business grows, users can add additional features or services without having to purchase additional software or hardware. Additionally, because it is cloud-based it requires no setup or maintenance costs which makes it an attractive option for businesses with limited budgets or resources. It features powerful security measures such as encryption and two-factor authentication which ensures that all customer data always remains safe and secure.

Features include sales management, marketing automation, customer service and support, collaboration, customization, mobile access, integration, analytics & reporting, and built-in data security.

Integrations include Google Workspace, Slack, Quickbooks, MailChimp, LinkedIn, Docusign, JIRA, HelloSign, Code Science, Active Campaign, and Dropbox.

HubSpot CRM is a cloud-based client and customer database platform with a suite of tools necessary for managing customer relationships and the sales and marketing aspects of a business. This solution allows users to store customer information—including contact details, company information, and communication history—in one location. This allows users to easily search, filter, and sort contacts to find specific information on a particular client or customer demographic.

HubSpot CRM’s contact management feature is included in the Free package and allows users to keep their contact records up-to-date easily by adding a prospect’s corporate email address and letting the software populate the records with relevant information. As long as the client’s information is stored in HubSpot’s database, manually entering data becomes less necessary. Currently, the database contains the contact details of around 20 million different businesses worldwide, so most users will be able to benefit from decreased manual data entry.

Users won’t have to switch tabs or screens when completing sales tasks since users will be able to send emails, make calls, record conversations, take notes, log sales activities, and more without needing to leave the contact records. This helps boost productivity since users will have easy access to important contact details and communication histories and be able to contact clients. Additionally, users will be able to continue using Gmail and Outlook through integrations so that users can automatically log emails sent to their contact records.

HubSpot’s contact management feature is part of the Sales Hub products and users can choose from the Free Tools, Sales Hub Starter, Sales Hub Professional, and Sales Hub Enterprise to use it. The paid plans will have more extensive features than the free plan, but users that only need a client and customer database can settle for the Free Tools package with its suite of free marketing, sales, service, CMS, and operations tools.

Features include contact management, sales pipeline management, email tracking, meeting scheduling, sales reporting, marketing automation, customization, a mobile app, and third-party integrations/add-ons. 

Integrations include Wistia, Datqabox, Seventh Sense, Zerys, PandaDoc, Eventbrite, and Aircall.

Pipedrive is a sales CRM software that helps you keep track of client and customer data effectively. It also has a visual, drag-and-drop sales pipeline to help you track leads through each stage of your sales process. The pipeline is customizable, and you can either build one from scratch or use one of the pre-built templates provided in the system.

You can add context to your client and customer records by adding notes, and the system's smart data feature gathers additional data from the web to enrich your records. This helps you keep information up to date, but can also provide you with additional contextual data you might not otherwise have had.

In addition to its sales pipeline and record keeping features, the software also has an email tool. You can connect your email account and send and receive emails right in the platform, reducing app-switching and keeping client communications centralized. Reporting and analytics tools are also included, providing you with data about your sales performance and insights into which leads are most likely to close, average deal time, and more.

Pipedrive integrates with other contact management and sales tools like Pipechat, Microsoft Teams, Trello, Slack, Zapier, and others. Plans start at $12.50/user/month, and a 14-day free trial is available.

Bigin by Zoho CRM provides a client and customer database as one of its core features. The platform is a lean customer relationship management (CRM) software that caters to the needs of small businesses. It's user-friendly and intuitive, and helps you keep track of your client records, manage your client communications, and automate parts of your sales pipeline.

The software's central database keeps contact information for all your clients safely stored. You can populate the database by importing data from an existing spreadsheet, and collect new data by creating custom forms through the system. Custom fields can be configured to best reflect your company's operations and ensure you collect the right data for every client record. Should you ever need to, you can export data out of the system, too.

In addition to a client database, the software provides multi-channel communication tools to help you manage your phone, email, and social media communications with clients. You can set up workflow automations to move new prospects through your sales funnel, and track your deals through each stage with the pipeline builder. Custom reporting and an analytics dashboard are also available to help you track your performance metrics.

Paid plans start from $7/user/month, and a 14-day free trial is available.

Zoho CRM is a cloud-based, easy-to-use client database management software with a simple UI and highly customizable workflows for generating, qualifying, and nurturing leads into deals and lifelong customers.

Users can track purchase history, product preference, and personal information on a timeline of activities dating back to the first interaction and lead source. The tool includes advanced filters and fields for deal stage, campaign source, email status, notes added, and even profitability percentage.

Choose from pre-built reports or dashboard templates, or create your own to visualize customer behaviour and metrics in the form of charts, KPIs, and funnels. Team members can export reports as Excel, CSV, or PDF files, embed dashboards on a website and/or make it accessible on a Slack channel.

Mobile-enabled features allow you to log prospect details on-the-go, pull up price lists and agreements, and post significant updates on your team forum or chat. Another great feature is the AI-powered sales assistant that can auto-fill empty fields in your CRM.

Zoho CRM has over 40 native integrations and 500+ third-party integrations that include Google (G Suite), Microsoft Office 365, MailChimp, RingCentral, Quickbooks, Zapier, Xero, and other popular apps.

Zoho CRM starts at $14/month with a 15-day free trial, and also offers a free version for up to 3 users.

Boasting over 150,000 clients and users, Freshsales aims to simplify CRM solutions. To do so, they offer AI-based lead scoring; phone, email, activity capture; sales lead acquisition assistance; sales pipeline management; event tracking (website and app); and more.

Freshsales does email segmentation, sorting, and display-by-relevance very well. This tool categorized conversations in a way that makes them easy to retrieve and sort by customer and it also uses conversation records (text, call, chat, email) to their full potential.

Native integrations include Freshdesk, Freshchat, Freshconnect, Freshcaller, Google calendar, Mailchimp, Segment, Office 365 Calendar, Hubspot, Freshsales for Web, PieSync, Google Apps, Quickbooks, Google Contacts, Xero, and many more through Zapier. Other integrations include Calendly, Facebook, GetAccept, Clenty, Justcall, Toky, 24sessions, Integromat, Akito, Trello, Magento, and more.

Setting up and learning the software was quite time-consuming, losing them some minor points in the Usability section of the evaluation criteria. Migrating from another CRM platform, in particular, has many pain points.

Freshsales starts at $15/user/month and has a 21-day free trial.

With over 800,000+ companies using Airtable, this tool uses native mobile and desktop apps to make it easy to edit, comment, and collaborate within the database in real-time. Organizational options include customizable fields for data; filtering, sorting, and grouping of content; and more.

Having a freemium version, as well as a very reasonable monthly subscription price, made sure that Airtable excels in our Value for Cost evaluation criteria section. This makes them a great choice for those just beginning to dabble in client database software.

Airtable has many built-in integration options as well as a robust API. Connect even more apps and websites through Zapier, Workato, Integromat, or Automate.io. Built-in integration options include Asana, Basecamp, Box, Dropbox, Eventbrite, EverNote, Facebook, Github, Gmail and G Suite, Instagram, Jotform, LinkedIn, and many more.

Minor cons include no options for rich text functionality, quite limited records for free plans, low-responsiveness with customer service, and minimal tutorial help.

Airtable starts at $24/user/month and has a freemium version.

Kintone is a customizable client database tool used by teams at Volvo Trucks North America, Japan Airlines, Shiseido, and over 23,000 organizations worldwide. Their unique approach to client database tools lets you build a wide variety of customizable “apps” either from scratch, using templates or from your existing spreadsheets, for data management, business processes, and workflows. Kintone apps can be customized for project management, sales CRM, client databases and activity logs, expense reports, shared to-do lists, equipment management, product feedback, and much more.

Kintone lets you build client database apps by dragging and dropping elements that you want to see onto the page: rich text fields, date fields, drop-down menus, number fields with built-in calculations, spaces for attachments, user or group selection menus, related data from other apps, tables, and more.

Once you’ve built the app you want, you can use it to more easily manage whatever data and tasks you and your team need to track. And with custom notifications and reminders as well as detailed permissions settings, your client database solution can look and work however you want it to.

What makes Kintone particularly great for client databases is the customizability—users can tailor what information the CRM records and holds, update and change fields or entire workflows without relying on IT support, and create automated reminders to notify sales members of important deadlines.

Kintone’s built-in communication features also allow your team to discuss customers or tasks directly in the database and in topic or project-based threads. Dedicated “spaces” organize all of the information your team needs about your customers in one place, including your customer database, customer inquiries and interactions, and more.

There are so many ways to customize Kintone it can be hard to know where to start. Read the starter blog “What Can You Build with Kintone?” or watch Creating an App from Scratch for a quick look at how the drag-and-drop builder works.

Kintone lets you expand its capabilities with both free native plugins built by the Kintone team as well as integrations with other tools like Slack, Gmail, Google Calendar, Outlook, Tableau, Dropbox, Salesforce, HubSpot, Eventbrite, WordPress, QuickBooks, MailChimp, and many more through a paid plan with Zapier or via API integrations.

Kintone costs $24/user/month with a minimum requirement of 5 users. They offer a 30-day free trial (no credit card required) and discounted prices for nonprofits and educators. Kintone’s team also offers a free custom app build as part of the free trial process.

Free for up to 10 users, Agile CRM is an excellent option for small to mid-sized businesses. Features vary between free and paid plans and may include sales enablement through gamification, marketing automation, customer service, contact management, and more.

Agile CRM’s monthly subscription price is one of the lowest per-user on this list, not to mention they have a freemium version for 10 users or less. This ensured they scored top marks in the Value for Cost section of the evaluation criteria.

Integrations include Twitter, Facebook, TowerData (Rapleaf), LinkedIn, Zendesk, ClickDesk, HelpScout, LiveHelpNow, Tidio Chat, UserVoice, IMAP, Google Apps, Microsoft Exchange, Twilio, VoIP, RingCentral, Bria, Mandrill, SendGrid, Amazon SES, FreshBooks, Xero, QuickBooks, and many more. Connect additional tools using Zapier, as well.

A few cons to note are limitations/restrictions in certain automation capabilities, some cumbersome sales tracking elements, and a lack of search/sorting fields.

Agile CRM starts at $8.99/user/month and has a freemium version for up to 10 users.