10 Best CRM Comparison For Small Businesses In 2023

Monday sales CRM is an all-in-one CRM platform that every small business owner should consider. It enables you to run all of your operations from one central, integrated place. This highly flexible tool excels at giving you high-level overviews of where every deal stands and managing everyday tasks across all teams (including marketing, client projects, and more). Because it's so easy to adapt to different use cases and easily grows with the business, I'd consider it one of the best customer relations tools for startups due to its flexibility, easy rollout, and scaling potential.

Using monday sales CRM, you can get a clear overview of your sales pipeline and prioritize leads according to status or deal value. Along with being a small business CRM tool, monday.com has robust workflow management capabilities that enable you to do everything from setting up automatic reminders, due date notifications, and automatically assigning teammates to new tasks. Use their reports and insights to dig into data for sales, processes, performance, and overall business opportunities other than customer service.

The user interface is colorful and easy to use, but what makes this CRM stand out is its capacity for deep customization. Impressively, most customizations can be set up without the need for a coding specialist – the out-of-the-box automation ‘recipes’ and apps make it a reasonably fast and easy process to tweak the platform for your specific needs without needing to deep-dive into lines of code. monday.com boasts integrations with the likes of Dropbox, Excel, Google Calendar, Google Drive, Integromat, Slack, Trello, and even more through Zapier.

If scheduling meetings between many clients and many company representatives is part of your day-to-day, then monday.com might not be the best tool for you. Viewing appointments in different groups can be cumbersome; you may find you end up with an overwhelming number of boards, and recurring meetings require a third-party app.

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.

HubSpot CRM is a cloud-based software that helps small businesses build customer relationships, track leads, and close deals. It is intuitive and easy to use, making it ideal for small businesses that don't have the resources or expertise to invest in a complicated, enterprise-level CRM solution. The platform includes tools for managing contact information, sales pipelines, email automation, and project management. HubSpot CRM offers integrations with popular third-party applications such as Google Calendar and Slack and its suite of marketing automation tools.

HubSpot CRM also includes features like lead scoring and segmentation, allowing businesses to prioritize leads based on criteria such as interests or industry. They can use automation tools to follow up with leads quickly and efficiently. Its contact management capabilities allow users to easily store customer information and keep track of key details like customers’ contact information, purchase history, and preferences in one place. HubSpot CRM’s lead scoring system helps users prioritize leads based on their potential value and identify which ones need their attention first. This can save time by allowing users to focus on quality leads rather than wasting time on those that aren’t likely to turn into customers anytime soon.

Compared to other solutions on the market today, one of the things that stands out about HubSpot CRM is its ease of use. The user interface is intuitive and easy to navigate, so users don't have to learn the system's ins and outs before using it effectively. Additionally, because of its integration with multiple platforms, including Salesforce and third-party applications, it's easy for businesses to customize their setup according to their needs, making it easier to track leads more effectively and build customer relationships to increase sales conversions. HubSpot CRM still provides enough functionality for most small businesses while being significantly easier on their budgets than other solutions would be.

HubSpot CRM starts at $50/month (1000 contracts) and offers a 14-day free trial.

Salesforce is a leading cloud-based CRM system that helps organizations manage customer data, automate sales processes, and track performance metrics. With its intuitive user interface and comprehensive features, Salesforce makes it easy to manage customer relationships and increase sales productivity. The software is scalable and gives you access to a centralized database containing all the necessary customer information where you can easily analyze trends and gain insights into how best to serve them.

Compared with other CRMs, what sets Salesforce apart is its intuitive user interface and powerful customization options. You can customize almost every aspect of the system—from reports and dashboards to analytics—to meet your needs. Additionally, it uses drag-and-drop functionality for certain tasks, such as customizing reports or creating pipelines.

Another advantage of using Salesforce CRM is its analytics capabilities. The platform provides real-time insights into customer behavior, so you can better understand their needs and preferences. It also allows you to monitor KPIs such as revenue, average deal size, and close rate to get an accurate picture of how well your sales efforts are performing over time.

Overall, Salesforce simplifies your sales process by providing an efficient way to manage leads, track opportunities, close deals quickly, and stay organized throughout the entire process. This improves team efficiency and allows you to focus on increasing sales rather than wasting time on administrative tasks. If this is not enough for you, you can look into Salesforce's AppExchange, where you can add apps that will extend the capability of the software to new horizons.

Kintone is a customizable CRM tool for small businesses that is used by teams from McCormick Distillery (Missouri), A-B Emblem (North Carolina), Michael Callahan & Associates (Virginia), and over 23,000 organizations worldwide. Their unique approach to CRM 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, client databases, customer activity logs, expense reports, shared to-do lists, equipment management, product feedback, and much more.

Kintone lets you build a no-code, CRM system for your business by dragging and dropping elements that you want to see into “apps”: 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 CRM solution can look and work however you want it to.

What makes Kintone a great CRM tool for small businesses is that users can tailor what information the CRM stores, 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 platform makes dealing with change easier. Users can quickly reassign work and add new customer information by adding new data fields to your CRM app with just a few clicks.

Kintone’s built-in communication features also allow your team to discuss customers or tasks directly in the apps 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.

Pipedrive is a sales management tool for small teams with big ambitions. It visualizes your sales pipeline and helps to make sure important activities and conversations won’t get dropped. Salespeople really like it because it’s easy to use and intuitive. And managers like it because they don’t need to nag their team to use their CRM.

Pipedrive is hailed as being very simple to configure and use, meaning that you don't need advanced tech support to get it up and running. (A relief for SMBs without IT resources.)

Pipedrive has a series of monthly subscriptions with varying degrees of feature support as well as for-purchase add-ons for lead boosting and web visitor tracking. As a small business, you can start with the essentials knowing that it is easy to scale up functionality if your customer base expands. The basic plan is a great place to start. You'll get lead, deal, calendar, and pipeline management tools for a low per-user monthly price.

Pipedrive integrates with other software such as Google Apps, Mailchimp, and Zapier (paid plan required). They also offer a powerful API for those that like to “roll their own' software solutions.

Pipedrive costs from $12.50/user/month (annually) and comes with a free 14-day trial.

Bigin is an easy to use, pipeline-centric CRM from Zoho that is built specifically for small businesses. The tool comes with multiple pipelines for different business operations and allows users to customize pipeline stages.

Bigin provides customizable dashboards to track key business metrics in one place. It also has built-in telephony and email so you can reach out to your prospects without having to switch between applications. Bigin also provides features for automating workflows and routine tasks, and allows users to set reminders for tasks and follow-ups.

The pipeline view is clean and intuitive. Users can track deals by stage, as well as filter contacts and companies. Bigin also offers a fully-featured mobile app.

Bigin integrates with some of the top apps like Google Workspace, MS Office 365, Mailchimp, Zapier, and a host of other popular Zoho tools including Zoho Books (Accounting), Zoho Desk (Customer Service), and Zoho Campaigns (Email Marketing). Bigin also offers an open API to connect to external data sources.

Pricing for Bigin starts at $7/user/month.

Zoho CRM is an omnichannel business management platform that provides its users with complete visibility and control over their sales pipeline and processes. Zoho caters to businesses of all sizes. When it comes to small businesses, Zoho CRM hasn’t scaled its features down. They understand that small businesses need to keep their productivity streamlined to help them focus on delivering stellar customer experiences and building brand loyalty.

Zoho CRM’s lead management software ensures leads find their way into your sales pipeline with smart web forms, a business card scanner, website visitor tracking with live chat, social media integrations, lead scoring, and distribution rules. Zia, Zoho CRM’s AI-powered sales assistant, can predict the best time to contact customers, scans your emails for urgency, and can even pull up relevant statistics or documents when performing searches. You can automate sales processes by assigning rules and mapping modules within or across Zoho products.

Analytical widgets such as charts, KPIs, target meters, and funnels are part of Zoho CRM’s customizable dashboards. Match data across modules and create in-depth reports with filters based on specific criteria, such as the deal stage, name, or time. Export reports as Excel, CSV, or PDF files, and embed dashboards into your website or share them on your Slack channel.

Zoho CRM is one of the 40+ integrated business apps on offer from Zoho. CRM users can work seamlessly with the most popular business apps on the market such as G suite, WordPress, MailChimp, Evernote, and Unbounce, with over 300 integrations. Over 150,000 businesses worldwide trust Zoho CRM, and their software is available in 26 languages.

Zoho CRM starts at $14/user/month, with a free version available to organizations of up to 3 users. Sign up for the 15-day free trial to learn more. You can pay monthly or annually for features of your choice with no hidden costs. Their free edition has a maximum of 3 users, with 24/5 support.

HoneyBook is a comprehensive CRM platform for independent professionals. It provides the tools to manage inquiries, contracts, scheduling, and payments⁠—everything it takes to serve clients as a service-based business. HoneyBook helps you move clients from inquiry to invoice by combining your workflow and client experience. You can add a contact form to your website or social media page and new inquiries get automatically added to your pipeline. You can even trigger proposals, invoices, contracts, and scheduling tools.

Beyond client management, HoneyBook gives you a birds-eye view of your overall business through reporting that tracks financial data, success rates, and lead sources.

HoneyBook has some free tools you can try, too, including invoice generators, email signature generators, and mission state generators. You can also access free invoice and contract templates.

Key features include invoicing, proposals, scheduling, contracts, workflow automation, digital payment processing, client communication, meeting/appointment bookings, tasks and to-do lists, file and document storage, and project management.

Integrations include Zoom, QuickBooks, Gmail, and Google Calendar. You can unlock more through a Zapier subscription (may incur additional costs).

After your 7-day free trial, you can use HoneyBook for $1/month for your first 6 months with code: ONLY1. From then on, HoneyBook starts at $39/month.

noCRM.io is a lead management software designed specifically for SMBs with sales teams. The tool enables sales teams to quickly create leads directly from emails, the mobile/desktop app, business cards, and LinkedIn, as well as manage them via an easily accessible interactive feed.

noCRM.io provides clear overviews of your sales funnel and a dashboard with key data, so users can view priorities and to-do lists at a glance. The tool is extremely easy to use, reducing time-consuming manual data entry, and can be set up in a few minutes.

Also included are features such as email integration, call tracking, built-in prospecting, a sales script generator, and visual pipeline management. The tool’s mobile app is available for iPhone and Android.

noCRM.io offers native integrations with G-Suite, RingCentral, Freshbooks, and you can use Zapier to connect noCRM.io with other apps in your sales and marketing stack.

noCRM.io pricing plans start from $12/user/month.

Act! is a CRM and marketing automation platform tailored for small- and medium-sized businesses that want to manage a central repository of valuable information about their existing customers, prospects, and potential opportunities. It is capable of securing contact information, account history, and customer interactions.

The marketing automation module is designed to facilitate the unique requirements of your business, offering automated management of your email marketing campaigns, customer and employee surveys, landing pages, and other related assets.

Additionally, its customer management module is capable of recording and maintaining comprehensive customer data, which includes their contact details, transaction/interaction history, emails, and relevant documents. It organizes the information and stores them in a central repository for quick and easy access.

Finally, the platform has Android and iOS apps, which enable users to remain connected to the platform and keep track of their contacts, client/customer activities, and communications.

Act! integrates with various third-party solutions that many small businesses may already be using, such as Google Apps, Outlook, and Slack. Act! also offers an open API for custom integrations tailored to specific business requirements.

Pricing for Act! CRM starts at $30 per user/month with Act! Premium Cloud or $40 per user/month if it comes with desktop sync, and $37.50 per user/month for Act! Premium Desktop, the on-premise version. You can access a 14-day free trial to try it out.