Web Pro

Apr 27, 2023

Nadia M.

14min Read

10 Best Client Management Software for All Types of Businesses (2023)

One of the main tasks for businesses is to provide solutions for clients’ pain points. To do so, they have to handle multiple customer-related processes. If not handled properly, there might be prospects left unfollowed up, resulting in lost sales.

This is where client management software comes in handy. It can help to streamline sales and marketing processes, which is essential when starting a business.

Customer relationship management (CRM) software helps establish and nurture individual relationships between a business and its existing and potential customers. It also enables companies to automate repetitive activities, allowing the team to focus on higher-priority tasks.

This article will go through the 10 best client management software platforms on the market to help you choose which one is the best option for your business. We’ll also discuss the key features you should look for when selecting CRM software.

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What to Look For in a Client Management Software

Client relationship management software is not a one-size-fits-all solution. Every business has different needs, and each client management system has its own standout features.

To help you choose, our experts conducted extensive research to select 10 of the best client management software platforms. All CRM platforms in this list have the following key client management features:

• Ease of use – a client management software system should be easily accessible to everyone in the team. In addition, its data dashboard should be easy to understand for everyone.
• Workflow automation – automate tasks to save your team’s time and effort. For example, send automatic welcome emails when a new user creates an account.
• Activity tracking and task management – track and monitor the current status of team members and client activities, such as whether a sales agent has closed a deal or how often a client requests support. This will help anticipate or prevent obstacles.
• Analytics and reporting capabilities – the software should provide an easy way to view metrics about clients, team members, and the business’ sales cycle, helping you evaluate if they’re on track. It should also have an easy reporting tool to get custom reports anytime.
• Communication channels – communicate with clients. Send direct, personalized, and automatic replies or template messages via various channels, including email and social media.
• Integrations – seamlessly integrate with the applications your business already uses, such as Google Suite, billing software, and productivity programs. This helps sync your data and save time since your teams don’t have to learn to use completely new platforms. It’s also important that your chosen client management software allows migrating and exporting your contact database.
• Mobile access – your chosen platform should offer mobile apps. This will allow your sales teams to have instant access to important information and update deals on the go.

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Top 10 Client Management Software

Here are our picks for the best client management software to help optimize your business performance.

Pro Tip

If your business has a WordPress site and you want to organize projects and tasks right from your WordPress dashboard, you can also opt for WordPress project management plugins.

Zoho CRM Stats:

• Rating: 4.5/5
• Compatibility: web-based, Android, iOS
• Notable features: AI sales assistant
• Cons: limited customer support
• Best suited for: small to large businesses
• Price: freemium, the paid plans start from $14-52/user/month, billed annually

Zoho offers various business management solutions, including its customer relationships management system. The Zoho CRM also provides a robust system to automate and analyze your business’ sales functions, manage leads, customer activities, and forecast sales trends.

Here are some of the features of this client relationship management software:

• Omnichannel communication – reach customers via various channels such as email, social media, and live chat. You’ll get real-time notifications anytime customers interact with your business.
• AI-powered sales assistant – Zia, Zoho’s AI sales assistant, provides intelligent alerts such as data anomalies, predicts sales outcomes, and gives suggestions based on your successful tasks. It understands text and voice queries, and it can read out the data you request.
• Migration wizard – import data from your existing CRM system or spreadsheets.
• Multifarious integrations – Zoho offers more than 300 popular business app integrations. It also has more than 40 integrated business and productivity applications, making it a comprehensive business ecosystem for your organization.

Zoho has a free plan that is valid for up to three users. Its three paid plans come with a 15-day free trial, while the most advanced plan, the Ultimate plan, comes with a 30-day free trial.

This CRM software also offers two other CRM solutions – Zoho CRM Plus and Bigin. While Zoho CRM is mainly a sales CRM, Zoho CRM Plus provides a holistic view of your sales, marketing, and support teams on one single interface.

On the other hand, Bigin is suitable for small businesses that aim to move away from spreadsheets to a CRM solution but don’t need full-fledged CRM features yet. Zoho CRM Plus starts from $57/user/month, while Bigin starts from $7/user/month, both billed annually.

In terms of support, Zoho offers four support plans. The Basic and Classic plans are free, while the Premium and Enterprise plans cost 20% and 25% of the main plan’s subscription fee, respectively.

Note that only the Enterprise plan provides 24/7 support access.

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HubSpot Stats:

• Rating: 4/5
• Compatibility: web-based, Windows, macOS, iOS, Android
• Notable features: free plans with lite features, a customizable plan
• Cons: the incremental contact addition can accumulate to a relatively high price
• Best suited for: small to large businesses
• Price: freemium, the paid plans start from $45-$5,000/month

HubSpot CRM is an all-in-one client management software to help grow your business. It offers separate client management tools dedicated to specific needs – sales, marketing, operations, content management, and services.

This platform offers a free version that consists of the lite version of its paid CRM tools.

Here are some of the standout features of HubSpot’s free client management software:

• Marketing tools – include ad management tools for attracting more visitors to your site. HubSpot CRM also has an email marketing tool for creating and sending bulk marketing campaigns to nurture your leads.
• Sales tools – get a detailed, real-time review of your sales activities to check if you have already reached your quota and determine what to do to follow up a prospect.
• Service tools – its universal inbox allows everyone in your team to view, manage, assign, and reply to any customer conversation with a single voice. It also offers a help desk tool, a ticketing system, and live chat. It includes chatbots for automated responses, helping you provide quick solutions for your customers.
• Operations tools – offers 1,000+ integrations, allowing you to connect to your existing tools and automatically sync data to your HubSpot CRM.

HubSpot CRM stands out among its competitors for its free client management software. It is especially beneficial for small businesses on a budget that just started putting more effort into their client management process.

It’s also possible to subscribe to the only toolset you need. For example, you can use the free plan with an addition of the paid Customer Service toolset for your customer service teams.

Each toolset is available in three tiers – Starter, Professional, and Enterprise – ranging from $23-$3200/month. All paid plans come with a 14-day free trial.

You can also opt for the CRM Suite bundle, which contains all five toolsets, with a subscriptions fee of $45-$5,000/month. Alternatively, HubSpot CRM offers a custom bundle creation, where you can combine various toolsets in different tiers, for example, the Professional Marketing plan with the Starter Sales plan.

It’s possible to add up to 1 million contacts to your free HubSpot account. However, if you add the paid Marketing toolset into your subscription, note that the number of contacts would also affect your Marketing subscription pricing, as they are sold in increments.

Furthermore, this CRM software is also available as a WordPress plugin, which allows you to sync your HubSpot account with the main Contacts dashboard in your WordPress admin dashboard.

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Insightly Stats:

• Rating: 4/5
• Compatibility: web-based, Mac, Windows, Android, iOS
• Notable features: relationship linking, lead routing
• Cons: many of the workflow automation options are only available on the highest tier plan
• Best suited for: freelancers, small to large businesses
• Price: freemium, the paid plans ranging from $29-99/user/month, billed annually

Insightly is a marketing automation and sales CRM software with a beginner-friendly interface.

Check the following list to see some of the features of this client management software:

• Lead routing – automatically route leads to the relevant customers in real-time, helping sales reps make effective sales moves.
• Send and track emails – create and send emails in bulk to your contact or lead list, then track and monitor their performance. Insightly will also notify you when a customer opens the email.
• Record linking – maps out complex customer relationships during their customer journey, helping you see your customers’ informal networks, organization’s structure, and how they interact with your business.
• Custom apps builder – build and deploy custom apps without writing any code with this CRM platform. Your team members can then use the app across the web and mobile devices.

Insightly offers a free client management software plan for up to two users. It also has three paid plans, which include a 14-day free trial period.

Furthermore, Insightly offers a demo request. It includes a free assessment of your business’s customer engagement needs and concrete tips to make the most of this platform.

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ProofHub Stats:

• Rating: 4.5/5
• Compatibility: web-based, Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, iOS.
• Notable features: no per-user fee, proofing tool
• Cons: no budgeting tools
• Best suited for: businesses with remote team members
• Price: $45-89/month, billed annually

ProofHub is project planning software that allows you to manage your teams, projects, and clients from one place. As it’s multilingual, your team members can use the language they are most comfortable with.

Here are some of this client management software’s best features:

• Discussion topics creation – focus on a particular matter by creating a discussion topic such as “SEO strategy,” then share relevant files and comments, mention team members, and proofread documents in one place. Team members can subscribe to discussion topics, or you can select who you want to discuss a topic with.
• Detailed reports – generate roadmap timelines of the project milestones to help you see if your team is on the right track. You can also keep track of open and overdue tasks.
• Request management – organize work requests, tickets, and support queries using request forms so that they won’t clutter your inbox.
• Account transfer tool – ProofHub allows account ownership transfer, meaning you can hand over the ownership and responsibilities to another person when needed.

In terms of integrations, ProofHub integrates with popular apps like Google Calendar and Dropbox. Furthermore, you can also integrate it with third-party apps using ProofHub’s API, enabling easy data transport.

ProofHub doesn’t have a per-user free – all its plans are valid for an unlimited number of users. It offers two plans – the Essential plan, which can accommodate up to 40 projects and comes with 15 gigabytes of storage, and the Ultimate Control plan, which can accommodate unlimited projects and has 100 gigabytes of storage.

All plans include a 14-day free trial period. ProofHub also offers heavy subscriptions fee discounts for non-profit organizations.

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Monday.com Stats:

• Rating: 4.5/5
• Compatibility: web-based, Windows, Mac, Android, iOS
• Notable features: 24/7 support, a comprehensive customer view
• Cons: limited features for the free plan
• Best suited for: individuals, small to large businesses
• Price: freemium, the paid plans range from the annually-billed $8-16/user/month and price upon request for the Enterprise plan

Monday.com is a workflow and team management solution. It offers various management solutions for specific department needs, including creative and design, HR, and sales and customer relationship management.

Some of the features of this client relationship management software are:

• Sales pipeline management – stay on top of the progress of your sales pipelines and manage leads easier with the Kanban view. You can also analyze them based on various metrics, such as priority, deal size, or expected closing date.
• Centralized data review – manage your data, including contacts, client records, documents, and tasks in one platform.
• Contact management software – offers informative contact cards that show customer data like activities, deals, tasks, and documents, providing full context about a contact.
• Marketing operations management – visualizes milestones and deadlines, runs email marketing activities, and syncs the data so that everyone in your team is on the same page.
• Sales and CRM templates – Monday.com provides several templates for sales and CRM activity tracking, such as managing marketing activities, tracking sales materials, and managing the customer onboarding process.

Monday.com has an intuitive interface that your clients can understand in no time. You can give them access to the project’s board, creating total transparency for its progress. This will also help save the time you usually use to update your clients about the project status and report.

This platform offers a free plan for up to two users, suitable for individuals who want to keep track of their own work.

There are also four paid plans, with subscription fees ranging from $8-16/user/month. The subscription fee for the highest tier plan, the Enterprise plan, is available upon request. All paid plans include a 14-day free trial period.

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Pipedrive Stats:

• Rating: 5/5
• Compatibility: Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, iOS
• Notable features: AI-powered sales assistant, 300+ integrations
• Cons: direct sales call from the web is only available on its two highest-tier plans
• Best suited for: small to large businesses
• Price: $12.5-99/user/month, billed annually

Pipedrive is one of the best client relationship management software in the market. It focuses on optimizing sales and the actions that drive them.

Here are some of this CRM software’s features:

• Sales pipeline management – this visual interface categorizes deals by sales stage, allowing your sales team to get a clear view of your sales process and priorities.
• Insights and reporting – keep the most important reports and KPIs in one centralized place and forecast your revenue for an expected date. You can share the reports even with those who don’t have Pipeline accounts.
• Contact management and customer communications tracking – manage sales conversations by organizing them into people and organizations categories, then automatically link them to deals they’re associated with. You’ll get notified anytime your emails or links are opened, enabling you to follow up at the right time.
• AI sales assistant – it provides suggestion cards that contain helpful information like performance improvement tips, recommended features, and information about potential risks, all based on your past performance.

Pipedrive offers more than 300 popular app integrations. This includes tools to automate the financial management process, communicate with remote team members, and lead generation. If you can’t find the app you need, use Pipedrive API to build a custom app for your company’s internal use or all Pipedrive users.

This sales CRM offers four paid plans which all include a 14-day free trial period.

It also provides premium add-ons such as LeadBooster, Smart Docs, and Campaigns. The subscription fees range from $32.50-41/company/month when billed annually, and you can try these add-ons for free once you sign up for any Pipedrive plan free trial period.

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HoneyBook Stats:

• Rating: 4.5/5
• Compatibility: web-based, Android, iOS, Windows, Mac, Linux, Chrome OS
• Notable features: all-in-one booking file, online invoice and contract signing
• Cons: limited integrations, transaction fees
• Best suited for: freelancers, service-based small businesses
• Price: $9-39/month or $390/year

HoneyBook is a client management software that combines invoices, contracts, and project management tools in one place.

Check the following list to see some of the features of this client relationship management software:

• Proposals – in HoneyBook, a Proposal is an all-in-one booking file that combines invoice, contract, and payment information. It allows your clients to review, sign, and pay in one location, cutting out unnecessary steps on their end and waiting time on your end, helping you win clients faster.
• Meeting scheduling – book meetings and sync your sessions with Google Calendar to avoid double bookings. You can also connect to projects to view important information before the meeting.
• Project management – stay on top of your project progress, from inquiry to payment. HoneyBook also allows the creation of a dedicated project portal for your clients, where they can message you, select services, reschedule meetings, access documents, sign contracts, and pay invoices.
• Automation – with this CRM tool, it’s possible to delay particular automated messages for approval to add relevant personal details. Doing so can boost the conversion rate.

When accepting online payments, HoneyBook applies a 3% transaction fee for credit and debit cards or 1.5% for bank transfers. This client management software also offers fraud protection to ensure the security of your clients’ transactions and resolution services to help you in case of a conflict with a client.

HoneyBook offers two monthly paid plans, the Starter Plan and the Unlimited Monthly plan, and the annual Unlimited plan. The Starter Plan is only valid for one user, and it has a threshold of $10,000 accepted payment – once you reach that number of payments, you’ll need to upgrade to a higher tier plan.

All plans include a 7-days free trial period and a 60-day money-back guarantee.

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Keap Stats:

• Rating: 4/5
• Compatibility: web-based, Windows, Mac, Android, iOS
• Notable features: 2500+ integrations, 24/7 support, business growth coaching
• Cons: additional fee for additional users and contacts over 500 may create significant addition to a small business budget
• Best suited for: freelancers, small to large businesses
• Price: freemium, the paid plans’ base fee starts from $40-100/user/month

Keap is a client relationship management software that helps businesses automate their sales and marketing processes.

Here are some of the features this CRM software offers:

• Client management tool – capture new leads and organize contacts automatically through custom web forms, landing pages, and social media. Keap also allows free data, contacts, and audience migration from MailChimp and Constant Contact.
• Invoices and payments – track, send, and receive client payments directly from Keap’s native billing software. You can also set up recurring payments to invoice customers regularly.
• Sales pipeline – easily track all sales performance and processes as they move through the sales funnel via this drag-and-drop visual dashboard. It’s also possible to assign your team members with specific tasks.
• Integrations – sync with thousands of apps, including Gmail, Quickbooks, and WordPress. Moreover, this platform also has Keap Marketplace which provides specialty apps, pre-built campaigns, and technology partners to extend the functionality of your Keap account and grow your business further.

Keap provides a free client relationship management plan with limited features: 100 contacts, 25 texts/day, and only one user.

Meanwhile, there are three paid plans ranging from $40-100/user/month. Those prices are valid for up to 500 contacts, and for each additional user, you have to add $30. Use Keap’s subscription plan calculator to count the exact budget for a specific contact volume.

All paid plans include a 14-day free trial period and exclusive access to the small business Growth Coach. The Growth Coach service offers access to one-on-one coaching, on-demand strategy courses, and unlimited 24/7 expert support.

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Salesforce Stats:

• Rating: 4/5
• Compatibility: web-based, Android, iOS, Windows, Mac
• Notable features: customer 360, sales forecasting, 3,000+ integrations
• Cons: the various pricing model options might overwhelm users
• Best suited for: small to large businesses
• Price: $25-1,250/user/month, billed annually

Salesforce CRM is one of the best client management systems for overseeing your company’s marketing and sales processes. It offers robust sales automation, contact management, and marketing attribution tools.

Here are some of the best features this client management system offers:

• Customer 360 – this customer relationship management system unites your marketing, commerce, service, IT, and sales teams in one platform.
• Pipeline management and sales forecasting – get a comprehensive view of your pipelines, review sales forecasts, and adjust your strategies accordingly. The forecasts are based on your business KPIs, making them relevant to your business’s needs.
• Marketing tools – reach customers in any customer lifecycle stage, from awareness to retention. Then, manage customer journeys across every channel, including email and sales reps.
• Sales Cloud Einstein AI – it’s an AI-powered data analyst helping your sales team by analyzing your client relationships management data. It also provides opportunity insights and bypasses data entry by connecting sales reps’ email and calendar to Salesforce, saving their time.

In terms of integrations, Salesforce has an app marketplace that offers various solutions to extend its functionality. This includes third-party apps, components to create apps and custom pages without code, and access to certified consultants to tackle Salesforce implementation.

Salesforce has a flexible pricing model, meaning you can choose the product you need – for example, only the Sales Cloud or the Sales and Service bundle. Each product has multiple tiers of plan. For the Small Business Solutions, there are four plans ranging from $25-1,250/user/month, all billed annually.

Note that the number of contacts also factored in the pricing, and there are additional fees for some third-party integrations.

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Zendesk Stats:

• Rating: 4/5
• Compatibility: web-based, Android, iOS, Windows, Mac
• Notable features: lead management, variety of integrations
• Cons: the lead generation and sales engagement tool requires an additional subscription fee
• Best suited for: small to large businesses
• Price: $19-199/user/month, billed annually

Zendesk is a customer service solution that offers a client relationship management software called Zendesk Sell. It’s an integrated sales tool for tracking customers’ communication history, streamlining daily sales activities, and monitoring each prospect as they move through the sales funnel.

The features of this client management system include:

• Sales prospecting – build targeted prospect lists based on specific variables, such as industry, company size, and role by using Reach, Zendesk Sell’s lead generation and prospect engagement tool. Then, use the list to create automated workflows for outreach tasks, such as post-meeting follow-ups.
• Call logs and records – log and record outgoing or incoming calls and reference them within the context of the appropriate lead, contact, or deal.
• Integrations – there are 1300+ third-party apps, 100+ Help Center themes, and 350+ partners that can help you enhance your business functionality and performance.
• Sales reporting and analytics – Zendesk Sell breaks down trends in your targeted sales regions or teams, helping you see the underlying factors that drive your sales performance. Furthermore, you can download customer data in various formats, including CSV, Excel, and PDF.

Zendesk Sell offers four paid plans that come with a 14-day free trial period.

However, note that there are additional fees for using Reach, with a subscription fee ranging from $27-81/user/month, billed annually.

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Conclusion

Using client management software plays a key role in the quality of your business relationship with your clients and customers. It helps nurture both existing and new customers, ultimately affecting your revenue.

Keep in mind that business needs and preferences might vary from one company to another. Make sure that your chosen CRM software has all the most important client management features for your business, such as contact management, sales pipeline dashboard, and sales automation.

We hope this list of the best client management systems helps you determine which platform is the most suitable for your needs. Good luck with your client management endeavors.

The author

Nadia M.

Maya is a website development and digital marketing enthusiast, and she’s keen to share her knowledge so people can thrive online. When she’s not writing, you can find her watching sci-fi movies while eating ramen.