Best Free CRM Software of 2023 | TechnologyAdvice

Key takeaways

• Free CRM options are available for teams with tight budgets, or those who want to test drive the platform before signing up.
• A solid CRM can provide significant returns in reduced overhead and improved sales results.
• Free isn’t always better, and often a small investment will give you access to significantly more software functionality.

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? 

If you have some budget to spend, you can absolutely try Salesforce, For teams that are still growing, have limited budgets, are there alternatives to signing an expensive contract? Of course there are and we’ve gathered the best free CRM options together below.

Best free CRM solutions of 2023

• HubSpot: The best free option overall
• Zoho: The best free option for multiple users
• Insightly: The best free trial
• PipeDrive: The best low-cost option
• Mailchimp: The best free-to-paid upgrade
• ClickUp: The best free ad-hoc CRM tool

Company
Free Option
Email Automation
Pipeline Management
Appointment Scheduling
Integrations

HubSpot
Free Plan
Yes
Yes
Yes
Restricted

Zoho
Free Plan
Yes
No
No
None

Insightly
Free Trial
No
Yes
Yes
Full

PipeDrive
Free Trial (14 day)
No
Yes
No
Restricted

Mailchimp
Free Plan
No
No
Yes
Full

ClickUp
Free Plan
No
No
No
Restricted

HubSpot: The best free CRM option overall

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. It’s comprehensive and robust, and its higher priced tiers reflect that. Luckily, they offer a free plan and a starter subscription tier for teams that can’t yet handle the expense of a SaaS vendor. 

Ultimately, there’s not a lot of middle ground with their pricing tiers. Either you’ll be using their lower tiers for an extended period, or you’re already in a place to drop $20k+ per year or more for the premium HubSpot experience. On whichever side of the spectrum your team falls, you can try it for free as long as you like before investing.

A HubSpot dashboard.

HubSpot CRM Pricing tiers:

• Free Tools: $0
• Starter: $30/month
• Profesional: $1,600/month
• Enterprise: $5,000/month

HubSpot CRM pros and cons

Pros

• Web pages can be rendered in multiple languages
• Integration with Facebook Messenger
• List segmentation functionality
• Companion HubSpot mobile app
• Subdomain and country-code options
• Live chat features

Cons

• HubSpot branding can’t be removed from assets and integrations
• Web page multi-language support limited to 3 languages max
• Email functions limited by inbox, automated emails, etc.
• Lacks payment features
• No integration with Salesforce, WhatsApp, Google Search Console, among others
• No SEO analytics, A/B testing, or CTA functions

Zoho: The best free CRM option for multiple users

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, so limiting the functionality hamstrings this value proposition a bit—and there are some pretty heavy limitations to the free plan.

Still, the pricing structure is more manageable, even for the higher tiers. Unlike HubSpot, which has flat monthly fees, Zoho CRM charges per user, which is the more common billing method. This means that even a team of one might reasonably afford the “Ultimate” plan, and get the full functionality the toolset offers. 

A Zoho dashboard.

Zoho pricing tiers

• Free
• Standard: $14 user/month
• Professional: $23 user/month
• Enterprise: $40 user/month
• Ultimate: $52 user/month

Zoho pros and cons

Pros

• Sales automation features, including leads, accounts, deals, document libraries, and project management
• Marketing automation features, including campaigns, custom email templates, and more
• Up to three users on free plan
• Reminder features for assigned tasks
• Sales analytics and reporting

Cons

• Single currency support
• Limited access to other Zoho suite tools
• No integration with social or Google Workspace, among others
• Analytics limited to standard reports
• No calendar booking

Insightly: The best free CRM trial

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). 

The Insightly dashboard.

Insightly pricing tiers:

• Plus: $29 user/month
• Professional: $49 user/month
• Enterprise: $99 user/month

Insightly pros and cons

Pros

• Majority of features offered with Plus subscription
• Low cost entry level plan
• Access to full integration library
• Calendar app integrations
• Task management features

Cons

• No free plan
• Access to other Insightly solutions (marketing, service, etc.) add to subscription fees
• No email scheduling for base CRM plan
• Limited process automations with Plus plan
• Plus plan limited to two user “roles” for permission controls

PipeDrive: The best low-cost CRM option

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. 

And while there are cheaper plans offered by other vendors in this list, few have as robust a feature set—most take the limited free plan options, add a few extra bells and whistles, and reserve the more extensive tools for higher tiers. 

The Pipedrive dashboard.

PipeDrive pricing tiers:

• Essential: $14.90 user/month
• Advanced: $24.90 user/month
• Professional: $49.90 user/month
• Enterprise: $99 user/month

PipeDrive pros and cons

Pros

• Extensive integration options with Essentials plan
• Hassle-free 14-day trial
• API access for customization
• Robust lead management features
• Fewer analytics restrictions on base plan than most
• Numerous mobile app integrations

Cons

• No email scheduling
• No meeting scheduling
• Limited automation features
• No Google or OneDrive integrations
• Limited document format support

Mailchimp: The best free-to-paid CRM upgrade

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. Case in point: you can’t schedule email campaigns to send automatically. Someone has to manually push the “send” button when you want to push a batch out. 

The intent here is clear: they don’t expect you to stick with the free version for long. The free trials they offer on the Essentials and Standard plans support this, as does their low comparative cost. In fact, they offer one of the least expensive top-tier subscriptions available, in part because the flat fee structure caps the price, while still offering unlimited users at that tier. 

For smaller teams, a per user price may still be cheaper, but even paying for half a dozen licenses makes the cost about even. Considering Mailchimp is a marketing industry leader, it’s pretty hard to justify going freemium when premium-level service is so affordable. 

The Mailchimp CRM.

Mailchimp pricing tiers

• Free
• Essentials, $13/month after first month
• Standard, $20/month after first month
• Premium, $350/month

Mailchimp pros and cons

Pros

• Pre-built email templates
• Large integration library
• Reporting and analytics features
• Support for forms and landing pages
• Automation tools for importing branding to Mailchimp assets

Cons

• Max 1,000 monthly email sends
• No email scheduling or A/B testing
• Customer support only available for the first 30 days
• Mailchimp branding can’t be removed
• No role-based access
• Minimal automation functions

ClickUp: The best free ad-hoc CRM 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.

Better still, it’s designed specifically to facilitate agile-based productivity systems, so if your whole organization is run with the methodology of a well-oiled software development crew, you’ll likely be well served by the options on offer.

The Clickup dashboard.

ClickUp pricing tiers:

• Free Forever
• Unlimited: $5 user/month
• Business: $12 user/month
• Business Plus: $19 user/month
• Enterprise: call for quote

ClickUp pros and cons

Pros

• Unlimited plan members
• Unlimited tasks for project management
• Strong collaboration and coordination functionality
• 24/7 customer support
• Flexible CRM implementation

Cons

• Limited integrations
• 100MB storage max
• Limited user management
• ClickUp branding can’t be removed
• Limited reporting

Common limitations and omissions in “free” versions

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? 

Here are a few examples:

• Reduced number values (lists, segments, languages, automations, options, etc.)
• Limitations on customer support
• User count restrictions
• User management limitations
• Branding from the CRM on assets created via their platform
• Simplified analytics and reporting tools

Methodology

In making our choices, we carefully selected reputable software companies that offered a genuinely free option. All analysis, feature listings, and pro/con tallies are based solely on the free plan’s offerings.

There are excellent free options for CRMs, and depending on what you need, it may be everything you need and then some. However, most will find that free options omit or limit features that sales teams depend on to operate at scale. 

In other words, if you’re shopping for free plans, take a careful look at what functionality is included, what’s been restricted, and what is unavailable in the free plan. By establishing clear expectations centered on the needs of your use case, you can more easily identify what options are worth trying, and which ones aren’t.

Making the right choice

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.

Looking for more of the latest in CRM solutions? Check out our CRM Software Buyer’s Guide.

1

Rolldog

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Rolldog is a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Sales Enablement solution that helps companies manage their business relationships, increase revenue, and boost sales & marketing effectiveness. Ease-of-use and an intuitive browser-based interface ensures that you can securely access the information you need, whenever you need it, from wherever you are.

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2

Kintone

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Kintone’s no-code platform lets sales teams easily build a custom CRM to track prospect data, task handoffs, and pipeline insights in one central place. Create database apps outfitted with the unique information you need to know about your prospects–and then connect those apps with customizable workflows that let you assign and track those future customers from lead capture to close. Over 23,000 companies trust Kintone to achieve their business goals.

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3

HubSpot CRM

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HubSpot is an intuitive CRM that makes managing your sales pipeline a breeze. Everything you need to track important metrics, set up time-saving flows and automations, manage clients seamlessly, and grow your business is available in one tidy dashboard. Plans are available for businesses at every stage of growth, starting at 100% free. Start taking the guesswork out of business management today with HubSpot CRM.

Learn more about HubSpot CRM

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