Zoho CRM Review

Why We Chose Zoho CRM as Best CRM for Remote Teams

We found Zoho CRM’s ease of use, effective mobile apps and built-in communications features make it an excellent CRM for employees and teams that spend the majority of their time away from the office. 

Remote team members can connect with clients and other teams easily for sales pitches, product demos and webinars through a wide range of conferencing integrations, including GoTo Meeting, TeamViewer, Zoom, RingCentral and Webex Teams. What’s more, the platform’s integration with popular communication apps like Slack, Google Chat and Microsoft Teams allows your team to share updates, sales reports and deals and lead details straight from the CRM — all without leaving the chat.     

We especially liked how real-time prospect alerts notify the appropriate members of your sales team when anyone visits your website, opens your email or talks about your brand on social media. This system keeps your employees looped into important developments and helps them stay on top of evolving customer interactions from wherever they’re working.

Subscribers to the Enterprise and Ultimate plans get access to Zia AI, a virtual assistant with data analysis capabilities to identify patterns in your platform’s activity history and suggest workflow improvements and time-saving automations. Zia can also determine when your clients are most likely to open an email, answer a call or visit your website and can help you draft a tailored message to move your sale forward. Zia can even aid you in cross-selling by analyzing sales patterns and recommending products for each customer at the ideal time as well as alerting you to any sudden changes in their behavior. 

The mobile app with business card-scanning capabilities puts all of your customers’ data in one place, logs call data for added accuracy and convenience automatically and suggests an optimal route when you want to meet your prospects in person. 

Usability

Zoho’s dashboard is user-friendly, thanks to the ability to quickly toggle between classic, personalized and custom homepage views. On top of that, the platform offers an exclusive “Manager’s Home” view that helps sales leaders track and analyze sales data to stay on top of their team’s work. It is fully customizable and, by default, includes insights into core business metrics like the most recent leads, deals and secured revenue. The upper navigation bar puts many sales-focused tasks, notifications and features at your fingertips, but you can also add components and reorder your page to better suit your needs. The sales agent’s personalized homepage sets the day’s open tasks and leads as the top priority.

You can configure Zoho CRM’s dashboard to visualize the data most important to your role. Source: Zoho CRM

Other helpful tools to facilitate remote work include the “Feeds” notification module that can be enabled in the customization menu easily. From here, you can send instant messages to remote colleagues and members of other teams to speed up the decision-making process — as if you’re all in the office together. [See our list of the most important features to look for in CRM software.]

Integration with Microsoft Teams goes beyond messaging and allows managers to share sales dashboards and records with remote team members, even if they are not using Zoho CRM. This means that as long as Microsoft Teams is your company’s choice communication tool, you can ensure that the entire team stays on the same page and collaborates effectively.      

You can also use the modular Canvas design studio tool to customize dashboards and customer record forms across your organization. Users can work from a gallery of templates created by certified designers or browse through Zoho’s list of design elements to develop a custom solution. The drag-and-drop system provides endless combinations, so it won’t take long to cobble together a tailored, branded solution that streamlines data entry and visualization and meets your business needs. 

Once you’ve built your CRM dashboard or customer record form, you can save them and share them across your team, department, division or company. For deeper customization, Zoho’s Kiosk builder allows admins to create unique elements and functions specific to the business through a no-code interface. 

We also like that Zoho CRM offers extensive localization features, allowing distributed teams to work in their preferred language. This makes it easier for your regional teams to adopt and make the best use of the platform. 

Zoho CRM Features

Leads

Leads is the second tab after “Home” on Zoho’s default dashboard navigation menu, letting you know how important it is to Zoho’s functionality. This is where you can create and store essential records like contact details, industry and email preferences for each generated lead. 

The Canvas design tool allows you to customize your lead form view and fields to fit your business needs. You can review all the past activities associated with the lead to track their sales journey. When ready, you can convert them into a contact by simply clicking the “Convert” button.  

You can also use the SalesSignals feature to track your leads’ interactions with your brand across multiple channels, such as emails, cold calls, messages, surveys and social media. By combining SalesSignals and SalesIQ features, you can get notified when a lead visits a specific page on your website so your sales team can take immediate action. Details like where your lead is interacting on your website and for how long can provide valuable information to help your sales agents nurture leads into loyal customers.

Motivator

The sales floor can be an exciting atmosphere — something that can be a challenge for remote teams to manage — and Zoho builds on that to take your sales team’s targets, incentives and promotions to new levels of success. Every lead generated, call made and deal closed turns into trophies and badges to create a competitive sales atmosphere — no matter where your team takes calls.

Features such as pop-up notifications can keep your teams on their toes and let them know how close they are to reaching their daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly or annual goals to stay ahead of the competition.

AI

Zia, an AI-powered assistant available at the top two tiers, can help your team collect customer data, write documents, predict sales, fetch information and automate repetitive tasks to make everyone’s job easier. Zia analyzes when each client usually opens emails, answers calls or visits your website and then suggests the best time to contact them. 

Additionally, Zia can analyze your emails and calls to determine customer sentiment, emotion and intent so your sales team can tailor their communication and next steps. 

The intelligent assistant can also streamline your sales efforts by predicting which deals are most likely to close soon and which customers are likely to churn, letting your team members focus on them and delegate tasks accordingly. 

When it comes to data management, Zia can automatically populate lead forms with additional information gathered from across the web, making it easier for your sales team to contact and nurture those leads.   

Add-ons and Integrations

Each of the four paid subscription bundles includes the option to integrate with popular third-party software and apps for online meetings, team collaboration, telephony, productivity, storage, analytics, email marketing, customer service, finance, business operations and website visitor tracking. You’ll find helpful remote work tools for Zoom, GoTo Meeting, Slack, Trello, Dropbox, Google Analytics, Google Chat, Microsoft Teams, DocuSign, Mailchimp, Zendesk and QuickBooks. [Learn more in our review of QuickBooks.]

Zoho CRM Pricing

Zoho offers transparent pricing based on monthly and annual terms with savings of up to 34 percent for annual subscribers. There are four stand-alone CRM service options, which range in price from $14 to $52 per monthly user when billed annually. Free trials are available for each subscription level. Zoho also offers a limited free plan available for up to three users. 

Choose from Zoho’s several tailored solutions to build the perfect sales platform for your organization’s needs. Source: Zoho

• Free
  
  • Pricing: $0 for up to three users
  • Features: Basic lead and deal management, automated workflows, reminders, standard reports, email campaigns, 10 email templates, one sales pipeline, 1GB of file storage, General Data Protection Regulation compliance, mobile app
• Standard
  
  • Pricing: $14 per user per month when billed annually
  • Additional features: Custom dashboards and lead forms, multiple pipelines, 250 daily bulk emails, prospect scoring, sales forecasting, email insights, Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act compliance, 1GB of file storage plus 512MB per user
• Professional
  
  • Pricing: $23 per user per month when billed annually
  • Additional features: Real-time sales notifications, Motivator sales gamification tool, blueprint business processes, inventory management, validation rules, quote and invoice management, webhooks, web-to-case forms, up to 10GB of data storage and 500 mass emails per day
• Enterprise (most popular)
  
  • Pricing: $40 per user per month when billed annually
  • Additional features: Zia AI, customer journey command center, territory management, custom modules, advanced analytics,  autoresponders, advanced customization, up to 15GB of data storage, webform A/B testing, multiuser portals, 1,000 mass emails per day, data encryption
• Ultimate
  
  • Pricing: $52 per user per month when billed annually
  • Additional features: Advanced business intelligence and analytics software, 5GB plus 1GB/user license of file storage, up to 30GB of data storage, 10 web forms, higher feature limits across the system, 2,000 mass emails per day

Zoho also offers two bundle options in CRM Flex and CRM Plus. The Flex option, which includes the Standard CRM, starts at $14 per user per month when billed annually and lets you add additional Zoho products like Zoho Desk for customer service and Zoho Social for social media marketing for an additional fee. With Flex, you can design a Zoho platform that suits your business needs. The all-in-one Plus plan costs $57 per user per month and comes with all ten of Zoho’s product offerings, including its sales CRM, Zoho Survey, Zoho Projects and Zoho Desk.

If you’re looking for an entry-level CRM with core functions and minimum clutter, Zoho also offers Bigin. Pricing ranges from $0 to $18 per user, per month, making Bigin a good solution if you want to keep track of your sales activities, manage contacts and deals and access basic reports and workflows. 

Setup

All paid Zoho customers are provided with personalized onboarding help through a specialist. Your support specialist will walk you through your tailored implementation plan in a series of remote one-on-one meetings and demos to help you set up and configure the platform to your needs.

If you require any additional help or prefer to hand the implementation over to Zoho, the company offers a “jump-start” service that costs between $2,000 and $8,000, with 10 to 40 hours of work done by a dedicated expert.

Customer Service

Zoho paid plans provide access to Classic, Premium and Enterprise customer service plans. 

The Classic plan is free and includes email, live chat and toll-free support eight hours a day, five days a week. The Premium option, which costs 20 percent of your license fee, adds remote assistance, product onboarding, configuration assistance and 24-hour support five days a week. 

The Enterprise option costs 25 percent of your license fee and provides support within one hour, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It also comes with early access to new features, a dedicated technical account manager and quarterly reporting with recommendations. Zoho’s free plan comes with Basic support options that allow you to email their customer service team or submit an online request, which will be addressed within 1-2 business days.  

Zoho has an impressive resource list for its customers, including free training webinars and paid courses for administrators, developers, sales reps and sales managers. It also has e-books, guided step-by-step tutorials, useful tips and a self-service request portal. You can also request a concierge to serve as a personalized consultant for any questions you have.

Drawbacks

Zoho’s standout features, such as Zia AI and unlimited customization, are not available unless they are bundled with many other features. While Zoho provides a great set of basic tools for free, there is a large gap between the lower- and upper-tier options, pushing most customers to a high-priced bundle. Standard data and file storage may also feel low for some businesses.

Customer support could be incredibly expensive for larger organizations, as the price would be a significant percentage of their license fee. The free support provided by the entry-level bundle provides basic support during business hours. However, the potential of having to wait until the next day for a response could spell disaster for some companies should an emergency arise. These types of service options are similar to what some of the other CRM solutions we looked into offer, such as the one in our Salesforce review and Salesforce vs. Zoho CRM comparison.

Methodology

Our editorial team and contributing writers considered all of the major CRM software providers in 2025 for review. After spending many hours participating in live product demos and testing each platform, we created a list of our favorite CRM systems to help small business owners and managers choose the best CRM for their needs. 

In our review of CRM systems, we considered factors like tools and features, overall cost, usability and integrations in our reviews. We also considered a range of different use cases common to many small businesses and selected the service we found to be the best fit for each. 

For the best CRM system for remote teams, we considered in-app communications features, integrations, alerts and notifications and features that can help bring hybrid and remote teams closer together.

Overall Value

We recommend Zoho CRM for …

• Small businesses looking to implement their first unified CRM solution.
• Small and midsize businesses that already use other Zoho products and want to introduce a sales management system.
• Midsize businesses that want to streamline their sales processes with helpful organization and insights from an AI-powered assistant.

We don’t recommend Zoho CRM for …

• Small businesses without a tech-savvy staff member to handle issues.
• Solo business owners who are looking for an entry-level, basic CRM to manage their sales operations. 
• Small and midsize businesses that want to pay for certain core and premium features only.

Jeff Hale contributed to this article.