Best CRM Software of 2024

For teams on the go and in different locations, Zoho CRM enables remote workforces to accomplish more together. Zoho is designed to increase leads, accelerate sales and measure performance accurately with ease and efficiency. Zia, the AI-powered assistant, predicts leads and deals, identifies potential customers for conversion and helps large sales teams focus their efforts with user-friendly guidance. Zoho is also an appealing option for remote workforces with its gamification features that encourage friendly competition. Every lead, call and deal can be made into a trophy that generates a competitive and encouraging sales atmosphere, no matter where your team members are located.

With Zoho, it’s easy to build a bespoke,  user-friendly platform with hundreds of available integrations and a flexible dashboard. Helpful tools like the Feeds notification module are easily accessible and can be universally highlighted across all team members’ dashboards. Other helpful tools include SalesSignals, which tracks customer interactions across various channels and notifies team members of valuable and time-sensitive potential leads to act on quickly.

Zoho offers four pricing plans: Standard, Professional, Enterprise and Ultimate. According to the software provider, the Enterprise plan is the most popular, which costs £35per user, per month, when billed annually. It features the helpful Zia AI, a customer journey command centre, Canvas visual CRM, a mobile software development kit and multiuser portals. The Standard plan is priced at £12 per user per month, and the most advanced plan, Ultimate, is £42 per user per month.

With thousands of integration capabilities featured in the new Operations Hub, HubSpot is a great option for sales teams looking to improve their performance by centralising data from various software providers. Customers can connect third-party tools to sync and clean customer data easily while automating business processes to assist the efficiency of your team. Once you have integrated your other software platforms, your HubSpot CRM tracks sales funnel metrics, activity insights, productivity and performance across your sales activities.

HubSpot integrations also help businesses centralise lead information in one place. Every interaction with a lead, no matter the platform on which the communication took place, is stored in a tidy timeline so you will always know exactly where a conversation left off the next time you or any other team member picks it up. By syncing with Gmail, Outlook and social media platforms, HubSpot captures virtually every customer interaction and makes it easy to track and use.

HubSpot offers a forever-free plan with more than 90 report templates available for customised dashboards, but its paid CRM solution with unlimited free user seats adds custom report builders so you can access precise data and fine-tune report results. If your small business is looking to integrate and centralise your sales operations, HubSpot’s free plan may be ideal. The entry-level paid Starter plan has a variety of essential marketing, sales, service, CMS and operations features to help you launch a new business online or streamline an existing one.

Salesforce is a leader in CRM software and offers a popular essentials-level platform that’s ideal for small and growing businesses. Small businesses will benefit from the workflow builder, helping to automate every task your team performs repeatedly. The Salesforce mobile app is also designed for ease of use, mirroring the Salesforce desktop experience with room to customise it for employees with different roles.

With one of the industry’s largest third-party app marketplaces, Salesforce can integrate natively with an impressive variety of platforms. Whether it’s Mailchimp, QuickBooks, Dropbox or Google Workspace, Salesforce can help you integrate and streamline whatever you need to accomplish your sales and service goals.

Salesforce recently introduced an upgraded version of its AI-powered Einstein tools, Einstein Copilot and Einstein Copilot Studio. Einstein Copilot allows users to run natural language queries using secure proprietary data from Salesforce Data Cloud. Meanwhile, Copilot Studio enables AI-powered app creation for functions like sales acceleration and customised websites. It simplifies customisation without the need for technical expertise.

Two major updates to the Einstein 1 Platform are on the horizon: the Data Cloud Vector Database and Einstein Copilot Search, both scheduled to pilot in February 2024. Both updates will allow Einstein 1 to access unstructured data like files, emails, stocking levels and purchase history to improve the user experience.

The Starter plan, which is optimal for many small businesses, is £20 per user, per month, and has a maximum of 10 users. With this plan, small teams will enjoy enterprise features like lead management, web-to-lead capture, mass email, campaign management, email templates, case management and five lightning flow automation processes. The Sales and Service Professional plans are £64 per user per month, and feature custom applications and collaborative forecasting. The Marketing Cloud Account Engagement plan for small businesses is £1,000 per month for up to 10,000 contacts.

For businesses with seemingly endless sales tasks and complex ventures, monday Sales CRM from monday.com offers a great solution for project management. The core work management platform provides key timesaving and organisational capabilities. Monday Sales CRM customers enjoy easy-to-use interfaces and unlimited boards to organise projects. Whether you need a custom dashboard for specific communication needs or want to delve into analysis with customer data visualisation tools, monday Sales CRM offers intuitive technology to support your success. The core work management platform is commendable for its intentional design and ability to run and scale to any workflow.

Not only is monday Sales CRM a user-friendly platform optimised for project management, but it is also highly customisable. Customers can set up and integrate notification systems with communications platforms like Slack, eliminating the need for regular status update meetings by automatically alerting team members when a project or task is ready for further action. Additionally, all plans include unlimited boards to organise projects and contacts. With monday Sales CRM’s simple trigger and action templates, you can build any number of timesaving automations easily without any complicated tasks or coding involved. You can save time and increase productivity with a centralised source of data that can automatically log sent emails, maintain a record of customer interactions and help you prioritise your sales opportunities.

monday.com recently introduced mondayDB 1.0 for all its customers, enhancing its Work Operating System with a new data infrastructure. This architecture addresses various complex work scenarios to ensure smoother workflow management and increased performance. mondayDB 1.0 notably accelerates board loading up to five times faster, enhancing data-intensive processes and user interactions.

Prices for the Basic and Standard plans range from £10 to £14 per user, per month, when billed annually. For large-scale operations in need of highly advanced automations, analytics, integration and security, monday Sales CRM offers the Enterprise plan, but you will have to contact the sales team for a bespoke quote. Students and nonprofit organisations using monday Sales CRM may qualify for discounted or free access and all annual subscribers are eligible to save up to 18 percent on plans.

Medium-sized e-commerce companies that rely on repeat business from their customers need a CRM platform that will help them understand their customers’ shopping habits better. Oracle’s NetSuite is a cloud-based ERP platform with CRM capabilities that is well-suited for business owners who want to provide the best customer experience possible. The CRM module helps companies obtain maximum value from each client interaction at every touchpoint. NetSuite organises, automates and synchronises your customer interactions across different departments, including marketing, sales, customer service and technical support. That means any employee can access all necessary context when interacting with a customer.

With NetSuite’s dashboard, you get a 360-degree view of your customer data and a clear view of what’s being accomplished across your customer-facing departments. The dashboard features key performance indicators, active campaigns, new leads, monthly data analysis and other helpful tools. NetSuite’s marketing automation is available for campaigns on multiple channels with forecasting tools that predict deal outcomes and help you stay on top of business goals. The mobile app allows for seamless work from any internet-connected device and its native shipping integration can help handle the tedious work of labelling and posting.

Pricing for Oracle’s NetSuite CRM module is only available upon request, but most small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs)should expect the monthly cost to be a few thousand pounds. Many NetSuite CRM customers choose to bundle NetSuite with other Oracle services to achieve a lower total cost per user. While the unknown pricing may be a drawback to some, Oracle has software solutions for businesses of all sizes, and it is worth the effort to get a price quote if you’re looking for an all-in-one solution.

Freshsales CRM software is both intuitive and adaptable, offering built-in tools designed to optimise communications and help you understand your customers better. The powerful AI assistant, Freddy, is designed to help you develop a more comprehensive understanding of your customers based on historical sales data, activities and engagement. Freshworks also has a basic built-in VoIP phone service with freephone and local numbers available for purchase in more than 90 countries and calling ability from any device.

Once you have your pipelines, workflows and forecasting tools in place, Freshsales makes it easier to better understand and serve your customers’ targeted products and services. From within the platform, you can run personalised bulk email marketing campaigns, manage deals, predict deal performance, forecast revenue and strategically engage with prospects. Your Freshsales CRM can also automatically build your prospects’ contact profiles, spot rotten deals and reawaken cold leads that still have potential.

While all three paid Freshsales plans include everything necessary for successful sales and marketing, the Pro and Enterprise plans offer standout features that make Freshsales such a desirable CRM platform. Freshsales offers a free plan and a 21-day free trial for any account. The lowest-cost plan, Growth, is listed at £12 per month and includes up to five sales sequences and 250 personalised bulk emails per day. The Pro plan provides double the sales sequences and greatly increases the daily email limit for £29 per user per month. For advanced sales needs at larger companies, the Enterprise plan is available for £55 per user, per month, with 25 sales sequences and 5,000 personalised bulk emails each day.

Offering a unique and highly useful relationship-linking feature, Insightly CRM gives businesses extra control over their sales operations. For small teams without the ability to manage all the details of sales processes, Insightly offers a dynamic and easily customisable solution. Admins and reps can build their ideal personal dashboards to highlight particular contexts, metrics and workflows. While AI and predictive tools are available only with the most expensive plans, all of Insightly’s service plans allow you to create specific rules for common events that trigger actions within the sales process.

Tracking metrics and key performance indicators is different for every business, and Insightly enables the customisation of both reports and processes to fit any business in any industry. The highest-level plan gives customers the ability to create and specifically define entire workflows around a single event. These customisation features can save a significant amount of time and relieve team members from monotonous low-productivity tasks. With complete workflow automation, custom validation rules, dynamic page layouts and configurable webhooks, Insightly offers impressive automation abilities with a fully featured plan.

Insightly CRM offers three pricing plans. The lowest-level plan, starting at $29 per month, allows you to work from any device and includes Slack integration with the AI bot to keep your team up to date on new leads and internal communication. The Professional plan priced at $49 per month helps businesses identify and manage leads with customisable real-time insight cards and additional integrations. For $99 per month, the Enterprise plan further builds on the platform’s CRM capabilities with stronger customer relationships, connections to any application and the ability to easily provide bespoke quotes for complex and customisable products.

Despite the large number of CRM software titles on the market, some small business owners find that nothing is quite the right fit for their company. Enter Quickbase, a downloadable CRM template that you can use to design a seamlessly integrated CRM.

Quickbase is a “low-code” solution, meaning most of the heavy lifting is done for you, but it still requires some coding knowledge to create the finished product. Quickbase isn’t the right CRM for everyone, but developers will recognise the value of a low-code app that can be ready for rollout in weeks instead of months. Tweaks and changes to the system are made in a sandbox environment, so there’s often no need to take the entire CRM system offline for updates. Some components can be changed with no downtime at all.

Once live, Quickbase behaves like a traditional CRM. It includes drag-and-drop workflow automations, file attachment space, business app integration, reports and other common CRM tools. Each service plan includes access to a library with hundreds of sample apps worth browsing. Quickbase isn’t as feature-rich as prebuilt solutions, but many businesses consider that an advantage. A flexible CRM gives you the option to include the features you want without paying extra for features you don’t need. Quickbase has three plans that start at around £27per monthly user.

With its user-friendly interface and simple setup, Keap is an appealing tool for businesses adopting CRM software for the first time. Keap is designed to help its users learn quickly without assuming its customers are CRM experts. The all-in-one CRM platform stores all customer activity in a centralised space and automatically adds all customer interactions to grow your team’s ability to sell and offer support efficiently. Right from the dashboard, your team can text, email, book appointments, process purchases and add invoices with one click. To make building your business easier, Keap automates contact management intuitively from activities across multiple platforms.

Small businesses can set up in 20 minutes and all customers are provided with a dedicated support manager to ensure the successful use of the software. Truly designed to grow your business, Keap provides premade and customisable templates for new pipelines and helpful video guides explaining the software’s capabilities. Without any coding experience, you can trigger automated actions to help turn leads into sales. For efficient navigation, you can organise information chronologically or by category. Keap also offers user-friendly analytics and support for revenue trends, email marketing performance and list growth.

Not only is Keap uniquely suited to first-time users, but its pricing structure is also different from those of other CRM software providers. Using a contact-based pricing structure, Keap offers two main plans: Pro and Max. When billed annually, the Pro plan starts at £125 per month for two user seats, and the Max plan starts at £180 per month for three user seats. Both plans include a limited number of contacts but, with a higher monthly base, the platform can easily handle more than 25,000 contacts. The company also offers a 14-day free trial.

For businesses in need of a powerful visual sales pipeline with at-a-glance information and data visualisations, Pipedrive is a great CRM solution. Its visual tools make it easy to understand each opportunity, while the drag-and-drop interface helps team members respond easily to the mission-critical tasks highlighted on the dashboard. With customisable pipelines and fields, you can optimise your existing workflow systems and improve processes across departments. With a powerful mobile app, Pipedrive also helps you engage with customers and team members on the go.

Pipedrive is easy to set up, even without a dedicated information technology staff, and its visual features are designed to enhance the efficacy of sales performance, reporting tools, automation of workflows and communication tracking. With a native messaging inbox, you can save interaction history automatically to help Pipedrive deliver valuable information about sales strategy. Pipedrive’s artificial intelligence (AI) tool picks up on key opportunities for improvement with performance recommendations and suggested tasks. The software also calculates your average conversion rate so that you know how many new leads to get and which activities to complete to meet your nearest targets. Real-time reports show if you’re on track, giving you time to adjust course, if needed, and providing timely coaching to maximise your sales strategies.

We also like how Pipedrive lets users share their automations creations with their colleagues. Rather than making sure all employees have the level of technical know-how, Pipedrive’s sharing functionality helps make sure your whole team can easily take advantage of the individually-created automations. In addition, Pipedrive recently gave sales team members the ability to to develop contingent automations, including those that vary by customer action (such as clicks or replies). For those who need support in developing automations, the template homepage and template-building wizard have been expanded and improved.

We also like how Pipedrive lets users share their automations creations with their colleagues. Rather than making sure all employees have the level of technical know-how, Pipedrive’s sharing functionality helps make sure your whole team can easily take advantage of the individually-created automations.

Pipedrive offers its customers a 14-day free trial with full access and no credit card required. At £14.90 per user, per month, when billed annually, Pipedrive’s Essential plan provides 24/7 support and over 275 integrations. The Advanced plan, priced at £27.90 per user, per month, includes additional workflow automations and email capabilities. At £49.90 per user, per month, the Professional plan features in-depth forecasting and one-click calling. Pipedrive’s most comprehensive plan, the Enterprise plan, costs £79.90 per user, per month, and adds unlimited feature use, user permissions and visibility settings.

Providing a superior customer experience doesn’t stop when you close a sale. You must continue to nurture your customer relationships and respond quickly when issues arise. Sage CRM’s customer service tools can help your employees provide support and monitor resolutions without leaving the CRM platform. Team collaboration features provide metrics on case histories and resolution times to help you identify service gaps, and reporting tools let you create comprehensive visual charts and reports.

Sage CRM includes a central repository to capture common issues and their solutions. You can add solutions as you go or store reviewed and preapproved solutions in the knowledge base for consistency and faster case resolutions. Alternatively or in tandem, you can create a web self-service portal that helps your customers resolve their own issues, reducing the burden on your support team.

A wealth of additional CRM features support the customer experience from the initial point of contact to the close of the sale. Automated workflows and lead routing ensure your salespeople interact with customers at the right time while forecasting and reporting tools analyse everything from customer behaviour to sales strategies. Sage CRM also has a collection of features to help you manage multichannel marketing campaigns and support targeted marketing efforts.

For businesses of all sizes, keeping up with a fast-paced and evolving sales environment can be a challenge. SugarCRM has designed its software with automation in mind, and its AI-powered predictions and lead conversations help teams operate more effectively and efficiently in a digital landscape. While its add-on modules enhance its automation capabilities, SugarCRM’s fixed core features work to maximise productivity without any customisations. Reports and dashboard summaries help you access the information gathered by SugarCRM’s automated features through a centralised overview. The AI system develops a complete history of a customer’s journey and predicts outcomes with impressive accuracy to help businesses achieve their monthly, quarterly and annual goals.

Sugar Market, the marketing automation module that can be combined with the Sell tool, helps businesses attract more visitors and gain visibility. It’s easy to cultivate leads with multistep nurture campaigns and conversion-focused emails along with CRM tools. Intuitive drag-and-drop page builders help users benefit from the power of Sugar Market and reduce repetitive tasks.

Most small business owners will likely be satisfied with the features and functions of SugarCRM’s entry-level Essentials Sell plan. However, if your business has more advanced needs, including intelligent lead or opportunity prioritisation, the Advanced plan with additional add-ons and AI-powered capabilities can increase efficiency immensely.

SugarCRM’s upper-tier tier plans feature tools like expanded customer support, cloud storage and advanced workflows. When billed annually, the basic tier plan, called Sell, starts at £39 per user per month with a three-user minimum. The Advanced plan allows businesses to create better experiences for customers at key moments and starts at £68 per month. Next, the Enterprise plan starts at £108 per month and gives businesses maximum control over their CRM operations.

Zendesk offers unique native integration and customer services products to provide support through a full customer life cycle. Customer experiences that extend beyond the sales team require everyone to be on the same page. Zendesk Sell maximises collaboration across departments, allowing teams across sales, marketing and support to work together with the same centralised data and goals. This CRM provider unifies data from multiple customer touchpoints, preventing different departments from duplicated communications or missing context. This is incredibly valuable for businesses with complex customer profiles and long-term relationships. For example, your support team can stay in the loop throughout the customer’s journey across marketing and sales with Zendesk Support.

Zendesk’s smart lists also help sales teams segment customers and filter leads, enabling marketing teams to monitor customer engagements and develop more effective personalised communications. This is one way Zendesk’s CRM solution supports accurate forecasting and management with full visibility into sales processes. Whether you are using the basic plan or an upper-level plan, you’ll be able to provide high-level customer support with all of the current and historical information you need at a glance.

Zendesk offers two valuable AI solutions — Intelligent Triage and Smart Assist — to empower businesses to triage customer support requests. The tools enable businesses to access valuable data at scale. Customer inquiries can be sent automatically to an agent equipped to handle billing for a quicker resolution. The tools can also recognise highly negative sentiments in writing, whether a user is writing in all capital letters or in a sarcastic way. These queries can be routed to the top of the queue for immediate attention. Zendesk’s unique approach to applying machine learning with these tools enables users to create more personalised and informed interactions to serve customers better.

Small businesses and solo entrepreneurs are best suited for Zendesk’s entry-level plan. It includes core CRM features, basic reports and customisable sales pipelines. For those in need of sales forecasting, advanced call analytics and ample document storage space, Zendesk Sell’s upper-level plans offer a compelling solution at a competitive price. Role-based permissions and other customisable settings give administrators granular control over data access within the CRM along with unlimited email templates to help teams streamline email marketing activities.