The Best Free CRM Software of 2024

A good free CRM software can be incredibly useful for fledgling business looking to further grow their sales.

After all, few things are more important for a growing business than a good understanding of your customer. The better you know your target audience, the more you can provide customized, memorable services, products, and support. Unfortunately, building relationships with consumers isn’t always easy. That’s where CRM software comes in.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software helps companies to track consumer interactions, improve loyalty, and generate brand advocacy. It’s no wonder the market for this software is accelerating to an expected value of $49.6 billion by 2025.

The question is, which free CRM software is best?

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What is the Best Free CRM Software?

1. Freshsales

Best Overall Free CRM

Freshsales is a comprehensive salesforce automation solution for companies of all sizes. If you want to attract quality leads, build more contextual conversations, and improve conversations with AI insights, Freshsales has everything you need.

With built-in tools for communication, like phone and chat, extensive lifecycle stage tracking, and amazing sales forecasting, Freshsales helps companies to thrive online. The Freshsales ecosystem also integrates with a host of other tools, like Slack, Mail Chimp and Facebook.

Key Features

• Contact management: Comprehensive contact and account management with tracking for previous conversations with clients.
• Communication: Built-in chat, email, and phone communication features make it easy to connect with your audience.
• Lifecycle stages: Check where your customers are in the purchasing process instantly with convenient insights.
• Mobile app: Access insights into your target audience, sales, and other important details on the move.

Freshsales Pricing

Freshsales’ free version comes with basic contact and account management, contact lifecycle stages, built-in chat, email, and phone, and 24×5 support, as well as access to a mobile app. Prices start at $15 per user per month for more advanced features, like a visual sales pipeline and predictive contact scoring. Options include:

• Growth: $15 per month
• Pro: $39 per month
• Enterprise: $69 per month

2. Zoho CRM

Best Free CRM for Automation

Zoho CRM offers a powerful platform for small businesses, complete with a powerful user interface, pragmatic automation, customizable modules, and a host of social media features. The unpaid plan allows you to access all kinds of automation workflows, while managing your leads and building better relationships with clients.

The Zoho CRM landscape integrates with a host of lead capturing tools like Twitter, Google, and Facebook, so you can connect with more potential customers. The usability factor of Zoho CRM is one of it’s most compelling features, with a wonderfully intuitive backend, even for beginners.

Key Features

• Automation: Build extensive automation workflows with tasks, events, call logs, notes, and tracking for all of your deals, accounts, and leads.
• Product customization: Rename tags and pages according to your needs when you’re trying to build personalized experiences.
• Marketing tools: Access simple marketing tools like email templates, and email marketing campaigns on paid plans.
• Team collaboration: bring teams together through direct messenger, calendar syncing, status updates, and a range of other useful features.

Zoho CRM Pricing

The features of the free Zoho CRM package are relatively basic, including things like standard workflow automations and a handful of marketing solutions. You can also connect your teams with simple collaboration tools. Paid packages cost:

• Standard: $14 monthly
• Professional: $23 monthly
• Enterprise: $40 monthly
• Ultimate: $52 monthly
• Plus: $57 monthly

3. HubSpot CRM

Best Freemium All-in-One Platform

One of the better-known free CRM solutions on the market today, HubSpot offers a free CRM for unlimited users, although you are limited to basic features. The solution allows you to track leads and manage the sales process however you choose, with powerful automation, and easy recording for customer interactions across every channel.

The comprehensive ecosystem is great for omnichannel conversations, and improving pipeline visibility. You can also access a range of comprehensive email marketing and inbound marketing tools. HubSpot CRM works with G-Suite and Microsoft Office, which is great for syncing data about your customers across multiple channels.

Key Features

• Visibility: HubSpot makes it easy to track important details about your customers in real-time. You can see performance across multiple channels at once, in the same environment.
• Automation: HubSpot’s free CRM tools will track conversations with customers automatically, and sync with Outlook and Gmail on your behalf.
• Comprehensive profiles: In-depth customer profiles allow you to see everything you need to know about your leads in a neat timeline view.
• Exceptional addons: The available add-on packages allow you to increase your functionality with HubSpot through things like AI insights and sophisticated reports.

HubSpot Pricing

HubSpot’s basic CRM solution is available to access for free, with complete tracking of all your customer relationships and sales performance. You’ll also have access to a range of basic email marketing tools, and integrations to Gmail and Outlook.

For paid packages, you’ll need to decide whether you want to focus on things like customer service, marketing, or sales. Each package includes options like:

• Starter: $45 per month
• Professional: $450 per month
• Enterprise: $1,200 per month

4. EngageBay

Best Free CRM with Affordable Premium plans

EngageBay is a comprehensive CRM and sales solution designed to act as an alternative to suites like HubSpot. You can access a host of features with this software, including marketing automation, helpdesk and live chat functionality, sales, and more. There are even contact management tools where you can track important details about customers through innovative profiles.

EngageBay is excellent for capturing valuable information about your audience through capabilities like multi-channel listening. You can track contact activity, email responses, web activity and more across various touchpoints, and EngageBay also integrates with a range IMAP services, including Office 365 and Gmail. You can also link to Xero, SendGrid, and Zapier.

Key Features

• Marketing: Even the EngageBay free package comes with marketing tools like email marketing with autoresponders to build customer relationships.
• Lead capture: you’ll get a range of lead capturing tools, like landing pages and forms, so you can improve your chances of finding new clients.
• Customer support features: EngageBay users can support their clients with helpdesk tools, and live chat functionality built into the software.
• Easy integrations: Integrations with tools like Xero, SendGrid, Zapier, and a variety of email marketing tools make it easier to run your business from one pane of glass.

EngageBay pricing

The free plan for EngageBay is very generous, offering everything from email marketing and autoresponders, to lead grabbing tools, landing pages, CRM, and helpdesk technology. The paid plans also start extremely cheap, at $11.99 per user per month. Options include:

• Basic: $11.99 per month
• Growth: $13.99 per month
• Pro: $79.99 per month

5. Streak

Best Free CRM for Gmail Users

Streak CRM is a dedicated customer relationship management tool specifically built for Gmail users. The solution integrates into your inbox, so you can reduce the time spent jumping between tools when managing leads. Easy to use, the technology comes with plenty of basic CRM tools, including powerful conversation tracking and engagement reports.

There are also various email tools built into this system, including email templates for more professional-looking personalized emails, and mass email marketing. You can also easily pull information from Google Sheets with the Streak Importer, or add offline CSV files to your system to fill in the gaps when tracking customers.

Key Features

• Email tracking: The email tracking feature shows you where your customers are reading your email with a map view, and allows you to track who is interacting with your content.
• Call logs and meeting notes: Easy-to-find insights into your conversations organized chronologically on your behalf make it easier to nurture relationships.
• Gmail integration: by embedding directly into Gmail, Streak ensures you don’t have to spend as much time moving between apps.
• Pipelines: you can manage your sales and leads by creating as many different pipelines as you need, with centralized record keeping and data tracking.

Streak Pricing

Streak’s free package comes with unlimited pipelines to help with tracking your leads, a basic CRM for up to 500 contacts, and mail merging for up to 50 contacts. You also get powerful email engagement tracking built-in as standard. Paid packages start at:

• Solo: $15 per month
• Pro: $49 per month
• Enterprise: $129 per month

6. Agile CRM

Best Free CRM for Email Marketing

Ideal for companies in search of an all-in-one platform for managing their business and customer interactions, Agile CRM features everything from contact viewing to project supervision, reporting, and various comprehensive timeline features. There’s customer ticketing, a knowledge database, helpdesk functionality, and feedback forms.

Integrations with Twilio and RingCentral ensure you can access built-int telephony capabilities, with conversation tracking, deal-making, and call recording components. You’ll also have full access to a range of email marketing campaigns, with two-way email integration and custom deal tracking, so you can create all your own pipelines.

Key Features

• Deal milestones: Track your deals and set milestones for your pipelines to help track your progress with countless contacts and companies. Unlimited deal tracking is included.
• Email integration: Access extensive email marketing tools, with 2-way email integrations, and comprehensive campaigns with web engagement tracking
• Telephony: Speak to your audience over the phone with integrations to leading communication providers.
• Customer service: Access helpdesk tools with canned responses, groups, labels, and a range of other tools to support your customers.

Agile CRM Pricing

The free package provides access to a host of useful features for up to 10 users, including access to 1,000 companies and contacts, extensive lead scoring, custom deal milestones, a landing page builder, and comprehensive email marketing. You’ll also have full helpdesk functionality and web engagement tracking. Paid packages include:

• Starter: $8.99 per month
• Regular: $29.99 per month
• Enterprise: $47.99 per month

7. Insightly

Best for free CRM Project Management

Insightly is one of the most powerful CRM and sales tools on the market today, offering endless tools to help businesses boost their relationships with customers. You can access everything from extensive contact records, to training videos that show you how to use features for sales tracking. There’s also lead routing, workflow automation, sales pipeline tools, and full customer management.

The Insightly ecosystem is built around the principle of “relationship linking” which means giving you a complete view of the interactions which take place between your customers, leads, and company. The record-linking functionality also gives a fantastic view of every conversation you’ve had with your customers.

Key Features

• Customizability: Customizability is a major part of Insightly, allowing you to build custom apps, data visualizations, and other tools to track key metrics without developer knowledge
• Integration: There are native integrations with a host of tools like QuickBooks, G Suite, Slack, Microsoft 365, and Dropbox, among other apps.
• Customer relationships: Tracking customer relationships is much easier with access to a wide range of “mapping” tools to show the customer journey.
• Business Intelligence: Extensive business intelligence tools help you to make stronger decisions about your future business interactions.

Insightly’s free package is hidden away at the very bottom of the page. With this package, you can access most of the features of the “Plus” service for 2 users, complete with access to tools ofr finding and managing leads on any device. Paid packages include:

• Plus: $29 per month
• Professional: $49 per month
• Enterprise: $99 per month

Free CRM Software Buyers Guide

What Is CRM Software?

CRM software, or “Customer Relationship Management” software is a set of data-driven software features designed to improve how you interact with your customers. These tools include things like lead tracking, to improve your chances of converting customers over time, and contact profiles, so you can see information about your leads in a convenient space.

CRM software can sometimes come with various tools for communicating with customers too. For instance, many applications include access to email marketing tools, while some also offer telephony functionality and live chat.

What to Look for in the Best CRM Software

There’s no one-size-fits-all solution for choosing the best CRM software. Some companies need access to all-in-one sales lead tracking and customer communication tools. Others simply want a way to keep track of conversations with customers across email, and build better user personas.

Think carefully about how you build relationships with your customers, and what kind of software might improve your chances of getting more conversions over time. Some of the most common tools to look for in a CRM software solution include:

Extensive analytics

A good CRM solution should come with in-depth analytics and reporting to help you learn more about your customers and your team. Most will allow you to track things like conversion trends and patterns in customer purchasing. You may also be able to keep an eye on which of your sales team members are making the most sales, or which products are selling faster.

Automatic recording

A good CRM should be able to automatically capture and record data about your target audience, often from multiple channels. Look for tools which can automatically add information from each call and conversation with a customer to their profile, so you can easily find the information you need for contextual conversations later.

Integration

It’s much easier to manage in-depth customer profiles and develop a deeper understanding of your target audience when you can connect insights from multiple environments. A CRM tool should integrate easily with your email marketing and service desk tools, as well as things like accounting software, for an all-in-one view.

Collaboration features

Collaboration features like chat and task management tools on the backend of your CRM can be very useful at getting your team members on the same page when interacting with customers. Some tools will also come with sales process tools to help support your teams as they work on closing deals.

Automation

Automation aspects are extremely valuable in CRM tools, as they can help with things like tracking where a customer is in a pipeline, and determining when you need to follow up with critical sales leads. Look for a tool which allows you to build your own pipelines and sales workflows, as well as email marketing campaigns.

Free CRM Software FAQ

Choosing the Best Free CRM Software

The best free CRM software will depend mostly on what you want to accomplish with your customer relationship management tools. Consider looking into solutions which can offer you the best possible range of automation tools, as well as intelligent insights into your customers, and extensive customizations.

Our choice for the top free CRM software is Freshsales, thanks to its fantastic tools for tracking contextual conversations, and AI insights. However, if you’re looking for automation features, you can’t go wrong with the powerful workflows offered by Zoho CRM.

Gmail users will love the simplicity Streak has to offer, while EngageBay makes it easy to upgrade to premium tools with more affordable pricing.