13 Best CRM for Small Business Owners & Agencies

Are you a small business owner looking to enhance customer relationships, streamline operations, organize databases, and boost profitability?

If yes, finding the best CRM for small businesses is essential to achieve these goals.

A CRM, short for Customer Relationship Management, is a powerful software that helps businesses improve customer relationships, streamline sales flow, organize databases, and manage leads effortlessly.

By centralizing customer data, automating sales and marketing processes, and providing valuable insights, a CRM can be a game-changer for your business. Without a CRM system, small businesses often face challenges such as scattered customer information, inefficient lead management, and poor communication with customers.

With the right CRM solution, you can overcome these pain points, improve customer satisfaction, and gain a competitive edge in the market.

To help you with the research part, we have done the leg work and curated a list of the best CRM for small business and agency owners.

It’s time to choose!

What is a CRM tool?

Customer relationship management (CRM) software is a cohesive system that enables you to manage your customer data, interaction history, sales cycle, lead segmentation, email marketing, and much more under a single platform.

All this produces a consistent and personalized experience for your customers, making your business their favorite place.

CRM for small businesses also acts as a centralized place for your marketing, sales, and customer support team to tap into all the data they need to run their tasks smoothly.

Having a CRM software at the foundation of your small business rather than doing things manually will develop efficiency and yield better results in the longer run.

The question is how to pick a perfect CRM tool for a small business?

Well, there are a few common aspects that every small business needs to look at in a CRM tool when buying, such as:

• Smaller learning curve
• Should be a cloud-based and Mobile CRM solution
• Should have funnel management
• Should be affordable
• Good customer support
• Integration friendly

Now that you have got the primer on CRM tools and a checklist of features, let’s head to the list.

Hubspot is a highly rated CRM tool with excellent features to manage your sales and marketing activities under one dashboard. Its intuitive UI makes it very easy for first-timers to keep track of new contacts, information and assign and track deals, hence reducing the learning curve.

And the best part – it’s free. Yes, Hubspot’s basic CRM plan is free forever. This makes Hubspot the most cost-effective option for small businesses just starting up. If you want more advanced CRM features, then you can switch to its paid SalesHub plans.

Let’s look at Hubspot’s impressive feature list:

Pricing: Hubspot’s basic CRM plan is Free, but for more scalability, you can switch to its Starter plan starting at $50/month.

Drip is an excellent CRM tool for small businesses acquiring leads, managing contacts, and building long-lasting relationships.

This easy-to-use CRM tool enables you to build automation workflows and email campaigns effortlessly. With its powerful visual email builder, you can create exciting personalized branded emails to seal the deal.

Drip has 100+ app integration to improve your lead generation and marketing efforts. Its integration with multiple eCommerce stores like WooCommerce, Shopify, and many more makes it a fair option for small businesses looking to sell products.

Let’s Checkout Drip’s features:

Pricing: Drip builds its plan based on the number of people on your list. The plan starts at $39/month for up to 2500 active contacts. It also has a 14-day free trial.

Salesflare is widely used by B2B marketers and agencies to manage leads and clients.

All credit goes to its ease of usability and the ability to automatically pull out data from emails, email signatures, social profiles, and other sources to help follow leads in a better way.

Moreover, it automatically logs all your meetings and phone calls with customers by connecting to your phone and calendar, saving you from the tedious task of doing it manually.

It also keeps track of your lead’s online activity and tells you when they open your mail, visit your website, or post something on social media.

Let’s check out Salesflare’s feature list:

Pricing: Salesflare’s Growth plan for a single user comes at $29/month (billed annually). Further, you can get a Pro plan for $49/month and an Enterprise plan for $99/month.

BIGContacts is a simple CRM software for small businesses that is easy to use, affordable, and comes with great support and learning resources. It effectively manages contacts, automates workflows, and has email marketing capabilities.

The software lets you organize contacts in one place, including their contact information, notes, and interactions. You can easily segment your audience to send targeted marketing campaigns to generate more leads and grow your pipeline.

With BIGContacts, you can create professional email marketing campaigns automated with triggers and workflows. You can also track the performance of these campaigns with real-time reports.

Overall, it’s a great platform to capture more leads, nurture customer relationships, and grow sales.

Let’s have a look at the top BIGContacts features:

Pricing: BIGContacts BIG plan for a single user comes at $5/user/month. There are three other plans to choose from, viz. BIGGER ($15/user/month), BIGGEST ($25/user/month), and Enterprise (custom plan). You can also get a 15-day free trial to test the software.

Zoho is well-known as one of the best sales CRM for small businesses, especially startups. It offers powerful features to empower your marketing/sales team to generate leads, accelerate sales, and measure sales performance.

It also enables you to connect with prospects and customers, talking through multiple channels from a centralized dashboard. It makes things easier for your sales team to have meaningful conversations with prospects effortlessly.

Zoho also has an AI assistant called Zia to help you fetch information, take notes, predict the future of a sale, provide suggestions, automate tasks, and more. But you only get this in the Premium plan.

Moreover, Zoho also has a cost-effective and straightforward CRM tool Bigin made for small businesses. It provides you with decent features to visualize your pipeline, engage prospects, and plug-and-play integrations with G Suite, Microsoft 365, and Zoho Desk.

Let’s take a look at its notable feature list:

Pricing: Zoho CRM offers a Free plan for up to 3 users. From there, you can use its Standard, Professional, Enterprise, and Ultimate plan starting from $20/month, $35/month, and $50/month, and $65/month respectively.

Salesmate CRM is the ultimate all-in-one CRM for small business owners and agencies, that empowers businesses to streamline and optimize their marketing and sales processes.

Indy’s all-in-one servicesWith Salesmate CRM, you can automate repetitive tasks, track sales activities, and gain valuable insights through sales reporting. It effortlessly integrates with popular apps like Gmail, Outlook, and Zapier, eliminating the need to switch between platforms.

With built-in calling and texting features, you can manage contacts efficiently, and automate workflows to boost productivity. Plus, with the mobile app, you can access your CRM data and activities from anywhere.

If you’re in search of a feature-rich CRM that caters specifically to small businesses and agencies, Salesmate CRM is the ultimate choice for your sales success.

Pricing: Salesmate provides a free trial for 15 days. The starter plan starts at $12/user/month, while Growth plan costs $24/user/month. Further, you can get a Boost plan for $40/user/month and you can connect with the sales team for the Enterprise plan and get customized pricing.

Freshsales, also known as Freshworks, is a fully-featured sales CRM tool best known for lead management for businesses of all sizes.

This CRM enables you to customize sales activities, add custom fields, and see the complete contact journey to become a customer.

Apart from the 360-degree view, the AI of the tool learns from the CRM data and notifies about the leads that are likely to convert first. You can also set up automation workflows, lead assignments, get insights from conversations, and connect with contacts across channels.

Let’s check out some of the best features from Freshsales’s long feature list:

Salesforce is the most prominent CRM company globally, owning around 19.8% share of the CRM market. Since it is the first CRM company, you can imagine how long its feature list would be.

Salesforce started as a tool for small businesses and later turned its focus to big enterprises. Still, it hasn’t forgotten its roots and has a separate solution for small businesses called Salesforce essentials.

Apart from providing a full-fledged sales experience, you can use Salesforce to bolster your marketing efforts and drive more leads through emails, SMS messaging, social media, and digital advertising.

Let’s see the key features offered by Salesforce:

Pricing: The small businesses plan starts at $25/month per user (billed annually) and goes up to $1250. You can also test the waters with its free trial.

Pipedrive’s power lies in its simplicity. Its fast and easy-to-use interface gets you up and running in just a few minutes.

The dashboard opens up a view of your complete sales process where you can use the drag-and-drop functionality to manage deals on different pipeline stages.

Moreover, you can use Pipedrive to track your email and calls for better reporting, get sales forecasting, and create workflow automation to cut back on manual tasks.

Also, Pipedrive has a marketplace with over 250+ tools and services to manage your marketing automation, lead generation, and phone communication needs.

Let’s check out Pipedrive’s features right away:

Pricing: Pipedrive’s basic plan starts at $14.90/month per user (billed annually). You can get a free 14-day trial.

vcita is a cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) suite designed to help businesses manage client databases, boost sales, and streamline scheduling processes.

It is ideal for small businesses such as consultants, health care practitioners, and service professionals.

vcita offers many automated features to enable efficient processing of customers’ needs, including online booking, invoice management, mobile payments, customer segmentation, and more.

Let’s check out vcita’s feature list:

Pricing: vcita offers both free and paid plans starting from $24/month for its Standard plan to $83 for the Platinum plan.

Agile is an all-in-one CRM to manage and automate your sales, marketing, and service under one roof.

Agile is pretty strong on the sales front with features like appointment scheduling, lead scoring, custom data fields, 2-way email integration and telephony, and gamification to instill collaboration and competition in your sales team.

You can use Agile’s marketing automation feature to score leads automatically, and segment contacts based on email opens, link clicks, web browsing activity, and custom tags.

On top of all that, It also has a host of powerful help desk automation features to make your customer support experience smoother.

Let’s check out Agile’s feature list:

Pricing: Agile offers a Free plan with limited features for 10 users. The paid plans start at $8.99/month per user for STARTER (billed annually) and go up to $47.99/month for ENTERPRISE. You can get an extra discount if you pay for 2 years.

When you hear ‘CRM,’ you probably think of huge companies or enterprise customers. EngageBay is here to change your mind – with the best CRM for small businesses, It offers time-savers, powerful analytics, and social tools at prices that make it easy to afford.

The system automates important business processes such as customer support, sales lead generation and tracking, email marketing, social networking, client projects and task management, and more.

Some of the features of EngageBay are:

Pricing: EngageBay offers a Free plan and their paid plan starts from $12.99 per user/month for Basic, Growth plan $49.99 per user/month, Pro plan $79.99 per user/month

Indy is a powerful CRM platform that provides small businesses with all of the tools they need to manage their work from beginning to end with one intuitive software solution.

Indy’s all-in-one services give teams the power to handle critical client communication, draft contracts, manage tasks and projects, conduct effective negotiations by sending proposals, and more.

Indy’s significant advantage is that its interface is clean and highly intuitive. The main dashboard operates like a command center overseeing your business operations, making it easy to balance multiple projects simultaneously.

There is little to no learning curve, and one of Indy’s many strengths is how it links tools together for seamless integration. For instance, you can link the Tasks tool to projects and add priority tags to organize your workload better, giving your team the flexibility to work how they want.

Let’s check out Indy’s impressive feature list:

Pricing: Indy offers a free forever version with limited access to many of its excellent features. For unlimited access, you can sign up for the Pro Bundle at a very affordable price of $12.00/month.