Best CRM software 2024 | CNN Underscored Money

With affordable pricing plans and a comprehensive and customizable all-in-one platform, Apptivo is our top-rated CRM for small businesses. Combining lead and contact management and quoting and invoicing into one integrated platform, Apptivo provides a centralized solution for managing customers, contacts and prospects.
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Apptivo’s core apps are customizable without code using a drag-and-drop editor that lets you tailor fields, reports, dashboards, views and layouts according to your business needs. While campaign management and marketing automation features aren’t included in the tool’s Lite plan, the higher pricing tiers have access to strong functionality that includes an email template builder, performance dashboards and audience retargeting.
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Following a 30-day free trial, you can choose from three progressive pricing tiers, each with a great range of CRM features. Pricing, when paid annually, starts at $8 per user for the Lite plan, increasing to $12 per user for the Premium plan and capping at $20 per user for the Ultimate plan. If you opt for month-to-month payments, prices will increase by 20%. Plus, Apptivo’s suite of applications allows businesses to start small and seamlessly add more functionality as they grow.
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Apptivo also provides 24/7 support and implementation assistance with every pricing tier, and its mobile app — with all the same features as the web app — enables teams to access and sync all data and gain a 360-degree view of customers and prospects in the field.

Going beyond basic social media monitoring, Nimble CRM has social media prospecting functionality baked into the platform’s core feature set. Along with social profile matching (which automatically updates relevant contact data from social media profiles to their records), Nimble’s segmentation tool identifies and groups audiences based on criteria like location and shared relationships. This enables targeted actions such as setting stay-in-touch reminders or sending group messages.
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Nimble’s social data enrichment tool further enhances your contacts’ social media data and creates a workflow once contact information is located. This involves sending messages, gauging their effectiveness and scheduling follow-ups. Nimble also enables users to customize multiple pipelines, automate marketing activities and engage in lead generation.
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In terms of pricing, Nimble’s single-tier pricing comes in at $24.90 per user per month (increasing to $29.90 if you choose to pay on a month-to-month basis), which might limit your ability to scale in terms of core features. However, you can add 10,000 contacts, storage in increments of 10GB and credits for data enrichment, each for an additional $10 per month, and, given the platform’s broad functionality, Nimble is still a strong option for growing businesses without compromising on essential features.

HubSpot’s free CRM is a great starter tool for small businesses that need a basic, easy-to-use CRM with strong core features. These include email scheduling, tracking and templates, a prospecting tool, contact and document management, and reporting dashboards. The free tool provides great functionality — in fact, the paid plans provide the same core features, just with extra bandwidth for features like email sends, templates, contact lists and deal pipelines.
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As well as being a great first-time CRM, HubSpot scales as businesses grow. The Starter plan — priced at $18 per month for two users with annual payment or $20 on a month-to-month basis — and the Professional plan — priced at $450 per month for five ($500 month-to-month) — offer extra functionality including conversation routing, recurring tasks and forecasting. This is great if you need advanced features, but the free plan will cover your basic CRM needs and more.
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Another benefit for CRM novices is the combination of easy implementation processes and great customer support reported by users.

If you need a highly collaborative CRM tool for cross-functional teams, monday.com’s Sales CRM platform could help you simplify shared ownership of tasks through custom workflows, centralized communication and real-time collaboration.
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monday.com’s CRM tool is for you if you prefer a project management style approach to managing the sales process, with several visual board styles including Kanban, timeline, workload and calendar views. You can also tailor your CRM according to your sales and work processes, including options to customize lead scores, labels and dashboards.
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Each plan comes with unlimited board creation, as well as unlimited customizable pipelines and templates for lead, contact and deal management. What’s more, every monday.com pricing plan lets you build an unlimited database of contacts, which means you won’t need to factor paying for extra storage into your budget as your contact list expands.
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You can easily add extra functionality at a reasonable price as you grow, with three pricing tiers ranging from $10 to $24 per user per month when paid annually, plus an enterprise version with custom pricing. However, all pricing tiers increase by 18% if you choose to pay on a month-to-month basis.

Founded in 1999, Salesforce is one of the most seasoned vendors in the CRM industry. Offering a highly customizable CRM suite packed with advanced marketing and sales features, Salesforce is best suited for businesses that want to configure and customize the core product to suit their needs.
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Salesforce’s recent venture into predictive and generative AI tools takes this premise one step further, promising to deliver “more sales, better service, and lower costs for small, medium and enterprise business”. These features include AI-powered campaigns, personalization, workflows, insights and chatbots. However, access to these features is limited to the platform’s two highest pricing tiers, priced at $330 and $500 per user per month, respectively.
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Priced significantly cheaper at $25 per user per month when paid annually, the platform’s Starter Suite comes with an impressive feature set encompassing lead, account, contact and opportunity management, onboarding, email integration, and automated activity capture. The next tier ($80 per user per month) provides customizable reports and dashboards and quoting and contracts. With a 30-day free trial, you can also explore all but the most expensive of Salesforce’s packages before you commit.

Zoho CRM offers a good range of sales enablement features to help businesses automate and optimize their sales workflows, including quote, invoice and order generation, vendor portals, calendar synchronization and integration with Google Workspace and Microsoft Office 365.
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Digging deeper into the tool’s sales enablement functionality, you can also expedite prospecting by creating custom quotes with the platform’s CPQ (configure, price, quote) tool, create sequential forms to guide sales reps, and prioritize and segment emails according to your sales pipeline. Plus, the platform integrates with over 800 third-party applications to help businesses sync their existing tech stack with their CRM.
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The platform also offers core CRM functionality, including sales and marketing automation, process management, and reporting and analytics across all four pricing tiers. These tiers range from $14 to $52 per user per month with annual payment, although these prices increase by as much as 34% if you prefer to pay on a month-to-month basis. Opt for either the Enterprise or Ultimate pricing package if you want AI-powered capabilities such as sales forecasting, email intelligence or data enrichment.
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Small and growing businesses can benefit from Zoho CRM’s scalable pricing packages. However, if you need core CRM features on a small budget, the provider’s generous free-forever CRM could be a good starting point, offering lead, contact, deal and account management features.

If you’re strapped in the marketing department, Agile CRM’s strong suite of marketing automation features can help you combine your marketing and sales efforts and processes. These include a drag-and-drop workflow designer, drip marketing, social media monitoring, multi-channel marketing campaigns and more.
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While Agile CRM offers a free plan for 10 users, more advanced marketing automation features are limited to the provider’s paid plans. The free plan, however, is a great option for businesses that don’t need robust marketing automation features, offering lead scoring, email campaigns and a form and landing page builder. For CRM beginners, users report an intuitive interface that facilitates easy setup and navigation.
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If you’re looking for a low-cost CRM, Agile CRM’s three paid plans start at $9.99 per user per month (when paid annually) for up to 50,000 contacts and $64.99 per user per month for unlimited contacts, campaign workflows and automation rules. Choosing to pay on a month-to-month basis costs $14.99, but with a two-year subscription, you can enjoy a substantial 40% discount.

We chose Pipedrive as the best CRM software for industry-specific features based on its vast range of customized CRM tools for various sectors. For example, if you need a call center CRM, Pipedrive provides automated call routing, recording and labeling. Or, if you need a CRM for the real estate sector, you can access property management features and audio notes for property showings.
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In terms of core CRM features, Pipedrive offers lead, deal, contact, calendar and pipeline management, customizable pipelines, visual dashboards and 24/7 live chat support across all pricing plans. For more advanced features like streamlined lead routing, revenue forecasts and unlimited reports and customizations, you’ll need to choose one of the higher pricing tiers.
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Pipedrive offers five pricing tiers, ranging from $14.90 per user per month for the cheapest plan to $99 for the most expensive plan (when paid annually), ensuring a suitable option for a diverse range of CRM needs. Prices increase by up to 32% when you choose to opt for a monthly subscription. However, there is no built-in feature for campaign management. To create customizable email campaigns and access email segmentation and analytics, you’ll need to purchase the Campaigns add-on, which costs an additional $13.33 per month.

Note: SharpSpring was acquired by marketing automation platform Constant Contact in 2021, and rebranded as Constant Contact Lead Gen & CRM in 2023.
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Constant Contact is a good choice for companies that want to level up their marketing efforts with SMS marketing and AI-powered tools. With an AI content generator tool for enhanced email and SMS campaigns, a library of plug-and-play marketing templates and A/B email testing, the platform helps companies improve their sales and lead generation activities. You can even set up a dedicated number from your brand that your customers will recognize to track SMS campaign analytics.
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Supporting the platform’s SMS marketing automation are features like account and opportunity management, customized pipelines, automated lead scoring, a drag-and-drop email template editor and email tracking and analytics.
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With only one pricing plan available ($449 per month), the platform might not be a great fit for smaller companies with fewer resources, especially given that there’s no free trial available. Despite the tool’s relatively expensive price, some users are disappointed with the platform’s lack of robust features and somewhat clunky interface.

Experienced CRM users may remember Keap under its former name, Infusionsoft. We chose Keap as the best CRM for entrepreneurs because of features such as the Lifecycle Automation Assessment, which helps business owners evaluate their business plans and create a customized sales and marketing playbook. Keap is also a suitable CRM for businesses across a variety of sectors, including e-commerce, real estate, hospitality and health and wellness.
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With Keap, users have access to 24/7 customer support and will be assigned a dedicated customer success manager, which is a valuable resource for businesses. Plus, users report that while the system has a steep learning curve, the platform’s automations help them efficiently manage their processes and workflows.
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Geared toward small businesses that want to automate basic sales, marketing and business processes, the platform’s most affordable plan, priced at $159 per month, includes 1,500 contacts and two users. However, these limits are relatively low compared to other tools on this list. Plus, the subscription doesn’t include the one-time fee of $999 that Keap requires for its onboarding services. Keep in mind that you can save up to 20% when you choose to pay for an annual subscription.