Top 10 Best CRM Software Solutions for 2024 Compared

The best CRM software can help you consolidate all your customer data, make data-driven decisions, and personalize your customer service and marketing campaigns.

However, with so many choices available, choosing the best CRM software isn’t easy. To help, we’ve reviewed and compared the market’s top CRM apps.

We’ve meticulously tested their ease of use, functionality, integrations, customer support, and more to deliver accurate insight into who each one is best for.

Table of Contents Table of Contents

1. The 10 Best CRM Systems in 2024
2. The Best CRM Platforms Reviewed
3. The 10 Best CRM Tools Compared
4. What is CRM?
5. Why You Need a CRM System
6. How to Choose the Right CRM Software for You
7. Free vs Paid CRM Software Providers
8. Prioritize Mobile CRM Solutions
9. Conclusion
10. Our other CRM guides
11. FAQs
12. References

Show Full Guide

Table of Contents

1. The 10 Best CRM Systems in 2024
2. The Best CRM Platforms Reviewed
3. The 10 Best CRM Tools Compared
Show Full Guide
4. What is CRM?
5. Why You Need a CRM System
6. How to Choose the Right CRM Software for You
7. Free vs Paid CRM Software Providers
8. Prioritize Mobile CRM Solutions
9. Conclusion
10. Our other CRM guides
11. FAQs
12. References

The Best CRM Platforms Reviewed

Our in-depth reviews of the market’s best CRM software will give you a deeper understanding of what each provider offers. This will help you accurately gauge how well each customer relationship management (CRM) tool would align with your business’s needs.

1. Monday CRM — Best CRM Software for Ease of Use

Monday is a simple, easy-to-use sales CRM app for businesses of all sizes. Its drag-and-drop UI is incredibly intuitive, and there are extensive options to customize the platform to your needs.

It automatically logs all emails and keeps track of conversations across multiple channels, eliminating concerns about scattered, inaccurate, or outdated data. It’s also excellent for email marketing.

You can leverage a library of email templates to save valuable time and increase the productivity of your sales agents. Another key feature is monday’s sales automation.

You can set up triggers for different actions and automatically assign leads to sales reps, set reminders for tasks and meetings, and get notified when a lead opens a marketing email.

The platform offers some of the best mobile CRM app solutions, which can serve as an extension of the platform for your sales reps when they’re on the move. The mobile experience gives you access to the software’s core boards: Contacts, Accounts, Leads, and Deals.

Read our full Monday review.

2. Salesforce Sales Cloud — Best CRM for Sales Reps

Salesforce is one of the most best sales CRM solutions. The platform offers a 360-degree view of your customers, facilitates team communication, and helps improve productivity.

Salesforce provides all your teams with key information on every lead and customer. You can even configure the system to send notifications to the right sales reps whenever a lead clicks an ad, opens a link in your marketing email, or downloads a lead magnet.

The platform also features powerful AI capabilities. For example, Salesforce’s Einstein will inform your sales reps when it’s best to engage with different leads. It can also help them formulate convincing and engaging messages to help convert leads into paying customers.

In addition to its well-designed and intuitive desktop platform, it’s one of the best CRM tools for mobile, offering easy-to-use apps that boast all the basic features you need, letting your sales reps work on the go and even offline.

Read our full Salesforce review.

3. Pipedrive — Best CRM for Pipeline Management

Pipedrive is a budget-friendly and a relatively simple CRM tool, making it a top choice for small businesses. Despite this, the platform is feature-rich and highly scalable.

The Kanban boards you can create are minimalistic, so there’s no visual clutter, and you can tell exactly what everyone’s working on at a glance. It’s also remarkably easy to add and customize new pipeline stages, thanks to its rich library of templates.

Pipedrive also features automatic progress tracking, letting you monitor your business’s performance in real-time. You can also see your average conversion rate, the number of new leads in your pipeline, average time-to-sale, and other key performance indicators.

The real-time reports clearly show areas for improvement and allow you to course-correct if necessary. It also offers great email marketing capabilities, including mass emailing, customizable email templates and signatures, and email scheduling.

Read our comprehensive Pipedrive review.

4. HubSpot — The Best Free CRM Software

HubSpot Sales Hub is a powerful sales CRM that allows organizations to centralize all their tools and data. The best part is that you can get started with contact management, creating and managing deal pipelines, scheduling, and reporting for free.

It easily offers the best free CRM plan that combines features from its different hubs — Sales, Service, Marketing, Operations, etc. — making it perfect for startups and small businesses that can’t afford paid-for CRM software or who only need a few basic features in the short term.

HubSpot creates detailed profiles of your contacts and leads in your pipeline so your sales agents can see all the activity, including previous emails, calls, meetings, notes, and other crucial details to help them close the deal.

To improve conversion rates, Sales Hub offers professional email templates and AI-powered insights that help your sales reps personalize communication and meaningfully engage leads and prospects.

Read our HubSpot review.

5. Act! — Best On-Premise CRM System

Act! is a CRM and marketing automation platform designed for small and medium-sized businesses. Although it’s more expensive than some, it’s one of few to offer an on-premise CRM solution — giving businesses control over how it’s implemented.

Besides this, small businesses appreciate Act!’s simple user interface. You can import all your existing contacts and segment your leads and customers based on their past purchases or readiness to buy for personalized campaigns — all very easily.

For email marketing, Act! gives you access to professional email templates, advanced automations, A/B testing, lead scoring, and real-time performance metrics. You can even create high-converting landing pages and web forms.

It also has very well-designed CRM software apps for iPhones, iPads, and Androids, letting your teams manage automations, leads, and more on the move.

Read our full Act! CRM review.

6. Less Annoying CRM — Best CRM Software for Simplicity

Less Annoying CRM offers a beginner-friendly web-based customer relationship management system that’s affordable and receives constant free updates. While it isn’t the best CRM for mobile, as no apps are on offer, it works on any browser on any device.

Its simplicity, ease of use, and affordable pricing make it an incredibly popular small business CRM system. While it lacks AI automation and scalable plans, its reputation is near-perfect.

With just one plan, you’ll get everything from contact and pipeline management to task and project tracking and collaboration features. You also get handy integrations with popular business tools like Mailchimp, calendars, Agile Forms, and Zapier.

Read our full LACRM review.

7. Zoho CRM — Best CRM for Large Businesses

Zoho CRM is a fully customizable customer relationship management platform that lets you streamline any aspect of your business. You can empower your sales reps and customer service teams with powerful collaboration features, making it ideal for large businesses.

As one of the top CRM apps, Zoho CRM also functions as an omnichannel communication platform that facilitates contact management across all your business touchpoints. This includes email, phone, social media, live chat, self-service portals, and even web conferences.

With Zoho CRM, your sales reps can unify customer data to avoid data silos, optimize sales organization by avoiding non-revenue generating activities, and automate marketing operations.

As one of the most popular CRM tools, it should come as no surprise that Zoho CRM can also enhance sales enablement. You can leverage the platform to develop client portals, track all orders and shipment statuses, generate auto-populated invoices, monitor stock, track expenses, and coordinate with partners and suppliers.

Read our detailed Zoho CRM review.

8. Freshsales CRM — Best CRM Software for Small Businesses

Freshsales CRM focuses on contact and lead management tools, helping you meet your sales goals and close deals more efficiently. This top CRM tool comes with handy mobile CRM apps for iOS and Android to help you capture information instantly to improve the customer experience.

It’s one of the best CRM systems for small businesses as you can capture more leads through landing pages, web forms, and live chat. You can also configure assignment rules to automatically assign new leads to the most appropriate sales rep.

It also offers powerful AI functionality, auto-enriching lead profiles with their publicly listed information. This includes their job title, role, and company, saving you time and giving your sales teams the necessary context to personalize marketing messages.

Read our full Freshsales review.

9. Maximizer — Best Sales CRM App for Large Businesses

Maximizer is one of the top CRM providers that is designed specifically for sales leaders. Its features help with coaching sales reps, monitoring their performance, and establishing processes and best practices to help increase sales.

We found that Maximizer truly shines in its ability to uncover sales opportunities. After honing in on qualified leads, you can set up the steps a sales agent should take to close the deal, including writing emails, scheduling calls, drafting proposals, and everything in between.

Additionally, you can see exactly what every sales agent is working on and what stage of the process they’re in. Your sales leaders can even set quotas and monitor each sales agent’s performance.

Maximizer also functions as a CRM customer service platform. It automatically logs all support tickets, complaints, and refund requests and alerts you in real-time so your customer service department can promptly resolve the issue and retain the customer.

10. Zendesk Sell — One of the Best CRM Apps for Customer Service Teams

Zendesk Sell helps organizations gain and maintain full pipeline visibility, define every step of the sales process, boost team productivity, and improve your customer’s experience.

With Zendesk’s CRM software, you’ll be able to capture and organize your lead data and have all the information you need to personalize your messages to close more sales.

That said, the key selling point of Zendesk Sell is email intelligence. This functionality tracks and logs all email communication, features real-time notifications, and provides activity reporting so your sales agents know when to reach out to each prospect.

Your sales department will also have access to a power dialer, allowing them to contact qualified leads in seconds. Every call is recorded, and your agents will have quick access to sales scripts, lead profiles, notes, and even call analytics to help them reliably close more deals.

Read our full Zendesk review.

The 10 Best CRM Tools Compared

Here’s a side-by-side comparison of the best CRM platforms in 2024 so you can narrow down your options:

What is CRM?

Customer relationship management software is a cloud-based or on-premise application that allows you to collect and manage prospect and customer data, visualize and streamline your sales process, automate your marketing efforts, and close sales more reliably.

Because of this, a top CRM tool is vital to scaling your business, nurturing your customer relationships, and encouraging repeat business and customer loyalty.

Why You Need a CRM System

Even if you only work with a few clients, managing their data and interactions with your business with spreadsheets is a recipe for disaster, especially in terms of duplicate entries, inaccurate information, or outdated data.

This won’t do your customer service or sales teams any good, and we wouldn’t recommend making any decisions based on data like this. From automated lead scoring to personalized marketing, here are the main reasons why you need an online customer relationship management system:

How to Choose the Right CRM Software for You

Choosing one CRM service provider over another can be difficult. That’s where our guide comes in, allowing you to focus your attention on the best CRM for your specific needs and budget.
Here are the key factors to consider when choosing a CRM for your business:

Free vs Paid CRM Software Providers

Several free CRM software solutions exist, like HubSpot, but it’s worth noting that free plans are incredibly limited and may not include core CRM features. Many providers also offer demos and free trials.

But, while a free CRM might suffice for startups, we recommend using these to test the platform before scaling to a paid plan — even a cheap paid service.

Ultimately, the decision of free vs paid CRMs is dependent on your specific needs and budget. If you do opt for a free plan, be sure to note all the limitations in terms of users, features, and integrations, and also make sure you factor in the cost to scale.

Prioritize Mobile CRM Solutions

Apps for CRM are vital in today’s world, where many work in hybrid, remote, or field environments and need flexible access to their work platforms wherever they go, on any device.

This is a key consideration, as some CRM software apps aren’t fully fledged, meaning your team won’t be able to do everything they need to do when they aren’t at their desk.

The best CRM app for iPhone or Android should let your customer service and sales team perform a variety of tasks, from managing leads and scheduling follow-ups to having the means to access and update lead and customer data and more without needing to be at their desktop.

Be sure to note what devices your team uses to check whether the provider offers dedicated apps for CRM — both Android and iPhone. The best CRM for mobile will also offer added perks like offline functionality, where it syncs changes when you’re back online.

Conclusion

When it comes to CRMs, there’s no one-size-fits-all solution. Depending on your industry and your specific business needs, you might need a CRM with features that help organize your reps or a custom CRM software package that you can tailor to your unique sales process.

Other organizations will want a CRM marketing software product with advanced email marketing automations, built-in email templates, and real-time notifications.

You should carefully compare the different solutions, evaluate the features you need, and make an informed decision.

Our other CRM guides

• Why is CRM Important?
• How Does CRM Software Work? A Full Guide
• How to Choose a CRM: A Complete Guide
• Here are the Key CRM Features Every Business Needs
• A Beginner’s Guide on How to Use a CRM

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