13 Best CRM for Startups in 2024

There are a lot of CRM software options out there on the market, so choosing the best one for your business can be daunting. However, by understanding what to look for in a CRM tool, you can narrow down your search and find the perfect solution for your needs. Here are some key factors to keep in mind when choosing a CRM system: 

• Functionality: Will the software fulfill all of your needs? Is it easy to use and navigate? Does it have all of the features you need?
• Price: How expensive is the software, and is it worth the price? Do you get what you pay for?
• Scalability: Can you add more users or employees without upgrading the software? Is it suitable for a large organization?

• Salesforce - Best CRM for Startups
• HubSpot - Best Free CRM for Startups
• Freshsales - Ideal for Sales Teams
• Zoho CRM - Best for for Customer-Facing Teams
• Monday - Ideal for Tracking Client Relationships
• Pipedrive - Ideal for Pipeline Management
• Salesmate - Best for Revenue Growth
• Insightly- Best for Building Customer Connections
• ClickUp - Ideal for Project Management
• Agile CRM - Best for Sales Enablement
• Close - Ideal for Scaling Companies
• Streak - Best for Gmail Compatibility 
• Salesflare - Best for Collaboration

Salesforce CRM offers a wide range of features, capabilities, app exchange, and open APIs which make it ideal for businesses of all sizes. 

With Salesforce, businesses can easily oversee their contact management, sales management, and marketing campaigns. Additionally, it offers an array of integrations with other systems, making it one of the most comprehensive CRMs available. Overall, Salesforce is an excellent CRM software choice for businesses of all sizes.

Pros

• Extremely user-friendly and easy to use, making it perfect for startups who want a simple solution that they can manage themselves.
• A wide variety of features and available plugins, so you can customize it to fit your needs perfectly to keep track of customer data, no matter how complex it gets.
• Backed by a strong company with a long history of success.

Cons

• The initial setup and configuration can be time-consuming and challenging.
• The user interface can be overwhelming and challenging to use for beginners.
• It can be expensive to maintain and upgrade the software.

Notable Features

• Build reports and dashboards for everything
• Create new leads for potential customers
• Create a campaign to send to potential customers
• Find leads that match specific criteria
• Find leads that have been contacted in the past week
• Track customer interactions
• Mobile app integration (API access, Zappier, etc.)

Pricing

• Essentials: $25/user/month
• Professional: $75/user/month
• Enterprise: $150/user/month
• Unlimited: $300/user/month

Want to learn more? Read our full Salesforce CRM Review.

Recommended: Get Salesforce today!

HubSpot is an excellent free sales CRM software for startups. It offers a streamlined interface and powerful features that make managing your business easier. With HubSpot CRM, you can keep track of all your contacts, leads, and sales activities in one place. You can also create custom reports to analyze your data in detail. What's more, HubSpot CRM is mobile-friendly, so you can access it from anywhere.

Pros

• Free forever plan
• Browser extension available
• Robust professional plan with lead generation tools
• Import email information exceptionally well
• Friendly user interface and user experience (UI/UX)

Cons

• The free plan is quite limited
• Many HubSpot CRM systems need management
• Pricing runs high on the Enterprise plan

Notable Features

• Track leads and prospects
• Monitor emails and phone calls
• Measure social media activity
• Analyze website visits
• Track marketing campaigns
• Track and analyze sales activities

Pricing

• Free Sales CRM Tools: $0
• Sales Hub:
  • Starter: $45/month for two users ($23/user/month for each additional user)
  • Professional: $450/month for five users ($90/user/month for each additional user)
  • Enterprise: $1,200/month for 10 users ($120/user/month for each additional user)

Want to learn more? Read our full HubSpot CRM Review.

Get HubSpot today!

Freshsales is a sales automation platform that lets businesses shorten their sales cycles, personalize customer engagement, and ultimately grow their business and increase revenues. The platform's key features include 360-degree customer views, allowing you to see all of your customer’s interactions and leverage data to deliver personalized experiences, as well as tools that make it simple to have a streamlined sales process. 

Freshsales gives you the functionality you need to focus on the best leads, generate solid opportunities, and shorten your sales cycle by having conversations with prospects in the context of where they are in the buying process. 

Pros

• Easily access customer accounts and get a birds-eye view of the sales process with each prospect
• Excellent documentation and support
• A great tool for tracking, planning, selling, and auditing processes that complements your business
• Allows users to cross-sell and upsell products with automated sales campaigns
• AI-powered insights let you improve conversion rates and drive deals to closure

Cons

• Could have additional sales sequence functionality, such as trail runs, etc.
• Lacking integrations with major email providers like Gmail
• No keyword or “search by keyword” option in the common search function

Notable Features

• Artificial intelligence (AI) powered chatbots
• Track visitor actions and viewed pages to understand user intent
• Use contact scoring to identify the best leads
• Communicate with prospects across multiple channels, including SMS, chat, email, and phone
• Improve your revenue forecasting with the dynamic forecasting feature

Pricing (Billed Annually)

• Free: $0
• Growth: $15/user/month
• Pro: $39/user/month
• Enterprise: $69/user/month

Get Freshsales today!

Zoho CRM is an excellent customer relationship management (CRM) platform that works especially well for customer-facing teams. It provides features such as comprehensive analytics, robust automation, and personalized solutions for making the sales process as smooth and efficient as possible. Teams will be able to use Zoho to build up excellent customer relationships, engage with customers through the best sales-driven channels, and give them the right message at the right time for maximum engagement and results.

Pros

• Excellent economical pricing options for all business types and sizes
• Can be deployed without hiring a technical specialist
• Ease of integration across the Zoho suite of products is excellent
• Easy to deploy, upscale, and customize
• Includes an extensive developer platform

Cons

• The interface can be a bit clunky
• The community is still growing and not as strong as more established platforms like Salesforce
• Lack of detailed tutorial videos or slide decks when first implementing Zoho into an organization

Notable Features

• Comprehensive and rich analytics for making decisions
• Dedicated administrative panel
• State-of-the-art customization
• Integrations with 500+ third-party apps through the Zoho Marketplace
• Dedicated programs for training, deployment, and migration

Pricing (Billed Monthly)

• Standard: $20/user/month
• Professional: $35/user/month
• Enterprise: $50/user/month
• Ultimate: $65/user/month

Want to learn more? Read our full Zoho CRM Review.

Get Zoho CRM today!

The Monday Sales CRM is an excellent customer relationship management (CRM) software solution that’s perfect for gaining visibility into your sales pipeline and boosting the productivity of your sales and customer management teams.

You can customize the Monday CRM to fit the requirements and personalized aspects of your sales cycle and tailor every aspect of the platform to work for you. It includes emails and activities for central client communication, integrations with third-party tools, and beautiful dashboards to show you exactly what’s happening at every step of your sales cycle. 

Pros

• Extensive template library allows you to start from proven layouts
• Incredibly easy to customize and tailor to your company
• The user interface is very intuitive to use
• Platform lets you keep track of your customers with ease

Cons

• Additional functionality and limits may require upgrading to the next pricing level
• The user interface (UI) can become bogged down if you have lots of data in the system
• Could have better reporting capabilities

Notable Features

• Offers excellent visibility into the sales pipeline
• Fully customizable sales cycle that you can tailor to your business
• Central client communication center and email integrations
• Instant overviews of every deal made to give you the complete picture
• Beautiful and customizable dashboards that can be built in real-time

Pricing

• Individual CRM: $0
• Basic CRM: $10/seat/month
• Standard CRM: $14/seat/month
• Pro CRM: $24/seat/month
• Enterprise CRM: Varies

Want to learn more? Check out our full Monday CRM Review.

Get Monday Sales CRM today!

Pipedrive is a cloud-based software platform that helps companies manage customer relationships more effectively. It provides a centralized platform for managing customer data and offers various features to help businesses reach their customer goals. Pipedrive CRM is perfect for companies that want to improve their customer interactions.

Pros

• Call tracking and lead management
• Sales automation and workflow automation
• Great customer service
• Built by salespeople

Cons

• Limited analytics

Notable Features

• Create to-do lists for improved business processes
• Drag and drop functionality
• Import sales data and track deals
• Account management
• Sales forecasting

Pricing

• Essential: $18/user/month
• Advanced: $33/user/month
• Professional: $59/user/month
• Enterprise: $119/user/month

Want to learn more? Read our full Pipedrive CRM Review.

Get Pipedrive today!

Salesmate is a customer relationship management (CRM) and automation software platform that was built to offer personalized and productive experiences to customers and sales teams. Salesmate is currently being used in over 70 countries by 4,000+ sales teams, helping them grow revenue, create happy customers, and win more deals. Some of the features in Salesmate include prospect management, lead management, sales pipeline tracking, sales activity tracking, sales automation sequences, sales intelligence and reporting, and extensive third-party integrations with all of the additional tools your sales teams use regularly. 

Pros

• Affordable for small teams compared to alternative CRM solutions
• Immediately boost productivity for sales representatives
• Integrated email, SMS, phone, and other platforms
• Sales pipeline graphical representations are intuitive and easily digestible
• Helpful and kind customer service and support personnel 

Cons

• Reports can be difficult to read due to their formatting
• The structure and layout of the “deals” page have room for improvement
• SMS messages are most reliable under 160 characters
• Learning the platform from scratch can be overwhelming with its significant features

Notable Features

• Send bulk texts and emails, track emails with ease, and utilize a calling power dialer if required
• Visualize your entire sales pipeline and track all sales activity
• Deep insights and reporting, including sales forecasting, custom reports, and custom dashboards
• Integrate with 700+ business apps, including Microsoft, Google Apps, and even Zapier
• Includes built-in collaboration tools for your entire team

Pricing (Billed Monthly)

• Starter: $15/user/month
• Growth: $30/user/month
• Boost: $50/user/month
• Enterprise: Varies

Get Salesmate today!

Insightly is a modern and scalable CRM platform for sales teams that’s incredibly easy to set up, has integrations with numerous third-party platforms and tools, and is built specifically to support your company’s growth.

By using Insightly, your company can centralize all of your customer data, use insights to close more deals, create engaging customer journeys, convert deals to projects to deliver on time, elevate your customer support, and exceed customer expectations. Insightly is an excellent solution for the job if you need to align all your teams on one platform. 

Pros

• Excellent set of features that are good enough to uphold any sales workflow
• A reliable tool that lets you document everything from start to finish
• User-friendly with a minimalist design 
• Great set of integrations across tools you may already use
• Can be easily customized and scaled to fit the needs of any business

Cons

• The extensive feature range can make it confusing to configure at first
• Doesn’t include time-tracking functionality
• Chrome extensions can be a bit clunky
• Project management functions are very basic

Notable Features

• Create personalized customer journeys to attract visitors and convert them into prospects
• Use A/B testing and multivariate testing 
• Includes a convenient customer support portal
• In-depth analytics and data to get a detailed look at customer health
• Delivers very quick time-to-value

Pricing

• Plus: $29/user/month
• Professional: $49/user/month
• Enterprise: $99/user/month

ClickUp is one of the best CRMs for teams and businesses that are heavily focused on project management and would like to visualize their organization’s key processes and sales pipelines through beautiful graphics, data, and illustrations.

When your organization decides to use ClickUp, you’ll likely never lose any client information ever again. The platform includes account management features, communication tools, sales pipelines, and everything in between.

Pros

• Excellent platform for capturing client feedback
• Great for marketing teams to keep all projects organized
• Offers nearly every solution a company can think of, all in one platform
• Easy to use compared to alternative specialized platforms, like Jira
• Includes employee and user time-tracking

Cons

• The font and text themes on certain pages can be difficult to read
• Subtasks don’t show up on the homepage, allowing you to click down a level
• Gantt chart functionality can take some time to become familiar with

Notable Features

• See all of your client's orders at a glance with intuitive CRM views
• Analyze your data for customer insights with high-level views
• 50+ dashboard widgets for beautiful visuals and reporting
• Centralized customer outreach with email integrations and a single email hub
• Easily collect account info through forms and automation features

Pricing (Billed Monthly)

• Free: $0
• Unlimited: $9/user/month
• Business: $19/user/month
• Business Plus: $29/user/month
• Enterprise: Varies

Agile CRM is a sales enablement, customer service, and marketing automation platform used by over 15,000+ happy businesses worldwide to grow their revenues and make more deals.

The Agile CRM platform includes an all-in-one CRM for automated sales, marketing, and service and is a next-generation cloud-based tool that’s fast, simple to use, and mobile-ready. Users can take advantage of contact management, telephony, project management, gamification, and appointment scheduling. There’s no better way to build relationships with your valuable customer base and close more deals than through a reliable CRM platform like Agile CRM. 

Pros

• The ideal solution for businesses looking for an “all-in-one” platform
• Impressive tracking and marketing capabilities
• Contains ample support documentation for getting up to speed
• The ideal platform for optimizing marketing, sales, and report generation
• Simple to view tracked processes and logged interactions

Cons

• Canceling your subscription may require writing to customer support
• Documentation of automation tools could benefit from an update
• Lacks integration with several niche/specialized APIs

Notable Features

• Easy implementation and affordable pricing compared to the competition
• Marketing features include a landing page builder, marketing automation, email marketing, mobile marketing, and even email tracking
• Service features such as customer feedback, ticketing, knowledge base, canned responses, and a helpdesk
• Integrations with popular apps such as Twitter, Facebook, Google Apps, RingCentral, LinkedIn, Twilio, and more

Pricing (Billed Monthly)

• Free: $0
• Starter: $14.99/user/month
• Regular: $49.99/user/month
• Enterprise: $79.99/user/month

Close is a CRM built for startups that are scaling fast. Not only is the platform easy to set up, but it’s also incredibly intuitive, allowing you to focus less on learning the ropes and more on creating meaningful connections for your startup. 

With several automations, from email marketing to call logging, Close offers a seamless user experience, which explains why the service boasts over 6,500 startups on the platform. 

Pros

• Easy to set up and import leads 
• Intuitive dashboard means no steep learning curve
• API integrations with popular apps and software 
• Free trial available to test the product within your workflow
• Unlimited contacts available for most plans 

Cons

• Short free trial (only two weeks) 
• SMS capabilities are limited to a few countries 
• Additional cost for SMS features 

Notable Features

• Automated email marketing campaigns 
• Call recording means valuable feedback on performance 
• Easily transfer calls for a seamless user experience
• Top-tier audio quality conveys professionalism 
• Automated calling and logging to keep your connections organized within the CRM

Pricing

• Startup: $49 per month
• Professional: $299 per month 
• Enterprise: $699 per month

Streak is a CRM built into Gmail that offers high-quality functionality and tools for email marketing specifically. The platform offers a variety of different tools within the Google Workspace for business development, project management, and asset management. 

It is important to note that Streak is limited to a Gmail CRM, making it less functional for other platforms and marketing strategies such as calling. 

Pros

• A fantastic tool for email marketing 
• Project management tools embedded into the platform 
• Thread splitter allows you to sort through incorrectly fused threads 
• Delayed sending features make it easy to schedule emails 
• Easily integrates with several apps plus access to a standard API 

Cons

• Limited to Google Workspace
• Reporting is only available in higher-cost plans 
• Lacks features outside of email marketing 

Notable Features

• Business development empowers your team to build strong relationships with customers and partners 
• Project management features keep teams on track and accountable for their progress
• Customizable templates and pipelines available 
• Mail merge allows users to send emails to several recipients at once 
• Snooze and send later email functionality lets you schedule emails and notifies you before they are sent out

Pricing

• Free: $0
• Streak Solo: $19 per user per month
• Streak Pro: $59 per user per month 
• Streak Enterprise: $159 per user per month

Built for small to mid-sized businesses, Salesflare is a team-centric CRM that encourages collaboration. With automated features and a variety of integrations with platforms such as Gmail, Microsoft, and LinkedIn, Salesflare streamlines workflows to keep productivity high.

However, Salesflare is built for business-to-business (B2B) sales specifically, making it not suitable for all sales teams and startups. 

Pros

• Connects seamlessly with LinkedIn, Gmail, and more 
• Email-finding credits are available with all plans 
• Customizable dashboards available with some plans 
• Free trial available to test product within your workflow
• Training and onboarding services available 

Cons

• There is no free plan available 
• Limited features available with lower-cost plans 
• Limited use cases 

Notable Features

• Automated address book gathers data for you, saving you time 
• Automatic meeting and call logs help you and your team improve
• Document organization based on customer 
• Personalized email campaigns 
• Email finding credits available with all plans 

Pricing

• Growth: $29 per user per month
• Pro: $49 per user per month
• Enterprise: $99 per user per month

The CRM software market is constantly growing and evolving as businesses seek to find the best CRM solution that meets their specific needs. In order to help readers decide which CRM solutions are best for their business, we evaluated the following criteria: ease of use, customer support, key features, pricing customization, and customizability. 

We evaluated the top CRM software based on the following criteria:

• Ease of Use: CRMs that have a clean UI/UX and easy navigation will help users quickly learn how to use them.
• Customer Support: Customer support should be available via phone, email, chat, live chat, social media, etc. The more plans a CRM has, the better it is. We looked at the number of different types of customer service options when determining which were the best CRMs for startups.
• Features: CRMs that have base features like customer management, sales, and marketing tools. Mobile CRM is a software application designed to run on mobile devices such as smartphones or tablets. It allows users to access their customer data from anywhere at any time.
• Pricing: Low pricing makes using a CRM easy and affordable for startups and new businesses.
• Customization: Being able to customize a CRM system to a specific business is one of the most important features that any CRM should have. This can be done in many ways, such as by using templates or custom fields and reports. However, it’s also possible to use a third-party service that integrates with the CRM, adding extra usability to the software.
• Customer Reviews: Authentic customer reviews from authority review sites like TrustAuthority and others give valuable insight into the CRM from the customer's point of view.

There are several qualities startups should look out for in CRM apps:

• Startups should look for CRM services that are easy to use and can provide the necessary features to manage their business (e.g., marketing automation tools, automating sales processes, contact management, sales forecasting, task management, tracking and analyzing detailed customer purchase histories, and other key features).
• Good CRM systems should be able to integrate with other systems used by the startup throughout the sales pipeline, such as accounting and workflow automation systems, contact automation software, and contact management software, to help streamline operations.
• It is important to find a CRM tool that has an intuitive interface so that startup employees can manage business processes, a sales team, and customer service tools and easily get accurate sales forecasting reports, access data, and even track multiple sales pipelines to improve business operations.
• Some advanced features to consider when choosing the top CRM software include robust reporting capabilities that track customer interaction, CRM tools that streamline marketing automation, lead management, the sales process, help to manage sales and marketing teams, and help to improve customer relations and business operations throughout the entire sales process (sales cycle).

• Best Customer Experience Management Software
• Best Help Desk Software
• Best Marketing Automation Platforms