We have said before that a company’s success depends on its ability to sell – regardless of what you are selling. The sales team in your business has been hired to sell, and they indeed want to do just that.
They don’t want to be spending their days on this earth roaming around endless spreadsheets and cluttered inboxes. They also don’t want to be using tools more about testing their patience than helping them get things done.
Good CRM software is of great help for your sales team and your business in general. But, unfortunately, they can also be quite costly.
Nothing in life is free, I guess.
Is it, though? I mean, we got this planet for free. Humans used to be able to eat, sleep, drink, and mate, basically for free. Yeah, you were more likely to be eaten by a predator before you reach your twenties, but at least we didn’t post every meal on social media.
So, what changed? Why can’t we have a perfect Free Customer Relationship Management Software for free?
Well, good news! You can!
In this article, we will look at some of the best free and open source CRM software you can find. All the options discussed here are reliable, tested, and offer excellent features.
But first, if you are still not sure whether your business needs CRM or not, we recommend taking a minute to check out these 8 Reasons Small Businesses Need CRM.
Best Free and Open Source CRM Software Solutions
- HubSpot CRM
- Zoho CRM
- Sugar CRM
- Freshsales
- Insightly
- Streak
- SuiteCRM
- Bitrix24
- Apptivo
- Capsule
HubSpot CRM
HubSpot CRM is the leading application in the field of CRM currently. The solution has taken place for two reasons: Price and ease of use. The solution is free and very simple to use. The platform allows your sales team to get started quickly without needing a drastic change in their workflow.
HubSpot CRM comes with all the necessary features you expect but let go of other solutions’ complex and often confusing nature. You can easily use it to create beautiful contact company profiles easily, and it will organize every detail of your customer communication with you. The platform will also assign and track your deals, track the performance of your reps and agents, and it comes with a detailed dashboard where all your employees can keep track of the business’s activities.
SEE ALSO: HubSpot Vs. Salesforce Comparison: Which is Right for Your Business?
HubSpot integrates smoothly with third-party applications such as Salesforce, Shopify, and Microsoft Dynamics and is a certified Google partner, so you can expect flawless integration with Google Apps as well.
What Can you get for free?
For no cost at all, HubSpot offers:
- Unlimited Storage
- Phone Integration
- Customer Documentation
- Client Profiles
- Automated importing from Social Media, email hubs, and Phone databases
- Excellent Pipeline management
- Drag-n-drop communicators
- Templates
- Scheduling
- Up to 1 Million users and contacts
- Deal & Taskboard
- Live support, tickets system, training base, and phone support
- Automated tracking of website visitors and Lead Enrichment
Zoho CRM
Zoho CRM is an excellent CRM system available for free for small teams with ten users or fewer. The solution comes packed with features for CRM and lead & sales management.
Zoho CRM is built to be the ideal solution for contact and lead management, sales pipeline management, and purchase control. Combined with the easy-to-use-and-navigate and straightforward interface, these features make the solution one of the best choices you could find on the market today.
The dashboard is customizable, so you can change it to suit your business better. In addition, the solution can be integrated with popular solutions such as QuickBooks, Outlook, Constant Connect, Google Apps, and many more.
You can use Zoho to automate daily sales tasks, import prospects from external sources, and convert web visitors into hot leads. The solution can match leads with the most appropriate sales agents. In addition, it allows you to monitor and manage customer accounts with ease. They are all stored in a single, shared database where you can view status, products, accounts, and more details.
What Can you get for free?
- Salesforce Automation
- Social Media Features (Facebook and Twitter)
- Standard Reports
- Up to 1 GB of storage
- Product customization
- Workflow Management
- Document Library where you can attach documents, review them, and share folders
- Web forms
- Marketing Automation
- 10 Email templates and Email Opt Out
- Team Collaboration Feeds
- Up to 10 users
SugarCRM
SugarCRM is one of the best open-source customer relationship management platforms you can get. The solution has been downloaded over 7 million times and is trusted by more than 50,000 businesses to handle their account management for sales-related tasks.
SugarCRM has gained popularity due to its wide range of features, rich functionality, and excellent customizability. You can personalize customer relationships, raise brand awareness, and provide excellent customer service quickly when using SugarCRM.
The solution also offers affordable pricing packages that should satisfy most users, and these packages don’t involve harmful feature restrictions contrary to what other solutions are doing. The system includes eight personas, including the primary administrator and going down all the way to account and support representatives. All of these personnel operate in a single platform where they can collaborate more effectively.
The Campaign Wizard allows users to create, execute, and monitor their beautiful marketing campaigns on several channels. You can also collate leads in the system and distribute personalized web-to-load forms and other engagement programs.
What Can you get for free?
- Lead Capturing and Scoring
- Customer Profiles
- Email Marketing
- Scheduled Communication and Reporting
- Lead forms and contact info tracking
- Customer profiles
- Real-time pipeline
- Management of files, emails, and calendars
- Open API
- Social Interactions tracking
- End-to-end project planning
- Bug Tracking
- Modifiable database
Freshsales
Freshsales is a product from Freshdesk that offers quality CRM for energetic teams. The solution can keep track of contacts while solving their inquiries. The solution is a single contact management hub that can help sales teams control thousands of leads.
Freshsales is simple with an easy-to-navigate interface and can optimize sales and prioritize pipeline opportunities while still offering all the features and functions of a full-fledged CRM system. Freshsales can not only capture leads, but it can also distribute, score, and divide them.
It also offers some useful advanced features such as auto-dialers, call recording, call routing, affiliate management, and, most important of all, is reporting. In addition, the revenue analytics features offered to make Freshsales the ideal solution for the analytical and focused user that can understand how to use these reports full of useful analytics to achieve great results with the excellent recommendations made by the solution.
You can also use a variety of filters when summarizing your data to make it possible to group and organize results the way you want, and you can also create summaries, charts, tables, and matrix reporting – which is not easy but can be beneficial, and even – dare I say it – fun!
We have not even mentioned one of the best parts about Freshsales and one of the main reasons that make it an excellent choice for small teams: Its affordable pricing. The solution is available for free for small teams, and they offer affordable packages for small groups. You can also have some peace of mind knowing Freshsales doesn’t have any unexpected, recurring, or hidden fees.
What Can you get for free?
- Unlimited Storage
- Unlimited Number of users
- Unlimited contact base and Records
- Lead Capture
- Basic Lead Scoring
- Automated Lead importing
- Advanced Reporting
- Freshdesk integration
- Management kit (Accounts, Contacts & Leads)
Insightly CRM
Insightly is one of the best CRM solutions for small and mid-sized businesses. The cloud-based solution offers specific, enterprise-level modules for large corporations and international, multi-level organizations. However, its main focus is delivering excellent CRM functionality and features for small businesses.
Insightly offers contact management, task management, pipeline management, deliverables tracking, and collaboration among its many features to help businesses improve and grow. As a result, you can get clear sales visibility and improve customer communication and collaboration efficiently and effectively.
Integrated project management is also offered, and it helps businesses with every stage of customer engagement. For example, you can track project performance and compare its performance against the timeline preset for it. You can also set automated email alerts and create project milestones, pipelines, and tasks.
Needless to say, since it’s designed for small businesses, it’s intuitive and straightforward to use, and mobile applications are also available for working on the go. The solution’s simplicity doesn’t mean it sacrifices anything regarding security, though.
Insightly also integrates with popular third-party solutions such as MailChimp, Office, Google Maps, and more and offers very flexible pricing packages that should meet the needs of businesses of all sizes. A free plan is also available for small businesses with small teams.
What Can you get for free?
- Up to 2,500 Email Templates
- Up to 10 Emails per day
- 10 Customer fields
- Up to 10 Advanced Reports
- Up to 200 MB of storage
- Up to 2 users
- Online Community Support
Streak
Streak is a CRM solution that differentiates itself from the rest by allowing users to turn their Gmail into CRM. In addition, streak relies that most businesses rely on email to communicate with customers and prospects, so it also makes sense to use their email as CRM.
Their CRM plugin primarily focuses on your Gmail inbox and can group email threads based on your workflow. However, it doesn’t only tag your emails but also groups them in stages across pipelines. The solution is designed for compatibility with sales processes, deals flow, fundraising, hiring, product development, real estate, and support.
Streak is an ideal solution for freelancers, entrepreneurs, startups, and small businesses that already rely on their Gmail for most of their communications and want an easy way to track views, schedule emails, send bulk emails, and create separate yet related email threads for different teams such as HR and sales.
This, however, doesn’t mean that Streak isn’t useful for larger businesses, as it is used by some of the top tech companies in the world, such as Uber, Yelp, and Twitter.
Streak is a highly collaborative solution that allows team members, customers, key partners, and other involved parties to participate in ongoing conversations. The solution also centralizes shared documents, and you get access to shared files regardless of the current stage of the conversation.
What Can you get for free?
- Mail Merge
- Mail Tracking (up to 200 emails)
- Search & Autocomplete
- Import/export functionality
- Unlimited private pipelines and boxes
- File attachments
- Magic columns & fields
- Basic CRM functionality and features
- Basic API access
- Mobile Access
- 50 shared pipelines
SuiteCRM
SuiteCRM is a free and open-source CRM software that offers highly actionable insights that users can use to make critical business decisions, build their business strategies, and take critical actions.
The solution is designed to help businesses improve their sales by bolstering conversations, driving innovation in product development, converting leads into customers, and providing the best possible customer care and support experience.
The open-source platform allows businesses to build process models and create flexible, automated actions that can be triggered and activated anytime. It can also generate sales pipeline models, regulate and control pricing strategies, monitor leads to progress, design template customer quotes, and maintain contact renewals.
The solution offers a self-service portal that allows users to deliver top-notch interactive support to their customers and faster response.
SuiteCRM is free, but you will need to pay for customization options if you want to make it yours (and you probably do). Free support is also available via the community forum, and dedicated support is only available for small and midsized clients. For enterprise clients, unique solutions with dedicated account managers are available.
What Can you get for free?
- Sales portal
- Finance Management
- ROI calculator
- Flexible workflow
- Contract renewals
- Business processes flexible modeling
- Billing and invoicing
- Template quotations
- Servicing and Marketing
- Customer self-service
- Pricing strategy control
- Q&A support
- Community forum support
Bitrix24
Bitrix24 is designed to be a model collaboration software that offers all the tools you need for collaboration, communication, and management. It provides a unified platform where all your files, projects, messages, tasks, and contacts can be stored and managed efficiently.
Users can register an account and start using the solution right away. You can then invite your colleagues and teammates to the platform, where everyone will keep track of tasks and collaborate on projects.
Bitrix24 is available for free for small teams with 12 members or fewer. It offers features and solutions, including tasks and projects, document management, file sharing, calendar and planning, email, HR management, social network, sales team management, and CRM.
The solution is available as a mobile application for devices running on Android and iOS, so you can always stay connected. In addition, Bitrix also offers time management tools such as a check-in/check-out feature and a daily planner. Some valuable time planning features, such as an event scheduler and meeting manager, also synchronizes with Outlook.
The premium (paid) plans are highly scalable so that the solution can grow with your business, and an On-Premise solution is available if you want to have complete control over your data and the source code.
The Bitrix app marketplace also allows users to create their apps or use their existing systems.
What Can you get for free?
- Full telephony suite with up to 100 phone call recording
- Sales automation
- Lead and contact management
- Invoicing
- Document Management
- Unified communicators
- Task and project management
- Time management, planning, and reporting
- Up to 5 GB of storage
- No limit on the number of users
- REST API
Apptivo
Apptivo enables businesses to efficiently create and manage as many customer accounts as needed. In addition, users can link each client’s account with other pertinent records such as opportunities or contacts.
The people behind the solution know how difficult, complex, and confusing it is to manage lots of client accounts when your business is dealing with clients from all over the country or even from different countries around the world, which is why they built a tool that enables its users to filter the marketers, company territories, and market segments. This information can be used to sort, search, and analyze all your client accounts.
Apptivo allows users to always have access to their work, thanks to the platform being web-based. In addition, it acts as a communication tool that should bring your business more transparency into client engagements.
The CRM functionality of the solution is built around increasing customer satisfaction, which includes current and new customers. As a result, you can use the solution to attract new leads, and it also allows you to nurture existing relationships and increase your sales.
Apptivo offers four pricing plans, one of which is free and provides the basic features and functionality that should satisfy small teams and startups. The other three pricing plans are not expensive, even though they are for enterprises and offer more features. A free trial is also available.
What Can you get for free?
- Up to 3 users
- Up to 500MB per business
- Basic contact sharing
- Basic reporting
- Standard support
Capsule
Capsule is an effective yet simple web-based CRM solution designed to help small businesses keep track of their contacts and the companies they deal with, communicate with them, track sales opportunities, and do more activities and tasks more effectively and efficiently.
Capsule also allows businesses to manage leads and vendors. You can use it to manage your sales pipeline; track deals, proposals, bids, and opportunities efficiently. You can have notes, conversations, documents, and a complete history of your many different business files in one place where you can access them anywhere and at any time, thanks to the mobile applications available for smartphones and tablets.
Reports are generated and can be extracted from the pipeline using filters that you can set, and the data can be used to forecast potential sales revenues in the future.
You don’t need to worry about the security of your data as well since Capsule uses Amazon’s data servers to host their servers, meaning your data is safe and secure with them. Another security measure is the SSL encryption of the data that passes between the business’s computers and Capsule’s servers.
Capsule offers a free plan, a free trial, and a pay-as-you-service, which you can upgrade or cancel at any time without worrying about hidden or unexpected fees.
What Can you get for free?
- Up to 2 users
- Up to 250 contacts
- Up to 10 MB of storage
- Unlimited Cases
- Unlimited opportunities
- Social media integrations
- Integrations with 3rdparty apps
- Dedicated technical support
What makes a good CRM System?
We know that not everyone is an expert on CRM systems. But, hey, everyone has to start somewhere, right?
So, what makes a good CRM system? How can you choose a CRM system? And more importantly, what do the features we have discussed in the solutions above mean for your business?
A good CRM system can help improve your business’s productivity, one that’s scalable and can provide good support and one that’s simple enough to use while providing all the necessary features and functions you would need. Of course, mobility is also a big advantage, so if a solution has mobile applications – preferably on the iOS and Android platforms – then it’s a plus for it, even more so when the mobile app provides most or even all of the features the desktop version offers.
Now, let’s talk about what you will need in a free CRM solution:
- The Number of users and contacts:
Other than HubSpot, almost every other tool has a restriction on the number of users or contacts. This can be a problem, so make sure the solution you choose can cover the number of contacts and users you have.
- Integrations
This is a point often overlooked by new users. You want a solution that will play nicely with other apps you are already using or will use in the future. Having to hop from one solution to another because the old one doesn’t work well with the other applications you are already using can significantly inconvenience you.
- Lead Management
A good CRM solution will help you effectively manage your leads and streamline qualifying leads in your sales funnel. This will have a significant effect on the efficiency and success of your business.
- Reporting
Comprehensive, in-depth, and advanced reporting is crucial to gaining insights that can help you take action and improve your customer relationships. You should also be able to access these reports while not in the office.
- Record Management
When the number of your leads starts to grow, so will the number of records of your deals and contacts, and things can get messy and confusing before you know it. A good CRM solution will create accounts, manage deals, contacts, and leads individually, and store them all in one place to easily access them.
If you want to learn more, we highly recommend taking a moment to learn How to Choose the Right CRM Software for Your Business.
