

Free CRM is basically like the meat and potatoes of the business software menu – it’ll satiate your basic hunger pang, but it’s not exactly going to set your tastebuds alight… and it’ll always leave you wanting more.īut what can you expect? Suppliers provide free CRM plans as a way to get you using – and reliant upon – their services. Purchasing one of Freshsales’ paid plans also allows you to integrate the CRM with a range of third-party applications – something the free version lacks.įree CRM is all well and good, but it does come with some frustrating restrictions.


Upgrading scores you a wealth of benefits – most notably for marketing teams, who’ll get list segmentation and a drag-and-drop email builder to play with. It's a package that includes sales and marketing automation features, as well as chat and telephony, for an affordable price. You can also lump for Freshworks ‘Freshsales Suite'. Likewise, Freshdesk offers customer service teams a free ticketing system for dealing with issues (plus a few basic reporting features), but not too much else. Crucially, it also adds lead scoring into the mix – a feature usually reserved for CRM software’s premium plans.įreshmarketer offers marketing teams a free solution for building emails, with web forms and limited CRO (conversion rate optimisation) tools thrown in. Well, Freshsales (Freshworks’ offering for sales teams) offers all the basics in terms of lead, account, and deal management, as well as a visual pipeline builder.
#FREE CRM SOFTWARE UPGRADE#
Though you’re privy to up to one million contacts with the free version, if you choose to upgrade to HubSpot’s Marketing Hub, your contacts will automatically appear in both places.Īnd guess what? HubSpot’s rates are determined by none other than your contact limit – so, if you’re not careful, you could end up paying through the nose to store a heap of contacts that used to be free.Ģ4/5 phone and chat support, 24/7 email support Our only word of warning re HubSpot is to take care with the contact limit. To upgrade, HubSpot’s offerings for sales, marketing, or customer service teams each cost £33.60 per month for up to two users, based on the ‘Starter’ plan. Sales teams too can benefit from live chat and conversational bots, while HubSpot’s drag-and-drop ticketing feature will make life easier for your customer service agents. But as contact management software with a few marketing features thrown in – including webforms, list segmentation, and basic ad management – HubSpot’s free version excels. Of course, on the free plan, you won’t be privy to HubSpot’s more developed features for businesses – that’s a given. You can jump to our methodology for information about how we undertook the research, or read on to start reviewing the best free CRM suppliers in the UK. So, we did some more research, focussing only on free CRM suppliers with the most generous contact, storage, and user limits, and with sufficient customer support. Three suppliers is okay… but it’s not quite enough. Only three – HubSpot, Freshworks, and Zoho – made it onto this list, on account of their excellent free versions. How did we decide? Well, we undertook research into all things CRM, rating and ranking eight of the industry’s most prominent suppliers.

Hence, we only recommend free CRM software for the smallest of businesses – either as a make-do until there’s more flexibility in your budget, or as a way to ‘try before you buy’ a more advanced version. All we’re saying is that free CRM has its setbacks – you can read about free CRM’s limitations further down the page. That’s not to say free CRM software isn’t widely available – a simple Google search turns up a plethora of providers, all willing to offer you something approximating ‘CRM software’ in exchange for your data. It may be tough on your wallet, but if you want the best CR M (customer relationship management) software, you’ll have to pay for it. In business, though, that’s not quite the way it works. They say the best things in life are free.
