Best CRM Software of 2023

Salesforce is a leader in CRM software and offers a popular essentials-level platform that’s ideal for small and growing businesses. Small businesses will benefit from the workflow builder, helping to automate every task your team performs repeatedly. The Salesforce mobile app is also designed for ease of use, mirroring the Salesforce desktop experience with room to be customized for employees with different roles.

With one of the industry’s largest third-party app marketplaces, Salesforce has integration capabilities for an impressive amount of platforms. Whether it’s Mailchimp, QuickBooks, Dropbox or Google Workspace, Salesforce can help you integrate and streamline whatever you need to accomplish your sales and service goals.

For businesses in need of a powerful visual sales pipeline with at-a-glance information and data visualizations, Pipedrive is a great CRM solution. Its visual tools make it easy to understand each opportunity, while the drag-and-drop interface helps team members respond easily to the mission-critical tasks highlighted on the dashboard. With customizable pipelines and fields, you can optimize your existing workflow systems and improve processes across departments. With a powerful mobile app, Pipedrive also helps you engage with customers and team members on the go.

Pipedrive is easy to set up, even without a dedicated information technology staff, and its visual features are designed to enhance the efficacy of sales performance, reporting tools, automation of workflows and communication tracking. With a native messaging inbox, you can save interaction history automatically to help Pipedrive deliver valuable information about sales strategy. Pipedrive’s artificial intelligence (AI) tool picks up on key opportunities for improvement with performance recommendations and suggested tasks. The software also calculates your average conversion rate so that you know how many new leads to get and which activities to complete to meet your nearest targets. Real-time reports show if you’re on track, giving you time to adjust course, if needed, and providing timely coaching to maximize your sales strategies.

For businesses with seemingly endless sales tasks and complex ventures, monday Sales CRM from monday.com offers a great solution for project management. The core work management platform provides key timesaving and organizational capabilities. Monday Sales CRM customers enjoy easy-to-use interfaces and unlimited boards to organize projects. Whether you need a custom dashboard for specific communication needs or want to delve into analysis with customer data visualization tools, monday Sales CRM offers intuitive technology to support your success. The core work management platform stands out in its intentional design and ability to run and scale to any workflow.

Not only is monday Sales CRM a user-friendly platform optimized for project management, but it is also highly customizable. Customers can set up and integrate notification systems with communications platforms like Slack, eliminating the need for regular status update meetings by automatically alerting team members when a project or task is ready for further action. Additionally, all plans include unlimited boards to organize projects and contacts. With monday Sales CRM’s simple trigger and action templates, you can build any number of timesaving automations easily without any complicated tasks or coding involved. You can save time and increase productivity with a centralized source of data that can automatically log sent emails, maintain a record of customer interactions and help you prioritize your sales opportunities.

With thousands of integration capabilities featured in the new Operations Hub, HubSpot is a great option for sales teams looking to improve their performance by centralizing data from various software providers. Customers can connect third-party tools to sync and clean customer data easily while automating business processes to assist the efficiency of your team. Once you have integrated your other software platforms, your HubSpot CRM tracks sales funnel metrics, activity insights, productivity and performance across your sales activities.

HubSpot integrations also help businesses centralize lead information in one place. Every interaction with a lead, no matter the platform on which the communication took place, is stored in a tidy timeline so you will always know exactly where a conversation left off the next time you or any other team member picks it up. By syncing with Gmail, Outlook and social media platforms, HubSpot captures virtually every customer interaction and makes it easy to track and use.

Midsize e-commerce companies that rely on repeat business from their customers need a CRM platform that will help them understand their customers’ shopping habits better. Oracle’s NetSuite is a cloud-based ERP platform with CRM capabilities that is well-suited for business owners who want to provide the best customer experience possible. The CRM module helps companies obtain maximum value from each client interaction at every touchpoint. NetSuite organizes, automates and synchronizes your customer interactions across different departments, including marketing, sales, customer service and technical support. That means any employee can access all necessary context when interacting with a customer.

With NetSuite’s dashboard, you get a 360-degree view of your customer data and a clear view of what’s being accomplished across your customer-facing departments. The dashboard features key performance indicators, active campaigns, new leads, monthly data analysis and other helpful tools. NetSuite’s marketing automation is available for campaigns on multiple channels with forecasting tools that predict deal outcomes and help you stay on top of business goals. The mobile app allows for seamless work from any internet-connected device and its native shipping integration can help handle the tedious work of labeling and shipping.

Freshsales CRM software is both intuitive and adaptable, offering built-in tools designed to optimize communications and understand customers better. The powerful AI assistant, Freddy, is designed to help you develop a more comprehensive understanding of your customers based on historical sales data, activities and engagement. Freshworks also has a basic built-in VoIP phone service with toll-free local numbers available for purchase in more than 90 countries and calling ability from any device.

Once you have your pipelines, workflows and forecasting tools in place, Freshsales makes it easier to better understand and serve your customers’ targeted products and services. From within the platform, you can run personalized bulk email marketing campaigns, manage deals, predict deal performance, forecast revenue and strategically engage with prospects. Your Freshsales CRM can also automatically build your prospects’ contact profiles, spot rotten deals and reawaken cold leads that still have potential.

For teams on the go and in different locations, Zoho CRM enables remote workforces to accomplish more together. Zoho is designed to increase leads, accelerate sales and measure performance accurately with ease and efficiency. Zia, the AI-powered assistant, predicts leads and deals, identifies potential customers for conversion and helps large sales teams focus their efforts with user-friendly guidance. Zoho is also an appealing option for remote workforces with its gamification features that encourage friendly competition. Every lead, call and deal can be made into a trophy that generates a competitive and encouraging sales atmosphere, no matter where your team members are located.

With Zoho, it’s easy to build a custom and user-friendly platform with hundreds of available integrations and a flexible dashboard. Helpful tools like the Feeds notification module are easily accessible and can be universally highlighted across all team members’ dashboards. Other helpful tools include SalesSignals, which tracks customer interactions across various channels and notifies team members of valuable and time-sensitive potential leads to act on quickly.

With its user-friendly interface and simple setup, Keap is an appealing tool for businesses engaging with CRM software for the first time. Keap is designed to help its users learn quickly without assuming its customers are CRM experts. The all-in-one CRM platform stores all customer activity in a centralized space and automatically adds all customer interactions to grow your team’s ability to sell and offer support efficiently. Right from the dashboard, your team can text, email, book appointments, process purchases and add invoices with one click. To make building your business easier, Keap automates contact management intuitively from activities across multiple platforms.

Keap can be set up in 20 minutes in small business scenarios, and all customers are provided with a dedicated support manager to ensure the successful use of the software. Truly designed to grow your business, Keap provides premade and customizable templates for new pipelines and helpful video guides explaining the software’s capabilities. Without any coding experience, you can trigger automated actions to help turn leads into sales. For efficient navigation, you can organize information chronologically or through a category view. Keap also offers user-friendly analytics and support for revenue trends, email marketing performance and list growth.

Despite the large number of CRM software on the market, some small business owners find that nothing is quite the right fit. Enter Quickbase, a downloadable CRM template that you can use to design a seamlessly integrated CRM.

Quickbase is a “low-code” solution, meaning most of the heavy lifting is done for you, but it still requires some coding knowledge to create the finished product. Quickbase isn’t the right CRM for everyone, but developers will recognize the value of a low-code app that can be ready for rollout in weeks instead of months. Tweaks and changes to the system are made in a sandbox environment, so there’s often no need to take the entire CRM system offline for updates. Some components can be changed with no downtime at all.

Providing a superior customer experience doesn’t stop when you close a sale. You must continue to nurture your customer relationships and respond quickly when issues arise. Sage CRM’s customer service tools can help your employees provide support and monitor resolutions without leaving the CRM platform. Team collaboration features provide metrics on case histories and resolution times to help you identify service gaps, and reporting tools let you create comprehensive visual charts and reports.

Sage CRM includes a central repository to capture common issues and their solutions. You can add solutions as you go or store reviewed and preapproved solutions in the knowledge base for consistency and faster case resolutions. Alternatively or in tandem, you can create a web self-service portal that helps your customers resolve their own issues, reducing the burden on your support team.

For businesses of all sizes, keeping up with a fast-paced and evolving sales environment can be a challenge. SugarCRM has designed its software with automation in mind, and its AI-powered predictions and lead conversations help teams operate more effectively and efficiently in a digital landscape. While its add-on modules enhance its automation capabilities, SugarCRM’s fixed core features work to maximize productivity without any customizations. Reports and dashboard summaries help you access the information gathered by SugarCRM’s automated features through a centralized overview. The AI system develops a complete history of a customer’s journey and predicts outcomes with impressive accuracy to help businesses stay on top of monthly, quarterly and annual goals.

Sugar Market, the marketing automation module that can be combined with the Sell tool, helps businesses attract more visitors and gain visibility. It’s easy to cultivate leads with multistep nurture campaigns and conversion-focused emails along with CRM tools. Intuitive drag-and-drop page builders help users leverage the power of Sugar Market and reduce repetitive tasks.

Offering a unique and highly useful relationship-linking feature, Insightly CRM gives customers extra control over their sales operations. For small teams without the ability to manage all the details of sales processes, Insightly offers a dynamic and easily customizable solution. Admins and reps can build their ideal personal dashboards to highlight particular contexts, metrics and workflows. While AI and predictive tools are available only with the most expensive plans, all of Insightly’s service plans allow you to create specific rules for common events that trigger actions within the sales process.

Tracking metrics and key performance indicators is different for every business, and Insightly enables the customization of both reports and processes to fit any business in any industry. The highest-level plan gives customers the ability to create and specifically define entire workflows around a single event. These customization features can save a significant amount of time and relieve team members from monotonous low-productivity tasks. With complete workflow automation, custom validation rules, dynamic page layouts and configurable webhooks, Insightly offers impressive automation abilities with a fully featured plan.

Zendesk offers unique native integration and customer services products to provide support through a full customer life cycle. Customer experiences that extend beyond the sales team require everyone to be on the same page. Zendesk Sell maximizes collaboration across departments, allowing teams across sales, marketing and support to work together with the same centralized data and goals. This CRM provider unifies data from multiple customer touchpoints, preventing different departments from duplicated communications or missing context. This is incredibly valuable for businesses with complex customer profiles and long-term relationships. For example, your support team can stay in the loop throughout the customer’s journey across marketing and sales with Zendesk Support.

Zendesk’s smart lists also help sales teams segment customers and filter leads, enabling marketing teams to monitor customer engagements and develop effective communications. This is one way Zendesk’s CRM solution supports accurate forecasting and management with full visibility into sales processes. Whether you are using the basic plan or an upper-level plan, you’ll be able to provide high-level customer support with all of the current and historical information you need at a glance.