15 Best CRM Tools In 2024

Growing and nurturing interactions with customers is a vital part of any business. This becomes more important during this remote-work era, where many organizations increasingly leverage virtual tools to stay in touch and streamline their operations.

As competition for sales and leads rises, business owners like you need more effective ways to track the various stages of a buyer's journey.

One of these ways includes meticulously tracking interactions with your customers. Doing this involves finding ways to record all touchpoints — purchase & support history, conversations, and more.

It will help you create predictability patterns and, thus, more relevant action plans and sales strategies for your business.

Now, this is where a CRM tool comes into play. These tools nurture your customer relationships across various channels, ensuring they get an optimum experience through their interaction with your products and sales reps and guiding them down the sales funnel.

If you're looking for the perfect CRM software for your business, we're here to help. In this blog post, we've compiled a list of 15 of them to make your search easier.

But, first:

What’s a CRM tool?

Customer Relationship Management is more than contacting potential leads initially. It encompasses the whole communication channel process, including nurturing contacts, building loyalty and engagement, and encouraging repeat purchases.

It also involves efficiently managing a business relationship throughout the sales and after-sales process—a practice that's key for any organization looking to thrive and stay ahead of its competition.

For small to medium-sized (SMBs) businesses, manually managing CRM functionality through spreadsheets could lead to redundant and ineffective practices.

A CRM platform can do all this for you. In fact, they can do more than just contain user and contact info. They can also dynamically create calendar events, keep track of all interactions & touchpoints, set reminders, provide analysis, etc.

CRM tools often have messaging and phone calling integrations, which allow you to record and track a customer's sentiment toward your services for better insight.

They're powered to straddle through several areas of business CRM, marketing, communication, analytics, and lightweight project management. Some CRM systems also have built-in chatbots, allowing sales teams to communicate directly with clients from the system.

The future of CRM tools

As CRM solutions become more powerful and their ability to draw new insights from customer interactions grows, the revenue impact of such developments will be unprecedented in the CRM market.

Research shows that the CRM software industry is set to grow from over $35 billion in 2022 to over $114 billion by 2030. Plus, this industry's compound annual growth rate (CAGR) will be 12.7% between 2022 & 2030.

In addition, artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly reshaping how we approach and execute tasks.

So, it's no wonder several CRM platforms now provide AI-powered features to further revolutionize businesses' engagement with their customers.

By harnessing AI, these platforms can make your CRM even more efficient!

15 Best CRM tools in 2024

Choosing the right CRM tool for your business can significantly improve your team's collaboration and productivity, increase sales, and heighten customer satisfaction.

There's no shortage of these tools on the market, but it can be challenging to pick one that best suits your business needs.

There are many great options out there that can create more confusion than clarity. To make your decision easier, we've compiled the best CRM tools based on their features, integrations, sales capabilities, and pricing.

Let's get started.

1. HubSpot

A top-ranked customer relationship management platform, HubSpot is used widely for inbound marketing.

It's one of the best CRM tools for small businesses because its free version provides enough functionality to improve sales processes and organization at zero cost.

HubSpot is also very intuitive. Its products are divided between marketing, sales, service, and CMS. Marketing can help you generate leads better and grow your network.

With HubSpot's marketing automation and analytics, you can stay promptly connected with your contacts.

HubSpot CRM is best for: Individual users, small teams, startups, and small businesses.

Pricing

HubSpot has a free plan and paid plans in categories like marketing, CRM & sales, and customer service. The plans are priced at different ranges based on different packs. Explore here.

2. Salesforce

Salesforce is easily one of the oldest names in CRM solutions, although there's a learning curve to using it effectively.

It provides many products and modules, including marketing, sales, and customer support tools.

Salesforce is a great CRM tool for growing businesses and offers many plugins to boost your sales revenue.

It can manage all your business processes, including:

• Marketing: Salesforce offers great tools to build email marketing campaigns. You can also set up marketing automation.
• Sales: Sales teams using Salesforce can benefit from its excellent contact management. You can also access CRM tools that will streamline the sales lifecycle.
• Customer service: Salesforce has CRM tools for creating a self-service resource. Customer support reps can use Salesforce CRM contact data to help customers faster.

Salesforce is best for: Startups, SMBs, and large businesses

Pricing: You can get started with Salesforce for $25/month. It offers several editions and pricing structures, which you can explore here.

3. Pipedrive

Pipedrive is a top CRM tool for pipeline management, and it focuses on helping businesses grow sales and revenue. It gets its name from the sales pipeline and stats processes.

It lets you track all your communication with every contact in your directory.

With its suite of features, Pipedrive helps you automate repetitive tasks, improve customer satisfaction & easily manage all your ongoing deals and leads.

As a user-friendly visual platform, Pipedrive makes it easier for you to monitor sales processes and analytics.

Pipedrive is best for: Startups, SMBs, workflow automation, and pipeline management.

Pricing: There are 5 pricing plans for Pipedrive. Its lowest-priced plan, Essential, costs $11.90/month. Pipedrive also offers a 14-day free trial.

4. Freshsales

Freshsales is a CRM solution provided by Freshworks, an all-in-one platform with separate SaaS for marketing teams and customer service.

It offers a plethora of AI-powered features that will simplify selling for businesses.

With Freshsales, sales teams can use built-in email and phone tools to help them manage their customer directory better.

It's an excellent tool when it comes to providing clear customer data and actionable tips on how to manage customer interactions.

Freshworks is best for: Startups, SMBs, and multi-people sales teams

Pricing: Aside from its free plan, Freshsales has 3 other pricing plans. It also offers a 21-day free trial.

5. Nimble

One of the best CRM tools for startups, Nimble is best known for its simple interface.

Nimble offers widget & mobile-based sales automation solutions for small and midsize businesses.

Along with contact and pipeline management features like deal tracking, task management, and alerts, Nimble also offers integrated social listening to update customer profiles.

Nimble is best for: Individual users and startups

Pricing: Nimble has just one plan, which costs $29.90/user/month. It also offers a 14-day free trial.

6. NetSuite CRM

A cloud-based CRM solution by the software giant Oracle, NetSuite provides companies of all sizes with a complete 360-degree view of their customers in real-time.

The platform offers much more than traditional CRM features. NetSuite includes powerful and advanced functions like marketing automation, sales force automation, and customer service management.

NetSuite's knowledge management is considered one of its top features. It allows businesses to publish and organize their content, making it easier for customers and employees to find the necessary documents.

NetSuite is best for: SMBs and large businesses.

Pricing: You'll need a custom quote to start with NetSuite. However, it offers a free product tour.

7. Zoho CRM

Zoho CRM provides many features that will automate workflows, processes, campaigns, customer journeys, and more.

One of its standout features is its conversational sales assistance through Zia, an AI companion designed to help you manage your CRM intelligently.

Zoho CRM is best for: Individual users and startups

Pricing: Zoho offers 4 different pricing options, including a free forever version. Its lowest tier, Standard, costs $18/user/month. You can also access a 15-day free trial.

8. Microsoft Dynamics 365

Microsoft Dynamics 365 is a set of intelligent CRM and ERP applications designed to streamline business processes and share data across the organization.

As a CRM platform, Dynamics 365 offers many AI and ML-driven apps that allow sales and marketing teams to make smarter decisions and take real-time actions for better business outcomes.

It is for organizations looking for a better way to connect their people, suppliers, retailers, wholesalers, and customers. It also helps you get more out of your data and, in the process, enables you to transform from a reactive to a proactive business.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 is best for: Small, medium, and large businesses

Pricing: There are several pricing plans in different categories. It also offers a 30-day free trial.

9. Insightly

Insightly is a cloud-based CRM solution for small businesses, but it also offers specific, enterprise-level modules for large companies and multi-level organizations.

Its main features include effective contact, pipeline, and task management.

Insightly can help you get clear sales visibility, an overview of the business, tracking of customer deliverables, collaboration within the organization, and more.

It integrates with over 2,000 tools, including collaboration, project management, and sales and marketing apps.

Insightly is best for: Small & midsized businesses and enterprises

Pricing: Alongside its three paid plans, Insightly offers a free forever plan (for up to 2 users) and a 14-day free trial. Its lowest pricing tier costs $29/user/month (billed annually.)

10. Apptivo

Apptivo is a CRM platform known best for workflow automation. It allows organizations to create as well as manage large-scale business accounts of their customers.

By creating an account, your business can enter and store any organization's or customer's account information, including contact information, annual revenue‚, address‚ website, market, and number of employees‚ among others, for easy retrieval.

Apptivo is best for: Individual users, small teams, and startups.

Pricing: Apptivo's pricing plans start at $20/user/month. It offers a 30-day free trial.

11. Keap

Keap offers numerous features to help small businesses organize their contact data to facilitate better services.

With a wide range of marketing tools, its CRM platform keeps your customer information organized and your sales team's collective work in one place.

This helps create a less repetitive user experience, letting sales teams move through sales tasks seamlessly.

Keap is best for: Startups and small businesses.

Pricing: You can start with Keap using its lowest plan, Pro, which starts at $159/month. It also offers a 14-day free trial.

12. Less Annoying CRM

Less Annoying CRM is perfect for any organization exploring how CRM solutions work without the complexity and expense of adopting said solutions.

Although it doesn't have all the features other competing CRMs have, it simplifies the implementation process. Even if you don't have much experience in using CRM software, you can have the system up and running in hours.

All in all, Less Annoying CRM is an approachable small business tool that can handle common sales and CRM functions.

Less Annoying is best for: Individual users and small businesses

Pricing: Its subscription plan costs $15/user/month, and you can try it for free for 30 days.

13. Salesflare

Salesflare's intuitive platform will keep you on top of your leads, ensuring no deals slip through the cracks.

It provides visual pipelines and insightful analytics that make it easier for you to manage your sales funnel.

Other standout features of Salesflare that can streamline your workflow include automated address books, data enrichment, and email synchronization.

Salesflare is best for: Small and medium-sized businesses

Pricing: Salesflare offers 3 paid plans, the first starting at $35/user/month. It also provides a 30-day free trial.

14. Copper

Copper offers a seamless solution for businesses to manage customer relationships and grow efficiently.

It integrates with Google Workspace to log all your emails and other interactions to your right contact.

With this CRM tool, you can create simple workflows to automate tedious tasks and trigger notifications when your team needs to take action.

Copper is best for: Small and growing businesses.

Pricing: You can get started with Copper using its Basic plan, which costs $29/user/month. A 14-day free trial is also available.

15. Close

This sales engagement CRM platform is tailored for businesses aiming to boost their conversion rates.

Close provides handy productivity features that will help you reach more leads, manage follow-ups, and seal more deals.

Plus, everything is neatly organized in a single timeline to ensure complete transparency for your team.

Close is best for: Startups and small & medium businesses

Pricing: Close's lowest pricing plan starts at $59/month. It also provides a 14-day free trial.

Special mention: Fireflies.ai

While not a typical CRM platform, Fireflies offers several features to help you manage your meetings and client interactions.

It automatically records, transcribes, summarizes, analyzes, and stores all your meetings.

By doing this, Fireflies ensures that all important customer information is well-captured so you can deliver more personalized services.

Here's what this AI-powered meeting tool can do for you:

• Offers 40+ integrations, including with CRM apps like Salesforce, Pipedrive, and HubSpot. Fireflies automatically log your sales notes, transcripts, and recordings in these apps to streamline your workflow.
• Offers automatic meeting capturing, transcription, and summarization. Fireflies supports transcription in 60+ languages (and 3 English accents).
• Helps you provide feedback to your sales team (and coach new reps) by leaving comments on your transcripts or reacting to certain sections.
• Allows you to turn important parts of your customer calls into shareable audio snippets (soundbites).
• Provides Conversation Intelligence—you can analyze your calls and access 10+ metrics, including sentiment analysis, question analysis, call volume tracking, and talk-to-listen ratio assessment.
• Lets you search keywords, topics, questions, and crucial customer details using Smart Search.
• It allows you to create custom topic trackers with the click of a button. This way, you can automatically find discussions around objections, pricing, competitors, etc.
• Stores all your conversations and transcripts in a central location. You can also create Channels to organize your voice conversations further.
• Offers a ChatGPT-powered chatbot, AskFred, to help you find vital customer information shared during your meetings.
• Keeps all your data encrypted at rest and in transit and is SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA, and GDPR compliant

The takeaway

While the CRM market will continue to grow with more powerful products, finding the right CRM solution that fits your needs is more important than having the most up-to-date offering.

Ideally, a CRM tool should have a simple and intuitive look and feel. There shouldn't be too much information clutter in its analytics dashboards. This makes the learning curve much easier to handle and use.

Fortunately, Fireflies offers a solution that ticks all the boxes — it's user-friendly and provides a comprehensive set of features that will improve your customer service.