The Best CRM Software of 2024

Salesforce gives businesses the ability to create the customized workflows and automation they need to become more efficient and perform at their best. When you factor in the sheer number of features, third-party integrations and add-on options available to you in the app marketplace, the CRM is ideal for businesses with diverse and evolving needs. That’s why it is our choice as the best CRM for customization.

At its core, Salesforce is a competent, easy-to-use and powerful CRM tool that will scale with your business. There’s so much you can do with it. For example, marketing teams can send out 5,000 emails a day with the marketing tool, or they can use the platform  to coordinate telemarketing and online advertising campaigns. They can then analyze each campaign individually and in-depth to see which ones were the most successful. We like how Salesforce can handle workloads for sales and customer success teams better and more effectively because the system presents them with the information they need to close a sale or get a one-call resolution to an issue. But these examples only scratches the surface of what’s possible with Salesforce.

For a while, and with some justification, Salesforce had a reputation for being difficult to use and customize. We are impressed at how much easier the company has made it now. Instead of getting under the hood to make minor changes, you can customize many automations, reports and more using drag-and-drop functionality and prebuilt scripts. You can add thousands of apps to your system that improve a range of functions such as project management or supply chain coordination. The company’s ongoing integration of high-level AI is impressive. Einstein GPT, a generative AI developed specifically for Salesforce, and Genie, a data optimization tool, set the standard for the sector.

Salesforce recently introduced several new tools within its Commerce Cloud and Marketing Cloud platforms, powered by the Einstein 1 Platform, to enhance the shopping experience. These tools leverage generative AI and consumer data to provide real-time insights into customer behavior and preferences, improving employee productivity as well as customer interactions and loyalty. Key releases include the Einstein Copilot for Shoppers, which offers personalized product recommendations to consumers, and Page Designer, which simplifies e-commerce site customization.

Other new features like the Data Cloud Related Lists and Data Cloud Triggered Flows allow businesses to see real-time customer data directly on Salesforce records and send automatic alerts to salespeople, simplifying data integration within Salesforce’s CRM. Features like the new Model Builder offer a flexible approach to building AI models with varying coding requirements, and Service Intelligence leverages AI to offer insights into service performance.

By some distance, Salesforce offers the best CRM system for companies that want complete customization across their sales, marketing and customer service teams.

monday.com is an intuitive and intelligent CRM system that SMBs can use to achieve greater operational efficiency and effectiveness. Its ease of use is second to none. It’s as simple to operate as many of the underpowered CRMs that one-person businesses use, but it has much of the power and functionality you’d expect from an enterprise-level CRM. It’s highly customizable, very user-friendly and has one of the slightest learning curves of all the current CRMs.

monday.com has a sleek, minimalist onscreen work area that you can make your own using a drag-and-drop editor to include the information and features you need. This approach to customization makes it much easier for sales, marketing and customer service managers to create complex sales funnels and workflows without a programming background. We like how you can create different automations and pipelines for various products and campaigns. This provides ultimate internal flexibility.

Tasks like assigning leads, setting up new notifications and automating reminders for follow-up actions are easy. The marketing features on monday.com work particularly well, offering users the ability to launch and manage proactive multi-channel campaigns, create content marketing calendars and more. You get a helpful library of email templates, and when you want to launch an email marketing campaign, simply drag your design into the correct window, and monday.com auto-populates with the correct customer or prospect information.

monday.com recently introduced mondayDB 1.0 for all its customers, a data infrastructure enhancing its Work Operating System. The architecture caters to diverse and complex work scenarios, which allows for streamlined workflow management and increased performance. This software update was driven by the need to accommodate growing customer needs and evolving work processes.  For example, mondayDB 1.0 loads user boards up to five times faster, which enhances the data-intensive processes and user experience on the platform. 

monday.com’s user-friendliness, back-end power and flexibility make it our choice of CRM for SMBs looking to extract more value from their company.

Pipedrive is the best CRM for businesses that rely heavily on the performance of their sales teams. Sales is a complex process — a lot happens between the point of contact and a closed deal. Pipedrive automates as much of the process as possible to reduce workload, giving reps more time to prospect and close. It also remembers where each deal in the system is at and can remind reps that they need to take a particular step at a given time to move a client along the sales pipeline.

Pipedrive is great for sales managers too. It gives them the ability to monitor what each rep is doing, where all their deals are, and view forecasted monthly revenue based on pipeline population. Pipedrive also has the rare distinction of being one of the few CRMs to include a recurring revenue model.

Pipedrive is a very use-specific platform. While it does have a well-executed email marketing platform built into it for lead generation, Pipedrive doesn’t do as much as other CRMs. But what it does, it does better than every alternative we’ve reviewed. It’s straightforward to set up and use, the pricing is mid-market, there’s a well-populated app store for adding more functionality, and AI has been intelligently applied throughout the platform.

Recently, Pipedrive added the availability for users to share their automations with each other. We like how this allows those who are skilled in creating automations to be able to share those with their colleagues who aren’t as tech-savvy. In addition, in September, more upgrades were made to the automations feature, including the ability for sales employees to build automations that are contingent upon specific conditions, including customer clicks or replies. The template homepage and template-building wizard were also built out to include increased support and functionality.

Freshsales CRM from Freshworks makes it easy for businesses of all sizes to attract, manage, nurture and close leads. It offers an intuitive user interface, an expansive feature set, visual deal pipelines and intelligent workflow automation. Freshsales is designed to help your business manage sales without juggling multiple platforms.

We were impressed with Freshsales’s robust analytics features, as it allows sales managers to create visual dashboards and get detailed insights into their team’s performance and recent sales activities. Freshsales’s AI tool, Freddy, provides in-depth reports and tailored recommendations to improve your sales strategy. Freddy uses predictive lead scoring to highlight the most promising leads and opportunities and can flag stalled deals that require extra attention.

Freshsales also offers omnichannel communications functionality. Team members can initiate and respond to interactions by phone, email, webchat, social media and messaging channels like WhatsApp, Facebook and Apple Business. Freshsales CRM integrates with e-commerce platforms and packages marketing automation, multichannel campaigns, and conversational sales and support into one platform.

Oracle NetSuite CRM is a top-notch solution for companies needing to track their customers’ buying journey, from lead acquisition and deal management to order fulfillment and post-sales support. Easily integrated with NetSuite’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) module, the platform combines sales, marketing, customer success and accounting functionality, allowing users to manage all customer-related processes in one place.

NetSuite CRM’s campaign management tools track and analyze your marketing efforts based on purchase trends, demographics, response patterns and other data points. You can also deliver targeted messages using email and direct mail templates, manage additional activities (e.g., events and phone-based outreach in a single platform), and track all team efforts in real time.

Additionally, you can build custom reports to measure personalized KPIs, assess marketing benchmarks like website visitors and use standard reports to track customer service efforts such as customer purchase trends, call volume and overall customer satisfaction. We like how the software lets you review individual and team performance with a side-by-side comparison of expected results versus actual data.

The partner relationship management features help users track all partner-related sales and marketing efforts like joint campaigns, sales forecasting and partner commissions. We found that the online portal makes it easy for resellers and partners to place and manage orders directly, without the need to go through your sales team.

Zoho CRM is a leading CRM with a unique set of features that, together with its scalability, make it the best CRM for growing businesses. During periods of growth, businesses can encounter many complications. Revenue has to match increased expenses, which means the marketing and sales teams have to operate better than ever before. Customer service teams must be in top form to retain customers and spot new selling opportunities. Zoho’s integrated tools and optional extended functionality help each team maximize their performance and collaborate better.

Plug Zoho into your business so your key teams — the ones responsible for attracting, converting and retaining customers — can coordinate their activities to be more efficient and effective. Zoho enhances this collaboration by centralizing all data in a logical, neat and intuitive way so everyone has access to the latest information. Zoho offers managers the insights they need to create workflows and automation that minimize the necessity for staff to perform repetitive but non-value-adding tasks. This gives them more time to be productive.

Zoho has clearly prioritized providing companies and their employees with a quality, friction-free experience at every stage — the platform is very user-friendly. That extends to setup and training, both of which should require a minimal time investment. The integration of AI in Zoho is also worthy of praise. AI powers contact management, deal tracking, advanced analytics on the platform and much more. You can also deploy AI for sales and service reps to help them achieve the desired outcomes in live contact situations.

The range of services, competitive price, AI integrations, marketplace size and scalability make Zoho the best CRM for growing businesses.

HubSpot CRM is our recommendation for the best CRM for businesses wanting to benefit from greater sales and marketing integration. We were impressed by how well the system analyzes the vast amount of customer interaction data it collects in real time. The ability to easily share this information enables sales and marketing leaders to work together to optimize performance. Beyond that, HubSpot’s features, range of third-party apps, customization options and user-friendliness allow companies to shape the platform to achieve their goals.

The well-executed omnichannel functionality HubSpot provides is among the best of any CRM. Choose the channels you want a presence on, and HubSpot will track every interaction with customers and prospects on each channel. This allows you to spot ways to improve your marketing and sales funnels by examining the most common points at which prospects drop out. The call-recording feature is highly useful because it allows sales managers to share real-life target audience conversations with marketing managers. By allowing marketing leaders to hear conversations with potential clients at different stages of the customer journey, they are better able to gain deep insights into customers’ pain points and reasons to buy. We find this invaluable for improving future marketing campaign collateral.

Although Salesforce and Oracle NetSuite have greatly improved their interfaces lately, HubSpot stands apart from other enterprise-suitable CRM systems thanks to its intuitive navigation and user-friendly drag-and-drop customizations. This makes automation and workflow creation much easier and greatly flattens the learning curve for new users. The onsite training materials are excellent if you need them, and customer support is available 24/7.

Keap is a comprehensive, easy-to-use solution with built-in marketing, sales and e-commerce tools. The CRM software requires minimal setup and can be used out of the box, or it can be customized to fit your company’s specific needs.

Keap’s true power lies in its automation capabilities. You and your team members can set up straightforward trigger workflows to follow up with leads, send automated reminders and notifications, and create and update deals based on the set conditions. For those who want to create more advanced workflows with alternate decision paths and delay timers, Keap offers a visual drag-and-drop builder. You can then test the created automations, ensuring they work as intended.

Keap also provides excellent e-commerce features. You can use it to create customer invoices, process single or recurring payments, and link transaction details with individual customers or organizations. Revenue and payment analytics provide insight into cash flow and track weekly and monthly activity to monitor overall growth. Additional CRM reports track daily, weekly and monthly sales for easy performance comparisons over time.

We like how Keap offers 60-minute webinars for new customers who want to learn more about its features, like lead capture and automation, and Keap has an extensive self-service knowledge base. There’s also a user community, where you can troubleshoot issues, and you can get 24/7 chat support from Keap’s customer service team.

Connect SugarCRM to your e-commerce websites to get actionable, real-time customer and visitor insights. Although nearly all CRM systems integrate to some degree with online shops, the “eCommerce Solution for Sugar” plug-in does this particularly well, making Sugar our choice as the best CRM for e-commerce businesses.

As a standard CRM platform, Sugar is very capable. We were impressed by how easy it is to learn how the system operates. There’s a large bank of blogs, videos, training courses and webinars to help you use the platform better. The array of reports and workflows you can create without coding is impressive, as are the customizable dashboards. There are 240 native integrations, including those for analytics, accounting and communications. But the “eCommerce Solution for Sugar” really stands out for us.

The plug-in supports Shopify, BigCommerce and WooCommerce stores. You can integrate multiple stores into one SugarCRM deployment too. Marketing teams looking for segmentation opportunities will really appreciate detailed customer, order and product reports. You can also use SugarCRM to create customer support and order fulfillment workflows.

The plug-in costs $790 a year with unlimited users and supports all SugarCRM iterations. Platform subscriptions start at $49 per seat (three user minimum). This is a great stand-alone CRM. Although it may not be powerful enough to run Amazon, it is a great option for up-and-coming e-commerce businesses as well as clicks-and-mortar retailers.

When you’re building client relationships, winning a deal is just the beginning. Insightly’s comprehensive project management tools allow users to successfully manage post-sales activities and effortlessly convert won opportunities into projects. We were impressed with the way users can review key project information and the latest activities, track milestones, schedule and manage tasks, and create events that sync to their calendars. Insightly allows you to set up custom task workflows for each pipeline stage to minimize manual data entry. That way, the relevant tasks are automatically assigned to designated team members whenever the project moves ahead. Insightly’s project management features are also accessible through its mobile app.

Insightly’s automation helps create workflows to ensure nothing slips through the cracks to derail an otherwise positive customer experience. Automatic social profile enrichment adds social data to contact records and identifies potential relationships between existing contacts in the database. The system automatically detects duplicated information to ensure sales teams always have clean data and allows batch edits to records. Companies can automate several sales process steps, such as creating and updating records, sending emails and generating tasks. Insightly automatically syncs to external business systems already in place.

You can have confidence in Insightly’s up-to-the-minute analytics and metrics, which allow you and your team managers to make rapid decisions and adapt sales strategies instantly. Insightly’s CRM is designed to manage every aspect of customer engagement, from initial contact to post-sale projects. This helps build long-lasting client relationships.

Zendesk is the CRM we recommend for businesses that want to lock in the productivity gains seamless cross-departmental collaboration can deliver. When sales, marketing and service teams work closely together from one accurate source of data and information, the insights gleaned can help companies generate more leads, improve conversation rates, and reduce churn. Zendesk provides businesses with a standardized and centralized database, along with great internal communications tools, to encourage cooperation and sharing ideas.

Two unique features that stood out to us — made possible thanks to Zendesk’s superb integrated omnichannel communications platform — were the ability to launch side conversations and appoint light agents. Both tools enable colleagues and teams to consult with each other to help improve the chances of making a sale or getting a first-contact customer service issue resolution.

We thought Zendesk’s built-in AI was impressively applied to a wide range of features. One example is its customer service chatbot. Zendesk has trained the AI on billions of service tickets over the past few years and programmed it so well that it quickly adapts its output to respond to customers’ questions accurately. The AI can also offer suggestions on improving performance and workflows based on its observations of how employees use the system.

The reporting and analytics functions on Zendesk are fully customizable. The platform offers templates to get you started that can be adapted to your needs. Zendesk’s user interface is intuitive and easy to navigate, and its marketplace offers more than 1,500 apps that can be used to improve functionality.

Particularly ideal for SaaS and subscription businesses operating in competitive markets, Zendesk can deliver joined-up marketing, sales and customer service functions to drive revenue and reduce churn.

Manage your contacts, leads and tasks with a simple and customizable CRM that syncs with your email and calendar. While many CRM platforms target enterprise businesses, Less Annoying pitches its services squarely at microbusinesses. It knows what its target audience wants and serves it very well. Price-wise, you get everything for just $15 per user per month.

Although other CRMs target this market, there are several reasons we chose Less Annoying CRM as the best for businesses with 10 or fewer employees. We like that contact management is so easy and clear. The dashboard makes it simple to access and alter any information. For owners, creating new users and assigning roles to them are straightforward. Less Annoying CRM gives insight into what team members are working on and their pipelines. Workflow automation is limited, but its drag-and-drop functionality is incredibly intuitive.

The app marketplace is a little empty compared to other platforms, but you will find MailChimp, Google and a VoIP provider there. Customer support is available by telephone, email and ticketing. Overall, Less Annoying CRM stands out for its advantageous features and the ease with which users pick up on how to quickly navigate it. That’s why we rate Less Annoying CRM as the best for microbusinesses.

Run your service business from anywhere with a CRM that lets you book, bill and communicate with clients via your website, review websites, email and text. Thryv is an all-in-one marketing and promotional platform, CRM system and payment services provider. We like that the system’s many features knit seamlessly together on its intuitive and easy-to-use dashboard. This is why we rate Thryv as the best CRM for service businesses.

We were impressed with Thryv for how well it manages omnichannel conversational threads from a single inbox. Creating marketing campaigns is easy too, with the platform’s built-in templates. We like that you can create trigger-based marketing campaigns to send to customers or prospects you may not have heard from in a while. With Thryv, you can build your own marketing lists and send promotional messages to prospects and customers via SMS and email. You can also create a customer portal where clients can send messages, schedule appointments, and make payments. We were impressed at the way the platform can crawl social media platforms to flesh out existing customer profiles with more information. To reduce the risk of no-shows, you can send appointment reminders through Thryv, as well as promote upcoming events.

The dashboard interface is excellent and provides a great user experience. You can add to what Thryv already does through the app marketplace, but there are only around 40 options to choose from. Thryv does not share its pricing online, and instead provides individualized quotes for each customer.