Compare CRM Software Costs 2023

With so many CRM systems available, each offering diverse pricing plans, packages, and feature tiers, comparing CRM pricing and providers can quickly become an overwhelming task, requiring a significant amount of time and patience.

To make your search easier, we’ve created a comprehensive guide to CRM pricing where you’ll find thorough reviews of nine suppliers, including their product offerings and price ranges.

This CRM pricing guide will help you identify the ideal provider for your business quickly and easily, but to save even more time, you can use our free quote-finding tool to request quotes so you can compare the best suppliers for your needs.

But before we delve into the details of CRM pricing, let's quickly confirm what we're talking about.

Who Are CRM Systems Best For?

Businesses with multiple customers and sales leads benefit the most from CRM software. A CRM system is best suited to a sales or client services manager in an ambitious or growing business. If you're looking to scale up your customer base, you should look into the best CRM systems for marketing automation.

Smaller sales and marketing teams can benefit from a CRM subscription thanks to its automation and revenue calculation features. That's why businesses with fewer people can handle more sales or customer service enquiries using a CRM.

Here are the types of workers likely to benefit most from a CRM:

• Sales executive
• Business development associate
• Marketing team leader
• Client success manger
• Field sales rep
• Customer support agent
• Call center worker
• Real estate agent
• Ecommerce entrepreneur
• Hotel bookings coordinator
• Event planner

If your company only tends to handle one deal at a time or gets very few customer service enquiries, then your team likely doesn't need a CRM.

Zendesk Costs: $19 to $149 per user, per month

Zendesk specializes in affordable, effective solutions for sales and service teams. ‘Sell’ and ‘Support' plans both start from just $19 per user, per month. There used to be a $5 per user, per month Essentials Support plan, but this was retired in 2021. You may still see it mentioned – along with the Elite plan, which is also retired – but you can no longer sign up to these.

You can see a summary of the main features you'll get in each pricing tier in the table below. Enterprise pricing is also available, but we haven't listed those as they're not recommended for SMBs.

In our testing, we found that Zendesk's all-in-one system would suit growing businesses. It's not for nothing that Zendesk one of the most popular CRM providers. This platform is ideal for managers, marketing teams, customer care, and sales teams looking for customizable pipelines and data tracking.

You can make use of a free Zendesk trial to help you test the waters. If you're a startup, you can even apply for a six-month free trial.

Zendesk CRM Pricing

If you don't need the full sweep of capabilities of the Zendesk Suite packages, you can choose from these lower-priced options.

For more detail on these packages – and to see the Zendesk Suite options – head to the Zendesk site now.

monday.com Costs: $10 to $24 per user, per month

In our analysis, we judge monday.com as ideal for managers that need lots of customization. We particularly liked the separate dashboards for leads, contacts, deals, and accounts, all of which you can customize. monday.com is better than Zendesk in this respect because you get unlimited customizable pipelines at every price point. It's a lower-priced product that reliably tracks deal progression and client communications.

At $10 per user per month, the ‘Basic’ plan offers an app for both iOS and Android, as well as 5GB of storage and whiteboard collaboration. That's really convenient and rather rare in the scope of CRM software.

Yet if your organization relies heavily on email, you're better off going for monday.com’s ‘Standard’ plan, because of its email integration with Gmail or Outloook.

Zoho Cost: $14 to $65 per user, per month

Zoho is a powerful platform offering lots of features across sales, email, customer support, and more. Sure, the interface isn’t as jazzy, but it gets the job done. If you want to dive in and add lots of data to customize your database of accounts, contacts, and deals, Zoho will really come into its own. Free for up to three users, with paid plans starting at $14/user/month (billed monthly).

In our testing, Zoho impressed us with its ‘Set Up Your CRM' checklist, and customizable layouts for accounts, leads, and contacts. This platform is great value for money and offers the strongest selection of features of any CRM system we tested.

As you may already know, Zoho has as many software offerings as a millipede has legs. If you're looking for more powerful business tools, you should take a look at our Zoho One pricing review. You may be able to score better value for money with extra functionality compared with Zoho CRM products.

Pipedrive Cost: $14.90 to $119 per user, per month

Pipedrive is the perfect affordable CRM solution for businesses with several stages in their sales funnel. It’s the perfect way to guide each consumer from prospect to regular customer, especially for high-value products. Easily integrate with third party applications to maximize efficiency. Plans start at $14.90/user/month.

During our testing, we found Pipedrive had one of the easiest interfaces of any system we tested, including pre-made email campaign templates. Overall, Pipedrive is good value for money.

You should be aware that you'll only get access to phone support at the Power tier which costs $64.90 per user, per month (billed annually). This makes Pipedrive support more expensive than Zoho CRM, as the latter has phone support available at all price plan levels (excluding the free plan).

Can't decide if you need Pipedrive? We've gone under the hood with Pipedrive vs monday.com comparing their features, pricing, scalability, and weaknesses head-to-head.

Freshsales – $15 to $83 per user, per month

If you’re a small business looking for a good, affordable CRM system without all the bells and whistles, Freshsales will be right up your street. Get up and running in next to no time with an easy, useful dashboard, packed full of features you’ll actually use. Freshsales is popular across the board, but it’s the small businesses that sing its praises the loudest. Paid plans start at $15 per user per month.

Freshsales is one of the best value for money CRM systems we tested, after Hubspot, offering a powerful platform that's easy to use. In our testing, we found it easy to set up email campaigns, and to import contact information from a variety of sources including CSV/Excel, Google Contact, or Outlook Contact

Salesforce – $25 to $300 per user, per month

Salesforce is the big name in CRM software – holding 23% market share, which is greater than its four nearest competitors' combined. If you're part of a medium-to-large business, you're ready to upgrade to the sharpest tools in the CRM shed.

Get advanced deal management and highly customized sales pipeline monitoring with Salesforce CRM. One of its many highlights is the huge range of integrations you can connect. With over 4,000 apps, Salesforce CRM is superior to Zoho CRM, which offers just five, 10, 15, 20 or 50 at each paid price plan.

While its lower-priced tiers seem reasonable in cost (considering how big a brand it is), you'll miss out on some key features if you pay anything beneath $300 a month, per user.

Customer service is in short supply on the Starter Plan ($25 per user, per month) – you can expect a response within two days. For response within an hour, you'll need to pay for the “Premier Success Plan” which is an extra 30% of your net license fee (or included at the Unlimited Plan at $300 per user, per month).

HubSpot – $0 to $1,781 per month

You can buy Sales Hub tools from HubSpot, with packages priced at $0, $20, $500 or $1,200 per month. If you're looking for a wider range of tools, you can sign up for the CRM Suite, a platform with subscriptions costing $0, $30 or $1,781 per month. There's an enterprise option for $5,000 a month, but we wouldn't recommend that for SMBs.

HubSpot sales software pricing is a little different from typical CRM packages. Each tier includes a certain number of users, and you pay to add more.

• Sales Hub Starter includes two users ($10 per extra user, per month)
• Sales Hub Professional includes five users ($100 per extra user, per month)
• Sales Hub Enterprise includes 10 paid users ($120 per extra user, per month)

However, it's good to note that everyone in your team can access the features of the Free HubSpot plan.

You'll save money if you pay for the entire year's bill upfront. This gets you a 10% discount, including a reduction in the cost of each additional user per month.

You should note that Starter customers only get email and app support, while phone support becomes available in the Professional tier.

HubSpot Onboarding Fees

You will have to pay additional “onboarding” fees when you sign up to certain premium HubSpot plans. This pays for a HubSpot professional to help you:

• Set goals specific to your company
• Start projects, and advise on prioritization
• Access resources to understand the software
• Integrate your existing tools with HubSpot

HubSpot Sales Hub Onboarding costs $1,000 for the Professional package or $3,000 for the Enterprise package.

You can benefit from a free demo if you want to see how the premium features look in practice.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 – $40 to $162 per user, per month

You've got to pay close attention to what's included in the Microsoft Dynamics 365 deal you sign up for. Microsoft Viva Sales is available as a standalone product – the cheapest of its sales software programs at $40 per user, per month. Note that Viva Sales is included in the Sales Enterprise and Sales Premium packages.

It's a useful tool that automatically captures data from Microsoft 265 programs into any CRM system. AI-powered analytics provide account managers with recommendations and reminders, reducing your chances of losing sales due to forgetfulness or overwhelm.

However, Viva Sales is not a full CRM database so you'll need another product alongside it. Instead you can choose from price packages at the higher end of CRM system costs, and make use of cross-application collaboration.

In contrast to other CRM pricing packages like HubSpot and Freshsales, the Enterprise package of Microsoft Dynamics 365 ($95 per user, per month) is not its top-priced tier. Instead, it's a great mid-range option for business leaders looking for useful context-based sales insights. It comes with much better customization opportunities compared with the Professional package ($65 per user, per month).

The free trial is 30 days.

SugarCRM – $49 per user, per month to $1,000 per month

What you'll get from SugarCRM depends on whether you'd prefer cloud hosting or on-premises software. Enterprise options are available for on-premises use, which will suit businesses with a well-resourced IT infrastructure. Learn more in our guide to the best cloud-based CRMs.

All price plans support third-party add-ons and code customizations except for Sell Essentials ($49 per user, per month).

It's also essential you're aware of the user limits per price plan:

• Sell Essentials: Minimum three users (maximum five)
• Sell Advanced: Minimum three users
• Sell Premier: Minimum 10 users
• Enterprise On Premises: Minimum three users
• Enterprise+ On Premises: Minimum 10 users

SugarCRM's short free trial of seven days can help you decide whether it's the right system for you.

What Is CRM Software?

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software is a program that keeps track of all your sales leads, automates follow-up, and calculates estimated deal sizes. It's a database of all your contacts where team members can view the progress of each deal along the pipeline.

Sales managers overseeing large volumes of clients – often with different staff working on the same leads – use a CRM to operate more efficiently. Instead of keeping track of deals via conversations and emails, staff can quickly view notes, contact details, and relevant next steps for each client in the CRM.

CRM systems tend to integrate with marketing, VoIP, and accounting software. This makes it painless to carry out business critical actions at scale, such as sending mass emails, making a timely phone call or tracking revenue targets. Therefore using a CRM is a more secure and streamlined way of managing clients compared with working from spreadsheets.

CRM is mainly used for sales management and marketing, but there are specialized CRM tools for customer support services. These will create tickets per enquiry, and allow different team members to access relevant account information as well as previous chat logs.

Types of CRM Pricing Plan

Each CRM provider typically offers three different plan types, with different features (and pricing) for each one. Here's an outline of each one:

Starter/Basic Plan: Ideal for small businesses or startups with limited budgets. It offers essential CRM features and basic functionality, suitable for businesses with a small customer base or simple sales processes.

Mid-Tier Plan: Suitable for growing businesses that need more advanced features and customization options. These plans typically offer additional features such as sales automation (which are becoming more readily available due to the rise of AI), reporting, and integration with other tools, targeted at businesses with moderate customer volumes and sales activities.

Enterprise/Advanced Plan: Designed for large enterprises or businesses with complex sales and marketing needs. These plans provide extensive customization, advanced analytics, integrations with multiple platforms, and comprehensive support services. These high-end plans suit businesses with a large customer base, multiple sales teams, and intricate sales processes.

How Much Does an Industry-Specific CRM Cost?

The variation in pricing for CRM systems depends not only on plan size and features but also on the industry. Pricing varies wildly whether the CRM system is intended for sales, marketing or customer service teams. The reason for this is that different teams require different levels of complexity in their processes.

Below we'll break down how much you can expect to pay for your CRM system based on whether you're a sales, marketing or customer service professional.

CRM for Sales

CRM for sales teams is mainly used for lead capture, communication and conversion and tends to be priced between $12 and $300 per month. There are also many totally free plans for sales teams, which is fantastic for sole entrepreneurship but can be limiting once you require multiple users or higher data capacity.

If you upgrade to a middle-tier sales CRM, you may have the added benefit of more advanced features such as lead scoring, and deal and quote management which helps to gain a fuller picture of the prospects in your sales pipeline.

The highest-priced plans are intended for enterprise-level teams and instead of adding more features, will enhance the operational functionality of your system with higher data, user and contact limits.

CRM for Customer Service

CRM systems for customer service teams are mainly used for managing customer queries and complaints and for maintaining relationships with existing customers vs. sales and marketing CRM systems are used at an earlier stage in the sales funnel. That being said, customer service CRM systems are rather similarly priced to sales systems at $14-$300 per month, making them a feasible investment for teams of all sizes.

CRM for Marketing

CRM systems for marketing teams are where we see the biggest increase in pricing. They can range from $19-$15,000 per month, a marked price increase from sales and customer service systems. Marketing CRM systems offer more advanced capabilities than that of sales or customer service systems. These features include email marketing, multi-channel lead communication and capture.

With higher-paid plans, you'll also benefit from analytics features and automation, which are particularly useful when it comes to reallocating your team's time and resources to more valuable activities.

Free CRM Plans vs Paid CRM Plans

Free CRM plans typically offer limited features and functionalities with potential usage restrictions, making it suitable for small businesses or startups with budget constraints or for those wanting to test the CRM's suitability. That being said, we love HubSpot's Free plan for companies looking to streamline their contact management processes without the investment of paid software.

On the other hand, a paid plan such as Freshsales or Salesforce provides comprehensive features, advanced functionalities, and dedicated support, making it ideal for businesses with complex sales processes, larger customer bases, and the need for ongoing support, customization options, and scalability. When it comes to CRM pricing, paid plans offer a more robust and tailored CRM experience, while free plans serve as a starting point for businesses with simpler needs.

How to Get the Best CRM Deals

We understand that CRM systems are more complex than most business software you'll be looking to invest in. Because it can do so many things, there are more moving parts to keep track of than, say, a video editing tool. To take some stress off your shoulders, we wanted to provide you with a clear structure for making your decision.

Step one: Identify your business use case

We mentioned that it's best to hone in on the features you really need from a CRM. That means you should take time to identify business inefficiencies and workflow bottlenecks which could be resolved with a CRM. You want to make sure your investment is really going to save you money by freeing up staff hours, improving customer satisfaction, and hitting targets.

This allows you to create a realistic budget; your CRM is not simply a business cost, but a money-saving investment and revenue driver.

Step two: Factor in training time

As part of deciding on the level of complexity your system should have, take time to reflect on the skillset and working culture of your business. Staff will need to train on the new CRM, so you need to factor in that downtime. If staff turnover is high, you may want to buy a simpler CRM.

Jan Chapman, Managing Director of managed IT services provider MSP Blueshift, shares: “Most people believe they can't handle the technology, but you don't have to be an expert in every area. Understanding your options is a crucial first step in overcoming this alleged technological barrier.”

CRM providers offer training and support (though this may come at an extra cost), so take comfort in the fact you can outsource some of this process. “Don't waste any more time thinking you have to learn everything on your own,” adds Chapman.

Step three: Laser focus on CRM solutions that match your needs

Now you're ready to approach CRM providers with a clear vision of the features you'll need. For instance, if you know you need email marketing automation, ensure the plan you're considering comes with that included (or added on for an affordable price).

Don't settle for a pricey solution that misses functions you're going to have to buy another tool for. To ensure you're getting the best deal with the right functionalities for your business needs, it's important to shop around. You may benefit from using our free comparison tool to make this process run smoothly.