The 9 Best CRMs for Sales Teams in 2023

Zoho CRM is the best sales CRM for capturing leads, receiving a perfect score of 5/5  for lead capture. It offers features that help generate more leads and ensure smoother lead communication, such as website visitor tracking, web forms, and social listening.

It offers a 15-day free trial, which is beneficial for small businesses that want to give Zoho a try. Its free plan comes with lead capture features that can help you track the demographics, analyse website traffic, and know what they’re looking for. These features are website visitor tracking and web forms.

Its Standard, Enterprise, and Ultimate plans come with everything that the free plan has, plus social listening, which allows you to monitor what your competitors and customers say about your service. Zoho’s Plus plan offers every lead capture feature, including a website chatbot, which is great for tracking purchase patterns and consumer behaviour. Because these affordable plans are packed with lead engagement features, it receives 4.6/5 for pricing.

However, Zoho only scores 2.7/5 for lead communication because it lacks communication features until you purchase its Plus plan, which will give you access to website live chat, auto-response, and instant messaging apps. Meanwhile, Freshsales gets the highest lead communication score of 3.5/5, because it offers website live chat, native VoIP, and instant messaging apps, which gives you more chances of engaging with potential customers. However, unlike Zoho, it has a poor range of lead capture features.

But Zoho offers customisation, integration, and management options, making it highly scalable, thus scoring 4.5/5 for scalability.

While the 24/7 live support is only available on its Ultimate and Plus plans, other paid plans come with all the essential user-support channels, such as phone, chat, and email, earning 5/5 for customer support.

Our research shows that Freshsales is the best sales CRM for tracking communication with leads, because its plans offer features that allow you to enhance your lead engagement strategies with website live chat and native VoIP. It scores the highest lead communication score of 3.5/5 among the top CRMs. It does provide lead capture features that enable you to monitor purchase patterns, such as the website chatbot, scoring 3.2/5 in this category. However, it doesn’t offer website visitor tracking and social listening features on any of its plans. Meanwhile, Zoho scores a perfect 5/5 for lead capture because its plans come with social listening and website visitor tracking.

What’s great is that Freshsales offers a free plan and a 21-day free trial, allowing you to experience its service before signing up. Rates for its paid plans range from an affordable £12 to £66 per user, per month, receiving 4.6/5 for pricing.

Scoring 3.9/5 for scalability, Freshsales offers a custom objects feature on all of its plans, which allows you to customise the system as you see fit. While it doesn’t provide 24/7 live support on any of its plans, its free and paid plans come with all the necessary user-support channels, such as phone, chat, and email, scoring 4.2/5 for customer support.

HubSpot is the only CRM supplier to hit a perfect 5/5 score for lead conversion in our research. Its Professional and Enterprise plans offer features such as lead scoring, which allows you to rank leads on the likelihood of becoming a paying customer.

It offers digital engagement features which is great for boosting sales. These are website visitor tracking, website chatbot, and website live chat, scoring 3.7/5 for pricing. However, there aren’t enough features that can generate leads. It doesn't offer social listening, video conferencing tools, or instant messaging apps on any of its plans, which is why it only scores 2/5 for lead communication and 3.7/5 for lead capture. Zoho is best when it comes to lead capture because it offers much more options for sales teams to track prospects. Its plans offer social listening, website visitor tracking, and web forms, scoring 5/5 in this category.

HubSpot’s software lacks the flexibility to customise task types, but it offers a wide variety of integration options, such as social media, which is great for increasing lead engagement. This earns it a 4.3/5 score for scalability. While its plans don’t offer 24/7 live support, it offers useful support channels on its paid plans, such as email and chat, scoring 4.2/5 for customer support.

Pipedrive is the cheapest platform to offer extensive security settings, which is why it’s the best sales CRM for data protection. While it doesn’t provide IP restriction on its most expensive Enterprise plan, all of its lower plans come with security settings for data protection, including custom permission, multi-factor authentication, and IP restriction. This will give your customers peace of mind that all their data programmed on your CRM won’t get accessed by cybercriminals.

However, its lead generation features are only available as an add-on. These are website visitor tracking, website chatbot, and website live chat, earning only 3.7/5 for lead capture and 2/5 for lead communication. Freshsales, on the other hand, scores 3.5/5 for lead communication because it offers much more lead communication features for free, including website live chat, which comes as an add-on on all of Pipedrive’s plans.

But Pipedrive does offer access to its API, which enables you to automate workflows for less manual tasks and more closing deals, thus earning a 3.2/5 score for scalability. While it doesn’t come with email support on every plan, it offers 24/7 live chat support on all of its plans, receiving 4.2/5 for customer support. With these features and extensive security settings, Pipedrive earns an impressive 3.7/5 for pricing.

monday.com’s very-low cost and customisable platform make it the best value sales CRM, scoring 5/5 for pricing in our research. This is why it was also ranked as one of the best cheap CRMs on the market. It’s an easy-to-use version of Excel that can be customised to function like a CRM platform. It enables you to customise its tasks, calendar, and even software integrations.

This productivity app comes with lots of customisable business processes, which allows you to customise workflows and make the software adaptable to your existing processes. These features include custom objects, custom task types, and custom dashboards.

However, it offers a weak range of integration options, earning a scalability score of 2.3/5 because its Individual and Basic plans don’t come with any integration options, such as VoIP, web conferencing, and third-party sales engagement integrations. Meanwhile, Salesforce scores 4.7/5 for scalability because it offers a host of third-party sales engagement, VoIP, and web conferencing integration applications on all of its plans.

monday.com receives 2/5 for lead capture and 0/5 for lead communication because its plans don’t come with many lead communication and lead capture features. It only offers web forms for lead capture and the email templates for lead communication are only accessible on its more expensive, Pro and Enterprise plans. All of its plans do have customer support options, such as community forum and email support. However, phone, chat, and 24/7 live support aren't offered, seeing it score an above average 2.8/5 for customer support.

Salesmate isn’t just CRM software; it doubles as a VoIP platform too, which enables you to make calls from anywhere with its mobile and web apps. This offering of a built-in calling solution makes Salesmate the best sales CRM for cheap calls. It offers local and toll-free virtual phone numbers for 80+ countries with call credits that are charged at $10 per month.

It offers features that allow you to increase sales reach, such as native VoIP, instant messaging apps, and auto-response, scoring 3.5/5 for lead communication and 3/5 for lead capture. But its poor customisation and integration options are what earn it a low scalability score of 2.1/5. Salesforce, however, bags the highest scalability score among the top CRMs. It scores 4.7/5 because it offers a large number of third-party, VoIP, and web conferencing integration applications on all of its plans. Aside from that, it offers customisable business processes tools, such as custom objects, which isn’t available on any of Salesmate’s plans.

However, Salesmate offers email, chat, and a community forum, scoring 3.7/5 for customer support. Despite its lack of customisation options, its 15-day free trial, affordable plans, and effective sales features earn Salesmate an impressive 4.1/5 pricing score.

With the highest score for scalability in our research (4.7/5), Salesforce is the most scalable sales CRM and is the best for growing businesses. It offers extensive integration features on all of its plans, such as first-party, third-party, and social media integrations, which allow you to build a comprehensive sales system for your customers and leads.

It also offers lead generation features, such as website visitor tracking, web forms, and email templates, enabling you to quickly connect with potential customers. However, those are the only lead communication and lead capture features it offers, scoring 2/5 for both categories. So, without many digital marketing tools on its plans, its expensive rates, and no offering of a free plan, it only scores 1/5 for pricing.

monday.com gets the highest pricing score of 5/5 because its very-low cost platform offers lots of customisation options, such as custom objects, custom dashboards, and fully editable forms, that enable you to scale.

Meanwhile, Salesforce receives a perfect score for customer support because it offers important user-support channels on every plan such as community forum, chat, and email.

Microsoft Dynamics offers the best contact database, scoring a solid 5/5 in this category. It offers robust business processes and integration options, scoring 4.4/5 for scalability. Setting up a custom automated workflow is made easier because it offers custom objects, custom dashboards, social media integrations, and third-party integrations. While it doesn’t offer chat support, it gives you all the customer support channels, including 24/7 live support on every plan. This scores MS Dynamics 4.4/5 in this category.

Its plans offer contact's communication history, list segmentation, and duplicate detection, which allow you to obtain customer data that gives you contact visibility over customers.

Meanwhile, none of the lead capture features are available on any of its plans, receiving 0/5 for lead capture. Aside from that, instant messaging apps, website live chat, and native VoIP aren’t included on any of its plans, earning a measly 1.2/5 for lead communication. Since there are limited digital engagement features offered, and its rates are a little steep for such offerings, it only earns 1.9/5 for pricing.

Meanwhile, Freshsales receives 4.6/5 for pricing, plus, higher lead capture (3.2/5) and lead communication (3.5/5) scores than MS Dynamics because Freshsales offers much more lead capture and lead communication features, such as web forms, website live chat, and native VoIP on all of its extremely affordable plans.

Our research shows that Zendesk Sell is the best sales CRM for easy data visualisations, hitting 3.5/5 for data/reports category. While it didn’t get the highest score in our research, it offers you the power of CRM data analysis that helps you monitor your business’ performance. Its API automation solutions allow you to keep your business systems in sync with its pre-made reports, which is great because it allows you to easily build a data dashboard on the platform.

However, it scores low for everything else. It’s 2.8/5 for pricing because, while its lower plans are affordable, its pricier plans don’t come with enough features to help you with your digital sales strategy. Thus, earning 2/5 for lead capture and 1.2/5 for lead communication. Freshsales, on the other hand, scores 3.5/5 for lead communication because it offers more features, including website live chat, which isn’t available on any of Zendesk’s plans.

Meanwhile, every Zendesk plan has customisation and integration options such as custom dashboards, custom objects, third-party integrations and VoIP integrations, which will help you streamline your sales, marketing, and customer service operations, earning a 3.4/5 score for scalability. However, its plans don’t offer phone, email and 24/7 live support, scoring 2.4/5 for customer support.