How Much Does CRM Software Really Cost?

A CRM system can cost as much as £264 per user, per month, depending on your business needs. That being said, some providers offer free plans with basic features.

The standard monthly fee excludes unforeseen costs such as a one-time onboarding fee. Ultimately, CRM pricing will depend on its functionalities, user limit, data limit, and other minor factors, which are all highlighted in this article.

We’ll go in-depth with the cost of CRM software, starting with the factors determining its price and comparing seven of the most popular CRM systems in the UK. Finally, we’ll also discuss how you can save while making the most out of your system.

Need more help with choosing the right CRM system for your business? Use our free CRM cost comparison tool, and we’ll match you with trusted providers who will contact you with personalized, obligation-free quotes.

CRM costs explained: what factors affect CRM pricing?

CRM providers set their price per user, per month, which will also vary depending on whether you want monthly or annual billing. From there, you can choose from subscription plans based on the features you want to include and how much data storage you need. Other than that, there are add-on features you can integrate for an additional price.

Fundamentally speaking, the price of your plan depends on factors, such as:

• Company needs and goals
• The number of users
• Data storage
• Subscription plan based on the features you want to include
• Add-on features
• Billing cycle (monthly or annual)
• Time investment fees
• Onboarding costs

Ultimately, your current business needs and goals are crucial factors you’ll want to consider when choosing a CRM system. You will have to determine where you want your software to focus, whether it’s on sales, marketing, or customer service.

Nevertheless, these are just the baseline of your CRM pricing. Don’t be surprised if your bill is a little higher than expected as there are  transparent and hidden fees, which we’ll discuss in the next section.

How much does CRM implementation cost?

Setting up your CRM system requires serious technical skills. You would need expertise from your provider to help you implement your system.

Here are just some of the implementation services you need to consider:

• Consulting services
• Data migration
• Contact import
• Workflow export/import
• Building dashboards
• Automated workflow creation

In any case, a few of these services are already included in some plans. So, it is of utmost importance to find out what services you will need before picking a plan.

Implementing a CRM system also involves indirect costs, such as training and onboarding of staff. This process may cause downtime while the staff become familiar with the system. As CRM systems are essential for the sales pipeline, any downtime during the implementation phase could lead to missed sales opportunities, which could also be considered an extra cost.

CRM software cost comparison

While it’s complex to figure out the overall price of your CRM system, computing your baseline cost will give you a ballpark figure of how much you should put into your CRM budget. This is why we’ve put together the price per user, per month for each subscription plan offered by the top seven CRM providers in the UK.

HubSpot pricing

HubSpot Sales Hub offers three pricing tiers, ranging from £19 to £99 per user, per month, and earns a 3.7/5 pricing score in our research. The

• The Starter plan: £8.50 – £9 per user, per month
  • It’s the best CRM for lead conversion in our research. You’ll get a maximum of 5,000 email templates as well as website live chat to help you communicate with your leads.
• The Professional plan: £79 – £88 per user, per month
  • Featuring fully editable forms and 300 custom automation builders to help you design your CRM system.
• The Enterprise plan: £105 per user, per month.
  • This includes a unique predictive lead scoring feature, that automates lead scores to help you identify the best leads. The catch is, HubSpot requires a one-time onboarding fee for its pricier plans. Specifically, you’ll have to pay £308 upfront to subscribe to the Professional plan, while it will cost you £2,460 for the Enterprise plan.

While HubSpot Sell is on the higher end of our pricing spectrum, it offers the most feature-packed free plan, and is certainly one of the best free CRM systems. For no cost, you’ll get lead capture tools, such as website visitor tracking and a website chatbot, which monday.com, which has the cheapest paid plans available, does not even offer. You’ll also gain access to 164 integrations, which is a massive difference to monday.com’s eight integrations across all its plans.

Add-on features

• Software training
• Setup support

monday.com pricing

monday.com has four pricing tiers, including its free plan. Its priced plans range from £10 to bespoke prices.

• The Basic plan: £10 – £13 per user, per month,
  • monday.com’s Basic plan earns a perfect 5/5 pricing score from our team of independent researchers. That’s almost half the price of Salesforce’s Essentials plan (£20 per user, per month), which restricts users to 10, while monday.com offers unlimited users.
  • That said, it’s not surprising how scanty the storage is, with a data limit of 5BG. Limited data storage can degenerate your functionalities, as you would need to store data to analyse patterns, utilise features, and gain insights from your leads and customers. Still, monday.com enables unlimited users to access your system, view your revenue data, and create custom reports.
• The Standard plan: £14 – £18 per user, per month.
  • For the small increase in cost, your data limit will increase to 20GB per user and include 250 custom automated workflows per month
• The Pro plan: £24 – £31 per user, per month
  • This plan gives you a larger 100-gigabyte storage per user and lets you set key performance indicators (KPIs) for your team and organisation.
• The Enterprise plan: bespoke pricing.
  • Lastly, monday.com’s Enterprise plan grants a massive 1,000GB data limit per user. It also provides onboarding support to help you set up your system.

Add-on features:

• None

Salesforce pricing

With no free plans and plans that cost £20 to £264 per user, per month, Salesforce Sales Cloud is our most expensive plan, earning the lowest pricing score in our research (1/5). Despite this, it does offer a generous 30-day free trial across all of its plans, with the best features for customer support and scalability.

• Salesforce Essentials: £20 per user, per month.
  • You’ll have access to tools like list segmentation, duplicate detection, custom reports, and a chart builder so that you can customise and manage data on your system.
• Salesforce Professional: £64 per user, per month,
  • With this upgrade, you’ll have the capacity to design your database to reflect your business processes with features like custom task types, team dashboards, and team hierarchies.
• Salesforce Enterprise: £132 per user, per month.
  • Salesforce Enterprise is a worthy upgrade for enterprise-level operations seeking API and analytics capabilities from their CRM system.
• Salesforce Unlimited: £264 per user, per month.
  • Taking the top spot for the most expensive plan in our research is Salesforce’s Unlimited plan. For what it’s worth, it does offer strong features like 24/7 live support, customisable databases and reports, and high scalability. However, it’s missing some lead capture tools. If you’re looking for a system that will help you collect data from your leads, Zoho CRM is our best CRM for lead capture features.

Add-on features:

• 24/7 live phone line support
• Data migration
• Setup support

Freshsales pricing

Freshsales is another great option for companies on a budget, with prices ranging from £7 to £49 per user, per month, which is why it scores an impressive 4.6/5 in our pricing analysis.

• The Free plan
  • This plan offers pretty neat lead communication features, such as web forms and live chat.
• The Growth plan: £7 – £9 per user, per month.
  • With this plan, you’ll get more communication tools, including email templates, instant messaging apps, and email auto responses.
• The Pro plan: £29 – £35 per user, per month.
  • With this plan, you’ll be able to set automated workflows, team hierarchies, and organisational KPIs to help you manage your team.
• The Enterprise plan: £49 – £59 per user, per month.
  • For an Enterprise plan, Freshsales is cheaper than most competitors’ high-tier plans.

Our research shows that Freshsales is the best CRM system for tracking communication with leads, earning 3.5/5, the highest score in lead communications, as well as 3.25/5 score in lead capture. It’s equipped with the best tools to connect and communicate with your leads, such as website live chat, video conferencing, email templates, and instant messaging apps.

Add-on features:

• Quote proposal management
• Setup support

Zoho CRM pricing

Zoho CRM has a wide range of pricing tiers, offering five plans ranging from £12 to £55 per user, per month. This provider is a definite contender for the software system with the best value for money, scoring 4.6/5 in our pricing score.

• The Free plan
  • For a free plan, Zoho includes various advanced tools, like segmentation, access to each pipeline and revenue, data migration, and custom permissions. The drawback is that it has a maximum user limit of two.
• The Standard plan: £12 – £16 per user, per month.
  • To increase the tools at your disposal, you can upgrade to its Standard plan, which has unlimited users and 200MB of data storage.
• The Professional plan: £18 – £28 per user, per month.
  • This plan expands your data limit with 20MB data storage per user, in addition to another 10GB of data storage for organisations with less than 200 users, and 15GB for those with more than 200 users.
• The Enterprise plan: £35 – £40 per user, per month.
  • This upgrade takes it up a notch with 50MB of data per user, as well as customisation tools for your database, including custom objects, custom task types, and approval workflows.
• The Ultimate plan: £42 – £52 per user, per month.
  • Lastly, Zoho’s Ultimate plan has 100MB of storage per user and 24/7 live support.

Add-on features:

• Setup Support

Zendesk pricing

Zendesk Sell provides a range of affordable plans, from £15 to £139 per user, per month, but it doesn’t offer a free plan, which pulls its pricing score down to 2.8/5 in our analysis.

Zendesk’s pricing plans are listed on its website per five users, so we have calculated it according to each user to provide an accurate comparison with the other providers. Your upfront costs may therefore be higher than those shown below if you choose to include more users in your plan.

• Sell Team: £15 – £20 per user, per month.
  • This includes features that help you organise your database, like a customisable sales pipeline, list segmentation, and duplicate detection.
• Sell Growth: £45 – £59 per user, per month.
  • With this plan, you can explore various communication tools to track your leads, including web forms and email templates.
• Sell Professional: £89 – £115 per user, per month.
  • This plan enables you to build your database according to your business processes.
• Sell Enterprise: £139 – £179 per user, per month.
  • Finally, Zendesk’s Enterprise plan provides 250GB per user, the largest data storage allowance offered across all providers.

Zendesk doesn’t have a free plan, unlike most CRM providers. However, it does have a 30-day trial, which you can cancel at any time, so you can test whether the system is right for you. If you want a CRM plan that won’t cost you anything, we recommend HubSpot’s free plan for a plethora of valuable tools and features for marketing, email, customer service, and data management.

Add-on features:

• None

How to keep CRM costs to a minimum

With a per user pricing model, with the additional transparent hidden costs, it’s easy for your CRM budget to get out of control.

Here are some helpful tips:

• Start with a free plan
• Determine your goals for your CRM
• Choose an cloud version instead of installing an on-site hardware
• Conduct quarterly evaluations

If you want to save time choosing the best CRM system for your business, our free quote comparison tool can cut your research time and provide you with access to same-day quotes. Simply answer a few questions, and the leading CRM providers will contact you with bespoke, obligation-free quotes.