Develpreneur: Become a Better Developer and Entrepreneur

Customer Relationship Management Tools - Free and Low-Cost CRM

Listen

Description

Customer Relationship Management Tools are big business.  You can see examples in vast and expensive solutions like SalesForce.com.  However, not every answer is world-class and focused on the enterprise customers.  There are also plenty of options all the way down to the free and low-cost arena.  We will look at some of these contenders that not only can serve your needs. They also can be easier to implement than SalesForce.

CRM Tools Are Broad in Features

One of the most significant challenges in selecting a CRM is matching the requirements.  There are a lot of directions a CRM can go and still be focused on customer management.  There is the sales pipeline approach that focuses on analytics about your customers.  On the other hand, your CRM can focus on contacts and building relationships through notes and regular communication.  Do not forget you can also focus on sales and who bought what.  This analytics can blur the line from CRM to ERP and other systems.
We will still see some variance in the offerings at the level we are reviewing.  However, these tend to have a core set of features that most small businesses will find valuable.  These features include the ability to build a process for evaluating customers or prospects, contact tracking so you can keep up with what was said and when, and there is often email and other communication tool integrations.

The List

I tried to keep our list to a reasonable number of options.  You can easily spend weeks or months evaluating CRM tools, so I highly recommend you get to a short list of less than five very early in your process.

https://www.insightly.com - Pricing: FREE for up to 2 users with 2,500 or fewer customer contacts.  The Paid plans range from $29-$99 per user per month.

http://www.nimble.com - Pricing: They keep it simple and have only one plan. $19 per month per user. This has an unlimited number of customer contacts allowed.

http://www.zoho.com/crm - Pricing: The Paid plans range from $12 - $100 per user per month.

https://www.bitrix24.com - Pricing: There is an entirely free account (cloud based), you get five users and 5GB of storage. The vendor also offers an installed option for a one-time fee of $2,990, which gets you their small-business installed CRM (good for 50 to 500 users). If you need a system that has telephony and project management and don't need a lot of handholding or the most natural UI this is a good option. Overall, I found Bitrix24 to be powerful but a bit slow in responding to requests.  On the other hand, they have great import tools.

https://capsulecrm.co Pricing: Capsule is free for up to two users with 10MB of storage and 250 contacts.  I found it to be easy to use and easy to learn.  The mobile-responsive site appears easy to use as well although I did not spend much time with it.  This is a simple interface and product but strong on the functional side.

https://monday.com - Pricing: $25/month for up to five users.  It is an elegant solution but more project management focused than a CRM.