The cheapest CRMs

Flowlu is only partly a CRM. It is a business-operations tool for service companies, and the pipeline sits alongside project management, task tracking, invoicing and basic finance, on the theory that in an agency or a consultancy these are all views of one job rather than four systems.

The pricing is remarkable for what is included. There is a free tier, and the paid plans are US$6 and US$11 per user per month on yearly billing — which is a low rate for a product carrying project management, invoicing and finance alongside the pipeline.

The value case is the strongest thing about it — very little else asks so little for so much surface. The downside is the arithmetic of breadth. Nothing at this price is deep, and a company that mainly needs a sales CRM will find the pipeline module competent rather than considered, with the design attention spread across modules it may never open. The right way to read Flowlu is as an operations tool that happens to include a CRM, not as a CRM that happens to include invoicing.

HubSpot sells the sales half of its platform as a product in its own right, and the reason it appears on so many shortlists is the bottom of the range rather than the top. The free tools are not a trial: contact management, a deal pipeline, email tracking and a mailbox integration cost nothing and keep working, within a documented ceiling of two users and a thousand contacts. For a one- or two-person business running on a spreadsheet, that is a real answer rather than a lead magnet.

What the free tier buys is a path, and the path gets steep. Starter is US$7 per seat per month billed annually. Professional is US$90, and carries a required one-time onboarding fee of US$1,500 before you can use it, with Enterprise asking US$3,500 on the same basis. Those fees are published, but they turn a subscription into a project budget.

The catch is that setup and eventual cost pull in opposite directions. Getting started has almost no friction, but the tier most growing teams land on cannot be switched on without buying onboarding first, which turns a per-seat decision into a procurement one. What you get for staying is depth: custom objects, forecasting and automation higher up, a large catalogue of integrations, and a public API.

Bigin exists because its own vendor's flagship CRM is too much for most small businesses, and the company decided to say so with a product rather than a discount. What you get is a pipeline, contacts, activities and the integrations of a very large platform, packaged into something a two-person business can set up in an afternoon.

On setup and value it is hard to argue with. There is a free tier, Express costs US$7 a seat each month on annual billing and Premier US$12 — figures that sit at the bottom of this field while still including Gmail and Outlook integration, automation, a developer API and documented data migration. Very little here is withheld to make a cheaper plan feel thin.

The cost is deliberate shallowness. This is a product designed not to grow past a certain size, and the honest consequence is that outgrowing it means changing products rather than changing tiers. For a business that will always be small that is a feature; for one that expects to be forty people in three years it is a migration scheduled in advance.

Twenty is the open-source CRM that most obviously wants to be used by people who write software. It is licensed under the AGPL, the repository is busy, and the documented way to run it yourself is a Docker Compose file rather than a support ticket. If your objection to this category is that your customer data lives on somebody else's machine, this is the entry that answers it directly.

The pricing inverts the usual shape. Full customisation, custom apps and workflow automation are all on the cheapest paid tier at US$9 per user. What the second tier at US$19 adds is governance rather than capability: row-level permissions, single sign-on, and a custom domain.

On scale headroom it is better equipped than its age suggests, with row-level permissions, single sign-on and an audit log. The tradeoff is the one you would expect of a young project. Integrations are thin — the catalogue does not approach what a decade-old vendor accumulates — self-hosting is only free if your time is, and above the two published tiers sits an enterprise arrangement starting at fifty thousand dollars that is negotiated rather than listed. What you get in exchange is unusual control: run it on hardware you own, read exactly what it does with your records, and take the database with you whenever you want.

Close is built for a specific job: outbound sales where somebody picks up the phone. Most of this category treats telephony as an integration you buy separately and wire in. Here the dialler, the call recording and the email sequences ship inside it, which means a rep works a list without leaving the record they are working.

The ladder is published in full and unusually long at the bottom — Solo/Essentials at US$9 a seat on yearly terms, then Growth at US$35, Scale at US$99 and Enterprise at US$139. Two-way email sync, custom objects and single sign-on all appear rather than being reserved for a negotiation.

The catch is that native calling is not free calling. Minutes are metered apart from the licence, and the free trial carries only five dollars of calling credit, so the number on the pricing page is a floor rather than a bill. For a team that lives on the phone the arithmetic still works; for a team that mostly emails, a large part of what you are paying for goes unused.

Freshsales is the sales half of a company whose reputation was built on helpdesk software, and it is priced like a product being used to open a door. Growth costs US$9 a seat each month on yearly terms, which buys a working pipeline with contact management and email, a rate more typical of a single-purpose tool than of a product with a large vendor behind it.

What sits above it is substantial. Pro at US$39 and Enterprise at US$59 add sequences, territory management, deeper reporting and the administrative controls a larger team needs, and the whole thing carries the integration surface of a vendor with several other products to connect to.

The thing to weigh is the add-on model. Branded documents cost US$19 a seat, and the AI agent is billed by session at US$49 per hundred, so the published rate is not the whole invoice for a team that wants either. The step from Growth to Pro is also steep — more than four times the rate — and the capabilities most growing teams reach for sit on the far side of it.

OnePageCRM is built on an argument about behaviour rather than about features. Every contact record carries a next action — one thing, with a date — and the interface is a queue of those actions rather than a board of deals. If your problem is that follow-ups quietly stop happening, the product is designed to make that failure visible.

On setup and value it is among the easier decisions here. Pricing starts at US$9.95 per user per month, records are unlimited, and the vendor states there are no paid add-ons, so the figure on the pricing page is the figure on the invoice. Email sync, click-to-call, workflow automation, forecasting and a published API are all part of it rather than upsells.

The tradeoff is the method itself. A product with an opinion this strong is excellent when the opinion matches how you work and irritating when it does not — a team running long, multi-stakeholder deals with no single obvious next step will spend its time fighting the queue. The pipeline tooling is also lighter than the products aimed at larger sales teams, which is a consequence of the same design choice rather than an oversight.

Nutshell's distinguishing decision is granularity. Where most of this category offers three tiers and hopes you round upward, it publishes five, from US$13 up to US$79 a seat a month, so the gap between what you need and what you buy stays narrow. Annual billing takes several dollars a month off each of them.

Alongside that sits a commitment stated in plain language on the pricing page: no seat minimums and no maximums. That matters more than it sounds. Several products in this field will not sell fewer than three or five licences, which quietly doubles the bill for a team of two, and Nutshell has removed that arithmetic entirely.

Scale headroom runs further than the price implies — federated login and a logged history of edits, on top of that absent seat minimum. The cost is cognitive rather than financial. Five tiers, each with a different combination of capability, plus separately-billed add-ons, is a lot of comparison to do before you can price a decision — and the vendor publishes a cost calculator precisely because the answer is not obvious. Single sign-on, an audit log, quoting and documented migration are all present; working out which rung each one sits on is the work.

Pipedrive is built around one idea carried further than most: a sales pipeline is a board, and everything else is subordinate to moving cards across it. That focus is why the cheapest plan feels usable rather than crippled. You get leads, deals, contacts and a calendar in one workspace, and you can bring your existing records in from a spreadsheet or another system without paying more.

The cost of that focus appears on the second tier. Full mailbox sync, workflow automation and forecast reports are all held back to Growth, which more than doubles the per-seat price. A team that wants its email in the CRM — which is most teams — is not really choosing the entry plan, and it is worth pricing the tier you will actually end up on.

Scale headroom is the quiet strength: an administrator gets role-based access and a change record, and no ceiling on records is published anywhere. What holds up well is the surrounding infrastructure. The API is documented endpoint by endpoint and readable before you buy, the catalogue of integrations is genuinely large, and pricing is published in full at every tier rather than hidden behind a form. Data control is ordinary rather than bad: a published privacy notice and a separate processing agreement, but no choice of where your records are handled.

EspoCRM has been around long enough to have stopped chasing fashions, and its pricing reflects a philosophy the rest of this category has largely abandoned: you get everything, and what you pay for is scale. All three hosted tiers advertise the full feature set and every extension. What separates Basic from Ultimate is file storage and how many records you are allowed to keep.

That makes the arithmetic unusually simple. Basic is US$15 per user per month with a hundred thousand records and a three-user minimum; Enterprise is US$25 with ten million; Ultimate is US$69 with no limit. Underneath sits the open-source edition, which you can install on your own server and run without a licence fee.

The cost is the seat minimums, which make this a poor answer for somebody working alone: the cheapest way into the vendor's cloud is three seats whatever your headcount. Self-hosting removes that and replaces it with an operational burden you carry yourself. Integrations are respectable rather than remarkable, and an external API is on every tier. On data control it is as strong as software gets, because you run it on your own hardware, and the value case is simple arithmetic.

What defines this product is a pricing decision rather than a technical one. There is one plan at US$15 per user per month, it includes everything the company makes, and there is no tier above it holding the useful parts hostage. Unlimited contacts and companies, unlimited pipelines, custom fields, user permissions and support are all simply in the price.

That makes setup and value unusually easy to reason about. You do not have to model which tier you will land on in eighteen months, because there is only one, and the trial runs thirty days without asking for a card. For a very small business that has been burned by a ladder priced to be climbed, the absence of a ladder is the feature being sold.

What you give up is depth. Automations and an API both exist and are documented, so integrations are a real possibility rather than a dead end, but the product is a well-kept contact database with pipelines attached rather than a sales platform. Because there is only one plan, whatever is missing is missing at every price — there is no tier to climb to when you outgrow it.

monday CRM is what happens when a general-purpose work platform is packaged, priced and sold specifically as a CRM. That origin shows in the interface — everything is a board of coloured cells — and it shows in what the entry plan contains. Quoting and invoicing are on Basic at US$18 per seat, with unlimited pipelines and boards, rather than waiting for an upgrade.

The catch is the seat minimum, and it is not on the pricing page. Basic is sold in blocks of three seats, so the smallest possible bill is US$54 a month rather than US$18 — a difference that matters a great deal to a team of one or two. The caps are stated more plainly: 20 quotes and invoices a month on Basic, 50 on Standard, with 250 automation runs alongside them.

The range runs from US$18 per seat to US$41, and then stops being published: the top tier is quoted rather than listed, which is the one place this product follows the enterprise playbook. Everything below it is self-serve, the timeline view pulls email, calls, meetings and notes into one place per contact, and the platform's integration catalogue comes along with the CRM packaging.

Capsule is one of the few entries here that seems entirely comfortable being small. There is a contact database, a sales pipeline and a task list, and the product does not spend much effort persuading you it is a platform. For a business of two or three people that mainly needs to stop losing track of conversations, that restraint is the feature.

The free tier is unusually honest about what it is. Two users, two hundred and fifty contacts, five custom fields and one pipeline — small numbers, but they include connecting a Gmail or Outlook account, which is the thing free plans in this category normally hold back. Moving to Starter at US$18 per seat raises the contact ceiling to thirty thousand and adds a shared mailbox, email templates and direct integrations.

The cost of that restraint is that depth arrives late. Workflow automation, multiple pipelines, project boards, access controls and the reporting that produces a forecast all begin at Growth, at US$36 per seat, and above Advanced at US$54 there is nowhere further to go. The tier descriptions are refreshingly specific about who each plan is for — one to five employees, then small businesses with sales teams — which makes choosing between them a shorter conversation than usual.

Odoo draws its free line somewhere nobody else does. Rather than capping users or records, it gives you one application at no cost for an unlimited number of people. If the application you pick is the CRM, a company of forty can run its pipeline on Odoo Online without paying anything, which is a genuinely different offer from the two-user free tiers elsewhere in this field.

Above that, pricing is per user for all applications together: EUR 19.90 a month on yearly billing for Standard, or EUR 29.90 for Custom, which adds on-premise deployment, the Studio builder, multi-company support and an external API. The core is open source, so self-hosting is a real route and the data can sit on machines you control.

On value that is hard to argue with: an unlimited-user CRM at no cost. The catch is that the free tier is a doorway rather than a destination. The moment a second app is useful — invoicing, helpdesk, projects, all of which sit right there — the price becomes per user for everything, and the step is deliberate. There is also the configuration burden that comes with any suite: this is more product than a small sales team needs, and making it fit takes work that a single-purpose CRM does not ask for.

Copper is designed for a platform rather than for a market segment. It assumes your company runs on Google Workspace, and it builds on that assumption throughout: the CRM appears inside Gmail, contacts stay in step with Google Contacts, and files live where they already live. For an agency or consultancy already committed to Google, that removes an entire category of synchronisation problems.

Pricing is published in full across three tiers — US$23, US$59 and US$99 a seat a month on annual billing, with monthly rates roughly a quarter higher. The entry tier carries pipelines and team collaboration rather than being stripped to a contact list, which is more generous than the equivalent rung on several competitors.

The cost is the dependency that makes it good. This is not a CRM you can adopt while running Microsoft 365, and it is not one you can take with you if the company later switches. There is also no free plan beneath the trial, so the evaluation window is the only free access, and the entry price sits above the middle of this field for a product with a deliberately narrow addressable audience.