CRMs that work inside Gmail and Outlook

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.

Streak answers the oldest problem in this category, which is that people do not use the CRM. Its solution is to put the CRM where the work already happens: pipelines render as rows inside Gmail, attached to the threads that generated them, and there is no separate application to open or forget about.

For a business whose sales process is genuinely conducted over email, that is a real advantage rather than a gimmick, and it makes setup almost nonexistent — installing an extension is the whole of it. Adoption stops depending on habit change, the correspondence and the deal record cannot drift apart, and the vendor keeps a set of email power tools free with no time limit underneath the paid tiers, so the extension has a reason to stay installed.

The cost is a hard dependency and a steep price. This works if you are on Gmail and does not exist if you are on Outlook, which rules it out for a large share of the businesses reading this. And at US$49 a user a month for Pro, rising to US$69 and US$129, the seat price is high for something that is structurally a browser extension with a strong idea behind it. Scale headroom is correspondingly modest.

folk starts from a different premise to most of this directory. The record that matters is a person, not a deal, and the product is built for work where the relationship is the asset — agency business development, investing, recruiting, consulting. Pipelines exist, but they are a way of tracking people through stages rather than the centre of gravity.

What you get on the entry tier is unusually complete for the kind of thing it is. Email, calendar and WhatsApp all sync into one timeline, a browser extension pulls people in from LinkedIn, and enrichment fills in the details you did not type. Those are frequently the paid extras elsewhere, and here they are the baseline at US$24 per member per month.

The cost shows up in two places. There is no free plan, so the entry price is genuinely the entry price. On scale headroom and integrations it is mid-field — single sign-on, workspace roles, custom objects and an API all exist, and all of them wait for the second tier. And the things a growing team eventually wants — custom objects, deals as first-class records, workspace roles, dashboards and API access — all sit on the second tier at US$48. For one person tracking a network, that is beside the point; for a team of ten, it doubles the bill.

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.

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.

NetHunt belongs to the small group of products that answer the CRM adoption problem by refusing to be a separate place. It renders inside Gmail, so records, pipelines and the correspondence that produced them share one window, and nobody has to be persuaded to log in anywhere new.

What distinguishes it from lighter tools in the same space is structure. This is a real record model with fields, views and pipelines rather than a clever arrangement of labels, and the entry tiers are listed at US$24 and US$34 a seat, with month-to-month rates of US$30 and US$42.

The thing to weigh is the top half of the price list. Business and Business Plus show monthly rates of US$60 and US$84 but are quoted rather than published for annual billing, so a growing team cannot price its own future without a conversation. And like every Gmail-native product, the dependency is absolute: there is no version of this for a company running Microsoft, which settles the question before any feature comparison begins.

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.

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.