CRMs that process your data in the EU

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Salesflare is built on a complaint rather than a feature list: sales people do not maintain a CRM, so a CRM that depends on being maintained is a CRM full of stale records. Its answer is to construct the history automatically from the mailbox and calendar you already use, so the contact, the company and the thread of what was said are there without anyone typing them.

The pricing is straightforward and published in both dollars and euros. Growth is US$29 a user a month on an annual plan and Pro is US$49; paying monthly makes those US$39 and US$64. Forecasting and a documented migration path come with the subscription instead of being sold beside it.

The cost is that automatic is not the same as complete, and the model suits some sales motions far better than others. A relationship-led business with long threads gets a rich record for free; a high-volume outbound team working from lists gets much less from the automation and still pays for it. There is also no free plan, and the lead-search credits that fill in missing addresses are sold separately from the seat.

Salesforce Starter exists because the company's main products cannot be bought the way small businesses buy software. It is packaged as a suite with sales, service and email in one place, published at US$25 per user per month, and — unusually for this vendor — you can sign up for it without a conversation. There is a free suite beneath it as well.

What that buys is a foothold in the largest ecosystem in the category. The partner network, the integration catalogue and the availability of people who already know the platform are all without equal here, and none of that goes away as the business grows.

The thing to weigh is what happens next. The published price carries a note that transaction fees apply, so the seat rate is not the whole cost, and everything above Starter returns to the sales-led model the rest of the vendor's range uses — quoted, negotiated and frequently partner-implemented. Starter is a genuine self-serve product; it is also the last rung on this ladder that behaves like one.

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.