CRMs with single sign-on

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.

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.

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.

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.

Insightly is aimed at a specific shape of business: agencies, consultancies and implementers, where the deal closing is the start of the work rather than the end of it. The pipeline looks like any other, and then a won opportunity becomes a project with milestones and tasks against the same account record, which is the part the rest of this category leaves to a second subscription.

What supports that is a fairly complete set of machinery. Custom objects, workflow automation, click-to-call, email sync, SAML single sign-on and an audit log all appear across three published tiers at US$29, US$49 and US$99 a user a month, and there is a documented REST API rather than an integrations page pointing at an automation platform.

That machinery is why scale headroom is high: field-level access control and a change log both sit on published tiers. The cost is that two products in one box take longer to make useful than either would. Setup is a configuration exercise — objects, pipelines, project templates and permissions — before the thing does anything you could not do in a spreadsheet, and the entry price at US$29 a seat sits above the middle of this field. A team that only ever needed the sales half is paying for a delivery half it will not open.

Attio starts from the observation that most CRMs decide in advance what a customer relationship looks like, and that the shape rarely fits. Its answer is a flexible data model: objects you define, attributes you choose, and relationships between them that the product does not second-guess. For a company selling something that is not a straightforward B2B deal, that is the whole appeal.

The pricing follows the same instinct. There is a free tier with no expiry, Plus at US$35 per user per month and Pro at US$79, and the things that make the product interesting — custom objects, automation, single sign-on — are not quarantined at the top. A published migration service exists for bringing records across.

The tradeoff is that you are doing the modelling. A product that will not decide what a deal is has, by construction, handed that decision to you, and a team that wanted a pipeline out of the box will spend its first week designing one instead. The entry price above the free tier is also toward the upper half of this field, and the top tier is quoted rather than listed.

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.

Salesmate's pitch is bundling. Where much of this field sells a pipeline and expects you to buy telephony, sequencing and enrichment from somebody else, Salesmate folds calling and outreach into the subscription and publishes integrations as included at no extra cost. For a team that would otherwise be reconciling three invoices, that is a real simplification.

The tiers are published at US$23, US$39 and US$63 per user per month, which places it in the middle of this directory on price as well as on positioning. The capability curve is correspondingly even — you are not being asked to jump a chasm to reach the features most teams need.

The tradeoff is that middle positions are hard to love. It is not built around a single conviction — no strong opinion about the telephone, the inbox or the data model — and bundling is a commercial argument rather than a design one. The Enterprise tier is also quoted rather than published, and the vendor notes that enterprise onboarding packages start at US$1,999 — a figure worth knowing before that conversation starts.

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.

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.

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.