Freshsales Alternatives

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.