Zoho Bigin

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.