The Best Free CRM – SBG’s Top Picks

HubSpot is a veteran in marketing technology solutions, web analytics, and customer service. The company has been offering content management, lead generation, search engine optimization, analytics, and customer relationship management systems for over a decade. It also has a solid free CRM toolkit that’s complemented by excellent paid addons.

Main Features

HubSpot offers some of the best CRM software for small business owners absolutely free of charge. To start with, there is a solid contact management tool that allows you to manage up to one million contacts with ease and includes unlimited user logins. Contacts can be sorted through a myriad of different filters and imported from .csv, .xlsx, and .xls files or through one of the many app integrations, which includes Google Mail and Microsoft Outlook.

You can easily track sent emails through the Activity feed or manage all of your Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, or Google ad campaigns through the Marketing tab. From here you can also create customizable emails and landing pages.

Widely regarded as the best sales CRM for small business owners, HubSpot allows you to track how prospects are being turned into customers through the Deals tab in the Sales section of your interface. It also offers highly useful ticketing tools that eliminate any hassle when handling customer complaints and questions.

In addition, HubSpot’s CRM service offers communication tools, including FB messenger integrations, automated email responders, and customized chat experiences for customers. But bear in mind that most of the advanced features are only available with paid plans.

Speaking of paid plans, HubSpot mostly charges for advanced automation tools such as sales forecasts, SEO, and other high-level analytics, automated email campaigns and lead scoring, and a service hub with more detailed metrics for measuring customer feedback.

User Experience

When it comes to the user experience, HubSpot offers a top CRM for small business owners. Registration is a breeze, and new users are given optional tutorials for almost every feature of the software. Mobile apps for iOS and Android systems are also remarkable, offering almost every bit of functionality as the web interface.

You can contact HubSpot staff by phone, email, or live chat, but response times aren’t particularly impressive, and unless you’re filing a complaint or inquiring about the price, you’re better off consulting one of the many well-written or interactive tutorials on the site.

Pricing

In addition to offering arguably the best CRM for a small business that’s attainable for free, HubSpot has three premium plans that build on this solid foundation. The free plan includes many helpful CRM tools, such as contact management, contact website activity, app marketplace integrations, reporting dashboard, and other. You can integrate these free tools with your Gmail, G Suite, or Outlook account and add up to 1,000,000 contacts to your account.

The Starter plan costs $45 per month if you commit to annual payments. It allows you to get more detailed sales reports, use HubSpot’s VoIP calling functions directly from your web interface, and utilize the live chat functionality and basic automation tools. HubSpot allows users with the Starter plan to remove HubSpot branding from all their documents, live chat and one-on-one email interactions.

The $450 per month Professional plan unlocks a variety of team management and email automation options, sales analytics, personalized outreach, and the option to use eSignatures for quotes.  Besides that, this plan also includes custom reporting, forecasting tools, and 1:1 video messaging.

The Enterprise plan costs $1,200 per month and offers even more advanced team management, revenue tracking, and predictive lead scoring tools. To get the best small business CRM software features at the most reasonable price, you can also sign up for one of the company’s bundles. The Growth Suite bundle costs $50/month and includes all the marketing, customer service, and sales software you need.

Zoho is an Indian software development company focused on web-based business tools, as well as marketing and IT management software. It was originally set up in 1996 under the name AdventNet. Its most advanced software package, Zoho CRM, was released in 2005, and the company was renamed Zoho Corporation in 2009. Today, it has offices in 12 cities around the world, serving over 50 million customers.

Main Features

You’ll find Zoho on pretty much any top 10 CRM list thanks to its many features for contact and lead management, sales automation, advanced AI-driven analytics, and multi-channel customer interactions.

For starters, you can easily import your contacts from a variety of sources including social media accounts and use advanced filters to sort through them. The software also provides fantastic reporting tools for accounts, contacts, deals, leads, and sales, as well as advanced email autoresponders.

AI-driven email and sales analytics with lead conversion and deal closure predictions help boost sales. Zoho also offers real-time sales notifications, process and inventory management, automated social media lead generation, workflow conversion, KPIs, and more.

CRM reviews for small businesses often highlight the importance of software integrations. This is another area where Zoho CRM doesn’t disappoint. Integrations are available with almost every important messaging, productivity, or finance-related tool, including everything from Google’s G Suite and Microsoft’s Office 365 to Xero and WhatsApp Messenger.

User Experience

Zoho has a classic look that some may call a bit dated. Nevertheless, getting around the web interface is a breeze, and there are excellent tutorials for new users. Mobile apps for both Android and iOS are highly rated and easy to use. As with any of the best CRM software for small business purposes, Zoho CRM allows you to customize everything from your dashboard to the email templates.

Replies to emails can take a little longer, but you can reach Zoho’s customer support team through a dedicated phone line or even get in touch via social media networks such as Facebook and Twitter. Alternatively, there are excellent guides and tutorials available on the website.

Pricing

Zoho offers basic contact management with social media integrations, a call log, and workflow rules (alerts, tasks, and field updates) for free. There are also four paid plans. The Standard plan costs $12/user/month and offers some of the best CRM tools for small business owners in this price range, including sales forecasting, customizable dashboards, and mass email.

The other three plans are Professional for $20/user/month, Enterprise for $35/user/month, and Ultimate for $45/user/month. These include features such as Google AdWords integrations, inventory management and workflow automation tools, advanced AI-driven analytics, more customization, and a larger number of email notifications per day (free version is capped at 150 emails per day, while the Ultimate version supports up to 50,000).

EngageBay is arguably the best software for real estate agents when it comes to marketing, sales, and managing your team and clients. Other CRMs typically offer one too many tools and integrations that are ultimately expensive, clunky, and, if we’re honest, unnecessary, while EngageBay keeps it very balanced. So, if you’re looking for help attracting new clients and making more sales, look no further than EngageBay.

The best aspect of this CRM is that it is designed to automate the whole process with little to no stress. It doesn’t require any technical knowledge to set up and is one of the cheaper products available.

Contact/Lead Management

EngageBay excels thanks to its simplicity and its many valuable tools for managing contacts and leads. The process is easy to understand for both managers and employees, while the tailored tools allow for excellent communication with your leads and contacts.

Since you can organize all of your contacts within the same dashboard, you can effortlessly manage and nurture your relationship with your clients. You can use the same dashboard to make calls with your clients, making it one of the most comprehensive real estate contact management systems out there.

EngageBay Call Scripts can help your agents perform excellent calls every time, and you can use the reporting feature to check each team member’s progress. The opportunity to gamify your sales dramatically helps maintain your employees’ productivity.

Excellent analytics allow you to find room for improvement, and you can rely on automated tasks and appointment scheduling to take these time-consuming tasks off your plate.

Listing Management

While EngageBay is excellent as a tool for managing your clients and your team, its Real Estate CRM lacks an option for handling listings. You cannot add properties to the CRM or include them in the process in a more meaningful way.

Hopefully, EngageBay will soon improve on this. In the meantime, it remains an excellent way to keep track of your clients and listings even without this specific feature. You can use the software to create conversion forms and effortless landing pages that will showcase the properties you’re helping to sell or rent.

Email System

This CRM offers a multitude of options when it comes to email marketing solutions. One of its best features is the ability to set up automated responses. This means you no longer have to type the same thing over and over again. You can also send emails in bulk (known as email broadcast), send personalized emails, and track your metrics to help improve customer engagement.

It comes with quite an impressive number of customizable email templates, which you can further modify using a simple drag-and-drop builder. Once you have your templates set up and ready to go, you can segment your list and automatically send emails with EngageBay.

EngageBay also offers email A/B testing, double opt-in email, as well as the RSS to email option, which will automatically share your new blog posts with your clients via email. Its advantage over the competition lies in providing drip campaigns, making it excellent for those who rely heavily on email marketing.

EngageBay also offers an exciting tool for creating a multichannel campaign. In essence, it allows you to connect all your social media accounts and run them through its system.

Third-Party Integration

EngageBay has quite a list of impressive integrations, each of them helping you get the most out of your sales and improving the process of finding and selling properties.

The list of integrations is almost endless, and that’s what helps it remain one of the top CRM systems for real estate. Zapier is the most helpful integration; it will save you plenty of time every day by allowing you to connect all the apps you need to your EngageBay CRM dashboard.

The Xero integration will help you handle invoices. PieSync will help keep all your data and information distributed across more than 250 apps you might be using to sell those properties.

Suppose you’re already using an API to help you communicate with sellers and buyers via email. In that case, the good news is that EngageBay offers integrations with quite an impressive number of these providers. You can integrate the software with with Mailgun, Mandrill, Postmark, and SendGrid.

Mobile App

EngageBay also offers free real estate CRM software in the form of an app available for iOS and Android to ensure that you can make those sales on the go and contact your clients even if you’re away from your computer.

This app’s most notable feature is its live chat option, which allows you to provide prompt messaging and support to your clients. It is an excellent solution for checking your tasks while you’re on the go, but you can also use it to keep your performance in check, manage your team, and keep in touch with your social media profiles, all from one place.

The mobile app doesn’t currently have many reviews on the App Store, but the first and only one gave it 5 stars and mentioned that it makes life much easier. On the other hand, Google Play has some more reviews for the app, with the average score being 4.3.

EngageBay Pricing

EngageBay pricing is divided into four tiers. That’s because you can choose to purchase a segment of this CRM instead of the whole deal. You can buy the Marketing deal, only the Sales Bay & CRM, just the Service Bay, or an all-in-one solution.

Each of these solutions is entirely free for up to 1,000 contacts or 1,000 branded emails, so you can always try this free CRM for realtors out on a small scale. The price for an all-in-one solution, for example, starts at $8.99 per user per month. Included in that price, you’ll get up to 15,000 contacts and 10,000 emails. These numbers are more than sufficient, since they come alongside handy features like a landing page builder, lead scoring, and third-party integrations.