Prices read at source · nothing tested, nothing scored
Sales CRMs, ranked by the team they are cut for
Not by feature count, and not out of ten. Eleven CRMs laid out by the shape of team each one was built around — and the point at which a general sales CRM stops being the right answer at all.
Pieces on this sheet
What a sales CRM is cut for, and what it is not
A sales CRM is a pipeline with a contact database attached, and everything about how it is priced, shaped and reported follows from that. Its home screen is a board of deals moving through stages; its reports answer the question "what closes, and when". That is a narrow thing to be, and it is why a sales CRM is superb for a team whose work really is a sequence of deals and frustrating for a team whose work is a job, a policy, a donor or a candidate.
So the useful question is not which CRM has the most features, but which shape of team each was cut for. Eleven are laid out below in order of the cheapest seat a team can hold indefinitely, and the last section is about the teams that fall off the sheet entirely.
Every figure here was read off the vendor's own pricing page on 24 September 2026, in a browser configured as a United States visitor. Nothing here has been bench-tested and nothing is scored out of ten; where a vendor does not publish something, this page says so instead of estimating.
Eleven sales CRMs, in order of the cheapest seat a team can hold indefinitely. Prices read at source on 24 September 2026.
| CRM | Cheapest standing seat | Cut for | Free tier | What the bill scales by |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bigin by Zoho | $7 a seat a month | one desk, or a pair, running a few pipelines | US$0, single user | seats |
| Close | $9 a seat a month | a rep whose day is calls and follow-ups | none — Solo at $9 is capped at one user | seats |
| Nutshell | $13 a seat a month | a small team that wants no rules about who gets a login | none — 14-day trial, no card | seats, with no minimum or maximum |
| Zoho CRM | $14 a seat a month | a team of three that expects to outgrow three | US$0, free for 3 users | seats |
| Pipedrive | $14 a seat a month | a team whose work is a pipeline and nothing else | none — 14-day trial, no card | seats |
| HubSpot | $20 a seat a month | two people who want the whole stack for nothing | US$0, up to 2 users | seats, then marketing contacts |
| Copper | $23 a seat a month | a team that never leaves Google Workspace | none — trial, no card | seats, with a contact ceiling on each plan |
| Salesflare | $29 a seat a month | a seller working out of an inbox and LinkedIn | none | seats, 5 minimum on the top plan |
| Method | $35 a seat a month | a business whose customer record already lives in QuickBooks | none — 10-day trial, no card | seats |
| Apollo | $49 a seat a month | a rep who needs the contact list as much as the pipeline | US$0, 900 credits a seat a year | seats and credits |
| Keap | $299 a month for the account | a business buying automation and a CRM as one purchase | none | the platform, not the seat |
Drawn from the table above. Keap is absent because it publishes one platform price for the account rather than a seat rate, so there is no bar to draw. Two of these figures come with a catch the bar cannot show: Close Solo is capped at one user, and Apollo's cheapest paid seat buys credits as much as it buys software.
One desk: Bigin, Zoho, HubSpot and Close
For one person or a pair, the right answer is usually free or nearly free, and four of the eleven make that possible. HubSpot's own pricing page describes its free tools as free for up to two users with no card; Zoho CRM's page is titled around being free for three; Bigin's free plan is a single user; Apollo's free plan grants 900 credits a seat a year. A solo practice can run on any of those for as long as it stays solo.
Where you go when free runs out depends on what runs out first. Bigin at US$7 a seat a month billed yearly is the cheapest standing seat on this page, and its own page advertises free onboarding with it. Zoho CRM proper starts at US$14 and is the upgrade path if what you outgrow is the feature ceiling rather than the seat count.
Close is the odd one here. Its Solo plan is $9 a user a month billed annually and its own page captions that plan "Limited to 1 user" — a product for one seller, not a cheap way to start a team, with the next rung at $35. What it buys is a CRM built around calling, its plan cards measured in AI credits per user per month.
HubSpot is the one to be careful about, and it is the one most people land on. Its free tier is genuinely free and genuinely good, and it pays this site nothing — HubSpot's partner programme pays on paid plans only. The $7 a seat figure on its Starter card is not what Starter costs; see the next section.
What the price on the card is not
Eight of the pricing pages read for this site carry a billing toggle and open on the annual panel: Pipedrive, Close, Zoho CRM, Copper, Salesflare, Nutshell, Apollo and, outside this table, Recruit CRM. The first number you see on each therefore assumes you pay a year upfront, and the monthly number sits one click away.
The more serious pattern is the offer price with no published renewal. HubSpot's Starter card shows $7 a seat a month with $20 a seat a month struck through beside it, under a banner reading "Save up to 65% on Starter… New customers only. Select offers available for a limited time." What the $7 becomes when the limited time ends is not published anywhere on the page, so every worked example on this site uses the $20 list price. Method runs a similar offer and handles it differently: its cards carry the offer price and the list price together, captioned "25% off for 3 months (with 3+ user accounts)", so you can see exactly what you will be paying in month four.
Then there is the advertised saving that the vendor's own two panels do not produce. Copper Basic is $23 billed annually against $29 billed monthly, and Copper Business is $99 against $134, under a banner reading "Up to 26% off" — the arithmetic reaches 26% on Business and falls short of it on Basic. Nutshell Foundation is $13 against $19 and Nutshell Enterprise $79 against $89, beside a label reading "Save 15%", which the cheap end beats and the dear end does not reach. Apollo Basic is $49 against $65 and Apollo Organization $119 against $149 under "SAVE 24%". Salesflare Growth is $29 against $39 and Salesflare Enterprise $99 against $124, which the page captions as saving $10 and $25 a user rather than as a percentage — the only one of the four that describes the saving in the unit it is actually paid in.
Both figures in each pair are the vendor's own, read off its two billing panels on 24 September 2026. The percentage is arithmetic on those two numbers, not a claim by anybody. The red bar is the monthly rate; the blue bar in front of it is the annual one.
None of this makes any of them bad value. It means the number on the card is an argument, and the figure worth comparing is the rate you can hold for as long as you want the software — the column this page ranks on.
A small selling team: Pipedrive, Nutshell and Copper
Once there are three or four people sharing a pipeline, the question changes from price to shape, because everyone will be looking at the same board every morning. Pipedrive is the purest expression of that: the product is a pipeline, the annual Lite seat is US$14 (the page states it as one payment of US$168 a seat a year) and the monthly seat is US$19. There is no free plan. If your work genuinely is a sequence of deals, its narrowness is the feature.
Nutshell makes a different promise. Its pricing page states "No seat minimums or maximums" and "Unlimited contacts & storage" in its own words, and the Foundation seat is $13 billed annually or $19 billed monthly. It is the only CRM on this page that puts the absence of a seat floor in writing rather than simply not publishing one — which matters if you want to give a login to a part-time bookkeeper without thinking about it.
Copper is for the team that has already decided where it lives. It is a Google Workspace CRM, the Basic seat is $23 billed annually or $29 billed monthly, and each plan carries a contact ceiling: 2,500 on Basic, 15,000 on Professional, unlimited on Business. That ceiling is the thing to check before the price, because it is the limit you will hit first if you import a list. There is more on that choice in the guide to CRMs that live in Gmail and Outlook.
A seller who works out of an inbox: Salesflare and Apollo
Some sellers never open the CRM. Their day happens in an inbox and on LinkedIn, and a tool that needs a separate tab to log what just happened gets updated on Friday or never. Two of the eleven are built around that.
Salesflare lists a LinkedIn sidebar, an email sidebar and a mobile app among the contents of its cheapest plan, which is $29 a user a month billed annually or $39 billed monthly. Its Enterprise plan is the only one on this page with a published seat floor written into the price line: $99 a user a month billed annually, "with a minimum of 5 users". That floor is worth noticing early, because it turns a per-seat decision into a five-seat decision.
Apollo is a different animal in a similar coat. Paid seats start at $49 billed annually and $65 billed monthly, and you are paying for the contact data as much as the pipeline: every plan is described in credits granted per seat per year — 900 free, 30,000 on Basic, 48,000 on Professional, 72,000 on Organization. If you already have a list, those are credits you do not need.
A business whose customer record is a ledger: Method and Keap
For a lot of small businesses the customer record does not live in a CRM at all — it lives in the accounting system, because that is where the invoices are. Putting a sales CRM beside it creates two customer lists that disagree within a month.
Method exists for exactly that. It is built around QuickBooks — its own pages name QuickBooks Online, Desktop and Enterprise, plus a separate Xero product described as a two-way sync — and its CRM Quick Start plan lists at $35 a user a month, Pro at $59 and Enterprise at $97. Its FAQ states annual prepay takes 10% off, though no annual dollar figure is printed. For a business that raises a lot of invoices it can still be the cheapest option once the reconciliation work it removes is counted; there is a longer account in the note on CRMs that sync with QuickBooks.
Keap is the one page here that does not sell seats. Its pricing page reads "Starting at $299/mo (Billed monthly)" for the whole platform, with automation, email, text, pipeline, landing pages, payments and appointments included rather than tiered. It also states that implementation services are required, and publishes no price for them — so the $299 is a floor on the software and not a floor on the purchase. That shape suits a business that has decided to buy automation and a CRM as one decision; it suits nobody who wants to try a CRM.
Where the sheet runs out
A general sales CRM stops being the right answer when the thing your business tracks is not a deal. The test is blunt: if you are about to rebuild the vendor's core object out of custom fields, you are buying the wrong category, and the reports will be about pipelines when your questions are not.
Four kinds of team hit that wall reliably, and each has its own note on this site rather than a row in the table above. A charity tracks a giving history, and the tools built for it are priced by the number of records rather than the number of people — see CRMs for nonprofits. A trade or field business tracks a job with a crew, a site visit and an invoice attached — see CRMs for construction and contractors. An insurance desk tracks a policy with renewal dates and commission on it — see insurance CRM software. A recruiter tracks a candidate who is also, awkwardly, part of the product — see recruitment CRM software.
One category is deliberately absent: property and estate agency, which has its own listing feeds and its own vendors, and is a whole site's worth of ground on its own.
How to run the fitting in an afternoon
- Write down the object your business actually tracks — a deal, a job, a policy, a gift, a candidate — before you look at any software. If it is not a deal, start with the note for your trade rather than with this table.
- Count the people who need to see it, including the part-timer and the bookkeeper. That number decides whether a free tier finishes the job and whether a seat floor rules anything out.
- Pick the two plans whose standing rate you would still be happy paying in a year, ignoring every offer price on every card.
- Import a hundred real records into both trials, not sample data. Contact ceilings and required fields only become visible with real mess in them.
- Run one week of genuine work in each. The one you still open on a Friday afternoon is the one that fits.
None of that needs a scoring rubric, and this site does not publish one. The fit is not a property of the software; it is a property of the pair.