6 Most Affordable CRMs for Solo Founders in 2024
In a landscape where technology drives success, CRM tools have become essential for businesses of all sizes, even 1 man bands. Particularly for solo founders operating on a tighter budget, finding an affordable yet effective CRM can be a monumental task. In 2024, the challenge continues with an expanding CRM market, and finding the right CRM system that delivers on all fronts at a cheap price has become more difficult than ever. For this edition, the team at Toksta reviewed 6 of the most affordable CRMs in 2024, outlining their features, benefits, and what makes them stand out in terms of value for money.
What should budget-conscious businesses look for in an affordable CRM?
When it comes to affordable CRMs, the criteria might differ slightly from general purpose ones, but the core concepts remain vital. Here's what you need to focus on:
Cost-Effectiveness
All In One Functionality
Integrations
Ease of Use
Scalability
Support
Compliance and Security
The Top 6 Most Affordable CRMs In 2024 Are:
1. EngageBay
Founded: 2018
HQ: Wilmington, Delaware, United States
Sitting at the top of our list is EngageBay, and rightfully so. EngageBay is a multipurpose affordable CRM that integrates marketing, sales, and service automation into a single platform.
Depending on your business needs, you can opt for just one of these three software packages or have them as an all-in-one bundle. All these features are seamlessly integrated into a dashboard with a user-friendly interface.
The service bay is entirely free, and if you are going for just the marketing or sales package, they each have a free plan, then a Basic, Growth, and Pro plan.
On the free plan, you will get access to key features like contact management, appointment scheduling, and custom deal milestones allowing you to easily manage contacts, schedule meetings, and track your deals’ progress from the initial contact to the final sale.
We’d recommend the Growth plan. With less than $50 per user per month, it offers robust automation facilities that let you create smart workflows to automate your routine marketing and sales processes based on various actions and conditions.
Putting all these features together, considering its pricing point and compared to other CRMs, users give it a comfortable 9.2/10 score on G2. Many of its 46,000 users share our sentiments, with one customer stating, “Engagebay is a viable competitor to Salesforce and Marketo without the costly pricing and set-up headaches”.
3. Pipedrive
Founded: 2010
HQ: New York, United States
Pipedrive is designed to guide leads through the sales process, recording their key contacts and feedback to help the sales teams understand client needs and optimize their strategies for better conversion rates.
The platform’s clean and intuitive user interface makes organizing and managing the sales pipeline easy. Plus, its visual depiction of the sales pipeline ensures you don’t overlook essential activities and conversations.
Unlike Freshsales, Pipedrive has no free plan, so if you want a completely free CRM, you’d have to consider another option. However, it offers a 14-day free trial, so you can test it before committing to a payment.
Pipedrive compensates for its lack of a free plan with affordable pricing and ease of use. Its pricing plan is the lowest on this list, with its cheapest Essential plan going for $9.90 monthly. The other pricing tiers include:
Advanced plan: $19.90
Professional plan: $39.90
Power plan: $49.90
Enterprise plan: $49.90
On the Essential plan, you can access the sales pipeline feature and get a visual overview of all your deals in one glance. This feature can improve your sales efforts rapidly, ensuring that you prioritize your efforts and focus on deals that are most likely to close.
Another feature we found impressive while exploring Pipedrive was its lead management. Although it’s not as advanced as Freshsales’ with its AI-powered capabilities, it does a good job. This feature automates most tasks you or your sales team would have had to carry out to guide your customers through their sales journey.
You’ll be able to track your leads from first contact to the final sale and get detailed insights into their needs and preferences that you can leverage to close the deal.
After evaluating the features in each subscription tier, we recommend the Advanced plan as a good fit for small to midsize businesses. At $29.90 per user per month, it balances cost and functionality.
With features like full email sync, automated email sequences, and workflows, it offers a substantial increase in features compared to the Essential Plan, making it particularly suitable for small to midsize businesses that require more than just basic CRM functionalities.
As your business grows and evolves, you may need to incorporate additional tools or services into your operations. This CRM integrates seamlessly with over 450 tools, including Google Drive, Trello, Hubspot, and Zapier, so it can scale with your business and continue to provide value.
Plus, having a CRM that integrates with the rest of your tech stack means different systems can communicate and share data, eliminating the need for manual data entry and making your business processes more efficient.
Pipedrive’s customer support is available 24/7 via e-mail and live chat, and user reviews are generally positive, with an impressive 8.4/10 score on G2.
4. Freshsales
Founded: 2010
HQ: San Mateo, California, United States
Key Info Price: Free
Free Plan: Yes
Trial: 15 Days
Support: email, call, or chat or remote assistance session Best For Thriving small to mid-sized businesses seeking powerful sales management capabilities. Pros + Simple to set up
+ Offers value for money and a wide range of features
+ Seamlessly integrates with different software Cons - The customer support and billing process can be unclear
- Additional features, standard in other CRMs, require purchasing separate Freshworks products
- New users may find its intricacy daunting. Integrations Zapier, Segment, Shopify, Typeform Pricing Model "Growth: $15 per month
Pro: $39 per month
Enterprise: $69 per month"
Freshsales is an affordable CRM that focuses on sales and lead management. This comprehensive CRM solution helps businesses improve customer relationship management and drive revenue growth.
Freshsales is part of the larger Freshworks suite of business SaaS tools. We found the software's interface quite intuitive and were particularly pleased with how its customizable features tailor the platform to each business’s specific needs.
The CRM offers a functional forever-free plan and affordable paid plans, making it a great option for small to mid-sized businesses. The paid plans include a Growth plan at $15 per month, a Pro plan at $39 monthly, and an Enterprise plan at $69 monthly.
Compared to other CRMs in the same category, what set Freshsales apart for us were its built-in chat sessions, AI-based lead scoring, deal insights, and subsequent action suggestions. These features come together to ensure you are making better relationships with your best leads so you can close the sale.
We found the platform’s AI-powered features particularly impressive. They automatically rank your leads based on their likelihood to convert using explicit and implicit lead data automatically fed into the CRM system from emails, web forms, and chat. With these features, you can prioritize leads more likely to convert.
The AI-powered smart recommendations feature that suggests the next best actions for your deals also streamlines your decision-making processes, reducing the time and resources you and your team spend making complex decisions.
However, we noticed you can’t access any AI-powered feature on the forever free plan as it offers limited features. You can manage your contact and engage leads directly from the CRM with built-in chat, email, and phone services, which makes your communications easier to track, but that’s basically where it ends. If you want access to more robust, valuable features, you will have to upgrade to a paid plan.
Apart from the AI-based features, the paid plans also offer other impressive features like
Lead generating chatbot sessions,
Visual sales pipeline
Multiple sales pipelines
Sales sequences
Time-based Workflows
The chatbot sessions feature helps automate your responses to give instant resolutions to common questions and reduce the workload caused by live chats. That way, you can continue capturing and managing leads even outside business hours.
If you are a growing business, you may not initially require multiple thousands of monthly chatbot sessions. Freshsales lets you choose the number of sessions you need based on your current requirements.
As your business expands and your needs increase, you can easily upgrade to higher subscription plans to access more sessions. This ensures that you're not paying for features you don't need, making it a cost-effective solution for your growing business.
Also, the multiple visual sales pipelines make your lead generation and management process easier, allowing you to track all your leads and deals through various stages in one glance. So as your leads increase, they don’t get overwhelming for you to handle or manage.
Of all the subscription tiers, our top recommendation is the Pro plan. At just $39, you get access to all the above features and more tools to manage multiple sales teams and grow your revenue efficiently. You’ll normally get these features on other CRM’s more expensive enterprise plans.
Freshsales customer support is available 24/5 by email, phone and chat. Overall, the platform has gathered majorly positive reviews, with users giving it a 9/10 score on G2.
5. Zoho CRM
Founded: 2005
HQ: Austin, Texas, United States; Chennai India
Key Info Price: Free
Free Plan: Yes
Trial: 14 Days
Support: 24/5 Chat & Email Support Best For Prospective users seeking a CRM suitable for beginners and effective reporting system. Pros + Geared towards those new to CRM, suitable for beginners.
+ Effective Reporting System in place.
+ Small businesses can make do with the free version. Cons - Even enterprise plans have restrictions on custom fields.
- Documentation and tutorials for all features are lacking.
- Unless you integrate other apps, features may be limited. Integrations Salesforce, SugarCRM, OneDrive, and many more Pricing Model Standard: $12 per user/month
Professional: $20 per user/month
Enterprise: $35 per user/month
Ultimate: $45 per user/month
Next on our list is the Zoho CRM. With up to 50 SaaS applications and almost three decades in the SaaS industry, Zoho has built a solid reputation as a reliable service provider for small businesses, and Zoho CRM testifies to this.
The CRM is designed to streamline workflows, processes, campaigns, customer journeys, and more, allowing you to focus less on software and more on relationships. Zoho CRM is used by businesses of all sizes, from mid-scale to large-scale enterprises.
We didn’t find the user interface as appealing as some of the competition, but Zoho tries to compensate for this with the Canvas feature, a no-code design studio. Canvas allows you to create beautiful CRM views tailored to your needs. With its drag-and-drop editor, you can make your CRM views visually appealing.
The platform offers a range of affordable paid pricing plans.
The Standard plan at $12 per user per month
The Professional plan at $20 per user monthly
The Enterprise plan at $35 per user per month
The Ultimate plan at $45 per user per month
The Standard plan, which is the most basic option costs $12/user/month. As you progress through the different levels, you gain access to additional features and raise the limits on the existing ones.
At $20/user/month, the Professional plan offers more automation and process management capabilities.
The Enterprise tier, costing $35/user/month, provides further data analytics and customization options for the interface.
Finally, at $45/user/month, the top-tier Ultimate plan introduces Zia, Zoho CRM's AI assistant that performs tasks like maintaining and updating your contacts database, giving real-time insight into sales activities, and responding to your sales inquiries through a chat window.
Out of the subscription plans offered, we recommend the Professional plan, especially for a small to medium size business. At $20 per user per month, the plan provides essential tools that cater to your core business needs, such as optimizing your operations and enhancing efficiency.
Although the higher-tier plans offer more advanced analytics and customization, these features often require additional resources and expertise to leverage fully. For growing businesses, these offerings might not be immediate priorities and starting with the Professional plan will see that you are not paying for a feature you don’t need.
One of Zoho CRM’s functionalities that stood out for us was its integration capabilities. Being part of the Zoho ecosystem, it integrates seamlessly with other Zoho products, providing a unified platform for all your business needs. So if your business already uses Zoho products, the CRM will blend in seamlessly.
It also integrates with a wide range of third-party apps, like Google Analytics, Mail Chimp, etc., enhancing its functionality.
Zoho CRM is highly flexible and houses different needs. You can easily create personalized dashboards and set up multiple pipelines to map out unique customer journeys.
If you are running a solo or very small business, you can get started with the free plan, and it would serve you efficiently. The free CRM plan is widely used by small businesses that want a free way to track their leads and manage contacts easily.
The free plan will give you a slim CRM solution that handles your basic needs, including lead, accounts, contact, and deal management. You’ll also be able to automate workflows and customize your pages and tabs. And once you have automated workflows, the CRM operates in the background while you spend your time on other business needs.
And when your business needs more robust features, the platform scales with your growth. You can always upgrade to a paid plan and get access to advanced features like:
Multiple pipelines
Sales forecasting
Advanced analytics
Advanced customization
AI assistance
Predefined reports
Blueprint business management, and a lot more.
With the AI assistant, you’ll get suggestions on creating better workflows and better insights into customer behavior, allowing you to make data-driven decisions and prioritize the right leads.
Most Zoho CRM reviews are positive for its ease of use and little to no learning curve, although some users have complained that some features require other Zoho App products, so you might have to pay for other Zoho products. However, an average 8/10 rating on G2 proves this CRM is a superb investment.
6. ActiveCampaign
Founded: 2003
HQ: Chicago, Illinois, United States
Key Info Price: $29.00
Free Plan: No
Trial: 14 Days
Support: Phone, email & chat Best For Businesses seeking effective email automation solution for personalized and targeted communication Pros + The email automation features are powerful, user-friendly, and straightforward.
+ ActiveCampaign offers effective tools to segment your audience and personalize communication.
+ Efficient automation that can help save time. Cons - Customizing might involve intricate steps.
- Certain advanced functions could lead to extra charges.
- It's more expensive compared to rival options. Integrations Salesforce, Accounting Suite, Xero, Quickbooks, and 870+ more Pricing Model Lite: $29 per month
Plus: $49 per month
Professional: $149 per month
Enterprise: On quotation
Another comprehensive yet affordable CRM is ActiveCampaign. ActiveCampaign offers numerous automation features for your marketing and sales efforts, and in our assessment, its automation system is the most advanced on this list.
While the CRM system might not have the extensive features of standalone platforms like PipeDrive, it compensates with its advanced automation capabilities. And, despite these advanced functionalities, we found the user interface so intuitive that new users can get the hang of the platform within a day.
ActiveCampaign splits its features into two categories, Marketing and Sales. You can purchase them separately or have them both as a bundle. The drawback is the platform does not offer a free plan. However, you can get a 14-day free trial to test the waters before making a decision.
The Marketing suite offers four pricing plans: Lite (from $29/month), Plus (from $49/month), Professional (from $149/month), and Enterprise at a customized price tailored specifically to your business needs.
For the Sales & CRM package, you can choose between the Plus plan from $19 per month, the Professional plan from $49 per month, and the upper tier Enterprise plan with custom pricing as usual.
As a bundle, the Plus plan costs $93 monthly and the Professional plan $382 monthly. ActiveCampaign’s prices are on the pricier end of the spectrum.
Compared to other CRMs on this list, we found ActiveCampaign’s prices to be high. But it still has lower-tier plans that offer good value for money. These plans provide the essential features to achieve your marketing and sales goals without straining your budget with the more expensive plans.
If you're just getting started or running a small business, the Lite plan for Marketing and the Plus plan for Sales & CRM might be sufficient.
But if you're looking for more advanced capabilities or your business is rapidly growing, we suggest you invest in the Professional plan. It offers a balanced blend of affordability and rich features, supporting more complex marketing strategies and providing tools that can adapt to a growing client base.
The lower tier Sales & CRM plans give you access to features like:
Sales Automation,
Chat & Email Support,
Lead Scoring,
Pipeline, Account & Deal Management,
Task Management & Reporting, and
Email Content Generation AI assistance.
The content generation AI can automatically suggest what content and marketing messages will be most relevant to your leads and the best time to send these messages to yield the best results.
On the other hand, the marketing suite’s lower tier plan offers features like :
Email marketing & marketing automation,
A landing page builder, and
Integrations with WooCommerce, Shopify & BigCommerce.
Site & Event Tracking
API & Webhooks
With the API and webhooks feature, you can integrate the CRM with other essential business applications you use and automate your workflows. This move streamlines your operations and increases efficiency, ultimately improving productivity and business growth.
In the higher subscription tiers, ActiveCampaign offers Machine Learning based features, including predictive content and predictive leads’ win-probability scoring to help you automate your marketing & sales process even further.
We believe ActiveCampaign is a solid choice if your business relies on heavy e-mail marketing. The CRM’s powerful email marketing and automation features can help you effectively reach your target audience and convert your leads into customers.
And it's not just us - the many positive reviews, including the impressive 8.8/10 score from 1472 reviews on G2, is a testament to why this CRM made our list.
Finding the Right Affordable CRM for Your Business
The myriad options available for cheaper CRM solutions in 2023 might seem overwhelming, but the team at Toksta have meticulously sifted through the offerings to highlight the features, benefits, and potential shortcomings of the top 6 most affordable CRMs. This guide is designed to help you seamlessly identify the CRM that will best align with your budget without sacrificing quality or functionality.
It's essential to understand that this list should be a starting point, not an endpoint, in your decision-making process. To complement our insights, consult reviews from other reputable sources and consider taking advantage of free trials to gain hands-on experience with these systems. Remember to always conduct a thorough software comparison and assess your specific needs before making your final decision.
Engagebay
Engagebay packs a ton of powerful features and Automation at an incredibly low price making it Toksta's Top Most Affordable CRM software in 2023.
*All pricing shown on this page was accurate to the best of our knowledge at the time of writing (07/08/2023) and may now have changed. Always consult the companies' own pricing pages for the most up-to-date information.
Meet the author
Sam Cassman is a seasoned growth marketer with over 10 years of experience as a growth marketer for startups and small businesses. He is the founder of Toksta, a research technology company that helps businesses find and purchase the best software and SaaS. Sam has also run his own growth marketing consultancy Honest Growth, where he helped numerous clients to grow their businesses, including Eventcube, Baluu, Obby, and NBM Group.