Sales CRM

A sales CRM (customer relationship management) keeps a team's contacts, companies and deals in one place and moves each deal through the stages of a pipeline, with the emails, calls and meetings around it logged on the record. Sales teams at startups, agencies, software companies and service businesses use them, from a founder tracking a first few deals to large sales organizations. They differ in where they started (a free marketing platform, a visual pipeline, an all-in-one suite, a database built from email), which plan carries email sync, automation, sequences and forecasting, and where single sign-on, custom objects and a HIPAA agreement sit.

We compare them on the same six indicators, read from each vendor's pricing, trust, legal, help center and developer pages:

• Pricing clarity: whether the plan you need has a published price, can be bought online and month to month, whether extra AI usage has a price, and whether the pages leave prices out or contradict each other.
• Free plan and trial: a permanent free plan, and whether it includes a connected mailbox, workflow automation and several users; otherwise the length of the trial and whether it needs a card.
• Price for 5 users: the monthly cost for 5 users on the cheapest plan with more than one pipeline, a connected mailbox and workflow automation, billed annually, with any required onboarding fee, and the arithmetic shown; 0 when the pages cannot price it.
• Sales features: email sequences, sales forecasting, custom objects, quotes and calling, and on which plan each one sits.
• Compliance and data residency: the vendor's own SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001, a HIPAA agreement, and storing data in the EU.
• Admin, API and data export: SAML single sign-on, custom roles, an audit log, a REST API and a self-serve export of all your records.

How many deals a team closes depends on the team, not the tool, so we do not score it. Each review says which pages it was written from and when. Where we have run a product hands-on, the evidence is on its page.