The best free CRM software in 2026

In business, relationships drive everything, from cold lead all the way to closed won. While you may have everything under control in an Excel file—or in a forest of Post-its around your monitor—using customer relationship management (CRM) software will make it easier to manage and nurture more complex relationships. It'll also introduce opportunities for automation and help standardize processes in your company, leading to more consistent touchpoints across channels.

It sounds huge, I know. But you don't have to pay a huge price to get started. I've been updating this list for a few years, and this year, I considered about 80 free CRM systems and then did in-depth testing on the top contenders.

After dozens of hours of testing, these are the 15 best free CRMs.

The best free CRM software

Best free all-in-one CRMs

• EngageBay for built-in help desk and live chat

• Bitrix24 for a full business feature set

• Zoho CRM for automation and suite integrations

• HubSpot CRM for lots of native integration options

• Vtiger for following up and closing deals

Best for building your own CRM

• Zapier for a customized, automation-driven CRM

• Twenty for an open-source, self-hosted CRM

Best free CRMs for your email inbox

• Streak for adding a CRM to Gmail

• eWay-CRM for adding a CRM to Outlook

Best CRMs with AI features on the free plan

• Clarify for an AI-native free CRM

• Attio for powering your GTM strategy

Best free CRMs for niche use cases

• Capsule for easy project management

• Snov.io for prospecting and outreach

• Brevo for free daily email marketing sends daily

• Clay for a personal CRM

What makes the best free CRM software?

CRM software is a lead management solution that keeps track of your contacts—both their personal and business information. It lets you classify each one based on your contact history and the deals you're building and negotiating.

The more basic free CRM apps help you organize your contacts, have a sales pipeline to keep track of the deal process, and provide simple reports and dashboards to let you know how you and your team are performing. More advanced platforms pack extra functionality in areas like project management, marketing, help desk, content management, and SEO; offer automation and integration opportunities to save time and streamline processes; and let you create your own reports and access game-changing analytics.

With that in mind, here's what I was looking for as I tested each free CRM app:

• Ease of use. Using your CRM system should be as easy as using your email client. It should also make repetitive actions easier, like adding new contact details or tracking deals.

• Contact and sales management. For contacts, I was looking at how many fields there were and if you could create filtered lists for segmentation; for sales, I looked for at least one visual sales pipeline that you could customize for your particular sales process.

• Reporting and analytics. I paid attention to how the dashboards work: how informative they are, how many reports you can run (and if you can create your own), and any analytics that give you insight into how to improve your processes.

• Integration with other apps. The more integrations and the more seamless they are, the better. Your CRM is your information hub, so it needs to be able to send data to and receive information from your other business-critical apps.

• Unique features. I tested anything that's not strictly tied to CRM functionality but that could be an interesting advantage—things like traffic analytics, project management, or internal team collaboration features.

To test these CRMs, I signed up for each one and followed the suggested onboarding procedure. Then I added a few contacts and businesses, created deals, and advanced them through the pipeline. I then took a look at the reporting and analytics features to see what had changed with my data. Where available, I tested marketing features by sending out an email campaign to myself; managed projects, adding tasks and milestones; asked myself for help in service desk portals; and tested some integrations with other apps. I spent anywhere from 40 minutes to several hours with each app, depending on the breadth of features.

Here are the best CRM apps with a solid free plan.

How to choose the best CRM for you

I divided this free CRM list into five broad categories to help you find the best app for your circumstances and objectives. Here's what to expect:

• Best free all-in-one CRMs offer a complete feature set, with sales tools at the core, plus customer service, marketing, or finance capabilities, depending on the app you choose.

• Best for building your own CRM gives you the flexibility to create a custom system that fits your exact workflow.

• Best CRMs for your email inbox extend Gmail or Outlook with sales features so you can manage deals without leaving your email interface.

• Best CRMs with AI features on the free plan leverage AI to automate repetitive tasks and surface insights, with stronger capabilities than other free plans.

• Best CRMs for niche use cases focus on specific needs like project management, prospecting, or email marketing. These are ideal if you already use other sales tools and just need a simple CRM to complement them, not replace your entire stack.

The best free CRM software at a glance

Best free CRM software with all-in-one features

Best free CRM with built-in help desk and live chat

EngageBay (Web, iOS, Android)

EngageBay pros:

• All-in-one platform with sales, marketing, live chat, and help desk included

• AI chatbot available on free plan

EngageBay cons:

• Free plan capped at 250 contacts and 1,000 branded emails per month

Most free CRM plans give you contact management and maybe some basic email features. EngageBay gives you a complete customer service operation instead: ticketing, live chat, canned responses, and even an AI chatbot to handle basic inquiries. Competitors treat support features as premium add-ons, but EngageBay builds them into the core platform from the start.

Look for the top-left dropdown menu to find each section of the app: sales, marketing, service, and live chat. Each has its own dashboard, tabs, and tools, but all are connected at the core. This means a support ticket can trigger a marketing email, or a live chat conversation can create a sales opportunity, without jumping between disconnected systems.

The service module comes with two default views for assigned and unassigned tickets, and you can create more based on custom criteria as volume grows. The free plan doesn't include automation workflows or macros, but includes notifications for you and your customers on ticket updates. You also get canned responses: full message templates that you can drop into a ticket, easy to customize or send right away.

Live chat runs through a unified inbox where all customer conversations appear in real time. Configure and connect the widget to your website, and soon you'll be assigning chats to team members, as well as trading messages with your visitors. To reduce work for repetitive conversations, EngageBay offers a free AI chatbot you can train to answer questions automatically.

EngageBay's biggest advantage is giving small teams a complete customer support stack without breaking the budget. Extend your capabilities by connecting EngageBay to Zapier, so you can integrate it with thousands of other apps to be sure your information is flowing in and out of your CRM automatically. Learn more about how to automate EngageBay with Zapier, or take a look at these pre-made workflows.

EngageBay price: Free plan available for up to 250 contacts and 1,000 branded emails. Basic plan at $14.99/user/month.

Best free CRM with a full business feature set

Bitrix24 (Web, Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, Android)

Bitrix24 pros:

• Business software suite

• Wide range of features

Bitrix24 cons:

• Potentially high configuration time

Bitrix24 is an all-in-one business app. Along with sales, you'll find marketing, customer service, contact center and phone, analytics, and automation. Wrapped around this strong core, you'll also find project management, collaboration, HR, website building, eCommerce, eSign, and a built-in AI assistant.

Breadth doesn't mean sacrificing depth here. It's great to see that the sales features are on par with more specialized competitor CRMs, with useful details that speed up workflows. For example, the contacts page lets you rearrange fields so you can see what you need faster, and offers a link to a report on the client's relationship, including a graph of the current communication load.

The sales pipeline offers multiple views, starting with the traditional Kanban. You can add deals quickly and even tap to add activities to existing ones. Beyond list view, there's an activities view to focus on what's still to do and a calendar view to visualize due dates and plan accordingly. On the top right of the screen, you'll find pipeline automation, an in-depth toolkit to choose what happens when deals change status, with options to notify your team or add activities.

Despite this year's nice overhaul to the user interface and experience, the platform is still quite deep and requires a heavy dose of patience in your first weeks. Start slowly: first, get your team on the platform and start collaborating there; then, add your contacts and set up your sales pipeline and deals; after that, explore the reports and integrations. Momentum is more important than speed: when everyone's fully familiarized with the platform, the productivity gains compound.

Curious after this sizzle reel? If you're shopping for an all-in-one workspace, Bitrix24 is a great option to provide structure to all your teams. If you're missing anything, you can connect Bitrix24 to Zapier to automate all your business workflows: trigger important emails when new contacts are added or create new contacts from your lead gen tool—and that's just the tip of the iceberg.

Bitrix24 price: Free plan includes unlimited users and contacts and all the basic features, with a 5GB limit on uploaded data. Basic plan extends the base feature set and starts at $49/month for 5 users.

Best free CRM software for automation and suite integrations

Zoho CRM (Web, iOS, Android)

Zoho CRM pros:

• Great AI features via Zia

• Many compatible Zoho apps include great free plans as well

Zoho CRM cons:

• Steep learning curve

Time is money. Automation saves time, and that's why most apps monetize it behind paid plans. Zoho CRM helps you save some time right from the start by offering five automations on the free plan, setting it apart from the competition. And that's not even mentioning its rich Zoho app ecosystem that you can tap into for solving plenty of business problems without burning thousands of dollars.

The first time you log in, you'll notice there's a lot to explore. This year, Zoho CRM refreshed the user interface, moving the tabs from the top to the left side, and organized them to improve navigation. To access automation, click the settings cogwheel at the bottom and then select which kind you'd like to set up first: workflow rules for updating record data, actions for email notifications, task automation, or updating fields. You can also use webhooks to communicate with other apps easily.

Beyond automation, Zoho CRM is strong all around. The 360-degree contact data view helps you inspect a relationship, even finding the best times to call or email. There are over 60 pre-made reports covering everything from lead analytics, through deal insights, to marketing metrics—and you can configure the cards in whichever way is most useful to you.

The core app already has a varied feature set, extending core sales with inventory, ticketing, and productized services. When you need more, you can browse the Zoho software suite, starting with Zoho Projects and Zoho Analytics, the two that integrate seamlessly into the CRM. The remaining 55+ apps cover marketing, office apps, and IT management, letting you extend your tech stack as needed, not as a result of a fixed contract.

But what happens if you want to connect your CRM to an app outside of the ecosystem? If you don't find a native integration, connect Zoho CRM to Zapier. For example, you can automatically add leads you generate from Facebook lead ads or connect your eCommerce store to the CRM to power all your business's workflows. Learn more about how to automate Zoho CRM, or take a look at these pre-made workflows.

Zoho CRM price: Free plan available for 3 users and up to 5,000 records. Paid plans, which add features like sales forecasting, custom reports, and more marketing automation features, start at $14/user/month.

Best free CRM for lots of integration options

HubSpot CRM (Web, iOS, Android)

HubSpot CRM pros:

• Generous free plan

• Wide range of well-designed features

HubSpot CRM cons:

• When you need to upgrade, paid plans are confusing

HubSpot is where your tech stack comes together. With nearly 1,000 native integrations available for free CRM users, you'll be able to connect most of the other apps you use to your CRM. And if you connect them via HubSpot's Operations Hub, you can make the data bi-directional, pulling it into HubSpot and pushing out updates if you make changes, keeping information current wherever it is.

If you don't find the app you want in HubSpot's marketplace, you can always connect HubSpot with Zapier to open the doors to thousands of other integrations. You can learn more about how to automate business processes in HubSpot, or start with one of these examples.

HubSpot's CRM is free forever for unlimited users and unlimited contacts. Those "unlimited contacts" come with an asterisk: due to technical limitations, each account can only have up to one million contacts. Still, going through all those could take a nice decade or two, depending on how much lead gen goes on at your company.

There's just one pipeline on the free plan, and you can't create more, but HubSpot makes it up to you by letting you create your own customized dashboards and tailored reports. You can take a peek into analytics like marketing campaign stats, traffic analysis of your website, contact analysis on your CRM activity, and form performance. 

The extent of HubSpot's free plan is pretty remarkable—it's far from limited to the CRM. There's an entire marketing suite, including email marketing, landing pages, and basic forms. You can create and manage your own website using HubSpot's content management system, handle support tickets and set up live chat and chatbots with the service suite, and review traffic analytics and SEO tools to optimize your channels. There are a range of AI tools that'll help you save time at each step by generating emails, blog posts, and chat messages. Some of them are available on the free plan, so you can definitely take a tour to get a feel of the power.

HubSpot price: Free plan includes unlimited users and contacts, plus a lot more; paid plans from $15/month—browse the pricing plans for individuals and small teams to find them.

Best free CRM for following up and closing deals

Vtiger (Web, iOS, Android)

Vtiger pros:

• Strong core of sales, marketing, help desk, and project management

• Feature-rich on the free plan

Vtiger cons:

• Steep learning curve

Tired of manually remembering which prospects need a follow-up on Tuesday? Vtiger automates the chase. Build email sequences, let prospects book their own meetings, and get nagged when deals go cold—all on the free plan.

Instead of using a Post-it or a task to remind you to follow up, set up a simple email sequence. This lets you queue a predefined series of messages that go out automatically based on your prospect's behavior: for example, if they don't open or reply in one day, Vtiger fires a follow-up. This already saves a lot of time, especially when you're handling dozens of leads every day.

When you have a lead's attention, make it easy for them to book time with you. Create an appointment page with your profile photo, a brief introduction, and a calendar to browse your upcoming availability. No back-and-forth emails to set up the time: leads can browse your availability and book with convenience. All the data will be synced into your CRM as soon as they make their choice.

Then, there's the "don't drop the ball" layer. Vtiger has configurable alerts and notifications so you're warned when a deal or contact has been idle for too long, or when an important activity happens—such as a deal sitting in the "Ready to close" stage for several days without any movement. These alerts can be delivered in-app or via email, so you stay on top of deals even if you're not watching your CRM all the time.

Beyond the follow-up automation, Vtiger's free plan is unusually complete: you get sales, marketing, help desk, and project management tools, plus extras like social media integration. When you start getting serious ROI and need to upgrade, it offers tiered user pricing: full-access users pay more, while limited-access users cost less—helpful if you're scaling a team where not everyone needs the full CRM but just help desk or marketing.

Connect Vtiger to Zapier so it can talk to all the other apps your team uses. Do things like automatically add an opportunity when someone posts to your company's Facebook feed or completes a lead form. Learn more about automating Vtiger, or use one of these pre-made workflows to get started.

Vtiger price: Free plan available for up to 10 users and 3,000 records. Paid plans start at $15/user/month.

Best free software for building your own CRM

Best for building a customized, automation-driven CRM

Zapier (Web)

Zapier pros:

• Build and customize your CRM in a no-code environment

• Build your own AI features into your CRM

Zapier cons:

• Advanced reporting only available through integrations

Zapier (whose blog you're on right now) is an all-in-one automation platform. It includes its own logic and orchestration builder (Zaps), data infrastructure (Tables), a form builder (Forms), and AI chatbots and agents to work on top and alongside all other layers.

With the CRM template, you start with a form to add new contacts and a sales pipeline view. You'll have to build the rest, but that's not a disadvantage: it means it's really customizable. You can keep expanding your CRM to display data in new ways, let your team interact with it, and trigger automated workflows from anywhere.

Since it's so easy to connect Zapier to thousands of other apps, and since the CRM is usually the data backbone of a company, it makes it a very strong choice to use as a central point to manage your sales. You can add extra features by signing up for other apps to do SMS, email marketing, analytics, or anything else: there are over 8,000 integrations available. Moving data in and out of each of them is easy, so you'll be more agile if you like to switch software frequently.

Get started building with one of these CRM templates.

Simple CRM Template

A Simple CRM, without all the bells and whistles.

Try it

Sales CRM Template

Organize and automate your sales pipeline to confidently grow your business.

Try it

Zapier price: Free plan available for unlimited Zaps, Tables, and Interfaces; advanced features start at $29.99/month.

Best open source CRM for self-hosting

Twenty (Web)

Twenty pros:

• Streamlined, smooth user experience

• Strong sales workflow automation tools

Twenty cons:

• Requires technical skills to implement

When you sign up for a free plan on any other app on this list, there's a subtle expectation that you'll one day become a paid user. As you move up the pricing tiers, you start paying hundreds, sometimes thousands, to unlock more features and remove limits, until you're locked in a contract that's slowly chipping away at budget efficiency. If you want to get out of this treadmill, Twenty is the solution as self-hostable open-source software.

Twenty doesn't have a free cloud version hosted by its developers; those plans start at $12/user/month. To get the full advantage from this platform, you'll head over to GitHub's project page—it has more than 37k stars as I write this—download it, and spin it up in your own cloud infrastructure. This makes the software free and extendable in any way you want, and you only have to pay for the compute: the actual workload of running the app on servers, which is usually much lower than buying a contract with a major CRM provider.

Is it worth it to hire someone to get Twenty running for you? If you care about efficiency and scaling, yes. Around the web, you'll see Twenty compared to giants like Salesforce and HubSpot, the top two CRMs in the world. This is because Twenty's sales features are robust and well-designed, creating a smooth and trustworthy experience. It doesn't have the breadth of features of bigger platforms—no ticketing or help desk, for instance—but it does the core extremely well.

Another advantage is that, since you're on the self-hosting path, you can now build your own enterprise-grade CRM by also spinning up Mautic for marketing automation and the Zammad/Chatwoot combo for customer service, all open-source options. This modularity will force your IT team to think about data hosting, making it easier to migrate to new platforms in the future if needed or to connect new software and services as your objectives evolve.

So Twenty is free CRM software, but it's not free to run. Due to the technical skill required, it's not a great match for non-technical solopreneurs or small businesses. But it shines for companies that want more control of their data and software, paying only for what it costs to run, not for enterprise plan markups.

If you go with Twenty, you can connect it to Zapier to integrate it into all your workflows. Turn form submissions into records, get CRM notifications wherever you need them, and be sure your CRM data is in sync with the rest of your tech stack. Here are a few pre-made templates to get you started.

Twenty price: Free when self-hosted on your own infrastructure (you pay for the computation to run it). Cloud plans hosted by Twenty's developers available for $12/user/month.

Best free CRMs for your email inbox

Best free CRM for Gmail users

Streak (Web extension for Chrome, Safari, Edge; Gmail add-on)

Streak pros:

• Seamless Gmail integration

• Multiple pipelines available

Streak cons:

• Lack of deep reports

If Gmail is the base for all your business communication, you're in luck. You don't have to install a separate app or even give up the interface you've grown so used to. Streak doesn't just integrate with Gmail: it fits seamlessly into the original interface, adding the buttons and features of a powerful CRM.

To get started, you have to download and install the Streak browser extension. With that out of the way, all you have to do is give Streak permission to access your Gmail account—necessary to enable all the features—and walk through the simple configuration process, with an introductory video to all the features sitting at the end.

Unlike other options on this list, Streak's interface feels more like Google Sheets. The sales pipelines have the stages at the top, and below the graphical representation, there's a spreadsheet where you can see your contacts, add relevant details, and move them through the pipeline. This approach may feel a bit strange at first, but after you add your first contact and see how the app handles it, things will click into place quickly.

You can add new contacts from emails in your inbox and assign them to any active pipeline you have. From that point on, all future emails will be labeled as a lead or deal, and the information about tasks/notes/activity will appear on a column to the right. If you click on the contact's email on that column, the entire history will appear, letting you take a look at the whole relationship so far.

In addition to the standard pipeline, there are multiple pipeline templates for use cases spanning sales to HR. You can start from one of those or create your own. This is great if you do more than sales—for example, if you're also hiring or looking for partnerships. Another useful extra is email tracking. When your recipient opens the email, a message pops up on your screen. It even keeps a record of the tracking history, showing the email views by date and location.

Streak doesn't offer any integrations on the free plan; it also doesn't have any deep reporting and analytics features, which is a definite drawback. If you ever upgrade to a paid plan, you can integrate Streak with Zapier to be sure all your CRM info is up to date and all your critical workflows are running in the background. Check out some ideas for automating Streak with Zapier, or try one of these pre-made workflows.

Streak price: Free plan includes 500 items and 50 mail merge emails per day; paid plans, which add features like shared pipelines, link tracking, and reports, start at $59/user/month.

Best free CRM for Outlook users

eWay-CRM (Microsoft Outlook desktop add-on)

eWay-CRM pros:

• Adds new features inside Outlook

• Great free plan

eWay-CRM cons:

• Interface isn't very up-to-date

It's not fair that Gmail users get all the love with their own integrated CRM, is it? Faithful Outlook users rejoice: eWay-CRM will augment your email inbox with plenty of useful features to keep track of contacts, projects, deals, and notes. And it's free for unlimited users and contacts.

To use eWay, you have to create your account and download the installation file—it's meant to be used as an Outlook add-on for the desktop version. (If you use Outlook on the web, you're out of luck.) After you complete the installation, you'll notice some top menus on Outlook change to accommodate the new features that eWay offers. When you click to create a contact, a new window appears with all the fields ready to be filled. After you type in the details, your contacts will sit on a list accessible from within Outlook, with an Excel-like look and functionality. You can then customize which fields you want to see in columns, and filter, sort, or reorganize as you want. eWay also has a company view, letting you add details and then connect the individual contacts with their respective employers.

One of things I liked most is how it improves the right-click menu in Outlook: you can convert anything in your inbox to a contact, task, project, or note, saving you the time of tabbing out to your project management or enterprise platform to enter the details manually. This is a testament to how eWay isn't setting out to impose a new working logic—it's instead building on the things you actually do every day on Outlook.

eWay also has a board view, improving the sales pipeline experience. You can add your own colors to categories, helping you distinguish them and making your work more intuitive.

There are no sparkling dashboards, but you can use your Excel skills to Group by, then sort and filter to create your own reports. If that's not enough, eWay can export the data to the actual Excel app so you can put the data magicians in your department to work. eWay also integrates with Word, and you can start a chat in Teams with a right-click. It even has an offline mode—a nice touch.

For more integrations, connect eWay-CRM to Zapier, and you can automate a lot of the power of eWay. Here are a few ways you can get started, but you can automate processes across your entire tech stack. 

eWay-CRM price: Free plan includes unlimited users and contacts; paid plans, which add things like more storage, deeper project management features, and more customization, start at $18/user/month.

Best free CRMs with AI features on the free plan

Best free AI-native CRM

Clarify (Web, Mac)

Clarify pros:

• Intuitive, modern interface

• No per-user pricing

Clarify cons:

• Recently launched (June 2025)

Small teams wear many hats. The longer you spend doing manual work under the admin hat, the more likely you are to fall behind on other tasks—and beyond that, it's just busywork. As an AI-native CRM, Clarify adds an agent to your sales workflow, so you can spend more time doing the tasks that only you can do, leaving the rest to the machines.

You won't need to log every call, email, or next step: Clarify connects to your email and calendar, then uses its own AI to keep your data up to date. For your sales calls, it handles the entire arc: it briefs you before the call, so you have full context before you start; it transcribes the entire meeting; and after you finish, it offers a meeting summary and updates your CRM with everything that you discussed, including next actions to take.

The AI layer is strong, and the underlying CRM is robust too. It offers all the basic tools to track people, companies, and deals, with basic reporting and a flexible workflow automation tool. It nudges you when something needs attention, and you can send and receive emails from this interface. When you install the Chrome extension, you can browse LinkedIn to capture new leads and enrich them, too.

Where other CRMs gate their AI features behind paid plans, Clarify offers most of the feature set for free: unlimited users, with enrichment, AI fields, deal/meeting intelligence, and a total of 2,500 monthly AI credits that are consumed as you use features. If your workload is smooth and regular, you can extend your stay in the free plan; however, if there's a sudden spike, you may be left without the AI automation at a critical moment.

Now that your CRM runs itself, you can have it control other parts of your tech stack. Connect Clarify to Zapier to automate it with your entire tech stack, adding even more AI power to your workflows. Here are a few templates to get you started.

Clarify pricing: Free plan with core CRM, autonomous AI features, and unlimited seats, capped at around 2,500 AI credits/month; paid plans start at about $20/month with more credits and advanced integrations.

Best free AI CRM for powering your GTM strategy

Attio (Web, Mac, Android, iOS)

Attio pros:

• Highly customizable and flexible

• Easy to set up and learn

Attio cons:

• Lightweight on advanced CRM features

Most CRMs treat AI like a feature you turn on and then sits expectantly in a side-tab chat. Attio treats it like intelligent architecture that you can customize to fit your GTM strategy. It uses a combination of sequences, workflows, and AI attributes to make this happen.

Starting with sequences: it offers all the core tools to set up an email sequence with time delay between each message. What's new here is that you can add one or multiple AI content variables to each message: write a prompt for what you'd like to have in a specific section of the email, and it'll get generated just before sending the email to each lead. You can use variables inside the prompt, meaning that you can ground the results on live CRM data and personalize the message.

The next step is workflows, core to automating your sales processes. Attio offers all the core capabilities with AI magic on top. Beyond the actions to set up conditions or calculations, you can trigger an AI agent to research details about a record; summarize a record with a set of tags, useful to label leads; classify text into tags, useful for sentiment analysis; prompt completion for generating text; or summarize records to crunch a lot of data into a snappy intro.

And then there are AI attributes, acting like fields in your CRM that think for themselves. In a nutshell, you'll be able to run the same AI actions available in workflows in a dedicated column for companies, people, deals—or any other list or pipeline you create within Attio. For example, when you add an AI attribute to summarize a deal, you can add additional instructions regarding formatting or what it should include/discard. After you lock it in, it'll generate the output for all deals based on the unique data in each.

Extend your intelligent sales architecture by connecting Attio to Zapier, orchestrating your strategy across thousands of apps you use for work. Here are some templates to show you how it works.

Attio pricing: Free plan with 3 seats, 50,000 records, AI attributes, and 250 automation credits/month; paid plans start at $36/user/month with advanced AI and unlimited objects.

Best free CRMs for niche use cases

Best free CRM for easy project management

Capsule (Web, iOS, Android)

Capsule pros:

• Very intuitive

• Dashboard focuses on tasks to do

Capsule cons:

• Not as feature-packed as others on the list

Doing good work means taming chaos and turning it into value. It's hard to do that when your CRM is cluttered, unintuitive, and complicated. That's why Capsule is so refreshing: it combines sales and project management in a single platform, with organized interfaces that actually keep that chaos under control.

The project management functionality resembles that of a true project management platform, with enough depth to keep everything on track. It has a calendar view, Kanban view, and list view, and a dashboard that shows you the tasks for the day and what's coming next—it really takes the overwhelm out of your daily tasks.

There's only one sales pipeline on the free plan. It comes with a Kanban view for visual tracking, a filterable list view, and a dashboard view displaying pipeline forecast, status by milestone, conversion rate, and a grouping of pipeline tags. In the end, the metrics that Capsule offers make up for some of the limitations.

You can connect Capsule to thousands of apps via Zapier (no coding skills required) so that all your important business workflows run in the background. Import sales opportunities or projects, send automatic notifications, and more.

Here's how this love story ends: Capsule will only let you use its free plan as long as you stay below its 250-contact limit. But when you're willing to invest, getting on the lowest-paid plan will bump that to 50,000, as well as lift the limit on your sales pipelines and project views.

Capsule price: Free plan for up to 2 users and 250 contacts; paid plans start at $21/user/month.

Best free CRM for prospecting and cold outreach

Snov.io (Web)

Snov.io pros:

• Plenty of company data available

• Chrome extensions for prospecting

Snov.io cons:

• Very focused on the outreach use case

When you're just starting out or trying to get established in a new market, you can't leverage referrals or inbound marketing as much. This is when prospecting and reaching out to leads is crucial to securing new business.

Snov.io packs all the features of a CRM with prospecting, letting you search for companies, see their employee rosters and respective titles, and then verify if their emails are valid and active. If you use LinkedIn on a daily basis, Snov.io even offers an extension to let you add search result pages or individual profiles to your prospecting lists.

So now you have a good list of people you want to reach out to. What's next? Snov.io lets you send direct emails to these contacts, and you can start from one of their many email templates or build your own. Alternatively, you can set up a drip campaign built on a visual editor, with customizable rules on how many emails to send, how much time to wait between each one, and conditional triggers for when the recipient clicks on a link.

Since there's no previous relationship between you and your prospects, there's a possibility that your email may get caught in spam filters. Snov.io offers a basic email warm-up feature on the free plan, allowing you to optimize your emails to land in the inbox, not in spam or promotions. It also has lots of tips on the platform to improve your deliverability, and to keep your sending reputation intact—for example, not sending to invalid email inboxes and not repeating sends for email addresses that bounced your message. Even with all that, everything throughout the app feels pretty straightforward.

Snov.io's pricing puts most of the limitations on the prospecting and email verification features with a credit system. You get 150 credits per month, and each new lead or verification costs 1 credit. There's also a 100-recipient limit on email drip campaigns per month, but that only applies to the first email sent to a contact—all subsequent ones for the month are free. 

Do more with Snov.io by connecting it to Zapier, so you can automate all your prospecting and lead management workflows. Here are a few examples to get started.

Snov.io price: Free plan includes 50 credits and 100 recipients; Starter plan is $30/month for 1,000 credits and 5,000 recipients.

Best free CRM for free daily email marketing sends

Brevo (Web)

Brevo pros:

• Multichannel capabilities: includes email campaigns, transactional email + SMS, WhatsApp as pay-as-you-go

• Large 100,000 contact allowance

Brevo cons:

• User experience is a bit rough around the edges

If you're doing high-frequency communication with multiple customer segments, Brevo's free tier is exactly what you need. Other options on this list cap you at either 1k or 2k marketing email sends monthly, but Brevo doesn't care: it gives you 300 free emails every single day, 9,000 per month if you're using your quota consistently. The limit resets daily, but unused sends don't roll over—use them or lose them.

Formerly known as Sendinblue, an email marketing platform at heart, Brevo is now expanding with sales and multichannel features. You can track contacts and manage deals while accessing core email marketing features—it's a tool you choose primarily for the generous daily sending volume and marketing capabilities, with CRM as a useful bonus rather than the main attraction. As for multichannel, you can shoot out SMS and WhatsApp messages, but that's not available on the free plan.

The email marketing features are good, with the drag-and-drop editor, templates, contact segmentation, signup forms, basic automation workflows (for up to 2,000 contacts on the free plan). The trade-offs are reasonable: Brevo branding appears on all emails, reporting stays basic, and advanced features like A/B testing, landing pages, and deeper analytics require paid plans.

The CRM is bare-bones but functional. You get a visual sales pipeline with filtered views to slice deals by stage, owner, or value, plus contact records, task management, and meeting scheduling. The catch: the free plan limits you to one pipeline and 50 open deals. That's plenty for a solo entrepreneur or small team managing straightforward sales, but don't expect the reporting depth, customization, or multi-pipeline complexity of a dedicated sales platform.

Looking to use Brevo as the communication layer of your business? Connect Brevo to Zapier and make your other work apps trigger actions in Brevo—and vice versa—so you can automate all your CRM workflows. Learn more about how to automate Brevo, or get started with one of these pre-made workflows.

Brevo price: Free plan for 300 email sends/day and core features for email marketing, CRM, eCommerce and multichannel. Standard plan at $17/month for email marketing with a $31 add-on for Sales Essentials for 1 user.

Best free personal CRM

Clay (Web, Windows, Mac, iOS)

Clay pros:

• Regular prompts to update relationship details

• AI-powered contact search engine

Clay cons:

• Missing core CRM features like a sales pipeline

Clay—not to be confused with the data enrichment platform of the same name—stands apart from other options on this list. It focuses on a more personal approach to relationship management, helping you keep in touch with people as you remember their birthdays, check in on important life events, and schedule catch-ups when you discover they'll be in your city.

While this is a different vibe from traditional sales work at scale, it can work better for solopreneurs or highly personalized outreach processes. If you have to build a deep relationship before there's even a talk that leads to conversion, Clay has more intuitive tools to help you here.

It runs a bit like a cross between a CRM and a social media feed. As you add new contacts, they're automatically enriched with their work information and social media channels. It grabs information from your calendar, iMessage, and your email contacts into the platform. With that information, it starts tracking people to see what they're doing, and it populates a feed for major life moments or career changes. So, instead of setting an interval for reaching out to people, you can instead connect every time something major happens in their lives, which helps put the focus on them.

Beyond this activity feed, Clay also sets up reconnect reminders so you can check in with people you haven't talked much with recently. As you chat with your contacts, add notes and details to their page about anything that's important to you. Later, when it's time to find someone to collaborate with or the best match for a product or service, you can use the Nexus AI feature to find people using natural language prompts. For example, you can ask for people who speak a certain language or are in a specific city. The AI engine will comb through your data and give you all the best matches.

As you're focusing on nurturing these relationships, you can leave the rote work to computers. Connect Clay to Zapier and automate all your relationship management workflows. Here are some examples to get you started.

Clay price: Free plan available for up to 1,000 contacts; paid plans start at $20/user/month.

Other free CRM options

So far, we've explored apps that are either pure CRMs or have equivalent features. But if free is the most important part of the equation, there are other apps that will help you keep track of your sales for zilch, for a long time.

• Notion is an all-in-one workspace with a very generous free plan for personal users. It lets you add as many contacts and data visualizations as you need, so you can track clients, projects, or anything else. You can add up to 15 guests to any page you create, so that can help with collaboration without having to upgrade to a paid team space right away. Get started with this Notion CRM template.

• Airtable is the next best option. A spreadsheet with a mountain of extras, it's loved by productivity enthusiasts by letting you add all your data and then change into new views intuitively. The free plan lets you play with up to five people, and each base (Airtable file) can hold up to 1,000 records on the free plan. Here's a starter Airtable CRM template.

• Finally, Google Sheets is still a viable option to keep track of your contacts. It will require tinkering and tuning, but if you're not really looking to invest, and you love spreadsheets, it's free forever. Get inspired with this Google Sheets CRM template, and start getting all your leads organized.

Free CRM FAQs

Still have some questions? Here are the answers to some questions lots of folks have about finding a free CRM.

Is there a fully free CRM?

There aren't too many fully free CRMs out there. A lot of CRMs offer free plans, but as you add contacts, you'll eventually end up needing to pay. eWay-CRM, a Microsoft Outlook desktop add-on listed above, has a great free plan with unlimited users and contacts, but you'll have to pay for access to advanced features. Alternatively, you could use a spreadsheet as a CRM, if you really don't need anything fancy.

Is there a free CRM for small businesses?

There are plenty of free CRMs that are a great fit for small businesses. Vtiger, in particular, is a great option for small businesses as it's easy to use and free for up to 3,000 contacts.

Does Google offer a CRM?

Google doesn't offer its own CRM, but you can use Zapier to connect your Google apps to virtually any other CRM you'd like to use.

Which free CRM tool should you use?

If you're used to managing your leads and customers the traditional way, with notebooks and spreadsheets, hopping on a free CRM system will streamline your systems and help move your work forward. It's also the beginning of building a body of data that you can analyze, giving you better insights about your business, helping you increase your impact.

Give a few of these free CRM tools a spin. Before committing, be sure you take a good look at the pricing pages. Each app approaches "free" a little differently, so make sure you have everything you need on the free plan, and that the upgraded pricing model matches your budget. 

Related reading:

• CRM automation to boost your team's productivity

• The best free small business software

• The best HubSpot alternatives

• The best sales tools for sales managers and B2B sales teams

• The sales forecasting spreadsheets you need

• What is CRM data quality? A complete guide to accurate customer data

This article was originally published in December 2014 by Matthew Guay and has had contributions from Chris Hawkins. The most recent update was in December 2025.