One of the most daunting parts of freelancing and small businesses is staying organized. If you’re a successful freelancer or a new business owner flooded with mission-critical tasks and customer data and you feel like you’re drowning just trying to hold your sales process together, you need a customer relationship manager (CMR) software.
CRM has grown to become the world's largest software industry, with no signs of slowing down. It is on track to generate more than $80 billion in sales by 2025. In fact, 91% of businesses with more than 11 employees use CRM to organize their processes and increase productivity.
The best CRM for freelancers and businesses alike can help you keep track of all of your contact records, including leads, offers, and clients. It can unite the sales and customer support activities through a seamless, user-friendly interface.
It's an easy way to keep on top of your game, handle customer support questions, and create appealing marketing emails, thanks to drag-and-drop options.
This blog post is a detailed walkthrough to assist you in your quest for the right CRM for your business. Below are the ten best CRM tools that will help you grow and scale your business efficiently.
10 Best CRM for Freelancers and Businesses
Zoho CRM
Easy to use, simple to implement, and reasonable to adopt, Zoho CRM provides consumers with a variety of features at a competitive cost.
Zoho is a multichannel CRM software for freelancers and small businesses that organizes data from a multitude of channels such as e-mail, live chat, phone calls, and social media.
Its SalesSignals functionality gives consumers real-time analytics and alerts. You can set specific goals for each member of your team and monitor their work progress from a centralized dashboard.
Zoho CRM enables you to develop and automate sales processes, as well as create separate channels for your customers.
Then there’s the Zoho Marketplace, which has hundreds of plugins that can be applied to the CRM dashboard to make things much more useful.
Zoho CRM Pricing:
Free: Supports three users
Standard: $12/month per user
Professional: $20/month per user
Enterprise: $35/month per user
Ultimate: $45/month per user
Free trial of paid plans: 15 days
Agile CRM
When listing CRM software for freelancers, Agile CRM always comes after Zoho. It is the perfect tool with a robust feature set and comprehensive automation capabilities.
Agile CRM provides marketing teams with builder tools for a variety of resources, including e-mail templates, forms, and website landing pages. It's also possible to simplify campaign activities and keep tabs on social networking.
Anything from canned responses to reports is accessible, and the features can be further expanded with plugins.
Agile CRM Pricing:
Free: Supports up to 10 users
Starter: $9.99/month per user
Regular: $39.99/month per user
Enterprise: $64.99/month per user
Pipedrive CRM
Pipedrive is a sales-focused CRM for freelancers that enables them to organize their sales process and monitor deals.
Pipedrive CRM solution makes email marketing easier for users by allowing them to select from pre-made email templates, generate custom email templates, and merge fields to autofill content.
It works with Outlook, Gmail, and Yahoo without a hitch. Pipedrive maintains a visual log of any call, text, and activity made for each customer, allowing freelancers to double-check the last conversations they had with them before resuming the communications.
The click-to-call function in Pipedrive enables users to contact clients directly. Freelancers with a lot of tasks will be able to better handle their time as this CRM solution will give them email updates, follow-up alerts, and notifications.
Pipedrive also provides a user-friendly and fully flexible interface with built-in functionality such as revenue planning, monitoring, and pipeline management.
Pipedrive CRM Pricing:
Essential: $12.50 per user per month, billed annually
Advanced: $24.90 per user per month, billed annually
Professional: $49.90 per user per month, billed annually
Enterprise: $99.00 per user per month, billed annually
HubSpot CRM
HubSpot CRM software is the go-to option for sales teams all around the globe. Sales teams can easily implement it without disrupting current workflows because it is easy to use.
HubSpot CRM is a user-friendly platform with many of the essential and advanced functionality. The tidy, feature-rich setup of this CRM makes it simple for even new users to create a professional business and consumer profiles.
When you sign up for the HubSpot CRM free trial, you can test-drive all of its advanced functionality.
HubSpot CRM Pricing:
Free: For unlimited users
Starter: $45/month, starts at two paid users
Professional: $450/month, starts at five paid users
Enterprise: $1,200/month, starts at 10 paid users
Zendesk Sell CRM
Zendesk Sell is an ideal CRM for freelancers who ought to collaborate with clients and consumers on a daily basis. Users may assign functions to users, set permissions, and designate a unique URL for each client room.
Each web-hosted portal can be set up safely right from the client's deal card. Zendesk Sell, on the other hand, lacks a free plan as well as help for quotes and time trackers, which lost several points in our assessment.
Zendesk Sell Pricing:
Team: $19/month per user
Professional: $49/month per user
Enterprise: $99/month per user
Free trial: 14 days
Bonsai CRM
Bonsai CRM for freelancers is a robust web-based project management software developed to help you organize and simplify all the back-office bits and pieces that can slip by the wayside while managing several tasks on your own.
Whether it’s about creating client proposals and contracts, tracking your time and expenses, or invoicing your clients and ensuring that you’re getting paid on time, Bonsai can do it all.
Freelancers love it because of its client management, accounting, and project management capabilities, which allows them to easily handle their tasks because all project knowledge is kept in one place - the Bonsai dashboard.
This CRM also keeps track of the payments and notify you of your clients' contacts with the invoice as well as when they expect to pay. This actually makes it easier for the customers to sign contracts and submit invoices.
Bonsai CRM Pricing:
Workflow: $19/month
Workflow plus: $29/month
Add-ons:
Partners: $9/month (Invite other users for full account access and company management)
Bonsai Tax: $10/month (Track expenses, identify write-offs, and estimate quarterly taxes easily)
Insightly CRM
Insightly is a fantastic CRM for freelancers that has project management and marketing features, such as lead and opportunity management integration, as well as an easy-to-use lead profile layout.
Users may easily view their exchanged data, activities, email messages, relevant assignments, and notes in their operation log.
This app enables you to keep track of everything and collaborate with all of your partners and consumers.
For email marketing, Insightly allows you to deliver up to 2,500 mass emails a day, and there is email scheduling as well. With features such as pipelines, activity sets, Google Contacts, and Calendar Sync, Insightly makes project automation a breeze.
Insightly CRM Pricing:
Plus plan: $29 a month
Professional: $49 a month
Enterprise: $99 a month
NetHunt CRM
NetHunt CRM is the best free CRM for Gmail users. It allows you to handle contacts, sales, projects, reports, and email promotions directly from your inbox.
You can use the preferences to import files integrate the app with tools like Zapier.
NetHunt CRM Pricing:
Basic: $24user/month
Business: $48/user/month
Advanced: $99user/month
Salesforce CRM
Salesforce can be considered as the best CRM for freelance writers, with solutions for big and small companies as well. Salesforce, like HubSpot, offers useful tips to help you get started with CRMs.
The Salesforce app is simple to use and it was created to address the most common issues that users face. Finance, healthcare, marketing, advertising, shopping, and non-profit organizations can find it especially useful.
Salesforce's technology is cloud-based, which means you can use it from either computer or device (Android or iOS). Simple customization, contact management, lead generation, reports, as well as a fast initial setup are some of the most considerable features of the Salesforce CRM for freelancers.
Salesforce CRM Pricing:
Sales essentials edition: $25/user/month
Professional edition: $75/user/month
Enterprise edition: $150/user/month
Unlimited edition: $300/user/month
Bitrix24 CRM
Bitrix24 is yet again one of the best CRM for freelance writers with a variety of resources to help you become a more productive freelance writer. Through its functions, you can replace the services with the Bitrix24 ecosystem, without losing any consumer connections.
It features HD video conferences for communicating with customers, as well as a website creator that will help you market your writing services – plus it's SEO-friendly!
This CRM app has intranet features and project management and is available in 18 languages. You can use it to create notes, log time, plan and announce activities, and communicate with others via private or community chats.
Bitrix24 CRM Pricing:
A 30-day free trial is available, and a free plan for starter business tools, after which pricing is as follows:
Special Plans:
Start+: $24/month for 2 users
CRM+: $69/month for 6 users
Project+: $69/month for 24 users
Business Plans:
Standard: $99/month
Professional: $199/month
What Is the Right Time to Use a CRM for Freelancers?
The majority of freelancers devote 30% to 50% of their time hunting for jobs or managing client relationships which keeps them from doing their actual job for which they are being compensated.
Tools like CRM are built to help you organize your time well, simplify processes, and increase productivity.
Wrap Up
Every freelancer is not the same, and the CRM that works best for you would be different as well. To decide the right tool, you first need to determine your needs and budget. When you keep those important details in mind, you will be able to find the right tool for you.