RELATED: Best Pipedrive Substitutes | Top Alternative Tools For Freshsales | FreshDesk CRM Alternative Software
Being a sales leader and deciding which CRM to use can often prove difficult. You will need to compare features like customizability and ease of use to choose the best CRM for you and your business.
You want to improve your sales process without having to use complicated software. We have a list of Salesforce CRM alternatives that can help you to improve your sales process without introducing unnecessary complexity.
Top 13 Best Salesforce Alternatives
- Hubspot – Most Full Alternative
- Zoho – Most AI-Friendly Alternative
- Freshworks – Most Streamline Alternative
- Pipedrive – Most Visual-Based Alternative
- ActiveCampaign – Most Automation-Friendly Alternative
- EngageBay – Most Affordable Salesforce Alternative
- Zendesk Sell – Most Customer-Savvy Alternative
- Less Annoying CRM – Most Easy-To-Use Alternative
- Thryv – Most Small Business-Orientated Alternative
- SalesFlare – Most B2B-Orientated Alternative
- Nethunt CRM – Most Unique Alternative
- Microsoft Dynamics – Most Cloud-Based Alternative
- Keap – Most Personal Alternative
- Bitrix24 CRM – Most Organized Alternative
FAQs
- What Is The Best SalesForce Alternative?
- What Is The Cheapest SalesForce Alternative
- Should I Stick With SalesForce, or Use An Alternative?
1. Hubspot – Most Full Alternative
Pricing: starts at $45/month
HubSpot, a CRM platform, helps you align your teams, draw meaningful insights, report growth opportunities, and combine Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, and Service Hub. It also offers hundreds of integrations that can be used to aid in sales, marketing, and other service processes. It is ideal for scaling businesses, both small and large, and all teams (including sales, marketing, customer service, operations, and C-suite span).
| Pros | Cons |
| Ease of use | Can be unreliable |
| Automation | Poor CRM |
| Amazing customer service | Lack of transparency |
| Free trial available | – |
| – | – |
2. Zoho – Most AI-Friendly Alternative
Pricing: starts at $12/month
Zoho CRM includes an AI-powered assistant, lead management tools, and reporting dashboards. These provide insight into the key sales metrics that you care about via mobile or desktop. In addition, Zoho CRM has a feature that lets you video conference and conducts virtual sales meetings.
| Pros | Cons |
| Team collaboration | Glitches |
| AI Assistant | Not recommended for startups |
| Mobile & desktop app access | Poor customer support |
| Full of features | Confusing UI |
| Free trial available | – |
3. Freshworks – Most Streamline Alternative
Pricing: starts at $15/month
Freshworks CRM allows you to manage tasks, pipelines, and quotes. The CRM has collaboration tools that will enable teamwork, marketing, sales alignment, and internal communication. The CRM’s AI-powered features, including lead scoring, activity capture, and email, can streamline and automate tasks.
| Pros | Cons |
| Full of features | Shady business practices |
| Very affordable | Poor customer support |
| Automation | – |
| Free trial available | – |
| – | – |
4. Pipedrive – Most Visual-Based Alternative
Pricing: starts at $12.50/month
Pipedrive CRM makes it easy for you to manage and visualize your sales pipeline. You can organize your deals into pipelines and then tailor those pipelines to fit your sales cycle. You can also collaborate with deal pipeline features like shareable goals and reports.
| Pros | Cons |
| Visual-based | Not recommended for non-startups |
| Very affordable | Limitations |
| Syncing Email | Poor customer support |
| Integrations | Glitchy |
| Aimed at startups | – |
5. ActiveCampaign – Most Automation-Friendly Alternative
Pricing: starts at $9/month
ActiveCampaign, a sales CRM, is ideal for businesses that want to automate tedious tasks like lead prioritization, email marketing, and contact management. The CRM will automatically update your contact data and allow you to view all interactions and conversations with your contacts.
| Pros | Cons |
| Very affordable | Poor customer service |
| Full of features | Lack of customization |
| Automation | Clunky |
| Integration | – |
| – | – |
6. EngageBay – Most Affordable Salesforce Alternative
Pricing: starts at $11.99/month
EngageBay is an excellent sales CRM software with a host of powerful features, including deal pipeline management, multistep automation, appointment scheduler, task management, proposals, and quotes. You also get a 360-degree view of all your customers, including a visual activity timeline. EngageBay is more than just a sales automation software, though: you get an all-in-one marketing, sales, and customer support solution.
| Pros | Cons |
| One of the most affordable | Not enough 3rd-party integrations yet |
| All-in-one marketing, sales, and customer support software | No search marketing |
| Multistep automation | – |
| Customizable sales dashboard | – |
| 360-degree contact view | – |
7. Zendesk Sell – Most Customer-Savvy Alternative
Pricing: starts at $19/month
Zendesk is already well-known for its exceptional customer service software. But, they also offer a sales-focused CRM that can be used to increase productivity and automate sales tasks. Create pipelines tailored to your business and gain visibility into your sales process.
| Pros | Cons |
| Great customer service | UI needs work |
| Easy collaboration | Confusing |
| Full of features | Clunky |
| Customer designed | – |
| – | – |
8. Less Annoying CRM – Most Easy-To-Use Alternative
Pricing: starts at $15/user/month
It’s possible to see the goal of Less Annoying CRM from its name. Small businesses can use it to manage their contacts and track leads. You can view all of your contact information on one dashboard. There you can also add files, events, tasks, and notes.
| Pros | Cons |
| Very affordable | Confusing |
| Easy to use | Can be expensive depending on company |
| Integration | – |
| Clean UI | – |
| – | – |
9. Thryv – Most Small Business-Orientated Alternative
Pricing: available on request
Thryv CRM is ideal for small businesses. It integrates sales automation, marketing automation, and reputation management. You can locate all your contacts centrally with simple-to-use filtering and tagging.
| Pros | Cons |
| Ideal for smaller businesses | Poor customer support |
| Automation | Not user friendly |
| Dedicated Customer Portal | Missing features |
| Clean UI | – |
| – | – |
10. SalesFlare – Most B2B-Orientated Alternative
Pricing: starts at $29/month
Salesflare, a simple-to-use CRM for small businesses that sell B2B products or services, is designed to make it easy. It reminds sales reps of upcoming tasks to ensure prospects don’t slip through the cracks.
The CRM pulls in all the contact information it can, including email signatures, social profiles, emails, past conversations, and adds it to your records. This will allow you to have all the details about your contacts at your fingertips. The CRM can also be connected to your mobile phone and calendar to enable you to log and manage your calls and meetings with customers and leads.
| Pros | Cons |
| Geared at small businesses selling B2B | Lack of integration |
| Information extraction | Confusing |
| Mobile app | – |
| Visual design | – |
| – | – |
11. Nethunt CRM – Most Unique Alternative
Pricing: starts at $29/month
Because NetHunt CRM integrates seamlessly with your Gmail account, it is truly unique. All of your CRM functionality and data is linked to your Google account. This allows you to view and manage customer information, deal possibilities, and email campaigns from your CRM.
It also integrates easily with other Google Workspace apps. NetHunt also includes standard CRM functionality like task and follow-up automation, reporting, analytics, forecasting, and analytics.
| Pros | Cons |
| Gmail integration | Slow |
| Full of features | Complex |
| Follow up automation | Poor price tiers |
| Advanced tracking | – |
| – | – |
12. Microsoft Dynamics – Most Cloud-Based Alternative
Pricing: starts at $65/user/month
Microsoft Dynamics, a CRM/ERP software, includes social insights, cloud-based campaign administration, and business intelligence (BI). It can be delivered via the cloud, hosted, or on-premises.
Microsoft Dynamics offers a range of apps you can integrate with to help manage customer relationships via mobile devices. You can also sync data from other business tools and social media with your CRM. AI-powered, real-time insights allow you to acquire qualified leads and get to know your audience at a deeper level.
| Pros | Cons |
| Cloud based software | Expensive |
| AI-Powered | Complex |
| Full of features | – |
| Advanced features | – |
| – | – |
13. Keap – Most Personal Alternative
Pricing: starts at $79/month
Keap CRM has various tools that allow you to personalize your interactions, schedule appointments, track leads and contacts, manage quotes, and make appointments. You can personalize your outreach, and you can customize and automate follow-up reminders and communications to make sure you reach out when you need.
Every interaction with a contact in the CRM’s Activity stream is automatically updated so that all interactions are current, accurate, centrally located, and up-to-date.
| Pros | Cons |
| Automation | Expensive |
| Customization | Shady business practices |
| Full of features | Clunky |
| Additional marketing tools | – |
| – | – |
14. Bitrix24 CRM – Most Organized Alternative
Pricing: starts at $19/month
Bitrix24 CRM records all interactions with customers, leads, partners, customers, and other people. All of this data can be updated and stored in the tool’s contact database. As a result, you can easily create, share and contact contacts and segment your target audience.
Spread all incoming contact among sales reps to ensure a steady workflow. You can use Activity Stream to make notes, send emails, and place phone calls. Finally, you can choose to host your CRM either on your server or in the cloud.
| Pros | Cons |
| Advanced tracking | Poor customer support |
| Clean UI | Complex |
| Very affordable | Clunky |
| Full of features | Lacking features |
| Free trial available | – |
FAQs
What Is The Best SalesForce Alternative?
Times like this are crazy right now for CRMs. Salesforce is synonymous with customer relationship management, and they still have the largest market share with over 70% of all implementations. That said, there are now some great alternatives to its platform that make it worth taking a gander at what else is available right now.
Hubspot is hands down the most popular alternative to SalesForce out of the 13 choices we listed today. HubSpot has many tools to grow your business, but the one people love their marketing automation platform. Hubspot also uses the tagline “Inbound Marketing,” which seems to be the buzzword right now in technology and startup-land.
The price structure for HubSpot is a bit confusing, but essentially you pay for what you use. This CRM makes top ten lists year after year and has a very loyal user-base that recommends it to anyone looking for a CRM.
The company has successfully combated what many thought would be a fatal blow to CRM companies: The rise of mobility. Salesforce is an all-in-one product, but when you work from a bad location and can’t use it, there’s no work done. HubSpot was made for mobility, and they have apps out almost as soon as most other popular platforms.
What Is The Cheapest SalesForce Alternative?
Hands down, the cheapest alternative you can get right now is ActiveCampaign. Paying only $9 per month, you’ll get a very affordable, feature-rich CRM with automation and integration. Quite a deal, huh?
What makes ActiveCampaign so effective for its price is its Zapier integration. With Zapier, you can connect ActiveCampaign with other applications and automate your workflow without needing to hire a developer or code anything yourself. Instead, you’ll need to use their platform, and you’re good to go!
For example, let’s say that as soon as someone fills out the form on your site, they get added to a new list in ActiveCampaign. Zapier will then automatically add the subscriber to your email marketing automation sequence that you made and set up earlier!
While having ActiveCampaign is already great, it doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t try other alternatives. There are various cheaper options out there, but they’ll still get the job done and give you the results you’re looking after.
The best part is you can do a free trial to see if ActiveCampaign is the right fit for you and your business.
Should I Stick With SalesForce, or Use An Alternative?
Salesforce CRM is a unique CRM system that offers standard-setting services to thousands of businesses. So they have been for years.
Salesforce is also the industry leader in CRM. It accounted for 19.5% worldwide CRM market as of December 2018. It also increased its market share by 18.4% in 2019, far more than any of its competitors. It has continued to push forward and thrive, even amid a global pandemic.
Salesforce is an excellent CRM. It has a clean, modern interface that offers intuitive and easily understandable data blocks on every page. The information you need to access is right there in front of you, as well as tabs for related records and links to other Salesforce pages or applications like the Sales Cloud and Service Cloud.
Salesforce is a powerful product, and it can be intimidating for people who are not appropriately trained. Couple that with the fact that Salesforce is a subscription service, on top of being expensive to purchase outright, and you have an equation that makes many small businesses turn away from it.
Salesforce is also vast, and many SMBs don’t need it. Some people don’t have the funds to purchase a product as powerful as Salesforce and may prefer cheaper options. Some people may have bad experiences with Salesforce and may want to change. No matter your reason, It’s best to thoroughly consider what your needs are out of a CRM before deciding to choose an alternative.
Remember: You don’t have to choose an alternative. The options are there for you. SalesForce is the industry standard for a reason!