CRM costs: A guide for small businesses

A customer relationship management (CRM) system can be free (though with major limitations on what you can do), or cost anything from £10 to several thousand pounds per month.

But whichever provider you choose, the numerous benefits of CRM software – time saved, opportunities seized, profits boosted – make it a great investment for any small business.

Generally, CRM systems can be broken down into three distinct categories – sales, marketing, and customer service – which can be variously priced as ‘per user per month’, or ‘per month’.

However, there are a few other factors that come into play to determine the overall monthly cost of your CRM, including allowances, add-ons, and the size of your team.

In the table below, we’ve rounded up some of the top small business CRM providers on the market, and broken down their many-tiered pricing plans to give you a good approximation of how much you should expect to budget for your CRM every month.

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BEST FREE	EASY TO CUSTOMISE
Freshsales	monday CRM	Pipedrive	Zendesk	Less Annoying CRM	Bigin	Salesforce CRM	Nimble
Best for: Functionality	Best for: Customisation	Best for: Usability	Best for: Help and Support	Best for: Intuitiveness	Best for: Pricing	Best for: Scaling businesses	Best for: Generating new leads
Price per month (billed annually): Free plan, or £7 per user	Price per month (billed annually): £10 per seat	Price per month (billed annually): £14 per user	Price per month (billed annually): £15 per user	Price per month (billed annually): £11.20 per user	Price per month (billed annually): £5 per user	Price per month (billed annually): £20 per user	Price per month (billed annually): £14.20 per user
Free trial? ✓	Free trial? ✓	Free trial? ✓	Free trial? ✓	Free trial? ✓	Free trial? ✓	Free trial? ✓	Free trial? ✓
Verdict: Freshsales’ huge list of features means there’s no end to its capabilities. Great for teams with complicated sales pipelines.	Verdict: monday CRM has excellent customisability to give a personal touch to your CRM needs – we’d recommend it for creative teams in design or marketing.	Verdict: Sophisticated integration tools make Pipedrive an excellent choice for small, tech-reliant businesses with any sized team.	Verdict: Zendesk’s excellent support features – for both users and their customers – make it a great choice for SMEs providing specialist services.	Verdict: Small businesses with fewer than 10 employees will rate Less Annoying CRM highly for its gentle learning curve and easy-to-use interface.	Verdict: One of the most affordable options on the market, Bigin offers budget-conscious SMEs good value for money, with all the essential features covered.	Verdict: Salesforce makes for an excellent CRM system that can develop alongside your expanding business – starting with teams smaller than 10.	Verdict: Nimble’s impressive social networking tools will benefit startups or small businesses at the beginning of their growth plan

What factors will affect the cost of your CRM?

Does it have a free trial or a free plan?

Most top CRM suppliers offer a free trial, ranging from between 14 days to 30 days.

Usually, you’ll be allowed to sample a basic version of the software without having to register a credit card or commit to any form of contract. But you’ll lose access at the end of the trial period unless you choose to sign up.

Some CRM systems are also available for free, or have entirely free plans. However, the limitations on these plans mean they’re not really suitable for anything other than a very small or early-stage business. They’re a good way to get a feel for the product, but we’d recommend upgrading to a more sophisticated, paid plan as soon as possible.

It’s also worth being clear on any initial onboarding or setup costs you may have to consider, which can add a further overhead to your initial CRM implementation.

Monthly or annual billing

The single biggest factor that affects the monthly cost of your CRM plan is whether you choose to pay monthly or annually.

The featured prices for most suppliers equate to the monthly cost of an annual billing, which works out cheaper overall than paying month by month. So, while HubSpot’s Sales Hub Starter plan is listed as £38/month, you’ll actually be paying a total of £454 up front, resulting in a 10% cost saving overall.

Plan limitations

Additionally, the featured monthly cost is usually a base price for a plan with limitations on how many users, contacts, or emails you can have.

For example, when you visit monday.com’s pricing page, you’ll see a range of /seat/month prices. The set prices on the page are for a three person team. monday CRM’s Standard plan is listed as £14/seat/month (when billed annually), meaning you’ll pay £42/month for three seats (£504 up front).

You can then add additional seats in increments of five. So, if you opt for 20 seats on the Standard plan, you’ll pay £280/month for an overall annual cost of £3,360.

Alternatively, on a marketing CRM plan, you’re likely to have limitations on the number of contacts you can have. HubSpot’s Starter marketing plan includes 1,000 contacts, with additional marketing contacts sold in increments of 1,000 from £37.80/month. But the more you add on, the lower the cost – if you add on £5,001+ contacts, you’ll only be charged £29.70/month per 1,000.

CRM cost comparison

The tables below are intended to give you a rough overview of the average costs of CRM providers.

As we said earlier, many providers categorise their CRM products as either sales, marketing, or service, but some just offer all three in one comprehensive package. Likewise, while most offer around three different tiered pricing plans, some offer four or even five.

To complicate the picture further, some suppliers give their prices as per user per month, rather than just per organisation per month.

As such, direct comparison can be tricky. In order to give a more comprehensible picture of average CRM costs, we’ve taken the liberty of simplifying the range of plans offered by some providers. And, if a provider only offers all-in-one CRM – as in the case of Sendinblue – we’ve included the same pricing across all three tables.

Additionally, many of the CRMs offer enterprise plans with tailored pricing. These are generally for large businesses with bespoke needs, so we’ve chosen not to include them. Nor have we covered the costs involved of building your own custom CRM – this isn’t quite as common an approach as using a branded suite from a trusted name.

If you’re unsure what kind of plan would suit your requirements, why not compare costs from a range of top providers using our online service? Just answer some basic questions using the form at the top of this page to get started. 

Sales CRM costs

Sales CRM is designed to help sales teams to manage leads, streamline workflows, and take advantage of every opportunity that comes their way. Sales CRM can also provide granular reporting on all the data you need to monitor your organisation’s ongoing performance.

It can range in price from as little as £15/month to £1,000/month, excluding the cost of additional users, which can be purchased for an additional monthly fee.

All featured prices are for annually billed contracts.

*Doesn’t offer a dedicated Sales CRM package

Marketing CRM costs

Marketing CRM helps you make practical use of the goldmine of information you gather from every customer interaction, to target them with tailored and highly effective marketing campaigns.

Functions include segmentation of your customer base into promising and less promising leads, automated CRM communications across multiple channels, and campaign tracking and reporting.

Marketing CRM is almost always priced per month, so it can be difficult to compare average prices to sales or service CRM. Your plan will usually include a set number of contacts that you can directly market to, as well as a much larger number of ‘non-marketing contacts’ that you can store for free, but not contact. Additional increments of contacts can be added on to your bill.

Again, all featured prices are for annually billed contracts.

Customer service CRM costs

Customer service CRM includes everything you need to keep your customers happy, including complaint resolution, customer support features, dedicated customer accounts, and more.

As you can see, prices are comparable to sales CRM. Plans usually start with a set number of users, which you can increase for an additional monthly cost.

CRM supplier costs

Below, we take a deep dive into the costs of CRM plans from leading suppliers, and detail some of the pricing strategies they use for their various add-ons and extensions.

HubSpot

On the face of it, HubSpot appears to be on the more expensive end of the spectrum of CRM providers. But look a little closer, and you’ll see that all its prices are listed as per month, rather than per user per month. They’re actually pretty average.

Both the Sales and Service Hubs have three plans, with a limit of two, five, and 10 users respectively. Additional users start from £21/month each on the starter plan, and increase to £98/month on the Enterprise plan. There’s also a one off onboarding fee for the Professional (£205) and Enterprise (£2,460) plans.

Likewise, the three Marketing Hub plans start from 1,000, 2,000, and 10,000 contacts as standard, but additional contacts can be purchased in increments of 1,000 from £37.80/month.

monday CRM

monday CRM is an all-in-one sales CRM platform with four distinct pricing plans. Because it is built on top of the monday.com Work OS, it is a fully functional CRM that also benefits from all the robustness and intuitiveness of the monday’s other impressive business tools.

Each plan has a set per ‘seat’ per month price, which remains the same regardless of how many seats you add. Team sizes start from three seats, and then increase from five in increments of five. This all makes it very transparent and easy to budget for as you scale.

For example, on the Pro plan (£24/seat/month), you’d pay £720/month (£8,640 up front for the year) for a team of 30.

Salesforce

Founded in 1999, Salesforce is one of the most established providers in the CRM space. As such, it can justify putting a pretty hefty price on its plans across the board.

But you get what you pay for, and with Salesforce, that’s a range of the most comprehensive CRM packages you could hope to find – backed up by more than 20 years of experience in building and deploying CRM systems for small businesses.

Owing to its tenure in the CRM game, Salesforce actually has a huge range of plans to suit businesses of all needs and sizes – far too many to feature here. We’ve chosen to focus specifically on its specific small business offering.

Across its Sales and Service CRM packages, Salesforce’s plans are priced per user per month, and double in price from Professional (£60/user/month) to Enterprise (£120/user/month) to Unlimited (£240/user/month).

Freshsales

Founded in 2010, Freshsales offers a decent range of competitively priced sales, marketing, and service CRM packages, with add-ons – such as workflows (£10/month) and email contacts (starting from £15/month) – also available.

We like the no frills nature of these tiered plans. And, with plans ranging from just £25-£79/user/month for the Sales Cloud, £15-£79/month for the Marketing Cloud, and £25-£99/user/month for the Service Cloud, scaling up isn’t going to cost the Earth.

Insightly

Insightly’s offering differs from the others in that it only offers a dedicated CRM solution and a separate marketing package. There’s no specific sales or service package.

Insightly’s marketing plans come with a very generous 10,000 contacts included as standard. Its three CRM plans, on the other hand, start from a pretty average £22/user/month.

If you’re looking for an integrated CRM and marketing package, you can contact Insightly’s sales team to discuss bundles.

Insightly also has two additional ‘Marketing Support and Service Plans’ – Premium (£1,139.92/year minimum) and Ultimate (£2,279.84/year minimum) – which give you access to advanced help features, such as a customer success manager, webinars, email and phone support, and Insightly’s onboarding program.

Sendinblue

Sendinblue offers simplistic, all-in-one CRM solutions for very reasonable prices.

The Lite plan starts from £14.64/month with 10,000 emails. You can add up to 100,000 emails a month for an overall monthly cost of £53.19/month. The Premium package starts at 37.47/month and comes with 20,000 emails, and you can increase your allowance to a maximum of 1 million emails for £381.72/month. For anything more than that, you’ll need to contact sales for a quote.

It’s also worth mentioning that Sendinblue’s free plan is generous enough to allow you to get a good feel for the product, and whether it’s a good fit for your business. You get 300 emails per day and unlimited contacts, as well as a range of free marketing tools.

Zoho

Starting from just £10/user/month for its fully integrated CRM solution, and maxing out at £40/user/month, Zoho’s prices are certainly very appealing.

But Zoho is no upstart trying to win custom with low prices. It’s one of the first names in CRM, with a host of industry awards under its belt, and customers in 180 countries around the world.

Zoho also has a very basic CRM package, Bigin CRM, which starts from just £5/month.

Next steps

We’d advise you not to get too bogged down in the intricacies of CRM pricing plans.

While monthly prices can become astronomically expensive as you increase the number of users/contacts/emails etc., most providers offer pretty competitively priced plans. The most important thing is to choose a provider and a plan that includes everything your team needs to succeed.

After all, the average monthly cost of a CRM system for small business more than pays for itself – see our guide on CRM statistics to get a sense of the return on investment.

And remember, allowances are easily scalable, so you never need to pay for more than you need. It’s probably best to start at the lower end and increase as and when you need to.

If you need help choosing the right provider for your small business, we can help you. Just click the link at the top of this page to answer some basic questions, and we can direct you towards the plans and providers that match your requirements.