The best CRM software in 2026

Using great software is the first step toward great results. This is true for any app category, and more so for your CRM (customer relationship management) software. As the backbone of your sales, having a robust CRM platform tailored to your processes and clients helps improve results in the long run. But out of so many options out there, which CRM is the best for your business?

I considered a grand total of 150 CRMs, from basic solutions to enterprise-ready suites. The 11 you'll find below can fit any business at any stage, whether you're just starting or growing fast. They offer a wide range of features covering everything the best CRMs should do, adding specialized tools and interfaces to optimize parts of your sales and business processes.

I know it's tough to switch systems or adopt a new one, so I'm hoping this selection can help you zero in on the best CRM without too much work. And when you finally switch, you'll start seeing promising results.

The best CRM software

1. Salesforce Sales Cloud for extensibility

2. HubSpot for versatility

3. Zoho CRM for all-in-one value

4. Pipedrive for ease of use

5. Ontraport for automating online transactions

6. Nimble for prospecting

7. Nutshell for managing a sales team

8. Attio for startups

9. Salesmate for customizability

10. Close for faster prospecting and outreach

11. Copper for Google Workspace users

What makes the best CRM platform?

Customer relationship management software is simple at heart. It keeps track of contact information, the deals you're building for them, and the relationship activity as you do so. Then, on top of these basic features, each CRM offers different productivity shortcuts to help you and your team. That means telephone integration, email marketing, and customer service, just to name a few from a long list of possibilities. All these tied together with helpful reports and time-saving automation.

What does this mean when talking about the best CRM programs for all businesses? I prioritized apps that offer all the contact, deal, and activity tracking as a baseline. Then, I selected those that have a good implementation of the extra features I mentioned, offering a user experience that supports the processes you already have in place.

This means you won't find niche CRM platforms on this list: the ones that do one thing extremely well but are light in other departments. At the same time, I don't have a cap on subscription price, as more expensive platforms can sometimes give you a much more powerful set of tools—after all, ROI isn't about how much you spend; it's about how much you can gain from your initial investment.

With that in mind, here's what I looked for in the best CRM software:

• Ease of use. These CRM applications make complex operations and tasks easier to manage. Bonus points for thorough onboarding tutorials, multimedia knowledge bases, and fantastic support teams.

• Contact and sales management. Tracking contacts, activities, and deals in a visual pipeline is a must.

• Customization. Your CRM adapts to you, not the other way around. The way you do business is unique, so these apps must be flexible enough.

• Reporting. If you can't measure it, you can't manage it. And if you can't manage it, how can you grow? High-quality reports are essential to show you how your decisions impact the results.

• Automation and integrations. More work doesn't always mean better outcomes, so automating workflows and integrating your CRM with your other apps frees up time to dedicate yourself to critical decisions.

Over the course of a few weeks of research and testing, I narrowed in on several dozen viable CRMs from the 150-strong list. As I signed up for each, I managed a fictional marketing agency: I added my contacts, scheduled activities, and tested the extra features to understand how they improved the experience. Here are the best CRM platforms based on all that testing and research.

The best CRM software at a glance

1. Best CRM for extensibility

Salesforce Sales Cloud (Web, iOS, Android)

Salesforce pros:

• Wide range of ambient AI features available in its Einstein Platform and agentic via Agentforce

• Heavily focused on rounding up customer data for increased clarity

Salesforce cons:

• It can be hard to migrate out of Salesforce if you ever want to

It's hard to place Salesforce anywhere other than the first spot on this list. After all, it holds a massive part of the CRM market. Hundreds of thousands of companies big and small rely on this software to run all their sales operations. The best part about it is how much you can build upon the base features with add-ons and custom-built extensions. This flexibility is great if you're scaling fast or feel your current software isn't keeping up.

The Starter Suite offers the basic CRM features with useful twists. You can upload your tried-and-tested email templates onto the platform and set up nurture sequences to warm up relationships. When you set up the marketing and customer service features, you can track signals as your leads interact with your pages and sales reps. This is great for segmenting your audience, enabling higher personalization or tailored deal-building.

Salesforce has many enterprise-grade users, so it's natural that the product is built to solve bigger problems. This shows when configuring some settings that can save a lot of time and trouble later, even if you're a smaller business. One example is setting up labels for each data field to guide newer sales reps through their deals. For example, if you have a discounts field, you can add a label saying they can only give up to 20% discounts. Anything higher than that has to be run via management.

As you grow with Salesforce, you'll see how you can upgrade from the CRM experience to using it as a business platform. The Data Cloud acts as digital infrastructure, so you can host your sales data with everything else that matters to your business. With your data in one place, you can use Tableau to generate detailed reports, Agentforce to use that data to automate workflows with AI, and activate other products that handle areas like service, B2B commerce, or app-building.

If you want to do even more with the CRM, connect Salesforce to Zapier and start customizing and automating right away, so Salesforce can become your source of truth across your entire tech stack. Kick off automated workflows based on triggers in other apps, or access Salesforce directly from your AI assistant. Learn more about automating Salesforce.

Salesforce AI features: 

• Einstein AI for sales: lead and opportunity scoring, forecasting, activity capture, email generation, call transcription and analysis, deal insights, and pipeline monitoring

• Einstein Copilot: AI side tab offering a chat experience with suggestions, action plans, and task automation; fully configurable with prompt, skills, and model builder

• Einstein Trust Layer: privacy, security, trust, and observability features

• Agentforce: AI agent builder, grounded on your data and capable of taking action across internal and external systems

• MCP server: integrates the Salesforce platform with AI chatbots

Salesforce price: From $25/user/month

2. Best CRM for versatility

HubSpot (Web, iOS, Android)

HubSpot pros:

• Intuitive user experience

• 2-way data sync with other apps available

HubSpot cons:

• Steep pricing in enterprise-level plans

HubSpot is versatile on two fronts. It has a collection of Hubs spanning sales, marketing, customer support, content management, operations, and commerce. And it also has a mix of pricing plans and bundles to fit every kind of budget—or even no budget at all.

HubSpot used to have one of the most generous free plans around, offering unlimited CRM contacts and asking nothing in return. This has changed: the free contact cap is now 1,000, with a 1 million limit for data that you create in the platform (such as deals, activities, and so on). The usefulness of the free plan is now in the breadth of features that it offers out of the gate, giving you a versatile toolkit for scoring quick wins and getting the first few thousand in the bank.

Then, when you're growing, you'll have to brew your favorite hot drink and sit down in front of the pricing page—it's a bit overwhelming. HubSpot offers a range of pre-made bundles based on what you need most. If you prefer to tailor it to your needs, you can upgrade or downgrade any Hub's features, meaning you can combine an Enterprise Sales Hub with a Starter Operations Hub, for example. Be sure to also toggle between "For businesses & enterprises" and "For individuals & small teams" at the top of the page to see different offers based on your current stage.

The platform itself is a breeze to use and easy to navigate, which is surprising considering the mountain of tools you have at your disposal. You can quickly move from posting to your company blog to tracking support tickets, accessing useful reporting dashboards along the way. 

Want AI in the mix? Breeze Copilot goes beyond the chat experience: it can run actions on your CRM, creating and updating records, generating emails and messages, and performing native contact enrichment. Always ready to go as a side tab chatbot, you can use AI to interact and manage your CRM.

With a thorough knowledge base and one of the best educational blogs in the industry, HubSpot hits all the requirements here with flying colors. The cherry on top is its Zapier integration, so you can automate everything—automatically or straight from your AI chat window—and have it run without a fuss. Learn more about Zapier's HubSpot integration.

HubSpot AI features:

• AI content creation, editing, and remixing: generates blog posts, landing pages, emails, and social posts across the platform, with inline editing commands for rephrasing, expanding, or adjusting tone, and SEO/AEO-optimized drafts via Semrush data

• Breeze Agents (content, prospecting, and customer service): autonomous agents that run multi-step workflows, creating full content campaigns, monitoring buying signals and automating outreach, and resolving support tickets end-to-end across chat and email

• Breeze Intelligence (data enrichment, buyer intent, and form autofill): enriches contact and company records; buyer intent scoring surfaces companies showing purchase signals; Form Autofill pre-populates lead capture fields using enrichment data

• AI reporting assistant: generates charts and CRM reports from plain-English queries; Smart Deal Progression synthesizes call transcripts and deal history to surface next steps and draft follow-up emails

HubSpot price: Free plan available for up to 2 users; paid plans from $20/user/month.

3. Best CRM for all-in-one value

Zoho CRM (Web, iOS, Android)

Zoho CRM pros:

• Strong range of AI features

• Enterprise-ready

Zoho CRM cons:

• Some screens are very cluttered

• A bit buggy

Doing more with less is always a compelling point, but that usually means you have to take a hit on power to save some money. Zoho CRM doesn't compromise: it's one of the most powerful sales platforms out there, with economical pricing across all tiers, making it easy to unlock advanced features without astronomic costs. 

It handles the entire breadth of sales work, from tracking your leads and deals, keeping in touch via multiple channels, automating repetitive work, and extracting insights with reports. For what it doesn't handle natively, you can take a look at the rest of the Zoho software suite, including project management, app building, and document management. The integrations are seamless for most products in the suite, with pricing plans always on the budget side.

The resident AI engine, Zia, is one of the best implementations of the technology in the sales space. It looks through your contacts to clean them, identifies the ones more likely to become customers, and detects anomalies in the sales process, flagging unusual drops in closed deals. It can suggest new products and services to offer to your customers and predict how likely they are to do business with you again. It even figures out when your prospects are more likely to pick up the phone, so you can hop on a call at the right time. And if you're overwhelmed, it suggests workflows and macros to keep work moving without the pain.

Zia also offers an AI agent builder platform, where you can start from templates to automate work or set up a new agent from scratch. Set up your instructions, test them on your workspace, and they deploy them when you're ready. It's free to access and you only pay for usage: you can pick from a range of LLMs hosted in the Zoho platform, including a proprietary option and a range of Qwen models, or bring your own key from popular providers. One note: in my testing, there were still some bugs to work out with the agents—it's not as smooth an experience as it is on other platforms.

Zoho CRM also integrates with Zapier, connecting it to thousands of other apps to maximize your team's time. Access your CRM data and take action on it straight from your AI assistant, or let automated workflows take care of everything in the background. Here are a few ways to automate Zoho CRM.

Zoho CRM AI features:

• Data: enrichment using email data, automatic classification of uploaded files to CRM records using OCR

• Predictive analytics: conversion likelihood for leads and deals, churn, next best action, best time to contact, historical-based forecasting, custom predictive model builder

• Email: sentiment and intent analysis, summarization, activity extraction, competitor mention alerts

• Automation: workflow, macro, and record assignment suggestions

• Insights and analytics: data anomaly detection, real-time data change alerts, sales strategy analysis

• AI agents: deploy pre-built agents that execute multi-step tasks across Zoho products without human intervention; build custom ones in the no-code Zia Agent Studio

Zoho CRM price: Free plan available for 3 users; paid plans from $20/user/month.

4. Best CRM for ease of use

Pipedrive (Web, iOS, Android)

Pipedrive pros:

• Easy workflow automation

• Plenty of educational content

Pipedrive cons:

• Can become expensive quickly

When an app is hard to use, a deadly brain fog settles in and kills your productivity—and your mood. Pipedrive does the opposite: designed by salespeople, it offers a smooth user experience that helps you consistently hit it out of the park.

How does this translate into practice? The main menu on the left has icons that direct you to every part of the app. Some main screens offer a sub-menu with icons and text labels, providing clear direction on where each setting or action button lives. Overall, none of the pages feels cluttered—there's never the "this is too much" feeling.

The sales pipeline is another example of this principle. Each deal card has a dynamic icon that changes based on the deal's status. At a glance, you can tell if it doesn't have activities scheduled or if they're overdue. The colors in the interface pop out with good contrast, helping your brain quickly assess if you should start problem-solving or if everything's flowing.

Easy mode doesn't end with a well-designed interface. Pipedrive adds a range of tweaks to the sales experience. When you hop off a phone call, you get a quick list to help you note the outcome. The call is recorded, added to the contact's page along with your note, and you can move on to the next one with a single click (you can start calls straight from your deal pipeline).

If you're worried you're putting a lot of pressure on a lead, you can take a look at the contact timeline to help space out each touchpoint. And if one of your teammates already added that new contact from the trade show, the app will stop you from adding a duplicate.

Beyond sales, Pipedrive has a range of add-ons when you're ready to expand. These add prospecting, chatbots, website traffic analysis, email marketing, documents, and project management to the mix. In terms of AI, they've grown from modest notifications-based suggestions to a broader feature set covering the basics of what a future-facing CRM should have—take a look at the list below for a full breakdown.

If you're looking for increased automation power, Pipedrive's Zapier integrations let you add new people as email subscribers, add new deals to a spreadsheet, and send emails when new deals are added to a stage—or you can access and act on Pipedrive data directly from your AI assistant. Learn more about how to automate Pipedrive.

Pipedrive AI features:

• Email tools: AI-generated emails from a prompt, thread summarization with sentiment and readiness-to-buy score, and context-aware suggested replies; agentic features in beta can also prioritize incoming messages

• AI Sales Assistant (beta): chat about deals, contacts, and activities

• AI-nowered Notifications: analyzes pipeline patterns to surface high-potential deals, recommend next actions, and flag performance insights

• Pulse prospecting toolkit: data enrichment for missing contact/company fields, custom lead scoring based on ICP criteria, automated outreach sequences, and a real-time feed of overlooked deals and prospect signals

• AI report generator: creates Insights reports from a natural language prompt, with filters and visualizations auto-selected

• AI marketplace tools: natural language search for third-party integrations, plus personalized app recommendations based on your tools and similar companies' usage

• AI chatbot (LeadBooster add-on): engages website visitors, collects lead data, and routes deals to reps with live chat handoff

Pipedrive pricing: From $24/user/month; add-ons priced separately

5. Best CRM for automating online transactions

Ontraport (Web, iOS, Android)

Ontraport pros:

• High-quality support team

• Adapts to multiple use cases and industries

Ontraport cons:

• Steep pricing scaling based on users, contacts, and add-ons

If you sell online, the path to higher conversion is paved with funnels and automation. Ontraport has a smart way of handling all the assets and pages needed to set up everything you need to slowly build a business that runs on autopilot—or as close as it gets.

Ideally, you want to set up methods to grab new leads from all your channels: traffic from your website, people who hit up your social media profiles, newsletter subscribers, and more. These people need to travel through your content, learning more about the problems you solve and how your products and services are ideally positioned to do that. Depending on what you sell, that could lead to conversions on your payment page straight away or a scheduled call with a prospect who's ready to buy.

Ontraport helps you build the infrastructure for these journeys using Systems. When you click that tab, you'll add all your sales assets and string them together in sequences. There are a number of templates to start with, like recapturing abandoned carts or setting up a lead magnet. And there's an element of modularity here that's super useful: you can add pages with your copy, input fields, and custom rules. As leads get added to your CRM, you can keep track of their progress and contact them at any point during their journey.

Automate to your heart's content, or add personalization by routing a few of these flows to your sales reps. As they exchange emails with prospects, they can easily attach case studies or other files to email threads, great for adding more context about the topics of the conversation.

When compared with others, Ontraport captures more specific data about your leads: it keeps track of campaign engagement history, actions taken, purchases, and memberships, to name a few. These stats are also available from each of your automations, so you can track performance—useful to add or remove steps from your systems as you optimize.

Ontraport integrates with payment and eCommerce platforms natively, and you can get more out of the software with Ontraport's Zapier integrations, so you can connect it to the rest of your tech stack and work directly from your favorite AI assistant. Learn more about how to automate Ontraport.

Ontraport AI features:

• Workflow automation (AI Assistant): segments contacts, drafts personalized emails, moderates comments, routes messages by content, analyzes call transcripts, and generates content, all triggered automatically; supports merge fields to insert contact record data directly into AI prompts

• Model and prompt controls: choose from multiple GPT models; configure system role, task prompt, temperature, Top P, credit limits, and where output is stored (a CRM custom field, AI Logs, or both).

• Conversation memory (AI Logs): stores all prompts and responses for three months; prior context can be included in subsequent automation steps, enabling multi-turn content workflows.

• MCP server: connects external AI clients (Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor) to Ontraport data in real time

Ontraport price: From $99/month for 1 user; additional users at $19/user/month (for Plus plan; other plans have different pricing per extra user)

6. Best CRM for prospecting

Nimble (Web, iOS, Android)

Nimble pros:

• Plenty of controls for viewing and interacting with data

• Strong enrichment features

Nimble cons:

• User interface can be slow from time to time

The internet is a deep, sprawling mine of opportunities. In the quest for gold, having a tool that helps you find your mineral veins easily is the difference between a clunky ancient dwarven epic and a high-tech planet mining operation.

Fantasy aside, Nimble is great for prospecting because its browser extensions help you fill your CRM with new prospects and their data. You can have an entire field day on social media finding new leads and registering the actions you're taking as you go.

Looking at a company page on the web? Open the extension, and get an enriched view, with data such as employee headcount, date founded, and revenue. This can save you searching the web for this data, so you can quickly understand if they're a good target or not. Now that you're not wasting time on bad fits, you can invest in chasing the prospects that are more likely to want to connect with you. All this without having to tab into the Nimble web app interface at any time.

When you finally come back to the app, hit the Contacts tab. All your leads are here. You can filter the list with a range of handy options on the left side—recently added, marked important, or recently contacted, among others—or you can further segment the list to get a more manageable group or assign it to a specialized team.

In addition to the sales pipeline, Nimble offers workflows. This is a way to visualize relationship progress with your contacts, which is useful if you do more than sales. There are templates for fundraising, job applicants, and orders, each with unique fields and stages. You can also create a new one from scratch and funnel your contacts into each of these as needed.

Nimble's Zapier integrations let you automatically turn new email subscribers into Nimble contacts, send new contacts wherever you need them, and anything else you need to do in the apps you use most. Kick off workflows automatically based on triggers or directly from your AI assistant.

Nimble AI features:

• Prospecting and data enrichment: uses AI to surface additional contact details directly within the CRM, reducing manual research on new leads

• Business card scanning: AI-powered OCR reads and parses business cards to create or update contact records automatically

• Email writing and outreach sequences: AI assists with drafting outreach emails and optimizing sequence timing; the AI email marketing add-on extends this to full campaign creation with AI-generated copy, dedicated list management, and segmentation

• Lead scoring and follow-up prioritization: AI surfaces which leads to act on first based on engagement signals and activity history

• AI chat helper: introduced with the web chat feature, this handles website visitor conversations when staff are unavailable and generates session summaries that attach automatically to the contact record

Nimble price: From $29.90/user/month

7. Best CRM for sales management

Nutshell (Web, iOS, Android)

Nutshell pros:

• Unlimited contacts

• Very intuitive

Nutshell cons:

• Occasional minor user interface glitches

In larger sales teams, smart management maximizes efficiency. It helps people focus on the tasks they need to do, leverage their specializations, and collaborate with others. Nutshell has three tools that help you achieve this.

The first one is territory-based management. For example, if you want a group to handle every lead within a 25-mile radius of New York, you can set these rules to automatically assign leads. You can go as micro or macro as you need with postal code, state, and country selectors. If your leads usually have similar needs based on location, getting specialized reps or teams to handle them will make it easier to address their needs or objections.

Next, you have a deep report screen with the stock reports in place for main pipeline metrics, as well as reporting by territory, team member, or source. Take a look into the future with forecasts, so you can see how present performance may influence what's in store and direct your team to that vision accordingly. With this information at hand, you can tailor your teams to the objectives you've set.

Lastly, as a manager, you can turn on or off notifications about nearly anything. Choose whether to get them only in the app so they only poke you while you're at your desk, or also via email if you're working in the field. This helps you step in whenever anything important happens, so you can steer a deal, coach a teammate, or weigh in on a decision.

Apart from this, Nutshell has all the features of a top-tier CRM, so it's not a one-trick pony in sales management. It grabs the social media profile links of your contacts. It offers drip email campaigns to naturally raise interest in your products and services. It can also connect to your website to follow your prospects as they browse, so you know how aware they are as they move through your funnels.

The platform doubles down on one of AI's major powers: summarization. It'll do this for people, companies, and leads timelines, helping you get an overview of all activities in a paragraph. Your Zoom calls will also be transcribed, saved, and summarized here, turning hours of sales action into short snippets. And, unique on this list, a voice-to-text notetaker to save you from typing.

Boost your business capabilities with Nutshell's Zapier integrations. You can do things like automatically creating contacts from new Nutshell leads and adding people to Nutshell from new form submissions—or kick off work in Nutshell directly from your AI chat window.

Nutshell AI features:

• Transcription and voice capture: Notetaker agents transcribe and summarize calls and meetings across nine platforms, logging results to the relevant CRM record; a voice-to-text tool captures spoken notes inside timeline notes, activity dialogs, and the email composer

• Lead and contact intelligence: Timeline Summaries condense a contact's full interaction history into an overview of topics and lead progression; Lead Recaps and AI Lead Summaries deliver on-demand status views, answer direct questions about a lead's history, and surface suggested next steps

• Email and campaign writing: Email Reply Starters draft personalized replies without leaving the conversation thread; a one-click campaign builder turns a webpage URL and brief description into a complete email broadcast.

• Reporting and digests: Smart Reports answer plain-English queries against CRM data; email digests send automated summaries of team activity and key metrics on a daily or weekly schedule.

• AI sales chatbot: answers website visitor questions 24/7 using a custom knowledge base, captures leads into Nutshell, and books meetings via the scheduler

• AI agents and data enrichment: four sidebar agents handle pipeline design, email sequences, objection coaching, and lead research; the Nutshell IQ suite covers contact discovery, company enrichment, visitor identification, and competitive analytics; an MCP server integration connects ChatGPT and other external AI tools directly to Nutshell account data

Nutshell price: From $19/user/month for unlimited contacts and storage

8. Best CRM for startups

Attio (Web, macOS, iOS, Android)

Attio pros:

• AI-native CRM

• Flexible data model

Attio cons:

• AI and automation consume the same monthly credit pool; you'll have to buy a credit package if you're using both heavily

When you're building your own startup from scratch, you don't really have time to babysit your tools. You need them to be fast and effective at delivering results. This is why Attio is the best for startups: it delivers an AI-native CRM experience that automates a good chunk of sales work.

Other CRMs can take up to eight weeks until your team can hit peak productivity with it. Attio doesn't fully eliminate the setup arc, but collapses it into a span of one to two weeks: start by customizing the data model to your needs, build your core AI workflows to automate tasks, and iterate from there as your sales strategy evolves.

Manual data entry usually adds a lot of drag and easily gets classed as skippable low-value work. Attio automates a big part of it, enriching contacts and companies you add to your workspace. You can set up AI autofill fields, adding a new column to any object, useful for summarizing information, reasoning on buying signals, or pulling in web data. This way, you can have useful signals to qualify leads and act on deals, without having to sit in front of your CRM logging activities at the end of the day.

The flexible data model is another big win for startups: you don't have to follow the classic contact > company > deal flow to the letter. Instead, you can define object types for the relationships that matter to you. Add investors, partnerships, and hiring pipelines, customizing which fields matter for each of these objects, whether they're static data or AI-generated. This is all no-code in the Attio interface, so you don't have to divert an engineer's attention to get it done.

Speaking of engineer attention (and keeping it where it should be), connect Attio to Zapier to automate actions across all the apps you use for growing, no code required. Create automated workflows that trigger across your tech stack, or take action directly from your AI chat.

Attio AI features:

• AI attributes: custom fields for any object that autofill based on AI instructions, such as summarizing a deal

• Automatic data enrichment: enriches contact and company records when added to your workspace

• Call intelligence: records, transcribes, and analyzes video calls, summarizing the interaction, tracking buying signals, and automating follow-up tasks

• AI workflow steps: AI logic steps available in the workflow automation tool, so you can automatically qualify leads, act on product usage data, or monitor churn

• Ask Attio: natural language interface to interact with your workspace for asking questions, updating information, or creating new records

• MCP server: connects with external AI chatbots, so you can interact with your CRM from ChatGPT or Claude

Attio price: Free plan for up to 3 seats. Plus plan at $36/user/month (monthly billing).

9. Best CRM for customizability

Salesmate (Web, iOS, Android)

Salesmate pros:

• Wide range of features

• Intuitive user interface

Salesmate cons:

• Building new modules comes with a learning curve

When you have a unique way of doing sales or if you operate in a niche, your tools have to keep up. Salesmate offers plenty of customization, so you can shape it in the way that's most powerful for you.

Everything on the interface is drag and drop. You can move things around as you wish, putting the important information at the top and the extras out of view. You can save layouts for your deals, contacts, companies, and activities screens, so if something doesn't work out, you can always roll back to the earlier good version.

You can also move things around in the forms you use to add information to your CRM, adding or removing fields as needed. This is possible even on a role basis, so managers can have extra input fields while junior employees handle less, for example.

Deep customization continues through custom modules inside Salesmate, which help you manage other data types beyond contacts or deals. When creating a new module, set the data type and fields you want to keep track of. This lets you manage your projects inside Salesmate, too, since you can add all your project details—name, due date, assignees, and so on—and see them inside the app.

Salesmate is more like a no-code CRM builder than your traditional fixed sales software. On top of that customizability, it offers telephone, texts, email marketing, live chat for multiple channels, and plenty of workflow automation opportunities for all of these. If tinkering is a synonym for winning at your company, definitely pick up Salesmate.

If you've got a tech team in house, they can grab the API endpoint for this module and build custom integrations with your other apps. If you don't, you can connect Salesmate to Zapier and do it anyway, no tech skills required. Work with Salesmate directly from your AI assistant, or trigger workflows automatically across your tech stack.

Salesmate AI features:

• Call transcription and conversation intelligence: real-time transcription with AI-generated summaries, sentiment analysis, talk-to-listen ratio, keyword tracking, and trackers that flag signals like urgency or dissatisfaction; coaching insights and action items are generated per call

• Sandy AI assistant: drafts and replies to emails in your tone, creates and updates CRM records, adds notes, schedules meetings, and summarizes email threads, chats, and support tickets on demand.

• AI agents via Skara: Autopilot handles routine queries, qualifies leads, books meetings, and routes hot leads autonomously across web chat, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook; Copilot assists human reps with real-time reply suggestions and can flag complex situations for team input

• Lead scoring and predictive analytics: automatically scores leads based on engagement, behavior, and demographics to trigger follow-up sequences; predictive analytics surfaces pipeline trends and flags workflow drop-offs

• Workflow AI (Smart Flows + OpenAI): Adds AI steps to automated workflows for summarization, sentiment analysis, translation, and data entry

Salesmate price: From $29/user/month. AI agent features via separate platform Skara, from $99/month.

10. Best CRM system for faster lead prospecting and outreach

Close (Web, iOS, Android, Windows, Mac)

Close pros:

• Plenty of native integrations

• Good range of workflow automation options

Close cons:

• Reports aren't very customizable

When you're handling dozens or even hundreds of leads, you may lose track of the next best action you should take. Close helps you keep your eye on the ball, so you always know what to do.

When you look to the left side of the main menu, you'll find Smart Views. This divides your leads based on status. It helps you see:

• Which leads you need to contact

• Those you haven't called or emailed yet

• Leads that opened one of your emails

• Leads with no touchpoints in more than 30 days

• Follow-up opportunities

Why is this useful? Whenever you come back from lunch break, a meeting, or an in-person event, you can take a look at these lists and quickly see which lead you should contact next. At the same time, if you see a list that's getting too long, you can process the contacts there to keep the relationships active.

Close handles telephone natively through a Twilio partnership, so you get new numbers and manage your billing within the app. You can quickly scale up or down your call center as needed. The Power Dialer helps you ring your prospects automatically at the best possible moments during the day—just be sure to record the greeting message in case someone from your team can't hop on the call; otherwise your lead will just hear the confusing sound of silence.

As you're in each call, you can take notes that'll be automatically connected to the contact's record. Once it wraps up, you'll have a recording attached too. If you have new reps on the team, you can sit in on each call and coach them through talking to their leads so they get up to speed quickly. And if your target audience doesn't like to pick up the phone, you can use the texting features instead.

Close implemented generative AI well and across all CRM workflows that benefit from it—full list below. No predictive features yet, but seeing this set, I bet that's where they're moving next.

You can accomplish even more with Close when you connect it to the rest of your tech stack with Zapier. Do things like adding new leads to Close, posting Slack messages for new Close leads, or anything else you need to do in the apps you use most—automatically or straight from your AI chat window. Learn more about how to automate Close.

Close AI features:

• Chloe (AI sales agent): makes outbound calls, qualifies leads, books meetings, and auto-updates CRM records (available on all plans in the U.S. and Canada only)

• Call transcription and summaries: notetaker transcribes and summarizes every call automatically; the AI Call Assistant add-on adds speaker labeling, 20-language support, and org-wide search

• Lead intelligence: AI Lead Summaries compile calls, emails, and meetings into a single lead overview

• AI email writing: Rewrites email text to adjust tone, length, and complexity; drafts follow-up emails after calls

• AI enrich: populates CRM fields from public web sources automatically

Close price: From $49/user/month (or $19/month for solo users)

11. Best CRM for Google Workspace users

Copper (Web, iOS, Android, Google Workspace integration)

Copper pros:

• Full CRM feature set integrated with Google Workspace

• Great setup, help content, and user experience

Copper cons:

• No integration at all with the Microsoft ecosystem

You know what Google Workspace is missing? Yes, a CRM. Google knows it and considered buying HubSpot, but that ultimately fell through. Because of this, there's a whole range of software that seamlessly integrates with your workspace, with Copper being the frontrunner in the best-for-all-businesses class.

A Google Partner, the app integrates with your inbox as a side-tab in Gmail, Drive, and Calendar to offer contextual help wherever you need it. When you connect your account for the first time, it pulls all your existing conversations, adding people as contacts straight away. I was surprised to see my email threads already on the feed after initial setup.

For thoroughness, it also imports contacts you might have saved in Google Contacts. Whenever you're exchanging emails with a lead, you can hit the Related tab on the side to reveal connected Docs, Slides, or Sheets so you can quickly attach them. And you can export Copper activity to Google Sheets and Looker Studio to extract those deeper insights.

Even though the intention is to reduce tab switching, the experience extends beyond the inbox, with a web dashboard to help you interact with the CRM in depth. When you're not reading and slinging emails, you can come here to take a look at your pipeline, catch up on tasks, and take a look at the feed as you move through your workday.

Copper's AI rollout has useful tools that are mostly strategic and insights-based, such as scoring, predictive sales, and sentiment analysis. There isn't generative AI, but Google is pushing Gemini into Workspace anyway, so it'd feel weird having two chatbots in your Gmail inbox fighting to write your emails—though potentially cool to see how they'd square up.

All in all, Copper feels like it was tuned to extend Google Workspace with the CRM feature set, not a clunky bolted-on piece of software. If you want to keep expanding it, connect Copper to Zapier so it can seamlessly talk to and act with the rest of your stack, automatically, or directly from your favorite AI assistant. Learn how to automate Copper.

Copper AI features:

• AI email drafting and rewriting: Copper Magic generates templates for eight outreach scenarios with auto-populated merge fields; a separate AI email rewriter polishes tone or fixes grammar on any email

• Copper GPT: A read-only ChatGPT integration for querying CRM data in plain language ("Which deals stalled last month?")

• Pipeline health flags: AI flags stalled or inactive deals directly on the pipeline board for quick triage

• Contact intelligence: suggests contacts found in Gmail and Google Calendar that aren't yet in the CRM, and auto-enriches new records with phone, email, and social profiles

Copper price: Plans start at $29/user/month

What is the best customer relationship management platform?

This category of apps—CRMs—has the highest number of options out of all other categories I've tested. I can understand your pain when choosing the perfect one, with such a long, long list of viable options.

I hope this selection helps you narrow down the options and find the best CRM for your needs today—and those you can see peeking at you in the future. All of them offer free trials or have a free plan that'll let you test. If you're still undecided, you can reach out to their sales teams. They'll walk you through the specifics of their app, which can be helpful to find the perfect match.

Related reading:

• How to automate your CRM

• The best free CRM software

• CRM automation to boost your team's productivity

• The best ERP software

• The best client management apps

• The best Pipedrive alternatives

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

This article was originally published in 2014 by Matthew Guay and has also had contributions from Chris Hawkins. The most recent update was in June 2026.