10 Best CRM Apps For Small Business Success

Top 10 best CRM apps for small businesses:

Jump to: What to look for in a CRM app

How we chose the best customer management apps

Not all mobile CRM software works the same, and it can be a challenge to find one that suits your business needs. 

This is why we took the time to research the different CRMs currently on the market to determine the strengths of each app so that you can find your perfect match.

Everyone’s list of the best CRM apps looks different, but here is what we did to put together our comprehensive list:

• Researched the most sought-after app features for small businesses
• Watched app tutorials to understand how the products work
• Read customer reviews for firsthand strengths and weaknesses
• Tested the key features of the apps ourselves

Whether you’re looking for the best CRM app free of complicated bells and whistles, or want a customer management app that is jam-packed with features, you’ll find the perfect tool for your purposes below.

Kicking off our list of the best CRM apps is Jobber.

Jobber is a mobile field service CRM software built specifically for field service and home service businesses. Trusted by over 250,000 home service professionals, Jobber lets you track all your customer info in one place so you can deliver personalized service that makes every customer feel like they’re your #1.

Here’s how Jobber can improve your customer relationships:

• Quickly view past quotes, jobs, visits, invoices, and a full billing history associated with each of your clients
• Use custom fields to track whatever additional information is important to you, like entry codes or pets at the property
• Instantly add notes and attachments on a client profile to all their work requests, quotes, jobs, and invoices
• Tag clients as leads to manage them separately from active clients

And because working in field service means you’re rarely at a desk, Jobber provides you with quick access to customer data on the go. So your field service team will have everything they need to get the job done right.

Use Jobber to save yourself a day’s worth of work each week you’d otherwise spend managing leads, sending estimates, invoicing, and getting paid.

If you are looking for the best CRM app free of charge, Zoho CRM is a top choice.

Zoho CRM allows teams to work faster by keeping essential customer relationship activities in one central place. The free version of Zoho CRM lets you use the app’s key features at no cost for up to 3 users, making it ideal for small teams on a tight budget.

The app’s simple home screen shows all your activities for the day, like upcoming meetings, tasks that are due, and call history with customers. Right from this home screen, you can schedule new meetings, calls, and tasks with one tap.

Beyond simplifying your day, here’s what makes Zoho CRM one of the best CRM apps for small businesses:

• Comprehensive contact records. This customer management app provides a detailed communication history for every customer, and can attach notes and files to their contact record. You can even send customers a new email directly from the contact record.

• Lead management. Capture leads from forms on your service website landing pages, scan business cards from the mobile CRM app, and send targeted email campaigns to turn leads into customers.

• Editable sales pipeline. Create a deal containing all the customer data you’ve collected and add that deal to your sales pipeline in Zoho CRM. Then easily move them along your pipeline and update information as you go.

While the free version of Zoho CRM doesn’t offer sales forecasting, certain types of reports, and mass email—you can integrate it with most other Zoho services, like their marketing campaign software and survey tools to enhance the software.

Next on our list of the best CRM apps is Freshsales.

Freshsales (formerly known as Freshworks CRM) is ideal for sales teams with more complicated and fleshed out sales processes. The deal pipeline in Freshsales offers helpful visuals of your sales process and breaks it down into actionable tasks.

You can build a custom sales pipeline around your typical sales process, with each deal card showing the details you choose to see. You can either click and drag each deal across a Kanban-style board, or manage deals in a funnel, a timeline, or list view.

Freshsales CRM also allows every office admin and sales rep to:

• Complete admin tasks on the go from a simple home screen, like booking meetings, adding contacts and companies, and starting phone calls.
• Set up a team email inbox where anyone in the team can answer emails from your customers within the CRM.
• Make calls directly from the app, and Freshsales saves those conversations for you to refer to later.
• Route calls to one specific person or to the whole team by setting up rules on who gets which calls (and when to send calls to voicemail).
• Create workflows that send out communications when a contact completes a certain action (e.g., ‘When a contact fills out this form, send them a welcome email).

Best of all, when you click on a contact record, you get a snapshot of their lifecycle stage and a score that tells you how ready they are for the sale.

Pipedrive CRM is one of the best CRM apps for finding prospects who could become your customers. Like Freshsales, it’s designed to simplify sales and customer relationships with customizable pipelines and easy task management.

What sets Pipedrive CRM apart as a customer management app is its LeadBooster add-on that includes Prospector, a tool that helps you find high-quality outbound leads. Using Prospector, you can:

• Access a database of over 400 million profiles and 10 million companies gathered from high-quality sources
• Use easy filters to locate your ideal customers based on criteria like job title, location, and industry
• Get suggestions for the best potential leads with help from an AI tool that verifies each prospect

Once you have prospects, contact them directly through Pipedrive instead of hopping from one tool to another. Pipedrive’s contact management and storage, like their Leads Inbox, will help you organize every contact and convert them to customers faster.

READ MORE: Use this sales script to book more work

Mailchimp is our top pick for managing relationships with marketing contacts. It is one of the best CRM apps to store and organize leads to send marketing emails and updates on your products and services.

The audience dashboard in Mailchimp is a clean and organized location for your customer data. Use this dashboard to keep a pulse on your audience engagement as well as to find new and better ways to communicate with them.

Build better relationships with your audience in Mailchimp by:

• Keeping all important customer data in one place, including top locations, common tags, and customer lifetime value (CLV)
• Creating your own segments and tags to filter audience data however you need to
• Setting up automated messages to trigger based on specific segments or tags

Do you need customer records, pipelines, and communication customized to fit your unique business needs? If so, then monday sales CRM might be the best CRM apps solution for your small business.

monday sales CRM is built for flexibility across multiple industries and team structures. Here’s how you can customize this customer management app to work for your business:

• Create customizable dashboards—from scratch or with pre-built templates—that help you manage customer relationships
• Build a pipeline that matches your sales cycle by editing deal stages and adding as many columns as you’d like
• Choose how you view your sales data, whether you prefer Gantt charts or Kanban columns
• Update contact and company details without leaving the pipeline view
• Connect the CRM with your communication channels, including email, social media, and text messages

Finally, the platform’s mobile CRM software allows you to access your CRM anywhere, anytime, so that your team always stays connected.

Copper is CRM software designed to integrate with Google Workspace apps such as Gmail and Google Drive. It is a seamless addition to your toolset if most of your emails, work, and communication lives in Google already.

What’s more, Copper CRM saves you from hunting for conversations and files by automatically connecting every contact’s Gmail data to the CRM. Plus, Copper mimics the look and feel of Google products, so it fits seamlessly with what you’re already working with.

Here’s how the CRM can improve your email communication and file management with customers:

• See customer details in a sidebar when you’re emailing a contact in Gmail. When you start emailing someone new, it just takes one click to sync a contact to your CRM.
• Instantly save attachments to your contact’s profile when you get an email with a Google Doc, CSV, image, or any other file type.
• Find files quickly by searching the people who have sent or received that file, in case you can’t remember the file name.

Copper CRM is simple enough that you don’t need IT support to move all your contact data from Google to Copper, meaning you can get started using your new CRM quicker.

Good reporting tells you where your business has been and where it is headed.

HubSpot is among the best CRM apps if you need robust reporting that’s still user-friendly and easy to set up. In HubSpot, you can create detailed reports on sales and customer service activities, marketing engagement, revenue, and productivity.

HubSpot reports are great at capturing engagement trends from all your contacts. Multiple view options let you choose between list views, charts, numbers, and more—whichever visuals work best for you.

Improve your decision making with these other analytics and reporting features in HubSpot CRM:

• Access a massive report library with intelligent, pre-built reports that give you precise analytics on contact activity, sales performance, revenue, marketing engagement, and customer service, and more.
• Create multiple dashboards that host reports for different purposes. Your team will get a glimpse of customer activities and company performance right when they enter the CRM.
• Manage permissions to decide which team members can view or edit each analytics dashboard.
• Analyze activities with individual contacts. HubSpot’s contact records are packed with detail that make it an ideal customer management app. Every profile shows which of your emails, links, and documents your contact has opened, with exact timestamps.

READ MORE: 10 easy ways to increase revenue from new customers

Nimble is a CRM platform that integrates with thousands of other apps, to keep you connected with the best tools to manage your accounting, marketing, scheduling, website management, e-commerce, and more.

On its own, Nimble helps you organize contacts into segmented lists, track your team’s activity, manage your sales process, and communicate with customers strategically.

Its strongest feature is its ability to unite contact data from multiple apps into a single platform that’s easily accessible everywhere you work. This feature alone makes Nimble a contender for the best mobile CRM.

Nimble offers integrations with 160+ apps, including:

• Mailchimp
• Evernote
• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• Shopify
• Gmail
• ActiveCampaign
• Google Sheets
• Google Calendar
• Zendesk
• QuickBooks Online

Plus, using Zapier, you can connect the Nimble to over 5,000 other apps.

Last on our list of the best CRM apps is SugarCRM.

SugarCRM leverages the power of AI to provide a smarter way to manage your business. This CRM solution has all of the features you need to enhance productivity and simplify your workflows, including:

• A central platform for your team to connect with customers via messaging, chat, portal, email, or voice to ensure that all conversations are properly documented
• A comprehensive dashboard for a 360 degree view of your customers’ details for a complete picture of their journey
• An extensive list of integration options including Slack, Mailchimp, Zoom, and more

What makes SugarCRM one of the best CRM apps for AI fans is the solution’s use of predictive AI to analyze factors your data may not cover. This gives you better visibility into your business to make better decisions and maximize opportunities.