Our selection for the best Salesforce alternative is HubSpot, as it can successfully fulfill a variety of needs related to CRM (customer relationship management), all at a great price. Click here to try HubSpot for free.
Salesforce is a highly popular CRM package, as more than 150,000 businesses rely on it. The Salesforce suite has an extensive collection of services from which you can select. It tailors its services to match the needs of businesses operating in particular segments, while also offering solutions for each individual department in the business.
Popularity alone doesn’t make Salesforce perfect for everyone, though. Our Quicksprout research team studies the CRM software market extensively, and we compiled our recommendations for several of the best solutions, many of which will work as alternatives to Salesforce.
The 9 Best CRM Software Solutions
Our research shows that HubSpot is the best alternative to Salesforce. It delivers a highly competitive price point while fulfilling a variety of needs that businesses have related to CRM. To see our full list of the best CRM software options, head right over here.
- HubSpot – Best for Varying CRM Needs
- Salesflare – Best for Prospect Management
- Zoho CRM – Best for a Customizable CRM
- Freshsales – Best for Managing Sales Leads
- Insightly – Best for Project Management Features
- Apptivo – Best for Adding Services As You Need Them
- Pipedrive – Best for Simplifying the Sales Process
- EngageBay – Best for Automating Customer Service Tasks
- Salesforce – Best for Integrating Multiple Services
HubSpot – Best for Varying CRM Needs
Our favorite aspect of HubSpot is how it delivers a wide range of services for those businesses that need CRM features. Its features are especially impressive considering it is available at a low price, including one tier that remains free to use forever.
When compared to other free CRM software options, HubSpot has an almost hard-to-believe list of features. It is a highly comprehensive free CRM software package, which is great for a small business that needs to begin deploying CRM services.
Should your business need to make an upgrade from HubSpot’s free tier to a paid tier, this is an easy process. Once you begin using a subscription tier in HubSpot, you gain access to a whole set of new, powerful features aimed at meeting the needs of businesses of varying sizes and in a wide range of industries.
How HubSpot Compares to Salesforce
Both HubSpot and Salesforce are highly popular CRM packages with very recognizable brand names. Both offer a high level of variability in the services they provide, making them usable for many different businesses.
Salesforce offers more customization features than are found with HubSpot. However, this ability to tweak Salesforce to meet certain requirements of your business does add some complexity to using Salesforce.
Pricing is one area where HubSpot has a significant advantage over Salesforce. Beyond its powerful free tier, HubSpot’s subscription tiers also have better price points than typically what you find with Salesforce.
Our HubSpot review highlights the methodology that led to us ranking HubSpot as the best choice for businesses that need varying CRM features.
Salesflare – Best for Prospect Management
Businesses that struggle to manage their sales prospects often struggle to complete sales too. With the Salesflare CRM software in place, though, managing sales prospects – as well as sales leads and actual customers – becomes a far easier process.
Even better, Salesflare automates much of the process of entering data to help you manage your sales prospects. This CRM software package pulls data from email messages, social media posts and profiles, and other publicly accessible areas of the internet. It then populates the software with this information about each prospect, saving time on data entry for your sales team.
Salesflare tracks how your prospects are interacting with your brand and how they are communicating with you as well, giving you additional valuable information. If the prospect visits your website or opens one of your emails, Salesflare tracks it. The software then ranks each prospect’s position along the sales pipeline, giving your sales team the best idea about how to approach the prospect.
How Salesflare Compares to Salesforce
Salesflare may have a similar name to Salesforce, but the two CRM software packages differ quite a bit. Where Salesflare focuses primarily on the sales pipeline and on tracking prospects, Salesforce offers quite a bit more versatility in terms of CRM features.
Salesflare has some ancillary features that match up with what Salesforce offers. However, its extra features don’t offer the depth of Salesforce’s features. On the other hand, Salesforce doesn’t have quite the depth in terms of managing sales prospects that Salesflare provides.
Salesforce has significantly higher price points than what Salesflare offers. Additionally, Salesforce carries a bit more complexity than Salesflare does.
Zoho CRM – Best for a Customizable CRM
When selecting Zoho CRM, you receive a CRM software package that not only delivers the basics, but also offers extensive customization capabilities. This creates something that truly fits the way your business needs its CRM software to work.
Its customization features are especially nice for small businesses that may not have extensive tech support resources available. You can make any desired changes to Zoho CRM relatively easily and without significant technical know-how.
Zoho CRM works equally well for large enterprises that want an easy-to-use CRM software package. You will find tools in Zoho CRM related to managing sales leads, projects, and marketing. It also helps with managing your customer service processes more effectively, which is important for any business in any industry.
How Zoho CRM Compares to Salesforce
During our research, we found that Zoho CRM doesn’t quite offer the level of advanced features that you receive with Salesforce. However, for smaller organizations, Zoho CRM is easier to start using successfully on day one than Salesforce.
Both Zoho CRM and Salesforce boast large customer bases of well over 150,000 users. However, we like the price point found with Zoho CRM versus the cost of Salesforce, especially for small businesses.
As our Zoho CRM review points out, we like the way Zoho strikes a helpful balance between basic features that are easy to begin using immediately and customizable options that give you the functionality you need.
Freshsales – Best for Managing Sales Leads
Freshsales is a great CRM software option for your business when you need to improve the way you manage your sales leads and prospects. As an added benefit, Freshsales has desirable price points, especially when you are willing to agree to an annual contract. It also has an impressive 21-day free trial period.
Many small and medium-sized businesses may not have significant tech resources to throw at a CRM software package that requires extensive setup and training time. But you’ll be up and running quickly with Freshsales, and its easy-to-use features make managing your sales leads quite a bit simpler than with some other packages.
To aid in managing your sales leads, Freshsales provides alerts about contract renewals and other important dates coming up for your clients. The Freshsales dashboard interface contains the most relevant information for managing your sales leads, ensuring your salespeople are focusing on the right things.
Once a sales lead converts to a client, Freshsales moves all the relevant data into the client contact, including links to profiles on social media.
How Freshsales Compares to Salesforce
Salesforce offers a greater depth in its features than what you’ll find with Freshsales. However, our research shows that Freshsales is quite a bit easier to use with very little training time required.
Both Freshsales and Salesforce offer operations in dozens of languages other than English, which can be helpful for a business that sells around the globe.
Freshsales delivers a more advantageous price point than Salesforce, which can be helpful for those businesses that qualify as SMBs, as they may not have huge budgets for CRM software.
Insightly – Best for Project Management Features
Like most CRM packages, Insightly has a host of sales and marketing features, helping you manage customers and sales leads. However, Insightly sets itself apart from competitors by focusing on project management too.
Having a task and project tracking capability within Insightly is helpful for team members who need to be able to communicate about progress on a project. Insightly also allows you to specify tasks that have relationships to each other, keeping your team on top of everything it needs to do to move tasks forward.
Consequently, Insightly probably works best for SMBs who may not want the hassle of running a separate project tracking software package. For those businesses, it becomes easier to manage sales, marketing, and projects within a single software package like Insightly versus using separate packages.
How Insightly Compares to Salesforce
For enterprise-level users who need extensive features and significant customization options, Salesforce is going to be a better choice than Insightly. However, Insightly is far easier to use than Salesforce for those who want to be up and running quickly.
Both Insightly and Salesforce have a really useful mobile app. Through the app, team members can have the information they need to manage sales leads and other aspects of customer relationships with them at all times.
Insightly is one of the cheapest CRM packages around, making it far more budget-friendly than Salesforce. It even has a really useful free tier, but this tier only works for one or two users.
Apptivo – Best for Adding Services As You Need Them
The Apptivo CRM software is a popular selection on its own. But its greatest level of strength lies in the ability to incorporate multiple apps into it. These apps bring services related to customer management into the Apptivo dashboard, giving you one interface from which to operate everything.
Rather than using standalone software for things like online invoicing, expense reports, supply chain management, and other features, Apptivo uses apps to obtain access to these features.
Additionally, Apptivo is able to easily incorporate other types of standalone apps, such as Slack or Office 365. When your CRM software plays nice with all the other apps and software you are already using, your organization and sales team can increase productivity in a hurry.
How Apptivo Compares to Salesforce
The ability to incorporate multiple apps to gain extra features gives both Salesforce and Apptivo some similarities. Salesforce has more apps available than Apptivo, but both pieces of software do a good job of incorporating apps.
Apptivo’s biggest advantage over Salesforce is its pricing. Apptivo is far less expensive than Salesforce, making it more affordable for an SMB.
Apptivo also has fewer complexities than Salesforce, which shortens the time required to learn how to use it successfully. Apptivo does provide the ability to customize the various apps that it uses, which gives you some advanced features that come closer to what’s available in Salesforce.
Pipedrive – Best for Simplifying the Sales Process
If you find that your sales team is losing prospects and sales because your CRM software is too complicated, Pipedrive is the answer. Pipedrive incorporates nearly every aspect of the sales process into a single software package. This interface ensures that no key information falls through the cracks, which could lead to missed sales opportunities.
Not only does Pipedrive save time with information management, but it also eliminates tasks that waste time. When your team members have more time to spend speaking to clients, while spending less time trying to manage the CRM software package, they are going to improve their closing rates.
The easy-to-use interface found with Pipedrive further shortens the amount of time sales team members must spend entering data. Yet, Pipedrive delivers the information team members need in a timely manner.
How Pipedrive Compares to Salesforce
Salesforce and Pipedrive have comparable price points, although you save a bit with Pipedrive in this comparison when you agree to an annual contract.
When you would like a CRM software tool that makes the process of managing your sales simpler, Pipedrive outperforms Salesforce. The Salesforce CRM has far more high-end features built into it than Pipedrive, so Salesforce may work better for an enterprise-level sales team.
Where Salesforce provides a number of add-ons and apps that deliver extra features beyond sales lead management, Pipedrive focuses on sales almost exclusively. This singular focus can be a significant benefit if your company doesn’t need all the extras available with Salesforce.
EngageBay – Best for Automating Customer Service Tasks
When your sales team and customer service team find themselves bogged down with data entry and busy work, the EngageBay CRM software tool can help. EngageBay focuses on organizing the data your sales team needs, while also collecting quite a bit of the data using automated processes.
If you work in an industry where the sales team and the customer service team need to work in tandem, EngageBay simplifies this process. After the sale, you may need to continue interacting with your clients using strong customer service techniques. EngageBay works well for this type of business.
Administrators can set up triggers that cause automated responses. When a salesperson completes one task with a potential client, for example, EngageBay can move the contact along the pipeline, triggering tasks and assignments for other team members. It also automates aspects of managing the customer service process, keeping clients engaged.
How EngageBay Compares to Salesforce
Salesforce has a far larger customer base than EngageBay, so some businesses may trust the Salesforce brand name more than they trust EngageBay.
However, EngageBay outdoes Salesforce in terms of the price points it offers. You could choose to use the fully free tier with EngageBay if you are a small business or if you have a small sales and customer service team. (However, you need to use the mid-range paid tier to make use of EngageBay’s automation tools.)
Salesforce can provide strong customer service management tools, similar to EngageBay. However, you probably need to access one of Salesforce’s apps to gain the same features as EngageBay in this area.
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