Is there a clear market leader, or should you look elsewhere for a better fit?
Choosing a CRM for your business can feel overwhelming, which often pushes you towards obvious choices.
cough Hubspot cough.
But ... the obvious choices aren't always the best choices.
Yes, there are market leaders everyone knows about, but popularity doesn't always equal suitability.
Often, CRMs focus heavily on sales at the expense of other critical functions like marketing automation, customer insights, and creating more sophisticated prospect experiences.
So, we thought it was worth undertaking some research and doing A LOT of testing to help simplify your CRM choice by guiding you through the landscape, highlighting what truly matters, and giving clear recommendations based on detailed research.
So we've borrowed some 'thinking' from our friends at Gartner and created our own magic quadrant, scoring 20 of the best platforms out there today. Some you'll know, some you might not.
Why the obvious choices aren't always the best.
It's easy to gravitate toward well-known CRM platforms like HubSpot, Salesforce, or Zoho. They have huge market recognition, impressive feature sets, and attractive promises.
However, these platforms often come with hidden pitfalls like escalating costs, complex interfaces, and challenging implementations.
For example, HubSpot appears to be the obvious choice due to its comprehensive features and brand reputation.
I mean, who ever got fired for buying Hubspot? Well, maybe more people than you think!
Why? Because as your business scales or you want the clever stuff, costs skyrocket, usability declines due to complexity, and you're left questioning if you made the right choice.
Popularity alone isn't enough. Your CRM must genuinely align with your business operations, budget, and team capabilities. Not to mention your sales process.
Who's who in the CRM market?
Let's dive deeper into each platform we've analysed.
This is a balance balanced view of their strengths and weaknesses to help you make an informed choice, so here's our magic quadran and scoring:
Highly recommended CRMs
HubSpot
HubSpot is undoubtedly feature-rich, intuitive, and highly integratable. It offers robust marketing automation, sales tools, and excellent scalability.
However, costs escalate sharply as your needs grow, and advanced features often sit behind expensive tiers, which can quickly strain smaller budgets. And not to mention, Hubspot has had issues with email deliverability.
Zoho CRM
Zoho is a cost-effective yet powerful platform offering impressive versatility across sales, marketing, and customer support.
Its intuitive interface and strong integrations make it particularly attractive for SMEs looking for comprehensive functionality without substantial costs.
Pipedrive
Designed explicitly for sales-focused teams, Pipedrive is one of the most intuitive platforms on the market.
It excels in sales pipeline management and usability. Plus it's incredibly cost-effective. However, its marketing features remain limited, potentially requiring additional marketing tools to supplement it.
High Level
High Level uniquely combines marketing and sales automation, making it perfect for ambitious businesses.
It's been called the 'Hubspot killer', not only because of its advanced feature set but also its capped pricing model, meaning no nasty surprises.
It also has a very impressive product development roadmap, with regular new feature releases and is already embracing Gen AI heavily.
It does everything from pipeline management, social media scheduling, landing pages, forms, polls, advanced automation, and much more. It's incredibly impressive.
Recommended CRMs with some considerations
Salesforce
Salesforce is powerful, robust, and highly customisable. But this power comes at a cost: financial investment, complexity, and a steep learning curve.
It can be an excellent choice for larger businesses or those with dedicated CRM teams but may overwhelm smaller teams.
Copper
Copper uniquely integrates seamlessly with Google Workspace, making it ideal for teams heavily reliant on Google's ecosystem.
Its clean interface and ease of use encourage high adoption, but its limited marketing functionality means businesses with extensive marketing needs might find it restrictive.
Creatio
Creatio's strength lies in its sophisticated automation capabilities across sales, marketing, and services.
Its interface can seem complex and requires an initial in-depth setup and deployment phase, making user onboarding critical for successful adoption.
Keap
Ideal for smaller teams looking to automate sales and marketing, Keap offers intuitive usability and effective automation.
Its balanced feature set is perfect for SMEs, though larger businesses might eventually outgrow its functionality.
Agile CRM
Agile CRM provides affordable, straightforward features for SMBs.
It's a balanced platform with solid integrations but lacks the advanced capabilities found in higher-tier competitors, limiting scalability long-term.
Up and coming.
As always, the MarTech and SalesTech space is fast-moving and very noisey.
However, two exciting platforms worth looking at are Gong.io and Attio.
Where Attio is more of a typical CRM platform you'd expect, with strong pipeline functionality, it has a very usable automation and AI offering. Not to mention the very 'Notion' '-like user interface. This is a strong contender for the future as it feels very modern.
Gong.io is, however, a bit different. Yes, it ticks the CRM boxes, but the big differentiator here is the revenue tracking, management and forecasting functionality. It's pretty impressive, but the wider usability and functionality makes the tool lack overall.
Least recommended.
Dynamics 365, Outreach.io, Cvent, and Notion are powerful in their own niches but are unsuitable as primary CRMs for most SMBs.
They typically require extensive setup, have higher costs, or lack comprehensive CRM functionality.
Platforms such as Insightly, SugarCRM, Nimble and Capsule CRM each offer specific benefits but generally fall short in crucial areas such as scalability, marketing functionality, or ease of adoption. These tools may fit niche use cases or very specific workflows, but they rarely provide comprehensive solutions suitable for growth-oriented businesses.
Monday.com is a tricky trap as it's often already in the business as a delivery management and operational tool.
It does blend powerful workflow management with CRM capabilities and looks like that silver bullet that connects your CRM to your project management tool.
It's highly customisable and intuitive, and it can easily adapt to different business processes. It's ideal for businesses that value flexibility and ease of adoption, though advanced automation can require additional setup.
However, this was not born from a sales mindset, and it severely lacks that DNA in the way the product feels and works.
For instance, excels in sales analytics but doesn't adequately address marketing or general CRM tasks. Dynamics 365 is highly functional but overly complex and expensive. Notion is highly customisable but not inherently a CRM, creating additional workload and complexity.
The hidden challenge for CRM adoption.
A common mistake businesses make is focusing entirely on CRM features while neglecting adoption. Without buy-in from your team, your CRM is just another unused tool gathering digital dust. Even the best CRM requires strategic adoption:
- Ensure your CRM choice aligns with your existing processes.
- Involve your team early to identify needs and potential roadblocks.
- Provide comprehensive onboarding and ongoing training.
- Regularly assess and optimise your use of the CRM to maintain engagement.
Remember, adoption defines CRM success more than any individual feature.
Embracing contemporary solutions.
While HubSpot remains popular, alternatives such as High Level, Pipedrive and Zoho CRM offer compelling features with fewer compromises.
They typically balance functionality, usability, and cost-effectiveness better, providing a clearer path to long-term CRM success.
Your goal should be to choose a CRM that scales effectively, integrates seamlessly, and supports rather than complicates your processes.
Consider trialling multiple platforms, as most offer free trials, allowing you to practically evaluate their fit.
Make a strategic decision, not a popularity-based one.
A CRM is only a tool, and it doesn't solve business problems on its own.
Your CRM must align with your overall business strategy and processes.
Even a perfect CRM can't fix gaps in your approach or process. Strategy and execution must always lead to technology.
Our recent research compared over 20 CRM platforms in depth, highlighting cost, usability, integration, and growth potential.
Use these insights to avoid common CRM pitfalls and strategically select the platform best suited to your business needs.
Let's wrap this up.
Your CRM decision shouldn't feel complicated. Remember that popularity isn't always a reliable indicator of suitability. Clearly define your business's real needs, carefully consider hidden costs and adoption hurdles, and prioritise contemporary, versatile solutions designed for your processes.
What should you do next?
- Understand your sales process and define how your CRM supports your sales experience.
- Define how your marketing team need to be supported by your CRM and what features they need.
- Understand cross-over touch points in your sales and marketing process and use this to define some simple requirements across your sales and marketing teams.
- Shortlist 2-3 CRMs based on your specific business priorities and take advantage of free trials to evaluate practical fit and usability.
- Engage your entire team early on your chosen platform, making adoption and training key to your implementation strategy.
You could very quickly run two products side by side before you do a complete migration and switch to ensure you have used the new product in anger and stretched its capability and usability.
Lastly, don't be afraid to try a new product and break the addiction to the obvious choices.