12 Best Free CRM Software Options for Small Sales Teams

Every vendor in this category uses the same word, and almost none of them mean the same thing by it. One free CRM gives you unlimited users and caps your storage. Another gives you one seat and a generous record limit. A third calls a two week trial a free plan and hopes you do not read the footer.

That is why a list of free CRM software is only useful if it answers two questions per tool: what is capped, and can you actually work out of it. A contact database you cannot send from is an address book. A sending tool without a contact record is a mail merge.

Below are twelve free plans worth knowing, with the limits stated as the vendors state them, plus a short section on the tools that keep appearing on free CRM lists despite no longer having a free plan.

What "free" Means Once You Read the Fine Print

Free plans fail in predictable ways. Knowing the failure mode in advance is most of the work.

There are four caps that matter, and vendors pick different ones to squeeze:

• Seats. Two users is the most common limit. It is fine for a founder and one rep, and it breaks the moment a third person needs their own login.
• Records. Two hundred and fifty contacts sounds like a lot until you import a conference list. Five thousand records covers a year of steady prospecting.
• Sends. A daily or monthly email cap decides whether the tool can run outreach or only log it.
• Branding. Several free plans add the vendor's logo to your emails, chat widget and booking links. It costs nothing and it shows.

Then there are the quieter conditions. Some free workspaces are deleted after a period of inactivity. Some free plans exclude the export you would need to leave. Some withhold email templates, which sounds minor until you are retyping the same message for the fifth time.

The last thing to check is what happens at the top of the free plan. A free CRM that shares a data model with its paid tiers lets you upgrade without a CRM migration project. One that does not will cost you a weekend of spreadsheet work later.

How We Compared the Free Plans

Every tool here had to clear the same bar before it made the list.

1. Free forever, not a trial. A fourteen day window is a trial even when the pricing page calls it free.
2. A real contact record. Contacts, companies, activity history and notes, not a list of rows.
3. Stated limits. If the vendor does not publish what the free plan caps, the plan is not evaluable.
4. A path out. Export, or an API, or both.
5. Useful without a card. No payment details to reach the free tier.

Feature counts were deliberately ignored. What got weighed instead was whether a one to three person team could run a week of pipeline work inside the free plan without hitting a wall, which is a very different question from how many checkboxes a comparison page can fill.

The 12 Best Free CRM Software Options

1. Outsales

Outsales is the CRM we build, and the free plan exists for a specific reason: the manual half of the product costs us almost nothing to run, so it is free forever rather than free for two weeks. The AI half, which decides and writes and sends on its own, is the part that costs money to operate, and that is the part you pay for.

What makes the free plan unusual is that it sends. Most free CRM plans stop at storing the contact and tracking the deal; the outreach lives in a second tool with a second bill. Here the contact record and the multi step sequence are the same product, so a reply lands on the timeline of the person who sent it without an integration in between.

What the free plan includes:

• A sales CRM with the full contact timeline: emails, notes, meetings, payments and status changes on one page
• Custom fields and documents on any contact
• Two way email sync with Gmail and Outlook, sending from your own address
• Multi step email sequences, with contacts imported from a file, a domain list or your CRM
• Open, click and reply tracking, with a funnel per campaign
• Sending limits, send windows and time zones, so a campaign never arrives in a burst
• Bounce, unsubscribe and suppression handling across every surface
• Two way sync with HubSpot, Pipedrive, Salesforce and ActiveCampaign
• A revenue dashboard synced from Stripe, with each payment on the contact it belongs to
• Fifty AI credits, one time, to try the automated half against your real pipeline

Standout strength. It is a free CRM that also runs outbound. For a founder doing their own prospecting, that removes the usual two tool split between where the contact lives and where the sequence runs.

Best for. Founder led sales, solo consultants and one person revenue teams who send their own email and want the history in the same place as the pipeline. There are situation specific versions of the plan for small businesses, early stage startups and real estate agents.

Limitations. One seat, so a second rep means upgrading. Three hundred emails a month, which suits steady prospecting and not a large campaign. Everything autonomous, from lead scoring to written follow ups, runs on credits once the free fifty are spent.

Compared with the rest of this list. Broader than a pure contact manager like Capsule, narrower than a suite like Bitrix24, and the only free plan here that treats sequences as part of the CRM rather than an upsell.

2. HubSpot CRM

HubSpot's free tools are the default answer to this question, and for good reason: the free tier is a genuine product rather than a demo, and it shares its data model with every paid tier above it, so nothing has to move when you upgrade.

The current free tools allow up to two users and up to one thousand contacts, with no expiration date and no card at signup. Within those limits you get contact management, deal pipelines, tasks, reporting dashboards, email tracking, a meeting scheduler, live chat and a shared inbox.

What the free plan includes:

• Contact and company records with activity history
• Deal pipelines and pipeline management
• Tasks, activities and a reporting dashboard
• Three email templates and three canned snippets per account
• Email tracking and notifications
• One personal meetings link with HubSpot branding
• Live chat, a chatbot builder and a shared inbox
• Forms, list segmentation and CRM import
• Two thousand marketing email sends a month, with HubSpot branding
• Mobile apps and payment links

Standout strength. Integration breadth. Whatever else your team uses, something already connects to HubSpot, which matters more in practice than any single feature.

Best for. Small teams who expect to grow into marketing and service tooling, and anyone who wants a free CRM they will not have to leave.

Limitations. Two seats and a thousand contacts are tight for a growing team. The branding on emails, chat and booking links is visible to your prospects. Sequences, the feature most sales teams want next, sit on a paid Sales Hub tier, which is where HubSpot's pricing starts to climb.

Compared with the rest of this list. The most polished free CRM here, and the one that most clearly exists to sell you the next tier.

3. Zoho CRM

Zoho's free edition is the pragmatic pick when three people need logins and a small automation budget. It supports up to three users, five thousand records across all modules, one gigabyte of storage and workflow automation for up to five tasks.

The free edition covers leads, deals and contacts, tasks and events, basic analytics, some customisation, and the connections into the rest of Zoho's application suite, which is the real reason people start here.

What the free plan includes:

• Three users
• Five thousand records across all modules
• Leads, contacts, accounts and deals
• Tasks, events and call logging
• Workflow automation for up to five tasks
• Standard reports and dashboards
• One gigabyte of file storage
• Integrations with other Zoho applications

Standout strength. Three seats and five thousand records is the most balanced set of caps on this list. Nothing is unlimited, and nothing runs out in the first month either.

Best for. Two or three person teams who want a conventional sales pipeline with room to grow, especially if other Zoho tools are already in use.

Limitations. The interface carries the weight of a very large product, and the learning curve shows. Five automations go quickly. Advanced customisation and the AI assistant belong to paid editions.

Worth knowing. Zoho also runs Bigin, a lighter CRM with its own forever free plan: one user, five hundred records, one pipeline and three automations. It is the better starting point if a full CRM feels like too much surface area.

4. Bitrix24

Bitrix24 takes the opposite approach to almost everyone else here. Instead of limiting users, it limits depth. The free plan allows an unlimited number of users, and inside it you get CRM with unlimited deals and invoices, tasks with Kanban and Gantt views, group chat, video calls with up to three hundred participants, a website builder and five gigabytes of storage.

That combination is unusual enough to be the whole argument for it. If you have eight people and no budget, no other free CRM lets all eight in.

What the free plan includes:

• Unlimited users
• CRM with unlimited deals and invoices
• Tasks and projects with list, Kanban and Gantt views
• Group chat and video calls with up to three hundred participants
• Five gigabytes of cloud storage
• A website and online store builder with hosting
• E-signature
• An AI assistant for chat based work

Standout strength. Unlimited seats on a free plan, with collaboration tools attached. It is closer to a free workspace than a free CRM.

Best for. Small businesses that want the whole team inside one system, including the people who would never pay for a CRM seat.

Limitations. Breadth has a cost, and here the cost is navigation: the CRM sits inside a product that also wants to be your intranet. Several sales features are reserved for paid plans, and Bitrix24 states that accounts left inactive for fifty consecutive days are deleted and cannot be restored, which is a real risk for a workspace you only open occasionally.

Compared with the rest of this list. The most generous free plan on seats, the least focused on selling.

5. Freshsales

Freshsales is the free plan for teams whose pipeline lives on the phone as much as in the inbox. Freshworks makes it free for up to three users, and the free tier keeps the parts most CRMs charge for: a visual pipeline, contact records and multichannel engagement across email, phone, chat, SMS and Facebook Messenger.

What the free plan includes:

• Three users
• A visual sales pipeline with deal stages
• Unified contact records with activity history
• Multichannel engagement: email, phone, chat, SMS and Facebook Messenger
• Built in phone
• Reports and analytics
• Mobile apps for iOS and Android

Standout strength. Channel coverage. Very few free CRM plans include telephony at all, and fewer include it next to chat and messaging.

Best for. Inside sales and inbound teams who qualify by phone and want the call attached to the record without a separate dialler.

Limitations. Automation, AI features and advanced customisation such as custom modules are reserved for paid plans, so anything repetitive stays manual. Freshworks does not publish a contact cap for the free tier, which makes the ceiling harder to plan around than Zoho's.

Compared with the rest of this list. Similar seat count to Zoho, stronger on conversations, weaker on automation.

6. EngageBay

EngageBay is a marketing, sales and service suite that made an unusual choice on its free plan: it caps contacts hard at two hundred and fifty, then leaves almost everything else open, including up to fifteen team members.

That trade is worth understanding. Two hundred and fifty contacts is small. Fifteen seats with email marketing, ticketing and live chat attached is not.

What the free plan includes:

• Up to fifteen team members
• Two hundred and fifty contacts
• One thousand branded emails a month
• Email broadcasts, autoresponders and two sequences
• Contacts, deals, tasks and appointment scheduling
• Email tracking with Gmail and Outlook integration
• Basic predictive lead scoring
• Ten web forms, ten popups and one landing page
• Ticketing with two views and ten canned responses, plus live chat
• Twenty AI conversations a month

Standout strength. The only free plan here that puts marketing, sales and support in one place for a whole small team.

Best for. Micro businesses with a short customer list and a long list of jobs: nurture, pipeline, tickets and a landing page, all on one login.

Limitations. The contact cap is the binding constraint and you will meet it early. Emails carry EngageBay branding. Two sequences will not run a real outbound program.

Compared with the rest of this list. More surface than any other free plan at this contact volume, and the smallest database to run it on.

7. Capsule

Capsule is the clearest product in this group, and its free plan is deliberately small: two users, two hundred and fifty contacts, one sales pipeline and five custom fields. What you get for that is a CRM with no learning curve, which is not a small thing for a team that abandoned its last one.

What the free plan includes:

• Two users
• Two hundred and fifty contacts
• One sales pipeline with custom milestones
• Five custom fields
• Task management with custom categories
• Calendar, Kanban and list views
• Mail connection for Gmail and Outlook

Standout strength. Speed to useful. There is very little to configure, so the pipeline is populated in an afternoon rather than a sprint.

Best for. Two person teams who want a tidy contact record and one clean pipeline, with no suite attached.

Limitations. Email templates, reporting, workflow automation, shared mailboxes, the AI features and the premium integrations all belong to paid tiers. On free, Capsule records work and does not do any of it for you, which makes CRM adoption easy and leaves the manual load where it was.

Compared with the rest of this list. The simplest free CRM here, and the strictest about what free means.

8. Vtiger One Pilot

Vtiger's free plan, called One Pilot, has the most interesting shape on this list: ten users, three thousand records, three gigabytes of storage and one thousand emails a month. Ten seats with a real email allowance is rare.

Inside it you get lead and contact management, a sales pipeline, basic marketing email, project tasks, a help desk and the mobile app, which makes it one of the few free plans that covers the whole customer lifecycle rather than the sales slice of it.

What the free plan includes:

• Ten users
• Three thousand records
• One thousand marketing emails a month
• Lead, contact and deal management with a pipeline
• Help desk and case management
• Project and task tracking
• Internal collaboration
• Mobile apps
• Three gigabytes of storage

Standout strength. The seat to allowance ratio. Ten people can work in it and it can still send.

Best for. Small teams that handle sales and support with the same people and want both histories on the same record.

Limitations. Predictive and generative AI, deal playbooks, higher sending volumes, multi currency and internal ticketing sit on paid editions. Three thousand records fills faster than it sounds once support cases share the count.

Compared with the rest of this list. More seats than Zoho, fewer records, and a free email allowance that most free plans withhold.

9. Attio

Attio is the modern take: a flexible data model where you define the objects, closer to a database with a CRM's manners than to a traditional pipeline tool. Its free plan reflects that, with up to three seats, three custom objects and a record ceiling of fifty thousand, which is the highest here by a wide margin.

What the free plan includes:

• Three seats
• Fifty thousand records
• Three custom objects
• Email and calendar sync, one account per user
• Two hundred emails a month, with bulk sends capped at ten recipients
• One hundred seat credits per user and two hundred and fifty workspace credits a month
• Company and people enrichment
• Three reports
• Basic integrations and API access
• Fifty gigabytes of file storage

Standout strength. The record ceiling and the data model. If your go to market motion has an unusual shape, Attio bends to it instead of asking you to bend.

Best for. Technical founders and product led teams who want to model accounts, users and workspaces as first class objects rather than forcing them into contacts and deals.

Limitations. Sequences and the deeper workflow automation are paid, and two hundred emails a month with ten recipient bulk sends rules out outbound on the free tier. Advanced permissions and single sign on are paid too, which matters once more than three people are involved.

Compared with the rest of this list. The most flexible free CRM database here, and one of the least able to send from.

10. Brevo

Brevo comes at the CRM from the email side. The free plan is built around three hundred marketing emails a day with generous contact storage, and the sales tooling is attached to that: one pipeline, up to fifty open deals, meeting scheduling and live chat.

For a business whose main motion is a newsletter plus a handful of live conversations, that ordering is the right way round.

What the free plan includes:

• Three hundred marketing emails a day
• A large contact database at no cost
• One sales pipeline with up to fifty open deals
• Meeting scheduling
• Live chat and a shared inbox
• Email campaign builder with templates
• In app calling and video meetings
• Transactional email and SMS on a pay as you go basis

Standout strength. A daily send allowance you can actually build a list on, without a contact cap doing the limiting.

Best for. Small businesses that market by email first and close a small number of deals at a time, especially ecommerce and local service businesses.

Limitations. Fifty open deals is a hard ceiling on pipeline, and additional pipelines require a paid sales add on. The daily cap means a large campaign has to be spread across days, and the CRM side is thinner than any dedicated tool here.

Compared with the rest of this list. The strongest free plan for email marketing for a small business, the weakest for managing a lot of open deals.

11. Odoo CRM

Odoo's One App Free plan is the quiet outlier. Pick a single Odoo application, in this case CRM, and it is free for an unlimited number of users, hosted on Odoo Online, with no time limit. Install a second app and you move onto a paid plan.

For a team that only needs a pipeline, that rule is generous in a way no seat based free plan can match.

What the free plan includes:

• One application, in this case CRM
• Unlimited users
• Hosting on Odoo Online
• Pipeline and opportunity management with stages
• Activity scheduling and logging
• Email integration
• Reporting and dashboards
• Mobile access

Standout strength. Unlimited users on a hosted, maintained product, with the option of an ERP underneath it when the business needs one.

Best for. Operations minded small businesses that expect to add inventory, invoicing or manufacturing later, and want the CRM to already be in the right system.

Limitations. One app means one app. Invoicing, marketing automation and helpdesk are separate applications, and adding any of them, or using the Studio customisation tool, moves you to a paid plan. Odoo's interface assumes a process oriented user.

Compared with the rest of this list. The only free plan whose constraint is the number of apps rather than the number of people.

12. Twenty

Twenty is the open source option, and it is free in the original sense: you can self host the core at no licence cost and run it on your own infrastructure. The hosted cloud plans are paid, so the free path here involves a server, a deploy and somebody who maintains it.

What the free option includes:

• The open source core, self hosted, with no licence fee
• Custom objects, fields, views and records
• A modern record and pipeline interface
• Full control of your data and where it lives
• An active GitHub project and community

Standout strength. Ownership. No seat maths, no record ceiling, no vendor deciding what the free tier includes next quarter.

Best for. Technical teams with an existing deployment pipeline, and anyone with a data residency requirement that hosted tools cannot satisfy.

Limitations. Self hosting is not free of cost, only free of licence: infrastructure, upgrades and backups are yours. The integration ecosystem is young compared with HubSpot or Zoho, and the cloud plans that remove the operational burden are paid.

Compared with the rest of this list. The most control and the most work. Everything else on this list trades one for the other.

Free CRM Plans Compared

The caps, side by side. Where a vendor does not publish a number, the cell says so rather than guessing.

Limits change. Treat the table as a map of the trade offs rather than a contract, and check the vendor's own plan page before you commit a database to it.

Tools Often Listed as Free That Are Not

Three names appear on almost every free CRM list and no longer belong there.

Streak. The Gmail native CRM still has a permanently free tier, but it is email tooling rather than a CRM: tracking, snippets, thread splitting and mail merge capped at fifty a day. Pipelines, the reason most people installed it, now sit on the paid plans. If a Gmail pipeline is what you want, that is the plan you are pricing.

Insightly. No free plan. There is a fourteen day trial without a card, and the entry paid tier after it.

Pipedrive. No free plan either, only a fourteen day trial of the paid tiers with no card required. Pipedrive is a good product and a poor answer to this question, which is worth knowing before you compare what Pipedrive costs against tools that charge nothing.

The pattern is worth naming: a free tier is a marketing decision, and marketing decisions get revisited. The freemium model works for a vendor when the free tier converts, and when it stops converting the free tier gets thinner. Plan your data exit before you need it.

How to Choose, by Situation

The right free CRM depends less on features than on which cap you will hit first.

You are one person doing your own prospecting. You need the contact record and the sending in the same tool, or you will spend your week copying between them. That is the case the free CRM plan we build was designed for.

You have a team of five or more and no budget. Seats are your binding constraint, so start with Bitrix24 or Odoo CRM. Everything else on this list will ask for money at the third or fourth login.

You expect to grow into marketing and support tooling. Start with HubSpot or Zoho. The migration you avoid later is worth more than the extra allowance you would get elsewhere.

Your pipeline runs on the phone. Freshsales includes telephony on free, which nobody else here does.

Your list is the asset and deals are occasional. Brevo. A daily send allowance beats a deal count you will not reach.

Your data model is unusual. Attio, if you can accept that outbound happens elsewhere.

You have a hard data residency or control requirement. Twenty, self hosted, and budget the operational time honestly.

You sell your own time, or a small team's. The selling and the delivery compete for the same week, so the follow-up has to keep running while you are busy. There are versions of our free plan written for exactly that: consultants and small agencies.

If you are furnishing a specific kind of business rather than a specific kind of team, the longer breakdowns for small businesses and startups compare paid and free options side by side.

When a Free CRM Stops Being Enough

Free plans do not fail gradually. They fail on a specific day, and it is usually one of four.

A second or third person needs their own login. Shared logins destroy the audit trail, and the audit trail is most of what a CRM is for.

The manual load becomes the job. Logging calls, updating stages and retyping the same follow up is work that produces nothing. This is the point where teams start looking at CRM automation and at how to automate data entry rather than a bigger seat count.

Reporting becomes a question somebody asks twice. Most free tiers cap reports. When you need to know why last month's pipeline stalled, CRM reporting is the answer and the free tier is usually not.

Outreach volume passes what the free plan sends. Every plan here has a ceiling. Crossing it is a good problem, and the cheapest version of it is upgrading a tool you already know rather than adopting a new one under pressure.

There is a fifth case that is less about volume than about what the software is doing for you. A CRM that records is a filing cabinet with a pipeline view; a system that decides who to contact, writes the message and closes the deal when the payment clears is a different category, which is what an autonomous CRM means in practice. Our own split is drawn on exactly that line: the recording half is free forever and the deciding half is what our pricing covers.

The Short Version

A free CRM is worth having if it does more than store. The plans that hold up are the ones where the cap you will hit is the one you can live with: unlimited seats and less depth at Bitrix24 and Odoo, balanced seats and records at Zoho and Freshsales, polish and a low ceiling at HubSpot, a large database and no outbound at Attio, sending and one seat at Outsales.

Start with the constraint, not the feature list. Then build the habits that survive the upgrade, because CRM implementation is the part that decides whether any of this works, and it costs the same on a free plan as on a paid one.