Best CRM For Solopreneurs

A solopreneur is a hard worker by nature. These people are independent and confident in their own abilities. They know what they can do best and are content to do it all their life. Solopreneurs do not rely on teams, associates, or subordinates to get the job done. Instead, they trust their own abilities but also know their limits.

Our Top Pick

Hubspot offers a powerful and free CRM with smooth sales tools for managing contacts and optimizing your sales pipeline.

Rating: 5 out of 5.

A successful solopreneur knows how important contact management is for this success of their one-man enterprise. The best software for customer relations management should be easy to use and should offer a free trial because solopreneurs want to test software of CRM before they commit to buying it.

Best CRM For Solopreneurs Top Picks

Hubspot

HubSpot is a comprehensive CRM platform for solopreneurs and small businesses with strong social media marketing and sales features. With Hubspot, one can easily align their sales and marketing automations and take advantage of its powerful reporting capabilities, and workflows management functions.

Moreover, one doesn’t have to use different CRM tools for their daily tasks. HubSpot allows you to manage social media, emails, monitor your landing pages, and view real-time analytics in one place. As a solopreneur, you may need to do some content management and email marketing along with your daily CRM routine. In this case, you can avail of Hubspot’s various integrations such as WordPress, MailChimp, and Salesforce.

Free CRM Forever

HubSpot offers the following CRM tools that are 100% free forever:

  • Customer relationship forms
  • Ad management
  • Conversations inbox
  • Contact list management
  • Contact website monitoring
  • Deals management
  • Reports on tasks & activities
  • Small business insights
  • 3rd-party online marketing integrations
  • App Marketplace add-ons
  • Custom support forms
  • Ticketing automations
  • Prospect management
  • Reporting dashboard
  • Email tracking & notifications
  • Email template library
  • Canned snippets
  • Meeting scheduling
  • Messenger integration
  • Custom properties

These free CRM tools by HubSpot make your life as a solopreneur a lot easier. All reports get updated automatically and all of your sales pipelines are neatly organized on a user-friendly dashboard. With HubSpot, you can enjoy unlimited leads, customer records, and lists of up to 1,000,000 contacts. In addition, your customer records are regularly and automatically updated with information from over 15 million small businesses in a variety of fields.

Your small business will take off in no time if you arm yourself with time-saving CRM tools listed above. Having the mighty CRM capabilities of Hubspot on your side, you’ll be able to close more deals with less work and optimize your sales process.

Moreover, HubSpot’s CRM tools automatically notify you when a prospect opens their email or visits your web page, so you’ll be able to follow up on the most promising leads. Customer relationship management has never been easier with HubSpot’s free meeting scheduling tool, live chat, and its huge selection of email templates.

HubSpot Pros:

  •  Offers free CRM software for life
  • Integrates easily with a wide variety of 3rd-party apps
  • One of the best CRM offers for solopreneurs on the market today

HubSpot Cons:

  • The email templates aren’t very customizable
  • You have to pay for everything outside CRM
  • The reporting capabilities of the platform aren’t impressive

Zoho

Zoho is a complete SAAS solution that provides a fully-developed CRM platform for your business. The company offers different CRM bundles to its large customers, and specially-tailored ones to its smaller clients, including solopreneurs.

Zoho’s CRM tool for solopreneurs is called Bigin. It allows them to seamlessly manage their business by visualizing the progress of their deals in the sales pipeline. Bigin also features robust contact management capabilities. Thus, solopreneurs can keep in touch with their leads via email, chat, or social networks.

As your solopreneurship grows, managing your contacts and sales is likely to take much more than just an excel spreadsheet and a bunch of sticky notes. This is where Bigin comes to the rescue. It gives you a complete picture of how your small business is performing by organizing your contacts by company, and by the number of deals you’ve closed with them.

Zoho offers easy drag-and-drop deal management

Unlike some more basic, card-based CRM tools, Bigin by Zoho allows you to easily drag and drop deals across various stages in your sales pipeline. You can also set up multiple pipelines in case you need to sell more than one product or service. Bigin also manages your scheduled tasks, the upcoming events you’re planning to organize, as well as the correspondence you’ve been having with your customers via email, chat, or phone.

Bigin’s analytics dashboard shows per month revenue, your best selling items, the most active customers that you currently have, and if you’ve got any overdue tasks to take care of. The CRM software will also notify you when you receive an email from some of your contacts or an instant message on Twitter.

Bigin is one of the few CRM offers that comes with a free plan. It includes the following features:

  • 3 connected user accounts
  • Leads, contacts, and deals management
  • CRM dashboard with sales forecasting
  • Tasks, events, call log, and notes

All pricing plans are quoted in EUR and are 20% cheaper if paid annually:

  • Standard – EUR 12 per user per month
  • Professional – EUR 20 per user per month
  • Enterprise – EUR 35 per user per month
  • Ultimate – EUR 45 per user per month

The Ultimate plan comes with a 30-day free trial, and the other paid plans can be tried for free for 15 days.

Zoho CRM Pros:

  • Zoho allows you to easily drag and drop deals
  • Bigin has a free plan
  • You can also set up multiple pipelines

Zoho CRM Cons:

  • All quotes are in EUR which can be confusing
  • Zoho offers limited customer support
  • Bigin requires a lot of customizations to get started

PipeDrive

PipeDrive claims to be the first CRM platform developed for salespeople by salespeople. This is the best CRM for small businesses that need to better visualize their entire marketing and sales process. The platform allows you to easily add deals and specify their value, as well as set an expected close date.

PipeDrive’s dashboard is as easy to use as putting sticky notes on a whiteboard. Thus, you’ll be able to tell how each deal is progressing through your pipeline at any given time. The system will automatically notify you if a deal is going cold so you could act accordingly.

PipeDrive’s unlimited custom fields allow solopreneurs to collect and organize all sales data they need and create specific fields for their products. The statistics tool shows how your pipeline is performing and which stages need fine-tuning.

To see a more detailed analysis on your business, you should apply relevant filters, and this requires some preliminary knowledge. This is one of PipeDrive’s few drawbacks. Being one of the best CRM solutions out there, PipeDrive supports call and email tracking and contact history management.

How much does PipeDrive cost?

PipeDrive offers the following pricing plans:

  • Essential – EUR 12.50 per month
  • Advanced – EUR 24.90 per month
  • Pro – EUR 49.90 per month
  • Enterprise – EUR 99 per month

All quotes are in Euro and are valid for a full year. With the exception of Enterprise, all plans include a 14-day free trial, but there isn’t a free plan.

PipeDrive CRM Pros:

  • The platform is easy to use
  • The dashboard offers clear visibility of your deals
  • Good communication management features

PipeDrive CRM Cons:

  • No free plan
  • The Essential plan features basic CRM functions
  • All prices are quoted in EUR

AgileCRM

Agile offers free CRM solutions for small businesses and solopreneurs. This is the only contender on our list to offer as many as ten connected user accounts with their free plan. In addition to robust online business automation features, AgileCRM offers a convenient online calendar to manage your appointments and a contact list with 1,000 entries.

The free email marketing templates are rather basic, but they are well-complemented by the platform’s powerful deals and sales automation. This is the only CRM software on our list that synchronizes seamlessly with your Gmail account and all of your favorite Google Apps.

Agile’s best feature is the revolutionary 360-degree contact views of your social data and calls. We also liked how easily the user can import and export CSV files. Of all candidates on our list, agile probably offers the best lead tagging and segmentation features.

AgileCRM pricing plans

In addition to its free plan, Agile offers the following pricing options:

  • Starter – $8.99
  • Regular – $29.99
  • Enterprise – $47.99

All quotes are per user per month if paid for two years. Unfortunately, Agile’s paid plans do not include a free trial.

AgileCRM Pros:

  • 360-degree contact views
  • A free plan with a lot of useful features
  • The platform has got a short learning curve
  • Efficient workflow builder

AgileCRM Cons:

  • The free plan’s support is by email only
  • The starter plan provides only 5 email campaigns
  • The automation tools are difficult to set up

ActiveCampaign

You may come to ask yourself why an online marketing platform as powerful as ActiveCampaign occupies the last spot on our list. Well, the reason is pretty obvious. ActiveCampaign is mostly for launching email marketing campaigns and creating beautiful email templates and landing pages.

As far as it has got some CRM capabilities, they are part of the platform’s sales pipelines and marketing automation tools. The built-in CRM of ActiveCampaign allows you to easily perform various customer relationship management tasks from a centralized platform. The CRM tool automatically updates contact details and lets you view a contact’s entire purchase history from their record.

The CRM software of ActiveCampaign has been developed around deal creation and management. Instead of a unified dashboard, the platform provides different card-based CRM pipelines, where you can manually move your deals from one stage to the next. All stages can be customized to match your existing sales processes, in case you sell more than one product or service

ActiveCampaign’s unique approach to CRM is not based on leads and accounts. Every contact is a potential lead and is thus considered a potential deal opportunity. Solopreneurs can add tasks, notes, and send emails in each deal. By lightening up their CRM tool, ActiveCampaign helps solopreneurs focus on what they can do best – get their sales pipeline and marketing automation to work together for faster sales.

Low granularity level

ActiveCampaign’s CRM tool offers decent reporting capabilities neatly organized on the dashboard. Your business as a solopreneur can also benefit from funnel overviews and numbers of closed deals by the owner.

Compared to Salesforce or Microsoft Dynamics, ActiveCampaign’s CRM tool offers fewer customizations and a low level of granularity. For example, solopreneurs can’t export their list of deals from the tool without setting up an API call for that.

Not all ActiveCampaign Plans Include CRM

Here we should mention that the built-in CRM tool is only available on ActiveCampaign’s Plus, Professional, and Enterprise plans. If paid yearly, they cost as follows:

However, most solopreneurs will be reluctant to pay more than $50 per month for a CRM tool. ActiveCampaign does not offer a free version. Its Lite plan costs $9 per month but does not offer any CRM capabilities. All plans that include CRM come with a free trial, but the Plus plan offers only basic CRM features. As the Pro and the Enterprise plans are expensive, ActiveCampaign is hardly solopreneurs’ preferred choice is CRM.

ActiveCampaign CRM Pros:

  • The tool is light and easy to use
  • ActiveCampaign offers reliable customer support
  • Their CRM software is sales-focused

ActiveCampaign CRM Cons:

  • Low level of customization and granularity
  • Not all plans include CRM capabilities
  • The cheapest CRM plan includes only basic reports

Conclusion

The best CRMS software should be suitable for their small business and should offer decent social media and marketing automation capabilities. The CRM solutions reviewed below all offer friendly customer support, easy sales pipeline setup, and many of them boast a free version.

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