As per a study by Backlinko, Salesforce CRM holds 19.8% of the market share in the CRM Applications Market.
While this statistic clearly shows the popularity of Salesforce, it also shows that 80.2% of the market share is captured by other CRMs!!
Wait!! What??!
Yes!! You heard it right!
Now small and growing businesses are coming to terms with the fact that their teams only use a fraction of the capabilities of the CRM. And also rather than just looking for CRM software, the businesses are on the lookout for integrated software with Project Management tools, HRMS, CRM and integrations with third-party apps, everything in one place available at an affordable rate. Also small and growing businesses are actively using online video editors for easy video editing.
In the last few years, many brand new Salesforce alternatives have arrived and they are doing great catching up with the market leader.
In this blog, we review the best Salesforce alternatives, highlight their key features, and analyze whether they will be the right fit for your business.
But before we begin, let’s find the answer to this important question.
Is Salesforce the right CRM for your startup?
Salesforce may be the best CRM solution for some enterprise startups. Despite this, we feel most startups – the ones that don’t generate annual revenue of billions – shouldn’t use Salesforce. Here’s why:
- Salesforce is Expensive: If you have extensive needs across sales, customer support, and marketing, and are planning on making use of Salesforce products to meet these needs then be ready to pay extra.
- You need add-ons to get the most out of it
- Complex setup that might lead to low CRM adoption and poor employee productivity
- Configuration is time-consuming
- Poor Customer support: Help is rather limited via the self-service opportunities. In addition, certain customer questions remain unanswered on the Salesforce Trailblazer Community.
- A cluttered interface that makes simple tasks unnecessarily complex
- The learning curve never seems to end
Yes, Salesforce is one of the most comprehensive CRM platforms but you really have to pay plenty for those privileges. And if you’re a startup, you’d probably need something more intuitive to get started which is way cheaper than Salesforce CRM.
And here we have a list of top 9 Better and Cheaper Alternatives to Salesforce CRM:
- TeamWave
- Pipedrive
- Zoho CRM
- Engagebay
- Nutshell CRM
- Agile CRM
- Bitrix24
- Keap
- Capsule CRM
#1 Salesforce Alternative: TeamWave
TeamWave is easy to use, straightforward, and super affordable – and that’s exactly what you’re looking for in a Salesforce alternative, right?
You can manage your sales, projects, teams, clients, and marketing all in one place. TeamWave lets you streamline workflows, get things done faster, and scale your business with confidence.
You can get all this for a flat price of US $39/month for UNLIMITED USERS. Yes! TeamWave does not charge per-user fees.
Top TeamWave Features
This is how your business can work smarter with TeamWave:
- Visual Sales Pipeline: This gives you complete visibility of your deals across different stages. Quickly see how many deals are in each stage, sort and filter by their expected close date, make smart decisions and stay in control of a complex sales process.
- Customize your CRM: Customize your sales pipeline, filters, contacts and deals with ease, to suit any type of sales process.
- Time Tracking: Keep track of hours worked, improve your team’s productivity and your bottom line.
- Work Anywhere, Anytime: Our mobile apps let you access your deals, tasks, projects and contacts even when you’re on the road.
- Team Calendar: Schedule and track meetings, tasks, milestones and events for you or other team members.
- Collaborate: Work with clients, partners and your team. With the option to keep things private, you control what the client (and team members) can see.
- Contact Management: Manage all contacts from one place, get a clear overview, and build better relationships.
- Reports and Dashboards: Gain instant visibility and insights you need to make informed decisions in real-time. Spot issues before things go off-track.
- Integrations: Powerful integrations with apps such as Zapier, Quickbooks, GSuite, Mailchimp and Slack. You can capture and collect the information from the apps that you daily use, without leaving TeamWave. Apart from these integrations, TeamWave’s REST-based API enables developers to integrate CRM, Projects & HR functionality into virtually any system or application.
Paid Plan for Unlimited Users: US$ 39/month
#2 Salesforce Alternative: Pipedrive
Pipedrive enables startups to stay at the top of their game by streamlining the processes from the get-go and actively monitoring their deal pipeline. It is easy to set up, cost-effective and user-friendly – landing it here on our list of cheaper salesforce alternative for startups.
Top Features:
- Deal management
- Customizable pipelines
- Contact and Organization Management
- Deal and activity reports
- Sales Assistant
Key Consideration: Pipedrive is an affordable option for small businesses in search of basic features. But if your team demands advanced features such as goal tracking, custom fields and products catalog, you will have to go for the higher plans and that becomes expensive for small businesses.
Paid Plan for 10 users: US$ 125/month
#3 Salesforce Alternative: Zoho CRM
Zoho CRM has a simple and straightforward user interface. It helps your team to reach out to the right prospects, engage with them faster across various channels and thus helps you to close more deals in a smarter way.
Top Features:
- Deal management
- Page Customization
- Score prospects
- Workflow automation
- Send bulk emails
Key Consideration: Zoho makes the cut as a Salesforce alternative for startups. It strikes a balance between providing essential CRM features and highlighting different options for integrations. But, at the same time, Zoho is too difficult to get started with – specifically for users who are not familiar with CRM terminology or concepts. Simply put, it has too steep of a learning curve.
Paid Plan for 10 users: US$ 140/month
#4 Salesforce Alternative: Engage Bay
EngageBay is an all-in-one marketing, sales, and service platform with free CRM. The software is designed with startups and SMBs in mind, thus providing a comprehensive set of tools at affordable pricing. Its pricing plan is perfectly tiered to cater to businesses of all kinds.
Top Features:
- Drag-and-drop form and landing page builder
- Intelligent lead scoring
- Powerful A/B testing tools
- Built-in social suite
- Robust set of automation tools
- Two-way calendar sync
- Smart data analytics
Key Consideration: Though EngageBay is hands down one of the best platforms for startups and SMBs, it could do away with more pre-built templates.
Paid Plan for 10 users: US$ 89.9/month
#5 Salesforce Alternative: Nutshell CRM
Nutshell is a sales-focused CRM, that allows the sales reps to optimize their efforts and focus more time on building customer relationships. It offers dozens of software integrations for accounting, email marketing, communication etc.
Top Features:
- Customized pipelines
- Sales automation
- Email marketing
- Reporting and performance tracking
- Contact management
Key Consideration: Nutshell CRM calls themselves the sneaky powerful CRM that is simple to use and sophisticated for any business. However, the user reviews on websites like G2 suggest that the UI is outdated and the learning curve is high.
Paid Plan for 10 users: US$ 220/month
#6 Salesforce Alternative: Agile CRM
Agile CRM combines sales and marketing features in one platform. It is a powerful and easy-to-use software that is perfect for small businesses. It offers plugins and integrations for social media, customer support, email marketing, telephony services, billing, content management systems (CMS) and more.
Top Features:
- Contact Management
- Appointment scheduling
- Track deal stages and milestones
- Landing page builder
- Email tracking
Key Consideration: Agile CRM is one of the affordable CRM choices in this list. But that comes at the cost of limited third party integrations and service automation features.
Paid Plan for 10 users: US$ 89.9/month
#7 Salesforce Alternative: Bitrix24
Bitrix24 is a good option for sales teams that are fairly tech-savvy and can handle an open-source platform with a steep learning curve.
Top Features:
- Gantt Charts
- Time Tracking
- CRM access rights
- Recurring deals
- Create deals and invoices from quotes
Key Consideration: It’s a powerful piece of software but it has a lot of additional features, communication tools, and software that comes along with it. Thus making it hard to set up and install the software.
Paid Plan for 50 users: US$ 79/month
#8 Salesforce Alternative: Vtiger CRM
Vtiger is a comprehensive CRM solution designed for small businesses. It adds value to your sales process from helping you capture top leads, nurture deals via automated campaigns, collaborate with teammates, analyse & forecast revenue, and ultimately win more deals.
Top Features:
- Multiple pipelines
- Internal team collaboration
- Live Web chat
- Customizable reports and dashboards
- Invoicing and Vendor management
Key Consideration: This is an affordable choice for small businesses but its innovative but convoluted navigation and menu system can present a steep learning curve for new users.
Paid Plan for 10 users: US$ 100/month
#9 Salesforce Alternative: Capsule CRM
Capsule CRM is a simple and powerful CRM that lets you store and manage all your business contacts in one place. Nurture customer relationships and win more sales with ease. It allows you to integrate with over 50 business apps such as Mailchimp, Zendesk, Zapier, PieSync and Xero.
Top Features:
- Calendar and task management
- Customizable sales milestones
- Kanban visual pipeline
- Activity reporting
- Add-ons and integrations
Key Consideration: Although Capsule CRM has a multitude of integrations with the most used SMB tools, it lacks lots of reporting features. And also, overall the feature-set might be limited for growing and large businesses.
Paid Plan for 10 users: US$ 180/month
So what are you waiting for? Click here to kickstart your free TeamWave trial.