Skip to main content

Digital Trends may earn a commission when you buy through links on our site. Why trust us?

Best Salesforce alternatives 2023: 7 other CRM tools worth trying

In the realm of sales management, finding the right customer relationship management software (or CRM) is crucial for streamlining your sales funnel, nurturing customer relationships, and boosting your conversion rate. While Salesforce has long been a dominant player in the CRM market, there are a number of compelling alternatives that offer comparable functionalities and features.

This roundup explores seven powerful Salesforce alternatives, analyzing their unique strengths, customizable interfaces, and integration capabilities. Whether you’re a small startup, a growing medium-sized business, or an established enterprise, these CRM systems provide diverse solutions to your specific sales management needs. From advanced AI-driven lead prioritization to intuitive visual pipelines, each alternative offers its own benefits that can transform how you approach sales. Ready to level up your sales game? Let’s dive in:

Freshsales

The Freshsales CRM logo on a white background.
Freshsales

Freshsales CRM is a compelling alternative to Salesforce, offering robust features to enhance customer relationship management for sales teams. With its intuitive interface and automation tools, Freshsales simplifies lead management, contact segmentation, and deal tracking. What sets Freshsales apart is its powerful AI capabilities, which enable sales representatives to prioritize leads effectively and engage with prospective customers. By leveraging AI-driven lead scoring, sales teams can focus on the most promising opportunities, ultimately leading to faster deal closures.

Moreover, Freshsales provides advanced analytics and reporting that offer valuable insights into team performance and sales pipeline health. Sales managers can track key metrics, identify bottlenecks, and make data-driven decisions to optimize outreach. The customizable dashboard allows teams to tailor the CRM to their requirements with a more personalized and efficient workflow. Additionally, Freshsales integrates seamlessly with popular communication tools, such as email and phone systems, facilitating smooth collaboration and ensuring that no customer interaction falls through the cracks.

Zoho

The Zoho CRM logo on a white background.
Zoho

Zoho CRM is an exceptional Salesforce alternative, providing a comprehensive suite of tools for businesses of all sizes to effectively manage customer relationships. One of its standout features is its highly customizable interface, allowing you to tailor the CRM to your needs and workflow. With Zoho CRM, businesses can easily configure modules, fields, and automation rules to align with their unique sales process.

Another strength of Zoho CRM is its seamless integration with other apps, allowing you to forge a unified ecosystem spanning your entire business. This enables seamless data flow between sales, marketing, and customer support teams, allowing for smoother collaboration and providing a birds-eye view of customer interactions. Additionally, Zoho CRM offers advanced sales and customer interaction analytics, letting business owners track key performance metrics, track sales, and make decisions based on hard data.

Zoho CRM’s features include lead management, contact management, pipeline tracking, and more. It also provides social media integration, email marketing automation, and customer support functions, allowing businesses to nurture leads, engage with customers, and provide exceptional service.

Hubspot

The HubSpot logo on a white background.
Hubspot

HubSpot CRM stands out as another robust Salesforce alternative. Renowned for its powerful inbound marketing and sales software, HubSpot CRM is compelling because of its user-friendly interface and intuitive design that makes for easy adoption by sales teams. With HubSpot CRM, businesses can seamlessly manage contacts, track deals, and automate parts of the sales process, all within an environment that requires minimal training.

Another of HubSpot CRM’s key strengths is its extensive integration options. The platform effortlessly connects with many popular email clients, social media outlets, and other essential tools, ensuring seamless data synchronization and maximizing efficiency. This integration enables sales representatives to quickly and easily access customer information, track communication history, and deliver personalized service, all within the CRM.

Furthermore, HubSpot CRM provides detailed customer data, enabling sales teams to tailor their approach and engage with prospects in a more personalized manner. The CRM’s built-in reporting and analytics features provide insights into sales performance, allowing businesses to identify trends, monitor progress, and fine-tune their strategies accordingly. Best of all? It’s totally free to use.

Monday

The Monday.com logo on a purple background.
Monday.com

Although it’s better known as a project management app, Monday.com also offers robust CRM tools, making it another Salesforce alternative worth mentioning. Its intuitive and collaborative interface sets Monday CRM apart, which promotes transparent communication between individuals and across teams. The platform allows sales teams to track leads, manage customer interactions, and streamline sales, ensuring everyone stays aligned and up-to-date. This collaborative environment fosters teamwork throughout the sales process.

The visual nature of Monday CRM is among its standout features. With its customizable boards, teams can visualize their sales pipelines, track deals, monitor projects, and see progress at a glance. This helps sales team members stay organized, prioritize tasks effectively, and identify any bottlenecks in the sales funnel. Monday’s flexibility also allows for customization to align with different sales methodologies, making it adaptable to the unique needs of various businesses.

Like the other top Salesforce alternatives, Monday integrates seamlessly with popular communication tools like email and chat apps, enabling customer service representatives to connect with customers. This flexibility extends to its integration capabilities as well, allowing you to connect Monday CRM with other essential business tools and create a centralized hub for all customer-related activities.

ClickUp

The ClickUp CRM logo on a black background.
ClickUp

Like Monday, ClickUp is a well-known known project management and productivity platform that offers CRM functionalities. ClickUp CRM allows businesses to organize leads, track communication history, and manage deals more efficiently. It also syncs with popular communication apps, including email and chat, putting it in the same league as the other Salesforce alternatives we’ve mentioned. This integration ensures smooth collaboration between sales representatives and customers, facilitating efficient communication and timely follow-ups.

ClickUp CRM’s versatility is another notable strength, as it can serve as an all-in-one solution for both sales and project management. Businesses can customize workflows, create custom fields, and set up automation rules to align with their unique sales processes. The flexible interface and reporting capabilities provide valuable insights into sales performance and customer relations, allowing businesses to identify areas for improvement, optimize their outreach, and nurture the highest quality leads.

This adaptability ensures that ClickUp CRM can cater to the needs of different industries and sales methodologies. Whether you’re a small startup or an established enterprise, ClickUp CRM provides a powerful alternative to Salesforce that integrates sales and project management into a single platform. And, like HubSpot, it’s free.

Pipedrive

The Pipedrive CRM logo on a green background.
Pipedrive

Pipedrive CRM is a Salesforce alternative that’s particularly well-suited to small and medium-sized businesses. Its emphasis on visual pipeline management sets it apart, allowing smaller sales teams to track deals and monitor progress more effectively. Pipedrive’s intuitive interface and automation features greatly simplify lead management, enabling organizations to focus their energies on the most promising prospects. The platform nonetheless provides a broad set of features, including email integration, activity reminders, and sales forecasting.

One of the best things about Pipedrive CRM is its mobile app, which allows sales representatives to quickly access critical information on the go. This mobility makes sure that important customer interactions and updates are never missed. Pipedrive’s integration options also enable businesses to sync with many third-party apps and tools, ensuring a centralized and interconnected sales ecosystem. Pipedrive CRM also offers the reporting and data that you need to analyze your sales performance and get a handle on what’s working (and what’s not).

Act!

The Act! CRM logo on a white background.
Image used with permission by copyright holder

Act offers a trusted and long-standing CRM system that rounds off our list of Salesforce alternatives. Act is a highly customizable CRM system that can be fine-tuned to the needs and industry requirements of just about any company. With Act, businesses can efficiently manage contacts, track the progress of leads through the pipeline, identify sales opportunities, and automate various processes, ensuring a streamlined marketing funnel and reducing wasted energy.

One of Act’s major strengths is its robust reporting and analytics functionalities. The platform provides detailed marketing and sales metrics, allowing businesses to stay on top of trends and ahead of the competition. Customizable dashboards and reports also make it simple for sales teams to monitor progress, identify bottlenecks, and optimize their strategies. Act integrates with popular email clients and other productivity tools as well, facilitating smooth communication and collaboration across teams.

Act CRM offers a range of add-on options, allowing businesses to further customize the platform to their unique requirements. These add-ons include marketing automation, more advanced reporting, and additional app integrations. This lets companies scale up their CRM and expand Act’s capabilities as they grow.

When choosing the perfect CRM system for efficient sales management, you have many options worth considering. These Salesforce alternatives offer unique features and functionalities that cater to various business requirements and at competitive price points. Whether you’re looking for AI-driven lead prioritization, customizable interfaces, third-party integrations, visual pipeline management, project management capabilities, robust analytics, or all of the above, these alternatives provide powerful solutions to dial in your sales process, nurture customer relationships, and drive sales.

Lucas Coll
Deals and News Writer
Lucas Coll has been a freelance writer for almost a decade and has penned articles on tech, video games, travel, cars, and…