6 Web-based CRM Applications Side-by-Side
Customer relationship management software is important for businesses that are both small and large. Freelancers and small businesses need such a system as much as large businesses and enterprises do. Well, maybe you need it a bit more if you have millions of customers, but that said: managing your customer relationships is not only tricky and often complicated, it’s essential to running a successful business.
Software makes such a complicated and time-consuming aspect of your business easier to handle and more efficient. There are many web-based CRM applications available, so let’s take a look at a few of the options available to you.
Highrise
Highrise is the popular CRM from 37signals, developers of many other popular productivity web apps. There’s no free option, and the prices are a bit marked up – you’re probably paying for the storage space more than anything. Perhaps they’re only targeting enterprise users, but for my uses I’d only want to plonk down for a plan if it had more power than the cheapest option while costing less than the $50/month option.
Highrise’s main features are a shared company address book, built-in task management, contact histories and cases, which allows you to keep case notes on a contact, along with other files.
PipelineDeals
PipelineDeals delivers a sigh of relief with a monthly cost of $15 per user, and unlimited data storage is included in that price. PipelineDeals is very sales-oriented, as the name implies, focusing on tracking your sales, keeping a sales calendar, tracking your leads and organizing sales documents, so if you’re in a sales environment this may be one for you to look at. They talk about your sales pipeline a lot too. Who would’ve guessed?
Salesforce
Salesforce is perhaps the most popular CRM in the field, and prices start at $9 a month and go up higher than you can count. There’s also a pretty restricted free account called Personal Edition, which infers that it’s useless for anything business-related. Salesforce tries to integrate the process of managing customer relations with the process of funneling new leads into the system, using Google AdWords integration.
While it’s popular and quite powerful (and the fact you can manage AdWords campaigns from the app is enticing), it’s another CRM that is highly focused on making sales and not so much on customer relations management.
Oracle CRM On Demand
Oracle’s CRM On Demand starts at $70 a month per user. What you get for that $70 is not incredibly clear, with a convoluted website design that makes finding decent information difficult, and copy that’s just badly written. Oracle has some built-in analytics tools and call center integration features that will make it more useful to quite large businesses.
I couldn’t find any sign of whether data storage was limited or unlimited, and the website claims that the app requires “Microsoft Windows compatibility.” What kind of a hosted CRM requires you to be on Windows?
Unfortunately, when a web application’s sales pages are poorly designed, it’s a good indicator that the web app itself is just as bad.
SugarCRM
SugarCRM has an on-premise product, but we’re looking at hosted CRMs, so I’m going to look solely at their hosted option, Sugar On-Demand. The cheapest option is $40 a month and will allow you 300 users, though it requires an annual commitment. It also demands that you have five users or more, which is a fairly odd and restrictive move (as if the requirement for an annual commitment was not enough).
That said, SugarCRM seems to have a better balance between sales and marketing than some of the other options that focused far too much on one or the other to be an effective CRM. Furthermore, part of customer relationship management is good customer support, and SugarCRM is one of the few hosted options that offers decent customer support features.
Zoho CRM
From a perspective of price, Zoho CRM offers one of the best deals. The first three users are free, and after that, the prices are $12 and $25 per user per month for the Professional and Enterprise Editions respectively. The free edition isn’t lacking all that much from the paid versions; it doesn’t let you send email marketing material and there’s no SSL. There are a few other disabled features, but aside from that it’s fairly intact.
Zoho does a good job of balancing the marketing, sales and support triad, and includes an inventory management system that integrates with the sales process — this obviously prevents any embarassing sales of a product that is out of stock.
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Joel Falconer
Offering a unique perspective and insight on productivity based on his experience as a writer, musician, family man and manager, Joel Falconer has been published online and off, and brings to Lifehack's readers practical advice you can use to be more efficient and effective.
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Comments
mike says on August 27th, 2008 at 10:22 am
Zoho CRM is an excellent product. We have been using the free edition.
ckstevenson says on August 27th, 2008 at 11:44 am
Jeff, have any opinions on these services for a services based organization? Anyone else?
Anyone have any tips on how to actually get good use from a CRM tool? My company uses Central Desktop for basic project management, and we have tweaked it for running our proposals. This works fine, but I’d like to use a more CRM like too to better track opportunities and especially existing relationships.
Thanks!
Beth Robinson says on August 27th, 2008 at 11:54 am
Actually, there are less expensive options for Highrise. The one you mentioned is the lowest with SSL security for a group. You can get SSL for a single user for $30, non-SSL for a small company for $25, and a free plan for two users and 250 contacts without filesharing. Sure, it’s got limited utility, but for a freelancer just starting out it’s a good option and will expand with their needs and company in the future.
I’m not affiliated with Highrise but am currently using their free option to begin keeping track of my networking and like it so far.
Elliott says on August 27th, 2008 at 12:39 pm
Surprised you left Oprius off your list! $15 per month gets you unlimited storage, campaigns (setup autoresponders and reminders in a specific timed order), and much more. Great for indy sales people and network marketers.
Bill Rice says on August 27th, 2008 at 2:46 pm
I would add Kaleidico’s (http://kaleidico.com) icoSales to the mix. It has a unique “Get My Next Lead” feature that sort of defines the simplicity and focus of the web-based sales application. Here is a recent post I came across from a pretty enthusiastic client: http://lenderama.com/author/chrisj/
Dens says on August 27th, 2008 at 7:43 pm
http://joblogs.cc is launching at the Office 2.0 conference next week. Their intro says features suited for agile, service-focused teams.
Jeff says on August 28th, 2008 at 1:09 pm
Interprise Suite is a newcomer that is rather intriguing, http://www.interprisesuite.com. It isn’t Web based, but it can run over the internet so you can access from anywhere, yet it has the power of a desktop application. The great thing I feel is that it has not only CRM, but also accounting/ERP type functionality as well to manage your entire business. It can truly be a single solution to run your entire company, including your Website or retail operation.
Shane says on August 28th, 2008 at 4:15 pm
Another missing from the list Simple Sales Tracking – http://www.simplesalestracking.com
Free an Paid versions exist
cheers.
Alan says on August 28th, 2008 at 6:42 pm
How can we get SynergyXO (https://www.synergyxo.com) in the side-by-side?
Ramesh @ The Geek Stuff says on August 29th, 2008 at 1:09 am
The on-premise product of SugarCRM is excellent and cost nothing, if your IT team is savvy in managing a LAMP stack.
Todd Lohenry says on August 29th, 2008 at 5:40 pm
Salesforce.com has taken on a Microsoft attitude. I like SugarCRM better for many reasons, but their hosted plan is just BRAINDEAD. Many small businesses just don’t have 5 people. If they would only allow monthly payments for as few as 1 person, they would be the dominant player in the small business space, but their business plan is nowhere near as good as their product…
Devin Hedge says on August 30th, 2008 at 8:57 am
The author seems to not really understand what he is reviewing. CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is a broad field. SugarCRM, Salesforce.com, Pipeline Deals, etc. are Sales Force Automation (SFA) tools. They only address one of the many aspects of the customer relationship. They don’t address service delivery for service based applications, or product delivery (and the associated supply chain management) for product based companies. And NONE of them address hybrid companies that sell both products and services. For services delivery I highly recommend OpenAir.com. It is pricey and thier business model really doesn’t work for SMBs, but they got the requirements right and integration with your accounting system right. Two critical pieces to Customer Relationship Management.
Ann says on September 4th, 2008 at 5:43 am
Devine is right, it depends on what kind of business you are and what you really need.
And the vast majority of above listed products are sales force automation oriented.
If choosing among support oriented solutions I would recommend CRMdesk – http://www.crmdesk.com . These guys offer an unlimited data storage, allow supporting an unlimited number of customers and outstanding customer support in the first place. The program is hosted. I’ve t started with it like a month ago and it has being up and running in 3 days!
Mads Nygaard Pederen says on October 27th, 2008 at 3:38 pm
I am GREATLY surprised not to find anybody having mentioned vTigerCRM:
http://vtiger.com/
Demo is available on site.
Fully fledged alternative to Salesforce and it is Open Source in the genuine sense of the word. Know there are many fans of SF – but I find it quite cluttered and not particularly cost friendly.
vTiger is very definitely one to recommend for LAMP devs looking for a decent and free alternative – very sleek GUI and all the functionality needed to keeo things flowing…
Only pitfall – it is so extensive that it might hit the clutter category for some…
Thomas Trevino says on November 21st, 2008 at 4:47 pm
This is good but a good one to consider would be http://www.SalesNexus.com. They have good affordable pricing, great features that focus on sales and marketing as well as contact relations management, and Customer Support is Outstanding! Check it Out!
Jason Barone says on January 7th, 2009 at 10:47 am
I think the author did a fantastic job comparing very similar solutions. I’ve played with the demos of 5 of those and I really love the power of Salesforce and SugarCRM. Salesforce integrates very well with everything but if you want to add features, you’re going to tack on more money to your monthly bill. All the extensions and plugins cost extra too. SugarCRM works great–very similar to SF, but I really love the Open Source idea, it brings a whole different motivation to the developers and 3rd parties. SugarCRM can be hosted on your webpage very easily, could be setup within minutes by any tech savvy person, or your developer could set it up in minutes too. I run mine on my webserver and it works great. I pay $9.99/mo through my webserver and I host multiple sites, multiple emails, AND my SugarCRM flawlessly in one place. I vote SugarCRM because it can do a lot of what the others do, plus more.
Jason Barone says on January 7th, 2009 at 10:51 am
Oh and one more thing I read somewhere…they said the average Salesforce.com monthly bill is somewhere above $100/mo, because most people need a few of the extensions for daily activities. Keep that in mind.
David Schultz says on April 21st, 2009 at 9:08 am
Zoho CRM – I have tried to use the product on a couple of occasions and have left frustrated. I have also tried to get my business partner to use it, no luck. Just one user’s experience. Maybe it’s just me, but I find ACT! more intuitive, and that’s not high praise.
Chris says on March 1st, 2010 at 4:31 pm
SBMSuite offers a free and paid hosted CRM, the free version allows up to 3 users, and the paid version is $24/month unlimited users. The website is http://sbmsuite.com/products/w.....siness-crm