Top CRM Software Benchmark

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Our complete CRM software benchmark is available for download in excel format free of charge. You will also find a comparison of each tool on about thirty different features.

#11 Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales: The Microsoft Reference

Microsoft Dynamics 365 is a bit dusty and some would say a gas factory, but it remains a true industry standard. The great strength is obviously in the powerful integrations with the entire Microsoft 365 suite.

In short, Dynamics 365 for Sales is an adaptive and intelligent tool that will enable your sales team to monitor, collect and exploit the customer data you receive.

The Dynamics 365 Sales Professional plan starts at $65 per month per user. This is the basic integration between sales force automation and Microsoft 365. Then it goes up to $162 per month with a minimum of 10 users.

#12 Efficy CRM: the CRM suite with the best support

Efficy is an all-in-one software suite for French SMEs and VSEs. It’s made in Belgium (Brussels) and they put the emphasis on customer support.

They managed to find a nice compromise between the impressive number of features, and the depth of each, which is quite convincing.

You benefit from project management tools, marketing campaigns, and a complete CRM software, which even comes close to ERP at times.

Efficy manages to keep up with the market with an offer of €20 per license per month starting from 2 users. If you want to go further, the price goes up in increments of €20 per license to €80 per month per user. And then you have the whole package: multi-channel marketing, BPM, gamification, forms, tracking, etc.

#13 Copper CRM: A complete CRM in Gmail & Gsuite

Copper CRM is built for Google Suite (Gmail) users. Add leads, search for past interactions, create Google Calendar events etc. directly from Gmail.

It is a remarkably powerful solution, but manages to remain super light to install, and simple to use.

Copper is not among the cheapest CRMs, simplicity has a price! Rates start at $25 per month per user with the Basic package. You will be limited to 2500 contacts and 3 users.

After that, it goes up quite quickly, to $119/month per user.

#14 AgileCRM: Very powerful, but quite complex

AgileCRM is probably one of the most complete CRM software of our selection. Lead scoring, gamification, automation, … the list of features is really impressive.

All this, with an impressive free plan, and prices that are frankly far below the market.

So why only in #14?

The problem with AgileCRM is that the richness of its functionality is somewhat to the detriment of the user experience, and therefore of adoption. Above all, it is a very complete software, and therefore quite complex, which makes it quite difficult to configure.

Simply put, if this is your first CRM project and you’re looking for a lightweight, easy-to-install solution, you’ll have to pass. However, if you are a seasoned CRM practitioner and are looking for advanced functionality at an affordable price, Agile CRM is well worth a look.

Agile CRM offers a very generous free plan. Yes, you read that right, free.

Then it starts at $9/user/month and goes up to $29/license/month.

Overall, it is unbeatable in terms of quantity/price ratio, but don’t neglect the other costs it imposes (maintenance, integration, training, …), and the impact on adoption, which is more difficult to measure.

#15 Monday CRM: project management tool adaptable to CRM

Monday is first and foremost a project management tool that is currently very popular. It’s a far cry from JIRA and Asana, they’ve focused on the user experience to offer a hyper flexible tool that adapts to all possible processes.

From a product point of view, this is impressive.

On the CRM side, it is necessarily a little light on reporting and pipeline reviews, but the tool is very pleasant and very affordable. It’s a great solution for those who don’t yet have a proper CRM and are looking for an intermediate solution that is easy to implement.

What is CRM software? Definition

CRM software aims to optimise Customer Relationship Management (CRM).

Customer relationship management in the strict sense refers to the tools and processes that an organisation uses to manage its customer relationships. But CRM can (and should) also be used to manage relationships with all of your company’s external stakeholders. A CRM can, for example, include :

• Subscribers to your newsletters
• Leads at all stages of the funnel
• Your customers
• Your partners
• Your candidates
• … etc.

Customer relationship management includes guidelines on how direct interactions take place. But also tools to organise and track all the relevant information you need to :

• Finding and converting leads
• Making deals
• Building customer loyalty
• Improve customer satisfaction
• Develop your partnerships
• Optimise your recruitment

Overall, the goal is to make your organisation’s (and your brand’s) relationship with your ecosystem more effective.

Internally, a CRM can help salespeople automate their sales activities and managers track the performance of their team. With a good sales CRM, you’ll know when to contact your prospects, what to say and how to say it.

Do you need a CRM?

More concretely, there are generally three main uses for CRM.

#1 Managing a sales funnel

You are in this case if you are primarily looking to organise and structure your sales team. This use of CRM is very close to sales processes. It is essentially a question of setting up rules for allocating leads and processes for following up on sales opportunities.

This software facilitates the task of your teams and systematises the processes with a layer of automation and data enrichment (sequences, automated 3-day reminders, etc.).

This is the most common use of CRM software, and yet the furthest from the initial definition of the concept: here it is much more a question of transforming leads into customers through commercial action than of working on customer relations as such.

#2 Managing large accounts and multiple projects at once

This is the classic use of B2B service companies: consulting, web agencies, marketing agencies, CRM integrators (inception…) etc.

If your business is similar to this type of company, you know how essential it is for your commercial development to listen to everything that is being done and said by your client. You systematically sell a different, “tailor-made” product, and the challenge is much less in the assiduous follow-up of each commercial opportunity, than in the preparation of a convincing commercial proposal, the edition of a tailor-made (and often complex) estimate, etc.

#3 Develop a single customer repository

The idea is simple: it’s about centralizing all customer data in one place: all contacts with your teams, purchases (online or offline), behaviour on your website, activity on your product (if you sell software).

The objective? To manage all your customer relationships on a large scale and according to clearly defined processes in order to improve quality, better identify signals of upsell potential, and invest the energy of your sales teams in the right place.

That’s in the best of all possible worlds. In the real world, this kind of proposal often boils down to a (really) complete customer file – which is already a lot.

What makes a good CRM software?

We’d love to tell you that there’s only one among hundreds of programs that’s really worth it. But that would be rather dishonest. In reality, it all depends on what you want to do with your CRM, and how much you are willing to pay.

#1 If you are looking to optimise your sales funnel

If you have recognised yourself in our first scenario, the most critical aspect of the CRM software you install will be its adoption, and the time it saves your sales people.

It is therefore recommended to over-prioritise the user interface & ease of handling daily business tasks (note taking, calling, email, calendar, …). It may sound trivial, but if you want to optimise your sales funnel, it is precisely these tasks that you are looking to optimise.

To make your life easier, our opinion:

• If you are doing one-off sales, noCRM is simply brilliant at managing sales tasks.
• If you are selling on slightly longer cycles (i.e. more than 3 months), Pipedrive is more robust on tracking, automation and enrichment features, and the task management interface is still among the best on the market.
• If you are considering Salesforce or Hubspot for this use case, change your mind, or your use case.

#2 If you are looking to better manage a few key customer accounts

In this scenario, to put it simply, you have to deal with a lot of complexity, with relatively few customers.

For this, project management software is king. Overall, if your sales are complex enough that you consider them “projects”, take the project aspect fully into account.

#3 If you want to build a unique client repository

If you are in the process of building a single customer repository, it is strongly recommended that you start by identifying the “inputs” – the sources of customer data – and the “outputs” – the levers that can be activated through the centralisation of customer data.

Generally, your customer data comes mainly from the human relations ensured by your sales teams, and the challenge is mainly to expose this data to the agents in communication with a customer, and to exploit it in marketing automation campaigns. In this case, the main issue for commercial CRM is data quality.

Salesforce, in addition to being one of the market’s deepest solutions on the subject, is backed by a powerful community of integrators & experts who know the tool and its potential in depth.

The others are not featured here, as they are traditionally reserved for a much smaller audience, but download our full benchmark to compare Salesforce to other leaders in Enterprise CRM.