How we compare CRM software
We list 11 CRM platforms sold into Australia, and a published rate card exists for 11 providers. Where a vendor quotes instead, we show a quote rather than an invented figure, because putting a number against a company that refuses to publish one would be a guess dressed as a fact.
The calculator is driven by the number of users, because that is the axis nearly every vendor here prices on, and by your contact count, because that is the axis most of them cap on. Ranking is arithmetic on the published rate at the numbers you enter. Commission never moves a provider, we do not sell prominence, and the row at the top is wherever the arithmetic puts it.
Prices are what each vendor publishes to an Australian buyer, in Australian dollars. Several are the monthly equivalent of an annual commitment rather than a true month-by-month price, which is why the contract row deserves as much attention as the figure beside it. Copper lists its contract as Annual and Salesforce as Annual, where Pipedrive lists No and Zoho CRM lists No.
Quoting and chasing jobs: CRM software for a local service business
A trades business, a salon, a clinic or a consultancy is not running a sales team, and that changes which rows in this table decide the purchase.
There is no pipeline of deals worked by a floor of reps. There is an enquiry that has to become a quote, a quote that has to be chased before it goes cold, and a customer who should be contacted again before the next service is due. Nearly all CRM marketing is written for the first situation and nearly all Australian small businesses are in the second. Four things follow from that.
Your seat count is small, so the per-seat price is not where the money goes. An owner, an office admin and perhaps a lead tech is often the entire licence count, and at that size the gap between any two of these tools is smaller than the gap between two plans of the same tool. What costs money is the plan the automation sits on, not the number of people using it.
Follow-up is automation, and automation is gated by plan. This is the most expensive misreading in the category, because the plan you priced is frequently not the plan the reminder lives on. Capsule CRM lists workflow automation as Yes (Growth+), Pipedrive as Yes (Growth+), Copper as Yes (Professional+) and HubSpot as Yes (Starter+). Monday CRM lists Limited (Standard+), which is a metered allowance rather than an on or off switch. If the reason you are buying is that quotes go unchased, price the plan carrying the automation, not the entry rung.
The phone matters more here than in a sales CRM, because a service business rings people rather than emailing them. Freshsales lists phone integration as Yes (built-in) and Salesforce as Yes, while Pipedrive lists Via integrations and Zoho CRM lists Via integrations. Keap's row reads No, which is an Australian constraint on an otherwise capable product rather than a feature it lacks everywhere.
Then the ledger. Capsule CRM lists its integrations as 60+ (Xero, QBO) and Copper lists 100+ (Google focus). Read that row for the name of your own accounting file before you read the price: a CRM that cannot push a quote into the ledger you already run leaves someone retyping it.
A mobile app is not a differentiator here: every row carries one, Capsule CRM's reads Yes.
Retail counters, walk-ins and where CRM software stops helping
Retail asks this question differently, and part of the honest answer is that a shop may not need a CRM at all yet.
A retail customer arrives without an appointment, pays and leaves, and no deal record is ever created, so pipeline management, which most of this table is built around, has nothing to hold. What a shop wants is the repeat purchase: a list of customers, some sense of what they bought, and a reason to contact them again. That is closer to email marketing with a customer database attached than to sales software, and it makes two rows matter more than the pipeline rows.
The first is where the email actually lives. ActiveCampaign lists email marketing as Yes (best-in-class) and Freshsales as Yes, while Zoho CRM lists Add-on (Zoho Campaigns), Pipedrive lists Add-on (Campaigns), Capsule CRM lists Add-on (Transpond) and Salesforce lists Add-on (Marketing Cloud). Where that row says add-on, the sending is a second subscription on top of the seat price, and for a retailer it is the part actually being bought.
The second is the contact ceiling, because a retail list grows with foot traffic rather than headcount. ActiveCampaign is the clearest case: its price row reads Per contact (from $23/mo) and its contact allowance 1,000 (Starter), so the bill tracks the list and ignores how many staff touch it.
If your POS already holds the customer list and you send an occasional email out of a dedicated mail tool, a CRM is very likely the wrong next purchase. The trigger to buy one is a customer relationship with stages, quotes, bookings or accounts, not simply having customers.
Per seat, per contact or one bundle: three ways CRM software is priced
There are three distinct pricing shapes in this table, and comparing figures across them is the fastest way to get the answer wrong.
Per user, per month covers most of it. Pipedrive publishes $19/user/mo (Lite), Zoho CRM $20/user/mo, Freshsales $13/user/mo (Growth), Capsule CRM $26/user, HubSpot $31/seat/mo (Starter), Copper $33/user/mo (Basic), Insightly $41/user/mo (Plus) and Salesforce $35/user/mo (Starter Suite). A headline that reads as small is a price per person: multiply it by everyone who needs a login, including the bookkeeper and the part-timer who only looks things up, then by twelve. A modest gap per seat is a real annual number at five people, which is why the seat count you enter reorders this table more than any feature does.
A seat minimum turns that arithmetic on its head at small sizes. Monday CRM lists a minimum of 3 seats, so a two-person business pays for an empty one, while Pipedrive lists None and Zoho CRM None. Sole traders should read that row first.
Per contact ignores seats entirely, and ActiveCampaign is the example above. The two shapes cross over, so a big team with a small list and a solo operator with a large list get opposite answers from the same table.
One bundled platform is the third shape. Keap charges a platform fee of $417/mo (Ignite, includes 2 users and 1,500 contacts) and then $55/user/mo above the 2 included, with a contact allowance of 1,500 (Ignite). That is not a seat price with extras bolted on, it is a marketing and CRM platform sold as one line, and priced accordingly.
Setup fees are the last term and mostly absent. Keap lists an implementation package at $2,091 one-time (Ignite Implementation Package), HubSpot lists None (Starter) and Pipedrive lists None. A vendor selling an implementation package is telling you how much implementation it expects you to need.
Seats or contacts: which cap a free CRM software plan hits first
State this plainly, because it is where free CRM plans surprise people: a free plan is capped on at least two things at once, users and stored contacts, and those two do not move together.
Capsule CRM's free plan is Yes (2 users, 250 contacts), HubSpot's is Yes (2 users, 1,000 contacts) and Zoho CRM's is Yes (3 users, 5,000 contacts). Read each of those as a pair of ceilings rather than as one allowance.
Seats change rarely, usually when you hire, and you see it coming. Contacts change every week you trade, nobody watches the number, and it only ever goes up, because a CRM keeps the people who never bought as well as the ones who did. So the cap that ends a free plan is almost always the contact cap, and it arrives mid-quarter rather than at renewal. That is why a plan genuinely free for a two-person business is not free for a two-person business with a mailing list.
The rest of the table has no free plan, only a time-limited trial: Insightly's row reads No, ActiveCampaign's No and Copper's No.
Paying does not automatically remove the ceiling either, which is the second half of this. On the entry paid plans, Capsule CRM's contact row reads 30,000 (Starter), HubSpot's 25,000 (Starter), Copper's 2,500 (Basic) and Monday CRM's 1,000 (Basic), while Pipedrive lists Unlimited, Freshsales lists Unlimited, Insightly lists Unlimited and Salesforce lists Unlimited.
Those are different products sitting in one column. Estimate the list you will hold in two years, not the one you hold now, and check it against the plan you would actually buy.
AI in CRM software, and the plan it usually sits behind
Every row in this table now lists some form of native AI, so "has AI" has stopped separating anything. Two rows still do.
The first is whether the AI is part of the plan or sold on top. HubSpot's AI row reads Native + add-ons (Breeze), Salesforce's Native + add-ons (Einstein, Agentforce) and Zoho CRM's Native + add-ons (Zia, Agent Studio), where Pipedrive's reads Native (AI Sales Assistant), Freshsales' Native (Freddy AI), Capsule CRM's Native (AI Content Assistant) and Copper's Native (Copper GPT). A row naming add-ons alongside the native features is describing a second line on the invoice.
The second is whether your own AI tools can reach the CRM. Some vendors now publish a Model Context Protocol server, a documented way for an assistant to read and write records directly instead of routing everything through an automation service. ActiveCampaign lists Native MCP (official), Monday CRM lists Native MCP (official), Zoho CRM lists Native MCP (Zoho, official) and HubSpot lists Native MCP (official, beta). Capsule CRM lists Native MCP (beta, read-only) and Freshsales Native MCP (beta), where Pipedrive lists Via 3rd-party (Zapier) and Insightly lists Via 3rd-party (Zapier). Keap's row reads Not stated.
Read the qualifiers on that row: beta means the vendor can change it, and read-only means an assistant can answer a question about your pipeline but cannot update it. If nothing in your business uses an AI assistant today, treat this row as a tiebreaker rather than a reason to choose.
CRM software an owner can set up without a consultant
What decides whether a non-technical owner gets a CRM running is not the software. Every row here is self-serve and lists custom fields, Capsule CRM's reads Yes, and every row lists API access, Pipedrive's reads Yes. The demo always looks fine. The work is the data, and three decisions taken before you import anything.
One list, deduplicated, with one owner. Contacts arriving from a phone, an inbox, an accounting file and a spreadsheet will overlap, and merging duplicates after go-live is far worse, because by then each copy carries its own history.
One pipeline, with the stages you actually use. Enquiry, quoted, won, lost is a complete pipeline for most service businesses. Every extra stage is one someone has to remember to drag a card into, and an unmaintained pipeline is worse than none because it looks like information.
Decide what counts as a record. Whether a customer is a person, a household, a site or a business changes every report you run, and it is close to impossible to change afterwards.
Two rows carry real signal on how much help you will get. Support is the first, and for an Australian buyer the timezone is the point. HubSpot lists support as 24/7 chat, Monday CRM as 24/7 online and ActiveCampaign as 24/7 chat, while Pipedrive lists Business hours, Zoho CRM lists Business hours and Capsule CRM lists UK and US west coast hours. Business hours in a distant timezone means a Tuesday morning question gets answered on Wednesday.
The second is the onboarding row above: where a vendor sells implementation as a priced package, treat it as part of the purchase rather than an optional extra you will skip.
The honest advice for an owner without a technical person is to buy the smallest system that holds your list and reminds you to follow up, and to finish setting it up inside a fortnight or not buy it at all. A capable system half-configured is worse than the spreadsheet you were actually keeping, and it costs money as well.