10 Best CRMs for Startups (2024)
Hi, I’m Kieran! I worked in startups for 5+ years at places like On Deck and Wefunder. As an early employee, one part of my job was evaluating CRMs to determine which best fit our team's needs. Picking a CRM is a big decision for a startup since the cost of it adds up quickly, and there is a lot of friction if you pick the wrong one and need to migrate to a different system down the road. Since this is such a big decision for startups, I decided to write a guide to share my personal learnings and research to help you feel confident when picking a CRM for your startup.
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The Best CRM Software for Startups
- Hubspot: Best overall
- Airtable: Best for custom workflows
- Salesforce: Best for reporting and analytics
- Copper: Best for google users
- Monday.com: Best for cross-team collaboration
- ClickUp: Best for affordability
- Close: Best for customer support
- Attio: Best for customizations
- Notion: Best for personal use
- Google Sheets: Best for simplicity
Hubspot
Recommended Starting Plan: Starter
Pricing:
- Free Tools – $0, no credit card required
- Starter – $20/month (billed annually)
- Professional – $1,600/month (billed annually)
- Enterprise – $5,000/month (billed annually)
Pros:
- Simple to use
- Affordability
- Solution for the entire funnel (marketing, sales, account management)
- Select startups are eligible for 90% off in year one (https://www.hubspot.com/startups)
- Robust marketing and sales suite
- It can be set up and administered without 3rd party developers or consultants
Cons:
- Minimal customizations - suboptimal for non-traditional sales processes
- Limited reporting
Why we picked it: When I joined Wefunder, I migrated our team from Copper to Hubspot after evaluating several options. As a startup with ~20 people (4 who were actively selling) without product-market fit, we had a limited amount of runway and needed to set up a system that would be adopted quickly. The combination of Hubspot’s simple setup, ease of use, and affordability made it the best choice for us. It took me less than a week to import existing contacts and data, build out the basic workflows, and create documentation so that our team could begin centralizing all of our sales conversations in Hubspot. As someone who took thousands of founder calls at Wefunder, my favorite part about Hubspot was the automated email sequences and task reminders to help me stay on top of every deal.
Startups on Hubspot: Zapier, SurveyMonkey, Loom, Wefunder, Razorpay
Airtable
Recommended Starting Plan: Business
Pricing:
- Free – $0
- Team – $20/seat/month (billed annually)
- Business – $45/seat/month (billed annually)
- Enterprise Scale – contact sales
Pros:
- Robust customizations
- Affordability
- Easy to integrate with Zapier for workflow optimizations
- It can be set up and administered without 3rd party developers or consultants
- Email support
Cons:
- Prone to errors when you add automations
- Prone to errors with data since teammates can accidentally delete or edit
- Breaks at extreme scale
Why we picked it: At On Deck, we used Airtable as our CRM for our admission process. For context, On Deck scaled from 15 → 200 employees in a little over a year and 1 → 20 Fellowships while I was Head of Admissions. During that time, I saw the major benefits as well as the drawbacks with using Airtable. Airtable was a good solution for our admission process because of several reasons — we needed to review and score hundreds of apps every day (it has a better interface than Hubspot to read multiple fields quickly), the filtering and dashboards allowed us to cut data to answer questions from leadership and other functional teams, and Airtable’s flexibility made it easy for us to update things on the fly (each admission cycle we were learning and trying new things to help us better evaluate candidates and make it easier for our team to do so).
Startups on Hubspot: Benchling, GitHub, Buildspace, Motion, Frame.io
Salesforce
Recommended Starting Plan: Starter Suite
Pricing:
- Starter Suite – $25/seat/month (billed annually)
- Professional – $80/seat/month (billed annually)
- Enterprise – $165/seat/month (billed annually)
- Unlimited - $330/seat/month (billed annually)
- Unlimited+ - $500/seat/month (billed annually)
Pros:
- Robust customizations
- Powerful tools for customer reports and sales forecasting
- Full-suite of sales prospecting tools
- Long-term solution if you scale
Cons:
- Steep learning curve
- Expensive
- Need to pay 3rd party developers and consultants to help you scale
- Very high switching costs
Why we picked it: When I worked at Wefunder, we narrowed our decision down to Hubspot and Salesforce. We picked Hubspot for the reasons I mentioned above, but I was still very impressed with the capabilities of Salesforce. The feature that caught my attention during the demo was the Sales Cloud Einstein tool. Sales teams spend hours every week creating lists and scoring leads to prioritize where to spend their time. Since we picked Hubspot, we ended up doing this manually by pulling in various public data points (lastest funding, traction data, social media likes, etc.) to associate with every lead to filter our lists down. Sales Cloud Einstein would have automated much of this and cut down the number of hours we spent doing “sales operations” work rather than talking to customers. Salesforce is a powerful solution for startups for startups with product market fit.
Startups on Salesforce: Uber Eats, Cruise, Wonolo, Asana, Sprig, GrubHub
Copper
Recommended Starting Plan: Basic
Pricing:
- Basic – $23/seat/month (billed annually)
- Professional – $59/seat/month (billed annually)
- Business – $99/seat/month (billed annually)
Pros:
- Integrated with Google Workspace
- Simple to set up and use
- Robust pipeline management and deal surfacing features
Cons:
- No sales or marketing products
Why we picked it: Copper is an excellent solution, but doesn’t have a full-suite of sales and marketing products that you can purchase in addition to the CRM software. A common stack with Copper might be to combine it with a specific marketing solution (like MailChimp for email marketing) and a specific sales solution (like Streak for email automations). My favorite aspect about Copper is that it natively integrates with Google Workspace. This means, you don’t need to leave your email workspace to move leads in your pipeline, set tasks and notification reminders, and follow up. If your team is experiencing fatigue from all the various software products you need to switch in and out of, then Copper may be your best bet.
Startups on Copper: Atlassian, Udacity, HelloFresh, Bird, Nerdwallet
Monday.com
Recommended Starting Plan: Standard
Pricing:
- Free – $0
- Basic – $12/seat/month (billed annually)
- Standard – $17/seat/month (billed annually)
- Pro – $28/seat/month (billed annually)
- Enterprise – contact sales
Pros:
- Comprehensive pre— to post sales tools
- Affordability
- Live chat, email, and request a call support service
- Customizable to any workflow
- Mobile app
Cons:
- Steep learning curve to set up the automations
- Limited templates to accelerate getting set up
- Minimal marketing software products
Why we picked it: Monday.com includes a robust sales suite with robust sales pipeline tracking, contact management, and mass email automation tools and excels in cross-team collaboration. In additional to managing marketing and sales process, teams on Monday.com use it for product management, internal roadmapping, HR, IT, and more. The major benefit of Monday.com is it can solve the needs of most of your teams and you can tie all sales and marketing functions back to personal and company-wide objective and key results. Another major benefit of Monday.com is its mobile app, which can move the needle for startups with field sales teams who need to track stuff on the go.
Startups on Monday.com: Canva, Glossier, Uber, Peloton, Wix
ClickUp
Recommended Starting Plan: Business
Pricing:
- Free – $0
- Unlimited – $7/seat/month (billed annually)
- Business – $12/seat/month (billed annually)
- Enterprise – contact sales
Pros:
- Affordability
- Simple to set up and use
- Top rated CRM on G2
- 24/7 chat support
Cons:
- Steep learning curve with automations and features
- Hidden pricing with premium features
- Lack of customizations on the homepage
- Certain integrations don’t work well
Why we picked it: ClickUp has a robust product-suite as it sells itself as “one app to replace them all” – tasks, docs, goals, and chat. Similar to Airtable, one of ClickUp’s main value propositions is highly flexible views you can create for your team to easily track, manage, and report on deals. ClickUp is easy to get started with, but there is a steep learning curve to become an expert since it has a lot of robust automations and features which you can incorporate into your workflows to take your processes to the next level.
Startups on ClickUp: Pigment, Netflix, Spotify, Booking.com, Zynga
Close
Recommended Starting Plan: Startups
Pricing:
- Startups – $49/seat/month (billed annually)
- Professional – $99/seat/month (billed annually)
- Enterprise – $139/seat/month (billed annually)
Pros:
- Transparent pricing
- Fast onboarding and team-wide adoption
- Free support and migration
- Select startups are eligible for $1,200 in credits
Cons:
- Affordability
- Minimal collaboration
- Not designed for outside sales teams
Why we picked it: Close is a great solution for startups with small sales teams. It’s a simple solution with fast onboarding and adoption, and transparent pricing. Close stands out in the customer support department as they are willing to help you with the initial migration and provide ongoing support regardless of the plan you pay for. Close works for startups because it’s a simple all-in-one CRM with calling, email, SMS, and reporting built-in. The main drawback with Close is that it’s not as affordable as some of the other solutions with similar product suites.
Startups on Close: Hipcamp, Customer.io, NatureBox, Commonwealth Joe
Attio
Recommended Starting Plan: Pro
Pricing:
- Free – $0
- Plus – $29/seat/month (billed annually)
- Pro – $59/seat/month (billed annually)
- Enterprise – $119/seat/month (billed annually)
Pros:
- Customizable to any workflow
- Live collaboration visibility
- Excellent chat and email support
- Select startups are eligible for $5,000 in credits
Cons:
- Affordability
- Not a fully-developed product suite since it’s a startup
Why we picked it: Attio is a hybrid solution between an Airtable and Notion CRM. Similar to Airtable, Attio is flexible, can easily integrate with other tools to supercharge your workflows, and has robust filtering and views so each individual can get the data they need. What I really like about Attio is it's perfect for the new multiplayer sales world. More and more startups realize sales is a team game where multiple stakeholders on your team are required to get a deal across the finish line, from the founder to an account manager to the Head of Sales. Attio’s sleek design allows you to collaborate in real-time on deals and provides insights into things like who the strongest point of contact is on your team and communication intelligence data to understand how warm or cold the contact is.
Startups on Attio: OpenAI, Pallet, Passionfroot, Casual
Notion
Recommended Starting Plan: Free
Pricing:
- Free – $0
- Plus – $8/seat/month (billed annually)
- Business – $15/seat/month (billed annually)
- Enterprise – contact sales
Pros:
- Easy-to-use templates to start
- Select startups are eligible for 6 months free
Cons:
- Minimal data ingestion
- No data enrichment
- Limited automations
- No reporting and forecasts
Why we picked it: While I wouldn’t recommend Notion as a company-wide CRM, I would recommend it as a personal CRM or for specific-projects. For example, Notion may be the best solution to spin up a CRM if I were doing a simple task like getting product feedback from various customer types. I may use Notion to find leads, write down notes, add links to video recordings, and define takeaways and next steps. So, if you’re already using Notion as your startup’s workspace, individuals on the team may elect to build their own CRMs to help them manage simple projects that don’t need cross-org visibility and the robustness of a revenue-driving sales motion.
Startups on Notion: Uber, Figma, Snowflake, Loom, Deel, Primer
Google Sheets
Recommended Starting Plan: Free
Pricing:
- Free – $0
Pros:
- Simple to use
- Free
Cons:
- No data enrichment
- No reporting and forecasts
Why we picked it: Google Sheets is one of the best products ever. It’s simplicity is the feature, and why it has been relevant for so long. If you’re down to Google Sheets and Notion, here is how I would think about it: If you are already paying for Notion as a workspace operating system — use Notion as the CRM; If you are not already paying for Notion — use Google Sheets since it's free.
Startups on Google Sheets: N/A
