Best contact center CRM in 2024

If you’re looking for a free CRM, look no further than Bitrix 24. Its software is free forever for an unlimited number of users — pretty much unheard of in the industry. The free plan comes with 35 free online sales tools, an omnichannel contact center, customizable fields, marketing automation and inventory management. It also offers VoIP telephony support, including call recording, transfer and forwarding.

However, the free plan doesn’t offer webmail or telephone, its video call functionalities are pretty limited and you can’t share files across departments. If those features are necessary to your operations, consider upgrading to one of its four paid plans, starting at $61 monthly for five users.

The paid plan prices are pretty expensive relative to other companies, and some customers report that its interface isn’t user-friendly and is burdensome to use. So, if the free plan doesn’t work for you, you may be better served with others on this list for the price.

Salesmate is an attractive, user-friendly CRM that’s packed with customization features. It allows businesses to create their own modules, fields, pipelines and dashboards to build customized layouts for each team. It also offers field rules, custom formulas and pipeline templates.

Smaller contact centers will find a lot of benefits from its Basic plan at $29 per month per user. This plan offers call and text, workflow automation, reporting and tracking. But for more customization options like custom reports and dashboards or custom roles, the Pro plan is a better choice ($49 per month per user).

If you want a CRM that puts you in the driver’s seat — and don’t mind spending a decent amount of time setting up all the customization rules and formulas — Salesmate’s two base plans offer a great solution for the price.

While other CRMs on this list offer a generic CRM for all types of businesses, Zendesk offers two pathways for customer service teams to choose from: a CRM designed to be used by sales teams and one designed specifically for support teams called Zendesk Suite. Depending on how your contact center functions, one or the other may be a better fit.

Zendesk Sell plans start at $25 per month per user, while Zendesk Suite starts at $69 per month per user. At that price, the Sell plan offers the core of what a contact center CRM should, including call tracking and recording and text messages.

But if you want to take your services up a notch (and have the budget for it), the Zendesk Suite plans expand into more service-specific niches like email, chat, voice, social messaging, ticketing systems, a chatbot system and help desk features. If these are features you may have paid for otherwise through an add-on or third party, using a Suite plan can simplify the process in one place.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 is a set of accounting and sales software, which includes the Dynamics CRM. Its CRM product list is vast, including a variety of products for different types of customers. For a contact center, four of its products match a customer’s need: Business Central Essentials (starting at $70 per user per month), Business Central Premium (starting at $70 per user per month), Customer Service Professional (starting at $50 per user per month) and Sales Professional (starting at $65 per user per month).

Each plan offers its own benefits and features, depending on what you want out of a CRM. For example, the Central plans combine finance, sales, service and operations into one ERP tool, while the Sales plans operate more like a sales-based CRM with AI, automation and data insights.

There’s a reason why Microsoft is such a giant in the industry, although its complex (and sometimes complicated) solutions may be too much for some businesses. You can try it out yourself to see if it works for your needs with a free 30-day trial.

Agile CRM sells four plans, including one free plan. Its paid plans start at $14.99 per user per month, which is affordable compared to others on this list. While free always sounds nice, its free plan isn’t a good fit for most contact centers as it doesn’t include telephone services like two-way calls, call recording or voicemails and can only handle 1,000 contacts.

Its paid plans cover quite a bit of ground for the price, especially its Regular plan at $49.99 per user per month. It includes telephone services – although still no call recording or voicemail – and expands features to include social media monitoring, email marketing, a knowledge base and over 50 integrations.

Most of its plans — including free — are packed with unique marketing features, setting Agile CRM apart from the competition. In addition to email services, the Regular plan includes marketing automation, ten campaign workflows, 5,000 branded emails and a landing page builder. So, if you want a CRM that handles more than just calls, Agile CRM is a good solution for the price.

Monday.com, a well-known project management platform, sells a customizable CRM starting at $15 per user per month. While the CRM is designed for sales teams, contact centers can choose from some of its customization features like account and contact management, status reports, personalized email templates and custom dashboards to tailor it to their needs.

The most significant benefit of Monday.com is its history of collaboration. As a project management software, it has perfected the art of working together as a team — which is often needed within a contact center. This includes collaboration across unlimited documents, customizable pipelines and contacts.

Plus, its Standard, Pro and Enterprise plans offer automation features like task generation, email composition, content summarization and formula building to expedite work. With these plans, you can install integrations, like Aircall for click-to-call or Mailchimp for email, to customize your plan (although these may incur additional costs).

Freshsales CRM from Freshworks is packed with automation features, ranging from automated workflows to automatic profile enrichment. We especially like the sales sequences, which include automated touchpoints and prospect definitions. These automation features help reduce redundant tasks and enhance critical information for your team.

These tools are included in its paid plans, which start at $18 per user per month, although the higher up in tier you go (and in price), the more automation features you get. Freshsales also has a free plan for up to three users, although none of the automation features are included.

And while Freshsales has a ton of optional integrations, email, chat and phone are built into the software, meaning no additional fees or complicated installations. But, the breakdown of plans isn’t as straightforward as some of the competitors, so it may take some time to find the right one for your business.

Zoho CRM sells four CRM plans, plus two other custom CRM products called Bigin and Zoho Desk, to give customers more options for finding a plan that works for them. Bigin is especially very affordable if you only need a telephone, email and contact records.

But if you want more bang for your buck, the traditional Zoho CRM plans offer features like sales automation, dashboard customizations and marketing automation, starting at $20 per month per user. And if you can’t figure out which plan is best for you, simply take its free Edition Selector quiz.

Zoho also offers “Lite” users for just $15 (Enterprise and Ultimate plans only), which allows access to features like analytics, contacts and other limited options. For contact centers with many employees who don’t need to provide full access to everyone, this can be a great way to stay on budget without forgoing users completely.

If your contact center operates exclusively or frequently within the social world, Nimble CRM is a great option. It offers unique features like social profile matching and enrichment, social media extensions and Outlook and Gmail integrations. These features help build more detailed customer contact cards automatically on your employee’s behalf.

Nimble only offers one plan and doesn’t include telephone, which may be a drawback for some businesses. But at $29.90 per user, the cost to add a telephone integration with features like click-to-call may be worth the cost — especially if social CRM is appealing to you.

For smaller businesses, Hubspot’s Sales Hub CRM plans are a good choice. While its business and enterprise plans can reach upwards of $1,500 per month per user, the Sales Hub plans start at a much lower price: free. This plan includes email tracking, reporting dashboards, contact management and email integrations.

Its Sales Hub Starter plan is $20 per month per user and includes more email features like templates and tracking domains, 500 calling minutes, automated to-do lists and automatic conversation routing.

It doesn’t offer as many customization features or unique products as some of its competitors, but both its free and Starter Hub plans are very generous in terms of what’s included in the price. And most smaller businesses will find the feature list to fit most of their basic needs.