Five free CRMs we've tested. HubSpot is the only one that won't trap you. Here's the honest version, including which ones to avoid.
The only free CRM that doesn't punish you for not paying. 1M contacts, unlimited users, no time limit, full deal pipeline. Most free tiers exist to frustrate you into paying within 90 days. HubSpot is structurally different — they make money when you upgrade their marketing or sales hub, not when you outgrow the free CRM.
"Free CRM" is one of the most-searched commercial queries in software because almost everyone wants to avoid paying for a tool they're not sure they'll use. The catch is that most free CRMs aren't designed to be used long-term — they're lead magnets. Free until you hit a hard cap on users, contacts, automations, or storage, at which point you've already loaded a year of customer data into the tool and the migration cost is higher than just paying.
HubSpot is the structural outlier. Their business model lets them give away the CRM forever because the upsell path is the Marketing Hub and Sales Hub — separate products you may or may not buy in three years. That's why we recommend it without hedging. Everyone else on this list either limits the free tier hard enough to force an upgrade within months, or limits it so much that the free version isn't actually useful.
HubSpot CRM Free. Stays free as long as you need. Won't trap you.
Zoho CRM Free. Cleaner than Bitrix24 at the same scale.
Bitrix24. The unlimited-users-on-free-tier is genuinely unusual.
Skip free. Start on Pipedrive at $14/seat or HubSpot Sales Hub Starter at $15/seat and avoid the migration.
It's a 30-day trial, not free. And Salesforce is wrong for under-50-person businesses regardless of tier.
The right question for free CRMs isn't just "which is best" but "which one will trap you." Here's the honest version per pick.
The free tier doesn't include workflow automation. The first paid tier that does (Sales Hub Professional) is $100/seat/month — a 6.7× jump from Starter. If you know you'll need automation, start somewhere that includes it at a sensible price, like ActiveCampaign or Pipedrive Advanced.
The 3-user cap is hard. The moment you bring on a fourth person, you're forced to upgrade — and the next tier ($14/user) is fine, but you'll have wasted weeks setting up the free version. Just pay from day one or go HubSpot.
It looks and feels like enterprise software from 2014. Functional but joyless. Teams that will quietly stop logging in within a month should pick something else.
The 250-contact cap is the tightest on this list. Any business doing real outreach will hit it inside 6 months. By then you're locked in and paying $21/seat/month for the next tier — more expensive than Pipedrive.
Update cadence has slowed noticeably over the past two years. The product still works but doesn't feel like it's going anywhere. Fine for a year; risky for five.
Most free CRMs are designed to convert you to paid within 90 days. The features you'll actually want — automation, integrations beyond Gmail, more than 3 users, more than 250 contacts — are almost always paywalled. If you're an active business, the question isn't whether you'll pay, it's when. HubSpot is the only one on this list where the answer is "maybe never, and that's fine with them."
HubSpot's free CRM is genuinely the same product the paying customers get for the core CRM functions: contact management, deal pipelines, email tracking, meeting scheduling, basic reporting. You're capped at one deal pipeline and you don't get advanced workflow automation, but everything you'd reasonably expect from a CRM is there. The free mobile app is the best in this category and probably the second-best in any category, period.
The trick is that HubSpot makes money on a different axis — Marketing Hub, Sales Hub Professional, Service Hub. None of those are required to use the CRM. They're upsells you may or may not bite on three years from now. That's why the free tier is sustainable for them and safe for you.
Zoho's free tier supports 3 users and 5,000 records. For a 2-person business that mostly uses CRM as a contact database, this is genuinely fine. The interface is more dated than HubSpot's but functional, and the upgrade path is reasonable: $14/user/month for the Standard tier, which adds the things you'd want like workflow rules and email integration.
The reason to pick Zoho over HubSpot is if you're already using other Zoho products — Zoho Books, Zoho Mail, Zoho Projects — and want everything in one ecosystem. Otherwise HubSpot wins on every dimension.
Bitrix24's free tier offers something genuinely unusual: unlimited users. For a team of 8 working on a tight budget, this is the only free option that doesn't immediately price you out. The caveats are real, though. Storage is capped at 5GB. The interface is dense and unmodern. Customer support on the free tier is essentially non-existent. The product tries to be everything (CRM + project management + chat + video calls + tasks + intranet), which means none of those things are best-in-class.
Capsule's free tier is the prettiest on this list. The interface is clean, the mobile app is good, and the basic CRM features all work. The problem is the 250-contact cap. For a freelancer working with 30 ongoing clients, this is fine for a long time. For an active sales-driven business, you'll hit the cap inside 6 months and be forced to pay $21/seat — which is more expensive than Pipedrive ($14/seat).
Agile CRM's free tier includes things the others charge for: basic automation rules, email tracking, landing pages, two-way email integration. 10 users and 1,000 contacts is generous. The downsides are interface age and the slowing pace of product updates. If Bitrix24 feels too heavy and Zoho feels too capped, Agile is a defensible third option — but it's the kind of tool you should plan to migrate off of within two years.
Salesforce doesn't offer a permanent free tier — only a 30-day trial of Essentials. Including it would be misleading. It's also a bad fit for the audience that searches "best free CRM" in the first place.
Insightly has a free tier but caps it at 2 users and removes most useful features. The free version exists to advertise the paid one. Skip.
Freshsales (Freshworks) recently restructured their free tier to remove most of what made it attractive. As of April 2026, it's no longer competitive with HubSpot Free.
Free tiers change constantly — limits get tighter, features move behind paywalls. We check every quarter and send one email with everything that changed.
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HubSpot CRM Free. Up to 1,000,000 contacts, unlimited users, no time limit. Every other free tier on this list will force an upgrade within 90 days for any active business.
Yes. The core CRM has no trial expiration. The catch is the paid upgrade path — Sales Hub Starter is $15/seat, but Professional jumps to $100/seat with no middle tier. See our HubSpot pricing breakdown.
Most are "free until you need any serious feature." User caps, contact caps, no automation, no integrations. The catch is engineered to push you to upgrade once you're committed. HubSpot is the outlier because they monetize through separate products (Marketing Hub, Sales Hub) rather than restricting the CRM itself.
If you know you'll pay eventually, paying from day one avoids a painful migration. Pipedrive at $14/seat is the cleanest paid entry-point. If you genuinely don't know yet whether you'll need a CRM long-term, HubSpot Free is the right way to find out.
Salesforce doesn't offer a real free tier — only a 30-day trial. It's also wrong for the audience this page serves. Salesforce starts making sense around 50+ employees with a dedicated admin. Below that, the complexity is a tax.
The only free CRM we'd actually recommend. No credit card, no time limit.