Best Online CRM Software in 2025

A large portion of a company’s success depends on adequate communication, which ought to involve multiple people from both sides, and a variety of methods united under the acronym Customer Relationship Management. CRM programs are critical providers of invaluable information for the sales department, supposed to provide an advanced level of customer service experience. Therefore, a good CRM is the core of current and prospective interaction and a storage database of practices and experiences that can be accessed by any member of the team at all times. Online CRM tools cover front-end contacts, back-office operations, and all business relationships, which imposes the need to use one even when business is doing just fine. But how to do educated comparisons to choose the best online CRM tools for small business and enterprises? This guide will help you make that decision:

The best way to go is to sign up for at least a few free trials or demo and basic unpaid plans offered by popular online CRM software providers. With that method you will have the opportunity to test the important elements and you will get a good comparison of the capabilities of each app. The best thing to do is to try the list of tools that currently have the highest SmartScore rankings and Customer Satisfaction Rating in our online CRM software reviews to check the best online CRM software for your company: Insightly reviews, Salesforce IQ, Teamgate, InStream, and Mothernode CRM.

Online CRM software tools are invaluable both to market newcomers and established and reputable businesses that need a fast and automated way to manage their customers. Therefore, you would qualify as a potential buyer of these products in every of the following cases:

• Small Businesses. Small businesses may have as much as 10 clients to take care of, but those 10 clients are vital to the company and everything depends on them. Even if contacting them every day, customer teams are not expected to know every detail about them, and that’s where online CRMs become the handiest tools available.
• Medium Businesses. Medium businesses, on their behalf, are growing and attracting more customers every day, but have less and less time to deal with each one separately. With infrequent phone calls and curt emails, the only affordable way to stay on track and deliver service on time is to use an online CRM which gathers and analyzes information.
• Large Businesses. There is no doubt that large enterprises benefit from online CRMs, because with more than 100 employees and thousands of customers to attend, there is almost no way to keep everybody satisfied. What a large enterprise needs is a system that can target even most specific business needs, and attend every customer as if he was the only one to serve. That’s exactly what online CRM systems do.

• Insightly: A great CRM for small businesses with pre-developed structure for multi-level companies. It provides detailed business visibility, and facilitates collaboration and customer communication.
• Zoho CRM: An outstanding member of the Zoho productivity suite designed to attract customers and to grow your business. It is well integrated with other Zoho products and popular third-party applications, and can respond to the needs of business of all scales and industries.
• Salesforce IQ: A well-known CRM solution that takes care of all meaningful customer-related activities, and identifies most promising deals. It has a variety of advanced features, and it is highly customizable.
• Base CRM: An outstanding CRM that analyses and stores customer information, allowing you to improve business relationships and to evaluate your employees’ potential.
• Teamgate: One of the top cloud-based CRMs for making strategic sales decisions. It measures accomplishments versus goals, and comes with an incredible set of reporting features.

One of the things that makes choosing online CRM software so difficult is the variety of programs that can be used for the purpose. They range all the way from basic tool suites to ultra costly and accurate programs. Features can also be categorization criteria, as certain programs do nothing but keep customer records, while others are more robust and they allow users to report and discover trends, and even do some custom branding. The basic division criterion is deployment, depending on which you can choose between:

• Software-as-a-service (SaaS) online CRM systems. These are usually paid per month, and are hosted on the vendor’s server. The business owner is not responsible for installation, updating, and maintenance.
• Cloud-based CRM platforms. Most of these offer free basic plans, while some are completely open source and all of their features can be used for free. They qualify as the most affordable ones due to their universal access and the fact that the client doesn’t need to update them or to pay for maintenance.
• Specialty CRM solutions. Apart from the delivery method, online CRM tools can be categorized according to their purpose. This is indicated by the proliferation of CRM platforms designed specifically for nonprofits, the real estate industry, and similar.

These are the basic features you should expect from your next online CRM platform:

• Order Histories. As we already said, one of the strongest sides of every CRM is that they save information. Order histories are an invaluable solution for customers wishing to follow their purchase, but also for the company that gets to understand their buying patterns, and to focus on fruitful selling strategies.
• Integration. Your online CRM has to be compatible with the software infrastructure already in place, in particular such that is related to monitoring of customer behavior. Needless to say, it should support standard document formats, and to be intuitive to the extent that even tech-savvy uses can skip a learning curve.
• Mobile Friendliness. Mobile devices are the norm of many businesses nowadays, meaning that a large portion of the CRM target audience expects to complete tasks on their phones or tablets. Being an information-access system, an ideal CRM will boost productivity right because it can be used on multiple devices.
• Stability and Professional Support. To be absolutely frank, good CRMs are not cheap, which makes 24/7 assistance the least we can expect of them. There must be a knowledgeable team to help us ‘sail’ through implementation, and to help us deal with every issue so that we won’t jump on another platform soon. The best way to find a CRM like this is to look at ones that have been on the market for quite a while.
• Abundance of Sales and Contact Management Features. CRMs are very different in terms of sales/management features, but there are few each CRM should be in possession of: Contact management; Sales Team management; Opportunity management; Lead management; Reports; Dashboards; Customizable layouts; Sales Analytics; Sales Forecasting and Automation; Mobile apps & alerts; Email integration (Outlook and Google in particular); Territory management; Orders & approvals; File storage; File syncing/sharing; Performance management; Marketing automation; Chat integration, etc.
• Calendar and alerts. Essential to a business is the keeping of appointments or deadlines. That is why an online CRM platform includes a calendar, which helps users keep track of meetings with clients or due dates of deliveries. Further, the calendar connects with the alert feature of the solution. This way, users receive notifications when an important activity is coming up so they can be ready for it.

We live in a mobile age, where full control capacity from every location means the world to our business. Want it or not, we are expected to manage business using latest trends and advanced technologies, so that we could focus on proper efficiency incentives, and to make the appropriate decisions for our sales and marketing. This is what online CRM can do for us:

• Centralized data storage in a secure and available location. Isn’t that the mere definition of being organized? There are multiple advantages to having cloud-based data storage, availability from all locations and devices being the principal one. When you run a large team, access is simply a top notch priority. But there is more to online CRM than just summarizing data: the system is supposed to encrypt it and to store it safely, so that customers would be peaceful knowing that not even you have full access to their data.
• Enhanced relationships and generation of quality leads on a budget. Online CRMs are easy means for customer retention, which becomes equally important as customer attraction once your business has made headway. Retention rates grow as you peak deeper into what your customers want or need, and use this information for prospective marketing endeavors. The usual result is that you discover the perfect marketing strategy, without having to experiment with once that can actually harm your marketing budget. Your current customers, on the other hand, will be satisfied from the improved level of communication, because each and every time you open your CRM, you will find out a new way to respond to their needs. As a result, you will start treating them better; develop solutions based on their expectations, and increase business revenue based on this information.
• Identification of the hotspots of business performance. Be it because customers trust you, or because you manage time in an appropriate manner, you will be able to focus on the right issues, rewarding achievers and eliminating weaknesses wherever you spot them. Effectiveness will be out of discussion, because automating manual processes will leave no room for human error, and the only duplicate work you will be expected to do is the one you believe is the most profitable one.
• Valuing the importance of each business relationship separately. When you start prioritizing resources properly, you intuitively become protective towards most profitable accounts, and make well-informed decisions on how to make the most from your business opportunities. In fact, you get to focus on a specific consumer group you believe expresses genuine interest in your products/services.
• Automation of tasks. Modern online CRM software are now equipped with better automation capabilities. As a result, users can systematize their work processes and let once manual tasks occur with little to no human intervention. This allows them to focus on other tasks at hand, such as interacting with customers to increase sales.

Expanding role of AI: Artificial intelligence is being infused more and more into online CRM software. In fact, a survey reports that companies are increasing their AI use cases by 257% in the following 24 months. Areas that are likely to evolve due to that are automation, communication, and analytics.

CRM continues to be social: Buyers’ perceptions regarding a product, service, or brand is heavily influenced by what they see on social media, particularly when it is from their peers. That is why online CRM solutions now include social tools to allow sales representatives to increase the company’s social network presence. On top of that, it lets customer service agents mitigate the effects of negative reviews.

Companies want more flexibility: When a vendor launched an open-source CRM platform, they changed the landscape of the niche. Because then organizations realized that they can customize their online CRM software to fit exactly their needs. As such, CRM solution developers make a more concentrated effort to enable users to configure the interface and its tools to their requirements.

Mobile CRM tools are here to stay: Sales agents are a busy bunch and they need a mobile solution to help them close deals and complete other tasks even when they are out of the office.

Complex system of tools: CRM has many facets and there are as many types of online CRM solutions. That is why it is possible to have overlapping software especially when it comes to customer service and support, lead and sales management, and marketing automation. This can create a complex system and rather than ease your workflow will give you an additional headache. To remedy or to avoid that, you have to determine what kind of CRM you need to do. Afterward, you can research on possible software solutions that meet most of your needs to reduce the number of tools you have to implement and use.

Cloud storage. Customer and vendor information can take up a lot of storage. One of the drivers of the cost of online CRM platforms is actually because of that. If yours is a burgeoning business, you have to be ready to spend more to expand your data storage to accommodate the information you amass.

Employee adoption. No matter how good an online CRM software purportedly is, you cannot leverage it if your employees refuse to utilize it. This can happen when you select a platform that is not user-friendly. Apart from that, they may not adopt the solution if they have little knowledge of it. Thus, you also have to invest in training to ensure high ROI.