8 Best CRM Software for Marketing Automation in 2024

• Lead generation — The platform’s marketing automation features allow you to streamline your lead generation system, generating new leads while running on autopilot and driving engagement wherever your customers are.
• Analytics and reporting — A wide range of analytics and reporting features provide insights into marketing campaign effectiveness, ROI, conversion rates, and other key metrics, helping your sales team optimize their marketing strategies. This lets you comprehensively measure your campaign’s performance, all within Salesforce.
• Workflow automation — Salesforce supports automated workflows that trigger actions based on specific events or criteria. This includes sending follow-up emails, assigning tasks to sales representatives, updating contact records, and initiating other actions to nurture leads and move them through the sales funnel.

Salesforce Sales Cloud offers five pricing tiers to suit both small and large teams and has a 30-day free trial. Its Marketing Cloud plans are priced per company, not per user. Here’s more information on how much each plan costs and what it includes:

• Starter Suite — Contact, lead, task, account, and opportunity management, Gmail and Outlook integration, email productivity features, mobile app, and customizable reports.
• Pro Suite — Everything in Starter, plus individual buyer accounts, Salesforce meetings, Sales Cloud Everywhere, forecasting, Lightning App Builder, Flow Builder, and full offline mobile functionality.
• Marketing Cloud Engagement — Offers three sub-tiers: Professional, Corporate, and Enterprise. Includes email marketing, content creation, and robust analytics.
• Marketing Cloud Account Engagement— Offers four sub-tiers: Growth, Plus, Advanced, and Premium. Includes lead nurturing, lead scoring, engagement history, campaign reporting, and insights for 10,000-75,000 contacts.
• Marketing Cloud Growth Edition— Includes features relevant to growing your online audience, such as AI-powered emails and campaigns, multi-channel journeys, forms, and landing pages.

While the basic Salesforce package starts at $25 per user, per month for small businesses, accessing marketing automation tools will cost the organization at least $1,250 a month. This can either be beneficial for large team sizes or work out more expensive for smaller teams.

As such, Salesforce is best suited for established businesses looking to streamline their marketing efforts or integrate multiple platforms into one CRM. Small businesses with limited budgets or simpler sales processes may find more lightweight CRM solutions, like Capsule, more suitable.

• Website builder — Many businesses just starting out or just beginning to build an online presence need to start with a website. This can be expensive, so, fortunately, Thryv’s Professional plan includes a 15-page website so that your new or existing customers can find you online.
• Local listings — It’s also important to post ads for your business in places where your customers can find you. Thryv offers up to 40 local listings on sites like Google, Facebook, Yelp, Yahoo, Nextdoor, and YP.
• Landing pages — Using Thryv’s user-friendly templates, you can quickly create landing pages to serve as an online first impression for your website visitors. It also offers heat mapping to see which parts of your website are the most attention-grabbing so you can make changes accordingly.

Thryv offers two paid plans priced per location, not per user. It also offers a free demo. Below, you’ll find details on each plan’s cost and inclusions.

• Plus — enhanced local listings on seven sites, landing pages, real-time analytics, AI-powered recommendations, and tracking for up to 3 competitors.
• Professional — enhanced local listings on 40 sites, landing pages, optimization of online presence, real-time analytics, AI-powered recommendations, tracking for up to ten competitors, heat mapping on your websites, and a professional website with up to 15 pages.

Thryv’s marketing tools are designed specifically for small businesses, and this is reflected in its pricing. While $228 per month seems steep compared to some competitors, be aware that it’s per company, while the ‘cheaper’ competing plans are likely per user. With this in mind, Thryv is very reasonably priced compared to Salesforce, which is also priced per company at upwards of $1,000 per month.

I think Thryv is a great CRM for small businesses marketing to local audiences due to its focus on website building, local advertising, and competitor analysis, which are the three main components of local business marketing.

However, Thryv may prove limited for established businesses with a wider geographical audience or those who want to run complex online marketing campaigns. A more advanced platform such as Salesforce or HubSpot could be a better fit for this use case.

• Email and social media integration — Track your leads across multiple channels including social media, your own website, and email to build intelligent customer profiles and segment leads based on various criteria. You can then use these insights to inform your marketing strategy.
• Custom fields — Create a system that directly matches your company’s individual workflow with custom fields that you can change to fit your specific industry needs. For example, you can create defined columns for demographics, buyer preferences, deal stages, and priority.
• No-code automations — Automations can be one of the most productive features available with marketing CRMs, but they can also be rather technical to set up effectively. This is not the case with monday CRM, which offers an extensive library of readymade no-code automations, in addition to the ability to create custom ones.

monday CRM offers four pricing tiers to suit both solopreneurs and teams. Here’s more information on how much each plan costs and what it includes:

• Basic — Unlimited customizable pipelines, contacts, and boards; templates for lead, contact, and deal management; mobile apps; and unlimited free viewers.
• Standard — Everything in Basic, plus advanced account, contact, and deal management, 2-way integration with Gmail and Outlook, AI email generation, activity management, quotes, invoices, and 250 custom CRM automations and integrations per month.
• Pro — Everything in Standard, plus sales forecasting, email templates, tracking and automations, mass emails, Google Calendar sync, and 25,000 CRM automations and integrations per month.
• Enterprise — Everything in Pro, plus lead scoring, advanced analytics, account management, enterprise-grade automations, integrations, security features, and HIPAA compliance.

Since it’s highly customizable, I recommend monday.com’s CRM to companies who want to tailor their CRM to their unique business processes. It’ll suit companies in perhaps niche industries who want to personalize their software with their own industry terminology.

While it does offer a dedicated Enterprise plan, the lack of advanced forecasting and pipeline management features render it less capable of enterprise scalability than more heavyweight platforms such as Salesforce.

• List segmentation — Personalization is an important factor in creating strong customer relationships. By using segmentation, you can categorize your contacts based on factors such as age, gender, location, and buying preferences. You can then tailor your marketing strategies accordingly. This approach saves time for you and your customers by only sending out communications that are relevant to them, which is likely to result in a better response.
• LeadBooster — This paid add-on ($32.50 per month) can assist in lead generation by including a live chat function to your website, supporting web form creation and dissemination, and providing you access to a vast database of 400 million leads.
• Smart contact data — With a click of a button, Pipedrive can crawl the web for all public information about your leads from Google, social media, and other available sources. This helps to create a full picture of your leads and helps to gauge which are likely to convert so that you can better focus your sales efforts.

Pipedrive offers five pricing tiers to suit a range of budgets and has a 14-day free trial. Here’s more information on how much each plan costs and what it includes:

• Essential — Lead and deal management, customizable pipelines, products catalog, data import and export, merge duplicates, 3,000 deals, 30 custom fields, 15 reports, API access, and a mobile app.
• Advanced — Everything in Essential, plus 10,000 deals, 100 custom fields, 30 reports, 30 active automations, 1 active email sync, 2-way email sync, customizable emails, group emailing, automations, and Smart Contact Data.
• Professional — Everything in Advanced, plus 100,000 deals, 300 custom fields, 150 reports, 60 active automations, custom visibility groups and permissions sets, multiple email accounts sync, free Smart Docs add-on, AI sales assistant, unlimited dashboards, revenue forecasting, and 24/5 live chat support.
• Power — Everything in Professional, plus 200,000 deals, 500 custom fields, 250 reports, 90 active automations, 3 active email syncs, free Projects add-on, 24/7 live chat support, and phone support.
• Enterprise — Everything in Power, plus unlimited deals, custom fields, and reports, 180 active automations, 5 active email syncs, and security alerts.

I’ve selected Pipedrive as the top marketing CRM for sales teams because of its strong focus on sales pipeline management. Its intuitive layout, high customization capacity, and time-saving features, such as automatically updating information for new leads, will help your sales and marketing teams work more efficiently and concentrate on the most promising leads.

However, it’s somewhat limited compared to its more advanced tools, like Salesforce, in a few areas, including reporting, customer support, and automation, which could potentially create constraints for larger teams.

• Lead generation — Zoho supports a range of lead generation and lead capture methods, including custom landing pages, web forms, and pop-ups which ensure you don’t waste website traffic gained from external marketing campaigns.
• Zia AI — Lead generation is another area AI is taking by storm. With the AI-powered analytics engine Zia, you can gain valuable insights into sales anomalies and trends that support data-driven decisions.
• Customer journeys — Carefully map personalized step-by-step journeys from the point of lead capture, nurturing your contacts into loyal customers. This feature allows you to visually plan and automate points of engagement with your website visitors, such as a ‘welcome and thank you’ email, then continue into customer retention or events and webinar promotion, for example.

Zoho offers five pricing tiers to fit a variety of team sizes. There is also a 15-day free trial. Here’s more information on how much each plan costs and what it includes:

• Standard — Basic modules for contact management, advanced filters, multiple pipelines, scoring, sales forecasting, email insights, multiple currencies, workflow rules, homepage customization, custom fields, reports, analytics app, social media integration, and mass emailing.
• Professional — Everything in Standard, plus automated follow-ups, custom dashboards, assignment rules for new leads, and CRM for Google Ads.
• Enterprise — Everything in Professional, plus multiple scoring rules, email parsing, data entry wizards, CommandCenter, page layouts, custom modules and buttons, translations, developer sandbox, anomaly detection, webform analytics, autoresponders, and a range of AI features, including conversational AI, email intelligence, and sales prediction.
• Ultimate — Everything in Ultimate, plus added business intelligence, analytics, and customizable features to better manage multi-department, multinational teams.

Zoho is adept at nurturing fresh leads into the sales funnel, so it’s great for new business ventures that want to quickly build a strong customer base. However, Zoho does come with a steep learning curve.

During testing, I found that the extensive feature set and customization options can be overwhelming for new users, requiring a significant investment of time and effort to fully understand and leverage the platform’s capabilities.

• Workflow automation — Capsule’s workflow automation helps you automate your most repetitive manual tasks. It mitigates bottlenecks and automatically assigns tasks to relevant team members, helping your business run like a well-oiled machine.
• Email marketing — Capsule offers its own separate email marketing tool, Transpond, which aligns perfectly with Capsule to support successful email marketing campaigns. Transpond helps create attention-grabbing emails from ready-made templates, sets up automated follow-up emails, and offers insights into how well your emails are performing.
• Project management — Capsule also offers project management tools to help your projects run smoothly. It’s worth noting that this powerful feature is not offered by all CRM providers.

Capsule offers five pricing tiers to suit a wide range of budgets. Here’s more information on how much each plan costs and what it includes:

• Free — 250 contacts, 1 sales pipeline, 1 project board, 25 custom fields, 10 AI content edits, mobile app, API access, Zapier integrations and automations, and email sending.
• Starter — Everything in Free, plus 30,000 contacts, 50 custom fields, 1 shared inbox, 5 email templates, activity reporting, and key integrations, including Google Workspace and Microsoft 365.
• Growth — Everything in Starter, plus 60,000 contacts, 5 sales pipelines, 5 project boards, 150 custom fields, 1000 AI content edits, 3 shared mailboxes, 50 email templates, workflow automation, advanced sales reporting, and user roles & permissions.
• Advanced — Everything in Growth, plus 120,000 contacts, 50 sales pipelines, 50 project boards, 300 custom fields, 1000 AI content assists, 5 shared mailboxes, and 500 email templates.
• Ultimate — Everything in Advanced, plus 240,000 contacts, 100 sales pipelines, 100 project boards, unlimited custom fields, 10 shared mailboxes, 1000 email templates, implementation and data import support, custom training, dedicated account manager, and ongoing priority support.

Capsule is the ideal solution for smaller businesses that want a complete CRM solution that is flexible enough to assist with marketing and project management.

I found that it offers the essential features you’ll need when starting out, and strikes a great balance between simplicity and complexity. While it integrates with customer service platforms like Zendesk, it lacks built-in customer service features like ticketing and auto-dialing. It also doesn’t support third-party ads like HubSpot.

• Online ads — HubSpot allows you to run personalized ads to target your customers in meaningful ways outside of your own channels. It can also offer insights into ROI on Facebook, LinkedIn, Google, and Instagram ads. This allows you to see what’s working, what’s not, and gives you the data needed to adjust your approach accordingly.
• Email marketing — Give your open and click-through rate a needed boost by implementing HubSpot’s AI-written subject headings, stunning templates, and automated follow-ups.
• Web forms — Once leads have made it as far as your website, you can implement HubSpot’s user-friendly form builder. Any leads who fill it out will automatically appear in your CRM, so you can begin to further engage with them about your products and services.

HubSpot offers a free plan, as well as three paid marketing plans to suit a range of teams and budgets. Here’s more information on how much each plan costs and what it includes:

• Free Tools — Limited email reporting, email reply tracking, 1 email automation, Facebook Messenger automation, 2000 email sends per month, Stripe payment processing, mobile app, ad targeting, list segmentation, 3 reporting dashboards, 100 products, ticketing,
• Starter Customer Platform — Everything in Free Tools, plus 1 million products, 10 reporting dashboards, 10 automations, HubSpot payments, up to 5 currencies, and watermark-free live chat.
• Sales Hub Starter — Everything in Free Tools, with increased limits Free tools with increased limits, plus simple automation, repeating tasks and task queues, digital document signing, goals, and conversation routing.
• Sales Hub Professional — Everything in Starter, forecasting, ABM tools, sequencing, call transcription, and coaching.

During testing, I found that it offers a truly comprehensive package that’s perfect for businesses just starting out or working with smaller budgets. I’ve chosen HubSpot for this list as it has a generous free plan that gives you access to a variety of features spanning marketing, CRM, content production, and customer service.

Its solutions are also trusted by big names such as eBay, Reddit, and Tripadvisor – so it’s certainly suitable for larger enterprises, too, once you start looking at the advanced paid plans.

• Heatmaps — Freshsales shows you exactly which parts of your website grab the attention of your visitors via heatmaps. You can see where your users are clicking, scrolling to, and spending the most time so that you can optimize your website and UX to best serve your users’ needs and reduce the drop-off rate.
• Session replay — Session replay eliminates the guesswork regarding your website visitors’ experiences. You can watch back their journey exactly as it played out, offering you further opportunities to improve your site for higher conversion rates.
• Funnel analysis — This offers another breakdown of your customer journey through the various stages of your sales funnel. It helps you understand at which points drop-offs occur and helps you to identify possible negative impacts on your conversion rate.

In addition to a 21-day free trial, Freshsales offers three pricing tiers to suit both solo business owners and teams. Here’s more information on how much each plan costs and what it includes:

• Growth — Kanban view, contact lifecycle phases, built-in chat, email, and phone, email templates, custom fields, basic workflows, product catalog, Freshworks Marketplace, 1 CPQ license, mobile app, and 24/5 customer support.
• Pro — Everything in Growth, plus AI contact scoring, advanced custom fields, auto-assignment, AI sales emails, AI text editing, multiple sales pipelines, AI deal insights, advanced workflows, and custom reports.
• Enterprise — Everything in Pro, plus field-level security permissions, custom modules, AI sales forecasting, developer sandbox, and audit logs.

While Freshsales is a suitable CRM system at any stage in the funnel, using it specifically for CRO will come in handy for businesses with existing customer bases that want to go one step further to fine-tune their sales and marketing processes.

If you’re dealing with lots of abandoned shopping carts and want to figure out why, Freshmarketer’s tools can help solve these issues.

My only real gripe with Freshsales is that its AI-powered lead analytics tools are locked behind the somewhat expensive Enterprise plan.

I also found that there are fewer third-party integrations compared to other providers on our list. If this is a top priority for you, I’d recommend opting for Salesforce, which integrates with thousands of software platforms.