Fairly Compared is an independent CRM comparison for US small businesses. We compare 39 CRMs with dated evidence: what each really costs for your team, which plan you actually need, which fees the ads leave out, and who pays us.
Our promise: rankings are commission-blind (a check in our build fails if affiliate data could change a score), every fact links to its source and date, and where a free plan or a spreadsheet is enough, we say so.
Do you need a general CRM, an industry tool, something free, or nothing yet? Each kind is compared on its own terms.
Pipeline, contacts, email and automation for most small teams.
Free-forever plans and self-hostable CRMs, with their real limits.
Real estate, insurance, advisors, mortgage, nonprofits, trades, recruiting.
A spreadsheet may be enough. Six signs that it is not.
Take the 1-minute check →
Provisional fact scores: price, features on the plan you need, transparency. Usability and support stay unscored until our hands-on tests run.
Low-cost, deep CRM with a free plan for three users that already includes workflow automation; Standard adds email integration, built-in calling and custom modules.
Free CRM for two users plus a broad paid suite; Sales Hub Starter adds workflows and calling, while Professional jumps to $90+ per seat and a required $1,500 onboarding.
Low-cost sales CRM with built-in email, phone and basic workflows from the entry plan; Freddy AI scoring starts on Pro.
Zoho's pipeline-first CRM for very small teams: from $7 per user, built-in telephony on every plan and a free plan for one user.
Highly customizable board-based CRM with automations and AI credits from Standard; sold in seat buckets with a three-seat minimum.
Email-marketing and automation platform first; the sales pipeline is a paid CRM add-on that needs at least the Plus plan.
Computed from the published terms of 39 CRMs.
Median across 73 plans that publish both prices. The advertised price assumes a year up front.
Required onboarding, setup fees or a separate platform license, before the first login.
Mostly industry tools. You only learn the cost in a sales call.
Each list only contains tools that genuinely qualify.
Price, plan and ownership changes we recorded. Full log →
No sign-up, no cookies, no third-party scripts. Everything runs in your browser.
Six questions, three picks, reasons for each.
Six signs, and when a spreadsheet is enough.
What your team really pays in year one and over three years.
25 of 39 top results come from vendors.
Annual-billing prices, mandatory fees and quote-only plans, computed from published terms.
Any two or three CRMs side by side.
Not always. If one person handles a manageable number of customers through one channel, a spreadsheet or a free plan may be enough. Check the six signs.
Several are genuinely usable: Capsule CRM, Attio, SuiteCRM, EspoCRM have free-forever plans. Each caps users, contacts or automation at a different point. Compare the limits.
Partly because many are written by vendors: 25 of the 39 top Google results we checked come from companies that sell a CRM or sell to CRM buyers. See who wrote them.
From affiliate commissions: 23 of the 39 vendors we track run affiliate programs. Commissions are removed from the data before scoring, so they cannot change a ranking. Every vendor's terms.
