The Best CRM Software for 2025

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Customer relationship management (CRM) systems benefit businesses by automating tasks, centralizing customer data, improving collaboration, and providing insights for targeted email marketing. However, selecting the right CRM system from the multitude of available options can be daunting. Some CRM systems offer just the features essential for small businesses, while others are robust enough to meet the demands of large enterprises. PCMag has been reviewing solutions from leading and lesser-known vendors for over a decade, so we can help ease your decision-making process. Our Editors' Choice winner, Zoho CRM, is full-featured and very customizable, but we also highlight other options that might be a better fit for your business. Make sure to click through to our in-depth reviews of each entry below and read our buying guide for more advice on the category.

What Is CRM Software?

CRM software helps you track and nurture contacts to build customer loyalty and repeat sales. A good CRM makes the information it gathers accessible to other business platforms via integrations. In this way, CRM becomes the epicenter of how you manage your customer's journey, from the first marketing touch to a closed sale and on to the next engagement.

Some small businesses use spreadsheets to mimic a CRM's functionality. However, this type of home-brewed solution delivers just a tiny subset of the features you get with a CRM and isn't ideal once your customer list grows beyond 100 entries.

The best CRM solutions are easier to use than spreadsheets and do more than just retain user and contact information. They also automate processes, such as creating calendar events, identifying new sales opportunities, prioritizing the sales pipeline, and setting appointment reminders. They can even rank opportunities by the likelihood of success. Integrating your other customer data so the CRM can access it, such as from your help desk, makes that possible.

This information is a goldmine of opportunity. It lets you identify prospects for up-sell or cross-sell, convert existing customers to new products or services, target new marketing, and track invoices. The software is also a fail-safe because it prevents multiple salespeople from chasing the same prospect. Choosing the right CRM software can dramatically improve your team's collaboration and productivity, which in turn increases sales.

How to Shop for a CRM System

Choosing a CRM is a significant investment. Your pricing decision needs to start with knowing how your salespeople operate and having an idea of the features that can help them. You will get the best deal by knowing what you need and then matching that up with the appropriate pricing tier. But there are gotchas beyond that, too.

For example, the initial setup and training can eat up a chunk of the budget, as can upgrades and ongoing support. Integrating the software with existing systems might call for additional equipment. Does the CRM workflow mean the sales or customer service teams will need new PCs, smartphones, or tablets? These costs can add up quickly.

Note that many CRM vendors are expanding beyond customer relationships. They're moving toward managing the sales lifecycle end-to-end, with CRM representing the customer journey. The more expansive the tool, the more customization you need to make it work.

As with any software, it's critical to take advantage of free trials. No matter how many reviews you read or demos you watch, you can't fully understand how CRM software works until you use it yourself. Be sure to have colleagues from different departments try out the software, too, so you can know how it works in various situations.

Most vendors offer at least a 14-day trial (30 days is even better). Some, including Zoho CRM, offer free plans, albeit with limited features or users. These can either serve as a full-time solution for small companies or a long-term trial for larger ones.

What's the Latest in CRM Software?

CRM software is constantly evolving to help businesses improve their customer interactions and retention. Sometimes, that means adding new features and technologies. Other times, it means casting familiar features in a new light. As competing vendors jockey for position in the market, trends emerge that will define CRMs for the next few years.

One such trend is customers' tendency to prefer cloud-based CRM systems. All the CRM systems in our most recent tests are available as cloud-based subscriptions, and many aren't available any other way. This model, also called software as a service (SaaS), has several advantages over traditional, on-premises software, including lower upfront costs and greater scalability and flexibility.

Another recent development is social CRMs, which help businesses engage, manage, and monitor their social media presence and interactions. Social CRM software can also help companies leverage social media data to generate leads, identify influencers, and measure customer satisfaction.

Taking the concept of social CRMs even further, omnichannel CRMs allow businesses to interact with customers across multiple channels and devices, including email, messaging apps, mobile, phone, and web. These aim to provide a unified view of the customer journey and preferences across all touchpoints.

Customer data platforms (CDP) are another emerging concept. These systems collect and unify customer data from various sources, such as online and offline transactions, social media, third-party platforms, and web browsing. CDP can help businesses create a singular, 360-degree view of a customer.

Finally, artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly prevalent. Over the past few years, CRM vendors have increasingly used AI to automate tasks, generate insights from data, and provide personalized recommendations. AI can also enhance customer interactions through chatbots, sentiment analysis, and voice assistants. More recently, some vendors have begun experimenting with generative AI, typically based on large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, to further improve these capabilities.

How to Match a CRM System to Your Business Needs

The most challenging part of making a good CRM choice is understanding what the product can do and what your salespeople need. Sales is a difficult and often fast-paced profession, which means the very tool you choose could actually burden your employees. That'll kill adoption rates, so you must understand what they need before tossing more technology into the mix.

It's tempting to forgo this homework and simply pay for one of the big, all-inclusive CRM software packages to have access to every feature. That approach will almost certainly wind up costing you more in both time and money while probably delivering less flexibility than you expect. That's because large CRM software packages are often platforms rather than tools. The numerous features they advertise are the product of integrations with various third-party solution providers, not merely options you can turn on. All these features can add cost.

Instead, think about what tools your team is currently using and what processes they follow. Figure out how those tasks map to the CRM software you're evaluating. For example, if a tool forces users to dig through menus and submenus every time they want to log a call or email, it will complicate their jobs instead of simplifying them. An increasing number of CRM tools combine the email and sales experience into a single, smart inbox or centralized dashboard to manage all or most daily communications and tasks.

The ways in which companies interact with customers are shifting rapidly. Most customers still expect to interact with you via email, but social media is fast becoming a game-changing technology. Understand how your company engages with customers over email and make sure your CRM software complements that relationship. A fully optimized CRM should automatically capture data from email interactions, not force your employees to do that manually.

After you look at the requirements from the sales team's perspective, flip it around and think about your customer. Maybe even run an online survey or focus group. What is their best sales experience? Once you know that, you can tailor your CRM to fit.

Why Is CRM Data Quality Important?

Data quality should be a key focus of that tailoring process. You need to pay attention not only to customer information that originates inside the CRM but also to the supporting data from other systems, such as finance or service desk tickets. Ensuring this data is "clean" means it needs to be directly on-target to the CRM's queries, in the proper format, and verifiable.

A 2024 study from Validity surveyed more than 600 global organizations that use CRMs. Of the respondents, 24% of CRM admins said less than half of their data is accurate and complete, while 31% reported that poor-quality data costs them at least 20% of their annual revenue.

Ensuring good data quality is a matter of testing and constant vigilance. You need to run regular and repeatable tests on your system. Depending on the size of your staff and your CRM investment, the Validity report recommends appointing a data management professional as the lead in keeping your CRM data clean. That person should manage the entire data flow, including your CRM and any connected apps. They should also handle the full spectrum of data management tasks, including automating data workflows, backup, and data protection. If you feel such a hire is in your future, you should pull that person in as early as possible, preferably at the evaluation stage.

Weigh Your Support Options

As the saying goes, you should plan for success but prepare for when things go wrong. Whether it's a software bug or simply some difficulty with a particular feature, you'll need support from your vendor. That's why it's important to use your free trial period to evaluate the responsiveness and efficacy of your potential vendor's support team. Some tips:

• Make sure to understand the level of support you get with your pricing tier and whether you can modify it.

• Research the provider's support forum. See what questions other customers ask and how long it takes for the company to respond.

• Check for DIY resources. Are there self-service tools for specific issues if there's a support site? If there are, be sure to run through them to see how effective they are. Search the knowledge base to see what kinds of articles are there and whether they are in a useful format.

• Investigate the product's training options. Complex tools usually require some training, so see what your service vendor provides. Is on-site, in-person training your only option, or are there online resources, such as well-organized blogs, recorded webinars, and videos?

Do CRMs Support Mobile Devices?

Make sure to take a close look at the CRM solution's mobile app. This should be a separate app, not just a mobile "capability" (which almost always means a mobile-optimized version of the desktop website). In addition, you shouldn't pay extra for it. Mobile devices are an entirely different breed from desktops or laptops. Employees use them differently, and software renders them differently, which means the business processes will also be different.

Make sure your CRM software of choice can support the mobile device platform your team uses. Are you providing every employee an iPhone or is yours a bring-your-own-device (BYOD) environment, which inevitably means supporting multiple platforms? Next, carefully evaluate what the app can do. Some apps offer a read-only view of your sales pipeline or contacts but don't let you make updates until you get back to a computer. Others offer a seamless and responsive experience, letting you do everything on a mobile device that you can on a computer. Don't commit to CRM software until you try the mobile app in a way you and your team would do on a day-to-day basis. For many SMBs and their agents, the mobile component of a CRM app might be more critical than the desktop version.

Many CRM vendors cater directly to a mobile workforce. Apps for those are full-featured and responsive on mobile screens. If you have a field sales team that works on tablets and smartphones, you need to prioritize such tools.

Can CRMs Integrate With Your Existing Systems?

Salesforce and other larger CRM platforms have huge feature stacks that are available as modules with related features. If the features are what you need, you can configure your entire solution simply by accessing the right modules. But if something is missing, or your sales staff is simply more comfortable using something else, you may need to use software from third-party vendors to fill gaps.

Integration takes two basic forms. The easiest is if the CRM system or the system to which you're trying to connect supports the other as a "native" integration. That means that the company has a pre-built integration module you can just download and use as needed. You'll have the best luck with big-name targets here, as many companies pre-build integrations for companies such as NetSuite or Salesforce, for example.

The other method is rolling your own integration. This is easiest if both systems have an open application programming interface (API). The most common standard here is representational state transfer (REST). With a REST API, you can have developers build a custom integration for you. That option certainly provides the most flexibility and customization, but it can also add significant costs depending on the level of your coding talent.

It's also worth looking at any third-party software you're considering, or indeed any software you already use, to see if there are integrations available from that side. For example, maybe you already have email marketing software that you love, or you want to connect your help desk system to your CRM. It's entirely possible those vendors provide integrations with the CRM you're considering.

How to Secure Your CRM Data

When you work with the sales pipeline and customer data, make sure security is top of mind—especially if you're using a SaaS CRM solution (which means a big chunk, if not all, of your customer data resides in the cloud). You should feel comfortable with the company's security requirements. It's a warning sign when your CRM software lets you select a password but doesn't generate an audit trail whenever someone makes a change or if it doesn't let you define access controls for each user. Customer data is an extremely valuable commodity, especially now that customers are more reluctant to part with it. Securing it isn't just about maintaining privacy; it's about protecting profitable relationships that directly impact your bottom line.

Integrations play a role here, but it's mostly about research. You can make sure your CRM software integrates with as much of your current IT security software as possible, such as your identity management system, so your employees can take advantage of single sign-on authentication. But even more important than that is doing your homework. That means digging deep into the vendor's SLA and ascertaining exactly where your data resides, who is responsible for its safety, and what happens if there's a problem. Search for any past breaches and how the company responded, too.

Gadjo Sevilla contributed to this story.