Free CRM for small business: HubSpot, Zoho, Freshsales and Bitrix24 compared

A free CRM is only free until you hit its limit. Every vendor below lets a small team track contacts and deals at no cost, but each one caps something different: users, records, storage or features. This guide compares the free plans of HubSpot, Zoho CRM, Freshsales and Bitrix24 using the vendors' own published pages, so you can see which cap you would meet first. It is based on those pages and not on our own use of the products.

Quick comparison

Prices and limits change often. The figures above were read on 9 November 2026, and some came from help pages that carry their own dates, so confirm on the live page before you commit.

HubSpot: polished, but the 1,000-contact cap is tight

HubSpot's CRM page says its free tier covers up to two users and is free with no expiry. It lists contact, deal and task management, email tracking and templates, meeting scheduling, live chat, reporting dashboards and an AI assistant called Breeze Assistant.

The limit that matters is contacts. HubSpot's product catalog lists 1,000 contacts for free accounts, and its marketing-contacts page repeats that free storage covers up to a thousand non-marketing contacts. A reply in HubSpot's community forum says older free accounts were allowed far more and only newer ones are capped at 1,000, but that is a user-forum explanation, not official policy, so check your own account. If you expect to import a few thousand leads, plan for the cap.

HubSpot's Starter page lists HubSpot branding on emails, forms, live chat and meeting links in the free tier. HubSpot's Starter page compares the two: the free plan has 10 custom properties, 1,000 total contacts, community-only support and one automated action per email, while Starter removes the branding and adds email and chat support and more automation. HubSpot's product catalog lists Starter at $20 per seat per month, and its Starter page has shown limited-time discounts, so check the live price. Watch the difference between the CRM seat price and HubSpot's marketing products, which price by marketing contacts and can rise quickly.

Zoho CRM: the most room on a free plan for three people

Zoho describes its free edition as free for three users with no trial period. Zoho's own guide to the edition lists 150 emails per day, storage for 5,000 contact records, no Zoho branding on emails, five active workflow rules and seven native integrations with other Zoho apps. Zoho's pricing page adds up to 10 custom email templates, 5,000 API calls a day and a mobile app.

The catch is that the free edition leaves out the larger features. Zoho's pricing page lists features such as AI agents and unlimited reports among the paid editions. One other point: Zoho's pages are not entirely consistent about record caps: its guide gives 5,000 contact records, its comparison PDF says 5,000 records across all modules, and the guide's closing line mentions 1,000 records, which looks like an error. Treat 5,000 as the working figure and check your account.

Zoho's edition comparison PDF (dated 2022) lists the first paid edition at $14 per user per month billed annually, or $20 monthly. Its pricing page shows local currency, so check the price for your region.

Freshsales: free for three, with a confusing history

Freshworks' support article says the current free plan is limited to three users, with sales email templates, dashboards, app connections such as Gmail and Zoom, and up to five custom fields per module. An older Freshsales help article describes a free plan called Sprout with up to 10 users and 10,000 records, so the limits have changed over time. The support article we read was last modified in February 2024, and we found no record cap stated for the current plan, so confirm it before relying on it.

Of the per-seat prices we could confirm, Freshsales lists the lowest: its pricing page shows Growth at $9 per user per month billed annually, with Pro at $39 and Enterprise at $59. Bitrix24's flat pricing is not directly comparable.

Bitrix24: unlimited users, different trade-offs

Bitrix24 says its free plan has unlimited users. Its helpdesk lists CRM with unlimited deals, an AI assistant, and 5 GB of shared storage. Its overview page adds task management, chat and video calls, a website builder and a contact center. Its paid plans are tiered by team size rather than priced per seat (its overview says paid plans scale from 5 to 10,000+ users), but we did not confirm current prices, so read the live page.

Bitrix24 is closer to an all-in-one workspace than a pure sales tool. That helps a team that also wants tasks and chat in one place, and it can feel crowded if you only want a pipeline. Bitrix24 also says inactive free accounts can be deleted automatically and not restored. Its helpdesk gives 50 days and its blog 40, so log in regularly and export your data.

How to choose

• One or two people, under 1,000 contacts: HubSpot's free tier is the most polished option on the list, and its limit may never matter.
• Three people, several thousand contacts: Zoho CRM's published limits are the roomiest of the four for that size.
• A team larger than three on a zero budget: Bitrix24 is the only one here with no stated user cap.
• You expect to pay soon: compare the entry paid prices, where Freshsales lists the lowest per-seat price we could confirm.

Before you migrate real data, check three things on the vendor's live page: the user cap, the record cap and what happens when you pass either. Export your contacts to a spreadsheet first so you can move later without being locked in.