Every CRM in this catalogue sells seats, but what a seat buys differs enough that the headline price rarely predicts the bill.
The three models
Per user, per month, with tiers. The default: Pipedrive, Zoho CRM, Copper, Nutshell, Capsule and Close all raise the per-seat price as the feature set grows. The decision is which tier holds the feature you actually need, not which vendor is cheapest at the bottom.
One price for everyone. Less Annoying CRM charges a single per-user rate with no tiers at all. There is nothing to upgrade to, which is either the point or the problem.
Free with paid ceilings. HubSpot's free tools and Bigin's free plan let a small team work without paying; the cost appears when contact or feature limits bite.
No licence at all. EspoCRM and Twenty are open source and self-hosted: the price is a server and the person who maintains it.
What pushes you up a tier
Read the plan table for these four before the price:
- Automation. Usually absent from the entry tier and the most common reason to upgrade.
- Custom fields and pipelines. Often capped per tier rather than unlimited.
- Reporting. Dashboards are a mid-tier feature at most vendors here.
- Support. Phone or priority support is frequently the only difference between the top two tiers.
The trial is the test
Most vendors publish a fourteen-day trial. That is long enough to import a real contact list and run a week of actual work through it, which is the only way to find out whether the pipeline model fits how your team sells.
Where our prices come from
Every figure on these profiles was read from the vendor's own pricing page on 4 September 2026 and carries that page as its source. Where a vendor's pricing page could not be read by an automated client, the profile says the price is not verified rather than showing an estimate.
