CRM for a microbusiness: do you actually need one?

Does a microbusiness need a CRM?

If you run a microbusiness, a CRM (customer relationship management) system is simply the single place your contacts, conversations, deals and follow-ups live, instead of being scattered across your inbox, your phone and multiple spreadsheets. A microbusiness usually means a sole trader, a solopreneur, or a small business with fewer than ten people, often with nobody whose actual job is admin. So the question we ask isn’t “is a CRM useful”, but rather “does a business this small need one yet”.

For a while, a spreadsheet will do a fine job. If you’re tracking a handful of customers, you remember every conversation, and nothing slips, you technically don’t need to spend a penny yet. A CRM starts to earn its place the moment you can’t hold it all in your head: when leads go cold because you forgot to follow up, when you can’t remember what you quoted in March, or when a second person needs to see what’s going on without interrupting you to ask.

For most microbusinesses that have crossed that line, the answer is yes, and the good news is that choosing a CRM for a microbusiness costs little or nothing to start. Below we look at three of the best small business CRMs at the very bottom of their pricing, two of which have free-for-life plans.

Contents

• Signs you’ve outgrown your spreadsheet
• Three affordable CRMs for a microbusiness
  • Zoho Bigin
  • Capsule CRM
  • Pipedrive
• Which should a microbusiness choose?
• Too busy to set it up? That’s where we come in
• TL;DR

Signs you’ve outgrown your spreadsheet

A spreadsheet has no opinion about what you should do next, and that’s the heart of the problem. It stores what you type and nothing else, so the work of remembering, chasing and prioritising stays entirely in your head. A spreadsheet will happily let a £5,000 lead go cold and never say a word!

In our experience helping small businesses make this jump, the signs that a microbusiness has outgrown its spreadsheet are fairly consistent:

• You’ve lost work because a follow-up slipped, not because you lost the pitch.
• You can’t quickly answer “what did we last say to this customer, and when”.
• Two of you now update the same list, and it’s already out of sync.
• You’re rekeying the same contact into your inbox, your accounts tool and your notes.
• You want reminders and follow-ups to happen automatically, which a spreadsheet can’t do.
• Your notes have piled up and are hard to read, crammed into a single cell instead of a proper history.

If two or three of those ring true, you’re past the point where a spreadsheet is saving you money. Our breakdown of the real cost of running on spreadsheets puts numbers to that, and if you want a structured way to weigh it up, our guide to choosing a CRM sets out the questions that actually matter.

Three affordable CRMs for a microbusiness

In our experience, as a small business you don’t need an enterprise platform, and you certainly don’t need to pay enterprise prices. Three CRMs consistently suit microbusinesses on a tight budget, and we implement all three for clients. The table below shows where each one starts, then we cover the detail underneath.

Zoho Bigin

Bigin is Zoho’s small-pipeline CRM, and it’s the cheapest serious option here. The free plan is a real starting point rather than a demo: one user, up to 500 records, a single pipeline, three automation workflows, a built-in phone, mobile apps for iOS and Android, a no-code web form, and even Model Context Protocol (MCP) support so it can talk to AI assistants. For a solopreneur starting from zero, that’s plenty to run a business on.

The first paid tier, Express at around £7 per user a month at the time of writing, is where it opens up: up to three team pipelines, 50,000 records, email and WhatsApp integration, 30 automation workflows, mass emails with engagement insights, customisable dashboards, and ten custom fields per module. Higher tiers (Premier at roughly £12 and Bigin 360 at roughly £17) add advanced automation and AI tools, but most microbusinesses won’t need them.

The one limit to plan around is that the free tier is single-user only. The moment a second person needs their own login, you’re on a paid plan, though at £7 a head that’s hardly a dealbreaker. If you already use Zoho Books or Invoice, Bigin is the natural fit as they sit in the same ecosystem.

Capsule CRM

Capsule is a relationship-first CRM, built around the contact record rather than the sales pipeline, which makes it a strong fit for service businesses where the same people sell the work and deliver it. Its free plan covers up to two users, 250 contacts, five custom fields and one sales pipeline, so a founder-and-assistant setup can get going without paying anything.

The Starter plan, around £17 per user a month, lifts you to 30,000 contacts and adds email templates, a shared mailbox, basic reporting, premium integrations, sales goals, and the ability to send and store email through your own mailbox. The main thing to know is that workflow automation and the deeper reporting sit on the Growth plan (around £32), so if hands-off follow-up sequences are the whole reason you’re adopting a CRM, budget for Growth rather than Starter.

We deploy Capsule for clients more than any other CRM, partly because it’s genuinely easy to adopt and partly for its UK accounting integrations. If you’re leaning this way, our Capsule setup guide covers the first week, and our piece on whether Capsule is right for you is an honest fit check.

Pipedrive

Pipedrive is the pure sales tool of the three. It’s built around activity: every deal carries a scheduled next action, and the interface nudges you when one is missing. For a microbusiness whose whole job is chasing and closing deals, that opinionated design is genuinely useful.

However, unlike Bigin and Capsule, Pipedrive has no free plan at the time of writing, only a 14-day trial. Its cheapest tier, Lite at around £24 per seat a month, gives you pipeline and calendar management, AI-assisted report creation, a real-time sales feed, 500+ integrations, 2,500 deals per seat, 30 custom fields and 15 reports per seat. What it doesn’t give you is automation or email sync: both of those start on the Growth plan at around £49. So a solo user who wants automated follow-ups is really looking at £49 a month, not £24.

That makes Pipedrive the priciest entry point here, which is the trade-off for the strongest sales engine. If it’s on your shortlist, our Pipedrive pricing review shows what teams actually pay once the add-ons stack up, and our Capsule vs Pipedrive comparison covers the relationship-versus-sales question in full.

Pricing and features on all three change regularly, so treat these figures as a guide and confirm the current numbers on the Bigin, Capsule and Pipedrive pricing pages before you commit.

Which should a microbusiness choose?

For a business this small, the decision is less about feature lists and more about how you sell and what you can spend today:

The honest advice we give clients is to start free or cheap and only move up a tier when a limit actually bites, not in anticipation of growth that may be months away. The best CRM for your microbusiness is the one you’ll use every day, rather than the one with the longest feature list.

Too busy to set it up? That’s where we come in

Here’s the catch that never appears on a pricing page: the hard part isn’t choosing the CRM, it’s finding the time to set it up. Microbusiness owners, solopreneurs and sole traders are usually the busiest people in the building, and “migrate three years of customers out of spreadsheets” rarely makes it to the top of the list. So the tool gets bought, half configured, and quietly abandoned, and the spreadsheet wins by default.

That’s exactly the gap our CRM setup and migration service fills. We’ve moved plenty of small businesses off spreadsheets and into a CRM that matches how they actually work, from a commercial contractor whose quotes and live jobs lived in spreadsheets to a video agency that cut its CRM bill by 60% without losing a single record. We handle the import, the field mapping and the tidy-up, so you log in to something that’s ready to use rather than a blank database. If you want to see what’s involved first, our guide to CRM setup and data migration walks through the whole process.

TL;DR

• A microbusiness doesn’t always need a CRM. While a spreadsheet holds everything and nothing slips, you’re fine.
• The tipping point is when leads go cold from missed follow-ups, you can’t recall what you quoted, or a second person needs visibility.
• Three affordable options suit microbusinesses: Zoho Bigin (free for one user, £7 paid), Capsule (free for two users, £17 paid), and Pipedrive (no free plan, £24 paid).
• Bigin is the cheapest and most generous free tier for a solo founder; Capsule is the easiest relationship-led fit; Pipedrive is the strongest pure sales tool but the priciest entry, with automation only from £49.
• Start free or cheap and upgrade only when a real limit hits.
• The hardest part is finding time to migrate, which is the bit we can take off your hands.