How much does a CRM cost?
CRM software for a UK small business costs between £6 and £18 per user per month on entry paid tiers, and £25 to £50 per user on the mid tiers where automation and proper reporting live. Free plans (sometimes called Freemium) exist at one end of the market; premium systems such as Salesforce Enterprise reach £140 per user per month at the other. All prices here are per user, exclude VAT, and are correct at the time of writing.
That’s the shape of the market, but the number on your invoice is another matter. We advise UK small businesses and SMEs on CRM selection every week, and the budgets that go awry are rarely wrong about the headline price. They’re wrong about the onboarding fee, the add-ons, the dollar exchange rate, or the seat count. This guide covers the full picture: what each price band buys, where the hidden costs sit, and a worked budget for a typical five-person team.
Contents
- What are the four CRM price bands?
- What are the hidden costs of a CRM?
- What does a CRM cost for five users over a year?
- Is a free CRM good enough?
- Is a CRM worth the cost?
- TL;DR
What are the four CRM price bands?
The small business CRM market splits into four price bands: free plans, entry tiers under £15 per user per month, mid tiers from £15 to £40, and premium platforms above £40. In our experience, most UK teams of two to ten people end up in the middle two, and the jump between bands buys capability in a fairly predictable order.
| Band | Typical price per user/month | What it buys |
|---|---|---|
| Free | £0. Capped users or contact count | Contact management and a basic pipeline |
| Entry | £6 to £14 | Full contact management, email templates, one pipeline |
| Mid | £15 to £40 | Workflow automation, multiple pipelines, proper reporting |
| Premium | £40 to £140+ | Advanced permissions, forecasting, platform-scale customisation |
Free CRM plans (£0)
Capsule gives you 2 users and 250 contacts free, HubSpot offers free tools for 2 users with HubSpot branding on customer-facing touchpoints, Zoho CRM runs to 3 users, and Bigin covers a single user with 500 records. These are very usable plans, rather than crippled trials. We look at where their edges are further down.
Entry tiers (under £15 per user)
This band is where a sole trader or very small team should start looking. Bigin opens at £5, Freshsales at around £7, Monday CRM at £9 with a three-seat minimum and no free tier, Zoho CRM Standard at £12, and Capsule Starter at £14 (£17 on monthly billing). Pipedrive Lite is about $14 on annual billing, and Pipedrive bills UK customers in US dollars, a detail we’ll come back to. All these figures are annual billing per user.
The catch in this band is nearly always automation. Entry tiers manage contacts and one pipeline well, but the moment you want the system to chase quotes for you, most vendors point at the next tier up.
Mid tiers (£15 to £40)
This is where most established small teams land, because it’s where workflow automation and reporting become available. HubSpot Sales Hub Starter sits at £18, Zoho CRM Professional at £18, Capsule Growth at £27 (£32 monthly), and Pipedrive Growth at $49 on monthly billing, roughly £39.
In our client work this band covers the requirements of almost every business under 20 staff, which is worth remembering when a sales rep suggests otherwise. Zoho and Capsule anchor opposite philosophies within it, and our Capsule vs Zoho verdict unpicks why the cheaper of the two isn’t necessarily the better buy.
Premium tiers (£40+)
Capsule Advanced at £42 is the modest end of this band. Above it sit the platforms: HubSpot Sales Hub Professional at £85 plus a one-off onboarding fee of around £1,200, Salesforce Pro Suite at £80, HubSpot Enterprise at £135, and Salesforce Enterprise at £140. Our Capsule vs HubSpot head-to-head prices the gap between a mid-band tool and a platform in detail.
CRM searchers often start with Salesforce because it’s the name they know, and its £20 Starter Suite is solid, but the tiers a growing business actually needs price it as an enterprise product. We rarely recommend this band to firms under about 30 staff unless a specific requirement, such as complex quoting or territory management, demands it.
What are the hidden costs of a CRM?
The hidden costs of a CRM are UK VAT, onboarding fees, paid add-ons, currency risk on USD billing, contact and email caps, and the time cost of migration. Together they can push CRM spend 30 percent or more above the pricing page, and they’re where our clients’ budgets most often come unstuck.
VAT. Every figure in this guide, and on nearly every vendor pricing page, excludes VAT. Add 20 percent to the lot.
Onboarding fees. HubSpot Sales Hub Professional carries a mandatory onboarding fee of around £1,200 bought direct, and Enterprise around £2,800. That’s before any consultancy help you choose to bring in. We’ve broken down what HubSpot really costs in its own post.
Add-ons. Pipedrive’s base plans cover the pipeline, but email campaigns, lead capture and document tracking are separate paid modules that can add $45 to $75 a month to a five-person bill. Our Pipedrive pricing breakdown walks through how that stacks up. Inbox connection is a tier gate worth checking too, and our CRM inbox sync comparison shows which platforms charge for it and which include it free.
USD billing. Pipedrive, Freshsales and several others bill UK customers in dollars, so your pound cost moves with the exchange rate. This means that CRM spend can drift depending on exchange rate, so it’s worth considering.
Migration and setup time. Moving your data across is a legitimate cost, even when you’re doing it yourself. Done badly, it’s the expensive kind of free. Our CRM setup guide covers the sequence. Skipping the data-preparation step is how a £14 CRM ends up costing a week of somebody’s time.
Weighing those trade-offs across vendors is most of our software selection and advisory work, and the pattern repeats: the cheapest configured cost is often not the vendor with the cheapest headline tier.
What does a CRM cost for five users over a year?
A five-person UK team should budget between £720 and £6,300 for the first year of a CRM, excluding VAT, depending on the platform. That spread, nearly nine times between the cheapest sensible option and a premium platform, is the single most useful fact in CRM budgeting, so here it’s worked through on annual billing.
Pipedrive Growth lands between the middle and top figures: around $2,940 a year in seats (roughly £2,280), with the realistic all-in cost nearer £2,700 to £3,000 once common add-ons join the bill.
The uncomfortable part is that all four configurations solve the same core problem for a five-person team: contacts, pipeline, follow-ups, reporting. The premium platforms add genuine capability, but a business that won’t use marketing automation or revenue forecasting is paying for shelf space. We watched this play out when a video marketing agency cut its CRM costs by 60% by moving from an oversized platform to a right-sized one, losing nothing they actually used.
Is a free CRM good enough?
For one or two people, a free CRM is often genuinely enough, and we say that as consultants who’d earn more by telling you otherwise. Capsule’s free plan or HubSpot’s free tools will hold contacts, show a pipeline and attach follow-up tasks, which is the whole job at that scale. Our CRM for a microbusiness post looks at this end of the market in detail.
You’ll know you’ve outgrown free when one of three things happens: you need a third seat, you want the CRM to do something automatically, or you’re answering questions the basic reports can’t. At that point the £6 to £14 entry band is the natural next step, rather than migrating to another CRM platform.
One caution: free plans are also how platform vendors fish. HubSpot’s free tools are excellent, and they’re priced to make the next tier feel inevitable. Going in with open eyes about where the paid jumps sit makes it a fine deal and avoids future surprises.
Is a CRM worth the cost?
For most businesses with more than one person touching sales, yes. A missed follow-up on a single £2,000 job outweighs a year of Capsule Starter for a five-person team. The real cost comparison is CRM versus the spreadsheet system you’re running now, with its duplicate rows, its follow-ups stored in someone’s head, and its quote history in a sent folder. We’ve priced that side of the ledger in the real cost of spreadsheets, the companion piece to this one.
Where a CRM stops being worth it is overbuying, by which we mean paying for a plan that is overkill for your requirements. From experience, the failed CRM projects we get called into are almost never on tools that were too cheap. They’re £85-a-seat platforms configured by nobody, adopted by nobody, and quietly resented at renewal.
If you’re still deciding between candidates, our five questions for choosing a CRM is the place to start, and if you’re still on “what even is this software”, the plain-English CRM explainer sits above this post in the series.
TL;DR
- UK CRM pricing falls into four bands: free plans, entry tiers at £6 to £14 per user per month, mid tiers at £15 to £40 where automation lives, and premium platforms from £40 to £140+. All prices exclude VAT.
- Most small teams belong in the entry or mid bands. Bigin (£5), Zoho CRM Standard (£12) and Capsule Starter (£14) anchor the entry band; Capsule Growth (£27) and Pipedrive Growth (about £39) the mid.
- Hidden costs can move budgets more than tier prices: 20% VAT, HubSpot’s £1,200+ onboarding fees, Pipedrive’s add-on stack, USD billing that drifts with the exchange rate, and migration time.
- A five-person team pays roughly £720 a year on Zoho Standard, £1,620 on Capsule Growth, and £6,300 in year one on HubSpot Sales Hub Professional. Nearly a ninefold difference for the same core job.
- Free CRMs can definitely work for one or two people. Upgrade when you need a third seat, automation, or better reporting.
- The expensive CRM mistake is overbuying a platform your team won’t use, not underspending. Match the band to your process and move up only when the process demands it.
Budgeting for a CRM and not sure which band you're in?
We’ll tell you the configured cost of your shortlist, including the fees the pricing pages don’t mention, and whether a cheaper band would honestly do the job.