Features, Pricing, Pros & Cons

Freshsales is a robust CRM software that offers a variety of AI-powered tools to create custom pipelines and increase sales conversions. Its Freddy AI tool helps businesses segment and run campaigns that can generate, qualify, route and track incoming customers.

Freshsales can support organizations of any size, but if you’re looking for a powerful, free CRM with more integration capabilities, there are other options. Though Freshsales offers a free version that includes many features, like email templates and a sales dashboard, that tier only supports up to three users.

Freshsales pricing

• Free CRM: Free for up to three users and offers email templates, a sales dashboard and more.
• Growth: $15 per user per month, billed annually, or $18 per user when billed monthly.
• Pro: $39 per user per month, billed annually, or $47 per user when billed monthly.
• Enterprise: $69 per user per month, billed annually, or $83 per user when billed monthly.

Key features of Freshsales

Chat campaigns

Freshsales’ Freshmarketer tool can create and run chat campaigns through an organization’s website to engage with potential customers at the right time, qualify leads and accelerate sales conversions (Figure A). Sales reps are able to choose customized messages that can be triggered by a visitor’s actions or build out entire chatbots to automate support engagement.

Sales sequences

Sales sequences are workflows that help sales reps automate their outreach of scheduled series of sales touch points like emails, phone calls, SMS and reminders (Figure B). This feature allows reps to create, send and track personalized outbound campaigns.

Configure price quote

Freshsales CPQ allows an automation of creating new quotes for each individual client (Figure C). Sales reps can create preset templates that allow edits for document accuracy and better visibility and control over all customer quotes and documents. This feature integrates with Dropbox Sign to enable the delivery, signing and tracking of documents directly from the platform.

Contact scoring

Contact scoring identifies high-intent leads based on who they are and their engagement with an organization. Within the CRM, sales reps are able to define the positive and negative scoring signals based on the ideal customer profile (Figure D). Freshsales’ AI-assistant, Freddy, will then assign each client profile a score based on those signals and then recommend the best actions to engage with them.

Freshsales pros and cons

Alternatives to Freshsales

Depending on the size of your organization, what software and tools you currently use and how you anticipate using a CRM, an alternative to Freshsales might be a better choice. There are also industry-specific CRM software that could cater to your specific needs.

The most notable alternative CRMs to Freshsales include HubSpot, Zoho CRM, Pipedrive and Insightly. Most of those alternatives also offer a capped free version of its software and offer similar core features to Freshsales. Some do offer more sales-specific, marketing-specific or data-backed features, making each slightly different.

SEE: For a full breakdown of these CRM software and others, check out our list of the best enterprise CRM software.

* Pricing is based on annual subscription plans. Month-to-month billing options will differ.

HubSpot

HubSpot offers a free version that can support up to 2,500 users, which is drastic compared to Freshsales’ three-user limit. This free tier provides a large variety of sales, marketing and customer support tools for organizations to track and engage with leads and clients. HubSpot can integrate with over 1,500 applications, making it easy to adapt it to current tech stacks.

SEE: Considering HubSpot? See how HubSpot compares to Salesforce.

Zoho CRM

Zoho CRM offers advanced sales and marketing functionality through its omnichannel tool. Target and engage with high-intent leads and current clients through multiple outlets on one platform. This includes email, social media, live chat and webform campaigns that are branded and effective.

SEE: For a full breakdown, check out our independent review of Zoho CRM.

Pipedrive

Pipedrive is a great lead and pipeline management tool that allows users to create easy-to-navigate pipelines. Within these pipelines, organizations can use analysis and reporting tools to identify client trends and forecasts. Compared to Freshsales, Pipedrive doesn’t offer a free version and has limited marketing capabilities beyond email campaigns. This makes Pipedrive most ideal for sales teams.

SEE: Explore this side-by-side comparison of Pipedrive and HubSpot.

Insightly

Insightly is another CRM software that offers a generous amount of integration capabilities. Track and monitor individual tasks as well as entire projects by copying all corresponding details and records for complete visibility. In addition to its own price books and quotes features, Insighlty also offers a free-for-life version of their CRM that supports up to 2 users and 2,500 records.

Review methodology

To review Freshsales in detail, we used an inhouse rubric that consists of criteria deemed most important when evaluating CRM software. We then compared Freshsales against the industry standard for each criteria in that scoring tool. We relied on Freshsales’ own resources as well as some real user feedback and scores.

The criteria we used to score Freshsales include:

• Cost: Weighted 25% of the total score.
• Core features: Weighted 25% of the total score.
• Customizations: Weighted 15% of the total score.
• Integrations: Weighted 15% of the total score.
• Ease of use: Weighted 10% of the total score.
• Customer support: Weighted 10% of the total score.