A free CRM is not a free product. It is a permanent, no-cost tier inside a commercial platform, and every tier that lasts is capped somewhere: seats, contacts, records, automation runs, API calls, email sends, or storage. The cap that ends your free ride is rarely the one the vendor’s home page leads with.
The free tier is a lead-generation channel. Vendors give away a working CRM because a predictable fraction of free accounts convert to paid seats, and the conversion lands at a predictable moment: the third salesperson joins, or marketing wants to send a campaign without the vendor’s logo on it.
This guide covers the free tiers that still existed in September 2026, plus the open-source route, where the license is free but hosting is not.
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Three Things People Mean by Free CRM
The phrase covers three commercial models, and mixing them up is the most common mistake buyers make.
- A permanent free tier. A real edition that does not expire, with hard caps on seats, records, or features. HubSpot Free, Zoho CRM Free, Bigin Free, Bitrix24 Free, Capsule Free, and Streak Free sit here.
- A free trial. A fully featured edition for 14 to 30 days, then a paywall. Insightly runs a 14-day trial and Freshworks CRM a 21-day trial, with no permanent tier behind either.
- Open source. The license costs nothing and there is no seat cap, because there is no vendor account to meter. EspoCRM and SuiteCRM ship under the GNU Affero General Public License v3, and Odoo publishes a Community edition.
One caveat before you commit a record: free-tier terms change in one direction, tighter. HubSpot’s free contact allowance has moved over the years, so treat every number below as a snapshot dated September 2026 and re-check the vendor page before you import.
The Free Tiers Still Standing, and What Each One Caps
The table is the short version. The prose after it matters more, because the cap that stops you is usually the second or third one, not the headline figure.
| Product | Free tier | Seats | Record or contact cap | Other published caps | What you hit first |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| HubSpot CRM | Free, no expiry | 2 users | 1,000 contacts; 1 million records on other standard objects | 2,000 marketing emails per month, branded; 500 calling minutes; 3 templates | Seats |
| Zoho CRM | Free Edition | 3 users | No record cap published | 10 data exports; 5,000 API calls per day; no mass email or multiple pipelines | Exports, API calls |
| Zoho Bigin | Free | 1 user | 500 records | 1 pipeline; 3 automations; no mass email | Records |
| Bitrix24 | Free | Card says 1-2; FAQ says unlimited | Basic CRM, no published record cap | 5 GB storage; telephony and Marketplace apps paid-only | Storage |
| Capsule | Free plan | 2 users | 250 contacts | 1 pipeline; 5 custom fields; no AI or automations | Contacts |
| Streak | Free, Gmail add-on | Per user, no CRM | No CRM records at all | 50 mail merges per day; tracking and snippets only | The pipeline |
| Freshworks CRM | None – 21-day trial | Paid from $9/user/month (annual) | Not applicable | Trial only | Trial expiry |
| Insightly | None – 14-day trial | Paid from $29/user/month (annual) | Not applicable | Trial only | Trial expiry |
HubSpot CRM is the broadest free tier on features and the tightest on seats. Two users is the real constraint for most teams, and the 2,000 monthly email sends carry HubSpot branding until you upgrade.
Zoho CRM Free is the only mainstream tier publishing three seats, the natural fit for a three-person sales team that needs a real pipeline. The trade is a thin feature set: no mass email, no multiple pipelines, and ten data exports.
Zoho Bigin is the pipeline-first sibling for teams that find full CRM objects excessive, the same instinct behind our guide to pipeline CRM tools. One seat and 500 records is a small box, but the paid step is cheap: Express is $9 per user per month monthly or $7 annual, and Premier is $15 monthly or $12 annual.
Bitrix24 Free publishes 5 GB of storage and a basic deal and contact CRM, and its own pages disagree about seats: the card says 1-2 users while the FAQ says unlimited. Confirm that in writing before standardizing on it; the paid jump is Basic at $69 per month monthly or $49 monthly annual.
Capsule Free is the cleanest small-contact-list product here and the least forgiving on volume: two users, 250 contacts, one pipeline, five custom fields, no automation. Streak Free is the outlier: Gmail power tools with a 50-per-day mail merge cap that explicitly excludes CRM pipelines.
Reading the Fine Print: The Six Caps That Set Your Ceiling
Free-tier limits cluster into six dimensions, and vendors lead with whichever one flatters them.
- Seats. The hardest cap to work around, because it is a licensing boundary, not a data boundary. HubSpot Free and Capsule Free allow two users, Zoho CRM Free three, Bigin Free one. Shared logins work and create an audit trail you will regret later.
- Records and contacts. HubSpot caps contacts at 1,000 while allowing far more records elsewhere; Capsule caps contacts at 250; Bigin caps everything at 500. Contact caps bind marketing-heavy businesses, record caps bind transactional ones.
- Automation runs. Bigin Free ships three automations; its paid tiers move to 30 and then 50. Automation quotas are the quietest cap, because a workflow keeps working until it silently stops, and a lead-routing rule that fails at month end is worse than one that never existed.
- API calls. Zoho CRM Free publishes 5,000 per day, fine for a Zapier connection and inadequate for a nightly sync of a mid-size catalog. API quotas break integrations rather than people, so they surface as support tickets instead of upgrade prompts.
- Email sends. HubSpot Free allows 2,000 marketing sends per month, branded. Zoho CRM Free and Bigin Free exclude mass email entirely. If outbound email is part of your motion, the free tier is a demo of the feature, not the feature.
- Storage. Bitrix24 Free allows 5 GB shared across the account, including chat attachments. Storage caps arrive slowly and unpleasantly, because the remedy is deleting customer documents.
Vendors meter seats and contacts tightly because those scale with revenue, and API calls and storage loosely because those cost them little. Your usage profile decides which meter runs out first.
Open-Source CRM: Free Software, Paid Operations
Open-source CRM removes the seat cap and the record cap in one move, then hands you the bill in a different currency. There is no vendor account and no upgrade prompt. There is also no vendor.
EspoCRM is the lightest of the three to run: AGPLv3, installable on a standard LAMP or Docker host, and legible to a competent sysadmin. It also sells hosting at $15 per user per month on Basic with a three-user minimum, $25 on Enterprise, and $69 on Ultimate. That pricing illustrates the trade neatly: identical software, and you are paying someone to patch, back up, and monitor it.
SuiteCRM is the heavier, more enterprise-shaped option, also AGPLv3, with a large module ecosystem and a commercial track called SuiteASSURED that bundles support, warranties, and professional-service hours. The split between the mature 7.x line and the newer 8.x line matters before you commit a team to it.
Odoo publishes a Community edition and a hosted “One App Free” plan: one application, unlimited users, on Odoo Online. The catch is “one.” Install a second app and the account moves to Standard at $31.10 per user per month monthly or $24.90 annual, or Custom at $61 monthly or $49 annual. Because Odoo’s CRM is built to sit beside accounting and inventory, the second app is a matter of when.
What open source actually costs: a server, off-site backups, TLS certificates, security patching on the project’s release cadence, an upgrade path you own, and an administrator who is accountable. For a US company handling customer PII, that administrator is also your compliance answer.
The Hidden Costs of a Free CRM
Free tiers are honest about the price and quiet about the friction. Five costs recur.
- Vendor branding. HubSpot’s free email sends, live chat, forms, landing pages, and blog all carry HubSpot branding, so the free tier puts a competitor’s logo in front of your customers until you upgrade.
- Feature gates. Capsule Free has no AI or automations. HubSpot Free allows three email templates and three snippets, enough to prove the concept and not enough to run a cadence.
- Per-seat repricing. When you upgrade, the meter changes shape. Some vendors move you to seat pricing, others to contact-tier pricing, a few to both. Model the cost at your projected twelve-month headcount, not today’s.
- Export metering. Zoho CRM Free permits ten data exports, generous for routine backups and tight during a migration.
- Onboarding fees. Most free tiers include community or knowledge-base support only. Zoho Bigin’s paid plans advertise onboarding and data import help, which marks where the free tier’s support boundary sits.
What Actually Happens When You Outgrow the Free Tier
Vendor pricing pages imply a clean upgrade. In practice, teams rarely upgrade the product they started on, because the cap that finally breaks is a symptom of a process that has outgrown the tool. What follows is the pattern that repeats across implementations.
The export is the easy part, and it is where people stop thinking. A CSV export gives you records and field values. It does not give you attachments, email threads, call recordings, or the activity timeline, and those are frequently the actual value of the system. Attachments often sit outside a standard export and need a separate bulk download or API pull, which is where an API quota starts to matter. Confirm what a full export returns, not what the import accepts.
Field mapping is where the schedule slips. Free tiers rarely allow many custom fields, so teams improvise: they overload the company name field with a region code, or encode a lead source in a job title. That works until migration, when every improvised convention has to be decoded and the person who invented it has left. Two weeks of field mapping and duplicate merging is realistic for a database in the low thousands; the export takes an afternoon.
Duplicates multiply at the boundary. Deduplication rules are usually a paid feature. A free CRM will happily accept the same company three times, and the merge tools you need arrive with the upgrade. Teams moving between free tiers often find their contact count was inflated by 15 to 30 percent.
The price cliff is not linear. Leaving a two-seat free tier for a three-seat paid plan is cheap. Leaving a five-person team for a suite at $20 to $60 per user per month is $1,200 to $3,600 a year before add-ons, and it arrives in the same quarter as the hiring that caused it.
How to Choose Without Painting Yourself Into a Corner
Pick the free tier whose tightest cap is the one your business is least likely to hit in the next twelve months. That rule resolves most of the decision.
A two-person consultancy with a few hundred relationships should start with Capsule Free or HubSpot Free; neither will be stressed by the volume. If your constraint is budget rather than volume, the trade-offs differ from our cheap CRM comparison, which prices the paid tiers. A three-person sales team that lives in a pipeline should start with Zoho CRM Free, because the third seat is included. A company that already expects to need ten seats and data ownership should price a self-hosted EspoCRM or SuiteCRM deployment instead; those seat economics are the ones that dominate our best CRM for small business shortlist.
Do three things on day one: export a full backup before you import anything, so you learn the export works while the stakes are zero; record your seat count, contact count, and any integration’s API consumption in a dated document; and price the next tier up in writing, so the upgrade is a budget line rather than an emergency.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is there a genuinely free CRM with no time limit
Yes, and they are not trials. HubSpot CRM, Zoho CRM Free, Bigin Free, Bitrix24 Free, Capsule Free, and Streak Free all publish a permanent no-cost tier. The qualifier is that “no time limit” and “no limits” are different claims; each caps seats, records, features, or storage, and the vendor can revise those caps.
The category has also shrunk. Freshworks CRM now offers a 21-day trial with plans from $9 per user per month, and Insightly a 14-day trial from $29. Neither publishes a permanent free tier.
Which free CRM is best for a small business in the US
It depends on which limit you hit first. A two-person operation with a few hundred contacts should start with Capsule Free or HubSpot Free. A three-person sales team that needs a real pipeline and three logins should start with Zoho CRM Free, the only mainstream tier that includes the third seat. A solo founder who wants pipeline structure and nothing else should start with Bigin Free, whose paid step is $7 to $9 per user per month on annual billing.
Do free CRM plans limit how many contacts I can store
Most do, and the numbers vary by a factor of four or more. HubSpot Free caps contacts at 1,000 while allowing up to a million records in other standard objects. Capsule Free caps contacts at 250. Bigin Free caps records at 500 in total. Zoho CRM Free does not publish a record cap, so confirm the limit with sales before you import.
A contact cap and a record cap are different things. A contact cap constrains a marketing database; a record cap constrains every object, including deals and activities. If you store transactional history, the record cap arrives first even though the contact cap is the number on the pricing card.
Is open-source CRM actually free
The license is free; the operation is not. EspoCRM and SuiteCRM are published under the GNU Affero General Public License v3, and Odoo ships a Community edition. None charges per user, and none caps records. What you supply instead is a server, off-site backups, TLS certificates, security patching on the project’s release cadence, upgrades you own, and an administrator accountable for customer data.
What happens to my data if I outgrow or leave a free CRM
You keep it, with caveats. Every vendor here provides an export, and none claims ownership of your records. The friction is in the details. Standard exports usually cover records and field values but not attachments, email threads, call recordings, or activity history, and those often hold the real value. Some free tiers also meter exports; Zoho CRM Free permits ten.
Run a full export on day one, before you import anything, so you learn what the export returns while the stakes are zero. That habit also tells you what a later migration would cost in cleanup, since duplicates and custom fields rarely survive a CSV trip intact.
About the Author
Wartaholic Writer is a contributing editor at Wartaholic, covering business software, CRM, and ERP selection for small and midsize US companies. Articles are researched against vendor documentation, published industry standards, and hands-on implementation practice, then fact-checked before publication.
Last updated: September 2026