The Best Small and Midmarket CRM Suite: The 2025 CRM Industry Leader Awards

The Market

Grand View Research valued the worldwide market for CRM solutions at $73.4 billion at the end of 2024 and projects it to reach $163.2 billion by 2030, growing at a compound annual rate of 14.6 percent.

And while enterprises accounted for the largest market share (59.9 percent) in 2024, use is growing among small and midsize businesses. In fact. Grand View expects the SMB segment to grow at a compound annual rate of 16.2 percent through 2030. The segment’s expansion can be attributed to the global adoption of cloud deployments. Due to budget constraints, SMBs have traditionally been unable to invest in the IT infrastructure needed for on-premises CRM systems. At this point, cloud-based CRM solutions can help SMBs ensure easy deployment and flexibility.

The Top Five

When it comes to CRM, SMBs today have many choices. But few offer what Creatio does. “It’s a uniquely composable CRM. Users can choose what capabilities to deploy,” says Kate Leggett, a vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research. She also likes that Creatio “helps provide experiences that are supported and extended via a low-code platform” and endorses its process management and predictive AI capabilities. Rebecca Wettemann, founder and CEO of Valoir, says Creatio’s “ease of use, competitive pricing, and no-code capabilities make it attractive to SMBs.”

Flexibility is a key selling point for SMBs, and that’s where HubSpot’s platform shines. HubSpot puts out “a strong free version offering with upgrade paths as companies grow,” says Laurie McCabe, partner and cofounder of SMB Group. “It includes marketing, sales, service, and ops hubs to unify customer touchpoints, and many integrations with other tools that SMBs already use.” Leggett singles out the company for offering SMBs “a unified CRM that shares the same data, automation, channels, and reporting,” and for supporting full CRM operations but providing “quick value realization.”

With its AppExchange, Salesforce has one of the largest partner ecosystems on the planet, but its appeal among SMBs goes beyond that. Salesforce’s Starter Suite, McCabe says, “brings a streamlined version of enterprise-grade CRM capabilities to SMBs, with an upgrade path to the enterprise version. It is well-suited to fast-growing SMBs that want to start simple but need room to scale.” Wettemann agrees: “With Starter, Salesforce has packaged the core features from a sales, marketing, and service perspective into a single suite at a compelling price point for SMBs,” making it “easy for customers to get up and running.”

SugarCRM has strong roots in the SMB space, though its product has become largely verticalized in the manufacturing and technology sectors, according to several analysts. Nonetheless, it still has “a compelling value proposition” for the larger SMB community, Wettemann says. Leggett agrees, adding that Sugar’s main offering is “a straightforward, full-featured CRM” with thousands of midmarket customers.

Zoho has had a long-standing focus on SMBs, and its appeal for users in that space is undeniable. McCabe calls it “one of the most cost-effective full-featured CRMs on the market” and notes that its SMB platform is “very configurable, with strong automation tools and AI-assisted features.” Zoho’s integrated capabilities, complementary suite of products, and platform approach with AI and business intelligence make it attractive for SMB customers, Wettemann says. And Ray Wang, founder and principal analyst at Constellation Research, says his firm has continued to see Zoho take market share away from the enterprise players “because of its cost and value equation.”

Niche Players

With primarily a sales focus, Pipedrive is catching a lot of attention in the SMB space, particularly because it is so easy to set up and use. “With streamlined workflows, good analytics, and affordable add-ons, it works well for SMBs and small teams that want to keep CRM lean and focused,” McCabe says. And though still a relative unknown, Monday.com is quickly moving into a position of prominence in the SMB space, largely on the strength of its unified workspace for all departments. The company in early August hit $100 million in annual recurring revenue.