The best CRM for a UK small business, and when to build your own

What should a small business CRM actually do?

Five things, done reliably. Hold every contact with the full history of what was said and sent. Show every open deal or job and the stage it is at. Remind the right person to follow up, on the right day. Record emails and calls without anybody copying them in. And tell you, at the end of the month, where the work came from and where it stalled.

Everything else, from AI summaries to marketing campaigns, is useful only once those five work. A CRM that does them for a team of three is worth more than one that does fifty things for nobody, because the moment the team stops trusting it, they go back to spreadsheets and the inbox.

What do the popular CRMs cost?

These are published UK prices on 7 October 2026, per user per month. Check before you buy: introductory offers come and go, and the tier you need is often one above the one you first look at.

There are many more, including CRMs built for particular trades and sectors. The point of the table is the shape of the market: most small businesses can start for nothing or for the price of a lunch per user per month.

What does a CRM cost over a year?

Multiply by users and by twelve, and add VAT where the price excludes it. Five users on Pipedrive Growth is £39 times five times twelve, which is £2,340 a year before VAT and £2,808 with it. Five users on Capsule Growth is £1,620 a year at the published price. Then add the cost that never appears on a pricing page: the time it takes to set it up properly, move your existing data across, and teach the team to use it.

How do you choose between them?

Answer four questions before you open a single free trial. How do you sell: a pipeline of deals, a stream of jobs, or repeat bookings and memberships? Who will use it every day, and how comfortable are they with software? What must it connect to: your email, your accounts package, your website forms, your phone system? And who will keep the data clean when everybody is busy?

Then trial two, not five, with your real data and your real team for a fortnight. The one people still open on day ten is the right one.

What if you run jobs rather than deals?

Then you may not need a CRM at all. Trades and field service businesses usually need job management: scheduling, engineers' diaries, job sheets, certificates and invoicing, with the customer record attached. Our guide to job management software or a CRM sets out which fits, and why so many trades end up paying for the wrong one.

When is it worth building your own CRM?

Less often than people think, and more often than vendors admit. These are the signs we look for:

• You have tried two products, bent both to fit, and still run a spreadsheet alongside.
• The way you work with customers is part of why they choose you, and the products flatten it.
• You pay per seat for many people who only need to see one screen.
• The data is regulated or sensitive, and you need to control exactly where it lives and who sees it.
• The CRM has to sit at the centre of several other systems, and the connectors keep breaking.

If none of those is true, buy. If two or more are, a bespoke CRM can be cheaper over five years than the subscriptions and workarounds it replaces. Our guide to what a bespoke CRM costs gives the price bands, owners who have done it describe their experience in is a custom CRM worth it, and our CRM development page explains how we build one.

Is there a middle route?

Usually, and it is often the right first step: keep the CRM, and connect it properly to everything around it. Web enquiries go straight in, quotes are created from the deal, invoices flow to the accounts package and nobody retypes anything. That is a connected system, from £1,950 with us, and it is far less of a commitment than a build. Our comparison of Zapier, Make and n8n covers the tools that do the joining, and systems integration covers when to connect directly instead.

How do you move to a new CRM without losing anything?

Clean before you move, not after. Merge duplicates, decide which fields you actually use, and archive contacts nobody has spoken to in years. Import a sample, check it, then import the rest. Run the old and new systems side by side for no more than a couple of weeks, or nobody will commit to the new one. If the data is large or messy, our data migration service exists for exactly that.

Not sure whether to buy, connect or build? Our process audit, normally £495 and free for a limited time, gives you a written answer before anything is priced, and our guide to what software costs to build in the UK covers the wider costs.

Questions about choosing a CRM

What is the best free CRM for a small business in the UK?

Capsule and HubSpot both publish free plans for up to two users, and Capsule's free plan holds up to 250 contacts. The best free option is the one whose paid tier you could afford when you outgrow it, because most small businesses do.

How much does a CRM cost for a small business?

Published UK prices on 7 October 2026 ran from free plans for two users to around £14 to £79 a user a month for paid tiers. Five users on a mid-tier plan typically costs between about £1,600 and £2,800 a year, plus the time to set it up.

Do I need a CRM or is a spreadsheet enough?

A spreadsheet is enough for one person with a handful of customers. Once two or more people follow up the same customers, or deals get lost because nobody was reminded, a CRM pays for itself quickly.

Is it worth building your own CRM?

Only when off-the-shelf products genuinely do not fit: you run spreadsheets alongside the CRM, your process is part of why customers choose you, you pay for many seats nobody uses, or the data needs tight control. Otherwise buying is cheaper and safer.