Free CRM: how far a free plan gets you

Free plan, free trial or open source: what is the difference?

Three quite different things get sold under the same word, and the difference decides what happens to your data in three months.

• Free plan. It does not end. You stay on it until you choose to move. Watch the limit that stops you: users, records, or a capability held back.
• Free trial. It opens paid capability for a limited period, then ends on a date, and the account is usually downgraded or locked. Check whether a card is required, whether billing begins automatically, and what happens to the data you entered on day one when the last day arrives.
• Open source. The license is free; running it is not. Hosting, monitoring, backups, security updates, email infrastructure, implementation and support stay your responsibility. Watch who patches it, who backs it up, and who is on call when it stops.

None of these is dishonest. They are three business models, and each suits a different buyer. The costs of open source are real costs with real owners; they are simply on your side of the line rather than the vendor’s. The mistake is assuming you are on one model when you are on another, which is easy to do because the sign-up page for all three says the same word in the same size.

You can usually tell the three apart from the price list alone, before reading a single feature row. Look for a duration first: anything with a number of days attached is a trial, whatever the column header says, and the counter starts at sign-up rather than at go-live. Look for the card field second, because a card taken before anything is delivered is a billing relationship with a delay in it. Look for a repository link third, because a download instead of a sign-up form means the license is free and the running of it is yours.

One word on those pages is worth less than it looks. “Forever” is a marketing term, and its enforceable version lives in the terms of service, which say what notice you are owed before a plan changes. Read the terms page before the feature page. If the category itself is still loose, the definition of a CRM is a better place to start than any pricing table.

What does a free CRM plan usually include?

Free tiers have converged. Across the market you can reasonably expect the core of what a CRM does; if you want the longer version of what each part is for, the CRM features that matter, and the job each one does works through them one by one.

• Contacts and companies. Named people, the organizations they belong to, and notes attached to both.
• A pipeline. Deals with a value, a stage and a close date, moved by hand across a board.
• Tasks and reminders. Enough to stop follow-ups being remembered rather than recorded.
• Basic reporting. Usually a fixed set of charts rather than reports you build yourself.
• Sometimes a mailbox connection. Occasionally full two-way sync, more often a forwarding address you copy emails to by hand.

For one person, or two people who talk to each other every day, that list is genuinely enough. Plenty of businesses run on it for a year and are right to.

The four limits that decide when free stops working

Every free plan is shaped by one of these four. Find the one that applies to you and you have found the date you will outgrow it.

Limit	How it shows up	Who it bites first
Users	A hard ceiling on how many people can log in at all.	A team that hires a third seller.
Records	A cap on contacts or deals, or on how much history is kept.	Anyone importing an existing list rather than starting empty.
Automation	Rules, sequences and scheduled tasks are held back entirely.	The person who is manually creating the same follow-up task every week.
Integrations	Email, calendar or accounting connections are paid-plan features.	Anyone whose day already runs out of a mailbox.

The integration limit is the one people underestimate. A CRM that cannot see your mailbox is a CRM somebody has to retype into, and retyping is the single most reliable way to end up with a system nobody trusts. If email sync sits behind the first paid tier, price the plan you would actually be using rather than the one you are signing up for.

None of the four takes work away. Each one moves work onto a person, and that is the cost a price list never shows. It can be priced with numbers you already have. Time the workaround once, with a stopwatch rather than from memory. Multiply by how often it happens in a month. Multiply again by the loaded hourly cost of whoever does it. The result is what the free plan charges you, and it is the only figure that can sit honestly beside a monthly per-seat price.

Do that for whichever of the four applies to you and the answer is usually clear in one sitting. The other half of the cost is harder, because it is the work nobody is doing at all, and no stopwatch reaches it. The benefits of a CRM and how to measure each one is where that side gets worked out.

The questions that expose the boundary

Marketing pages describe what is included. These six questions describe what is not, and every one has an answer somewhere in the documentation.

1. What is the hard ceiling, in numbers? Users, records, storage, reports, API calls, emails a day. If a number is missing from the pricing page, it is in the documentation or in the terms.
2. What happens when I hit it? Read-only, blocked writes, or an automatic charge: three very different Mondays.
3. Can I export everything, today? Contacts, companies, deals, notes, activity history and attachments, in a format something else can read.
4. What support do I get? Free tiers usually mean documentation and a community forum. That is fine, as long as you know it before your first bad week.
5. Where is the data held, and under whose terms? A free plan is still a data processing relationship. The processing agreement applies to it exactly as it applies to a paid one.
6. Is there a time or card condition? A plan that asks for a card up front, or ends after a set number of days, is a trial by another name. Ask, too, what happens to the data after an account is closed, and for how long it can still be exported.

What it costs to leave

The real price of a free CRM is paid on the way out, and it is paid in data rather than money. Three things travel badly between systems, and they are worth checking on the day you sign up rather than the day you leave.

• Activity history. Contacts and deals export almost everywhere. The timeline of calls, notes and emails attached to them often does not.
• Attachments. Quotes, signed documents and specifications are frequently excluded from a standard export and have to be pulled separately.
• Relationships. A contact row and a deal row are easy. Which contact belongs to which company, and which deal to which contact, is the part that gets flattened.

Run the export once in your first week, while there are only twenty records in the system, and open the file. It takes ten minutes and it tells you more about the vendor than any feature comparison will.

When you ask for that export, ask for it by the right name. Two different things get called an export, and they come from different departments.

One is the privacy self-export, which exists because privacy laws such as the GDPR in Europe and the CCPA in California give people a right to access the personal data held about them. It returns that data for one identified person, in whatever format the vendor chose, on a request with a statutory clock attached rather than on a button. It is a right. It is not a migration.

The other is a bulk operational export: every record in a module, with the record identifiers that let the next system rebuild the links, on demand, in a file that system can import. That is the one to name in the question, and there are three follow-ups. Which modules does it cover, do the identifiers come out with the rows, and does the free tier have it at all.

The gap between the two shows up on the day you leave, which is the worst day to find it. Exit terms belong in the selection rather than in the farewell, and how to choose the best CRM treats data ownership and export as a gate a product passes or fails.

When should you move off a free CRM plan?

Not on a date and not at a headcount, but when a workaround has quietly become a job. These are the four signals, roughly in the order they appear.

When you do compare paid tiers, compare on the capability that will actually be used every day rather than on the longest list. Our guide on choosing the best CRM for your team sets out how to run that shortlist, and keeping a CRM database clean covers what to fix before you migrate anything into a new system.

Upgrade when a paid feature creates measurable value, not simply when a sales page creates urgency. Estimate hours saved, follow-up recovered, quoting time reduced, and reporting errors avoided.

Before running that comparison, write the decision down. It goes wrong in one predictable way: it starts from a capability the team does not have instead of a job the team cannot do. This order keeps it honest.

1. Write the sentence. “We cannot …” has to name something a person tries to do on a Tuesday, not a row from a comparison table.
2. Find where it actually fails. The step that breaks is often not the step somebody complained about.
3. Put a monthly figure on the workaround, using your own minutes and your own hourly cost.
4. Find the smallest tier that removes that failure. The tier above it is a separate decision, taken later.
5. Check the next ceiling. If the tier that fixes today’s job carries a limit you will reach this year, you are buying twice.
6. Set the two monthly figures side by side, then add what the failure costs on the days it goes wrong.
7. Put a date in the calendar to look again, because the answer moves when the team does.

If the first sentence is the hard part, the failing step is usually still invisible. Five CRM workflows and the tools that run them walks processes from end to end, which is where a missing step tends to become obvious.

Reading a free plan honestly

A good free plan is a small, finished product that a business can run on. A poor one is a trial that has not been labeled as one: it works until the moment you have enough data in it to make leaving painful. The difference is visible in a single afternoon of reading, and it is worth the afternoon, because the second kind takes a month to unwind.

For what it is worth on our side: Senitix CRM keeps leads, contacts, accounts, the pipeline and reports on one customer record on every plan, Free included. Quotes, connected email and calendar, automations and Senitix AI start on Growth, and a person confirms everything the assistant proposes before anything changes. What each plan includes, and what it costs, is published on plans and pricing rather than described here, and if quoting is the capability you are testing a free tier against, how quotes work in Senitix CRM explains it.

What does the Senitix CRM Free plan include?

The Free plan has no time limit and needs no credit card. There is no free trial of the paid plans, so it is also the way to try Senitix CRM. These are its limits, read from the same plan data the pricing page uses:

• Users: up to 2
• Records: 1,000 contacts, 250 accounts, 1,000 leads and 250 deals
• Pipelines: 1
• Reports: 3 · Dashboards: 1
• Products: 50 · Price books: 1
• Import and export: CSV and Excel files, included

Some things are not on Free at all, rather than merely limited: connected email and calendar, quotes, automations, custom fields and Senitix AI. Those start on Growth. Contracts, orders, invoices, approvals, forecasting and rule-based lead scoring start on Professional.

Read the set as a shape rather than as a score. Free is sized for a small team putting one shared customer record in place, which is a real job and a common place to start. Because import and export are on every plan, the week-one export test from earlier on this page can be run on Free itself. The paid tiers mostly buy back the four limits described above, a step at a time, and the same figures for every other tier are listed on Senitix CRM plans and pricing.