Zoho CRM Review and Pricing

Why We Chose Zoho as the Best CRM for Growing Businesses

Growing businesses face unique challenges and pressures. Ramping up employee numbers and boosting revenue while running your business can be challenging. However, marketing and selling efficiently while also growing and sustaining customer relationships is crucial. 

Zoho CRM is an easy-to-use, uncluttered and scalable CRM system that grows with your business. It’s easy to implement and adopt due to its intuitive user interface and its built-in AI assistant powers a wide range of tools, from contact and deal management to prospecting and advanced data analytics. Zoho’s omnichannel communication features ensure all your customer conversations are accessed and managed from a single, central location, improving response times and securing more leads.

Setup and training time are minimal — a huge plus for a busy, growing business. Support is there when you need it through Zoho agents or an online knowledge base. Additionally, Zoho’s extensive app marketplace allows you to connect the platform to many popular business tools, as well as other products within Zoho’s ecosystem.  

Access your Google Ads campaign performance via an executive dashboard report within Zoho CRM. Source: Zoho

Ease of Use

We were impressed by Zoho’s pleasingly simple interface. Here are a few elements we felt added to the platform’s ease of use: 

• Navigation bar: Zoho’s navigation bar gives you quick access to sales tasks, notifications and modules. Like many other features in the platform, it can be customized to match your sales process.
• Manager’s Home view: In addition to classic, personalized and custom homepages, Zoho offers a Manager’s Home view to help sales leaders track and analyze their team’s daily work. It displays key performance indicators (KPIs) like newly generated leads, deals and secured revenue by default but can be tailored easily to your needs. 
• No-code dashboard and form builder: We liked Canvas, Zoho’s no-code dashboard and record form builder. You can build customized interfaces for users and departments, pick from a range of templates, apply brand styles and drag and drop custom elements with ease.
• Marketplace: The sidebar makes it easy to access Zoho Marketplace, where you can connect to third-party apps and other Zoho products like Zoho Projects, Zoho Campaigns and Zoho Desk.
• Sandbox: If you have developers who like to work “under the hood,” Zoho CRM includes a sandbox for testing custom apps and workflows safely before going live. The platform helpfully offers six different APIs, including REST APIs, and supports multiple coding languages.
• Mobile apps: We appreciate that Zoho offers mobile apps for iOS and Android — a valuable feature for businesses with remote staff and representatives. Zoho’s mobile apps are intuitive and functional at both the manager and non-manager levels, offering growing businesses even more flexibility.

Personalize your Zoho CRM home page using Zoho Canvas — no code required. Source: Zoho

Zoho CRM Features

Zoho offers a range of highly relevant CRM features for growing businesses, complemented by standard CRM tools. Here are a few features we found particularly notable.

Customization

Zoho’s customization options are more extensive than many competitors we reviewed. We appreciate that all Zoho CRM paid tiers provide customization features, including custom fields and list views. We also like that you can share your custom setup with other team members — a feature that’s uncommon among competitors and helps ensure consistency across accounts. 

We were particularly impressed by the customization functionality offered on Zoho’s Enterprise plan, which allows you to:

• Create advanced custom views
• Change page layouts
• Add custom buttons and conditional fields
• Build custom modules

At the Ultimate level, you also get a generous number of custom modules and fields, along with enhanced customer support.

Zoho lets you share and receive custom configurations from your team, speeding up setup and helping ensure consistency. Source: Zoho 

Information Sharing and Automation

As companies grow, they must become proficient at lead generation and converting leads successfully. Zoho helps new and growing businesses accomplish these tasks with impressive information-sharing and automation features. Here are some highlights:

• Information-sharing: We were pleased to see that Zoho gives sales, marketing and customer service teams access to the same accurate information. This allows them to share insights and help each other hit targets and KPIs. Users can even share entire dashboards with teammates or clients via direct email links, exported PDFs or PNGs or through Zoho Social.
• Workflow automation: Sales managers can identify repetitive but necessary tasks and create workflow automations to streamline them. This frees up staff to focus on more productive work. Zoho’s powerful AI assistant, Zia, uses a trigger-condition-action formula to build email workflows that nurture leads, support onboarding and update client records automatically as they move through the sales funnel. It can even suggest workflows based on past activity and generate them using prompts.
• Lead automation: Zoho’s lead automation tools also impressed us. The CRM captures contact details from inquiries across multiple channels, including website chatbots and social media, and makes them available instantly to sales reps in the shared database. We especially liked Zoho’s SalesIQ feature, which identifies high-potential website leads and adds them to the CRM for immediate follow-up. Zoho also tracks touchpoints across the customer journey and shows your marketing team where leads drop off, helping refine the process and attract more qualified prospects.
• Automated lead scoring: We found Zoho’s lead scoring tool impressive. After prospect details are captured and analyzed, Zia AI provides insights into which customers are most likely to buy, helping your team prioritize high-potential leads. Zia can also analyze deal health and assign scores based on factors like engagement and follow-up quality. (Another top CRM, monday.com, also has excellent lead-scoring functionality. Read our review of monday.com CRM to compare the offerings.)

Zoho’s AI helps analyze a deal’s health and score it depending on a range of factors, including engagement and follow-ups. Source: Zoho

AI Integration

Many top providers are using AI integration to boost CRM software effectiveness. Zoho is no exception; it incorporates several AI tools, including Zia and Creator. Both AI tools impressed us and compared favorably to competitive CRMs with AI offerings:

• Zia: Zia offers a ChatGPT-like interface that responds instantly to questions, even via voice control, which is great for reps on the go. It has full access to your company data and can deliver business intelligence, team performance insights and customer experience analytics. Zia also acts as a chatbot, answering technical questions online, routing tickets, spotting trends, making predictions and detecting anomalies. It can generate targeted emails and workflows, suggest the best time to contact leads and analyze sentiment for more personalized follow-ups. Other features include contact enrichment, upselling and cross-selling suggestions and Zia Agents, which serve as a sales coach to help reps prepare for client interactions and refine their pitches.
• Creator: Creator is Zoho’s no-code AI tool that lets you drag and drop AI modules to build smart workflows, such as notifying customers about deliveries. Over time, these apps learn from your business activity. Creator even lets you build full apps using Zia prompts and preview the results in real time — a great asset for growing teams seeking investment or internal buy-in.

You can use the Zia AI tool to quickly retrieve and summarize CRM data with simple prompts. Source: Zoho

Omnichannel Capabilities

Omnichannel communication is a game-changer for businesses that want to interact with customers through their preferred channels. We were impressed with Zoho’s well-executed omnichannel options, which compare favorably with other CRM systems we reviewed.

Zoho offers the following omnichannel opportunities:

• Telephony: Connect to over 50 VoIP phone system providers, set up call reminders, auto-log and record calls and use call analytics to measure performance from sales and service teams. Zoho CRM also lets you create a list of blocked numbers to avoid spam calls.
• Email marketing: Send and receive customer emails and run email marketing campaigns using Zoho Campaigns. 
• Social media: Manage and organize your social media marketing campaigns and posts from within the CRM.
• Messaging apps: Send and receive messages from apps like WhatsApp, Messenger, WeChat and LINE.
• Website: Set up chatbots on your site and create surveys for customers and prospects.

Zoho’s omnichannel tools are impressive and can drive significant business benefits, including new sales opportunities — a major plus for growing companies.

Zoho allows you to add CRM leads directly from connected social media channels. Source: Zoho

Data Analytics

We love that Zoho offers abundant CRM metrics and AI-powered analytics that take the guesswork out of strategic decisions. Custom reports and cohort metrics help business owners examine data from multiple angles by curating information from marketing campaigns, quotes, leads, deals and sales activities.

Here are a few data analytics features that stood out to us:

• Anomaly Detector: Zoho’s AI-powered Anomaly Detector highlights potential issues in your sales process so you don’t have to dig for bottlenecks. It also identifies positive anomalies, like a surge in website visits or purchases of a specific product, so you can act on the opportunity. The platform’s Comparator and Quadrant Analysis features can help you discover your best-performing products or sales reps.
• CRM reports: Create CRM reports from scratch or choose from several templates. Then, export and share them as CSV, Excel or PDF files. We like that you can share reports with team members and stakeholders outside your Zoho account — a great option for budget-conscious small businesses. Zoho’s robust filtering options are impressive, allowing you to focus on the data that delivers meaningful insights. We also like that you can turn reports into charts quickly and add them to custom dashboards with just a couple of clicks. 
• ABM add-on: The Zoho ABM (account-based marketing) add-on helps users identify high-value accounts, enrich them with available data and segment them for highly targeted follow-ups. Companies can also use this information to build personalized email campaigns that nurture their most promising leads. 
• Data visualization options: We were impressed by Zoho CRM’s data visualization tools, including Sankey diagrams, treemap charts and butterfly charts, which let you view key KPIs in a way that suits your team.
• Target Meters: We liked Zoho’s Target Meters, which let you set goals and monitor performance in real time. Growing businesses face pressure to drive revenue while managing expansion costs. Target Meters help identify the most profitable areas to focus on, keeping cash flow healthy. We also appreciate that Zoho offers multiple meter styles, including dial gauges and traffic lights, adding a touch of gamification to an otherwise stressful process.
• Configure, Price, Quote (CPQ): We also liked Zoho’s built-in CPQ functionality. While other CRMs offer CPQ through third-party tools, Zoho’s is integrated fully. Zia AI can update quotes automatically with relevant add-ons and suggest products to support your team’s cross-selling and upselling efforts. (Read our Oracle NetSuite review and our Pipedrive review to learn how these platforms handle CPQ functions.)

Zoho’s ABM add-on can present key account information for your most promising leads on one custom dashboard. Source: Zoho

App Marketplace

Many CRMs offer app marketplaces, but Zoho makes integration especially easy. With 14 categories — including marketing, employee collaboration, analytics and remote work — Zoho’s expansive app store supports your business as it grows. Whether you need new workflows, added capacity or extra communication tools, chances are it’s already available and ready to plug in.

Here’s what stands out about Zoho’s marketplace: 

• Breadth of options: Zoho has one of the largest marketplaces among CRM providers, featuring over 2,000 extensions and 900 integrations. Users can access more than 40 in-house apps and choose from integrations with popular tools, including Zoom, Zapier, Twilio, DocuSign, Shopify and PandaDoc. Essential business apps like Google Workspace, Microsoft Teams, Slack and Mailchimp are also available, along with social platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn and TikTok. 
• Industry-specific tools: Additional vertical-specific solutions are also available, including Zadarma for phone systems and Credit Data Direct, which features a loan calculator and allows users to import consumer and business credit reports directly into the CRM. 
• Connect to the Zoho ecosystem: We also appreciate how easy it is to integrate Zoho CRM with 20-plus other Zoho products, including Zoho Projects for project management, Zoho Desk for customer service and Zoho Assist, which is considered one of the best remote PC access software solutions.
• App overviews: Many integrations include short videos that highlight the app’s functionality. We love how these make the integration process even easier.

Mobile App

We like that Zoho CRM’s mobile app offerings go beyond the basics to provide valuable tools for users. Here’s an overview of its mobile apps that complement the CRM software: 

• Zoho CRM app: This is the primary app for managing CRM data, including leads, contacts, deals and tasks. We like that it includes interactive dashboards, anomaly alerts, voice notes, call logging, map integration and collaboration tools — not just basic record access.
• Zia (in-app AI assistant): We were impressed that Zia is built into the CRM app. It helps reps update records, add notes and manage the sales pipeline with ease. You can even use voice commands. Just say, “Hey, Zia,” and ask for what you need.
• Zoho Card Scanner app: This separate app allows users to snap a photo of a business card and send the details directly into Zoho CRM. It’s a great tool for quickly capturing lead info at events or meetings.
• Zoho One app: For Zoho One users, this app provides access to all 45-plus Zoho tools, including CRM, marketing, support, human resources and more, from one place.
• Other mobile tools: We also like that Zoho offers apps for task management, scanning documents and team messaging. These extras extend functionality and help keep work moving wherever your team is.

Zoho’s CRM mobile app keeps a detailed record of each contact’s sales activities. Source: Zoho

Zoho CRM Pricing

We were impressed that, unlike many competitors, Zoho offers a robust free edition — a completely cost- and obligation-free way to get a sense of what this CRM can do for your company. It also has four paid tiers. Here’s a breakdown:

Additional pricing considerations include the following: 

• Free trials: You can access an extended 30-day free trial on the Ultimate plan. On the Standard, Professional and Enterprise tiers, you can take advantage of a free 15-day trial.
• No setup fees: Zoho does not charge setup fees for its service.
• Impressive basic tier: Zoho’s entry-level plan, Standard, impressed us with its feature generosity. Many competitors don’t offer tools like multiple pipelines, scoring rules and sales forecasting on their basic plans. 

Onboarding and Implementation

We appreciate that Zoho’s CRM implementation process is quick and easy, thanks to detailed instructions on the company’s website and the provided sample data. All paid Zoho customers receive personalized onboarding assistance from a specialist who guides you through a tailored implementation plan via a series of remote one-on-one meetings and demos, helping you set up and configure the platform to meet your needs.

A few deployment steps are required before the CRM is ready to use:

1. Enter the time zone, language and basic company information.
2. Configure the security settings.
3. Set user roles and permissions.
4. Invite your team members.
5. Customize the modules, record details and page layout.
6. Import existing data.
7. Connect your email account and preferred apps. 

Most of these steps can be completed within a few days, but customization options and integrations may require further adjustments as needs become more clearly defined.

Customer Support

In addition to a wealth of online resources, Zoho CRM offers four support levels: 

• Basic: Included with Zoho’s free plan; offers email support within one to two business days.
• Classic: Included with all paid plans. You receive email, phone and chat support, as well as remote assistance for smoother troubleshooting. 
• Premium: Costs an additional 20 percent of your license fee. You receive 24/5 support via live chat, phone, email and the Zoho CRM Plus community. You also get onboarding support and product expert sessions.
• Enterprise: Costs an additional 25 percent of your license fee and requires a minimum of 50 licenses. You receive 24/7 support via live chat, phone, email and the Zoho CRM Plus community, along with a minimum one-hour response time guarantee. You also get a dedicated customer account manager and perks like access to new features. 

Limitations 

Zoho CRM has many upsides, but we did identify the following potential drawbacks: 

• Feature availability: Zoho CRM’s tiered plans mean you may need to opt for a more expensive plan to access one specific feature your business needs. For example, while the Standard plan might seem enticing, integration with Google Ads is available only with the Professional plan. If you want to keep a close eye on your website’s performance, you might need to upgrade. We also found it surprising that Zoho Marketplace integrations aren’t included in the Free plan. 
• Slow connections: Some users have reported slow connections at times. While your experience may differ, it’s worth keeping in mind. 

Zoho CRM is a great choice if you want mobile-friendly tools and simple automations without the high cost or heavy setup. However, if you need more power, consider a heavier-duty option like Salesforce. Read our Salesforce CRM review and Salesforce vs. Zoho comparison for a deeper look at its advanced features.

Methodology

When evaluating the best CRM software, we conducted in-depth comparative research on dozens of solutions. Our review process included communication with customer support teams, evaluations of product functionality, attending live webinars and reviewing tutorials and support materials. We also took pricing into account. When identifying the best CRM for growing businesses specifically, we examined mobile app functionality, lead and deal management, sales automation, reporting and analytics, customization options and available integrations. Our goal is to help you find the right CRM for your business.

Bottom Line

We recommend Zoho CRM for …

• Companies that want to seamlessly integrate customer support, marketing and IT management services with their CRM, especially those already using other Zoho products.
• Small and midsize businesses seeking relatively advanced CRM functionality at an affordable price to support scaling.
• Companies looking for an AI-powered CRM that they can customize using low-code or no-code tools.

We don’t recommend Zoho CRM for …

• Companies that need a feature-heavy CRM to manage complex customer relationships and advanced workflows.
• Businesses that don’t want to pay extra for round-the-clock customer support.