Every top-producing agent will tell you that a solid real estate customer relationship management tool, or CRM, is essential. It helps you organize your contacts, establish a consistent communication plan for each client, and ultimately, close more deals. Most real estate-specific CRMs come with a hefty price tag, but we’ve put together a list of our favorite free CRMs for budget-conscious agents.
While the six free real estate CRMs below are all excellent options, they differ in the number of users allowed and contacts you can add, customer support, and cost of upgraded versions. Take these variables into consideration when deciding which of these CRMs is the best fit for you and your business needs.
Top 6 Free Real Estate CRMs
| CRM | No. of Users | No. of Contacts | Customer Support | Best For |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| HubSpot | Unlimited | 1,000,000 | Online training | Lead generation |
| Agile CRM | 10 | 1,000 | Social media | |
| Bitrix24 | Unlimited | Unlimited | Online training and outsourced support | Large teams/brokerages |
| ClickUp | 5 | 100 lists/400 folders | Email/ticket | Project management |
| EngageBay | 15 | 500 | Live chat | Solo agents |
| Streak | 1 | Unlimited | Limited | Gmail |
Of course, as with any freeware, you get what you pay for. Continue reading to see the one free real estate CRM we’d avoid, as well as a brief review of LionDesk and IXACT Contact, which aren’t exactly free, but have a wide array of affordable, sophisticated, real-estate-specific features.
Loyal readers will note some changes from our last update: Freshsales and monday.com, two of our favorite budget CRMs, no longer offer free versions.
HubSpot: Best for Lead Generation
There’s a reason HubSpot is a big name in the sales space. Not only can you have unlimited users in the free version of its CRM, you can manage up to 1 million contacts, and do it all on the company’s efficient mobile app.
HubSpot excels at connecting you with existing clients and helping you generate new ones. Its software firmly focuses on strong communication for lead generation and nurture and enables conversations with your contacts in myriad ways. Overall, it’s an excellent platform for agents who have some experience and are ready to grow and scale their business.
HubSpot’s free real estate CRM is a great choice, but you can also upgrade to access additional features, such as directly calling from your dashboard and appointment-scheduling integrations, for $30 to $450 per month.
Free Version
Best Feature
Unlike other free CRMs, HubSpot’s platform lets you customize just about every field, pipeline, and template. This goes a long way to making it feel like a CRM designed specifically for real estate, even though it’s not. One customization highlight for us is that a single contact profile can have as many as 80 different fields. Many of these fields are responsive, so that as your conversations and communications with your clients evolve, so do the entries in each field.
HubSpot Pros & Cons
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| |
| |
|
The HubSpot Interface
We find the interface to be user-friendly and intuitive.
The Close Verdict: HubSpot
HubSpot offers the most traditional, comprehensive free CRM on the market. Designed by a company known for its sales solutions, the CRM comes with an incredible number of free tools and optimizations designed for lead generation and nurture. While HubSpot is not specifically designed for the real estate industry, it is a robust and powerful CRM that can scale with your business.
Agile CRM: Best for Social Media
Much like HubSpot, the free version of Agile CRM is incredibly flexible and customizable. However, tailoring a free CRM to your specific needs requires a lot of time and effort, and it’s something not every agent wants to do. But if you put the work in, the result is a highly personalized dashboard with a slick, modern interface. We also appreciate the excellent social media integrations, which make connecting to social media accounts easy and effective. Agile CRM’s paid plans start at $8.99 per month and give access to SMS texting and other features.
Free Version
Best Feature
By far, the most ingenious feature in Agile’s free real estate CRM is its social media integration system. Using dashboard add-ons (called widgets), you can bring your contact’s social media stream from Facebook or Twitter into your contact profile and even interact with their posts from the CRM. You’re allowed to choose a single social widget to add to contact profiles in the free version. In the paid version, you can add many other features, including advanced email analytics, text messaging, and calling features.
Agile CRM Pros & Cons
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
The Agile CRM Interface
We appreciate all of the bold colors and graphics that show you where you are in your workflow at a glance.
The Close Verdict: Agile CRM
Agile CRM can help agents kick things up a notch. Its many features, especially those related to social media, really shine when used for real estate. However, what most excites us about this product is the upgrade. Don’t get me wrong—there is a lot of utility in the free version—but the paid option is inexpensive (about $9 a month) and opens up so many doors. Agile CRM is a good choice if you’re growing and budgeting to take your CRM to the next level.
Bitrix24: Best for Large Teams & Brokerages
Bitrix24 is a group communication and collaboration platform with a CRM that converts easily to the real estate space. It helps you keep your team moving in the right direction with sophisticated project management tools, which is why we’ve specifically recommended Bitrix24 for teams and brokerages that rely on internal communication. On the free plan, any number of users can access almost the entire platform and manage unlimited contacts in an infinite number of deals—which is hard to beat.
The downsides are limited cloud storage and the steep learning curve with limited customer support. But with all that Bitrix24 offers, including an integrated client call center and unlimited email marketing—features that are rarely offered in a free real estate CRM—the free version is an excellent value. The pricing for upgraded packages ranges from $49 to $199 per month.
Free Version
Best Feature
The best part of Bitrix24 is the interface between the CRM and the internal team management platform. Often, teams have to use two different systems to manage clients and each other, but Bitrix24 has solved for this by overlapping the two, making communication and decision-making easier.
When the internal and external systems are set on the same framework, you can decide on a strategy for a particular contact and assign the outreach to a team member without even leaving the browser window. This feature leads to fewer dormant leads, a more engaged team workforce, and, of course, no need to ping colleagues on Slack to get them to log into an entirely different platform.
Bitrix24 Pros & Cons
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| |
| |
|
The Bitrix24 Interface
The Bitrix24 interface is easy to make your own. We like the fact that you can customize the background with your own wallpaper, as well as the linear approach to task organization.
The Close Verdict: Bitrix24
Bitrix24 is one of the most comprehensive and generous free CRMs on the market, and is an ideal solution for large teams and brokerages on a budget. Unlimited users, contacts, and email marketing make this a serious contender for anyone in the market for a free real estate CRM. The storage limitations could be an issue, and learning this system takes some time and energy. But the analytics, reporting, project-management tools, website builder, and integrated client call center mean that Bitrix24 is as close to a full-fledged, Salesforce-type CRM as you can get without investing hundreds of dollars per month.
ClickUp: Best for Project Management
ClickUp is actually a project management software company that has created a free CRM worth considering. Again, this is not your typical sales CRM with all of the bells and whistles, but it has the organization and communication tools to be effective and is one of the most robust project management systems on the market. It’s highly customizable and was created with an emphasis on process and user experience. The result is an easy-to-use, intuitive interface. You can also upgrade at any time to access a host of features at affordable rates, from $5 to $19 per month.
Project management software is really a category all its own, and it’s worth thinking about how these kinds of tools can help you build your business. For example, let’s say you’re conducting a large marketing campaign with lots of moving parts. With this type of software, you can delegate responsibilities, track progress, analyze effectiveness, and evaluate resource allocation.
Free Version
Best Feature
ClickUp comes with a ready-to-go real estate template. We like that they’ve thought through what would be helpful for agents and designed the template to meet those specific needs. It’s still going to require some customization and setup, but the template gives you a big running start.
ClickUp Pros & Cons
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| |
|
The ClickUp Interface
ClickUp is a little busier than its competitors, but we still appreciate how much thought went into the larger systems with an eye toward productivity.
The Close Verdict: ClickUp
ClickUp’s free CRM has a real estate template that can help agents think in terms of projects, rather than individual transactions. It’s ideal for those who value user experience, want a sleek-looking CRM with plenty of automation, and who will utilize the extensive communication and project management tools.
EngageBay: Best for Solo Agents
EngageBay is new to our list and is quickly making a name for itself in the CRM space. There is a lot to like here: the interface is user-friendly and streamlined, the tools are intuitive, and the integrations allow for customization. It has all of the features needed to manage contacts and nurture leads, as well as manage deals, assign and complete tasks—all with excellent customer support. We recommend EngageBay for solo agents—it offers a full suite of features while remaining a cost-effective option at the paid tiers, which range between $14.99 and $99.99 per month.
Free Version
Best Feature
Our favorite feature in this all-in-one sales tool is the automation. Agents who want to leverage their email marketing will appreciate EngageBay’s free options: You can send a total of 1,000 emails, establish drip campaigns, and use one of their ready-made templates. The free version also offers newsletters and auto-responders, landing pages, and lead grabbers, which means that EngageBay isn’t just tracking your leads, it’s helping generate them.
EngageBay Pros & Cons
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| |
|
EngageBay Interface
This might not be the most aesthetically pleasing interface, but it gets the job done. Everything is clearly marked and the systems flow well together.
The Close Verdict: EngageBay
We see EngageBay as a strong competitor to HubSpot, especially for solo agents who want a system that will deliver without breaking the bank. It’s well-designed, impactful, and loaded with helpful marketing features. Agents who are active email marketers will enjoy all of the automation but may quickly hit the cap in the free version. Otherwise, we find the free version to be a generous and powerful CRM tool. It’s certainly worth trying out, especially since it gets high marks for customer support.
Streak: Best for Gmail
This is the product for those of us who roll our eyes at traditional CRMs and say, “Back in my day, I built my business with a spreadsheet.” Streak turbocharges Gmail with organizational tools and tracking capabilities to turn it into a fairly sophisticated standalone CRM—but one that looks and feels like a simple spreadsheet. And, since most of us are already really comfortable with Google, Gmail, and Google Sheets, there’s a very minimal learning curve.
The free version of Streak is fairly limited—there are virtually no tools for sharing contacts or pipelines without upgrading—but it’s worth a try if you’re struggling to see the value of a full-fledged CRM.
Free Version
Best Feature
Without doubt, the mobile app is our favorite feature. It looks like Gmail, it’s intuitive, and it makes working while on the go a pleasure. One of the best aspects of the mobile app is that it tracks and logs your calls, so there’s a complete record of who you’ve reached out to, plus you can add notes about the call. The app makes it possible to carry around your whole streamlined CRM, with searchable pipelines and contact sharing between devices.
Streak Pros & Cons
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Streak Interface
If you’re comfortable with Gmail, the Streak interface will feel familiar and easy to navigate.
The Close Verdict: Streak
To be clear, this is not a traditional CRM. Some might not even call it a CRM at all. But we find Streak to be a pretty interesting product that will appeal to busy real estate pros, old-school agents, and those who use and love Gmail. If you want to organize your contacts and track your communication via a limited learning curve—and, perhaps most importantly, hope to keep it all super simple—Streak might be the right choice for you.
The Free CRM We Don’t Recommend
Insightly
The biggest concern for us (and users) with the free version of Insightly is the almost total lack of customer support. Users of the free version get access to a library of articles and webinars, which is also true of HubSpot, but we found the HubSpot online support community to be much more robust. Even if you upgrade to an Insightly paid version, customer service is only available to those who pay an additional fee, from $29 to $99 per agent, per month.
It’s hard to understand what exactly is included in the free version of the CRM, except that it’s limited to two users. The tools available in the free version for contact and project management, analytics, and reporting remain unclear, even after contacting the company’s sales team.
We still believe in Insightly as a paid CRM—optimum features help agents organize contacts and leads, as well as set up email campaigns and an outreach schedule. But unless you’re a total tech whiz who’s never had to contact customer service, we would encourage you to first consider the other free options in this list.
(Nearly) Free CRMs Worth Mentioning
At the end of the day, the best CRM is the one you will use. If you hate being in the program, it doesn’t matter if it’s free. These three CRMs rate really highly, are designed specifically for real estate, and don’t break the bank.
LionDesk
Recently named The Close’s Best Real Estate CRM of 2023, LionDesk is a nimble, feature-packed real estate CRM that is easy to start using on day one. New LionDesk customers can try out their entire platform risk-free for 30 days to see if it’s right for them, and if they decide to continue as a client, plans start as low as $21 a month.
Check Out LionDesk
IXACT Contact
🚨New agents🚨: IXACT Contact offers a whopping six months free to anyone who’s had their license for a year or less. Beyond that, the company offers a full five-week trial for anyone else interested in trying the platform for free. They are easily one of the most robust and sophisticated platforms on our list, and the only reason they’re not our best overall choice is that they aren’t free forever. Still, if you’re a new agent and looking to kick the tires on a robust CRM for free, it’s tough to find a better deal than the one offered by IXACT Contact.
Check Out IXACT Contact
Bringing It All Together
If you are ready to move beyond the limits of how many contacts you can hold in your head and into a new world of communication automation, contact management, and ultimately, a better bottom line, then you need a solid CRM. And you can get a great one for free. Of all the free CRMs we reviewed, we recommend you start by looking at HubSpot or Bitrix24, both of which deliver the best features with the most efficient systems, providing the greatest value.
If you’re curious to see our overall CRM picks, check out our in-depth reviews and pricing of the best real estate CRMs for 2023.
Have experience with any of these CRMs or have a favorite that’s not on this list? Let us know in the comments below!
Tell us about you so we know what to send.
