Most CRM comparisons are written for enterprises. If you are a solo founder or a ten-person consultancy, the decisive factors are narrower: what it costs per seat, whether you are forced to buy seats you do not need, how long before it is actually usable, and whether it will talk to the rest of your stack without a developer. Here is how the seven CRMs we implement most often stack up on those four questions.
The short version
Prices below are typical per-user, per-month list prices billed annually at the tier a small team would realistically start on, in GBP equivalent. Vendors change pricing often — treat these as planning figures, not quotes.
- Pipedrive — from ~£14/user/mo, minimum 1 user, live in 1–3 days, excellent integrations
- Monday CRM — from ~£12/user/mo but minimum 3 seats, live in 3–7 days, excellent integrations
- Dynamics 365 Sales — from ~£52/user/mo, minimum 1 user, 3–8 weeks with a partner, deep but heavy integration
- ActiveCampaign — from ~£12/mo for 1 user on the marketing plan (CRM adds cost), live in 1–2 weeks, very strong integrations
- Keap — from ~£200/mo bundled (includes 1–2 users), 2–4 weeks including guided onboarding, good integrations
- Creatio — from ~£20/user/mo with a common 5-user floor, 4–10 weeks, strong but partner-led
- Attio — free for very small teams, from ~£24/user/mo paid, minimum 1 user, live in a day, modern API-first integrations
Pipedrive — the default for one to ten users
Pipedrive starts at a single seat with no minimum commitment, which makes it the safest starting point for a founder selling alone who expects to add two or three people later. The pipeline model is visual and opinionated, so there is very little to configure before it is useful.
Setup is genuinely fast: one to three days for pipeline stages, fields, email sync and a website form webhook. Integrations are its strongest suit — a large native marketplace, a clean REST API, and first-class Zapier and Make support for anything missing.
- Minimum users: 1
- Realistic setup: 1–3 days
- Integration: native marketplace + open API + Zapier/Make
- Best for: sales-led startups and MSPs with a simple deal pipeline
Monday CRM — flexible, but you buy three seats
Monday CRM is the most configurable of the low-cost options: boards, automations and views can model almost any process, including onboarding and project delivery alongside sales. The catch for very small teams is the seat structure — plans are sold in blocks starting at three users, so a solo founder pays for three regardless.
That makes it poor value at one user and good value from three upwards, particularly if you also intend to run delivery work in the same tool rather than paying for a second system.
- Minimum users: 3 (seats sold in blocks)
- Realistic setup: 3–7 days, longer if you build delivery boards too
- Integration: large native app library, strong Zapier/Make coverage, webhooks and API
- Best for: teams of 3–10 who want CRM and project delivery in one place
Dynamics 365 Sales — powerful, rarely proportionate
If you are already deep in Microsoft 365, Dynamics gives you single sign-on, native Outlook and Teams integration, and Power Platform automation across the whole estate. There is no seat minimum, so a single user can technically buy it.
The cost is time. Even a lean implementation runs three to eight weeks once you account for security roles, forms, duplicate detection and data migration, and most small teams end up paying a partner for it. For a ten-person consultancy it is usually more governance than the problem requires — unless compliance or an existing Microsoft agreement makes it the obvious choice.
- Minimum users: 1
- Realistic setup: 3–8 weeks, typically partner-assisted
- Integration: excellent within Microsoft, Power Automate elsewhere, Zapier available but less common
- Best for: Microsoft-centric firms with compliance requirements or existing licensing
ActiveCampaign — marketing first, CRM second
ActiveCampaign is an email marketing and automation platform with a sales CRM attached, and the pricing reflects that: the entry cost is driven by contact volume rather than seats, with sales features on higher tiers or as an add-on.
Choose it when nurture sequences and lifecycle email are the main event and the pipeline is secondary. Expect one to two weeks to get lists, tags, automations and deal stages into a coherent shape — the automation builder is the part that takes the time, not the CRM.
- Minimum users: 1 (priced by contacts, not seats)
- Realistic setup: 1–2 weeks
- Integration: very large app library plus Zapier/Make; API is solid
- Best for: content and email-led startups where nurture beats pipeline
Keap — bundled all-in-one with a real onboarding fee
Keap bundles CRM, email marketing, quotes, invoicing and appointment booking into a single subscription that includes a small number of users, so per-seat maths matters less. It suits an owner-operated business that wants one bill and one login rather than five tools wired together.
Two things to budget for: the entry price is meaningfully higher than Pipedrive or Attio, and Keap has historically required a paid guided onboarding. Allow two to four weeks before it is running properly.
- Minimum users: 1–2 included in the bundle
- Realistic setup: 2–4 weeks including guided onboarding
- Integration: decent native list, heavy reliance on Zapier for anything niche
- Best for: solo and micro businesses wanting billing and marketing in one system
Creatio — configurable, but sized for larger teams
Creatio is a no-code process platform with CRM on top. If your sales process has genuine branching complexity — approvals, quoting rules, service tiers — it will model it without custom code.
It is not really aimed at one-user startups. Licensing commonly starts around five users, and implementations run four to ten weeks, usually with partner involvement. Consider it at the top of the ten-user range when process, not price, is the constraint.
- Minimum users: commonly 5
- Realistic setup: 4–10 weeks
- Integration: open API and marketplace connectors; Zapier support is thinner
- Best for: process-heavy teams outgrowing a simple pipeline
Attio — the fastest to stand up
Attio is the newest of the group and the quickest to get value from: connect a mailbox, and it builds a contact and company graph from your existing email and calendar history within minutes. There is a free tier for very small teams and no seat minimum.
It is data-model-first rather than pipeline-first, which suits startups whose process is still changing. Integration is API-first with webhooks, native connectors and Zapier, so it slots into a modern stack cleanly. The trade-off is a smaller ecosystem than Pipedrive and less built-in marketing.
- Minimum users: 1 (free tier available)
- Realistic setup: under a day for a working pipeline
- Integration: modern API, webhooks, native apps, Zapier
- Best for: startups that want structure without committing to a rigid process
How to choose in ten minutes
Work down the constraints in this order and the field narrows quickly.
- One user today, growing later — Pipedrive or Attio; avoid Monday CRM's three-seat floor and Creatio's five
- Three to ten users wanting CRM plus delivery — Monday CRM
- Email and nurture is the growth engine — ActiveCampaign
- You need quoting and invoicing in the same tool — Keap
- Microsoft everywhere and compliance pressure — Dynamics 365
- Complex, branching sales process — Creatio
Whichever you pick, wire the website into it
The CRM only pays for itself if enquiries arrive in it automatically, tagged with the page and campaign that produced them. Every platform above supports that through native forms, webhooks or Zapier — but it has to be built deliberately at the point of capture, not retrofitted once the pipeline is already messy.