What is the best personal CRM?
- Ryan Hoover81Founder, Product Hunt · WrittenI asked this question on Twitter about a month ago and ultimately decided to go with Airtable. Most of the CRM tools are too heavy (built for companies or teams) or too restricted (e.g. mobile only). A basic spreadsheet tool like Airtable has worked great because it's easy to use, multi-platform, very customizable, and integrates with many other API's/tools. At the end of the day I just need a list of people I know, categorized by role, location, and other factors. That said, I'm eager to try a product that's specifically built for the use case you describe. Maintaining this spreadsheet of people is the biggest thing lacking in Airtable right now.ronsheridan5Startup Wannabe · WrittenI am able to use Airtable for a number of important processes and projects. I must have 15 ATs now with 4-5 that I use daily. I second Ryan's take on why he uses AT. Fascinating to see a free form product at the top of a crowdsourced list of CRM tools.Eli MatherProduct Management Community Apps · WrittenWas also going to recommend AirTable for personal CRM - love the flexibility
- Matt BettiolDo what you love!
This app is simply amazing! I have been using this as my replacement to Google Spreadsheets. The features inside of this amazing service are endless. If you have lots of data and want to organize it efficiently, this is the app for you :)
- Danielle A. VincentGeneral Enthusiast, Rouser of Rabble
We started using Airtable to manage our content projects at work. After using it for a month, I decided I liked it so much that I signed up for Zapier and Airtable to manage my personal projects as well. It has completely changed everything.
- Cody HalffCEO @ThePersonalCRM · WrittenCody Halff made this productThis is why we built FollowUp Personal CRM - we needed a simple tool to manage professional relationships, not leads. So instead of pipeline management, revenue forecasting, and other sales CRM features, FollowUp helps you stay in touch with contacts (followups, reminders, events from Gmail) and remember the important details about them (notes, tags, conversation history, contact enrichment). The most important piece was creating a method that's easy and repeatable. I've tried a lot of different contact management tools and the problem I consistently faced was actually sticking with them. Because FollowUp lives in Gmail you're able to manage relationships as you interact with them, in a place you probably already spend a lot of your time.I've used this product and it's been exactly what I need. It links to my already existing Google contacts and calendar that I use very heavily. I use it to keep track of people that I want to continue to engage with in my network. I use the tool to set a desired follow-up amount of time for each contact (2 weeks, 1 month, 3 months, etc) and then I never have to worry about "forgetting" to keep in touch with people. The app creates events on your Google Calendar and sends an email when you haven't been in touch with someone past the follow-up timeframe you set. It also has some additional data on the contact page, allows you to add notes, and shows links to social media presence.I've been using FollowUp daily for the past 6 months and highly recommend it. It's great for keeping all of my contacts in order and making sure I speak to everyone I need to. If you're looking for a simple to use and accessible way to keep in touch with people, FollowUp is the way to go. The Upcoming tab is an added bonus to the personal CRM because I don't have to keep opening and closing my Google Calendar throughout the day.
- angelaProduct Manager
I've been using this product for 2 months to keep track of people that I want to continue to engage with in my network personally. For people I don't talk to frequently, I set a desired follow-up amount of time (2 weeks, 1 month, 3 months, etc) and then I never have to worry about "forgetting" to keep in touch with people.
The app creates events on your Google Calendar and sends an email when you haven't been in touch with someone past the follow-up timeframe you set.
One caveat for me is that it works on Gmail rather than Inbox, and with events and emails more than Tasks.
being lazy as I am this is first CRM that I use on day to day basis. no need to login into other system, everything is handy and simple, feature list is simple but powerful
- Patrick Schüller7Marketing/SEO @Zenkit · WrittenHey Eric, I would suggest Zenkit. It is great for adding and managing personal contacts. Also, you can easily add meetings with people to the integrated calendar view and work with task lists. Works on the web and on iOs. Android will come soon too. It can also be integrated with over 750 applications via Zapier. Go check it out here: www.zenkit.com
Using Zenkit for a few months now and can't see myself going back to my old tool. The team has done a phenominal job of building an application that addresses the need of power users, light users, and everything in between.
- Yasmin Smith QuintalTech Mom
Edited my review to reflect the awesome response time to problem I encountered. Incredible, hard working team and their app reflects the care and dedication they have put into Zenkit. Keep up the great work, Zenkit!
- Anshuman Chadda3MD MPH; Physician Entrepreneur · WrittenIt is really designed for marketers, NOT a fan for personal use. and there is constant nagging request for upgrade.Jason SchecknerStart Up Sales Guru, VP @HiredScore · WrittenI've tried many of these platforms, and it feels like there are more of them every day. My personal choice for a start CRM is HubSpot. It has easy to use out of the box features. Many of my friends also swear by PipeDrive. Finally, I was looking at but never really tried ProsperWorks, but if you are on GSuite, it's well reviewed.Alja Knez (Laylae)DJ/Producer. Founder of Clubio. · WrittenI've tried many but at the end decided for Hubspot CRM
- David FergusonFounder, 5000fish, Inc.
I've been using HubSpot CRM since it was in Beta and it's really matured into a powerful CRM. I do pay for the Sales Pro tools which unlock a lot of power. There are some limitations however that make it a bad fit, you can read more about those in this review - https://www.techsmartboss.com/blog/top-things-you-should-know-about-the-limitations-of-hubspot-crm-with-workarounds/
- Julián MayaFounder, Sensorglobe
I applied for the program through Start-Up Chile accelerator for my startup.
It is a bad product, it lacks of quality, features and it is expensive. That is ok, you have the choice to deliver bad quality as I have the choice to find other solution.
But I can not cancel hubspot account, now we are attached to a 12month contract per agent without any advert. I'm watching how they take my money every month even when I am not using it, and i begging them to cancel my account, they refuse.
Keep away from hubspot for startups, this is more a SCAM than a support program.
- Nichole Elizabeth DeMeré10Co-Founder PurposeBeyondProduct.com · WrittenRun your entire business from your Inbox. Works with Google Apps.Kashish SharmaFounding Member|Head of Sales @SquadRun · WrittenBest lightweight CRM there is out there. Been using it for 2+ years, quick and easy to track, snooze and group your business emails. Snippets, major time-saving feature here! It has easily brought in 2x efficiency in my email management and response time.If you use (and live in) Gmail I recommend Streak. It's a lightweight CRM that comes with a couple of nice features I can't live without: snooze emails, read tracking, etc.
- Jonathan KnegtelBuilding blockdata.tech
I've used Streak for + 3 years and has always been my go to. I've set it up for clients for sales, project management and my personal inbox.
Support is always willing to help and once you think you have mastered it, there is another hidden feature. (formulas in a CRM anyone?)
Make sure to hold an onboarding session for your team and commit, it will pay off.
- Robert StojnicCTO, Factmata
Indispensable for managing hires and pipelines, been using it every day for months. However, it frequently takes a couple of seconds to load, and can take longer to retrieve old emails assigned to a box.
- Anshuman Chadda3MD MPH; Physician Entrepreneur · EditedCloze has been the only tool that has stuck with me for >1 year, I have tried all of the above. Airtable is good only for archiving contacts, but there is nothing actionable you can get out of it. In Cloze, you can do emails, mail merge, groups, reminders, phone calls, tags, notes etc...and it pulls all things passively in the background. Airtable and most of the other apps use Zapier.. which is good but is too much work... I actually use Cloze > Zapier > Airtable for backupsDanielle CadhitCo-Founder, CEO @CostCanvas · WrittenThis is what I use for personal / business. It's great because it smartly imports your contact data instead of having to manually input everything every time. The free plan allows for up to 1000 or 2000 free contacts I think.
- Arnaud BaaliCTO · WrittenIt's free for up to 5 users and they have Sales, Marketing and support integrated which is nice. you can also use the APIFernando BatistaGeek looking for cool new stuff · WrittenI'm using it right now and is a very complete and affordable CRM solution.Kevin TaylorChief Passion Catalyst, HYBRYD Studios · WrittenBeen using this for almost a year now, after trying InfusionSoft, HubSpot, ProsperWorks, Nimble and some others. Agile CRM has the best combination of functionality and pricing, especially for small business.
- Anshuman Chadda3MD MPH; Physician Entrepreneur · WrittenFound it extremely slow. Maybe it was my internet that day.Nick Abouzeid37Words at Product Hunt ✌️ · WrittenJust launched last week - seems super simple, but it gets the job done 🎉
- Patrick KanaleyBiz Dev @ BrandYourself · WrittenThis is the best I've seen in this space since it's aimed at long-term relationships vs. pipelines. Believe it was designed for real estate agents, but might work for what you're looking for.Björn BakkerFounder @Blindfeed.com · WrittenPersonally, I also really like Airtable. It has a lot of flexibility, and the spreadsheet view is really nice. It's like google sheets on Steroids. However, if you are really looking for a tool that helps you setup triggers to follow up on people and to build a strong network, I recommend checking out Contactually. It was recommended once by a top VC out of SF and he is a big fan (he wasn't even an investor). Other things I've tried out, is to build it in a Trello board, as I love the kanban approach and put pictures of the people I'm building relationships with. The challenge with all your personal CRM tools, is that it requires time and dedication to keep it up to date. My most natural behavior is actually taking notes of interactions and put that in my Evernote. I then sometimes set reminders to follow up. I do the same with my gmail. Mixmax has also some cool stuff you can do to scale your personal CRM a bit more. I think the gmail function of reminder yourself
- Jonathan Costet3Marketing & Content Manager · WrittenJonathan Costet made this productCRMs are for sales, so they all offer a pipeline view. If you're like me and need to manage a network, this is a problem because: 1/ not all my contacts are meant for the same purpose (think investors, journalists, advisors) 2/ one of my main objectives is to build a relationship over time (not a one-off deal). Folk helps me do this with LOTS of automated features that save time (import, enrichment, email threads, meeting logs, etc...) and with a simple layout to easily create and manage different categories of contacts/outreach efforts. Very smart product (and the design also helps!).
- Jonathan CostetMarketing & Content Manager
I've been using Folk in private beta for some time, and I'm glad I can finally tell the world how much of a game-changer it has been for me! Folk saves me a HUGE amount of time: it keeps all my contacts from multiple sources in one place, it automatically deduplicates/enriches/adds email threads to contacts, AND it acts like a CRM but for my network. I had tested many options before, so I'm relieved I won't have to switch tools back-and-forth anymore!
- David RyanCreator of Corilla.
New product that instantly made me smile. It fits in between the virtually useless contacts list in Gmail and the distant-feeling CRM in the cloud. Using it made me realise this happy medium of Folk is much quicker for the kind of contact management and outreach most relevant for our company. Plus the overall UX and beautiful UI run rings around the majority of CRMs and contact managers out there.
- Diego PizzocaroFounder / CEO, Sellfapp.com · WrittenDiego Pizzocaro made this productWe designed Sellf CRM to be the Runkeeper for Sales People. We really wanted to change the approach by helping to focus around goals and organize activities to reach those faster. In doing this we took inspiration from Runkeeper, Runtastic and in general fitness apps that use goals, badges and competition with firends and we essentially replicated these into Sellf. Give it a try and let us know what you think! We've already have a large community of 100.000 users and would love to have you join us! Disclaimer: I am the CEO and founder of Sellf.
- Raphaël ChabaudGrowth & Product Marketer · WrittenAutomated update and link to pictures, social networks is very handy and time saving.
- Leo BassamFounder, CEO at Plutio.com · WrittenLeo Bassam made this productHey Eric, give Plutio a try. It is a very simple and beautiful CRM for individuals. You could create a profile for your clients and contacts, group them in categories, and even invite them to start a conversations. Soon you will be able to talk to any of your contacts without inviting them, this will allow you to 1) keep track of all your conversions in one place, 2) have a bird-eye view of when you've last contacted someone and what it was about, 3) create actionable tasks and reminders. Hope this helps 😀
- Tejas Kinger20SaaS Product Marketing @ Freshworks Inc · WrittenTejas Kinger made this productYou could give Freshsales a try. It comes with a 30-day trial and a free plan that is loaded with quite a few features and should work well as a personal CRM.
- Steven HambletonFounder, Emailancer
I used Pipedrive for a while but Freshsales is so much faster and the user interface, automations and built in email tracking meant I could retire a few other products.
- Fanuel DeweverFounder Growth Architects & Crowd Angels · WrittenI prefer Nimble Social CRM. It is very easy to add social media profiles of your contacts and to auto discover other channels they use. I sync it with my Fb, LinkedIn, Twitter and Google contacts so I have the entire list up to date all the time. NIMBLE.com
- Learn UX made this productHi Eric, Great question :) We just released 2 months ago, with contact integration and a lot of support for conversation tracking - and we're FREE :) Curious about what features you want related to "managing (your) own meetings and address book"? Would love to hear more, and help you with that! -Brendan
Just writing things down is such a great way to commit them to memory. Friendsome helps you do this and puts all the key details about each relationship at your fingertips. It's very easy to use and the benefits are awesome. If you are a person who writes notes in your contacts, you should definitely use this app.
- Paul ChambersTechnical Director, iRobot Corp · WrittenPodio is a toolbox of sorts, and can easily be used for 'PRM' (personal relationship management). It's easy to customize, something I appreciate since someone else's idea of how things should work don't always match one-for-one with mine. I also like the integration with other services. Nothing worse than trying to keep key data in sync across multiple services. Duplicates are bad, but merging/deleting records that aren't the same is worse.
One of my favourite must have tools. I've used it in many non-for-profit orgs as an alternative to disconnected and messy spreadsheets. I've seen it used in Film Festivals, Vounteer Rostering and Event Planning. It can also be an awesome Intranet alternative.
- Charlie MuirFounder, brifs.co
This is unheard of in the world of SaaS, but I found a bug that broke Medium (blog platform) URLs because that site has '@' signs in their URLs (which is unusual). I contacted support, described the issue and they fixed it in less than 24 hours.
Anyone who is intimately familiar with software startups knows that getting something like this fixed immediately when only one user has an issue with it practically never happens because the company always has tons of other things that they are working on at any given moment. This requires the dev team to stop their sprint, context switch, dig through code to see what fixing this might break something else somewhere else, then test the new code, and push to production.
This world class customer support is a strong indicator that CapsuleCRM has a top tier organizational culture which empowers CS to get fixes like this out quickly.
I know that this is all inside baseball, but CRM software is very hard to get right. What this means for the average user is that you can expect to be able to use CRM to it's full potential which is very powerful in the hands of a business that knows how to leverage it.
CapsuleCRM seems to have some very important things right: Product and CS. If they can get the other things SaaS companies need to do right, then I think we can expect to see them becoming a breakout success.
Break a leg CapsuleCRM Team and special shout out to Josef over there for helping me out with this and knocking my support socks off!
- If you're willing to pay the $25/mo, this is by-far the best one you can use personally. Yeah, a bit overkill for personal usage but it's fully customizable and if you have a Gmail account or G Suite account for personal usage, it'll to you well!
