The 9 Best Contact Management Software
Dealing with lots of customer contact information can be overwhelming for small and large business contact managers alike. It’s often difficult to keep track of customer contact information and ensure you capitalise on every opportunity.
That's where contact management software comes into the picture.
Contact management not only makes it easier for you to organise your contacts, but also to utilise them according to your needs and interests. It is like a super-organised digital address book that helps you keep track of all the people you interact with, like customers or clients.
It helps you track prospect, customer, and vendor contact information. It also improves your sales efforts by simplifying communication and streamlining processes like outreach and lead qualification.
We have compiled a list of the best contact management software for your business that we tested ourselves, considering different factors like accessibility, features, support, integrability, and user reviews.
Rundown
- Best free contact management software: HubSpot, “It is a free-to-use contact management software that helps you to manage new incoming leads, make income projections, and manage ongoing contacts.”
- Easy to use contact management software: BIGcontacts, “It is a user-friendly and easy-to-use contact management software that helps you stay connected with prospects across channels and manage relationships with existing customers easily in an organised manner.”
- Best funnel-oriented contact management software: Pipedrive, “It helps you record and track important contact information, keep a 360-degree view of customer interactions, and streamline your sales process. It combines communications tracking, interactions, customer preferences, and support tickets in one centralised tool shared across your business.”
- Best AI-powered Customer management software: Zoho, “It is an AI-powered software that helps you automate data entry, analyse customer behaviour, and generate insights. Its contact management system helps you capture and track customer data across various touchpoints, providing a clear view of customer activities.”
- All-in-one contact management software: ActiveCampaign, “It is a comprehensive platform that helps you streamline contact management by automatically handling tasks like lead nurturing, follow-up emails, and customer segmentation. It also seamlessly intergrates with CRM systems, combining contact management and marketing automation functionalities.”
- Best for lead management: Nutshell, “It allows you to easily organise and track your leads, ensuring that no opportunities slip through the cracks. The software enables you to add important lead details, track conversations, and automate sales processes, providing a comprehensive solution for lead management.”
- Best for sales tracking: Keap, “It offers a central location for managing client interactions and communication, automating lead follow-ups, and keeping contact records up to date without any manual effort from you. Personalised forms, emails, and sales follow-ups can be created easily using the contact data already stored in Keap.
- Best for prospecting: Nimble, “It provides a comprehensive solution for contact management, allowing you to organise and track prospect information efficiently. Its centralised platform enables you to store and access valuable contact data, ensuring that no prospect goes unnoticed or opportunity is missed.”
- Best for Gmail Users: Streak, “Streak seamlessly integrates with Gmail, transforming it into a powerful contact management tool. By working directly within Gmail, you can manage your contacts, track customer interactions, and perform sales activities without switching between multiple platforms.”
How We Found the Best Contact Management Software?
Choosing the best contact management software requires extensive research and evaluation.
We carefully looked at many different platforms and evaluated them based on certain criteria to find the most reliable and effective ones.
In this list, there are different softwares for different use cases, like; some are for lead management, sales funnel management, prospecting, etc.
We have curated this list following the following criteria:
- Platform utilisation: We went beyond the reviews and personally tried the platforms firsthand to understand their features, functionalities, and user experience comprehensively.
- Features and Functionality: We considered the range of features and functionality offered by each contact management software. This included evaluating the ability to manage contacts efficiently, track customer interactions, automate tasks, and generate insightful reports.
- User-Friendliness: The software's ease of use and intuitiveness were important factors in our evaluation. We sought user-friendly contact management solutions that required minimal training or technical expertise to get started.
- Customisation and Flexibility: We examined whether the contact management software allowed for customisation and flexibility. We also looked for solutions that provided options to configure and personalise settings to meet your unique needs.
- Integration with Other Tools: We examined the compatibility and integration capabilities of the contact management software with other tools and platforms that you use in your business. This included evaluating integration with CRM systems, email marketing tools, project management software, and other relevant applications.
- Pricing and Value for Money: We compared the pricing plans and subscription options offered by each contact management software. We considered not only the cost but also the value for money in terms of the features and benefits provided.
Recommended Contact Management Software
Best free contact management software
HubSpot
HubSpot is a free software that manage all your contacts, track customer interactions, and perform sales activities in one place.
Additionally, HubSpot's contact management tool is integrated with the company's CRM, providing insights into customer behavior, lead sources, and more.
It has a centralised database to store and manage all contacts. The platform automatically associates any emails, notes, or calls with the respective contacts for easy reference, ensuring you have all the relevant information on hand.
HubSpot's contact management tool automates follow-ups, contact record creation, and contact record updates. This streamlines and simplifies the contact management process, saving your time and effort.
Apart from contact management, HubSpot's CRM offers a range of noteworthy features:
- Pipeline management: Effectively manage your sales pipeline and track the progress of deals.
- Reporting dashboards: Gain valuable insights into sales performance with comprehensive analytics and visual reports.
- Company insights: Access relevant data and information about companies, allowing for more personalised interactions.
- Deal tracking: Keep a close eye on every deal in progress and monitor their status and details.
- Email tracking and notifications: Receive real-time notifications when your emails are opened or clicked, allowing for timely follow-ups.
- Prospect tracking: Keep tabs on potential customers and track their engagement with your marketing campaigns.
- Meeting scheduling: Streamline the process of scheduling meetings with prospects and clients through integrated calendar tools.
- Live chat: Engage with website visitors and provide instant support or assistance through live chat functionality.
HubSpot is free forever, but you can upgrade to a paid plan at any time for more features as your business grows.
Easy-to-use contact management software
BIGontacts
BIGContacts is user-friendly and easy-to-use contact management software that helps you to stay connected with prospects across channels and manage relationships with existing customers effortlessly.
It gives a comprehensive view of contact records, offering detailed information such as phone numbers, location, emails, previous interactions, transaction history, notes, and upcoming engagements. You also have the freedom to store additional information in custom fields.
The tool enables you to utilise these comprehensive contact records to personalise your outreach communications and campaigns effectively. By utilising the data available, you can tailor your messages to each individual contact, improving engagement and response rates.
BIGContacts simplifies data capture by automatically gathering information from web forms, eliminating the need for manual effort and reducing the risk of errors.
The best things about BIGContacts are:
- It provides a comprehensive overview of contacts, offering a 360° view that includes details like previous interactions, notes, transactions, files, and upcoming appointments.
- The platform enhances customer segmentation and enables targeted interactions through static and dynamic contact lists. This functionality allows you to categorise and group contacts based on specific criteria, improving the effectiveness of your communication with them.
- To streamline the process of adding leads to your database, it has a web form connection feature that automatically captures lead information and adds it to your contact database.
- In order to measure the effectiveness of your engagement efforts with contacts, BIGContacts provides in-depth reports. These reports offer insights into your interactions, allowing you to evaluate the success of your strategies and make informed decisions based on relevant business metrics.
- It also offers automated drip email sequences and custom workflows. These features ensure that your communications are sent at the right time and in a personalised manner.
It has a forever-free plan for startups with all premium features. Paid plans starts at $5/user/month with a 15-day free trial.
Best funnel-oriented contact management software
Pipedrive
PipeDrive is a contact management software that focuses on the sales funnel. It enables you to seamlessly track and manage leads as they move through each stage of the sales process.
This funnel-oriented approach ensures that no potential opportunity is overlooked, allowing you to maximise your sales potential.
It has a visually striking pipeline management that associates specific deals with contacts and tracks their progress across sales process stages. This feature gives you an overview of each contact's status in the pipeline.
PipeDrive is a comprehensive platform that has a wide range of features that cater to all aspects of contact management. From capturing lead information to segmenting contacts, tracking progress, setting reminders, and generating insightful reports, PipeDrive has it all.
The best things about PipeDrive are:
- Keep track of available opportunities and manage them effortlessly using a visual sales pipeline with a user-friendly drag-and-drop interface.
- Enhance team collaboration by easily sharing files and receiving instant alerts.
- Boost efficiency by automating repetitive tasks such as data entry and follow-ups, freeing up your time for more important work.
- Achieve better targeting by segmenting and organising leads into distinct lists.
Best AI-powered Customer management software
Zoho
Zoho is an AI-powered software that streamlines and automates contact management processes, saving you valuable time and effort. Its intelligent algorithms analyse and categorise contacts, ensuring accurate data entry and eliminating manual tasks.
It allows you to store and manage a wide range of contact information in a structured manner. From basic details like names and contact information to more advanced data like preferences and purchase history, Zoho helps you to create a comprehensive profile for every contact.
This holistic approach to contact management ensures that you have all the necessary information to personalise your interactions and nurture customer relationships.
The best things about Zoho are:
- It has a user-friendly and intuitive interface.
- Zoho uses AI to predict customer behavior accurately and help you gain better insights.
- You can predict the probability of conversion for leads or opportunities, so you know what to prioritise.
- You can build custom models to predict how likely prospects are to purchase, convert, or miss a payment.
Zoho also provides real-time analytics and insights into your contact database. With comprehensive reporting features and visually appealing dashboards, you can gain valuable insights into contact engagement, sales performance, and marketing campaigns.
All-in-one contact management software
ActiveCampaign
If you need a centralised, all-in-one software to organise and manage your contacts, then ActiveCampaign is worth checking out.
ActiveCampaign aligns its contact management capabilities with your customer lifecycle. It starts with reaching and engaging your audience, followed by nurturing and educating them, converting and closing them, and finally supporting their growth. In the initial stages, ActiveCampaign assists you in creating a contact list to kickstart the contact management process.
Once you have your contact list set up, adding existing email contacts becomes seamless. From there, you can easily organise your contacts using lists, tags, or custom fields, allowing for efficient categorisation.
It also prompts you to create segments for your customers, enabling you to target and personalise content specifically for them. This contact management solution goes even further by helping you segment based on communication channels such as emails and forms.
It also identifies and extracts valuable insights from behavioral actions within these segments, giving you a deeper understanding of your customers.
The best things about ActiveCampaign are:
- It simplifies the process of adding contacts through features like importing lists and creating new contacts in just a few clicks.
- The Contact Record feature aggregates all collected data about a contact in one place, enabling users to edit, add information, subscribe or unsubscribe from lists, start or stop automation, and add or remove tags with ease
- It provides comprehensive contact management features, such as connecting contacts with accounts, sending direct emails from account records, attaching files to account records, and enabling bulk edits and ownership assignment
Best for lead management
Nutshell
NutShell is an easy-to-use software that allows you to efficiently gather, track, and organise leads, ensuring you never miss out on any potential opportunities. With Nutshell, you can easily capture lead information, assign leads to your team members, and track the progress of each lead throughout the sales pipeline.
You can easily import, store, and manage your contacts, keeping all pertinent details in one centralised location. Nutshell makes it simple to search for contacts, add notes, and attach important documents.
With its customisable fields and tags, you can organise and segment your contacts effortlessly, allowing for personalised communication and targeted marketing strategies.
The best things about NutShell are:
- It acts as the central hub for your company's customer data and knowledge, offering a unified location for you and your team to store and access contact information, call notes, and email conversations with customers.
- Nutshell seamlessly integrates with various applications, including Slack and Google Workspace, ensuring that you can easily access and utilise your customer data across multiple platforms.
- It provides in-depth lead tracking and reporting features. You can monitor the entire sales process, track interactions, and measure key metrics to gain insights into your lead management efforts.
Best for sales tracking
Keap
Keap provides a centralised hub for all client activity and communications. This tool allows you to automate follow-ups, create contact records, and update existing contact records, saving you time and ensuring accurate data.
Keap has a centralised contact database to effectively organise leads. This system offers features to qualify leads, tag them, and create personalised segmentation and activity triggers.
You can personalise your communications with contacts easily with Keap by utilising the contact data stored in Keap. You can quickly customise forms, emails, and sales follow-ups, delivering tailored messages that resonate with your audience.
Integrating Keap with popular email platforms like Gmail or Outlook ensures that all your email interactions are seamlessly updated in the associated contact's record. This integration eliminates the need for manual data entry and keeps your contact information current and synchronised.
The best things about Keap are:
- It has over 230 native integrations, making it compatible with various popular platforms such as Zapier, PayPal, Outlook, JotForm, and Instapage.
- The contact database feature in Keap allows you to easily store and manage all your contact information in one place.
- With analytics and ROI tracking capabilities, Keap helps you measure the success of your marketing efforts and make informed business decisions.
- The calendar and reminder system in Keap keeps you organised and ensures that no important tasks or appointments slip through the cracks.
- Automate your marketing activities with Keap's marketing automation features. These features allow you to streamline your campaigns and nurture your leads at scale.
Best for prospecting
Nimble
Nimble has a user-friendly interface which simplifies the prospecting process, allowing you to efficiently manage and track your contacts with ease.
It has prospecting tools that help you to identify and prioritise leads effectively. With features like lead scoring, tagging, and segmentation, Nimble helps you focus your efforts on prospects with the highest potential, improving your prospecting efficiency and success rate.
Nimble's prospecting tool also presents comprehensive contact information and company details for both prospects and customers. This includes a complete overview of emails, social interactions, messages, notes, and calendar events that you have exchanged with them.
With Nimble, you can create detailed contact profiles, track interactions, set reminders, and stay organised, ensuring that no prospect slips through the cracks.
The best things about Nimble are:
- It seamlessly integrates with Google Workspace and Office365, and offers more than 100 app integrations.
- It has automated email marketing campaigns that lets you pull from templates to send personalised group emails with tracking, analytics, and reporting capabilities.
- It allows you to host up to 25,000 contacts for free
Best for Gmail Users
Streak
Streak's contact management features seamlessly integrate with your Gmail inbox and other Google Workspace applications. The software enables you to organise and share a comprehensive timeline of customer contacts and interactions, including email records, call logs, files, notes, and tasks.
With Streak, you can create personalised views of your sales pipeline. You can search, filter, group, and sort your contact data in various ways and save these configurations as custom views. You can also share this data with your team for collaboration purposes.
Furthermore, Streak offers email tracking capabilities, providing you with valuable insights into your email performance. You can track your open rates, clicks, and other metrics, allowing you to refine your communication strategies and achieve better results.
The best things about Streak are:
- Streak has various features to enhance your email management experience, including view tracking, scheduled emails, and the ability to use pre-set email templates (snippets). These features enable you to track who has viewed your emails, schedule emails for later delivery, and save time with ready-made email templates.
- Streak's iOS and Android apps allow you to log updates and stay connected even when you're on the go.
- It offers shared access to pipelines, emails, notes, and call logs, Streak provides valuable context alongside access to your mailbox. This allows you to understand your interactions and comprehensively collaborate with your team.
- With Streak, you can create personalised mass emails by pulling details directly from your pipelines.
While the basic version of Streak is free for personal use, there are also paid professional and enterprise-level plans available for those seeking more advanced features and functionality.
