The Top 8 AI CRMs Tested

Firsthand experiences, features and future vision for AI in CRMs

Looking to learn more about how AI is used in CRM, which CRMs offer which AI features, and how well they work?

As co-founder of Salesflare, building a CRM for more than a decade, I tested out 8 of the top CRMs that offer intelligence features firsthand.

I’m happy to take you along for the ride.

The Current State of AI in CRM

With the rapid evolution of AI models, high expectations continue to build for AI to make new things possible across every type of software. This is no different for sales CRM software.

As CRM vendors feel the need to react quickly to these new expectations, they often add AI features that sound good in marketing but don't actually provide significant value to their customers. Some may argue it's "lipstick on a pig," and I think they're right.

Many of these AI features:

1. Don't improve the core usefulness of the CRM software.
2. Don't add more value than the standalone AI models.
3. Overpromise and underdeliver.

After all, it's nice that you can get an AI model to help you write emails, but it needs to be better than what you get in ChatGPT, Copilot for Microsoft 365, or Gemini for Google Workspace. Because otherwise, why pay another premium to your CRM software to get the feature?

There is no doubt in my mind, however, that every vendor will keep improving because I think everyone agrees that the introduction of AI will redefine software. (And no, not everything will become a chat interface. Visual interfaces are not dead.)

So, if we only seem to be at the start of the AI CRM journey, where are we actually going?

Where True AI CRMs Are Headed

In essence, CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management. And that's what CRM software does: it helps you track, build, and manage customer relationships better at scale.

If you have only a few customers or less than 10 leads in your pipeline, you maybe don't need CRM software. Your brain and a simple system to stay organized will do. But as you scale, good CRM software can help you track your sales in a much better way. You'll build better relationships, better manage your sales, and make more revenue.

That's also where AI can deliver the most value in CRM.

Here are some possible AI features I see that could help you track, build, and manage customer relationships at scale:

• Fill and update the CRM for you semi-automatically, so everything is properly tracked. This ranges from suggesting which companies, contacts, and opportunities to create to collecting all available information about them.
• Remind you to do important things when you're forgetting to do them: following up with an important lead, replying to an email, adding a note to a meeting, etc. The CRM can be your second and improved brain.
• Summarize large amounts of information, so you don't spend time reading and digesting it fully yourself. It can, for instance, summarize a history/timeline with a client, suggest next steps, and answer any questions you may have about it. Or it can summarize a call for you. Or summarize a relationship you're having with a lead or customer.
• Categorize large amounts of information, like replies to email sequences. It can automatically categorize these replies, so you know who is interested, who is out of the office, etc. It could also assign a category to a company based on other info you have about that company.
• Find new high-quality leads for you. For example, it can detect your ideal customer profile and search for more leads that fit precisely.
• Write emails, so you spend less time thinking and typing. This is one of the most obvious use cases for generative AI, but so far nobody is doing this right. Or are we all going to send each other generic, salesy, and uninformed AI emails from now on? I hope not.

I see a future where salespeople can focus on having human interactions with customers. Where they can do what they do best: understand their fellow humans, bring them the right solutions, and get rewarded. And CRMs can do the rest.

At Salesflare, we've been working towards this future since 2014, laying the foundation by making it super easy to track everything in the CRM. And I'm hopeful we will make big strides toward it in the next few years.

It's an exciting time to be alive.

The 8 Best AI CRMs + Their Current Sales AI Features

Now, it's good to know where we are headed, but you're probably interested in where we are today and how you can get the most possible value.

To save you some time, let me share my very own research with you into what some of the most popular CRMs out there deliver today in terms of "AI features" for sales teams.

But, before digging in, let me give you a few important disclaimers:

1. This research is part of our effort at Salesflare to build the most useful applications of AI into our CRM in the most thoughtful way. This is the ultimate goal I had in mind when writing up my findings, so the comments will be critical (while based on a decade of matter expertise).
2. A lot of intelligent features that are marketed as "AI" are not using AI technology. Even though it's deceptive marketing, I included those features in the review anyway, because what's most important in the end is that the features add value, not what the technology behind them is.
3. I'm obviously biased, having my own vision of where AI in CRM is headed as one of the people building it. If you want to understand how I think about AI, you can reread a short version of it above.
4. I'm describing current functionality in June 2024, so only features that are available for testing. I will however probably update this article in the future.
5. To make it a fair comparison in terms of pricing, I've listed the price of the Pro(fessional) plans for each CRM (as their feature sets are generally more or less aligned) unless the CRM required a higher plan to access those features. If applicable, I also listed any additional cost for the listed AI features, additional costs to get a normal level of support, or any required costs for onboarding.

Here are the CRMs I put to the test:

1. Salesflare
2. HubSpot CRM + Sales Hub
3. Salesforce Sales Cloud
4. Pipedrive
5. Zoho CRM
6. Nutshell CRM
7. Freshsales
8. Streak

With all that out of the way, let's explore.

Salesflare

My co-founder and I started Salesflare in 2014 after trying multiple CRMs to track our sales.

Every CRM we tried forced us to input a lot of information for us to be able to track things, which just didn't work for us. Then we saw that most of that information was already available somewhere: in our emails, calendar, socials, tracking, ... Our only job was to gather and organize it. Sounded simple, right?

We've spent the last decade doing exactly that: making it effortless to track your sales by making sure our B2B sales CRM fills itself semi-automatically and by offering it to you in a super easy interface that is integrated deeply anywhere you connect with customers (Gmail, Outlook, LinkedIn, ...).

In the back of our minds, we always knew that AI would come and bring everything we do to the next level. And we've been patiently experimenting with it all along the way.

We figured that the basis for good AI is good data. So most of what we've done the last 10 years has been focused on that.

Most of what Salesflare does is not using AI technology today, because AI simply didn't do a better job than our data algorithms. We're however building AI in some core areas as I write this, on top of the foundation that has been laid.

And, again, in the spirit of my second disclaimer above: what's important is that the features are useful, not what technology they are built on.

You'll also notice that we don't currently give our intelligent features a name, as they are embedded deeply into the product in different places. They are not presented as a separate entity but as an integral part of Salesflare.

Features & Testing

Now, here are some intelligent features Salesflare can offer you today:

• Suggested accounts: Salesflare detects which companies you're in touch with. When they seem to be important, it enriches them with company data and suggests adding them to the CRM.
• Suggested contacts: The CRM keeps track of which contacts you're in touch with, imports all the contact info present in email signatures and publicly available sources, and suggests you add them to the relevant accounts. That way you don't have to think "CRM" every time you meet someone.
• Follow-up reminders: Salesflare reminds you to follow up whenever you're forgetting to do so.
• Email reply reminders: If an email from a lead or customer does not get replied to or handled otherwise, Salesflare detects this for you.
• Meeting note reminders: Whenever you've had a meeting with a customer, Salesflare reminds you to add a note to it, so everything stays perfectly up to date.
• Relationship intelligence: Salesflare continuously measures the strength of your team's relationships. You can identify who knows whom best at a certain company, to make sure you always know the right way in.
• Lead scoring: Salesflare automatically keeps track of every interaction you're having with a lead or customer. If they start engaging more with you (e.g. opening emails, browsing the website, ...) the account will be marked as "hot" or "on fire" live. This can be a good sign that it is the right moment to reach out.
• Data enrichment: I mentioned it a few times already above, but to be complete: Salesflare enriches every contact and company with every piece of information it can find in your own emails, meetings, ... but also in publicly available info so you don't have to input all that. No manual clicks needed.

We've got way more intelligent features coming your way soon, both in terms of data improvements and AI additions. I plan to add them to this overview as they go live!

Pricing

Salesflare offers all listed intelligent features on its cheapest plan, called "Growth," starting at $29/user/month.

For the sake of comparison beyond intelligence features, the price of Salesflare's Pro plan is:

• $49/user/month (billed annually)
• $55/user/month (billed monthly)

HubSpot CRM + Sales Hub

HubSpot offers an all-in-one business platform with a CRM at its core.

The company has lately been going all in on AI - at least, that's what you hear when you join their earnings calls with investors - so their software was the first one I tried in this AI CRM journey.

HubSpot calls its AI assistant "ChatSpot," probably because the main proposition is that it's a chat interface for HubSpot.

In my exploration, it did seem that a lot of the functionality was still under development. Also, as HubSpot tries to power more different departments in a company, it's important to keep in mind that I only tested features that are built for the sales team.

Features & Testing

Here are the intelligent features HubSpot offered and my experience with them:

• Chat interface: ChatSpot essentially offered a sort of light ChatGPT for HubSpot. To be able to understand its capabilities, they offered some prompt templates. I tested it for a while by checking the different templates. As I mentioned previously, despite the current hype, I don't believe chat interfaces will replace visual interfaces, except in specific use cases, on the go, or when the normal user interface is unnecessarily overcomplicated. In the latter case, it may be better to fix the visual interface itself.
• Summarize timelines: HubSpot made this possible on companies, deals, contacts, and tickets. It worked relatively well and it seemed like a handy feature when conversations with customers and leads become longer than usual. It had some of the most useful summarization I got to test so far, although it was a pity that it was not offered in the core product.
• Draft emails: HubSpot promised to generate personalized emails based on some directions I gave it. In my tests, it didn't use any of the info in the CRM about the recipient, nor did it try to match my personal writing style, which was a disappointment. Because of this, I would probably keep using ChatGPT instead.
• Find new company leads by specifying a few criteria: I performed a few searches and it returned very little data. Confusingly, one search I did returned only one company called "The Feedback Firm," but when I clicked towards their website and Googled their name, the company didn't exist nor had it ever existed (or at least not publicly). Was this a hallucination of the AI or a flaw in their data?

Pricing

HubSpot CRM + Sales Hub did not seem to offer its AI features on a separate pricing plan at this time.

HubSpot's pricing on the Sales Hub Professional plan was:

• $90/user/month (billed annually)
• $100/user/month (billed monthly)
• + an extra required fee of $1470 for onboarding

Salesforce Sales Cloud

Salesforce has been touting its AI features for years. It has been doing this at least since 2014-2015 when it bought the company "RelateIQ," rebranded it to "SalesforceIQ," and positioned it at the heart of its "Einstein" offering, featuring a little avatar that resembles the actual Albert Einstein. (I'm honestly not sure how he would have felt about that if he were still alive, but that seems like a topic for a whole other article.)

In March 2023, just over four months after ChatGPT was launched, Salesforce announced "Einstein GPT, the world's first generative AI for CRM". (It's been recently rebranded as "Einstein 1 GPT".)

Since then, the company's homepage has been focused on AI, stating things like "Delight customers and grow revenue on the #1 AI CRM".

For those who don't know Salesforce, it is indeed the #1 CRM in the world in terms of market share, mostly fueled by its popularity with big enterprises that have deep pockets. Whether it's also the #1 in AI is of course another question.

So I went in to test it out.

Features & Testing

It was honestly not that easy to find out what Einstein GPT had to offer concretely to sales teams. There was a lot of marketing material to find, but little concrete substance that could be derived from it. To discover the details, I had to first dig deep into the support documentation.

Here are the intelligent features Salesforce offered and my experience with them:

• Data enrichment: Salesforce positioned data enrichment as a feature within its Einstein offering. While it's a bit deceptive to position it as an AI feature, good data is crucial to delivering good AI, so it does make sense in a way. The type of data enrichment did seem pretty lightweight, however, and it would definitely not suffice as a good basis for further AI work.
• Call summaries, exploration, signals & insights: A lot of functionality that Einstein GPT offered seemed to be related to calls and meetings. This makes sense: those are features you can add rather quickly without touching the core functionality of the CRM. This does beg the question of why you wouldn't use a specialized tool for this, like Gong or one of its many competitors, as these companies have been perfecting the functionality for years. This was confirmed by my tests, in which the quality of Salesforce's capabilities was rather average.
• Draft emails: The pro of this Salesforce feature was that you could write your own system message to personalize the emails consistently, which was a clear step ahead of most other CRMs I tried. I could however not help but wonder why I wouldn't use ChatGPT instead, as it also allowed a system message at no extra cost.
• Lead scoring: Salesforce promised to score my leads based on a series of factors, both when it comes to their fit to my ideal customer profile (industry, company revenue, geography, department, lead source) as well as their engagement with me (count and recency of interactions). It did seem rather opaque and it was hard to confirm its usefulness. Knowing the amount of data a Salesforce customer usually manages to track in Salesforce and its reliance on that data, I would assume that it usually does not live up to the expectations created.
• Relationship intelligence: The premise was that Salesforce crawls Gmail, Slack and/or Salesforce Files to detect relationships between people and companies. Even after reading the help documentation, I'm not 100% sure what it concretely does and whether it's actually useful.

Pricing

To get access to the AI features, one needs to be:

• On the Enterprise, Performance or Unlimited Edition of Salesforce
• Pay an extra cost for "Einstein for Sales," "Einstein Conversation Insights," and/or "Einstein Relationship Insights" (depending on the specific feature)

That means Salesforce's lowest pricing to get these AI features was:

• $165/user/month on the Enterprise plan + $75/user/month for Einstein for Sales + $50/user/month for Einstein Conversation Insights + $50/user/month for Einstein Relationship Insights Starter plan = $340/user/month (billed annually)

It may be that it costs even more, but this is what I could find out without having to talk to a sales rep. Then again, they may be able to offer you lower pricing, most likely temporarily and in return for a larger commitment. More about that in our article about Salesforce contracts.

Pipedrive

After Salesforce and HubSpot, this line-up wouldn't be complete without the third big player in the world of sales CRMs: Pipedrive.

The company has been around since 2011, offering a simpler and more sales-focused alternative for small and medium-sized businesses.

Pipedrive made its first steps into the world of AI in April 2024, announcing "Pipedrive AI" and its "Sales Assistant".

The "Sales Assistant" had been around for a bit, but now it was touted to be "AI-powered," so I had to take it to the test.

Features & Testing

Here are the intelligent features Pipedrive offered and my experience with them:

• Notifications: After some extensive testing, I concluded that the "Sales Assistant" sidebar seemed more like a lightweight notification center with a built-in daily metrics report. I didn't really experience it as an actual assistant, but maybe that's merely a disconnect between the company's future goal and the current status of its functionality.
• Next best action: The marketing materials for Pipedrive AI also focused strongly on a "Next best action" feature. After testing for a while, the assistant occasionally seemed to tell me to get in touch with a lead. Undoubtedly a handy feature for the busier salespeople out there. Positioning it as an AI feature seemed like a stretch to me, but - as mentioned previously, and apart from it being deceptive marketing - it's better to judge features by their usefulness instead of by their technology.
• Draft emails: Pipedrive incorporated the possibility to draft emails using AI. They allowed me to set email tone and email length for every email. I personally would have liked to personalize them more, as the emails did not match my writing style nor seemed to have any knowledge of who I am. Also, any email replies or forwards did not seem to know about the previous email in the thread. The results were honestly not as good as what I'd get with ChatGPT.
• Summarize emails: While most other CRMs summarized full timelines, Pipedrive decided to do something odd: summarizing one email at a time. The summarization process took more time than me scanning the email myself, so it wasn't terribly useful.
• Integration search and recommendations: When I typed "proposal documents" in their marketplace search then Pipedrive said "PandaDoc" was a good option. I failed to see how this was even an intelligence feature, but as it was an integral part of the "Pipedrive AI," I decided to include it in this overview anyway.

Pricing

At the time of writing, Pipedrive did not charge extra for its intelligence features. Instead, it offered these features on its Professional, Power, and Enterprise plans.

Pipedrive's pricing on the Professional plan was:

• $49/user/month (billed annually)
• $64/user/month (billed monthly)

Zoho CRM

Zoho is another big player in the sales CRM space.

Well, not just in CRM, but in business applications in general, like software for emailing, accounting, HR, IT management, ... You name it, they do it.

They launched their small business CRM product in 2005 and have historically been positioning themselves as a cheaper alternative to Salesforce. Based on that premise, they have built a relatively strong position in the small business market.

Zoho's AI assistant called "Zia" has been around since at least 2017, so you could say they are veterans in the business.

My main concern however was in whether their CRM contains good data to build any useful AI features on top of. Here’s what I found.

Features & Testing

Here are the intelligent features Zoho CRM offered and my experience with them:

• Preferred contact moment: If you're old enough to remember the Outlook add-in called "Xobni," keeping track of when is the best moment to email a person is a feature with instant appeal. This is what Zoho promises to do: it'll keep statistics about the moments specific people are most likely to call or email you. The caveat: for most leads you'll miss that data. (Again, not a real AI feature, but useful nonetheless when it works.)
• Suggested macros: Zoho had this feature called macros, which after some deeper examination seemed to be what's called "workflows" in most other CRMs. It claimed that it would suggest macro templates based on things I'd do routinely, but I did not use Zoho CRM enough to get any suggestions, so I can't share much more about it.
• Data enrichment: Unlike in many other CRMs, the data enrichment actually worked and enriched records consistently. It did however require a lot of manual steps. To give you an idea: the easiest way seemed to be to click edit, then click "enrich data," confirm the data, click "update," and then "save". I'm still unsure why it didn't do it more automatically.
• Summarize emails: Like Pipedrive, Zoho made the odd decision to summarize individual emails instead of full timelines. Considering scanning an email takes only a second or two and gives me better insights, I would find it way more useful if they'd summarize the full timeline instead.
• Call transcripts: Setting this up first required integrating my telephone provider, which was quite a job, but it worked out in the end. The quality was ok, but it was not as good as I've seen in specialized services. I'd probably use one of those, as there are so many on the market that do a great job.
• Autofill fields: While Zoho calls it "Predictions" and "Predictive AI," what it concretely seemed to do was guess the value of one predefined field using generative AI based on another field. In my tests, the results were a little flaky, but maybe using more extensive and more qualitative data it could do a better job.
• Chat interface: Just like I mentioned previously while testing HubSpot, despite the current hype, I don't believe chat interfaces will replace visual interfaces, except in specific use cases, on the go, or when the normal user interface is unnecessarily overcomplicated. In the latter case, it may be better to fix the visual interface itself.

Pricing

Zoho seemed to offer all its intelligence features on its Enterprise plan.

Zoho's pricing on the Enterprise plan* was:

• $40/user/month (billed annually)
• $50/user/month (billed monthly)
• To get a similar level of support as with other CRMs, it costs an additional 20% of your subscription fee to get Premium Support, so $48-60/user/month is in fact a more accurate pricing.

Nutshell CRM

Nutshell is a CRM and email marketing platform for small businesses that was acquired in 2022 by a big digital marketing agency called WebFX.

It's not really a big player, but it's been around in the small business market for a while. And in August of 2023 they launched their "Power AI" plan.

I was interested to see what that AI power was all about, so that was how they ended up on this list of AI CRMs.

Features & Testing

Here are the intelligent features Nutshell offered and my experience with them:

• Summarize timelines: This worked for all timelines across people, companies, and leads. Based on my tests, this didn't seem to work as well as in some other CRMs, but maybe that was particular to my exact tests. It may have been caused by a combination of flawed data enrichment, mistaking email newsletters for personal emails (hence including them in the summary), and an overly scripted summarization prompt... so not things I could impact. It brings home the point again that good AI can only work with good data.
• Summarize Zoom transcripts: As a long-time Zoom user, this paid Nutshell feature confused me because... Zoom already provides great summaries as part of its cheapest paid plan, the Pro plan. Furthermore, the quality of the Zoom AI summaries has been getting pretty high lately (definitely as compared to Nutshell's version). I'd think it would probably be handier for them to integrate those summaries, instead of rebuilding it on their end.

Pricing

Nutshell offered its intelligence features on its dedicated "Power AI" plan.

Nutshell's pricing on the Power AI plan was:

• $52/user/month (billed annually)
• $59/user/month (billed monthly)

This means the intelligence features set you back $10 on top of the "Pro" plan. The AI timeline summarizations were limited to 50/user/month. The Zoom summarizations were unlimited.

Freshsales

Freshsales is a sales CRM launched in 2016 by a company called Freshworks, which started in 2010 with a Zendesk alternative called Freshdesk.

The CRM product itself was touted to be a cheaper alternative to Salesforce, much like its competitors from the same city, Zoho, although a little more modern (and it's not just me saying that - this is what they say in some of their Google ads).

In June of 2023, Freshworks launched "Freddy AI," which at the time of writing could come in different forms: "Freddy Self Service," "Freddy Copilot," and "Freddy Insights".

For the purpose of this comparison, I focused on the "Freddy" features for sales teams.

Features & Testing

Here are the intelligent features Freshsales offered and my experience with them:

• Lead scoring: On contacts, Freshsales shows a score that measures the engagement of a team with a contact based on their amount of emails, calls, and meetings as well as their subscription statuses. It seems to be relatively classic lead scoring, but, again, if it's useful it doesn't matter what technology is underneath the hood.
• Draft emails: Freshsales generates subject lines and email messages based on some initial input. Based on my tests, there was no real personalization going on and there was no real differentiation from using plain ChatGPT, apart from not having to copy and paste the text. And from having to pay extra for it of course.
• Possible duplicates: It seemed that Freshsales was going to show me possible duplicate companies. While trying to test it out, I created two companies with a very similar name (the same name was not allowed) and the same website. It didn't detect any duplicate. Maybe I misunderstood how it's supposed to work, but I couldn't make it do anything.
• Possible connections: I understood this as if Freshsales was going to tell me which contacts I had at a company. I created a contact in the CRM with an email address matching the company's website and emailed it, but it did not suggest it as a possible connection.
• Deal insights: The premise is that Freshsales categorizes deals into "likely to close," "trending," "at risk," and a few other categories. The help documentation explained that this is mostly based on spikes in activity, dips in activity, etc. No deal insights were generated during my testing, as probably I didn't test it long enough.

Pricing

While Freshsales offered most intelligent features on the Pro plan, some were available on the Enterprise plan.

Freshsales' pricing on the Pro & Enterprise plans was:

• Pro: $39/user/month (billed annually)
• Pro: $47/user/month (billed monthly)
• Enterprise: $59/user/month (billed annually)
• Enterprise: $71/user/month (billed monthly)

Streak

Streak launched in 2011 as one of the first CRMs with a deep email integration, focused exclusively until today on Gmail users.

It initially found a lot of traction with its freemium model, but in March of 2024, it finally decided to kill off its free CRM plan, with its pricing now starting higher than most other small business CRM systems.

In December of 2023, they organized a big launch of Product Hunt of their "Streak AI" features, which caught my attention at the time.

I tested their intelligence features back then, and tested them again now. Let's dig in.

Features & Testing

Here are the intelligent features Streak offered and my experience with them:

• Summarize timelines & ask questions about them: This was a relatively handy feature, although it did take very long to get results (probably using an older AI model). I also did get some hallucinations here and there, but less than in some other CRMs. Overall, it was quite useful to be able to digest long timelines quicker.
• Autofill fields based on the timeline: When I tested this feature, it was relatively underwhelming. First, autofilling was only available on click and after waiting quite a while (just like with the timelines). The suggestions that finally appeared seemed to be mostly hallucinations and it required a lot of manual verification to decide what suggestions to accept. I think I'd prefer filling the fields manually.

All other intelligent features were still marked "coming soon" at the time of testing.

Pricing

Streak offered its intelligence features on its "Pro+" plan.

Streak's pricing on the Pro+ plan was:

• $69/user/month (billed annually)
• $89/user/month (billed monthly)

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