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Sales Cloud is equipped with customer relationship management (CRM) functionality that encompasses lead management, marketing automation and contact management solutions. It assists businesses in overseeing customer accounts, monitoring sales leads, execut...Read more about Salesforce Sales Cloud
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Shape's cloud-based solution offers tools designed to manage online marketing and promotions, capture leads from online sources, organize sales pipelines, connect with customers and automate everyday tasks. Shape is suitable for businesses in industries su...Read more about Shape
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*What is Topline?* Topline OS is an all-in-one growth operating system that brings together all the tools you need to run and grow your business in an easy to use, modern platform. It's packed with features like a complete CRM to keep track of all your cus...Read more about Topline
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Insightly is the modern, affordable CRM that teams love. It’s easy to use, simple to customize, and scales with companies as they grow, solving common pain points that legacy CRMs can't. Insightly helps teams build and convert sales pipeline, increase prod...Read more about Insightly
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Top Producer is an all-in-one business management platform designed specifically for real estate agents and teams. Grow your database and convert more leads with cutting-edge lead generation and marketing automation. Smart follow-up technology helps to gen...Read more about TOP PRODUCER
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monday CRM is a sales platform that helps businesses streamline sales cycle. The platform caters to a range of industries, such as real estate, software and IT services, media and communications, manufacturing, financial services, consumer goods, and healt...Read more about monday CRM
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LeadSquared is a cloud-based marketing automation and customer relationship management (CRM) solution for businesses of all sizes. It serves clients in industries such as finance, e-commerce, education, health and wellness, marketing, real estate, software...Read more about LeadSquared
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Rolldog is a customer relationship management (CRM) solution, with the perks of sales enablement all rolled into one. Rolldog helps companies manage business relationships, increase revenue, and boost sales & marketing effectiveness. Managing business rela...Read more about Rolldog
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Workbooks offers growing companies a SaaS platform to run their business and engage with their customers – at an affordable price. Workbooks designs, develops and implements its own software, which is targeted specifically at mid-market organizations. ...Read more about Workbooks
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Creatio CRM is an all-in-one platform that helps businesses manage the customer and revenue processes. It serves a variety of industries such as banking, credit unions, insurance, and telecommunications. The platform provides a unified CRM experience, enab...Read more about Creatio CRM
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Pipeliner has revolutionized CRM with our unique visual interface, no-code workflow automation engine, and instant, dynamic insights and reporting. This CRM provides both salespeople and sales management with many ways of displaying and analyzing sales ...Read more about Pipeliner CRM
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Less Annoying CRM is a contact management solution designed for small businesses. It helps them manage contacts, track leads, and stay on top of follow-ups. The platform offers several key features to help small businesses stay organized and productive. It...Read more about Less Annoying CRM
Google Contacts is a cloud-based solution that allows enterprises to store and manage contacts in a built-in directory. Professionals can create/import new contacts with details such as mailing address, phone number or directory profile and categorize them...Read more about Google Contacts
EngageBay is an integrated marketing, sales, support and CRM solution designed to help small to midsize enterprises acquire, engage and convert website visitors into customers. The cloud-based platform lets businesses use marketing tools to build relations...Read more about EngageBay CRM
ClickUp is a cloud-based collaboration and project management tool suitable for businesses of all sizes and industries. Features include communication and collaboration tools, task assignments and statuses, alerts and a task toolbar. Users can assign ...Read more about ClickUp
HoneyBook is the centralized clientflow management platform that empowers independent businesses to deliver remarkable client experiences and operate with confidence. Use one platform to see what’s happening with all projects. Manage each stage, from inq...Read more about HoneyBook
98% of customers rate VipeCloud's Value For Money at 4 stars and above! VipeCloud is the Sales CRM with Marketing Suite that builds rapport with you. Our All-In-One solution includes CRM, Email Marketing, Social Posting, Texting, Video Email, Integrations,...Read more about VipeCloud
Teamgate is a user-friendly, yet extremely powerful CRM for Sales and SaaS teams of all sizes. We pride ourselves on empowering Sales and SaaS teams to increase their speed of execution across the entire sales cycle. With an intuitive UI, essential inte...Read more about Teamgate
Tracker is a web-based, integrated recruitment ATS and CRM designed for recruiting and staffing firms across industries. The solution allows businesses to manage entire recruitment workflows, right from candidate sourcing and placement to employee onboardi...Read more about Tracker
Most CRMs are rigid, inflexible, and cost a lot of money to organizations, and Salesmate solves exactly these pain-points. Salesmate is a flexible, customizable, and cost-effective solution to multiple teams in your organization. The platform solves t...Read more about Salesmate
ActiveCampaign helps small teams power big businesses with the must-have platform for intelligent marketing automation. Customers from over 170 countries depend on ActiveCampaign’s mix of pre-built automations and integrations (including Facebook, Google, ...Read more about ActiveCampaign
Close is the sales engagement CRM designed to help SMBs turn more leads into revenue. Packed with productivity tools, such as custom workflows, call assistant, predictive dialer, premium phone numbers, email automation, and sales enablement tools, managers...Read more about Close
Lead Docket is a cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) solution that helps law firms to track leads. Key features include a real-time dashboard, contact management, task management and reporting. It enables users to search, sort and filter lea...Read more about Lead Docket
Pipedrive is a web-based sales CRM software that helps sales teams of all sizes and industries close more deals. Pipedrive lets salespeople, business owners and everyone in between focus on selling with its customizable sales pipelines, real-time insights ...Read more about Pipedrive
HubSpot is an AI-enabled, cloud-based CRM solution designed to support businesses of all sizes in the growth journey. It caters to a broad range of clients, both in the B2B and B2C sectors, and is versatile enough to suit various industries. The platform p...Read more about HubSpot CRM
Software Advice uses reviews from real software users to highlight the top-rated Contact Management products in North America.
Learn how products are chosen“Usability” includes user ratings for Functionality and Ease of Use.
“Customer Satisfaction” includes user ratings for Customer Support, Likelihood to Recommend and Value for Money.
Reviews analysis period: The reviews analysis period spans two years and ends the 15th of the month prior to publication.
This detailed guide will help you find and buy the right contact management software for you and your business.
Last Updated on January 27, 2025Effectively managing contacts is one of the most mission-critical tasks of running a business. Sales and marketing need the ability to quickly find the current status of an active opportunity in their database, while support teams should be able to quickly find a contact’s entire customer history.
This buyer’s guide will provide a brief overview of contact management software, which is designed for these purposes (among others). Here’s what we’ll cover:
What Is Contact Management Software?
Common Features of Contact Management Software
Contact Management vs CRM: What's the Difference?
At its core, contact management programs store customer contact information. This can include customers’ names, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses and even social media profile information. These databases are often easily searchable and store important documents within each contact profile.
Screenshot of Base user dashboard
These systems are designed to increase efficiency by consolidating critical customer data into one tool. Rather than trapping contact information in your team’s individual inboxes or address books, everyone maintains a single view of the customer.
In addition to the core capabilities described in the previous section, contact tracking systems might also include the following features.
Calendaring & notifications | These features allow users to schedule events and tasks and associate them with a contact in your database. This might include reminders to follow-up with an active opportunity in your pipeline, or a task for an account manager to send a renewal contract to one of your customers. |
Note-taking | In addition to storing contact information, your team might also want to make notes about a particular customer or opportunity. This might be notes from a recent call or meeting, or comments about the best time or day of the week to reach a certain person. |
File-sharing | Your team likely creates a variety of documents during the course of their relationship with each customer. These features allow them to easily store these contracts, proposals and other files in account profiles. Often, users can simply drag and drop files from their desktop; or, they can quickly click to upload them to the contact profile. |
Tags | Tagging features allow users to quickly pull subsets of customers at once. These tags are often highly customizable, so businesses can create groups by geographic region or project, for example. Think of it as a sort of index for your accounts, allowing you to quickly find customers of a certain type. |
To-do lists | Allows you to create to-dos for your team within each contact profile. Often, staff will be notified when a to-do is assigned to them. Then, when that person closes out the task, management receives an alert. Often, these tasks can be selected from a drop-down menu, which allows you to standardize workflow. |
Contact tracking software is essentially a more basic version of a customer relationship management (CRM) system, although vendors sometimes use these terms interchangeably, particularly when discussing CRM systems designed for small businesses.
Typically, CRM systems include the most common contact management features described in the previous section; however, they might also incorporate more robust workflow automation, reporting and interaction tracking, among other features. Depending on the CRM application, the system might also offer features for marketing automation, sales force automation, customer service, field service and help desk and call center management. For more information on CRM software, visit our buyer’s guide.
Despite many vendors differentiating their systems in this way, you might still encounter systems that have more features than another product described as being a CRM system, and vice versa. Regardless of what the system is called, deciding between a basic contact management system or a more robust CRM system could depend on a variety of factors.
Most of the buyers we speak with are smaller businesses, or smaller departments within larger businesses, which don't require capabilities beyond tracking contact information. These buyers most often can function exclusively with the core capabilities described in the “common features” section.
Meanwhile, CRM software buyers need more capabilities that extend well beyond simple contact management. They may need features specific to their industry (e.g., field service) or for a particular operational role, such as customer service. Very large enterprises might also need contact managing features to work in concert with other types of automation, so they would buy an integrated CRM suite.
The world of business software has offered contact management solutions for many years, probably longer than most other types of business software. But just because contact management apps have existed for many years, that doesn’t mean the products and their functionalities aren’t still evolving. Vendors of contact management software continue to refine their products in light of the changes brought by increasingly digital business environments. Modern contact management systems are often designed to be:
Always omnichannel. Omnichannel software allows companies to seamlessly engage with customers and clients across all common communication channels, from personal and business email addresses, to phone calls, live chat conversations and more. Omnichannel contact management systems ensure that information regarding preferred communication channels, and contact details, are stored with every contact’s entry.
Increasingly integrated. Contact management software is often combined (integrated) with other CRM functionalities into broader software suites. Integrated suites add efficiency to internal workflow processes by minimizing the number of interfaces employees use to complete individual tasks. While in years past contact management systems were often sold as standalone products, today, they’re more often found combined with other applications, like those used specifically for sales, service or marketing.
Interdepartmentally available. As more and more businesses find value in increasing the cooperation between their internal departments, more software vendors are designing platforms to facilitate cross-departmental information sharing. Contact managment solutions that allow all internal departments to share and work from the same database are increasingly common.