Bigin CRM Review 2025

Looking for an affordable CRM (customer relationship management) tool for your small business? No wonder Bigin caught your attention.

Created by Zoho CRM specifically for small teams, Bigin promises to be a small business CRM providing core functionalities at the lowest possible cost.

But can a CRM this cheap actually help you manage your sales? Or will you end up paying more in the long run through add-ons and workarounds?

We spent weeks testing Bigin CRM to find out if this budget option delivers the level of value a small business CRM should.

Overview of Bigin CRM for Small Business

Bigin CRM is an offshoot of Zoho. Realizing that their flagship solution was too complex and expensive for most small businesses, they decided to build a leaner alternative: Bigin CRM.

Bigin is a pipeline-centric CRM that focuses on helping small businesses manage business deals. That’s why the first thing you’ll see when you log in is the Pipeline page.

This small business CRM handles the basics well enough. You can advance deals through pipelines, manage contacts, and stay on top of sales activities. Everything happens in a familiar spreadsheet-style layout that you can figure out without much training.

However, this CRM software is riddled with limitations. Essential features like data backups cost extra money. File storage space is minute, regardless of your plan. And if you need email sequencing features, you’ll have to look elsewhere.

Besides, Bigin’s pricing plans don’t show the full picture. While Bigin has the lowest advertised price, extras like custom fields and email templates cost more and require a monthly subscription. So, the final bill can be much higher.

Bigin CRM Pros and Cons

Bigin CRM has several pros and cons worth considering.

Key CRM Features of Bigin CRM

To help you understand what Bigin CRM offers, we’ve analyzed its features at the Express plan level (the lowest paid tier at $7 per month/user). Here’s what you get, and what you don’t.

Here’s the table showing Bigin CRM’s features.

• Core Features

  • Mobile app
    ✅ Apple and Android devices
  • Contact management
    ✅
  • Follow-up tracking

    

    As a small business looking to close more sales, you need to stay on top each opportunity, so you don’t lose them. Follow-up tracking is what makes that happen.
    ❌
  • Pipelines
    ✅ 3
  • Duplicate management
    ✅

• Centralization Tools

  • Centralized workspace

    

    A centralized workspace is an essential small business CRM feature that lets you manage your whole business on just one page.
    ❌
  • Dashboard
    ✅
  • Number of integrations
    180+

• Communication Tools

  • Two-way email sync
    ✅
  • Click-to-call options
    ✅
  • Multi-channel inbox

    

    To make communications faster and easier, a multi-channel inbox stores messages you receive from various channels in one place.
    ✅ Email, WhatsApp, and X
  • Meeting scheduling
    ❌

• Simple Automation

  • CRM workflows
    ✅ Basic (no scheduled actions on Express)
  • Sales email sequences
    ❌
  • Free web forms
    ✅
  • Browser extension for auto lead capture
    ⚠️ Gmail only

• Customer Support

  • Email support
    ✅
  • Live chat
    ✅
  • Phone support
    ✅

• Pricing

  • Starting price
    $7 per seat/month
  • Free trial
    ✅ 15 days
  • Free plan
    ✅ Up to 500 records
  • Next paid plan
    ✅ Affordable ($12 per seat/month)

Below, we’ll examine the features in detail.

Contact Management

You can add up to 500 and 50,000 contacts on the free and lowest plans, respectively.

Every contact is organized in a list or sheet (like Google Sheets) on the main Contacts page, with some of their basic details visible. On the same page, you can send emails, update fields, change owners, export, or delete contacts en masse.

Click on a contact to open their 360º page. There, you can view and edit the contact’s data, send them emails, give them a call, keep a complete record of all communications, and move them down your funnel—from one place.

Task Management

There’s no dedicated follow-up tracking module on this CRM. Instead, it features simple task management.

Bigin allows you to create sales activities in a few clicks. You can schedule tasks, events, and calls, and then set deadlines, add reminders, or assign them to team members.

Every activity appears in your Activities tab, where you can manage everything in list or calendar view. While the former doesn’t arrange your activities according to their priority levels, the calendar does place each one into its due date.

On both views, clicking on an activity allows you to see its full details: due date, priority, status, notes, files, owner, and associated contact (if any).

And when it’s time to carry out an activity, the notification appears right beside the concerned contact in your database or list.

Pipeline Management

Bigin CRM lets you build product items and use them to create deals that appear in your pipeline.

The pipeline organizes all your deals in a Kanban board, according to their sales stages. It also allows you to manage the information for each deal, track related activities, send emails to or call associated contacts, and update the progress of each deal using drag and drop.

You can click on the eye icon to get a quick overview of the deal, or you can click on the deal name to open the deal’s page, where you’ll find its complete details.

Deal Management

Bigin provides up to 50,000 deals on the lowest tier.

The deal page shows the deal value, assigned sales rep, closing date, linked contact, and related organization. It also allows you to leave notes, share files, schedule activities, and even send emails. Since it’s a deal-centric CRM, Bigin is one of the few tools that allows sending emails from and storing them on a deal page.

Furthermore, on the deal page, you can manage product items, update the deal stage, and keep a complete log of everything.

Email Sync

Bigin CRM offers 2-way email sync from its lowest plan.

Connect your Gmail/Outlook account to send and receive emails from leads, and keep a complete record of all communications. Go to settings → email, and authenticate your email account.

Note: Emails won’t show in the IMAP emails section unless you activate “store sent messages on server.” Once activated, you’ll then be able to see sent and received emails. You’ll also know if an email has been opened or not.

Collaboration

Bigin CRM offers a few collaborative tools for small teams. You can add members of your team to the tool and put them in charge of a lead or assign them a task. You can also create a note and ‘@’ them, so they’re in the loop.

Moreover, the software allows you to give team members access to pipelines on your CRM.

Duplicate Management

On Bigin CRM, you can find and merge duplicates on any plan.

Simply select the contact you suspect has a duplicate record, click the 3 dots (ellipses) on the top right corner of the contact’s page, and select “Find & Merge Duplicates”. As you merge contacts into a master record, you’ll be required to choose which info to keep.

Beyond cleaning them up, Bigin has a functionality to help prevent duplicates in the first place. It’s noted as “Do not allow duplicate values”, and lives in Settings → Fields.

However, Bigin CRM doesn’t have a tool that automatically scans your entire database for duplicates. The duplicate management feature only works when you manually check individual contacts.

The only time Bigin automatically detects duplicates is when you’re importing new contacts—it will flag potential duplicates during the import process.

Dashboard and Reporting

There’s a standard dashboard and analytics on all plans.

Bigin CRM provides separate dashboards for your pipeline, tasks, events, calls, and emails. It also has a unified dashboard containing an overview of all these other dashboards.

On your dashboard, you can present KPIs in various styles, including rankings, scorecards, growth index, and more. You can also visualize data on the dashboard using various kinds of charts. Likewise, there’s a Target Meter, but that’s only available from the Premier plan (around $12/month/user).

Besides the standard ones, Bigin CRM features custom dashboards. However, these are only available from the lowest plan (Express).

Automations

There’s basic workflow automation on all plans. Bigin allows you to set an action to take place following a particular event. However, on the free and lowest plans, you cannot set up actions to trigger at a particular date or time (it’s called scheduled actions).

In addition, you can connect with your Lead Ads — on TikTok, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, and WhatsApp — to automatically pull in contacts’ data from them. You can also use the ‘Bigin for Gmail’ browser extension to add contacts from your email directly to your CRM.

That said, Bigin doesn’t have an extension like OnePageCRM’s Lead Clipper, which automatically extracts a lead’s details from not just emails, but also websites and social media profiles.

Similarly, there is no native email sequencing function on any of Bigin CRM’s subscription plans.

Integrations

Bigin CRM connects natively with a host of apps in Zoho’s ecosystem. It also integrates with over 185 tools on the marketplace.

However, most of these tools are for telephony (over 70), and when you exclude those, there aren’t that many other business apps left. But if the app you need is not on the market, Bigin CRM has API functionality to help create custom connections.

The small business CRM includes native integrations with WhatsApp Business, X (Twitter), and Shopify. This makes it a good CRM option for small-to-medium-sized retail and ecommerce businesses that often use these platforms to communicate with customers, take orders, advertise, and the like.

Mobile App

There are mobile apps for Android, as well as iOS, iPadOS, and macOS devices.

With these mobile CRMs, you can do almost everything you can on the web browser version. More specifically, the Bigin mobile app lets you manage your pipeline, contacts, emails, calls, and activities on the go.

If you’re using the app on an iPhone, you’ll be able to create new records from the device’s Control Center. You can also access Bigin in the device’s “Contacts” app.

Ease of Use

Bigin CRM has a clean design and user-friendly layout. It has very few tabs, so navigation is smooth and easy. And by somewhat mimicking Google Sheets, it provides a minimal, non-distracting interface that feels familiar.

The small business CRM is built for speed. It doesn’t lag, and it offers drag-and-drop and one-click functionalities to help you manage sales faster.

Bigin includes basic features, so it has a low learning curve. It also offers free onboarding, weekly webinars, and basic training to help you get conversant with the tool’s functionality.

The majority of the CRM’s top reviews on G2 come from users praising its simplicity and intuitive design. They say that although it’s easy to set up, it could do better with more functionalities.

Customer Support

Bigin provides equal support across all paid plans. It comes in the form of assistance through phone calls, emails, and live chat.

With every paid plan, Bigin CRM provides weekly webinars, and basic training for your team (if any). They’ll also assist you with importing data into your new CRM.

And when you log into Bigin CRM, you’ll be offered a free 1:1 demo with a product expert to help you get started. Short tutorial videos also pop up when you open some pages on the CRM.

This small business CRM also offers onboarding support to help users get started with the tool.

This onboarding support is called “Jumpstart”, and you’ll find it at $100 on the checkout page. But there’s another JumpStart program that costs $500. It’s an exclusive onboarding program where one of Bigin’s experts helps you implement the tool for your business.

It’s unusual that both services share the same name but come with such different price tags. To add to the confusion, the pricing page also advertises a free 30-day onboarding for all paid plans.

If onboarding is already included at no cost, it’s unclear why anyone should pay an extra $100 or $500 for what looks like the same service.

Bigin CRM Pricing Structure

Bigin offers a free tier and three paid plans.

The prices of the paid subscriptions start incredibly low, but you’ll quickly discover that Bigin CRM puts a cap on many of its features.

Many essential features require add-ons or upgrades. These add-ons include data backups, storage space, records, pipelines, forms, roles, automations, and a host of others.

How Much Does Bigin CRM Cost?

Bigin CRM has a free plan that has all but one of the basic functionalities of a CRM for small businesses: 2-way email sync. So, if your business relies on email outreach, this free plan is not for you.

In addition to that, the free plan has other limitations:

• Accommodates only 500 records, which is not ideal as you start to grow. So, it’s only useful as a personal CRM, not a small business CRM.
• Just one pipeline.
• No free backups. You’ll always need to pay to back up your data.
• Just 1GB of file storage, and you can’t buy extra even if you wanted to.
• There are no email sequences.
• Integrations are very limited.

With all these limits, it’s only a matter of time before you’ll need to get on a paid plan.

The lowest plan (Express) costs $7 per user/month and includes 2-way email sync.

However, it has its limits as well:

• No native email sequences.
• 1GB of file storage.
• 3 pipelines (max).
• 2 free data backups per month.
• 150 mass emails per day.

To make up for most of these limitations, you’ll need to purchase add-ons or upgrade to a higher plan.

That said, Bigin does offer a 45-day money-back guarantee with all its paid plans.

Is Bigin CRM Pricing Affordable for Small Businesses?

With a freemium and a plan starting at $7 per user/month, Bigin beats almost every competitor on price. The problem is that you’re going to get what you pay for, and it’s not much.

The free plan lacks email sync, a vital feature for most businesses. The Express plan fixes that, but introduces new problems: limited pipelines, minimal backup options, storage restrictions, and more limitations that force you into buying add-ons.

Once you start adding the features you actually need, that $7 price tag can easily double or triple. For many small businesses, a slightly more expensive CRM with everything included might actually cost less in the long run.

You might argue that the free plan still offers great value. However, with just 500 records, it’s only suitable as a personal CRM for professionals, freelancers, and solopreneurs who have extremely limited needs and work with just a few deals.

Final Verdict: Is Bigin the Best CRM for Small Businesses?

Bigin CRM succeeds at being simple and affordable. If you need a basic tool to advance deals and manage contacts without any learning curve, it does that job adequately.

But if you have plans to scale your sales operations and grow your business, this CRM will quickly reach its limits. And surmounting those limits means you’ll need to shell out a lot more money.

Based on our evaluation criteria (Value, Impact, and Speed), Bigin’s fit for small businesses is Moderate.

Best Alternative for Bigin CRM

If Bigin’s limitations are concerning for you, OnePageCRM offers a better balance of affordability and functionality.

Value: High
Impact: High
Speed: High
Pricing starts from: $9.95

OnePageCRM gives you the same simplicity as Bigin but without the frustrating restrictions. You get proper follow-up tracking, full email integration, and reasonable storage limits that won’t force you to pay extra.

The pricing is straightforward, too. Essential features are included from the start, not hidden behind add-ons and upgrade fees like with Bigin.