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With so many different contact management software available, figuring out which is right for your business is tough. You know you want software to help you manage your contact information efficiently, but you need to figure out which tool is best. In this post, I'll help you make your choice easy by sharing my insights on the best contact management software to organize your contact info, track interactions, and maintain strong relationships.

What is Contact Management Software?

Contact management software is a digital tool for storing and managing contact information to make future communication outreach easier. This type of software offers a centralized database for contact details that records interactions and tracks appointments, follow-ups, or other tasks, depending on your business needs. They also integrate with other systems to make your outbound communications easier, with integrated reporting to measure key metrics like bounce vs open rates.

Using contact management software can help your team develop better customer relationships faster by consolidating information into one central location. They also help teams gather more insightful data on each contact to inform future outreach campaigns or provide a more personalized experience for each contact.

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Best Contact Management Software: Pricing Comparison Chart

This comparison chart summarizes pricing details for my top contact management software selections to help you find the best software for your budget and business needs.

Best Contact Management Software Reviews

Below you’ll find brief description of each contact management solution to showcase each tool’s best use case and noteworthy features. I’ve also include a screenshot for each to show you their user interface.

Best low-code SaaS solution for contact management automations

  • 14-day free trial
  • From $25/user/month
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Rating: 4.7/5

Creatio’s contact management solution is part of their sales platform. Even though this software’s contact management features and current pricing make it a better fit for medium and large enterprises, its low-code build makes it suitable for small businesses as well.

Creatio is easy to configure and use. You can customize the solution to your business needs and create your own dashboards, panels, and graphs without any coding experience. The tool enables you to build comprehensive contact profiles, segment your list, and track the leads as they move through the sales pipeline.

I like the fact that Creatio enables you to simplify your sales process using automation templates. And if you can’t find a suitable template for your business, you can create your own automation process with a click-and-drag builder.

Features include a CRM, workflow automation tools, and 20 ready-to-use process workflows that you can customize for your needs.

Best for an affordable contact management and CRM solution

  • 15-day free trial + free plan available
  • From $9/user/month
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Rating: 4.3/5

Bigin by Zoho CRM is a customer relationship management tool designed for small businesses. It streamlines customer operations, including sales, support tickets, customer onboarding, and order delivery, into one platform. The software helps businesses manage customer data, communication, and automation, providing a 360-degree view of customer information.

One of the key reasons Bigin stands out as a contact management software is its simple but rich feature set that enhances productivity and organization. Bigin offers multichannel communication, enabling businesses to interact with contacts via email, phone, and social media from within the platform. The customizable pipelines also allow users to tailor the sales process to their specific needs, ensuring that no lead is lost.

Designed with user-friendliness in mind, Bigin offers customizable CRM templates and is ideal for small business owners, sales teams, and customer service professionals who need an efficient and affordable solution to manage their customer interactions and contacts in one place.

Best for multichannel customer communication features

  • 15-day free trial
  • $14/user/month (billed annually)
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Rating: 4/5

The Zoho CRM system is a good solution for startups and other businesses that use small sales teams but want to develop strong relationships with their customers. Thanks to its multichannel communication features, this tool enables a small group of people to manage huge contact lists across multiple online channels.

This software tracks your contacts’ activity on multiple platforms and enables your team to engage them via social media platforms like LinkedIn, live chat, calls, or emails. Every contact file is automatically updated with relevant information, so your customer-facing team can personalize every interaction without having to juggle multiple tools or windows.

One of the things I like about this solution is that it features gamification options, enabling you to reward your team with trophies and badges based on their performance. This can help drive their productivity and close more deals.

Best cloud-based database tool for fast-moving people operations processes

  • 14-day free trial
  • From $20/user/month (billed annually)
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Rating: 4.6/5

Airtable is a flexible collaboration and project-planning platform that enables you to create and manage custom databases. Many businesses use Airtable as a workflow management tool, but you can create custom fields for your customers and use it as a contact management solution with great results.

With Airtable, you can create a database from scratch, use templates, or import your data from spreadsheets. Once you have your data, you can create pipelines and automations, leave notes for your collaborators, and segment your list with tags.

One of the things that make Airtable stand out is the fact that it’s very flexible. You can customize every aspect of it without any coding experience, and you can create a tool that’s tailored to your business.

Every data field can be customized with character limitations, drop-down menus, icons, color coding, date inputs, and more. All changes made to an entry are logged right in the app for easy auditing.

Best for a full customer service suite with a robust contact management module

  • 14-day free trial
  • From $49/user/month
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Rating: 4.2/5

Zendesk’s contact management software is included in their Zendesk Sell platform. This sales CRM is a great option for businesses of all sizes that want to expand their lead management efforts. From the communication hub, you can track basic contact details, conversation duration, contact response to offers, and even save copies of each communication interaction.

One of the things that make Zendesk stand out from its competitors is the tool’s ease of use. The software has a smooth learning curve. It’s easy to navigate, and your sales team can access most of the features it relies on directly from the dashboard. The pre-defined reports cover most of your business needs, so you don’t have to waste a lot of time customizing them.

I like the fact that Zendesk helps you define your lists and segment them based on the number of leads, companies, phone numbers, contracts, and deals. This allows you to create different automated pipelines to collect customer information and engage with each audience without creating friction.

Best contact management software for IF/THEN communication automations

  • 14-day free trial
  • From $249/user/month (billed annually)
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Rating: 4.2/5

Keap’s CRM is a powerful solution for small to medium businesses. This solution stores and organizes contact data in neat files, so you can keep track of how they interact with your business, guide their customer journey, and create predictable sales pipelines.

The software comes with a useful mobile app that works well on Android and iOS, enabling your team to keep in touch with contacts remotely.

Keap offers some good automation features. I love that you can create automated communication flows and send personalized follow-ups based on existing customer data and recent activity. You can also apply tags to your contacts and transfer them in bulk from one pipeline to another if you want to.

Keap integrates with a lot of applications, such as Microsoft’s Outlook and Excel, Gmail, sales management solutions, or popular e-commerce platforms like Shopify and Woocommerce.

Best contact management software for enterprise organizations or ERP users

  • Free demo available
  • From $999/month

NetSuite CRM is one segment of the SaaS tool's broader functionality and product suite. A complete enterprise resource management (ERP) platform is provided by the company, meaning you can manage not just your contacts but various other aspects of your HR operations in the same system. It also provides accounting tools and a human capital management (HCM) system.

If you're looking for a bespoke, all-in-one solution, this could be a good option for your needs. The software is highly customizable and built for scalability, and can easily cater to the needs of SMBs and enterprise-level businesses alike. Its analytics and reporting functions bring your HR data all together in a centralized location, helping inform your decision making and shape your initiatives.

NetSuite integrates with other software products including Mailchimp, Box, Zendesk, Hubspot, Bill.com, Rippling, A2X, Handshake, DataServ, OnPlan, Bamboo HR, Twilio, Cleo Integration Cloud, and more.

Best contact system for case management and customer surveys

  • 30-day free trial
  • From $25/user/month (billed annually)

Salesforce is a popular CRM solution that’s easy to scale as your contact list grows. Even though this contact management software is suitable for all businesses, its complex features make it ideal for medium and large people-centric organizations.

This solution offers a lot of features, more than other CRM tools that made my list. These features help you create and implement an advanced contact management process. With Salesforce, you can view and update contact data with ease, check their activity and communication history, and collaborate with other members of your team to close gaps in the people operations pipeline.

One of the highlights of this platform is that it offers a lot of integrations. Salesforce’s dedicated marketplace is full of apps that can help you achieve different things, such as building forms, creating marketing presentations for your contacts, signing documents, connecting customers to your support team, or collecting customer feedback.

With all this, you can connect your contact management solution directly to your hiring, onboarding, training, and 360-feedback systems.

Best project management & CRM tool connected to task workflows

  • 14-day free trial + free plan available
  • From $8/user/month (billed annually)
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Rating: 4.6/5

Even though most companies use monday.com as a project management software, its contact management tool is top-notch. The tool’s contact management features are customizable. You can build your workplace from scratch, or you can start with a flexible template. And thanks to the tool’s drag-and-drop functionality, you can tailor its rows and columns to your needs.

One of the things I liked about monday sales CRM is that your team can attach a conversation panel to any row they create. This enables them to add notes, files, and other information that’s relevant to the contacts.

You can set up custom notifications for status changes, customer interactions, pipeline management tasks, and other activities that can help your team track the contact’s activity and improve your lead generation efforts.

I recommend monday sales CRM to business owners and managers who want to build their own contact management solution. The platform’s customization options and drag-n-drop features enable you to tailor the solution to your needs without coding skills.

Best for help desk contact management

  • 30-day free trial
  • From $15/agent/month (billed annually)
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Rating: 4.5/5

LiveAgent is a comprehensive help desk and live chat software designed to enhance your customer support operations. It consolidates various communication channels—like email, live chat, and social media—into a single platform, making it easier for your team to manage interactions.

LiveAgent offers a built-in CRM that stores detailed customer information. This enables your team to access past interactions and customer data effortlessly, facilitating personalized support experiences. By having all relevant information at their fingertips, your agents can resolve issues more effectively and build stronger customer relationships. 

It also has a robust ticketing system. This feature converts all customer communications from different channels into tickets, allowing your team to track and manage them efficiently. With functionalities like automated ticket distribution and agent collision detection, you can ensure that each inquiry is handled promptly without duplication of efforts.

Integrations include WhatsApp, WordPress, Shopify, Mailchimp, Pipedrive, Slack, Magento, Gmail, Facebook Lead Ads, Twitter (X), Zapier, and Google Analytics.

Other Contact Management Tools

Here are some additional options that didn’t make it into my best contact management software shortlist, but are still worth considering:

  1. HubSpot

    Contact management solution for robust team collaboration features

  2. Copper

    Contact management and CRM software for Google Workspace users

  3. Pipedrive CRM

    For adding smart data from the web to contact records

  4. Wrike

    For a task management tool with a simple contact management system

  5. Less Annoying CRM

    Good contact management solution for non-technical sales teams. The platform offers a 30-day trial.

  6. Really Simple Systems

    A CRM that offers great value for small businesses. Free forever plan available.

  7. Freshsales

    CRM with powerful marketing automation, email tracking, and sales management features. Free plan available.

  8. HoneyBook

    A popular CRM software for businesses of all sizes that’s especially useful for branded contact communications. Free 7-day trial available.

  9. vcita

    Contact management software that offers all the basic features you need plus some marketing automation. You can try the pro plan for free for 14 days.

  10. InfoFlo

    A great contact management option for small businesses on a tight budget. Free 30-day trial available.

If you still haven't found what you're looking for here, check out these other related tools that we've tested and evaluated:

Selection Criteria for Contact Management Software

When selecting contact management software for this list, I evaluated the features and functionalities that align with specific buyer needs and pain points. Based on my thorough research and personal trials, the final list features the best solutions to help organize contact data, track interactions, and maintain strong relationships.

Here's a summary of the selection criteria I used to create this list:

Core Functionalities (25% of total score): To be considered for inclusion in this list, each solution had to fulfill these common use cases first:

  • Storing and organizing contact details
  • Tracking email, call, and meeting history
  • Categorizing and segmenting contacts
  • Automating follow-ups and reminders
  • Sharing contacts and notes with team members

Additional Standout Features (25% of total score): To help me find the best software out of numerous available options, I also kept a keen eye out for unique features, including the following:

  • AI-driven insights for predicting customer behavior or relationship health
  • Visual dashboards for tracking relationship progress
  • Custom automations for sending reminders or generating reports
  • Real-time collaboration for teams to update and share contact records seamlessly
  • Advanced integrations with marketing automation or CRM platforms

Usability (10% of total score): To evaluate the usability of each system, I considered the following:

  • Clean, logical layouts with simple navigation
  • Customizable views for personalizing workflows
  • Drag-and-drop functionality for organizing contact pipelines
  • Quick access to frequently used tools or features
  • Consistent design language across desktop and mobile platforms

Onboarding (10% of total score): To get a sense of each software provider's customer onboarding process, I considered the following factors:

  • Availability of interactive product tours and tutorials
  • Clear instructions for importing and migrating contact data
  • Pre-made templates for standard workflows
  • Live webinars and training sessions for hands-on learning
  • Responsive chatbots or help centers for troubleshooting setup issues

Customer Support (10% of total score): To evaluate the level of customer support each vendor offered, I considered the following:

  • Availability of 24/7 chat, email, or phone support
  • A robust knowledge base for self-service troubleshooting
  • Fast response times for resolving issues
  • Dedicated account managers for larger businesses
  • Continuous updates and fixes based on user feedback

Value for Price (10% of total score): To gauge the value of each software, I considered the following factors:

  • Transparent pricing structures without hidden fees
  • Flexible subscription plans based on team size or usage
  • Free tiers or trials for testing key features
  • Discounts for annual subscriptions
  • Affordable add-ons for additional functionality

Customer Reviews (10% of total score): Evaluating customer reviews is the final element of my selection process, which helps me understand how well a product performs in the hands of real users. Here are the factors I considered:

  • Consistent praise for ease of use, reliability, and features
  • High ratings for customer service responsiveness
  • Positive feedback on the software’s ability to solve common pain points
  • Reviews from businesses in similar industries or use cases
  • Indications of reliability during scaling or integration with other systems

Using this assessment framework helped me identify the software that goes beyond basic requirements to offer additional value through unique features, intuitive usability, smooth onboarding, effective support, and overall value for price.

Features of Contact Management Software

Managing contact information, tracking interactions, and maintaining strong relationships are essential for any business. To do this effectively, the right contact management software can make all the difference. It should help you organize data, track communications, and nurture connections in a way that feels seamless and efficient. Here are the most important features to look for:

  • Centralized Database: A single location to store and access all contact details ensures nothing gets lost and makes it easy to retrieve information when you need it.
  • Interaction Tracking: The solution should record real-time-data covering your team’s interactions with prospects and customers and update the contact’s information in real-time whenever necessary.
  • Contact Categorization and Segmentation: The software should enable you to segment your contact list based on the contact’s stage of awareness, history, purchases, tickets, or custom tags.
  • Task and Follow-Up Reminders: A built-in task manager keeps you on top of important actions, ensuring no opportunity or relationship is overlooked.
  • Customizable Fields: Tailoring data fields to suit your needs ensures you can capture specific details that are relevant to your business or personal goals.
  • Team Collaboration: Your team should be able to collaborate in order to persuade your leads and customers to take action.
  • Detailed Insights: The software should be able to break down the data and offer your team actionable insights, such as the contact’s level of awareness, individual preferences, or their response to past customer interactions.
  • Software Integrations: Integrations are vital to contact management software because they help the solution collect social and other types of data from external sources.
  • Mobile Accessibility: Having access to your contacts on the go allows you to manage relationships anytime, ensuring you never miss a critical interaction.
  • Data Security and Compliance: Robust security features protect sensitive contact information and ensure your processes align with privacy regulations.

Frequently Asked Questions

How does contact management software work?

89.9% of companies use 2 or more tools for contact data and lead enrichment—and you can bet some form of contact management software is one of them. Before you can nurture and chase leads, you have to collect data about your potential customers. And storing information in a pocketbook just doesn’t cut it in today’s hyper-competitive, global, and online business environment.

Contact management software enables your team to keep track of the different stages of awareness a lead may be in, pick up a conversation where it left off, and leverage all the available data to guide the prospect through the sales pipeline without creating friction. (In people management, the “sales pipeline” can be actual sales—B2C or B2B—or it can be selling your company to a desirable job candidate.)

In recent years, most contact management systems transformed into customer relationship management (CRM) platforms. The modern platforms enable you to connect your address book to your customer support system, email marketing tools, and other platforms in your software ecosystem.  

Related Read: How Contact Management Software Can Benefit Your Business

Contact Management Solutions Help Grow Your Business 

Greg Greenberger, Partner Program Specialist at Signavio, notes that to make a successful sale or networking connection, you should "Never stop asking for more information on your prospects." Contact management software facilitates the backend of this piece of advice by giving you space to record, store, filter, search, and analyze the prospect information you've collected! Only then can you turn it into something useful and actionable. 

For people managers, your need for a contact management solution might be to keep track of business relationships, track qualified and desirable job candidates actively and passively, or to participate in your HR analytics strategies as a cog in a much larger machine. Either way, I hope you found a new tool to add to your tech stack to make your people operations processes easier, smarter, and stronger. 

For more thoughts on how to manage people and create a self-sustaining work environment that thrives, subscribe to the People Managing People newsletter.

Kim Behnke
By Kim Behnke

Kim Behnke is an HR software writer and analyst for People Managing People, drawing on nearly a decade of hands-on experience in human resources. With a background spanning recruitment, onboarding, performance management, training, policy development, and HR analytics, she brings a deep understanding of the challenges HR teams face and how technology can solve them. Kim holds degrees in psychology, writing, and technical communication, and is a Certified Digital HR Specialist through the Academy to Innovate HR. Her work is driven by a passion for streamlining systems and optimizing workflows to help HR teams work smarter.