Most CRM projects go wrong before anyone logs in for the first time. Three things to settle first.
Most CRM projects go wrong before anyone logs in for the first time. The software gets chosen, the licences get paid for, and then somebody realises that nobody ever agreed on what a lead is.
That sounds like a small thing. It is not. If your sales person counts a lead the moment someone fills in a form, and whoever does your books counts it when money lands, your reports will disagree forever. You will blame the software. The software is fine.
So before you compare products, write down three things.
The stages a customer actually moves through with you. Not the stages a textbook lists. Yours. For a lot of small businesses and freelancers it is honestly just enquired, quoted, paid, came back. Four stages you will keep updated beat fourteen you will abandon by March.
Who owns each record. One name per customer. When everybody owns a record, nobody updates it, and you end up with three half finished versions of the same person.
What you want to stop doing. This is the one people skip, and it is the one that decides whether the thing survives. A CRM that only adds work gets quietly abandoned around month three. If it does not remove a spreadsheet, a pile of sticky notes, or a recurring status call from your week, it has not earned its licence fee.
Notice that none of this is a software question. You can answer all three on paper in an afternoon.
Once you have, the buying decision gets much smaller and much less frightening. You are no longer choosing between platforms with enormous feature lists you cannot evaluate. You are checking whether a tool handles your four stages without a consultant, whether it makes ownership obvious, and whether it kills that spreadsheet.
Plenty of good options clear that bar, including some free ones. The expensive mistake is almost never picking the wrong product. It is picking any product before you have decided how you actually work.