Capsule CRM Alternatives for UK Small Business 2026: 7 Options Worth Considering
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Why You Might Be Looking
Capsule has been a sensible default for UK small businesses for years: simple, fairly priced, quick to adopt. The usual reasons to look elsewhere are reporting depth, automation, or the discovery that multiple sales pipelines sit on the £27 tier rather than the £14 one.
Those are fair reasons. What follows is seven Capsule CRM alternatives judged on free tier usability, real cost at two to five seats, UK accounting integrations, and setup time — with one criterion most comparisons leave out, which turns out to separate these tools more sharply than price does.
The Criterion Nobody Applies: Do They Bill in Pounds?
Three of the seven tools here do not price in sterling.
Billing in GBP: Capsule, Pipedrive, Zoho CRM, HubSpot.
Billing in US dollars: Streak, folk (which also offers euros), Notion.
For a UK buyer that is a real difference, not a rounding note. A dollar subscription moves with the exchange rate and may attract a card fee, so a figure that looks competitive in a comparison table is a moving target in your accounts.
It also explains a lot of the wrong pricing in circulation. Capsule, Zoho and HubSpot all geolocate their pricing pages — checked from outside the UK, Capsule shows dollars, Zoho served us Indian rupees, HubSpot shows dollars. Anyone writing a comparison without switching each currency selector will produce figures that are plausible, consistent and wrong.
Every sterling figure below is the UK price. Every dollar figure is quoted in dollars, deliberately, rather than converted and presented as though it were a pound price.
Capsule CRM Alternatives for UK Small Business: The Seven
1. Pipedrive — Best for Sales-Led Teams
Free tier: None · Paid: £14 to £79 per user/month · Setup: 1–2 hours
The most direct competitor if your priority is moving deals through a pipeline. Where Capsule is a contact manager with a pipeline attached, Pipedrive is built around the pipeline, and the visual board is among the best at this price.
The tiers are Lite £14, Growth £39, Premium £59 and Ultimate £79 per user per month on annual billing, rising to £24, £49, £79 and £99 monthly. Pipedrive renamed these, so guides referring to an “Essential” plan or putting £39 against a “Professional” tier are working from a stale pricing page — the £39 tier is Growth.
Reporting is considerably stronger than Capsule’s, with custom dashboards and revenue forecasting from Growth upwards.
UK accounting: native Xero and QuickBooks. No Sage.
Suits: a small sales team with deals that run across weeks or months. Less suited to service businesses without a clear deal structure.
Watch for: no free plan, so you commit from day one, and add-ons for email campaigns and lead generation climb quickly.
2. Zoho CRM — Best Free Tier, and Best Value Paid
Free tier: Yes, 3 users, free forever · Paid: from £12 per user/month · Setup: 2–4 hours
The strongest free offer here, and the draft recommendation most comparisons get right. Zoho’s free edition runs three users permanently, with leads, contacts, accounts, deals and basic workflow. A sole trader or pair could run on it indefinitely.
Paid tiers are Standard £12, Professional £18, Enterprise £35 and Ultimate £42 per user per month annually, or £16, £28, £45 and £55 monthly. Note that £12, not £14, is the entry point — and that multiple sales pipelines arrive at Standard, which is £12. That is a genuine advantage over Capsule, where the same capability is £27.
The wider ecosystem matters too: Zoho Desk for helpdesk, Zoho Campaigns for email, and Zoho Books for accounting, all integrating natively.
UK accounting: Xero, QuickBooks and Zoho Books.
Suits: anyone wanting room to grow without replatforming, anyone needing a credible free tier, and anyone already using Zoho.
Watch for: the sheer number of products and tiers is disorienting. Budget longer for setup than Capsule needs.
3. HubSpot — Good Free CRM, Not the One You’ve Been Told About
Free tier: Yes, 2 users, 1,000 contacts · Paid: Starter from around £18 per seat · Setup: 1–3 hours
This entry needs correcting more than any other, because the version of HubSpot’s free tier that circulates is years out of date.
HubSpot’s own pricing and product pages state the free CRM is free for up to two users, with 1,000 contacts and no expiry. It is not unlimited users, and it does not hold a million contacts. That was true before HubSpot moved to seat-based pricing, and it is the figure still quoted almost everywhere.
Two users is the same seat cap as Capsule’s free plan, with four times the contacts. So HubSpot free is still the more generous of the two, by a considerably smaller margin than advertised, and it is not a way to equip a five-person team for nothing.
Paid Starter is per seat, at roughly £18 at list and frequently around £7 promotionally. That is not an enterprise price and it undercuts Capsule Starter on promotion. The real escalation is the step to Professional, which is where the “upsell machine” reputation is earned.
UK accounting: Xero and QuickBooks apps exist in HubSpot’s marketplace. Plan requirements are unclear, so confirm before relying on them.
Suits: one or two people wanting capable free contact management, or anyone who expects to grow into marketing automation.
Watch for: the Professional step, and the marketing contact tiers that escalate alongside it. Our Capsule versus HubSpot Free comparison goes through it in detail.
4. Capsule — The Incumbent, Honestly Assessed
Free tier: Yes, 2 users, 250 contacts · Paid: £14 to £42 per user/month · Setup: under 1 hour
Still deserves its place. Nothing here is faster to set up — most people are running inside half an hour — and the interface stays out of the way.
Tiers are Starter £14, Growth £27 and Advanced £42 per user per month annually, with Ultimate sold through sales at five seats minimum. The £14 figure matters because Capsule is routinely listed at £18, which is Zoho CRM’s Professional price and has drifted into Capsule write-ups by mistake.
Where it actually falls short: reporting is basic below Growth, there is no email marketing (that is Transpond, a separate paid subscription), there is no time tracking, and multiple pipelines plus project boards plus workflow automation all sit at Growth, £27. The free plan is limited to 250 contacts and one pipeline, and does not include the Xero integration, which starts at Starter.
Where it is better than this list usually allows: its UK accounting coverage is the broadest of the seven, below.
Suits: one to ten people who prioritise simplicity, with the caveat that the useful configuration is £27 rather than £14. Our Capsule pricing guide and fit assessment for consultants and agencies cover which tier does what.
5. Streak — Gmail-Native, and the Free Tier Is Not a CRM
Free tier: Yes, but without CRM pipelines · Paid: from $49 per user/month · Setup: under 30 minutes
Streak lives inside Gmail, which is either perfect or irrelevant depending on whether your business runs on Google Workspace.
Two corrections, and the first is important. Streak’s free plan does not include CRM pipelines. It gives you email and link tracking, snippets, Streak Share, the thread splitter and 50 mail merge sends a day — email productivity rather than customer relationship management. Recommending it to a sole trader as a free CRM, which is common, recommends something it does not do at that tier.
Second, the paid plans are Pro $49, Pro+ $69 and Enterprise $129 per user per month on annual billing, rising to $59, $89 and $159 monthly. In dollars. There is no “Solo” tier, and the entry price is several times the roughly £15 often quoted.
UK accounting: none native. Zapier only.
Suits: Gmail-centric teams willing to pay dollar prices for pipelines inside the inbox.
Watch for: the price, the currency, and the fact that leaving Google Workspace means leaving your CRM.
6. folk — Relationship-Led, Trial Not Free
Free tier: No, 2-week trial · Paid: from $24 per member/month · Setup: 1–2 hours
A newer CRM that has found an audience among consultants, agencies and anyone whose business runs on relationships rather than transactions. Genuinely pleasant to use, and unusually good at the messy reality of contact management: spreadsheet imports, LinkedIn connections, referral networks.
Pricing is Standard $24, Premium $48 and Enterprise from $80 per member per month annually, or $30, $60 and from $100 monthly, with euros also offered. No sterling. New accounts get a two-week trial of premium features with no card required, after which the account is blocked rather than dropping to a free tier.
UK accounting: nothing native for Xero, QuickBooks or Sage that we could confirm.
Suits: relationship-driven businesses that want something elegant and do not need accounting integration.
Watch for: dollar billing, and no free fallback when the trial ends.
7. Notion — Only If You Already Live There
Free tier: Yes, for individuals · Paid: Plus from $10 per member/month · Setup: 1–3 hours, longer if you build it yourself
Not a CRM, but plenty of small businesses run one in it, with community templates or their own databases.
Plans are Plus $10, Business $20 per member per month, with Enterprise on application, shown in dollars with no currency selector; yearly billing saves up to 20%. The free plan is aimed at individuals and carries 5MB file uploads, seven days of page history and a block limit once you have two or more members.
UK accounting: none. It is a workspace tool.
Suits: very early-stage businesses already using Notion for everything else.
Watch for: maintaining the system instead of using it. Past two or three people, a real CRM wins.
UK Accounting Integrations, Corrected
This table is where the draft version of this comparison most undersells the incumbent. Capsule’s marketplace lists more UK accounting tools than anything else here.
| CRM | Xero | QuickBooks | Sage | FreeAgent | Other UK |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Capsule | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Crunch, FreshBooks, KashFlow, Wave |
| Zoho CRM | Yes | Yes | Zapier | No | Zoho Books |
| Pipedrive | Yes | Yes | Zapier | No | — |
| HubSpot | Marketplace app | Marketplace app | No | No | — |
| Streak | Zapier | Zapier | No | No | — |
| folk | No | No | No | No | — |
| Notion | No | No | No | No | — |
Capsule lists Xero, QuickBooks Online, Sage Accounting and FreeAgent among its accounting apps, alongside Crunch, FreshBooks, KashFlow, Wave and Paycove. Comparisons that mark Sage as unavailable for Capsule, and omit FreeAgent entirely, get this backwards — FreeAgent in particular is widely used by UK freelancers.
One caveat: Capsule’s directory does not state which apps are built in-house versus by third parties, nor which tiers each requires. The Xero integration is confirmed as Starter and above, and is not on the free plan — the detail is in our Capsule Xero integration guide.
If native UK accounting integration is a hard requirement, the realistic shortlist is Capsule, Zoho CRM and Pipedrive, in roughly that order of breadth.
What You’ll Actually Pay at Two to Five Seats
Per-user pricing means the headline figure is not the bill. Annual billing, sterling where available:
| 2 seats | 3 seats | 5 seats | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Zoho CRM Free | £0 | £0 | n/a (3 user cap) |
| HubSpot Free | £0 | n/a (2 user cap) | n/a |
| Capsule Free | £0 | n/a (2 user cap) | n/a |
| Zoho CRM Standard | £24 | £36 | £60 |
| Capsule Starter | £28 | £42 | £70 |
| Pipedrive Lite | £28 | £42 | £70 |
| Capsule Growth | £54 | £81 | £135 |
| Pipedrive Growth | £78 | £117 | £195 |
Zoho CRM Standard is the cheapest paid route to multiple pipelines by a wide margin: £36 a month for three people against £81 on Capsule Growth. Whether that is the right trade depends on how much you value Capsule’s simplicity and its accounting breadth, both of which are real.
Making Tax Digital: Where This Matters
Worth being precise, because the deadline has passed rather than approaching. MTD for Income Tax has applied since 6 April 2026 to sole traders and landlords with qualifying income above £50,000, falling to £30,000 in April 2027 and £20,000 in April 2028. MTD for VAT already applies to all VAT-registered businesses.
No CRM on this list handles any of that. Your accounting software does. What a CRM integration buys you is income attributed to the right client, which makes quarterly updates less painful rather than making you compliant. That is the only sense in which MTD belongs in a CRM comparison.
FAQ
Is Capsule still worth using in 2026?
For one to ten people prioritising simplicity, yes, and its UK accounting coverage is the broadest here. Budget Growth at £27 rather than Starter at £14 if you need multiple pipelines, project boards or automation.
Which alternative is best for a UK sole trader?
Zoho CRM’s free edition, which runs three users permanently and includes multiple pipelines from its £12 paid tier. HubSpot free is also usable at two users and 1,000 contacts. Streak’s free tier is not a CRM, so do not pick it on that basis.
Which is cheapest for multiple pipelines?
Zoho CRM Standard at £12 per user per month. Capsule puts the same capability at £27.
Do all of these bill in pounds?
No. Capsule, Pipedrive, Zoho CRM and HubSpot do. Streak, folk and Notion price in US dollars, with folk also offering euros. Several of the GBP vendors default their pricing pages to dollars unless you change the currency selector.
How much should a small UK business expect to pay?
Between nothing on Zoho’s free edition and about £27 to £39 per user per month for a genuinely feature-rich plan. Most land between £12 and £18. Add email marketing or time tracking separately, because few of these include either.
Does switching CRM lose my data?
Not if you export properly first. Most of the pain in a CRM move is field mapping and date formatting rather than the move itself — our guide to migrating from spreadsheets to a CRM covers the same ground for a CRM-to-CRM switch.
Capsule CRM Alternatives: The Bottom Line
Zoho CRM is the value pick and the strongest free tier: three users free forever, multiple pipelines from £12, and a wider suite including MTD-capable Zoho Books. Pay for it in setup time.
Pipedrive if you are sales-led and want the better pipeline and reporting, from £14 for Lite to £39 for Growth, with no free plan to ease into.
HubSpot if you expect to grow into marketing automation, with eyes open: free is two users and 1,000 contacts, Starter is roughly £18 a seat or about £7 on promotion, and Professional is the cliff.
Capsule if simplicity and UK accounting breadth matter most. It is £14, not £18, and the configuration most businesses actually want is £27.
Streak, folk and Notion are niche picks for Gmail-native, relationship-led and already-in-Notion respectively. All three price in dollars, and Streak’s free tier has no pipelines.
If you are torn between Zoho and Pipedrive, either will serve a small team well — our Pipedrive versus Zoho CRM comparison goes deeper, and trialling both is a better use of an afternoon than reading more comparisons.
Pricing and features correct at time of writing. Plans and capabilities are subject to change — always confirm current details on the provider’s website before purchasing.