For small businesses that are new to customer relationship management (CRM), Bigin by Zoho focuses on essential features and onboarding tools that help you get up and running quickly. An excellent free tier for single users, good integration support, and unusual (but welcome) voice-calling capabilities round out the experience. Bigin doesn’t have AI features or a standalone Windows app, but it still earns our Editors’ Choice award for CRMs thanks to its affordability and accessible design.
How Much Does Bigin Cost?
Bigin offers a perpetually free plan for businesses with a single CRM user. This plan supports one sales pipeline, along with comprehensive management tools for contacts, products, and activities. It lets you create three automations with an unlimited number of instant tasks but limits you to just 500 records. Available integrations include Microsoft Teams, Zapier, Zoho Desk, Zoho Forms, and Zoho Projects. HubSpot Smart CRM offers a free-forever plan for up to two users, but most others don’t have anything similar.
The least expensive paid Bigin plan, Express, costs $7 per user per month (billed annually). It includes three pipelines, 50,000 records, 30 automations, and bulk emailing tools. You also get integrations with Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Mailchimp, Zoom Workplace, more Zoho tools (including Zoho CRM), and a variety of social media advertising platforms.
Bigin’s Premier plan goes for $12 per user per month (billed annually). It includes five pipelines, 100,000 records, and global selling tools. Premier also includes 50 advanced automations, which let you schedule automated tasks for a specified number of hours after a workflow triggers. Finally, the Bigin 360 plan costs $18 per user per month (billed annually). This tier unlocks 15 pipelines, storage for 1 million records, and the ability to create up to 100 advanced automations.
If you subscribe to a paid plan, Bigin provides a 30-day guided onboarding process (including assistance with data transport), basic product training, and access to biweekly webinars. You also get 24/5 customer support via email, live chat, and phone.
These prices are highly competitive compared with other CRM services. The full-scale Zoho CRM starts at $14 per user per month, for instance. Freshsales, another CRM that mostly targets small businesses, starts at $9 per user per month. On the high end of entry-level CRMs, Salesforce Starter starts at $25 per user per month. It offers more features and a more comprehensive upgrade path, but it might not be worth the extra cost depending on your business needs.
Getting Started With Bigin
You log in to Bigin on a desktop via a web browser or the macOS app. Oddly, it doesn’t offer a dedicated Windows app (only an add-on for Microsoft Teams). Mobile apps are available for Android, iPadOS, and iOS.
Bigin’s web interface takes you to the Pipelines (deals) section by default. This is unusual since most CRMs begin with the Contacts area. Still, the Contacts icon is easy to spot in the sidebar menu, and a pop-up video tutorial helps you get started.
Navigate to the Contacts section to upload contacts files. Here, Bigin provides formatting instructions, which I appreciate. Some other CRMs, such as Pipedrive, don’t make things as clear.
When you first log in to Bigin, you’re greeted with the Pipeline view (Credit: Zoho/PCMag)
Two of my fields—address and state/province—didn’t map automatically because the default fields include only company mailing addresses. However, I managed to create new fields for this data to accommodate contacts without companies. Bigin lets you connect deals to individual contacts rather than companies, which is ideal for B2C businesses. Alternatively, you can import data from HubSpot, Insightly, Pipedrive, or Zoho CRM with the relevant API keys.
Head to the Settings area to add teammates. Note the difference here between Roles, which determine how much data each user can access, and Profiles, which determine the actions each user can take. The default Roles are Level One and Level Two, while the default Profiles are Administrator and Standard. These preset designations aren’t as flexible as those of Freshsales, though you can create more roles and profiles as necessary.
Bigin doesn’t let you invite multiple users at once, so you need to add each member of your team manually. This might prove frustrating if you need to onboard multiple people.
The Contacts area looks like a spreadsheet in its default view, laying out all contact details. Three fields appear here: Contact Name, Company Name, and Contact Owner. It’s simple to remove the Company Name field if you’re running a B2C business.
You can add a variety of fields for things like currency, custom text, and URLs. Filters for the status of the latest email you sent to contacts, the pipeline(s) they’re in, and other criteria help you sort through the list quickly.
Bigin’s Contacts view is straightforward (Credit: Zoho/PCMag)
Profiles for contacts are simple and effective. They show their basic information on the left and their history on the right. Tabs for activities, emails, notes, pipelines, and relevant files are also present. Bigin even allows you to connect your X (formerly Twitter) account to the CRM and view your contacts’ X profiles.
In the Activities tab, you can create and assign tasks related to each contact, including reaching out via email, scheduling events like Zoom meetings, and creating calls for prospecting or other purposes.
Calls are one of Bigin’s standout features. Unlike most CRMs, Bigin includes built-in telephony capabilities that allow you to place and receive phone calls without leaving the CRM. It automatically logs calls and maps the records to the relevant contact profiles, which can save you a lot of time. You can also route calls through interactive voice response (IVR) menus and purchase custom phone numbers for users within your organization. Conversely, If Bigin’s built-in telephony isn’t robust enough for you or you already use another voice over IP (VoIP) system, Bigin integrates with more than 50 of them, including Zoho Voice. Just keep in mind that you pay for each call you place and receive.
Head to the Contacts area to send out mass emails. Bigin doesn’t provide prebuilt templates like more advanced CRM tools, but you can quickly draft and schedule an email much like you would through Gmail. It’s also easy to turn any email you create into a template. Bigin lets you send mass emails to all of your contacts or specify recipients in a company or pipeline.
User Experience: Pipelines, Products, and Activity Management
Deal management happens in the Pipelines area. Here, a Kanban board shows where your current deals are in your sales pipeline. You can switch this to a list or table view, add new stages to the pipeline, or delete stages as necessary. Bigin also lets you create automations for each pipeline stage, such as a rule to automatically send a thank you email when a deal moves to the Closed Won stage.
Bigin’s Pipelines section provides a Kanban view (Credit: Zoho/PCMag)
Team pipelines let you organize every stage of the customer journey, with templates for customer support teams, sales teams, and more. You can move deals between these pipelines as necessary. For example, you might move a deal to the Customer Onboarding pipeline once you close a sale.
Clicking a button in the top right corner opens a sidebar for entering a deal name, assigning it to a company or contact, selecting the current stage, and entering the dollar value. You can select an expected closing date for a deal, as well as add a description and assign products.
Next, Bigin takes you to a deal screen that looks similar to the contact profile. The left side shows the contact information of the person you assigned to the deal, the description of the deal, and other basic information. The right side shows a timeline-style history and tabs for Notes, Activities, and more.
One standout feature here is the Collect Payment button. It lets you create custom payment links and receive money via PayPal or Stripe once you connect your accounts.
Deals management in Bigin includes a Collect Payment button (Credit: Zoho/PCMag)
The process for adding products to Bigin is similar to adding deals: name your product, assign a product code, set the dollar value, and choose a product category. Your products will then appear in a table.
The Activities area displays all activities relevant to your pipelines and contacts in a calendar that syncs with both Google Calendar and Microsoft Outlook. It’s possible to show only specific types of tasks or tasks you are responsible for. Tabs for Calls, Events, and Tasks let you view these activities in a list or table view so you can keep track of what you did the month prior and what’s coming up.
Bigin’s workflow builder allows you to automate tasks. Each workflow can include an unlimited number of Instant Actions, which occur immediately after the workflow triggers. Paid plans unlock Scheduled Actions that occur one or more hours after the workflow triggers.
Email Management: All Your Emails in One Place
Bigin’s inbox is in the Settings section. This isn’t the most intuitive place for it, but email management itself is simple. If you use popular email tools like Gmail or Outlook, you can sync Bigin with your regular email inbox. This integration enables you to manage all of your emails in one place and assign them to specific contacts or team members. Go to the Organization Emails tab to connect official department email addresses.
Bigin’s email inbox lives in the Settings section (Credit: Zoho/PCMag)
Other standout features include the ability to choose who can access certain types of emails, create templates for things like thank-you emails, improve the deliverability of your emails, and see whether recipients open emails you send.
Reporting and Analytics: Simple, Yet Comprehensive
The Dashboards area shows analytics. The default Overview shows a bird’s-eye view of your business progress for the month: contacts created, tasks completed, pipelines won and lost, top companies, open pipelines, and revenue. You can add data points, such as sales target trackers, by clicking the Components button in the top right corner.
Bigin provides basic and easy to understand analytics and reports (Credit: Zoho/PCMag)
Bigin also offers specialized dashboards for things like email analytics, pipelines, and tasks. This makes it easy to see different types of information in a way that’s not overwhelming. Bigin also allows you to create new dashboards.
Additional Features: Integrations (But No AI)
Bigin aims to create a simple, streamlined experience for users new to CRM software, so there aren’t a lot of extra features, but it does support a generous range of integrations, as mentioned. Bigin says it plans to continue adding new integrations to better serve its users, with new ones arriving in 2025.
Notably missing from Bigin are any kind of AI features. That’s a departure from the pricier Zoho CRM, which leans into the Zia AI assistant. Freshsales includes an AI assistant, as well, though you need to pay for its considerably more expensive Pro plan to use it.
Verdict: A User-Friendly CRM With Excellent Features
Bigin CRM is easy for small businesses to adopt because it provides everything they need to manage contacts, sales pipelines, and activities, albeit without any bells and whistles. The service packs everything into an interface that’s intuitive no matter your level of experience with this kind of software. A capable free tier and integrated VoIP functionality also help set it apart from the pack. Accordingly, Bigin earns our Editors’ Choice award for SMB-friendly CRMs. If you want AI features and need support for larger teams and workflows, you should upgrade to Zoho CRM, another Editors’ Choice winner.
The Bottom Line
The approachable and low-cost Bigin by Zoho CRM makes it easy for small businesses to organize contacts and leads, even if they’re starting from scratch.
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About Dianna Gunn
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