7 Best CRMs for Outlook + Integration Features

Learn what features to expect & how each CRM stacks up

If you’re using Outlook, then you’re in luck. It allows for some great integrations with your CRM. 💪

With all the different CRM possibilities out there however, it can be hard to figure out what to expect from such an integrated Outlook-CRM setup… so first, we’ll tackle that for you and give you a list of useful features to look out for.

After this, we’ll use this same feature list as well as authentic review scores from two leading sites to compare 7 different top CRMs that directly integrate with Outlook and the other Microsoft Office 365 products.

Here we go! 👇

What features can you expect from an Outlook CRM?

Here’s 10 core features you can expect from a CRM that is well integrated with Outlook and Microsoft Office 365:

• Update and use your CRM from within your Outlook inbox
• Live sync your Outlook emails & Microsoft Office 365 calendar meetings to the CRM
• Auto-create contacts for people you’re emailing or meeting with
• Automatically enrich your contact database by syncing your contacts’ email signatures
• Send automated, personalized email sequences from your Outlook inbox
• Use (shared or private) email templates when sending emails through the CRM
• See who your colleagues know and how well, with “relationship strength scores” based on their email traffic
• Track whether people open your emails and click on the links in your emails sent from Outlook
• See whether these people who clicked email links also visit your website, which pages and for how long
• Be reminded of emails you haven’t replied to or customer conversations that have gone quiet

That’s a lot of useful stuff to follow up your leads better and boost your productivity 😄 We’ll detail below which of these features come with each CRM.

How can you define what is the best Outlook integrated CRM for your company?

If you’re looking for a CRM that integrates well with your Outlook and Microsoft Office 365 environment, the above set of features can significantly boost your productivity. We’ve researched which of the current Outlook CRMs offer which features and have detailed them for you below.

It is however important to keep the bigger picture in mind when comparing CRMs, because you need to make sure your team will actually use that CRM as well. Getting a CRM that nobody uses is pretty useless as well 😏

Because of that, we’ll include the current scoring for each CRM on G2.com so you get a better idea of how each CRM stacks up. It’s broken down as follows:

• Ease of Use
• Ease of Setup
• Meets Requirements
• Quality of Support
• Ease of Doing Business With
• Ease of Admin

And to top it off, we also incorporate the review score each CRM’s mobile app gets on Google Play. That way it isn’t only great for Outlook, but handy on the phone too! ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

We then take the average of the Outlook feature score, the average G2 review score, and the Google Play score for the mobile app, to calculate… the final score! 🥇

The 7 Best CRMs for Outlook ranked

Don’t want to read the whole comparison? 🤓

Here’s a quick overview of how each CRM performs:

1. Salesflare: 9.7/10 🏆
2. HubSpot CRM & Sales Hub: 8.2/10
3. ActiveCampaign: 7.2/10
4. Freshworks CRM: 6.9/10
5. Salesforce Sales Cloud: 6.5/10
6. Zoho CRM: 6.4/10
7. Pipedrive: 5.7/10

Want to dig into the details? Read on!

1. Salesflare [9.7/10]

It’s no surprise that Salesflare stacks up so well against other Outlook CRMs: it’s built from the ground up to make following up leads more productive, starting from your Outlook inbox.

Salesflare (founded in 2014) is used by thousands of small and medium-sized businesses who sell to other businesses (incl. agencies, consultancies, development houses, tech companies, …). It’s top ranked across review platforms and is the #1 CRM on Product Hunt, the leading community for product enthusiasts.

Salesflare’s Outlook plugin doesn’t only offer a really tight integration (more on that below). What’s absolutely unique about it is that it brings 100% of the CRM functionality into Outlook, so you never need to switch between Outlook and your browser while selling (although if you want to use Salesflare in the browser and do all the same things from there, that is fully possible too 👊).

Many CRMs are strongly focused on integrating with Google Workspace / Gmail. Salesflare offers virtually the exact same integration in Outlook as well, which makes it a great fit for many slightly larger companies who want to get in on all the modern functionality too.

Without further ado, here’s an analysis of how Salesflare stacks up:

Features Salesflare offers: 10/10

• Update and use your CRM from within your Outlook inbox
• Live sync your Outlook emails & Microsoft Office 365 calendar meetings to the CRM
• Auto-create contacts for people you’re emailing or meeting with
• Automatically enrich your contact database by syncing your contacts’ email signatures
• Send automated, personalized email sequences from your Outlook inbox
• Use (shared or private) email templates when sending emails through the CRM
• See who your colleagues know and how well, with “relationship strength scores” based on their email traffic
• Track whether people open your emails and click on the links in your emails sent from Outlook
• See whether these people who clicked email links also visit your website, which pages and for how long
• Be reminded of emails you haven’t replied to or customer conversations that have gone quiet

Features Salesflare doesn’t offer: none

G2 review scoring:

• Ease of Use: 9.5
• Ease of Setup: 9.5
• Meets Requirements: 9.3
• Quality of Support: 9.7
• Ease of Doing Business With: 9.9
• Ease of Admin: 9.5

Final result

• Outlook CRM feature score: 10/10
• Average G2 review score: 9.6/10
• Google Play review score: 4.8/5 → 9.6/10
• FINAL SCORE: 9.7/10

Pricing to get all of the above (10 features):

$49/user/month (billed annually)
$55/user/month (billed monthly)

Want to see it all in action? You can try Salesflare for free. 👈

It only takes a few minutes to start a trial and install the Outlook plugin (you can find it in Settings > Applications & Integrations).

We guarantee you won’t find an easier CRM that integrates so well with Outlook! 👌

2. HubSpot CRM + Sales Hub [8.2/10]

HubSpot is a marketing automation platform turned everything platform. It was founded in 2005 to make marketing automation easier.

Nowadays, HubSpot’s main selling point is offering an all-in-one solution, including marketing, sales, service and operations. If you don’t like using different apps and integrating them (using tools like Zapier and native integrations), then HubSpot might be what you’re looking for.

To get CRM functionality that is comparable to what you’re getting with the other CRMs in this ranking, you need to get two HubSpot products: its CRM and its Sales Hub.

In terms of Outlook / Microsoft 365 integration, HubSpot does a fair job, although the pricing to get all this handy functionality (7 features) is quite steep, starting at $450/month billed annually (for 5 users, which is the minimum they impose).

Features HubSpot CRM + Sales Hub offers: 7/10

• Update and use your CRM from within your Outlook inbox
• Live sync your Outlook emails & Microsoft Office 365 calendar meetings to the CRM
• Automatically enrich your contact database by syncing your contacts’ email signatures
• Send automated, personalized email sequences from your Outlook inbox
• Use (shared or private) email templates when sending emails through the CRM
• Track whether people open your emails and click on the links in your emails sent from Outlook
• See whether these people who clicked email links also visit your website, which pages and for how long

Features HubSpot CRM + Sales Hub doesn’t offer

• Auto-create contacts for people you’re emailing or meeting with
• See who your colleagues know and how well, with “relationship strength scores” based on their email traffic
• Be reminded of emails you haven’t replied to or customer conversations that have gone quiet

G2 review scoring:

• Ease of Use: 8.6
• Ease of Setup: 8.3
• Meets Requirements: 8.5
• Quality of Support: 8.5
• Ease of Doing Business With: 8.7
• Ease of Admin: 8.6

Final result

• Outlook CRM feature score: score: 7/10
• Average G2 review score: 8.5/10
• Google Play review score: 4.6/5 → 9.2/10
• FINAL SCORE: 8.2/10

Pricing to get all of the above (7 features):

$90/user/month (billed annually – minimum 5 users)
$100/user/month (billed monthly – minimum 5 users)

3. ActiveCampaign [7.2/10]

ActiveCampaign is an email marketing/automation platform, founded in 2003. It now brands itself as a customer experience automation (CXA) platform, to cover its expanding range of functionality.

ActiveCampaign added a small business CRM to its offering in 2014, as a sales focused add-on to the rest of the platform. This integration between email automation and CRM is probably its main forte.

Setting up ActiveCampaign is not a light task and its software may become overwhelming, while the CRM aspect itself on the other hand will not be as feature rich compared to the other CRMs in this list.

When people compare ActiveCampaign to Salesflare, which also offers automated emails and email sequences, our advice is usually simple: if you’re an ecommerce company or B2C company, or you need very complex or very high volume email automation, ActiveCampaign is probably what you’re looking for. If you’re a B2B company with an active sales team and the need to automate more personal emails, then go with Salesflare.

Features ActiveCampaign offers: 4/10

• Update and use your CRM from within your Outlook inbox
• Send automated, personalized email sequences from your Outlook inbox
• Use (shared or private) email templates when sending emails through the CRM
• See whether these people who clicked email links also visit your website, which pages and for how long

Features ActiveCampaign doesn’t offer:

• Live sync your Outlook emails & Microsoft Office 365 calendar meetings to the CRM
• Auto-create contacts for people you’re emailing or meeting with
• Automatically enrich your contact database by syncing your contacts’ email signatures
• See who your colleagues know and how well, with “relationship strength scores” based on their email traffic
• Track whether people open your emails and click on the links in your emails sent from Outlook
• Be reminded of emails you haven’t replied to or customer conversations that have gone quiet

G2 review scoring:

• Ease of Use: 8.7
• Ease of Setup: 8.5
• Meets Requirements: 9.1
• Quality of Support: 9.1
• Ease of Doing Business With: 9.2
• Ease of Admin: 8.7

Final result

• Outlook CRM feature score: 4/10
• Average G2 review score: 8.9/10
• Google Play review score: 4.3/5 → 8.6/10
• FINAL SCORE: 7.2/10

Pricing to get all of the above (4 features):

$149/month (billed annually, with max. 2500 contacts)
$187/month (billed monthly, with max. 2500 contacts)

4. Freshworks CRM [6.9/10]

Freshworks CRM (formerly known as Freshsales) is a sales CRM from Freshworks, the company behind / initially called Freshdesk. Freshworks was founded in 2010 to provide a better, cheaper solution for customer service teams.

Freshworks’ main selling point is its feature depth. It has also managed to offer this range of functionality through an easier to use interface than its competitor/predecessor from the same city, Zoho.

While its Outlook integration is not as deep as with better performing CRMs in this ranking, it still deserves a mention in this ranking due to its relatively popular Outlook add-on.

Features Freshworks CRM offers: 4/10

• Update and use your CRM from within your Outlook inbox
• Live sync your Outlook emails & Microsoft Office 365 calendar meetings to the CRM
• Send automated, personalized email sequences from your Outlook inbox
• Use (shared or private) email templates when sending emails through the CRM

Features Freshworks CRM doesn’t offer

• Auto-create contacts for people you’re emailing or meeting with
• Automatically enrich your contact database by syncing your contacts’ email signatures
• See who your colleagues know and how well, with “relationship strength scores” based on their email traffic
• Track whether people open your emails and click on the links in your emails sent from Outlook
• See whether these people who clicked email links also visit your website, which pages and for how long
• Be reminded of emails you haven’t replied to or customer conversations that have gone quiet

G2 review scoring:

• Ease of Use: 9.1
• Ease of Setup: 8.9
• Meets Requirements: 8.9
• Quality of Support: 9.0
• Ease of Doing Business With: 9.1
• Ease of Admin: 9.0

Final result

• Outlook CRM feature score: score: 4/10
• Average G2 review score: 9.0/10
• Google Play review score: 3.8/5 → 7.6/10
• FINAL SCORE: 6.9/10

Pricing to get all of the above (4 features):

$69/user/month (billed annually)
$83/user/month (billed monthly)

5. Salesforce Sales Cloud [6.5/10]

Salesforce is the biggest CRM company in the world, controlling about 20% of the market. Its stock ticker is even “CRM”, so we definitely can’t compile a list of CRMs without mentioning it.

While, in the first few years of its existence, Salesforce was focused on small businesses and startups, it has since shifted its focus on enterprises. This also immediately explains why it’s forte is extreme customizability (provided you pay a team of consultants to do that) and why it has positioned itself to be the one software vendor that offers a solution to all your business needs.

Salesforce does still offer a solution to small businesses today, called Salesforce Essentials, a limited version of the full platform. Compared to other CRMs in this list however, it lacks in user friendliness and is not really customized for sales teams.

This frustration with Salesforce is actually one of the reasons why we started building Salesflare, and – perhaps not surprisingly – why many of our customers find Salesflare while looking for a better alternative.

If extreme customizability is however your thing, or you’re working at a corporate, Salesforce might still be the best choice for you. But before signing any contract, read this guide to the small print first.

Features Salesforce Sales Cloud offers: 3/10

• Update and use your CRM from within your Outlook inbox
• Live sync your Outlook emails & Microsoft Office 365 calendar meetings to the CRM
• Use (shared or private) email templates when sending emails through the CRM

Features Salesforce Sales Cloud doesn’t offer:

• Auto-create contacts for people you’re emailing or meeting with
• Automatically enrich your contact database by syncing your contacts’ email signatures
• Send automated, personalized email sequences from your Outlook inbox
• See who your colleagues know and how well, with “relationship strength scores” based on their email traffic
• Track whether people open your emails and click on the links in your emails sent from Outlook
• See whether these people who clicked email links also visit your website, which pages and for how long
• Be reminded of emails you haven’t replied to or customer conversations that have gone quiet

G2 review scoring:

• Ease of Use: 8.1
• Ease of Setup: 8.5
• Meets Requirements: 8.8
• Quality of Support: 8.2
• Ease of Doing Business With: 8.3
• Ease of Admin: 8.0

Final result

• Outlook CRM feature score: 3/10
• Average G2 review score: 8.2/10
• Google Play review score: 4.2/5 → 8.4/10
• FINAL SCORE: 6.5/10

Pricing to get all of the above (3 features):

$75/user/month (only billed annually)

6. Zoho CRM [6.4/10]

Zoho is a true household name in the CRM industry, so we couldn’t omit them from this ranking.

Zoho launched its small business CRM product in 2005 and has historically been positioning itself as a cheaper alternative to Salesforce. That is immediately its main selling point.

If you’re looking for a CRM solution, Zoho has many tiers (and products even: Zoho CRM, Zoho CRM Plus, Zoho One, …). To get all three features below, you need to get on the Professional plan of its standard Zoho CRM product. Do note that its add-ons (like the comparable Gmail add-on) usually don’t get the best review ratings.

Features Zoho CRM offers: 3/10

• Update and use your CRM from within your Outlook inbox
• Live sync your Outlook emails & Microsoft Office 365 calendar meetings to the CRM
• Use (shared or private) email templates when sending emails through the CRM

Features Zoho CRM doesn’t offer:

• Auto-create contacts for people you’re emailing or meeting with
• Automatically enrich your contact database by syncing your contacts’ email signatures
• Send automated, personalized email sequences from your Outlook inbox
• See who your colleagues know and how well, with “relationship strength scores” based on their email traffic
• Track whether people open your emails and click on the links in your emails sent from Outlook
• See whether these people who clicked email links also visit your website, which pages and for how long
• Be reminded of emails you haven’t replied to or customer conversations that have gone quiet

G2 review scoring:

• Ease of Use: 8.1
• Ease of Setup: 7.6
• Meets Requirements: 8.2
• Quality of Support: 7.4
• Ease of Doing Business With: 7.9
• Ease of Admin: 7.8

Final result

• Outlook CRM feature score: 3/10
• Average G2 review score: 7.8/10
• Google Play review score: 4.2/5 → 8.4/10
• FINAL SCORE: 6.4/10

Pricing to get all of the above (3 features):

$23/user/month (billed annually)
$35/user/month (billed monthly)

7. Pipedrive [5.7/10]

Pipedrive is an easy-to-use and easy-to-setup sales CRM for small businesses, and is therefore compared to Salesflare very often.

The company was founded in 2011 to launch a counterreaction to enterprise CRMs like Salesforce, which are built more for enterprise needs than they are for sales teams. Pipedrive set out to change that.

While the company has been doing its best in recent years to build out a closer Outlook and Microsoft 365 integration, it still has some work to do on this front. Its relatively low depth of integration makes it land in last place for this Google CRM ranking.

Features Pipedrive offers: 2/10

• Live sync your Outlook emails & Microsoft Office 365 calendar meetings to the CRM
• Use (shared or private) email templates when sending emails through the CRM

Features Pipedrive doesn’t offer

• Update and use your CRM from within your Outlook inbox
• Auto-create contacts for people you’re emailing or meeting with
• Automatically enrich your contact database by syncing your contacts’ email signatures
• Send automated, personalized email sequences from your Outlook inbox
• See who your colleagues know and how well, with “relationship strength scores” based on their email traffic
• Track whether people open your emails and click on the links in your emails sent from Outlook
• See whether these people who clicked email links also visit your website, which pages and for how long
• Be reminded of emails you haven’t replied to or customer conversations that have gone quiet

G2 review scoring:

• Ease of Use: 8.9
• Ease of Setup: 8.7
• Meets Requirements: 8.4
• Quality of Support: 8.4
• Ease of Doing Business With: 8.7
• Ease of Admin: 8.6

Final result

• Outlook CRM feature score: score: 2/10
• Average G2 review score: 8.6/10
• Google Play review score: 3.3/5 → 6.6/10
• FINAL SCORE: 5.7/10

Pricing to get all of the above (2 features):

$49.90/user/month (billed annually)
$59.90/user/month (billed monthly)

Want to dig deeper into the differences? Just ask our team using the chat on salesflare.com. We’re here to help 😄

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• Author
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Jeroen Corthout

Co-Founder at Salesflare

I'm Co-Founder of Salesflare, the simply powerful CRM for small businesses. I love growth, automating sales, and building beautiful products.

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