Published 9 September 2026 · Every price below was read directly from Zoho’s own pricing and edition-comparison pages on 9 September 2026, in the US dollar view shown to a US visitor.
Disclosure: SaaSPilot is an affiliate partner of Zoho, and the links to Zoho in this article are affiliate links. If you sign up through one we may earn a commission, at no extra cost to you. We were not paid to write this, Zoho had no input into it and did not see it before publication, and every price below is quoted from their own pricing and edition-comparison pages rather than from anything they sent us. Our full affiliate disclosure explains how this works.
How we researched this: Every figure in this article was read from Zoho’s public pricing page and its full edition-comparison table on 9 September 2026, under both the monthly and annual billing toggles. We have not run structured hands-on testing of Zoho CRM, and nothing below is a performance judgement, a vendor quote or a recommendation based on personal use. Zoho prices in local currency by region, so a visitor outside the United States will be shown different figures.
The short answer
Zoho CRM is one of the few genuinely usable free CRMs, but the free edition is capped at three users and leaves out the customisation and email features most teams reach for within the first month. Paid editions start at $14 per user per month on annual billing and run to $52. The gap between annual and monthly billing is wide — 30% on Standard, 34% on Professional and Ultimate — so the advertised price is only the real price if you commit to a year up front.
Zoho CRM pricing on 9 September 2026
| Edition | Billed annually | Billed monthly | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 (3 users) | $0 (3 users) | — |
| Standard | $14 / user / month | $20 / user / month | +43% monthly |
| Professional | $23 / user / month | $35 / user / month | +52% monthly |
| Enterprise | $40 / user / month | $50 / user / month | +25% monthly |
| Ultimate | $52 / user / month | $65 / user / month | +25% monthly |
Zoho also sells Bigin, a separate lighter product, at $7 per user per month billed annually and $9 billed monthly. It is not a Zoho CRM edition and does not upgrade into one on the same plan, so we have kept it out of the comparison above. We broke Bigin’s plans down separately. See Bigin’s current pricing →
The fifth edition the pricing page does not show
Zoho’s main pricing page displays four options — Free, Standard, Professional and Enterprise. A fifth edition, Ultimate, appears only once you open the full feature-comparison table, priced at $52 per user per month annually and $65 monthly. If you are budgeting from the pricing page alone you will not see it, and if you are reading a comparison written elsewhere you may see it quoted as though it were on the main page. Both figures above were read from Zoho’s comparison table on the same day.
What the free edition actually includes
Zoho lists the free edition as “forever free, for 3 users”. On that plan you get contact management, follow-up reminders, workflow automation, tasks, meetings and calls, data import and export, standard reports, API access, the mobile apps, 10 custom email templates and 1GB of file storage for the whole organisation.
That is a real CRM, not a trial. For a two- or three-person team tracking a manageable pipeline it is genuinely enough, and it is the reason Zoho keeps appearing in “cheapest CRM” lists.
What the free edition leaves out
Reading Zoho’s own comparison table rather than its marketing copy, four omissions matter more than the rest:
| Capability | Free | Standard | Professional | Enterprise | Ultimate |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Custom modules | Not included | 10 | 25 | 200 | 500 |
| Custom fields | Not included | 10 fields / module | 155 fields / module | 300 fields / module | 500 fields / module |
| Mass email | Not included | 250 / day / org | 500 / day / org | 1,000 / day / org | 2,000 / day / org |
| Scoring rules | Not included | 10 criteria / module | 20 criteria / module | 30 criteria / module | 50 criteria / module |
| Custom email templates | 10 | 100 | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited |
The one to watch is mass email. If any part of your process involves emailing a segment of your contacts from the CRM rather than one at a time, the free edition cannot do it and Standard caps you at 250 sends a day for the whole organisation.
Storage is metered, and it is cheap to fix
File storage is allocated to the organisation, not per user, and the per-user top-up only starts on paid plans:
| Edition | File storage for the organisation |
|---|---|
| Free | 1GB total |
| Standard | 1GB plus 512MB per user licence |
| Professional | 1GB plus 512MB per user licence |
| Enterprise | 1GB plus 1GB per user licence |
| Ultimate | 5GB plus 1GB per user licence |
Additional storage is listed at $4.60 per month for 5GB on every paid edition. It is not available on the free edition, which is the practical ceiling on how long a free account stays workable if you attach documents to records.
Workflow rules are the same on every edition
One figure that surprised us: the workflow-rule limit is identical across all five editions — 2,500 rules per organisation, with a maximum of 2,000 active. Automation volume is therefore not the reason to move up a tier. What changes as you climb is the kind of automation available, not how much of it you can have.
Which edition fits which team
- Free — up to three people, a single pipeline, no bulk email and no need to add fields of your own. Genuinely viable, not a trial.
- Standard ($14 annual / $20 monthly) — the first tier that lets you shape the CRM around your process: custom fields, custom modules, scoring, and 250 mass emails a day.
- Professional ($23 / $35) — the jump here is inventory management, CPQ and process management, plus a large increase in custom fields. Worth it only if you are quoting or managing stock inside the CRM.
- Enterprise ($40 / $50) — multi-team structures, approval processes, field-level encryption and a developer sandbox. This is an IT-governance tier, not a sales-features tier.
- Ultimate ($52 / $65) — higher limits across the board rather than a different product. Only defensible at scale.
What we could not verify
- Prices outside the United States. Zoho localises its pricing page by region, and we only verified the US dollar view.
- Whether any promotional discount is applied at checkout — the pricing page does not display one, and we did not proceed to payment.
- Implementation or onboarding fees. Zoho does not publish these on the pricing page, and we make no claim about whether they exist.
- Zoho CRM Plus, the bundled suite that includes CRM alongside other Zoho products, which is priced separately and was out of scope here.
- Any performance, usability or support judgement. We have not run hands-on testing of Zoho CRM and nothing above should be read as one.
Zoho revises plan limits and pricing from time to time, and the figures above are dated to the day we read them. Before you commit, see Zoho CRM’s current plans and pricing →
Related reading
Zoho is one of the four products in our comparison of the cheapest CRMs for small teams, alongside Pipedrive, monday and ClickUp. If you are weighing it against the other well-known free plan, the HubSpot CRM review covers what that one really includes, and the best CRM for small business puts the wider market side by side.
Sources
Every figure above was read from these pages on 9 September 2026:
- zoho.com/crm/zohocrm-pricing.html — edition prices under both billing toggles
- zoho.com/crm/complete-feature-list.html — full edition comparison, including the Ultimate tier and every limit quoted above
About the author
Nabaraj Wagle is the founder and editor of SaaSPilot, based in California. He runs online and e-commerce businesses — including a store on Shopify and an Amazon Seller Central business — and has built and managed WordPress websites hosted on Hostinger. He uses ChatGPT and Claude daily for research and business workflows.
Every SaaSPilot article states whether it is based on first-hand use or on research into official vendor documentation, and carries the date its figures were verified. More about how we research.
SaaSPilot does not accept payment for placement or ranking. This article contains affiliate links to Zoho, disclosed at the top and marked where they appear. Commission does not determine our coverage or our conclusions — see our affiliate disclosure and editorial policy.