Capsule CRM

Capsule starts at $18/user on the Starter plan, billed annually. There is no monthly base fee ($0), no minimum seat count, and no onboarding fee (None), so one person can subscribe at the entry rate. Growth and Advanced cost roughly double and triple that per user, and you move up when your contact list outgrows the tier below, not when you want more features.

Yes, and it is a real plan rather than a trial: Yes (2 users, 250 contacts). It covers core contact and pipeline management with a single sales pipeline and project board, which is enough to run a one-person business on. Workflow automation is not included, so you upgrade when you want sequences rather than when a trial expires.

Every Capsule plan caps how many contacts you can store: 30,000 (Starter) on the entry plan, then 60,000 on Growth and 120,000 on Advanced. That cap, not the headline per-user price, is usually what decides your bill, because a large list pushes you up a tier no matter how small your team is. Capsule publishes nothing above 120,000 contacts, so a bigger list means talking to their sales team. The calculator on this page applies those caps, so the estimate moves when you change the contact count.

Workflow automation is Growth+, so the Starter plan does not have it. Email marketing itself is Add-on (Transpond), a separate sister product rather than a built-in feature. If automated sequences are central to how you sell, budget for the Growth tier from the start rather than the Starter headline price.

Capsule is a British company (Zestia, based in Manchester) and its support is UK business hours. For a US business that means a question asked in the afternoon is often answered the following morning. HubSpot and Salesforce both offer US-hours support if same-day replies matter to you.

Both have a free plan capped at 2 users, and HubSpot's allows far more contacts (1,000 against Capsule's 250) with a much larger app ecosystem behind it. Capsule wins on simplicity and on what happens next: its paid Starter tier is a modest step up, where HubSpot's pricing climbs steeply from Starter to Professional and adds a mandatory onboarding fee. Start on HubSpot if you want room to grow into a full platform; start on Capsule if you want a CRM you can learn in an afternoon and keep paying a small amount for.

Capsule holds a 4.5-star rating on Capterra from 167 reviews, a smaller sample than the larger US-built competitors but consistently positive. Reviewers most often cite how quickly it can be set up and how little training it needs, which is exactly the trade it makes: less depth than Salesforce or HubSpot, far less to learn.