CRM for a Web Design Agency: What Small Studios Should Use

The three jobs, and the two questions that decide it

Before you compare feature lists, write down what is actually going wrong. In small studios it is almost always one of these three things.

• Enquiries scatter. Some come through your contact form, some through a client's site where your email is still on the form, some by WhatsApp, some as a reply to an old thread. Nobody can say how many are open.
• Proposals go quiet. You send a quote, the client says they will discuss it internally, and three weeks later you find it in your sent folder. One follow-up would have won a third of those.
• Invoices sit unpaid. The work shipped, the invoice went out, and you are now the collections department for a $2,400 build.

Then two questions narrow the list fast. First, what does it cost when the team grows, because nearly all of these tools charge per seat and a designer who only needs to read a brief still needs a login. Second, do clients ever need to log in, either to see their own proposals and invoices, or because you want to sell them the tool as part of a care plan.

One more thing worth saying early: a CRM is not a project manager. Keep delivery work on a board your designers already use and let the CRM own money and conversations.

What it really costs at three and five people

This is the table most comparisons skip. Prices are per month at the time of writing (October 2026), using annual billing where the vendor discounts it, because monthly billing is typically 20% to 30% more.

Two honest caveats about that table. HubSpot Professional and Keap both carry onboarding costs, and Keap's implementation package is required but not priced on its pricing page, so treat $299 as a floor rather than your bill. And WebNewBiz Growth is not a like-for-like CRM price: it includes hosting and the website builder too, so it only looks cheap if you were going to pay for a site platform anyway.

Pipedrive: the simplest pipeline, billing lives elsewhere

Pipedrive is a sales pipeline first and everything else second, which is why agencies like it. You see your deals as columns, you drag them along, and the tool nags you when a deal has had no activity for days. The learning curve is short enough that a two-person studio can be running properly inside an afternoon.

At the time of writing, the plans run from Lite at about $14 per seat per month on annual billing, through Growth at about $39 and Premium at about $59, to Ultimate at about $79. Monthly billing is noticeably higher. Automation and email sequences, which is what you need for proposal chasing, sit above the entry tier, so budget for Growth rather than Lite.

The gap for agencies is invoicing. Pipedrive's own support documentation points you at QuickBooks or Xero integrations to raise and send invoices from a deal, rather than offering full native billing, and proposals are usually done in a document tool. If your accountant already has you on Xero that is fine. If you were hoping for one tool that quotes, invoices and chases, Pipedrive is not it.

Choose Pipedrive if your problem is forgetting to follow up and your bookkeeping is already sorted elsewhere.

HubSpot: unbeatable free tier, then a cliff

HubSpot's free CRM is genuinely useful and genuinely free: unlimited contacts and companies, one deal pipeline, task tracking, Gmail and Outlook integration, a meeting scheduler, and email open tracking capped at 200 notifications a month. The two limits that matter are the two-user ceiling, with no way to buy a third seat, and the absence of automation and sequences, which is exactly the chasing you wanted. Invoicing is not part of the free tier either.

Sales Hub Starter is cheap at $9 per seat per month on annual billing ($15 monthly) and lifts the user cap. The cliff is Professional at $90 per seat per month on annual billing plus a one-off $1,500 onboarding fee, and Enterprise at $150 per seat with a $3,500 onboarding fee. For a three-person studio that is $270 a month plus the fee, which is a lot of money for workflows you may use twice a week. Client-facing portals are not a Sales Hub feature either, so clients will not be logging in to see their proposals.

Choose HubSpot if you are one or two people, want to pay nothing while you test the habit, and accept that you will outgrow the free tier the month you hire. If you have already hit that wall, our guide to HubSpot CRM alternatives for small businesses compares the cheaper landing spots.

Zoho CRM: the most features per dollar, the most setup

Zoho is the value pick. It is free for up to three users, and the paid editions run from roughly $14 per user per month for Standard through about $23 for Professional and $40 for Enterprise on annual billing, with monthly billing closer to $20, $35 and $50. For a three-person agency, $69 a month for Professional buys more capability than anything else at that price.

Two practical warnings. Zoho shows prices in local currency by region, so check what your own checkout says rather than trusting a comparison page, including this one. And invoicing properly means adding Zoho Books, a separate subscription, which is how you end up with four Zoho logins and a quiet suspicion that nobody owns the setup. Client portals in Zoho CRM sit on the higher editions, per Zoho's own documentation, so do not plan client logins on Standard.

Choose Zoho if someone on the team enjoys configuring software. Avoid it if nobody does, because an unconfigured Zoho is worse than a tidy spreadsheet.

Keap: invoicing and automation in one, at a serious price

Keap is the opposite trade. Invoicing, recurring payments, checkout forms, pipeline automation and a library of prebuilt follow-up sequences all come in one box, so the proposal-to-payment chain genuinely lives in one place. That is the thing most agencies say they want.

The price is the catch. At the time of writing it starts at $299 a month billed monthly, or $2,988 a year, with two user licences included and extra users at $39 each. Contact pricing is tiered, so the bill rises as your list grows, and an implementation package is required rather than optional, with the cost quoted by their team rather than published. For a studio billing $8,000 a month that is defensible. For a freelancer doing three sites a quarter it is not.

Choose Keap if you have a real volume of leads, you already run email follow-up seriously, and you want billing and automation on one invoice.

GoHighLevel and the agency platforms

GoHighLevel is built for the case where your clients are the end users. At the time of writing, Starter is $97 a month with three sub-accounts, Unlimited is $297 with unlimited sub-accounts and rebilling for phone and email at cost, and Agency Pro is $497, which adds a markup on rebilling. CRM and pipelines, payments and invoicing, and a website and funnel builder are all core features, and the desktop web app can be white-labelled, while a white-label mobile app is a $497 a month add-on or part of Enterprise.

The flat price is the attraction: five staff cost the same as one. Two things catch agencies out. First, phone numbers, SMS, email sending and the premium AI features are billed on usage on top of the subscription, so your real monthly figure is the plan plus a variable bill. Second, it is a marketing platform at heart, and its website builder is funnel-shaped. If your business is designing good-looking brochure and ecommerce sites, you may find yourself paying $297 for a CRM and still building sites somewhere else. Our GoHighLevel alternatives guide goes through that trade in detail.

Other platforms in this space, including Vendasta, sell a reseller marketplace rather than a single CRM, which suits agencies whose revenue is bundled services rather than design work.

HoneyBook and Dubsado: proposal to invoice for small studios

These two are not sales CRMs, they are client management tools for service businesses, and for a one to three person design studio they often fit better than anything above. The flow is the one you actually use: enquiry form, proposal with a price, contract signed, deposit invoice, payment plan, client portal where the client can find all of it.

HoneyBook costs $29 a month on Starter billed yearly, $49 on Essentials with up to two team members, and $109 on Premium with unlimited team members, at the time of writing. Card processing starts at 2.7% plus 10 cents, with bank transfers at 1.5%, so think of it as a payment tool with a CRM attached. Dubsado is $335 a year for Starter and $525 a year for Premier, which works out around $44 a month, includes three extra users free, and puts proposals, advanced scheduling and automated workflows on Premier only. There is a 21-day full-access trial and no cap on clients or projects.

Choose one of these if proposals and getting paid are the pain, and you have no plans to manage leads at volume or to sell software to your clients.

Side by side on the things agencies ask about

Where WebNewBiz fits, and where it does not

WebNewBiz approaches this from the website side rather than the sales side. The AI CRM starts on the Growth plan at $79 a month with 3,000 contacts and three team members, and it sits behind the same login as the sites you build. Enquiries from a website form land in the CRM without a connector, store buyers become contacts, leads are read and scored, and invoices chase themselves on a schedule instead of waiting for you to feel awkward enough to send a reminder. Deals, tasks and bookings are there, and you can connect your own email so follow-up comes from your real address.

Follow-up runs on workflow automations with triggers such as a form submission, a scheduled date or a birthday, and the CRM includes an AI funnel builder: describe the offer and it drafts a multi-step funnel with a landing page, opt-in and thank-you page, or start from one of 26 templates and edit each step. Opt-ins arrive as contacts. If you sell campaign work to clients, the marketing automation and email campaign tools sit on the Pro plan at $149, which also raises the limits to 10,000 contacts and five team members. Ultimate at $199 adds unlimited contacts, an AI chatbot and a phone system with its own number and two-way SMS, though that texting is for conversations rather than high-volume SMS marketing sequences.

For agencies the relevant part is reselling. The white-label setup puts your name, logo, colours and favicon on the dashboard, on your own domain such as app.youragency.com, so clients log in to a panel branded as your agency, down to the invoice PDFs. You create client accounts, set each one's plan and limits, log in as a client to do the work yourself or leave them to it, and sell at your own prices through your own packages and your own Stripe or PayPal account, so client money reaches you directly. There is a REST Partner API with single sign-on links and webhooks if you want websites inside your own product. The details are on white-label CRM for agencies and white-label website builder for agencies, and if you are working out what to charge, how to resell websites to clients covers the packaging side.

Now the honest limits. Agency pricing is not published, so you have to ask, which is slower than reading a pricing page. WebNewBiz is younger and smaller than Duda, GoHighLevel or Webflow's agency programmes, with a much smaller app ecosystem and community than Wix, Squarespace or Shopify. There is no CRM on the $9 Lite or $29 Starter plans, so $79 is the real entry point for this use case, and there is no free plan, only $1 for the first month. It is not a project management tool, so your delivery board stays where it is. The AI first draft of a site still needs your edits, photos and facts. And if a client later wants to move, content and the domain move but the layout gets rebuilt, so do not promise them a file export.

How to choose in ten minutes

• Solo, few leads, invoicing already fine: HubSpot's free CRM. Stop paying for a problem you do not have yet.
• Solo or a pair, proposals and payments are the pain: HoneyBook or Dubsado. The client portal alone saves a dozen emails per project.
• Three to six people, steady lead flow, bookkeeping sorted: Pipedrive Growth, or Zoho Professional if someone will configure it.
• High lead volume and real email marketing: Keap, if you can carry $299 a month plus implementation.
• You want to sell the software to clients: GoHighLevel if your clients want marketing automation, a white-label builder platform if what they actually want is a good website with a CRM attached.
• You are already paying for hosting, a builder and a CRM separately: add up those three invoices before you decide. Consolidating often wins on price without winning on features.

Set it up so it survives a busy month

Whichever tool you pick, the setup is what makes it stick. Keep the pipeline short enough to remember: enquiry, call booked, proposal sent, deposit pending, in build, live, care plan. Seven stages is plenty, and any stage that always empties on the same day it fills is not a stage.

Add five fields and no more: budget band, deadline, how they found you, current platform, and who controls the domain. That last one has saved more launch weekends than any automation.

Then write three rules and automate them. One, every enquiry gets a reply within one working day, even if the reply is a question. Two, every proposal gets three follow-ups over about nine days, then a polite close. Three, no design work starts before the deposit lands, and invoice reminders go out automatically so nobody has to decide whether today is the day to chase. Review the open deals once a week for fifteen minutes. A CRM nobody looks at is a filing cabinet.

Quick answers

What is the best CRM for a small web design agency?

For a solo designer or a team of two or three, the cheapest workable answer is usually HubSpot's free CRM plus the invoicing tool you already use, or Pipedrive's Growth plan at about $39 per seat per month on annual billing if you want proper pipeline automation. If proposals and invoices are the real pain, HoneyBook or Dubsado will serve you better than a sales CRM. If you want to resell the CRM to clients under your own brand, you are choosing between GoHighLevel and a white-label builder platform instead.

Do I need a CRM if I only get five enquiries a month?

You need a written pipeline, which a spreadsheet can be. The point at which a CRM pays for itself is usually when you lose a job you could have won because nobody followed up, or when you cannot say from memory how many proposals are outstanding. Five enquiries a month with a 30% close rate is enough money to justify a $30 tool.

How much should an agency expect to pay for a CRM?

At the time of writing (October 2026), a small agency of three people should budget roughly $25 to $120 a month for a standard sales CRM on annual billing, or $300 to $500 a month for an all-in-one agency platform such as Keap or GoHighLevel. Anything above that usually means you are paying for marketing features you have not set up yet.

Can I give clients access to the CRM?

Rarely in a straight sales CRM. Pipedrive has no client portal, and portal features in Zoho CRM sit on the higher editions. Client-facing access is normal in HoneyBook and Dubsado, where clients see their own proposals and invoices, and in agency platforms such as GoHighLevel and WebNewBiz, where each client gets their own sub-account.

Can I resell a CRM to my clients under my own brand?

Only on platforms built for it. GoHighLevel is the best known, with white-label branding on its web app and rebilling on the higher plans. WebNewBiz does the same thing from the website side: your brand on the dashboard, your own prices and your own Stripe or PayPal account, with the CRM included in whatever plan you sell. Pipedrive, HubSpot, Zoho, HoneyBook and Dubsado are not resold this way.

Should the CRM also handle project management?

Usually not. Most agencies end up with a CRM for money and conversations, and a separate board for delivery work in Notion, ClickUp, Trello or Asana. Tools that try to do both tend to be weak at one of them, and designers resist logging time in a sales tool. Keep the handover clear instead: when a deposit is paid, the deal becomes a project on the delivery board.

Related guides

• Dubsado alternatives for web designers, sorted by the job you need done
• HoneyBook alternatives for small businesses, sorted by why you are leaving
• Does Webflow have a CRM? The straight answer and what to use
• HoneyBook vs Dubsado for web designers: which one fits how you work
• Zoho CRM vs GoHighLevel for agencies
• The best CRM for freelancers, sorted by the job you need done

If you want the CRM and the client sites in one place

If reselling is the part you are weighing up, the quickest next step is to talk to us about white-label, since agency pricing is quoted rather than published and the answer depends on how many client accounts you need. We will tell you plainly if GoHighLevel or Duda suits you better.

If you would rather look first, the AI website builder page shows how client sites get drafted and edited by chat, and the free AI Website Preview designs a homepage from one sentence so you can judge the output on a real client brief before anyone signs anything. When you are ready to try the CRM itself, you can start for $1 for the first month and cancel if it is not for you.