Best Act! CRM tools in 2026 (1+ compared)

Act! CRM tools are made by Act! LLC, the US company formerly known as Swiftpage, which bought the product from Sage. Pat Sullivan and Mike Muhney created Act! in Dallas as one of the first contact managers for PCs. Symantec and Sage owned it before it went independent, and that long history explains its loyal base among advisers and brokers.

Today the company builds one core product for small businesses. Act! CRM comes as a cloud service or an on-premises installation, with marketing automation inside the same contact records. That narrow focus differs from Salesforce or Microsoft, whose CRMs sit inside huge clouds, and it keeps Act! CRM close to firms with 1–50 staff.

Act! CRM plans differ mainly in where your data lives and how much marketing automation you get. The cloud edition starts at about £30 per user per month and runs in the browser and mobile app. The on-premises edition installs on your own Windows server and suits offices that must keep client files in-house, as many insurance and finance firms do.

Higher tiers add marketing tools rather than contact space. Entry plans cover contacts, opportunities, calendars and Outlook or Gmail sync, while upper plans add drip campaigns, landing pages and lead scoring. Contacts stay unlimited throughout, so a 5,000-name client list does not push you up a tier.

The cloud edition fits teams that work from several offices or on the road. On-premises fits a single office with its own IT, for example a broker with a server in the back room and staff who need offline access. Unlike Salesforce, which splits sales and marketing into separate products, every Act! CRM plan keeps both on one contact record.

Act! CRM tools are simple contact managers for small firms, while Salesforce Sales Cloud is a platform that scales to thousands of users. Act! CRM puts the relationship first, with every note, email and meeting on one record. Salesforce puts the process first: leads, accounts, opportunities and forecasts that an admin shapes to your sales method.

Salesforce runs on a customisable cloud with Flow automation, Apex code and the AppExchange marketplace. Einstein and Agentforce add AI forecasts and assistants on higher editions. Act! CRM offers fewer building blocks but includes marketing automation and an on-premises edition, which Salesforce does not sell at all.

The effort gap is bigger than the price gap. A Salesforce rollout usually needs an admin or partner and several weeks of setup, and marketing or CPQ come as extra licences. A 5-person office has Act! CRM running in a day, with contacts imported from Outlook or a CSV file.

Pick Act! CRM if you are an adviser, broker or distributor who wants deep contact history, simple marketing and the option to keep data on your own server. Salesforce is the better choice once you plan to grow past 30 reps, need territory management or must connect sales to service and finance systems.

Act! CRM tools commonly cost about £20-£30 per user per month, while upper plans with marketing automation cost more. The entry price covers contacts, opportunities, calendars and email sync for a single user, with no seat minimum and no charge per contact.

Each step up adds marketing tools rather than storage or contacts. Drip campaigns, landing pages and lead scoring sit on higher tiers and replace a separate tool such as Mailchimp for many small firms. Compared with the free plans of HubSpot and Zoho CRM, you pay from the first user, but a client list of any size costs the same.

The chart below shows the price distribution of Act! CRM tools.

Before choosing an Act! CRM tool, you should weigh the following factors:

• Hosting: Act! CRM runs in the cloud or on your own server. Firms with strict rules on client files often pick on-premises, an option that Salesforce and HubSpot do not offer.
• Sales process depth: Act! CRM handles opportunities and simple stages well. Teams that need weighted forecasts, territory rules or approval steps find them ready in Salesforce Sales Cloud or Dynamics 365 Sales.
• Marketing needs: Act! CRM includes drip email and landing pages on higher tiers. Firms already paying for Mailchimp or HubSpot Marketing Hub cover the same ground with the entry plan and a Zapier link.
• Integrations: Act! CRM links natively to Outlook and Gmail and reaches most other apps through Zapier. Teams that need ERP or phone system links get more from Microsoft Dynamics 365 or Salesforce AppExchange.
• Training time: Act! CRM's dense screens need a short onboarding for new staff, often a half-day session. monday CRM and Pipedrive feel familiar within an hour for most users.
• Data migration: Act! CRM imports contacts from CSV files and Outlook, and older on-premises databases move to the cloud edition. Leaving Act! CRM for HubSpot later means mapping long history notes, which rarely transfer one to one.