How to choose CRM software in India.
Most comparison articles rank the software their author is paid to rank. This one is the list of questions we would ask if we were buying — including the ones that are awkward for us.
- Written as questions, not ticks
- No invented competitor data
- Updated 2026
Choosing CRM software in India comes down to four questions most feature lists skip: does the system decide CGST, SGST and IGST from place-of-supply rules or from a dropdown; can each branch hold its own GSTIN; is money stored as exact decimals so reports and quotations agree; and does the quoted price include tax handling or treat it as an add-on.
The questions that actually separate them
Every CRM has contacts and a pipeline. These are the parts where they genuinely differ.
Is GST calculated by rule, or chosen by hand?
Ask to see a quotation raised from one state to a customer in another. If somebody picks "IGST" from a dropdown, the system is not applying the place-of-supply rules — it is trusting whoever is typing, at four in the afternoon, on the twentieth quote of the day. That distinction is the single largest source of GST corrections in practice.
Can each branch hold its own GSTIN?
GST registration is per state, so any business operating in two states holds two registrations. Ask whether a branch is a real object with its own registration, address and permissions, or a text field on a record. The second kind works until your first inter-state invoice, then quietly does not.
How is money stored?
Ask whether amounts are stored as exact decimals or as floating-point numbers. It sounds like a detail until a thousand-row report disagrees with the quotations that make it up by several rupees, and someone spends a day finding out why. There is no fixing this later without a migration.
What does the price include?
Per-user-per-month figures are rarely comparable. Get the quote that includes tax handling, the number of branches you actually have, email sync, API access and whatever storage you need. Vendors differ enormously in which of those are in the base price and which appear at renewal.
How do you get your data out?
Ask before you buy, not when you are leaving. A CSV export of every object and a read API is the minimum. Software that makes leaving difficult is software that has stopped competing for your renewal, and you will find that out in year three.
Who sets it up?
Ask whether the quoted price assumes an implementation partner. For a business under about two hundred people, a CRM that requires a consultant to configure is a CRM that will require a consultant to change — and a change request queue is how good systems go stale.
A scorecard to take into both demos
We do not list other vendors’ prices or feature ticks here. They change, and a table that is wrong about a competitor is worth nothing to you. Ask both vendors these questions and compare the answers you get.
| Question to ask | What a good answer sounds like | SimplCRM’s answer |
|---|---|---|
| How is CGST/SGST vs IGST decided? | From the supplier’s state and the place of supply, per line, automatically | By rule, per line, on every quotation |
| Can each branch have its own GSTIN? | Yes — a branch is a first-class object with its own registration | Yes, with no company-wide override |
| Are HSN and SAC codes stored per line? | Yes, and frozen as issued so old documents reprint correctly | Yes, stored on the line as issued |
| How is money represented? | Exact decimals, computed in the database | Exact decimals to the paisa |
| How are customers isolated from each other? | A separate database, or an equivalently hard boundary | A separate database per customer |
| Is tax handling in the base price? | Yes — it is not a module you discover at renewal | In every plan |
| Can it run on our own servers? | Yes, if your policy requires it | Yes, cloud or on-premise |
| How do we export everything? | CSV for every object plus a read API, available on day one | CSV export and a full REST API |
| Is an implementation partner required? | No, for a business of this size | No — set up from the screens |
How to run the trial
The mistake is evaluating on a demo dataset. Nothing is ever wrong in a demo dataset.
What should I put into a trial?
One real enquiry, your twenty most-quoted products with their actual HSN codes, and three customers — one in your own state, one in another, and one that is awkward. Everything a CRM gets wrong, it gets wrong on the awkward one.
What should I try to break?
Raise a quotation to the out-of-state customer and check the tax without helping it. Revise it and see whether the original survives. Run a report over the three deals and check the total against the documents. Then add a second user and confirm they see only what they should.
Who should be in the trial?
The person who will actually type into it every day, not the person who will approve the purchase. Software chosen by the approver and used by somebody else is the most common way a CRM ends up unused six months later.
Questions people ask
What should I look for in a CRM for an Indian business?
Four things beyond the usual: whether tax is decided by place-of-supply rules or by a manual selection; whether each branch can hold its own GSTIN; whether money is stored as exact decimals so reports match quotations; and whether the price you were quoted includes tax handling or treats it as an add-on.
How much does CRM software cost in India?
CRM is normally priced per user per month, and the range is wide. The figure that matters is the one including the modules you will actually switch on — tax handling, extra branches, email sync and API access are commonly priced separately, so two quotes with the same headline number can differ by several times in practice.
Should a small business use a free CRM?
A free tier is a good way to learn what you need, and a poor way to run a business that issues GST documents. The limits that bite are usually the number of users, the absence of tax handling, and no way to get your data out — check all three before you put real customers into one.
How long should a CRM trial be?
Long enough to complete one real cycle: a genuine enquiry, a real quotation to a customer in another state, a revision, and a report you would actually show someone. A fortnight of that is worth more than three months of a demo dataset.
Compare us specifically
SimplCRM as a Zoho CRM alternative
Where a purpose-built Indian tax engine differs from a configurable general one.
SimplCRM as a Salesforce alternative
What a business under two hundred people gives up, and what it stops paying for.
Our pricing, in full
What each plan includes, with the tax engine in all of them.
Put us through the scorecard.
Start a workspace and try to break the tax on an inter-state quotation. It is the fastest honest test.