A hands-on 2026 Freshsales review: the free plan limits, current pricing, the built-in phone, Freddy AI gating, and who should pick it over Zoho or Pipedrive.
Table of Contents
Most CRMs make you bolt on a dialer. Freshsales ships one. A cloud phone lives inside the contact record, so a rep buys a number, clicks to call, and the recording and log write themselves back to the deal without a second tool or a second login. For an inside-sales team that lives on the phone, that one decision removes a whole category of integration headache.
It fits the rest of the product's personality. Freshsales, part of the Freshworks family alongside Freshdesk and Freshchat, is the friendliest to set up of the four big CRMs we reviewed this month. The interface is clean, the defaults are sensible, and a new user is logging activity within the hour rather than after a training session. Ease of use is the pitch, and it largely delivers.
Freshsales has a free plan for up to three users and a 21-day trial on every paid tier, checked in August 2026. The free tier covers contact and deal management, the built-in phone, and email, which sounds generous until you notice what is missing: no workflow automation, no sales sequences, no advanced reporting, and none of the Freddy AI features. It is a contact manager with calling, not a full CRM.
That shapes how to evaluate it. Spend the free plan deciding whether you like the interface, then start the 21-day trial of Pro to see the automation and AI you would actually pay for. Judging Freshsales on the free tier alone tells you almost nothing about the product people rate it for.
Per user, per month, billed annually, from the pricing page in August 2026. Monthly billing adds roughly 20%, so the annual figures assume a year's commitment.
The number to stare at is the gap between Growth and Pro. Growth at $9 is one of the cheapest capable CRM plans anywhere, but the AI scoring, forecasting insights, and multi-pipeline support that people actually cite as reasons to buy Freshsales all sit on Pro at $39. That is more than a fourfold jump, and it is where Freshsales stops being the bargain and becomes a normally priced CRM. Know which side of that line your needs fall on before you commit.
Freddy is Freshworks' AI, and inside Freshsales it scores contacts by how likely they are to convert, surfaces deal insights, forecasts your pipeline, and drafts email copy. Contact scoring is the standout: it reads engagement signals and ranks who a rep should call next, which is exactly the prioritization a busy salesperson wants handed to them.
The important caveat is placement. The Freddy features worth having live on Pro and Enterprise, not on Growth and certainly not on Free. So the honest way to read Freshsales pricing is that the AI-assisted CRM starts at $39 a seat, and the cheaper plans are a well-made but conventional CRM. Freddy is good, but you pay Pro money to meet it.
The ease that makes Freshsales approachable comes from doing less. Its reporting and customization are lighter than Zoho CRM's or Salesforce's; power users who want deeply custom report types and cross-object dashboards will find the ceiling sooner. The consumption pieces add up too, since phone numbers, call minutes, and bot sessions draw on credits that sit outside the per-seat price, so a heavy-calling team should price those separately.
And like every ecosystem play, Freshsales nudges you toward the wider Freshworks suite for support and marketing. That can be convenient if you want one vendor across the customer lifecycle, but it is a direction of travel worth choosing on purpose rather than sliding into.
Freshsales is the right pick for a small or mid-size inside-sales team that wants a CRM plus a working phone in one place, values a short learning curve, and will spend for Pro to get the AI. On Pro it is a well-rounded, genuinely pleasant tool, and the built-in calling saves a real integration for teams that dial all day. If your reps live on the phone, start here.
Pass if you want the most features for the money, since Zoho CRM reaches AI scoring and custom modules for less at the top end and is free for three users with automation-adjacent depth. And if you never touch a phone and just want the clearest pipeline for closing deals, Pipedrive is more focused. Choose Freshsales when calling and simplicity matter more than raw depth, and budget from the Pro tier, not the free one.
Start a free Freshsales trial and test the Pro tier so you are evaluating the phone and Freddy AI, not the stripped free plan.
Visit the official website to see the latest plans, pricing, and special offers.
Get Started — Freshsales* Affiliate link — we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you.