The CRM a solo consultant actually needs

By Marcus Webb · Pricing verified on vendor pages October 23, 2026 · Hands-on testing in progress — see note below

Most CRM comparisons are written for teams, and every one of their assumptions breaks when you are the whole company. No forecasting meeting. No pipeline review. No one to hand a deal to. What a solo consultant needs is a memory: who you spoke to, what you promised, and when to follow up. That is a much smaller product than what most vendors sell — and several of the paid options are irrational at one seat.

What solo consulting actually requires

• Contact history in one place. Not analytics — recall.
• A next-action date. The one feature that separates a CRM from an address book.
• Proposal and invoice context. Which version you sent, when, and what they said.
• Zero maintenance. If it takes ten minutes a day to keep accurate, you will stop, and a stale CRM is worse than none.

Notice what is missing: forecasting, team permissions, lead scoring, automation quotas. Those are the features vendors price against, and at one seat you are paying for all of them and using none.

The four realistic options

• HubSpot Free — $0. Contacts, companies, deals, tasks, email tracking, and a genuinely usable pipeline view. The free plan allows 2 users, so a solo consultant is comfortably inside it. This is the strongest default and it costs nothing while you decide.
• Streak — $49/seat/month for Pro, and the free plan has no pipelines. The value is that it lives inside Gmail, so the CRM is the inbox you already have open. For a consultant whose entire deal flow is email threads, this is the lowest-friction option that exists. At one seat, $49 is the real cost of not changing your habits. Our Streak pricing breakdown has the detail.
• Notion — $10/seat/month (Plus); free for individuals. A clients database with a last-contact date, a status and a linked notes page. You get exactly the shape you design and no automation at all — which means the follow-up discipline is entirely yours. Free works for a long time.
• Pipedrive — no free plan, €14/seat/month (Lite) after a 14-day trial. Excellent software aimed at teams with a repeatable multi-stage sale. For a solo consultant with eight open relationships, you are buying a forecast you will never read. Only justified if you are closing several deals a month with defined stages.

One seat, one year

Pipedrive is not the expensive option here — Streak is, by a factor of three. That surprises people, and it is a direct consequence of pricing per inbox rather than per user. Whether $588/year is worth it depends on one question: will you actually open a CRM tab?

The honest case for using none

If you have fewer than roughly fifteen active relationships, an inbox plus a disciplined labelling convention plus a weekly review of "who have I not emailed in three weeks" is sufficient. We wrote about exactly where that breaks in Can Gmail work as a CRM? — short version: it holds until about twenty open deals, then threads start to outnumber your ability to search them.

What a CRM buys you at that point is not features. It is a forcing function: a list of deals with no next action, sorted by how long they have been rotting.

A decision rule that holds up

• Under 15 active relationships, low deal value: nothing. Inbox plus labels. Revisit in six months.
• Over 15, or a deal that would hurt to lose: HubSpot Free. It costs nothing and the pipeline view is a real forcing function.
• Your work is email threads and you will not open another tab: Streak, and accept the $49.
• Deliverables are documents, not deals: Notion, free, and design the database around your follow-up rhythm.
• You are closing several staged deals monthly: Pipedrive, and you are no longer really a solo consultant — you are a one-person sales function, which is a different job.

What not to do

• Do not buy a team tool and use one seat. You will pay for automation limits and permissions you cannot use, and the interface will keep reminding you it was built for someone else.
• Do not migrate twice. Pick the one you will keep for a year. Contact exports rarely carry activity history, so each migration loses context permanently.
• Do not confuse a CRM with a business development system. No CRM generates leads. If your pipeline is empty because you are not prospecting, software will make that more visible without fixing it.

What we cannot verify

Prices and plan limits above come from each vendor's pricing page, verified October 23, 2026, and we re-check quarterly. Pipedrive prices in euros and Streak in US dollars as displayed; the annual figures are nominal, not currency-normalised. Our hands-on testing cycle is in progress — we have not yet spent a full month using each of these as a solo operator, so we cannot report measured time-to-log-a-deal, mobile experience in the field, or how the follow-up discipline holds up in practice. Those findings will be added per our How We Test process.