The best CRM for a web design agency
We make one of the six tools on this page. We have tried to write the comparison we wanted to read before we started building, which means telling you where we lose.
How we compared them
Five criteria, chosen because they are the five things that go wrong in an agency running a CRM built for someone else. Prices are the published list price for a small team, checked in September 2026.
Does it know your sites?
Whether a live website is a first-class record with a status, or a URL in a text field.
Does the deal survive closing?
Whether won work becomes a project and then a subscription, or falls off the end of the pipeline.
Can it quote properly?
Line items from a rate card, not a duplicated PDF that quietly loses margin each time.
Does it bill the recurring?
Care plans and hosting invoiced automatically, or a monthly reminder in someone's calendar.
What does it cost at five people?
Per-seat pricing looks cheap on the pricing page and stops looking cheap when you hire.
Side by side
| Tool | Best for | Knows your sites | Quoting | Recurring billing | At 5 people |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| AgencyGenius | Web and design agencies, 2 to 25 people | Yes, pulls live sites via platform API | Built in, from your rate card | Built in, your own Stripe | $99/mo |
| HubSpot | Agencies with a real outbound sales team | No, a URL in a text field | Quotes add-on | Payments, US only | Free to $450/mo |
| GoHighLevel | Marketing agencies reselling the platform | Its own sites only | Yes | Yes, white label | $97/mo |
| Dubsado | Solo designers and small studios | No | Strong, contracts and forms | Yes | $40/mo |
| Productive | Larger agencies billing by time | No | Yes, budget-led | Yes | $45/mo |
| Monday | Teams that want to build it themselves | No | Via templates | No | $45/mo |
The six, in detail
Built for agencies whose clients stay after the build. Sites are records, not strings; won quotes become projects; care plans bill themselves. Duda has full API integration, other platforms are linked manually.
Where it loses: No outbound sequencing, no lead scoring, and no time tracking. It is a young product and the integration depth outside Duda is honest but shallow.
The most capable sales CRM on the list by a distance, and genuinely free to start. If your growth comes from outbound, sequences and reporting, nothing here competes with it.
Where it loses: It has no concept of a website you built or a client you keep. Price escalates sharply past the free tier, and most agencies use maybe a fifth of what they pay for.
An entire white-label marketing stack you can rent to your own clients. For agencies whose product is the platform, that resale model is the whole point and it works.
Where it loses: It only understands sites built inside GoHighLevel. If you build in Webflow or WordPress, the site side is dead weight, and the interface carries the complexity of everything else it does.
The best client-onboarding flow on this list. Contracts, questionnaires, proposals and scheduling are genuinely well made, and solo designers get a lot for the money.
Where it loses: It stops at the client relationship. No site portfolio, and it strains once more than two or three people are working in it at once.
Built around utilisation, budgets and profitability per project. If you bill by the hour and need to know which work is actually making money, this is the serious answer.
Where it loses: Heavy for a five-person studio doing fixed-price builds, and it models a website as a project that ends rather than an asset you keep.
Flexible enough to become almost anything, and plenty of agencies have built a workable CRM inside it.
Where it loses: You are the one building it, and you maintain it forever. No recurring billing, and the board you designed in month one rarely survives the person who designed it leaving.
When we are the wrong answer
Three cases, and we would rather you found them here than in week three of a trial.
You sell by outbound
If your growth comes from sequenced cold email and lead scoring, use HubSpot. We do not do sequences and are not planning to.
You bill by the hour
If utilisation and time budgets are how you run the business, Productive is built around that and we are not.
You resell a platform
If your product is a white-labelled marketing stack you rent to clients, GoHighLevel already is that. We are a CRM, not a platform to resell.
Common questions
What is the best CRM for a web design agency?
It depends on where your revenue comes from. If it comes from keeping clients on retainers and care plans, pick a CRM that models the site and the subscription, which means AgencyGenius or GoHighLevel depending on whether you build on your own platform. If it comes from outbound sales, pick HubSpot. If it comes from billable hours, pick Productive.
Is there a free CRM for agencies?
HubSpot's free tier is the most generous and has no user limit, but it will not track your sites or bill your care plans. AgencyGenius has a free tier too. Free is genuinely fine until recurring revenue is a meaningful share of your income, at which point the spreadsheet becomes the expensive option.
Is GoHighLevel worth it for a web design agency?
Only if you intend to resell the platform to your clients. That is what the $97 buys. If you build in Webflow, WordPress or Duda and just want a CRM around that work, you are paying for a marketing stack you will not use.
Can I just use a spreadsheet?
For the pipeline, for a while, yes. It fails at renewal dates, because a spreadsheet cannot tell you that three care plans lapse next Tuesday. That is usually the moment agencies go looking.
The short version
If you build websites for clients and keep those clients on care plans, the thing that will bother you about every general CRM is that it treats a live site as a string. That is the specific problem we built for. If your work is shaped differently, one of the five above will fit better, and the table says which.