The best CRM for a UK charity in 2026 is Zoho CRM. It’s free for up to 3 users with real functionality, not a stripped-down trial, and its paid tiers start at £12/user/month if you outgrow that. This guide compares five CRMs suited to charity use, covering verified 2026 pricing, free tiers, and where each one fits supporter tracking, Gift Aid record-keeping and volunteer coordination.
Charities don’t need a sales CRM. You need somewhere to log supporters and donors instead of leads, manage GDPR consent for fundraising emails, track volunteers and grant pipelines, and pull a clean report for trustees. We compared five general-purpose CRMs against those needs, not against enterprise sales features a charity will never use.
Every price below is verified directly against each provider’s live UK site in August 2026. For a broader small-organisation view beyond charities specifically, see our best CRM for small business guide.
- Best value for charities: Zoho CRM - free for up to 3 users, with paid plans from £12/user/month once you outgrow it.
- Best for a very small team: HubSpot - free CRM for up to 2 users, though branding stays visible until you upgrade.
- Best UK-based budget option: Capsule - free for 2 users, paid plans from £14/user/month, built by a Manchester company.
- Best for volunteer and event coordination: monday CRM - from £10/seat/month, though plans require a 3-seat minimum.
- Best for fundraising-pipeline charities: Pipedrive - from £14/seat/month, built around a visual, stage-by-stage pipeline view.
Best CRM for Charities Compared
Prices below are verified from each provider’s live UK site in August 2026 and shown at the entry paid tier, per user, billed annually unless stated. None of these are dedicated nonprofit CRMs – they’re general-purpose tools a charity can adapt to donor and supporter tracking instead of sales.
| Provider | Best For | Price (from) | Free Tier | Key Feature |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Zoho CRM PICK | Cost-sensitive charities wanting real free-tier functionality | £12/user/mo | Yes (3 users) | Workflow automation for supporter follow-up |
| HubSpot | A very small charity team of two | £7/seat/mo | Yes (2 users) | Free marketing tools alongside the CRM |
| Capsule | UK-based, GDPR-conscious small charities | £14/user/mo | Yes (2 users) | Simple supporter pipelines, UK company |
| monday CRM | Volunteer rotas and event coordination | £10/seat/mo | No (14-day trial) | Board-based views anyone can build |
| Pipedrive | Fundraising and grant-pipeline tracking | £14/seat/mo | No (14-day trial) | Visual, stage-by-stage pipeline |
Zoho CRM EDITOR’S PICK
Zoho CRM is the pick for a charity watching every pound, because it’s genuinely free for up to 3 users rather than a time-limited trial, and its cheapest paid tier still undercuts most of the alternatives here once you outgrow that.
The free plan covers contact management, follow-up reminders, workflow automation, 10 custom email templates, task and meeting tracking, 5,000 API calls a day and mobile apps, with no credit card required. That’s enough for a small charity to log donors and supporters as contacts and set automated follow-up reminders around events or appeals rather than paying for software before you’ve proven you need it. Read our full Zoho CRM review for the complete tier breakdown.
Once a charity outgrows 3 users, Standard is £12/user/month, Professional £18/user/month, Enterprise £35/user/month and Ultimate £42/user/month, all in GBP with VAT added on top. Standard adds cadences (multichannel follow-up sequences) and AI agents, useful for structuring a supporter stewardship journey without hand-writing every email. Zoho is editorial-only in this guide, with no affiliate arrangement, and earns its place on merit.
The trade-off is support. Zoho’s own review profile flags slow, unresponsive customer support as a recurring complaint, along with renewal price increases that catch some buyers out. For a charity comfortable self-serving through documentation, that’s a reasonable exchange for the price. If responsive support matters more than headline cost, weigh it against Capsule instead.
HubSpot
HubSpot’s free CRM is the most generous starting point for a charity with just one or two people running everything, bundling basic sales, marketing and service tools alongside contact management, provided you can live with HubSpot branding on donor-facing emails and chat.
Free covers up to 2 users, 1,000 contacts, one pipeline, branded live chat and email, with no time limit and no card required. That branding matters more for a charity than a normal small business: donor-facing communications carry HubSpot’s logo until you upgrade, which some trustees or supporters may notice. Starter removes the branding at £7/seat/month billed annually (£18/seat/month billed monthly).
Professional jumps to £77/seat/month billed annually, but that headline figure hides a mandatory one-time Professional Onboarding fee of £1,310, not included in the per-seat price – a cost most small charities won’t clear for a CRM upgrade. Enterprise is £135/seat/month plus a £3,050 one-time onboarding fee. HubSpot is editorial-only in this guide. For a charity that only needs a lean donor database with no plans to run marketing campaigns from the same system, Zoho or Capsule are simpler and cheaper to scale.
Capsule
Capsule is built by Zestia Ltd, a Manchester company, which gives a UK charity native GBP pricing, UK-based support hours and a data controller based in the same jurisdiction as its GDPR obligations, rather than a US platform with UK pricing bolted on.
The free plan covers up to 2 users, 250 contacts, 1 sales pipeline and 5 custom fields, enough for a very small charity to trial supporter tracking before committing. Starter is £14/user/month billed annually, Growth £27/user/month, Advanced £42/user/month, and Ultimate is custom-priced for 5+ users with an account manager. Growth is Capsule’s recommended tier and adds workflow automations, multiple pipelines and project boards, which a charity can repurpose as a grant-application tracker or a donor-journey pipeline. Read our full Capsule review for the complete tier breakdown.
Capsule doesn’t have charity-specific features either, but its simplicity is the appeal: a small pipeline structure maps cleanly onto a supporter or grant journey without the sprawl of a sales-first platform. It’s editorial-only in this guide, with no affiliate arrangement.
monday CRM
monday CRM’s board-based, no-code layout is less about a sales pipeline and more useful to a charity as a flexible planning tool: volunteer rotas, event logistics and trustee reporting dashboards can all be built as boards without a developer.
Basic starts at £10/seat/month billed annually, though the platform requires a 3-seat minimum, so a one-person charity can’t buy a single seat. Standard steps up to £14/seat/month and adds 250 automations a month plus multiple workspaces – useful for separating a fundraising board from a volunteer-management board. There’s no permanent free CRM tier, only a 14-day trial.
Because boards, columns and automations are built by dragging and dropping, a non-technical trustee or volunteer coordinator can set up a rota or event checklist without waiting on IT support. It’s worth knowing that monday CRM is a separate product from monday.com Work Management, which has its own pricing and a genuine free plan for project boards rather than supporter or donor records.
Pipedrive
Pipedrive was built around the sales pipeline first, and while a charity has no sales to close, that same visual, drag-and-drop deal-stage view maps well onto a major-donor cultivation pipeline, a corporate-partnership pipeline, or grant applications moving through stages toward a decision.
The Lite plan starts at £14/seat/month billed annually, ex-VAT, and covers lead, calendar and pipeline management, AI-powered report creation and a real-time activity feed with 500+ integrations. There’s no permanent free tier, but every plan includes a 14-day free trial with full access and no card required, so a charity can test the workflow before paying. Growth (£39/seat/month) adds full email sync and automated sequences, useful once a fundraising team wants to track supporter email threads inside the same pipeline view.
For most charities, Lite is enough – it skips the sales-engagement and lead-scoring tools built for a commercial sales org and keeps the interface simple. If your fundraising team already thinks in stages (identify, cultivate, ask, steward) rather than a flat contact list, Pipedrive’s pipeline view will feel familiar faster than a general CRM’s default layout.
Should You Choose a Dedicated Charity CRM Instead?
None of the five CRMs above were built for charities specifically. Dedicated nonprofit CRMs exist, and it’s worth knowing they’re an option before you commit to a general-purpose tool.
Beacon, Donorfy and Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud are three UK-relevant dedicated charity CRM options. They ship with donor and supporter fields already built in – Gift Aid tracking, membership records, campaign and appeal reporting – rather than requiring you to relabel a sales CRM’s deal and contact fields yourself. We haven’t verified their current UK pricing, so no figures are given here; ask each provider directly, since nonprofit software pricing structures vary widely and change often. The structural trade-off is real either way: a dedicated charity CRM saves setup time and speaks the right language out of the box, but it’s a narrower product with a smaller ecosystem of integrations than a mainstream CRM like Zoho or HubSpot, and switching later is more disruptive than switching between general-purpose tools.
Several mainstream CRM vendors, including some covered above, offer nonprofit or charity discount programmes – it’s worth asking about charity pricing directly with the provider before you sign up, since eligibility criteria and discount levels aren’t consistently published. A small charity testing the water is usually better served starting on a free tier like Zoho’s or Capsule’s, then evaluating a dedicated nonprofit platform once supporter numbers and Gift Aid volume justify the switch. Our plain-English guide to what a CRM does is a useful starting point if your charity has never used one.
Do These CRMs Handle Gift Aid?
Not directly. None of the five general-purpose CRMs in this guide calculate or submit Gift Aid claims – that’s a structural gap, not a feature any of them are missing by accident, since Gift Aid is an HMRC tax process, not a CRM function.
What a CRM can do is store the declaration itself as a custom field or note against a donor’s record, and flag which donations are Gift Aid-eligible so your finance team or accounting software can pull that list at claim time. Zoho and Capsule both let you build a custom field for this; HubSpot and monday CRM can do the same through their custom properties or columns.
Actually submitting the claim still runs through HMRC’s own portal or your accounting/payroll software, not the CRM. If Gift Aid volume is a core part of your fundraising, a dedicated nonprofit CRM with built-in Gift Aid tracking may save more admin time than a general CRM’s custom fields.
GDPR and Donor Consent
Charities handle a specific category of GDPR risk: fundraising communications need explicit, recorded consent, and a supporter’s consent status can change (opting out of email but staying happy with post, for example) in ways a flat mailing list doesn’t capture well.
All five CRMs here can record consent status as a custom field or contact property, and most support segmenting your contact list so you only email people who’ve actively opted in. Capsule’s UK company base (Zestia Ltd, Manchester) means your data processor sits in the same jurisdiction as your charity’s own GDPR obligations, which some trustees prefer over a US-headquartered vendor, even though all five providers state UK/EU data protection compliance.
Whichever CRM you choose, build a consent field into your setup from day one rather than retrofitting it once your supporter list has grown – it’s far harder to reconstruct historical consent than to record it as you go.
Volunteer Coordination and Trustee Reporting
Volunteers and trustees are two more record types a sales CRM wasn’t built to hold. monday CRM’s board-based layout is the most natural fit for volunteer rotas and shift planning, since a board can represent a rota visually without repurposing deal-stage fields.
For trustee reporting, most charities still need a simple, exportable summary of supporters, donations and campaign activity – something a treasurer or trustee board can review without logging into the CRM itself. Zoho, Capsule and HubSpot all offer standard reports and CSV export on their entry tiers, which covers this without needing a dedicated reporting tool. If your charity runs regular events with volunteer sign-ups, weigh monday CRM’s board flexibility against the lack of a free tier before committing – our CRM software costs guide breaks down full pricing by seat count if budget is the deciding factor.
How to Choose a CRM for Your Charity
The right choice depends on three things: how many people need access today, whether Gift Aid and donor consent tracking need to be built-in or can live as custom fields, and whether your team thinks in pipelines (fundraising, grants) or flat supporter lists.
Choose Zoho CRM if budget is the priority and you want a genuinely free 3-user plan with room to add automation later. Choose HubSpot if your whole charity is run by one or two people and you’re willing to live with branding until you can afford Starter. Choose Capsule if a UK-based provider and simple, GDPR-conscious record-keeping matter more than deep features.
Choose monday CRM if volunteer rotas, event planning and trustee dashboards matter as much as donor tracking, and you have at least 3 people to seat. Choose Pipedrive if your fundraising team already works in stages – major donor cultivation, corporate partnerships, grant applications – and wants a visual pipeline rather than a flat contact list. For deeper detail on what any CRM actually does before you commit budget, see our free CRM software guide for the fullest no-cost options across all five.
Last updated: August 2026. Pricing is verified against each provider’s live UK site at the time of writing and can change; always confirm current rates, and ask directly about any charity or nonprofit discount, before purchasing.
