Small business CRM tools: Salesforce and Dynamics 365 plans with GBP prices

What to take away

Four named plans, two suppliers and one manual baselineSalesforce Starter Suite and Pro Suite, Dynamics 365 Sales Professional and Enterprise.
Published per-user prices run from £20 to £80.70 per month, so seat count drives the bill.
No plan is ranked as best. Test each one against your own workflow.
A spreadsheet, mailbox and written hand-off can stay as the baseline, with access controls and backups.
Settle the lawful basis for customer data before you load any records.

Four plans and a baseline at a glance

There is no universal winner among small business CRM tools. The sensible move is to shortlist a few plans, price them for your real number of users and run the same tasks in each. The table gives the published GBP figures per user per month.

Route	Plan	Published GBP price	Billing note
Salesforce	Starter Suite	£20	Billed monthly or annually
Salesforce	Pro Suite	£80	Billed annually
Microsoft	Dynamics 365 Sales Professional	£50.00	Paid yearly, excludes VAT
Microsoft	Dynamics 365 Sales Enterprise	£80.70	Paid yearly, excludes VAT
Manual	Spreadsheet, mailbox, hand-off	No licence fee	Staff time and controls

1. Salesforce Starter Suite

The Salesforce UK pricing page lists Starter Suite at £20 per user per month, billed monthly or annually. It also offers a free 30-day trial of Starter Suite for up to 10 users, which makes it a low-cost first test for a small team.

Treat the trial as a scripted exercise: load a sample file, assign owners, export the data and note what each task took. Best for: a small team that wants a monthly option and a trial first. Avoid if: you need every integration and permission control evidenced before you buy.

2. Salesforce Pro Suite

Pro Suite is priced at £80 per user per month and billed annually. The step from £20 to £80 is a fourfold increase per seat, so it needs a written reason, such as a requirement that Starter Suite cannot meet.

List the functions you actually need and ask the supplier to show each one in the edition you would buy. A feature elsewhere in the range does not prove it is in this plan. Best for: a buyer with written requirements the cheaper plan fails. Avoid if: the driver is a longer feature list, not a named gap.

3. Dynamics 365 Sales Professional

Microsoft's Dynamics 365 Sales pricing page lists Sales Professional at £50.00 per user per month, paid yearly, and states that the price does not include VAT. The plan covers core sales force automation, Microsoft 365 interoperation, reporting and dashboards.

The entities in Sales Professional are a subset of those in Sales Enterprise, so confirm which records and fields your process needs. Best for: a team already working in Microsoft 365. Avoid if: your process needs records that only the larger edition holds. Test the fit with your real data first.

4. Dynamics 365 Sales Enterprise

Sales Enterprise is priced at £80.70 per user per month, paid yearly and excluding VAT. The extra £30.70 per user per month over Professional should buy a specific, testable capability, such as contextual insights or advanced customisation.

Ask for a written answer on each gap you found in Professional. If the answer is a workaround, price the labour it needs, because a cheaper licence can cost more once staff time counts. Best for: a buyer with documented needs beyond the smaller edition. Avoid if: you cannot name the capability.

5. Improve the existing process

A spreadsheet, mailbox and documented hand-off can remain the baseline. This route avoids a new supplier, but it still needs access controls, backups, change ownership and deletion rules. It is not automatically cheaper or safer for a small team.

Measure the real administration time and the failures over the same period you use for software quotes. If the numbers are close, a move from a spreadsheet may not pay back yet, and the baseline stays the benchmark for every later quote.

Worked example: five users

The figures below are illustrative arithmetic from the published unit prices, not a quote. Take a team of five users, and remember that set-up, migration and training labour come on top of every licence line.

Starter Suite comes to 5 x £20 = £100 per month. Pro Suite comes to 5 x £80 = £400. Sales Professional comes to 5 x £50.00 = £250.00 before VAT, and Sales Enterprise to 5 x £80.70 = £403.50 before VAT. The pricing models comparison shows how to keep units consistent across quotes.

Data protection and buying checks

Customer data brings legal duties. You must have a valid lawful basis before you handle personal information, and you must decide it before you start and document it. Marketing messages bring extra rules, set out in the guide to CRM UK regulations for one newsletter send.

Ask for quotes in GBP with VAT shown, and confirm support hours, the escalation route and where the data is stored. Put these items on a written selection checklist and keep the answers with the contract, so renewal talks start from evidence.

Before you act

Count the users who need a seat and multiply by each published price.
Ask each supplier for a dated quote and the exact limits of the plan.
Run the same five tasks in each trialcreate, deduplicate, restrict, transfer, export.
Prepare CRM demo questions on data location and exit.
Compare the cheapest plan with the best providers shortlist before you decide.

Common questions

What do the prices include?

They are the published GBP figures per user per month for each plan, as listed on the supplier pages. The Microsoft prices exclude VAT. Taxes, add-ons, set-up and migration work come on top, so always ask for a dated written quote.

Which plan should a five-person team start with?

Start with the lowest-priced plan that covers your written requirements, and test it for the length of the trial. Move up only when a named task fails. Keep the manual baseline running in parallel until the exported data matches the source records.