Bigin

Bigin is Zoho's pipeline CRM for small businesses moving customer tracking off spreadsheets, with a free single-user plan and per-user paid editions.

Bigin gives a small business one place to follow every customer conversation and open deal, instead of a spreadsheet, an inbox and a pile of notes that only one person understands. Zoho Corporation builds it and sells it from its own site, apart from Zoho CRM, and a business that later needs more than Bigin covers can move up to Zoho CRM. It is built for teams that want their customer data in order without taking on a complex CRM. Work is organised in Team Pipelines, so sales, customer onboarding and support can each run as their own sequence of stages. Contacts, Companies and Products hold the records, and Activities tracks the calls, tasks and events assigned to each person. Emails from Gmail, Outlook or Zoho Mail are linked to the matching contact, and a WhatsApp Business integration covers chat. Workflows update fields, add tags, send emails and hand each new record to the right owner by its criteria. Forms embedded on a website drop leads straight into a chosen pipeline stage, and Booking Pages let customers pick a meeting time. Bigin is aimed at small and micro businesses replacing spreadsheets, owners working alone, and teams that already run other Zoho apps. A single user can start on the free plan, and teams pay per user each month, billed monthly or yearly, across the Express, Premier and Bigin 360 editions. Each step up adds pipelines, record capacity and automation, with an AI Writing Assistant and an Email Reply Assistant from Premier. Every paid edition can be tried first, and paid plans include onboarding sessions. A typical week in Bigin starts with leads arriving from a website form or from Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and TikTok lead ads, then moving through stages as the team calls and emails them. Reps place calls through the built-in phone in the apps for iOS, iPadOS, Android and macOS, and scan business cards after an event. When a deal closes, a payment link goes out to the customer and the invoice is raised in Zoho Books or QuickBooks. Documents go for signature through Zoho Sign, and meetings sync with Google or Outlook calendars. Bigin fits the business that wants its whole customer follow-up visible to everyone on the team, from the first enquiry to the paid invoice.