Capsule CRM for small business: choosing the right tier
If you've decided Capsule is the right CRM for your small business, the next question is which tier to start on. The tier choice matters more than people realise. Pick too low and you'll hit limits within months. Pick too high and you'll pay for features you don't use.
This piece is the practical guide to picking the right tier for a small UK business. There's a more detailed pricing breakdown elsewhere on the site, and the full guide to Capsule for the product overview.
The five tiers
Capsule offers Free, Starter, Growth, and Advanced (at the time of writing). The Free tier is for two users with significant limits and is best thought of as a trial.
For paying customers, the question is which of Starter, Growth, or Advanced fits your business.
Starter is rarely the right answer
Starter sits at around £17 per user per month and looks attractively cheap. The trouble is what's not in it.
Starter limits you to one pipeline. For most small businesses, that's enough for the first few months but limits you fairly quickly. You'll want a separate pipeline for new business and existing client expansion, or for different service lines, or for different sales motions. Once you need more than one pipeline, you're moving up.
Starter doesn't include Tracks, Capsule's project workflow feature. This is the bit that turns Capsule from a sales-only tool into a sales-and-delivery tool. For service businesses (which is most of my clients), going without Tracks is leaving half the product unused.
Starter has tighter limits on storage and integrations. For a single user with a hundred contacts and basic email integration, it's fine. For a team with proper email history, document attachments, and multiple connected tools, the limits start to bite.
The pattern I see: businesses sign up on Starter to keep the cost down, hit limits in three to six months, and move to Growth. The cost saving wasn't worth the friction.
Growth is where most small businesses sit
Growth, at around £32 per user per month, is the tier I most often recommend. It includes everything Starter has plus multiple pipelines, Tracks, fuller integration access, and sensible storage limits.
For a small UK service business with three to ten users, Growth covers what you need. Multiple pipelines for different parts of the business. Tracks for templated project workflows. Email and calendar integration. Mailchimp, Xero, QuickBooks. The full feature set that makes Capsule useful.
The cost for a five-user team on Growth is around £160 per month, which is competitive against any other "proper CRM" on the market for similar functionality.
When Advanced makes sense
Advanced, at around £52 per user per month, adds further capabilities. Advanced workflow automation, more detailed reporting, larger user count support, advanced custom fields.
The question is whether you'll use any of that. Advanced makes sense if:
Your team has crossed ten users and you need stronger permissions and user management.
You have specific reporting needs (custom dashboards, more granular pipeline analytics) that Growth doesn't deliver.
You want deeper workflow automation (auto-assigning, multi-step automations) than Growth's lighter automation features support.
For most under-ten-user teams, Advanced is overkill. Stay on Growth.
How to choose
The practical approach.
Start on Growth, not Starter. The £15 difference per user per month is worth it. Don't hobble your CRM out of false economy.
Trial the free tier for a week to confirm the interface and basic flow suit your team. Don't try to use the free tier as a long-term home; the limits are real.
Move to Advanced only if you can articulate a specific feature you need that Growth doesn't include. "Just in case we need it later" isn't a reason.
If you're choosing between Growth and Advanced, the Capsule sales team are honest about the differences. Ask them directly which tier suits your use case.
What this costs in practice
For a five-user UK team, Growth is around £1,920 per year on monthly billing. Advanced is around £3,120. Over three years, the difference is around £3,600.
For a ten-user UK team, Growth is around £3,840 per year on monthly billing. Advanced is around £6,240. Over three years, the difference is around £7,200.
The differences are real money but not unreasonable. The bigger question is whether the additional features justify the cost for your specific business.
What to do next
If you'd like help choosing the right tier for your specific team, the discovery call is a no-pressure half hour where we can talk it through.
If you want a deeper dive into Capsule's pricing structure with more worked examples, the pricing piece goes into more detail.
The honest position: tier choice isn't usually the decision that makes or breaks a CRM project. The bigger decisions are whether Capsule is right for you at all, and whether you set it up properly. Get those right and the tier question becomes a smaller decision.