Why I Loved Zoho CRM, and Why I Decided to Stop Using It in 2025

As someone who’s used Zoho CRM for several years, as well as helped several other businesses decide to use it, I have a good grasp now of what Zoho CRM is good for, and what it’s not.

When I started out as a freelance website designer five years ago, all I had was myself, my personal Gmail account that I’d had for almost a decade, and a Google Voice account for handling calls. Back then, I only had a small handful of contacts—mostly friends, family, and a few acquaintances who’d occasionally refer me business. Managing them was easy enough: I’d remember their names, keep their numbers in my phone, and call it a day.

As my business grew into a small team at Haven Media Solutions, however, our marketing channels grew, too. We began getting more organic leads, more referrals, and soon started dabbling in paid advertising. Suddenly, what used to be a trickle of prospects turned into a steady flow, and it became impossible to keep juggling all that information manually. I realized that at the number of leads we were getting, versus the number of deals we wanted to be closing, I couldn’t just keep handing my sales team a list of names and phone numbers and hoping for the best.

A couple of years into my journey, a friend recommended Zoho One, which came with Zoho CRM. It would also come with some bookkeeping tools, ability to send emails, and it seemed to have a decent reputation… so I signed up for it. In the beginning, Zoho CRM acted like a glorified address book for me: whenever I needed to look up someone’s phone number or email address, I’d open the CRM to copy it, then paste into Gmail or Google Voice. I wasn’t even aware of how other people were using it. As more leads piled up though, I realized both that Zoho CRM actually offers many advanced features, and that I needed to harness its full capabilities. That’s when I started experimenting with Zoho CRM’s custom functions, pipelines, and blueprints with custom stages, so our salespeople could follow a clear process for follow-ups and closing deals. We designed specific pipelines to guide them on what to do at each step, which tasks to complete, and how to keep track of every conversation. With a click of a button, we could automatically schedule a text to be sent out after two weeks to reactivate deals. With a little bit of work setting up some templates, we could even send out contracts in a couple of clicks, manage basic project data, and tie everything back to each contact’s profile. Before long, Zoho CRM became the central hub for our lead and client information, and it worked well enough that it felt like we finally had a system to handle the flow of business coming our way. Several clients I demonstrated my processes to liked my setup so much, I even built out some custom Zoho CRMs of their own.

Still, there were times when I noticed we were customizing our processes around Zoho’s structure rather than the other way around. While Zoho offers a lot of configuration options, I often had to pick and choose from their built-in features, and certain changes required me to learn their proprietary scripting language called Deluge. Even though I have a background in programming, there were moments where I wanted to tweak something very specific, only to find that Zoho’s customization options wouldn’t let me go as far as I needed. Plus, as our team grew, we’d have to pay for another user license every time someone joined our team. We picked ourselves up and made it work for a long time, and I even toyed with the idea of building my own CRM more than once, but Zoho covered just enough ground that I never fully jumped on the idea.

Eventually, a programming buddy suggested I check out Odoo, an open-source CRM platform that promised a world of flexibility. Open-source sounded ideal, because I could really get under the hood and shape it exactly how I liked. In theory, I could be as picky as I wanted without the limitations of someone else’s programmed blockades. As I dug deeper, however, I learned that while Odoo has a free community edition, some of its more advanced functionality is paywalled. It felt like the same issue all over again: I was being promised freedom and customizability, yet running into barriers when I tried to use the parts of the software that actually mattered to me.

That’s when I decided it was finally time to build my own CRM from scratch. It’s been a dream I’ve played around with for a while, and I finally reached a point where the thought of having complete control outweighed the comfort of sticking with an off-the-shelf tool. Developing our own CRM lets us tailor every detail exactly to how we nurture leads, store client data, and view accurate analytics on our systems. There are no hidden paywalls or proprietary coding languages dictating how we approach our workflow. It’s a big project, no doubt, but it feels like the right move for Haven Media Solutions as we continue to grow and refine our processes.

Zoho CRM deserves a lot of credit for supporting us in the early stages when we simply needed a place to organize contacts and automate basic tasks. I’m grateful it got us through those critical growth periods, and it definitely taught me the importance of having structured pipelines and systems. But over time, I realized that even the best customizable solutions still impose certain constraints, and some of the features we needed just weren’t possible to implement without rewriting how we did business. Whether you’re an individual freelancer or a scaling company, using Zoho CRM or a similar platform can be a fantastic step up from a patchwork of emails and spreadsheets. It was the perfect tool for me until it wasn’t. Now that we’re aiming for something more ambitious and more perfectly tailored, I feel that building our own CRM is the logical next step.

We’re currently deep in development on this new CRM, and it’s exciting to see something that truly aligns with not only our processes but also flexible enough for change that comes with scale, taking shape. I’m looking forward to sharing more details once we have something tangible to show, and I hope others who’ve had the same challenges with pre-built CRMs will find our story helpful.

If you’re debating which CRM path to choose, I’d encourage you to experiment, learn what works for you, and remember that there’s no one-size-fits-all. For us, it eventually meant leaving Zoho CRM behind, but for many others, Zoho might be just what they need. If you ever find that none of the existing options fit quite right, we’d be happy to help you evaluate your next steps—whether that’s customizing an off-the-shelf platform or crafting something entirely new.