How to Choose a CRM: 12 Questions to Ask Before You Buy

You choose a CRM once and live with it for years: moving a client base, a trained team and configured pipelines costs more than any subscription. That's why it pays to ask a CRM vendor some awkward questions before you buy. We've collected twelve of them and answer them honestly for emyCRM — including what we don't have yet.

Money

1. What do you pay for: per company or per employee?

A “per user” price grows with every new rep, and a small team starts saving on accounts — and clients go back to personal phones. In emyCRM, you pay for the plan per company, and each plan has an employee limit: “Basic” — up to 10, “Standard” — up to 30, “Professional” — up to 70. “Basic” costs 350 lei a month for the whole team.

2. What's included in the plan, and what costs extra?

Ask what you'll have to pay for on top: telephony, AI, messengers, file storage. In emyCRM, telephony is built into every plan — all you need is a SIP provider. Messengers are connected with a paid subscription for each channel and AI skills with marketplace apps, and the price is shown in the app card before you connect it.

3. How do you pay, and what happens after the trial?

You pay for the plan 3 months at a time, for six months with a 10% discount or for a year with a 20% discount — from your workspace balance, which you top up by sending a request to your manager. There's no online card payment yet. The trial is 14 days on “Standard,” no card required. If you don't choose a plan, your data stays and the CRM still opens, but telephony, Emy AI and marketplace apps are turned off.

Channels

4. Is telephony built in, and are calls recorded?

If calls live in a separate PBX, reps copy them into the CRM by hand — or don't. In emyCRM, you connect a SIP line from any provider: calls are made from the browser and the mobile app, they're recorded and land in the client card, and missed calls turn into “Call back” tasks. More in our article on CRM phone integration.

Conversations can be transcribed, with AI giving you a summary and the next step — these are separate marketplace apps, paid per minute of conversation.

5. Do messengers and email land in the client card?

Clients write on WhatsApp, Telegram and Instagram — and those conversations should live in the client's history, not on the rep's phone. In emyCRM, messengers are connected with apps from the marketplace: the conversation is visible in the card, and you can reply from the CRM. Email is connected via IMAP and SMTP, and Gmail and Microsoft 365 by signing in with your account; emails from a client and its contacts are gathered in the company card.

6. Is there a mobile app?

Reps don't sit at a laptop all day. There's an emyCRM app for iPhone and Android: “My day,” clients and deals, recorded calls, chats and Emy AI — more in our article on the CRM mobile app.

Data and security

7. Who sees what, and can you restrict sign-in?

Roles in emyCRM set permissions for each entity — read, create, edit, delete, import and export — with the scope “Own,” “Department,” “Subdepartments” or “All.” You can restrict sign-in to allowed IP addresses for the whole workspace, a role or an employee, and the sign-in journal shows who signed in and from where. There's no two-factor sign-in for employees yet.

8. How do you upload your database, and how do you get it back?

Companies, contacts and products are uploaded from CSV or Excel (.xlsx) — up to 5,000 rows at a time, with a preview, and duplicates are skipped by email, phone and name. Deals and leads can't be imported from a file yet. Export to CSV by filter is a separate permission in the role; the Manager role doesn't have it by default, so nobody can walk off with the database at the click of a button.

9. Can you restore what was deleted?

Deleted companies, contacts, leads, deals and invoices stay in the “Trash” for 30 days, and an administrator restores them together with their related records. Workspace data is regularly backed up to separate storage.

Team and growth

10. What language will your team work in?

In a multilingual team, a CRM in a single language is a source of mistakes. In emyCRM, every employee chooses their own interface language: Russian, Uzbek, Kazakh, English, Romanian, Ukrainian, German or Portuguese. An administrator can narrow the list for their workspace.

11. How long will setup take?

Your workspace is created right after you confirm your email, with ready-made pipelines. You can set up the pipeline and fields yourself or ask Emy AI in plain words — it makes changes only after you confirm. A plan for the first week is in our article on implementing a CRM in a week.

12. Can you connect your own systems?

Check whether there's an open API and what limits it has. In emyCRM, it's a REST API with documentation on the website, an OpenAPI description and named tokens that work with their owner's permissions; the limit is 150 requests per 10 seconds per token. There are no webhooks for changes yet: changes are fetched with requests. For specific industries, there are ready-made apps — for example, for clinics and dental practices.

How to test a CRM during the trial

1. Upload 100–200 real clients, not demo data.
2. Connect one line and one messenger, and run a week of real calls and conversations through the CRM.
3. Give a rep a role with the “Own” scope and check that they can't see other reps' clients or export the database.
4. Ask a manager to answer from the CRM alone: how much money is in progress and what's urgent.
5. Calculate the full price for a year: the plan, messengers, AI and other apps.