10 of the Best CRM Solutions for the Education Industry

The editors at Solutions Review have compiled the following list to spotlight some of the best CRM solutions for businesses in the education industry. 

Developing meaningful, lasting relationships with students and families is one of the foundational pillars of every educational institution’s success. With a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution, the education industry can use marketing, sales, and service tools to manage relationships with active, prospective, and graduated students and deliver unique, personalized service throughout the student lifecycle.

However, finding the best CRM solution for your company isn’t always easy, especially since each educational institution has unique needs. With that in mind, Solutions Review developed this list of top-rated CRM solutions for the education industry to help connect buyers with leading providers. The Solutions Review editors selected these solutions based on each provider’s Authority Score, a meta-analysis of user sentiment through the web’s most trusted business software review sites, and our proprietary five-point inclusion criteria. The list is organized alphabetically.

The Best CRM Solutions for the Education Industry

Freshworks

Description: Freshworks provides business software solutions designed to be ready to go right “out of the box.” For example, the company’s AI-powered CRM platform, Freshsales, comes equipped with the tools businesses need to identify loyal customers, improve engagement, personalize the shopping experience, and unify customer data. The company’s education-specific CRM makes it easy for users to organize customer data the way they want with customizable contact management tools, provides teams with all the details needed to engage with students, and streamlines time-consuming tasks like data entry, email sends, outreach, and more.

Full Fabric

Description: Full Fabric is an end-to-end platform specifically built to help higher education institutions manage, market, and sell their courses in a way that resonates with students. The company’s solutions for Customer Relationship Management, Admissions, Commerce, and Student Information System are modular and composable, and can be deployed natively on the Microsoft and Salesforce stacks that teams already trust. For example, the CRM for higher education includes lifecycle tracking, conversion-optimized forms, event management, email marketing, SMS marketing, and alumni engagement capabilities.

HubSpot

Description: HubSpot is frequently brought up in discussions on CRM integration, as most of the providers in the marketing world offer integrations with the company’s software. HubSpot offers a free CRM that can help schools and universities manage contacts, track enrollment pipelines, and automate student outreach, all with no time limit or credit card required. When the institution is ready to upgrade, HubSpot’s paid plans will upgrade a school’s tech stack with advanced marketing automation, custom reporting, and deeper integrations to manage larger volumes of prospective students.

LeadSquared

Description: LeadSquared is a provider of marketing automation and sales execution solutions designed to help marketers and sales teams capture lead and activity data across channels to make each engagement meaningful and targeted. The platform uses machine learning to forge a deeper understanding of conversion attributes. Its Higher Education CRM can be tailored for institutions of all sizes and focuses, including career schools, Edtech, overseas education, and more. Capabilities include a paperless applicant portal, applicant activity tracking and lead scoring, automated workflows, a teacher portal,  Below-the-Line marketing, and the LeadSquared 24/7 customer support agent.

Pipedrive

Description: Pipedrive provides a clean, intuitive, and interactive CRM tool to help sales professionals manage leads, track communications, automate tasks, measure performance with detailed metrics, and improve sales processes. With Pipedrive’s university and higher education CRM solution, users can track stakeholder interactions across platforms, increase admission rates, enable remote flexibility, and improve communications between staff and students. The platform can also help educators record information, automate acceptance offers, track email activity, build a pipeline that fits their application process, streamline enrollments, and more.

Qualtrics

Description: Qualtrics is the “Experience Management (XM)” service category creator and works with organizations to improve and manage their customer, employee, product, and brand experiences. Qualtrics offers faculty and student experience management solutions for higher education and K-12 educational institutions, equipping them with the tools and data they need to identify key struggles in the educational journey, replace guesswork with prioritized actions, eliminate points of friction with real-time solutions, and ensure each institution can deliver on its promises to students, teachers, staff, faculty, and families.

Salesforce

Description: Salesforce offers one of the most expansive and complete CRM products. The platform includes the company’s sales and marketing applications, most notably the Sales and Marketing Clouds, Service Cloud, Analytics Cloud, App Cloud, and IoT service. With Agentforce Education, institutions can maximize staff impact through shared capabilities and a flexible data foundation that fosters lifelong learning. The education suite offers distinct modules: Recruitment and Admissions, Academic Operations, Student Success, Student Financials, and Advancement and Alumni Relations. Together, these will help schools connect every touchpoint, predict key trends, and take action using AI-powered insights.

TargetX

Description: TargetX provides CRM solutions to help the higher education industry recruit and retain students. The company’s Recruitment Suite includes email, SMS, event management tools, and other features to improve enrollment management, increase applications, and streamline admissions productivity with mobile-first functionalities tailored for higher education users. TargetX’s Retention Suite includes an appointment scheduler, SMS functionalities, action plans, and a Student Success Center to help users increase retention, optimize the student experience, and maximize student success initiatives.

Zendesk

Description: Zendesk provides customers with a CRM experience focused on customer service and sales needs. Education businesses of all sizes can use Zendesk for their omnichannel communication needs, provide personalized experiences to users, build a knowledge base to help visitors find answers to common questions, share customer feedback, identify content trends with reporting tools, and boost staff productivity. The solution is built to require little to no maintenance, hardware, or extensive training, so most institutions won’t even need IT support for setup.

Zoho CRM

Description: Zoho is a multinational company specializing in software development, cloud computing, and web-based business tools. Its CRM solution suite includes journey orchestration, marketing automation, sales enablement, analytics, and process management. Its CRM includes an education-specific version that helps institutions manage the complete admissions lifecycle, increase engagement, and convert more leads into students. Teams can also use it to automate follow-ups, notifications, alerts, and emails, and maintain a smooth school management system with minimal human effort.