CRM systems in Lithuania: off-the-shelf or custom

DESAmedia · 2026-08-10

Short answer

An off-the-shelf CRM (Pipedrive, HubSpot, Salesforce, Zoho, Bitrix24) is usually the better choice when your sales process is standard, the team is small and you need the system within a few weeks. A custom CRM pays off when your business processes do not fit the "deal moving through stages" model, when you need deep integrations with local systems (in Lithuania, typically accounting software such as Rivilė, Directo or Agnum), or when licence fees over 5 years exceed the cost of building and maintaining your own system. The best CRM for a company in Lithuania is the one with the lower total cost of ownership over several years and no workarounds built into everyday processes.

What "off-the-shelf CRM" actually means

An off-the-shelf CRM is a cloud service (SaaS) paid for by subscription. The software remains the vendor's property, and you rent the right to use it. This has three practical consequences.

First, pricing is per user (per seat) or per organisation, and it recurs every year. Second, the data model is already designed: contacts, companies, deals, activities. You can adapt it with fields and stages, but the core logic stays the vendor's. Third, integration options depend on the plan: more expensive plans usually come with higher API limits (the API is the programming interface other systems use to connect) and more customisation.

Below are the prices of the CRMs most commonly used in Lithuania. This is market information from the vendors' pricing pages, checked on 29 September 2026, in euros, excluding VAT, billed annually.

HubSpot shows its Starter plan with a promotional discount on the pricing page, so we leave it out of the table: a promotional price is not suitable for a long-term calculation.

When an off-the-shelf system is cheaper

An off-the-shelf CRM wins in most cases, and it is worth saying so plainly. If your sales look like this: enquiry received, meeting, proposal, negotiation, contract, that is exactly the process these systems were built for. They already have email sync, calendars, a mobile app, reports and hundreds of ready-made integrations. Pipedrive, for example, lists more than 500 integrations.

We recommend an off-the-shelf system when:

• the team has up to 10-15 users and the process is standard B2B sales;
• you need the system within a few weeks, not months;
• it is not yet clear what the process should look like, so it makes sense to try a cheap tool first;
• you have nobody who would own the system's development and priorities.

Bitrix24 pricing stands out here: the Standard plan costs €99 per month for the whole organisation with up to 50 users. If its features are enough for your process, building a custom system will almost never pay off financially.

When licence costs outgrow the benefit

The licence cost grows linearly with the number of users, while the system's value often does not. If 20 people use the CRM only to look up a client's contact details or tick off a completed task, you pay as much for each of them as for an active sales manager.

The second reason is plan tiers. A single feature you need may only be available in a more expensive plan, and the plan changes for the whole team. HubSpot, for example, states that custom objects (your own data types, such as "property", "contract" or "device") are only available on Enterprise plans. If your process needs even one such object, the price per user rises from €90 to €150 or more.

Third, vendors change their prices and plan contents. This is not a criticism: it is how the cloud services business model works. But in a 5-year budget it is worth allowing for price changes, and you will have little negotiating power.

Three signs your processes do not fit

1. Your main object is not a "deal"

Off-the-shelf CRMs are built around a deal that moves through stages. In many businesses, however, the main object is something else: an order with several versions, a project with an estimate, an application with an assessment, a contract with annexes. In our work for a travel agency, one client can receive several proposals, and the price of each proposal has its own history because supplier prices change every week. In an off-the-shelf CRM, a process like this would have to be modelled with extra fields and conventions that every sales manager understands slightly differently.

2. Spreadsheets appear next to the CRM

If after a year of use the team is still filling in Excel files alongside the CRM, part of the process did not fit into the system. The most common examples are price calculations, production or warehouse statuses, commission tracking and supplier orders. Every such spreadsheet is a place where data is duplicated and goes stale.

3. Integrations become the main job

Companies in Lithuania almost always need their CRM connected to their accounting software (Lithuanian systems such as Rivilė, Directo, Agnum and others), and connectors for these systems are rarely available out of the box in off-the-shelf CRMs. API usage also has limits. Pipedrive's daily API budget is calculated with a formula: 30,000 tokens x plan multiplier (Lite 1, Growth 2, Premium 5, Ultimate 7) x number of users. On the Zoho CRM Standard plan, API credits are capped at 100,000 per day, and on the Enterprise plan they are calculated as 50,000 + 1,000 per user. When thousands of products or orders are synchronised every day, these limits become an architectural constraint. We cover how connections to local accounting software work in our article on integrating with Rivilė, Directo and Agnum.

How to calculate the cost of both routes

Comparing CRMs by monthly price per user is misleading. It is more accurate to compare the total cost of ownership (TCO) over the same period, usually 5 years.

Example calculation: 20 users, 5 years

This is an illustrative calculation based on September 2026 price lists, billed annually, excluding VAT. It does not include price increases, add-ons, implementation partner services or integration development.

The difference between the cheapest and the most expensive option is almost 40 times, so the first step is to establish which plan genuinely fits your process, rather than starting from the cheapest one.

What to add to the cost of an off-the-shelf system

• Implementation and configuration. Setting up fields, stages, automations and permissions, often through a vendor partner.
• Integrations. Connections to accounting, the website, the warehouse. If there is no ready-made connector, it will have to be built anyway.
• Add-ons and credits. HubSpot plans come with a set number of credits, and Pipedrive sells some features separately.
• Time spent on workarounds. The hours the team spends recording things that do not fit into the system.

What to include when costing a custom system

• Development. A one-off investment that depends on the scope of processes and integrations. We discussed market ranges in the article how much custom software development costs.
• Hosting and maintenance. Server, backups, security updates.
• Further development. New features as the process changes.

A custom system has no per-user fee, so 20 or 60 users cost almost the same. That is the main argument for larger teams. For a small team with a standard process, this argument usually does not apply.

A simple decision rule: if building a custom system plus 5 years of hosting and maintenance costs less than the licences and integrations of the right plan over the same period, and your processes require workarounds in an off-the-shelf system, a custom system deserves serious consideration. If either condition is not met, choose off-the-shelf.

Migration: what to do with existing data

Whichever route you choose, data migration is a separate piece of work that is worth planning in advance.

1. Inventory. List where client data lives today: the old CRM, spreadsheets, email, accounting software. It often turns out that the same client has records in three places with different contact details.
2. Clean up before migrating. Merge duplicates, archive inactive records, standardise field formats (phone numbers, company registration codes). Moving dirty data into a new system only moves the problem.
3. Field mapping table. For every field in the old system, specify where it will go in the new one. This is the best place to notice that some data has nowhere to go in the new system.
4. History and attachments. Activity history, emails and attached files are usually the hardest to migrate. You need to decide whether to move all of them or only the last few years.
5. Parallel period. The old system stays available in read-only mode for a few weeks so you can check that nothing has been lost.

Before signing an annual off-the-shelf CRM subscription, also check the exit terms: in what format you can export all data, and whether attachments and activity history are included in the export. Annual billing is usually paid upfront (Pipedrive, for example, states a single annual payment per user), so switching systems mid-year means paying twice.

When processes are more complex, a short analysis before deciding between off-the-shelf and custom is useful: describing the process, data objects and integrations. We carry out this work as a separate IT consulting and system design stage, and its output is useful for either route.

What to do next

If your sales process is standard, start with a trial of an off-the-shelf system and after 2-3 months assess how much work is still left in spreadsheets. If you see that your processes do not fit, and the 5-year licence estimate grows faster than the benefit, we write more about the custom route on our CRM development page.

Sources

• Pipedrive pricing
• HubSpot Sales Hub pricing (EUR)
• HubSpot: create custom objects
• Salesforce Sales Cloud pricing (EU)
• Zoho CRM pricing
• Bitrix24 pricing (EU)
• Pipedrive API rate limiting
• Zoho CRM API limits