The cheapest competent CRM in India, and the one with no property in it

6Degrees vs Zoho CRM

Zoho CRM is a good product and the price is honest, which is more than most of this category manages. It is also a horizontal CRM. A deal in Zoho is an amount and a close date. A referral in Indian real estate is a rupee claim with a counterparty, a deadline and a rival, and no amount of custom fields turns the first into the second.

The short answer

Pick Zoho CRM if you run a mixed business, already live in the Zoho suite, and your real problem is email and reporting. Pick 6Degrees if your real problem is that a builder paid somebody else for your buyer. Plenty of brokers should run both, and the export is there so you can.

Eight points, side by side

Checked 13 August 2026 against zoho.com/crm/pricing. These are the eight things 6Degrees is built to win, which is the honest way to read any vendor’s table: it is our axis, and you are allowed to decide it is the wrong one.

Zoho CRM, on these eight points2 built in · 2 partly · 4 not there

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6Degrees scores 8 of 8 here, which is worth exactly nothing on its own: 6Degrees chose the eight. The list of things Zoho CRM does better is further down, and the reason behind every count is in the table below.

What it does	6Degrees	Zoho CRM
Whose ledger it is	YesYours. It spans every developer you work with.	YesYours. It is your Zoho org.
Timestamped lead registration	YesYes. The server sets the date. The client cannot.	NoNo referral object. A custom date field is set by whoever types it.
Claim validity window	YesYes. A booked site visit extends it 30 days.	NoBuild it in Blueprint and maintain it yourself.
Published tie-break rule	YesYes. First verified tag, and the buyer’s own confirmation outranks it.	NoDuplicate detection merges records. It does not adjudicate a claim.
One ledger across many developers	YesYes. Seven builders, one ledger.	PartlyOne org, so yes in theory. Nothing models a developer or an empanelment.
Server-dated interaction trail	YesYes. Create-only. Nobody can backdate or delete a call.	PartlyActivities are logged and editable. An editable date is not evidence.
Evidence pack you can attach to a claim	YesYes. One dated pack: terms, timestamp, confirmation, site visit, timeline.	NoNo. You would export a report and assemble it by hand.
Self-serve export and cancel	YesYes. CSV and JSON, any day, no ticket.	YesYes. Zoho exports cleanly and cancels without a fight.

What Zoho CRM does better

1/Email, telephony, workflows, forms, analytics and a mobile app that all work, for ₹800 a seat on the Standard plan.
2/If you already run Zoho Books, Campaigns or Desk, the join across them is the whole reason to buy it.
3/It bends. Custom modules, Blueprint state machines and Deluge scripts will get you a long way if you have someone to build and maintain them.
4/Support, documentation and a partner network in every Indian city.

What 6Degrees does that Zoho CRM does not

1/The referral is an object out of the box, with a server-set timestamp the client cannot write.
2/The activity trail is create-only by rule, so a call logged in March cannot be edited in September. That is the difference between a note and evidence.
3/The commission ledger computes TDS under 194H and shows the net you will actually receive.
4/Scan reads a visiting card or a hoarding into a contact instead of asking you to open a form at a site visit.

The thing both products are arguing about

A referral has a fee, a counterparty, a deadline and a rival. That makes it an object with a state machine, not a note on a contact. Once you accept that, the only remaining question is whose database the object lives in, and the answer decides who can still read it after you stop working with that builder.

See every comparison

High-rise residential buildings photographed in daylight

What Zoho CRM is, before we argue with it

Zoho CRM is the most widely bought business software India has produced. Zoho puts the number at 300,000 businesses worldwide on its own homepage, and Gartner named it a Visionary in the 2025 Magic Quadrant for Sales Force Automation Platforms. It is sold in five editions. Free covers three users. Standard is ₹800 per user per month, Professional ₹1,400, Enterprise ₹2,400 and Ultimate ₹2,600, all billed annually, all before 18% GST, which the pricing page notes as local taxes charged in addition.

Nothing on this page argues that Zoho is bad software. It is very good software, and at ₹800 a seat it is the best value in this comparison by a distance. The argument is narrower and it is about shape. Zoho sells a horizontal CRM: a lead becomes a deal, a deal has an amount and a close date, and everything else is customisation. A referral in Indian real estate is not a deal. It is a rupee claim against a builder, with a counterparty who can deny it, a deadline after which it lapses, and a rival broker claiming the same buyer. The question this page tries to answer is what it costs to make the first thing behave like the second.

The ₹800 plan cannot do the thing people buy Zoho for

Almost every recommendation to run real estate on Zoho comes with the same three words: Blueprint, custom modules, Deluge. That is genuinely how you would build a referral engine on Zoho. The problem is the price attached to each of those words, and it is not ₹800.

Read Zoho's own edition comparison and the gates are exact. Blueprint, the state machine you would use to enforce a claim window, does not exist on Free or Standard. It starts on Professional at ₹1,400, capped at 3 Blueprints with 10 transitions each. Enterprise at ₹2,400 raises that to 50 Blueprints and 100 transitions. Validation rules, which is how you stop somebody typing a claim date that suits them, also start at Professional, at 5 per layout. Functions, the Deluge workflow actions you would need to compute a payout or a TDS deduction, are Enterprise and Ultimate only. Client Script starts at Professional.

Custom modules are the exception and they are cheaper than people assume. Standard gives you 10 custom modules, which is enough to hold Properties, Developers and Referrals as real objects. So the record shape is available at ₹800. The rules that make the record trustworthy are not. You can create a Referral module on the Standard plan and then have no way to stop a user editing its claim date, because validation rules are one tier up and the automation that would police it is two tiers up.

The storage ceiling on Standard is worth reading twice as well. Standard allows 100,000 records but only 200 MB across all modules, and additional storage is ₹240 for 100 MB a month. A brokerage that photographs visiting cards and site visits reaches 200 MB in a quarter. Professional and above move to 10 GB, which is the number most people think they are buying at ₹800 and are not.

What Zoho does better, and it is a long list

Email, telephony, web forms, workflow automation, reporting and a mobile app that a field user will actually keep open. All of that works on Standard and it works well. 6Degrees has none of it at Zoho's depth and will not pretend otherwise.

The suite is the real argument. If your books are in Zoho Books, your campaigns in Zoho Campaigns and your support in Desk, the join across them is worth more than any single feature either product has. That is a structural advantage 6Degrees cannot answer and is not trying to.

The partner network is the second one. There is a certified Zoho partner in every Indian city who will build your Blueprint, write your Deluge, and pick up the phone in your language. If your plan involves a consultant, Zoho has thousands and 6Degrees has none. That is a real reason to buy Zoho and we would rather say it here than have you find it out later.

And the exit is clean. Standard exports 200,000 records per module and allows 100 exports a day. Zoho gives two free data backups a month, with an on-demand backup at ₹690 a request. There is no hostage-taking in Zoho's commercial model, which is more than can be said for most of this category.

Zoho's own real estate page makes our argument for us

Zoho publishes a page for real estate. It opens with a statistic: "82% of new property sales are referrals from either existing contacts, previous clients, family, friends, or relatives." That is Zoho's line, not ours, and we agree with it.

Then read what the page offers a broker. Magic Bricks and 99acres feed leads into the Leads module. IDX Broker and Zillow sync listings for the US. There are 40 or so prebuilt reports and a Documents tab for property paperwork. Commission Management appears, and it is a marketplace listing rather than a core module: it calculates a commission amount from your own settings when a deal is won in Zoho CRM.

Now search that page for the words an Indian channel partner lives by. RERA is not on it. Builder is not on it. Empanelment is not on it. Channel partner is not on it. The page names referrals as 82% of the business in its first paragraph and then offers a lead pipe, a report pack and a document folder. The referral itself, the thing being claimed, has no object anywhere in the product.

That gap is not an oversight by Zoho. It is correct product judgement for a horizontal CRM sold in 180 countries. A referral claim against a developer is an Indian problem with Indian arithmetic in it, and no global CRM should hard-code it.

The audit log is real, and it is still not evidence

Zoho has audit logs on every paid edition, Standard upward. They are good. They record who changed what and when, and they can be exported through the API: up to the last three years without filters, and up to six months at a time when you filter, because Zoho caps a filtered audited time range at 180 days.

An audit log answers an internal question. Which of my staff changed this field. It is written for an administrator, and it lives inside your Zoho org where only your administrator can read it. That is the wrong artefact for the fight a broker is actually in.

The fight is external. A developer's CRM says another channel partner registered your buyer first. To argue, you need a document a third party will read: the registration with a timestamp nobody at your end could have set, the interaction trail from first call to site visit, and the buyer's own confirmation. In Zoho, a call log can be edited or deleted by a user who has the permission. The audit log then faithfully records that it was edited. A trail that records its own edits is honest. It is not the same object as a trail that cannot be edited, and a builder's legal team knows the difference.

6Degrees writes the referral timestamp on the server, and the interaction trail is create-only by rule. A call logged in March cannot be rewritten in September by anyone, including us. That is the single design decision this whole product hangs on, and it is not a feature you can add to a CRM afterwards with a validation rule.

A worked example, six seats in Thane

Take a Thane brokerage with six people who want the referral workflow described above: a Referral object, a claim window that expires, a rule that blocks a back-dated claim, and a payout line that nets off TDS.

The Referral object needs a custom module. Standard has 10 of them, so the record exists at ₹800 a seat: ₹4,800 a month. The claim window needs Blueprint, which is Professional: ₹1,400 a seat, ₹8,400 a month. The rule that blocks a back-dated claim needs validation rules, also Professional. The payout line that computes 5% TDS under section 194H needs a Function, and Functions are Enterprise: ₹2,400 a seat, ₹14,400 a month.

So the working configuration is Enterprise. That is ₹1,72,800 a year for six seats, and ₹2,03,904 with 18% GST. On top of that sits a build: somebody has to design the Blueprint, write the Deluge, and maintain both every time the process changes. A Zoho partner quote for that scope in Mumbai does not start below a lakh, and the maintenance never stops.

6Degrees is ₹1,999 per user per month. Six seats is ₹11,994 a month, ₹1,43,928 a year, ₹1,69,835 with GST, and the referral object, the window, the create-only trail and the TDS arithmetic are what the product is rather than what you built on it. That is the honest comparison: 6Degrees is not cheaper than Zoho. It is cheaper than the Zoho edition you need, and there is no build under it.

If you do not need any of that, the comparison inverts immediately and Zoho Standard at ₹4,800 a month wins by a mile. Which is the point of running the arithmetic rather than asserting a winner.

What happens the day you stop paying

Well, on both sides. Zoho does not hold your data. Export is self-serve, backups are ₹690 on demand, and downgrading an edition is a settings change rather than a phone call. We have seen no evidence of retention games and we are not going to invent any.

What you lose on the way down is the build, not the data. Drop from Enterprise to Standard and your Blueprints stop, your Functions stop, and your validation rules stop, because those are gated by edition. The records survive. The rules that made them mean something do not, and every claim created after that day is a date somebody typed.

6Degrees exports everything any day, including the evidence packs as dated files rather than a CSV of fields. That matters because a CSV of a claim is not the claim. The pack is.

The case for buying Zoho CRM instead

Buy Zoho if your business is mixed. If broking is one of three lines and the other two are anything at all, a horizontal CRM is the correct choice and a referral-shaped one is not.

Buy Zoho if you are already in the suite. The join to Books and Campaigns beats every argument on this page.

Buy Zoho if your bottleneck is outbound. Sequences, mass email at 500 a day on Standard and 2,000 on Enterprise, telephony and campaign reporting are things 6Degrees does not do.

Buy Zoho if you have a partner or an in-house builder who will own the configuration for years. With that person, Zoho becomes almost anything. Without them, an Enterprise subscription is a very expensive lead list.

And buy both if the money works. Zoho for the business, 6Degrees for the claims, and an export from either one on any day you change your mind. We would rather be one honest line item than the whole stack you resent.

Questions people ask about Zoho CRM

Can I just build a referral module in Zoho myself?

You can build the record on Standard, because Standard includes 10 custom modules. You cannot build the rules there. Validation rules and Blueprint start at Professional (₹1,400) and Functions start at Enterprise (₹2,400). A referral record with no enforceable window and no server-set date is a note with a fee written on it, which is what most brokers already have in a spreadsheet.

Is Zoho cheaper than 6Degrees?

Standard is, at ₹800 against ₹1,999, and if Standard does what you need then it is the better buy and we will say so. Enterprise, the edition you need for a working referral workflow, is ₹2,400 a seat before GST and before the build. For six seats that is ₹2,03,904 a year with GST against ₹1,69,835 for 6Degrees.

Does the Zoho audit log prove when I registered a client?

It proves it to you. The audit log is an internal administrator record inside your own Zoho org, exportable up to three years unfiltered and 180 days at a time when filtered. It is not a document written to be read by a developer disputing your claim, and a call log in Zoho can still be edited by a user with the permission, with the log recording the edit rather than preventing it.

What about Bigin, or Zoho CRM Plus?

Bigin is the right recommendation for a one or two person shop coming off a spreadsheet, and Zoho lists it at ₹2,400 per user per month for Express on the same pricing page. CRM Plus starts at $20 per user per month and bundles marketing and service. Neither changes the argument on this page, because neither has a referral object either.

Where these claims come from

Every one of them read on 13 August 2026. A vendor page changes without telling anyone, so check the date before you rely on this, and write to us if we have it wrong.