By Anna Odrynska, Co-founder of Mria Labs Inc.
The global CRM market is on track to reach $85.2 billion in 2026. Salesforce remains the market leader, while HubSpot and Pegasystems are growing rapidly. But the most interesting changes may be happening in how businesses choose CRM software: reliability, integrations, AI capabilities, security, and total cost of ownership are becoming central to purchasing decisions.
As a co-founder of Mria Labs, the company behind Mria CRM for Jira, I spend a lot of time finding out how businesses manage customer relationships. For me, particularly interesting is: what should a modern CRM actually do?
CRM has traditionally focused on sales pipelines, contacts, and revenue forecasting. But customer relationships don't exist in isolation: sales, delivery, support, and product teams all contribute to the customer experience, yet often work in disconnected systems.
Meanwhile, CRM buyers expect more: reliability, AI, seamless integrations, stronger security, and clear ROI.
Recent research from Metrigy, Gartner, and G2 reveals how these expectations are reshaping the CRM market. Let's look at the numbers and what they mean for the future.
CRM Market Size 2026: Global Revenue Expected to Reach $85.2 Billion
According to Metrigy's latest CRM Quarterly Market Share & Forecast Report: 2Q26, published on October 13, 2026, the global CRM software market reached $83 billion in 2025, representing 3% year-over-year growth.
Based on the first half of 2026, Metrigy expects CRM revenue to reach approximately $85.2 billion in 2026. The firm forecasts that the market will grow to $89.7 billion by 2030, representing a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 1.6% between 2025 and 2030. That's relatively modest growth for a software category that has received so much attention. But it makes sense when we consider how established CRM software has become.
What do I personally think? I think this means that CRM is no longer an emerging technology. For many businesses, it's already part of their core infrastructure.
CRM Adoption Rate: How Many Companies Use CRM Software?
Metrigy's 2026 Customer Experience MetriCast study found that:
- 52.4% of surveyed organizations currently use CRM software.
- Another 18.7% plan to adopt CRM by the end of 2026.
- CRM adoption reaches 74.4% among companies with 1,000–2,500 employees.
- Among businesses with fewer than 250 employees, adoption is 40.7%.
Regional adoption also varies:
| Region | CRM adoption in 2026 |
|---|---|
| North America | 53.9% |
| Europe | 51.8% |
| Asia-Pacific | 50.2% |
These figures are particularly interesting when compared with the previous year's research. Metrigy's 2025 study reported higher overall adoption. However, the firm explicitly notes that the 2026 sample includes a larger proportion of small businesses, which helps explain the difference. In other words, the lower reported adoption rate should not automatically be interpreted as declining CRM usage.
What stands out to me is the opportunity among smaller businesses. Many already rely on project management platforms, email, spreadsheets, and collaboration tools. But they haven't necessarily implemented a dedicated CRM. For some of these companies, the question may not be whether they need another standalone system at all.
CRM Market Share 2026: Top CRM Vendors and Industry Leaders
Salesforce continues to dominate the global CRM market. According to Metrigy's Q2 2026 analysis, Salesforce accounted for 26.0% of global CRM revenue during the quarter. The company is followed by Microsoft, Adobe, and Oracle.
But market leadership and growth are not necessarily the same thing. Metrigy identified HubSpot and Pegasystems as the vendors with the strongest year-over-year CRM revenue growth in its latest analysis.
| Vendor | YoY CRM revenue growth |
|---|---|
| HubSpot | 20.1% |
| Pegasystems | 19.6% |
These are vendor revenue growth figures reported in the Q2 2026 analysis, not market-share percentages.
So, the contrast is interesting. Salesforce continues to command more than a quarter of the market, while smaller competitors are expanding considerably faster than the market overall.
Gartner's 2026 market-share research also describes a fragmented CRM landscape, with established vendors facing competition from a broad range of providers. And the competitive landscape is becoming even more interesting with the emergence of AI-native CRM solutions.
I find this particularly encouraging for smaller, specialized CRM companies. For a long time, competing in the CRM industry often meant competing on the number of features. The larger the platform, the more capabilities it could offer.
But a smaller CRM vendor doesn't necessarily need to replicate every feature of Salesforce or Microsoft Dynamics 365 to deliver meaningful value. It can focus, for example, on a specific customer segment, business process, industry, or software ecosystem.
In my view, the next stage of CRM competition may be less about who offers the most functionality, and more about who solves a particular business problem most effectively.
CRM Customer Retention in 2026: Why Nearly Half of Companies Plan to Stay with Their Provider
One of the most interesting findings in Metrigy's latest research concerns CRM replacement plans. According to the Q2 2026 report, 49.4% of organizations already using CRM have no plans to replace their primary provider. The remaining organizations are replacing their CRM, planning a replacement, evaluating their options, or remain undecided.
For CRM vendors, this creates an interesting challenge. It's not enough to offer a better feature or a more attractive interface. Companies need a compelling reason to reconsider software that may already be deeply embedded in their operations. But the latest research also reveals what motivates organizations to evaluate alternatives.
Why are companies reconsidering their CRM providers?
Metrigy identified the following leading reasons for CRM vendor evaluation:
| Reason | Share of respondents |
|---|---|
| Company policy | 33.6% |
| Lack of AI capabilities | 33.6% |
| Cost | 32.8% |
These findings reveal something important about the current market. AI is no longer just an attractive additional feature. For a significant proportion of organizations considering a CRM change, insufficient AI functionality is already a reason to evaluate another vendor. Cost is almost equally important. And company policies remain a major factor, reflecting the organizational constraints involved in software decisions.
I think this combination is particularly revealing. Companies want innovation, but they also want predictable costs and solutions that fit their internal requirements.
Thus, for CRM vendors the challenge is to deliver new capabilities without introducing unnecessary complexity.
How to Choose CRM Software in 2026: What Matters Most to Buyers
One of the most useful findings in Metrigy's latest research concerns CRM selection criteria. Among organizations evaluating CRM providers, the most important factor was reliability, followed by integrations and technical features. I think this tells us something important.
The software industry spends a lot of time discussing innovation – AI assistants, advanced analytics, automation, and increasingly sophisticated workflows… But customers still want the fundamentals to work! They need a system they can depend on every day. And they need that system to communicate effectively with the rest of their technology stack.
This second point is particularly relevant. Think about a typical B2B company. Its sales team manages customer opportunities in a CRM. Its delivery team works in a project management platform. Customer support uses a service desk. Product managers maintain their own roadmaps and feedback systems. All these teams work with the same customers, but often see different parts of the relationship. An integration might synchronize a company name or contact record. But does it allow a sales manager to understand whether an important customer's project is delayed? Can an account manager see unresolved support issues before a renewal conversation? Can a product manager identify which feature requests come from strategic customers?
These are questions about business context, not just data synchronization. And no wonder they're becoming increasingly relevant to CRM selection.
CRM Software Security: How Data Protection Influences Buying Decisions
CRM systems contain some of the most valuable information a company manages. Customer details, commercial agreements, communication histories, sales opportunities, and internal notes can all reside in a CRM. This makes security a fundamental consideration.
According to the G2 2026 Buyer Behavior Report, based on a survey of 1,038 B2B software buyers and decision-makers:
- 39% identified IT security reviews as the biggest source of delays after selecting a software vendor.
- 87% said they were more likely to purchase software with transparent AI data practices than a cheaper alternative lacking that transparency.
- 40% said evaluation was the longest stage of their software purchasing journey.
These findings relate to B2B software generally, rather than CRM specifically, but they are especially relevant to systems that manage sensitive customer information. And recent security incidents involving CRM integrations have demonstrated why. In 2025 and 2026, attackers exploited trusted third-party connections to access Salesforce customer environments in several documented campaigns. Importantly, these incidents did not necessarily involve vulnerabilities in Salesforce itself. In multiple cases, attackers used compromised OAuth tokens or permissions associated with connected applications.
This highlights a broader architectural challenge. The security of a CRM environment depends not only on the CRM platform, but also on the applications, integrations, and permissions surrounding it.
For businesses evaluating CRM software, questions about data storage, third-party access, permissions, and integration architecture deserve serious attention.
How AI in CRM Transforms Customer Relationships
AI has become one of the biggest topics in enterprise software. CRM vendors are introducing AI assistants, automated sales insights, conversation summaries, predictive analytics, and increasingly autonomous agents. But what do customers actually expect?
G2's 2026 research found that 72% of B2B software buyers consider AI either a must-have or a differentiating factor when choosing software. At the same time, concerns about internal resistance to AI adoption increased from 16% to 29% year over year. And Metrigy's latest CRM-specific research adds an important perspective: lack of AI capabilities is now one of the leading reasons organizations evaluate changing CRM providers.
Together, these findings suggest that AI is becoming an expected part of business software, rather than an experimental feature.
However, buyers aren't necessarily comfortable with every form of AI implementation. G2 also found that most respondents preferred to keep humans responsible for consequential purchasing decisions, even when AI agents were involved in research and recommendations.
I see an important parallel with CRM. AI can be extremely useful for preparing meeting notes, summarizing customer interactions, suggesting follow-up tasks, and retrieving information across business systems. But an AI agent working with customer data also needs the right context and permissions. A sales representative, account manager, and finance executive may have very different levels of access to sensitive information. And there's an important difference between an agent suggesting an action and executing it.
For me, the real opportunity is in making AI useful within actual business workflows – with access to relevant information, appropriate permissions, and human oversight.
The True Cost of CRM Software: Licenses, Integrations, and Hidden Expenses
CRM pricing is another area where buyer expectations are changing. Traditionally, CRM products have been compared using subscription prices per user per month. It's a simple metric, but it doesn't necessarily reflect the total cost of operating the solution.
A CRM implementation may involve additional expenses for:
- Integrations and middleware
- Implementation and customization
- Administration and maintenance
- Employee onboarding and training
- Data migration and synchronization
- Additional tools required to support connected workflows
And software buyers are paying closer attention to these costs. According to G2's 2026 research, nearly half of surveyed buyers said their CFO had reversed a software purchase already approved by the buying team during the previous 12 months.
The same report found that seven in ten buyers said the pace of AI innovation was encouraging them to prefer shorter software contracts. These results suggest growing pressure on vendors to demonstrate value and make pricing more predictable.
For CRM buyers, I think this raises an important question: are we comparing the cost of CRM licenses, or the total cost of managing customer relationships across the business?
A standalone CRM may offer attractive per-user pricing but require additional integrations to connect sales, support, delivery, and product management. An integrated CRM may use a different pricing model but reduce some of those integration requirements. Neither approach is automatically cheaper. The answer depends on the company's existing software environment, number of users, business processes, and integration needs.
That's why I believe CRM pricing comparisons should focus on total cost of ownership rather than subscription fees alone.
The Future of CRM Is Connecting Customer Data with Business Workflows
This is the part of the CRM discussion that interests me most personally.
Before co-founding Mria Labs, I spent years working with business software integrations and the Atlassian ecosystem. And one challenge appeared repeatedly. Companies often had plenty of information about their customers, but it was scattered across different systems: sales knew what had been promised, delivery knew what was actually happening, support knew which issues remained unresolved, and product teams knew what customers were asking for. But there wasn't always a shared view connecting these different perspectives. The result was familiar: employees switching between tools, searching for context, duplicating information, or asking colleagues for updates that already existed somewhere else.
Traditional CRM integrations can help solve part of this problem. But synchronizing records is not necessarily the same as connecting workflows. Consider a sales-to-delivery handoff. A deal is marked Won in the CRM. The delivery team begins work in Jira. Over time, the project encounters delays, scope changes, or new customer requirements. If the CRM and delivery environment are disconnected, the sales or account management team may not have immediate visibility into those developments. The CRM can show that the deal was successful, while the operational reality tells a more complicated story.
This is why I believe the industry should think beyond the traditional sales-centric definition of CRM. Customer relationships don't end when a deal closes. They continue through onboarding, delivery, support, renewals, expansion, and product feedback. A modern CRM should help organizations maintain that context throughout the customer lifecycle.
How Mria CRM Addresses These Challenges
As the co-founder of Mria Labs, I see many of these industry trends reflected in the conversations we have with customers and in the decisions we make about our product.
When we started building Mria CRM for Jira, our goal wasn't to create another standalone CRM competing on the number of features. We wanted to address a problem we had seen repeatedly: companies managing customer relationships in one system while their support, delivery, and product teams work in another. Our approach is built around several of the challenges highlighted in recent CRM research.
Integration without unnecessary complexity
Mria CRM is built natively on Atlassian Forge and operates within the Atlassian ecosystem. Customer records, sales opportunities, and activities can be connected directly with Jira projects, issues, Jira Service Management requests, and Confluence spaces. Instead of relying entirely on external synchronization, teams can work with customer context where much of their operational work already happens.
For organizations already using Jira, this can provide a more connected experience across sales and operational teams.
Security and data control
Mria CRM is a Runs on Atlassian solution. Under this program, eligible application data storage and processing remain within Atlassian's infrastructure, subject to the program's requirements and scope. For customers evaluating data governance and third-party dependencies, this is an important architectural consideration. It doesn't eliminate every security risk, but it offers a different approach from traditional standalone CRM architectures that require customer information to be maintained in a separate application environment.
AI with real business context: Rovo and MCP support
AI is already part of how we're building Mria CRM. Our Mria CRM Rovo Assistant enables teams to interact with CRM information using natural language, retrieve customer context, prepare meeting notes, and manage follow-up activities directly within the Atlassian ecosystem.
We've also introduced MCP (Model Context Protocol) support, extending how AI agents can interact with Mria CRM capabilities. By connecting CRM data with the broader Atlassian ecosystem, we can help AI assistants work with a more complete picture of customer relationships. And while we're excited about what AI can do, we believe permissions and human oversight are essential. AI should make work easier without taking control away from the people responsible for important business decisions.
For us, AI in CRM is about helping teams turn customer context into meaningful actions.
Customer visibility beyond the sales pipeline
A customer relationship doesn't end when a deal is marked Won. Delivery progress, support requests, product feedback, and ongoing account activities all contribute to the bigger picture. Mria CRM connects sales information with these workflows, helping teams understand not only what was promised to a customer, but also what's happening afterward. This is particularly relevant for B2B companies where sales, delivery, and support teams collaborate closely throughout the customer lifecycle.
A different perspective on CRM costs
Because Mria CRM is designed for organizations already using Atlassian, we encourage customers to evaluate the complete workflow rather than comparing CRM subscription prices in isolation.
The relevant question is whether bringing customer management closer to existing tools can reduce integration overhead, administration, and context switching. The answer will depend on each company's setup and requirements. We've explored this topic in more detail in our comparison of Mria CRM vs. Standalone CRMs for Jira.
Of course, an Atlassian-native CRM isn't the right choice for every business. Organizations with independent sales operations or deeply established standalone CRM ecosystems may have different priorities. But for companies where sales, support, delivery, and product teams already collaborate in Jira, we believe there's a strong case for managing customer relationships closer to where the actual work happens.
And that's the direction we're continuing to build toward at Mria Labs: making CRM less of a separate destination and more of a connected part of everyday business operations.
7 Key Questions to Ask When Choosing CRM Software in 2026
Based on the latest research and my experience building business software, I would encourage companies to evaluate CRM solutions using seven key questions.
1. Reliability: Can we depend on this system?
CRM is business-critical software. Reliability, availability, and consistent performance should come before impressive feature lists.
2. Integration: How well does it work with our existing tools?
Look beyond the number of integrations advertised. Evaluate whether they support the actual workflows your teams need.
3. Security: Where does our customer data live?
Understand the architecture, permissions, data processing, and dependencies associated with the CRM and its connected applications.
4. Usability: Will employees actually use it?
A powerful CRM that requires excessive manual updates or constant context switching can become an additional administrative burden.
5. AI: Does it solve real business problems?
Evaluate what AI can actually accomplish, which information it accesses, and how users remain in control of important actions.
6. Total cost: What will the complete solution cost?
Include implementation, administration, integrations, training, and maintenance — not just subscription fees.
7. Flexibility: Can the CRM evolve with our business?
Consider how easily the solution can adapt to changing workflows, organizational structures, and customer requirements.
The Future of CRM Software
Looking at the latest research and the direction of the market, I see three developments worth watching.
More specialized CRM solutions
Large platforms will continue to play an important role, particularly for organizations with complex enterprise requirements. But I expect specialized CRM products to remain relevant by focusing on particular industries, ecosystems, and business processes. Rather than competing on the number of features, these solutions can compete on how effectively they address specific customer needs.
AI becoming part of everyday workflows
AI assistants and agents will continue to evolve. Metrigy's recent analysis also highlights a possible shift toward headless CRM – a model where AI applications and other interfaces interact with CRM data without requiring users to work directly inside the traditional CRM interface.
This is an interesting direction. If employees can access and act on relevant customer information through the tools they already use, the CRM interface itself may become less central to everyday work. For CRM vendors, that creates new opportunities — but also new requirements around APIs, permissions, and data accessibility.
Greater focus on connected business operations
I also expect companies to pay more attention to how CRM fits into their overall technology architecture. Instead of evaluating each application independently, organizations may increasingly consider whether new software helps simplify their environment or adds another disconnected system. This doesn't mean standalone CRM platforms will disappear. It means the value of CRM will increasingly depend on how effectively it supports the broader business.
Final thoughts: The future of CRM is about more than managing relationships
The CRM market is not standing still. It's a mature, multibillion-dollar industry facing changing buyer expectations, new AI capabilities, growing security concerns, and competition from specialized vendors.
As someone building a CRM product, I find this an exciting moment – I believe there's still a lot of room to improve how customer information supports real work.
At Mria Labs, we're approaching this challenge from within the Atlassian ecosystem, connecting CRM capabilities with the tools teams already use to deliver projects, support customers, and build products. We're also making that customer context accessible to AI-powered workflows. It's one approach among many, but one that reflects how we believe customer relationship management can evolve.
I don't think the next generation of CRM will necessarily be defined by who has the most features. It may be defined by who makes customer relationships easier to manage across the entire business. And that's a much more interesting challenge to solve.
About the author
Anna Odrynska is the Co-founder of Mria Labs Inc., the company behind Mria CRM for Jira — an Atlassian-native CRM designed to connect customer relationships with sales, support, delivery, and product workflows.
With years of experience building B2B SaaS products and business software integrations, Anna focuses on how connected systems, automation, and AI can help organizations work more effectively.
Sources & References
The following industry reports and research publications were used in preparing this article.
- Metrigy (October 2026). CRM Quarterly Market Share & Forecast Report: 2Q26.
https://www.metrigy.com/product/crm-quarterly-market-share-forecast-report-2q26/ - Metrigy (2026). Core Enterprise CX and Workplace Collaboration Markets See Near-Term Growth.
https://www.metrigy.com/core-enterprise-cx-and-wc-markets-see-near-term-growth/ - Gartner (May 2026). Market Share: Customer Experience and Relationship Management, Worldwide, 2025.
https://www.gartner.com/en/documents/7840981 - G2 (2026). 2026 Buyer Behavior Report.
https://sell.g2.com/2026-buyer-behavior-report - Google Threat Intelligence Group (August 2025). Widespread Data Theft Targets Salesforce Instances via Salesloft Drift.
https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/threat-intelligence/data-theft-salesforce-instances-via-salesloft-drift/ - Metrigy (April 2026). Customer Relationship Management Market Up 3.0% Year Over Year in 2025.
https://www.metrigy.com/press-release-customer-relationship-management-market-up-3-0-year-over-year-in-2025/ - Atlassian. Runs on Atlassian — Cloud App Security and Data Protection.
https://www.atlassian.com/platform/forge/runs-on-atlassian - Mria CRM. Mria CRM vs. Standalone CRMs for Jira.
https://mriacrm.com/mria-crm-vs-standalone-crms-for-jira/
