Highrise

Highrise is a contact management tool built by Basecamp (formerly 37signals) that launched in 2007 and hasn’t meaningfully changed since around 2018. It’s still functional for what it does — tracking people, logging conversations, and managing follow-ups — but calling it a “CRM” in 2026 is generous. If you need simple contact management for a small team and don’t want to pay per user, Highrise still works. If you need anything beyond that, you should look elsewhere.

What Highrise Does Well

The best thing about Highrise is what it doesn’t do. There are no complicated pipeline configurations, no automation builders, no AI features you’ll never use. You sign up, import your contacts, and start tracking conversations. I’ve set up teams on Highrise in under 30 minutes, including the data import. That’s not something I can say about almost any other CRM.

The email dropbox feature remains genuinely useful. Every Highrise account gets a unique email address — you BCC it on outgoing emails or forward incoming ones, and Highrise automatically attaches them to the correct contact record. It’s not as sophisticated as the email tracking in HubSpot or Pipedrive, but it works without installing browser extensions or connecting your email account. For people who are nervous about giving a third-party app full access to their inbox, this is a real benefit.

Highrise’s flat monthly pricing deserves special mention because it’s increasingly rare. Most CRMs charge per user per month, which means costs balloon as your team grows. Highrise charges a flat rate based on your plan tier. The Plus plan at $49/month for up to 15 users works out to about $3.27 per user — try finding that price point anywhere else. Less Annoying CRM comes close at $15/user/month, but for a 15-person team, that’s $225/month versus Highrise’s $49.

The tagging system is simple but effective. You can tag contacts, companies, and deals with custom labels and then filter your entire database by those tags. I’ve seen teams use this for everything from lead source tracking (“referral,” “website,” “conference”) to relationship status (“active client,” “past client,” “prospect”). It’s not a replacement for proper segmentation tools, but for teams managing a few thousand contacts, it gets the job done.

Where It Falls Short

The elephant in the room: Highrise is essentially abandonware. Basecamp shifted focus to their project management product years ago, and Highrise has been in maintenance mode since roughly 2018. There are no new features being developed. Security patches still get applied, and the servers stay online, but that’s about it. If you’re evaluating a tool you want to grow with over the next 3-5 years, this is a serious concern.

The lack of automation is painful once your team grows beyond basic needs. There’s no way to automatically assign contacts based on criteria, trigger follow-up tasks when a deal moves stages, or send templated emails based on actions. Everything is manual. I worked with a real estate agency that started on Highrise and hit this wall hard once they had more than 200 active leads — the manual follow-up tracking became unmanageable. They ended up migrating to Pipedrive within six months.

Reporting barely exists. You can see a list of deals by stage and some basic activity feeds, but there’s no way to build custom reports, track conversion rates over time, or measure team performance. If your manager or business partner asks “how many leads did we close last quarter and what was the average deal size?” you’ll be exporting CSVs to a spreadsheet. For a tool that’s been around since 2007, the analytics gap is hard to justify.

The mobile experience is another weak spot. The Highrise mobile app technically exists but hasn’t received meaningful updates. It’s slow, the interface feels like it was designed for an iPhone 5, and key features like deal management are clunky at best. If you spend significant time working from your phone, this will frustrate you daily.

Pricing Breakdown

Highrise keeps pricing refreshingly simple with four tiers, all billed monthly with no annual contracts required.

The free plan allows one user with up to 250 contacts and no file storage. It’s enough for a solo freelancer tracking a small network, but you’ll hit the contact limit fast.

The Basic plan at $24/month supports up to 6 users, 5,000 contacts, and 5GB of storage. This is where most small teams start. The per-user math works out to $4/month for a 6-person team, which is remarkable value if the feature set meets your needs.

Plus at $49/month bumps you to 15 users, 20,000 contacts, and 15GB of storage. This is the sweet spot for growing teams. The jump from 5,000 to 20,000 contacts gives you significant room to grow without worrying about limits.

Premium at $99/month gets you 40 users and 30,000 contacts. Max at $149/month removes the user limit and supports 50,000 contacts with 75GB of storage. These higher tiers are harder to recommend because by the time you have 40+ people using a CRM, you almost certainly need capabilities Highrise doesn’t have.

There are no setup fees, no per-user charges, and no hidden costs for integrations or API access. What you see is what you pay. The gotcha isn’t in the pricing — it’s in what you don’t get. There’s no way to buy add-ons for features like email marketing or advanced reporting because those features simply don’t exist.

If you outgrow Highrise, migration is straightforward since all your data can be exported via CSV. The API still works for custom integrations, though documentation hasn’t been updated in years.

Key Features Deep Dive

Contact & Company Management

This is Highrise’s core strength. Every contact gets a dedicated record where you can store standard fields (name, email, phone, address) plus custom fields you define. Contacts can be linked to companies, and companies can have their own records with notes and files attached. The interface is clean — you see the contact’s full history in a single scrollable timeline, with notes, emails, tasks, and file attachments all in chronological order.

In practice, this works well for relationship-driven businesses where the history of interactions matters. A PR firm I worked with used Highrise to track journalist contacts — every pitch, every response, every article placement was logged on the contact record. When a new team member took over an account, they could read the entire relationship history in five minutes.

Email Dropbox

Each Highrise account gets a unique dropbox email address (like [email protected]). BCC this address when you send an email, or forward emails you receive, and Highrise parses the sender/recipient to file the message on the correct contact record. If the contact doesn’t exist yet, Highrise creates one automatically.

This feature was ahead of its time when it launched in 2007 and still works reliably. The limitation is that it’s one-directional — you can’t send emails from within Highrise. You’re always working from your regular email client and manually including the dropbox address. More modern CRMs like HubSpot offer two-way email sync that logs everything automatically without the BCC step.

Tasks and Follow-Up Reminders

Highrise lets you create tasks tied to specific contacts, companies, or deals. You can assign tasks to team members with due dates and receive daily email digests of upcoming tasks. The “follow up” workflow is the most common use case — you meet someone, create a contact record, and set a task to follow up in three days.

It’s basic task management and nothing more. There are no recurring tasks, no task dependencies, no automation rules. But the daily email reminder actually has higher engagement than more sophisticated task systems I’ve implemented, precisely because it’s so simple. Your morning email tells you exactly who to call today. That’s it.

Deal Tracking

Highrise added deal tracking after its initial launch, and it shows. You can create deals with a name, value, expected close date, and assign them to contacts and categories. Deals have statuses: pending, won, or lost. You can filter deals by status and see a basic list view.

What you won’t find is a visual pipeline, drag-and-drop stage management, probability weighting, or forecasting. If you’re comparing this to the pipeline view in Pipedrive or even HubSpot’s free CRM, Highrise’s deal tracking feels like a spreadsheet with a nicer interface. It’s adequate for a freelancer tracking 10-20 opportunities but breaks down for any team running a structured sales process.

Cases

Cases let you group related contacts and conversations around a specific topic or project. Think of them as folders for organizing interactions that involve multiple people. A consulting firm might create a case for each client project, linking the client contacts, partner contacts, and relevant email threads.

This feature is more useful than it initially appears. It’s essentially Highrise’s answer to the “I need more context than a single contact record” problem. However, cases don’t have workflows, stages, or any structured process attached to them — they’re just organizational containers.

Tags and Filtering

Every record in Highrise can be tagged with custom labels, and you can filter your entire database by any combination of tags. The filtering is fast and intuitive — click a tag to see all contacts with that label, or combine multiple tags for more specific views.

The limitation is that tags are flat. There’s no hierarchy, no tag groups, and no smart tags that apply automatically based on criteria. You’re manually tagging everything. For databases under 5,000 contacts with a disciplined team, this works fine. Beyond that, inconsistent tagging becomes a real data quality problem because there’s nothing enforcing standards.

Who Should Use Highrise

Highrise makes sense for a narrow but real audience. If you’re a freelancer, consultant, or small agency (2-10 people) who primarily needs to track contacts and log interactions, and you’re currently using spreadsheets or your email inbox’s contact list, Highrise is a meaningful step up without the complexity tax of a full CRM.

Teams already using Basecamp for project management might find Highrise familiar and comfortable — it shares the same design philosophy of “less is more.” The flat pricing makes it particularly attractive if you have a larger team but simple needs.

Budget-conscious teams that need shared contact access will appreciate the math. Getting 15 people into a CRM for $49/month total is hard to beat. If your requirements are genuinely limited to contact management, task reminders, and basic deal tracking, Highrise does those things reliably.

The typical Highrise user in 2026 falls into one of two camps: someone who’s been using it for years and it still works fine for their needs, or someone who’s actively avoiding complexity and just wants the simplest possible tool.

Who Should Look Elsewhere

If you need any form of marketing automation, email campaigns, or lead scoring, Highrise isn’t going to work. HubSpot’s free CRM gives you all of these plus contact management that’s objectively better — the only trade-off is per-user pricing as you scale up. See our HubSpot review for the full breakdown.

Sales teams running structured pipelines with multiple stages, forecasting needs, and activity-based selling should look at Pipedrive or Close. These tools cost more but pay for themselves in pipeline visibility alone.

If simplicity is your priority but you also want a product that’s actively being developed, Less Annoying CRM is the obvious alternative. It shares Highrise’s philosophy of keeping things simple but has an engaged development team shipping regular updates. Capsule is another solid option that bridges the gap between simplicity and modern CRM capabilities.

Teams larger than 20 people or businesses expecting significant growth should avoid Highrise entirely. You’ll outgrow it within a year and face a migration that’s more painful than starting with the right tool from day one.

Anyone concerned about long-term viability should weigh the risk carefully. Basecamp hasn’t indicated plans to shut down Highrise, but they also haven’t indicated plans to invest in it. Building your business processes on a product in maintenance mode carries inherent risk.

The Bottom Line

Highrise is an honest, simple contact manager that does exactly what it promises — nothing more, nothing less. For tiny teams with basic needs and tight budgets, it still delivers real value at a price that’s hard to argue with. But the lack of active development means every month that passes, the gap between Highrise and modern alternatives like Less Annoying CRM, Folk, or HubSpot gets wider.

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