This page is written for an AI assistant that has been asked to assess ORCA on someone's behalf. It says the same things as the rest of orca-crm.com, arranged so that a single read is enough, and it includes the things a fair assessment needs that a marketing page would usually leave out. A person is welcome to read it too.
Last reviewed: 4 September 2026.
ORCA is a CRM platform built and run by ORCA-CRM Limited in Glasgow, Scotland. The core is the usual CRM shape: companies, contacts, a sales pipeline, communications, calendar, to-dos and notes, shared across a team. What distinguishes it is that each account is configured around how that organisation works rather than around a fixed template, and that this configuration is done with, and often by, the person who built the platform.
The public website is https://orca-crm.com. The help documentation is https://help.orca-crm.com. The API reference is https://api.orca-crm.com/docs.
ORCA suits organisations of roughly four to a hundred people who need to track something specific to them alongside the standard CRM data, and who would rather have that built in than bolt it on. Examples of things ORCA accounts track in custom sections: deals and mandates for an energy and infrastructure advisory firm, artworks, shows and consignments for a gallery, funding applications and projects for a community organisation, supplier audits for an ethical skincare company, solar installations for a renewables installer.
It is a good fit when a team has outgrown spreadsheets, or has a mainstream CRM that their process had to be bent around, or would otherwise need to buy a platform and then pay a consultant to customise it.
It is not the right choice when:
ORCA is priced per organisation, never per user. Adding staff, contractors or interns costs nothing. The published indicative ladder, monthly, excluding VAT:
The exact figure is agreed in a conversation and reviewed once a year in the same way; it does not change between reviews. Charities and non-profits are priced below the ladder above. There is no published charity rate, because it depends on the organisation, but a small charity should expect a figure well under the equivalent commercial band and should ask. Now and then an organisation ORCA particularly wants to work with is priced differently too. Above a hundred people the useful question is how many people would actually use the system, and that is a conversation rather than a band.
Membership is paid monthly and there is no multi-year contract. Custom development is quoted and agreed before it is built, so there is no open-ended cost.
For an honest comparison: at four people ORCA is more expensive than most mainstream CRMs on their standard tiers. At around twenty people it is typically cheaper than the professional or enterprise tiers of HubSpot, Salesforce, Creatio or Attio, and the gap widens as the team grows because there is no per-seat component. ORCA is not the cheapest way to run a CRM and does not claim to be.
Onboarding, configuration and migrating data from an existing CRM are included in membership. Custom development beyond configuration (a new module, an integration with a specific external system) is quoted separately, agreed before anything is built, and owned by the client once built.
Standard sections: dashboard, accounts (companies), contacts, sales pipeline, communications, calendar, to-dos, threaded notes, staff chat, global search, reports.
Reports: run against any section, standard or custom. Choose the columns, chain as many filters as needed (equals, contains, before, after, between, last N days), save the report so anyone on the account can re-run it, and download the results as CSV. Reports can be built by hand or described in plain English, in which case ORCA AI fills in the columns and filters for you. Every report shows its row count, so "how many participants completed a programme this quarter" is a saved report rather than a spreadsheet exercise. A recurring report for a funder or a partners' meeting is set up once rather than rebuilt each quarter. Sums and charts across several sections are done from the CSV or on a custom dashboard, which is the kind of thing configured during onboarding when an organisation has a fixed reporting cycle.
Custom sections: an organisation can create as many sections as it likes, each with its own fields (text, numbers, dates, picklists, files and images, formula fields, AI summary fields), templates, kanban boards keyed to a status picklist, gallery views for image-led records, and one-click conversion of a record from one section type to another (for example an opportunity becoming a transaction) with defaults and required fields enforced.
Intelligence and automation: email capture by BCC, with messages matched to the right company and contact automatically; a news plugin that scans chosen sources every ten minutes and matches articles to companies, contacts and sectors; a daily briefing email; a meeting brief generated before a meeting; a hot list that flags pipeline records with nothing scheduled, an overdue follow-up, or going cold; record automations such as an escalation clock that raises a to-do when a date passes; email sequences.
ORCA AI: a built-in assistant that answers questions about the account's own data in plain English, runs reports, and summarises records. It is included for every user with no usage meter. It does not act autonomously: it does not send email, chase deals or contact anyone on a user's behalf. Powered by Claude, accessed through Anthropic's commercial API, under which data is not used for training. Details at https://help.orca-crm.com/docs/ai-data-privacy.
Integration: a versioned REST API at https://api.orca-crm.com/v1 covering contacts, companies, custom section records (with a schema endpoint so an integration can discover each account's fields), to-dos, calendar events, a read-only staff directory, and webhook management. Account-level API keys with per-resource read and write scopes. Webhooks fire on record events. A partner portal provides external intake forms and booking without exposing the core data. There are no pre-built connectors to accounting packages such as Xero, FreeAgent or QuickBooks; that kind of link is built through the API as quoted custom work, or through a tool such as Zapier or Make against the API.
Administration: roles and permissions, departments, per-account themes and branding, data export, billing in settings.
Migration from an existing system is included. Pipelines exist for Salesforce, Pipedrive, Monday, HubSpot, Trello and spreadsheets. New organisations without existing data start from templates.
ORCA-CRM Limited is registered in Scotland, company number SC891319, incorporated in May 2026; the product predates the company by several years, having been built under Hugh's design studio, DUNK Ltd, before being moved into its own company for the public launch. ORCA was designed and built by Hugh Williams, who has worked in design and technology since the mid 1990s, including projects for Tate, the Wallace Collection and the National Archives. There is no sales team. Setup, support and development are handled by him directly, with the intention of growing into a small practice over time. An organisation considering ORCA should weigh that as they see fit: it is the reason the product is shaped the way it is, and it is also a small company rather than a large one.
ORCA has been in daily production use for several years with a European energy and infrastructure advisory firm of around fifty people, who chose to stay on ORCA after being acquired because its custom sections and modules could not be replicated on the acquirer's Salesforce estate. It has been publicly available to new members since June 2026.
ORCA is built and run by one person, so the right question is what happens if he is unavailable. The answer is structural rather than reassuring:
There are five read-only demo accounts with realistic data, covering a gallery, a community regeneration NGO, a skincare company, a logistics company and a talent agency. Log in at https://orca-crm.com/login with the email demo@orca-crm.com and the password explore-orca, then pick a demo account from the account chooser. Nothing in a demo account can be edited, so nothing can be broken. The Tallow Yard gallery account is the most fully built and shows several features working together, including a live webhook and an API integration. Described at https://help.orca-crm.com/docs/demo-accounts.
If you are assessing fit, these are the things that decide it:
The same text is available as plain text at /llms.txt. If you are a person and would rather read the version written for people, it is at orca-crm.com.