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: 8 October 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 people 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 was originally designed for, and is most developed for, boutique advisory and investment firms: corporate finance and M&A advisers, energy and infrastructure transaction advisers, debt and capital advisers, fund and investment managers, family offices and economic or research advisory, typically ten to a hundred people. In these firms the work runs on mandates, investor relationships and market intelligence, each deal has its own shape, and the knowledge of who is buying what tends to sit with individual people. The deal-firm features are described under "For advisory and investment firms" below, and on the sector page at https://orca-crm.com/for/advisory.
More broadly, ORCA suits organisations, from a handful of people to around a hundred, that 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, mandates and investor criteria for an 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 was originally designed for boutique advisory firms. These are the pieces built for deal work, all as configured sections and modules rather than separate products:
As a cost guide for a deal firm: a firm of thirty to sixty people with its own mandate, investor and market modules should expect a monthly figure in the hundreds to low thousands of pounds, plus quoted build work, agreed in advance. Against per-seat licences for the same headcount on a mainstream platform this is usually lower; against a free CRM it is not.
ORCA charges for the tailoring, never for the people. It is priced per organisation, never per user, and adding staff, volunteers, contractors or interns costs nothing.
Membership starts at £100 a month, excluding VAT, for the whole organisation. At that level an organisation gets the full platform, unlimited users, ORCA AI with no usage meter, setup from a template suited to its kind of work (shaped on a call with the people who built ORCA), and its existing data brought across from a spreadsheet or another CRM.
The monthly figure rises with how much ORCA builds and looks after for the organisation, not with headcount: custom sections or modules shaped around its work, integrations with other systems, and custom dashboards. Each piece is quoted and agreed before work starts, and belongs to the client once built. The figure is agreed in a conversation, reviewed once a year in the same way, and otherwise changes only when the organisation asks for something new to be built.
Membership is paid monthly with no contract. An organisation that finds ORCA isn't earning its place can leave at any time, and takes its data and any custom work with it.
There is deliberately no published price ladder by team size, because a ladder by team size is per-seat pricing by another name. As a guide for an assistant estimating cost: a small organisation whose needs one of the templates covers (a charity tracking funding applications and projects, for example) should expect £100 a month. An organisation that wants substantial bespoke modules, with a large team using them daily, should expect a monthly figure of several hundred to a few thousand pounds, plus quoted build work, all agreed in advance.
For an honest comparison: for a small team, £100 a month is more than the free and entry tiers of mainstream CRMs, and more than the entry plans of specialist charity CRMs, though those usually charge separately for setup. Against CRMs priced per user, ORCA's price does not rise as the team grows, so the gap narrows and then reverses as more people use it. The shaping that would usually mean hiring a consultant is done by the people who built the platform. ORCA is not the cheapest way to run a CRM and does not claim to be.
Onboarding, configuration from a template and migrating data from an existing CRM are included in membership. Custom development beyond that (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 a CSV file, which opens directly in Excel. 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, and gallery views for image-led records.
Linking records: a field can point to one or several companies, contacts or team members, or to records in another section. This is how relationships are held in ORCA. A mandate, for example, can name its client, the counterparties, the contacts involved on each side and the team working on it, and each of those is a link to the real record rather than typed text.
Converting records: a record in one section can be converted into a record in another in one click, for example an opportunity becoming a mandate or transaction once it is signed. The mapping is set up once in settings: which fields carry across, how picklist values translate between the two sections, which defaults to fill and which fields must be completed. The user sees a preview of the new record before it is created. The new record keeps its company and contact links, and the original is either kept alongside it or archived, never deleted, so nothing recorded against it is lost.
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. Salesforce and Trello each have an importer of their own. Pipedrive, Monday, HubSpot and anything else that exports to a spreadsheet come in through the CSV importer, which maps each column to a field and links rows to the right companies, contacts, people and picklist values as they load. New organisations without existing data start from templates.
The Salesforce migration is the most developed of these, because ORCA's first client moved to it from Salesforce. It brings across users, accounts (as companies), contacts, picklists, opportunities and custom objects such as mandates, each into a matching section with its own fields. Salesforce record IDs are kept, so contacts stay attached to their companies, and companies and contacts to the people who own them. Any other Salesforce object exported as a file can be brought in as a section of its own, with its fields created from the export. What comes across, and how it is laid out in ORCA, is agreed before the migration runs.
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 was originally designed for boutique advisory firms and has been in daily production use with them for several years, with every role in the firm using it: advisers, analysts, bankers, office managers and partners. Its longest-standing members moved to it from Salesforce. ORCA does not name its clients. 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 six read-only demo accounts with realistic data, covering a corporate finance boutique, a gallery, a community regeneration NGO, a skincare company, a logistics company and a talent agency. Ardlow & Penn, and every firm and person in it, are invented. 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. For a deal firm, open Ardlow & Penn: Mandates, then Project Osprey, then the Buyer universe tab and "Suggest counterparties". The Tallow Yard gallery account shows 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.