Octopus CRM Review: An Honest Look From a Competitor

We make Banyan, which competes with Octopus CRM. Read everything below with that in mind, and read their own material and someone else’s review too.

We’re writing this for the same reason we wrote our Dripify review: most “competitor reviews” in this industry are sales pages wearing a costume, and a genuinely fair one is more useful, including to us. If Octopus CRM is the better fit for you, we’d rather you found out now than after a month of frustration. For one specific buyer, it genuinely might be. We’ll say which.

What Octopus CRM is

A LinkedIn automation Chrome extension with a personal “CRM” page attached. Its homepage claims 50,000+ users in one place and 40,000+ in another. From their own site, it will:

• Send automated, personalised connection requests
• Bulk-message hundreds of your 1st-degree connections, existing connections only, it doesn’t message people you aren’t connected to
• Auto-visit hundreds of profiles
• Auto-endorse up to 7 skills per contact
• Build campaigns and funnels from those actions
• Push data to Zapier and HubSpot, the only integrations advertised, and no public API is mentioned anywhere on the site

What it doesn’t do is worth listing too: no email channel, no team management, and no AI anywhere on the advertised feature list. Personalisation means template variables in invites and messages. That’s what most personalisation is under the hood, ours included, but if you’re expecting drafting help, there isn’t any.

The price, plainly

Price is most of the pitch, so let’s put it first.

Annual billing is framed as a 35% discount, and every plan carries a 7-day free trial with no card required. At $6.99 a month, roughly ₹670 at current rates, Starter is about as cheap as LinkedIn automation gets, and even Unlimited at $24.99 a month annually, roughly ₹2,397, undercuts most of the category.

Two catches. The cheap tiers are thin: third-party breakdowns report that Starter is essentially auto-invites plus the CRM page, with bulk messaging, visits and endorsements arriving at Pro, campaigns and export at Advanced, and integrations, activity control and Sales Navigator compatibility held back for Unlimited. “Very limited functionality even in the paid plan” is a recurring review complaint, which matches that gating. And there’s no self-serve team tier at all: agencies managing 20+ accounts are pointed at sales for unpublished special pricing.

What they do genuinely well

Price. Covered above. If your entire requirement is basic LinkedIn actions at the lowest possible cost, Octopus CRM is one of the cheapest ways to get them, and reviewers repeatedly say exactly that.

Simplicity. The most common praise in reviews is ease of use: a simple interface, no training needed, prospecting within minutes. For a first-time user that’s worth something real.

It does what it says. Users report their networks growing steadily within months of switching it on. The core actions, invite, message, visit, endorse, evidently work.

The ratings are decent. 4.6/5 on Capterra across 274 reviews with 93% positive sentiment, and a reported 4.3/5 on G2 across 117 reviews. For a tool this cheap, those are solid numbers.

The extension question

This is the most important section, so we’ll be direct.

Octopus CRM is a Chrome extension, and their own blog says so plainly: it is not cloud-based, and automation stops the moment you close your browser. That single fact carries two costs.

The first is operational. Campaigns run only while your browser is open on LinkedIn. Close the laptop and outreach stops. Cloud tools, ours and others, don’t have this constraint.

The second is risk. Extensions inject code into LinkedIn’s pages and drive actions inside your own logged-in session, and that architecture is the category most associated with account restrictions. We’ve laid out the full argument in Is LinkedIn automation safe?, and it applies here without modification. Octopus does ship an “activity control” feature that monitors usage and throttles you against LinkedIn’s limits, which is a genuinely sensible safeguard. But throttling is not invisibility, and it doesn’t change what the architecture is.

What we can’t let pass is the marketing on top of it. Their homepage claims that, due to built-in safety measures, your outreach “cannot cause any risk to your LinkedIn account”. That is an absolute claim, and it is not one a Chrome extension can support. No architecture eliminates risk, cloud included, ours included. A vendor that tells you the risk is zero is telling you something about their marketing, not about your account.

Worth noting for contrast: Waalaxy, a rival that ran as an extension for years, retired its extension entirely in July 2026 and moved to the cloud, we cover why in our Waalaxy review. Octopus has stayed an extension.

The “CRM” in Octopus CRM

The name oversells it. The CRM is a personal page inside the extension where you store leads, run actions, build campaigns and view stats. It is genuinely useful for a solo user, and it is not a multi-user sales CRM. There’s no team management layer, and each LinkedIn account needs its own subscription and its own extension setup. Two seats means two installs, managed separately.

Where we think we fit better

Stated as opinion, because it is.

Architecture. Banyan runs in the cloud, in isolated workspaces on country-matched residential IPs, nothing installed in your browser and nothing injected into LinkedIn’s pages. Campaigns run whether your laptop is open or not. That’s the trade Octopus can’t offer, and it’s a real part of what our pricing buys. Octopus wins on price by a distance, we’d rather say that plainly.

Limits treated as the point, not the obstacle. The limits we recommend start conservative, new accounts get warm-up ramps, and stale invitations get withdrawn automatically. We think that’s the right posture for the thing being risked, your LinkedIn account, and it’s the opposite posture to marketing a cap bypass.

India. INR pricing without a forex markup on your card, GST invoices, support in your timezone. Octopus prices in dollars.

We don’t have a dedicated Octopus comparison page yet; our comparison index has the tools we’ve done side-by-side so far, written by us, so apply the same scepticism you’re applying to this page.

Who should pick Octopus CRM

• A solo operator on the smallest possible budget who wants basic invite-visit-endorse automation, accepts the extension trade-off with open eyes, and will keep the volumes low.
• Someone whose entire motion is messaging existing connections. Bulk messaging your 1st-degree network is a core feature and one of the least risky things a tool like this does.
• Someone who wants to try automation for a week before spending real money. The 7-day trial needs no card, though reviewers do call it short.

Who should look elsewhere

• Anyone who weighs account safety heavily. The extension architecture is the highest-risk category, and the zero-risk marketing on top of it is a reason for more caution, not less.
• Teams and agencies. No team management, one extension setup per account, and no published agency pricing. The product is built for one person with one account.
• Anyone who wants email in the sequence, or AI drafting. Neither exists here. A multichannel tool like Dripify fits better, we compared it honestly in our Dripify review.
• Anyone nervous about billing hygiene. The loudest complaint themes in reviews are unresponsive support and billing disputes, unauthorised-charge complaints and refund requests rejected after long non-use. We can’t verify individual cases, but the pattern recurs across review platforms.

What to check before buying, any tool, including ours

The same four questions we ask of every tool in this category. Ask them of Octopus CRM, of us, and of anyone else.

1. Where does the automation run? Extension, cloud, or your own machine. Octopus’s answer is an extension in your browser, the highest-risk category, and it only runs while the browser is open. Ours is cloud. Know which trade you’re making before you pay.

2. What are the daily limits, and can you lower them? Octopus ships activity control, but third-party tier breakdowns place it in the Unlimited plan, so check what protection the cheaper tiers actually give you during the trial. Whatever tool you pick, confirm you can go lower than the defaults. A tool optimising for your first-week impression is not optimising for your account’s survival.

3. What happens to your data if you leave? Export is reported to arrive at the Advanced tier. Test it during the 7-day trial, not after, and given the billing complaints in reviews, test cancellation too: know exactly what you clicked and keep the confirmation.

4. Does the pricing page match the checkout? Know which billing toggle you’re reading: the headline low figures are annual rates, monthly billing costs more. And if you’re paying from India, it’s a dollar price on your card. Get to the final number before you commit.

The short version

Octopus CRM is one of the cheapest LinkedIn automation tools you can buy, genuinely easy to use, and honest software attached to a piece of marketing we think is dishonest: it is a Chrome extension, the architecture most associated with account restrictions, sold under a claim of zero risk. For a careful solo user on a tight budget who understands that trade, it can be rational. For anyone else, the money saved is small against what a restricted account costs.

If you’re an Indian team who wants LinkedIn done carefully in the cloud, in rupees, with support in your hours, try us. If you’re not, take their 7-day trial, it costs nothing, and use the four questions above on whoever you choose.