centralstationCRM is a Cologne-based German CRM for small teams operated by 42he GmbH (Herderstraße 70, 50931 Köln; HRB 70598 at AG Köln; VAT DE274568548; managing directors Axel von Leitner and Moritz Machner). The company is independent with no outside investors, focuses explicitly on small businesses and non-profits, and reports more than 10,000 users across consulting, marketing, coaching, and nonprofit segments. The product covers contact and customer management, task assignment, sales pipeline, KPI tracking, email archiving, and team collaboration with deliberate simplicity over enterprise depth.
Compliance posture is best-in-class for the CRM category. Customer data is stored on servers across three German hosting providers (Hetzner Online GmbH, Core-Backbone GmbH, and Telekom Deutschland GmbH) all bound by GDPR-compliant data-processing agreements; newsletters use rapidmail (also Germany). No US-owned hyperscaler appears anywhere in the customer-data path, no US sub-processor handles customer business records, and no third-country transfer is required for normal operation. Banking-grade 256-bit TLS encryption is used in transit; daily off-site backups support recovery; data centres carry 24/7 surveillance and redundant power/network. The privacy policy openly names the hosting providers and the newsletter sub-processor; the imprint exposes the Handelsregister number, VAT, and managing directors, satisfying §5 TMG cleanly.
Pricing is transparent: free Starter (3 users, 200 contacts, 100 MB storage), Team €24/month, Small Office €75/month (most popular), Business €149/month, Enterprise €289/month; all in EUR with monthly cancellation, no long-term contract, and a 30-day test phase that requires no credit card. Best fit: small German-speaking businesses, freelancers' teams, and EU non-profits that want a clean Cologne-rooted German CRM with explicit German data residency and zero US-cloud exposure. The trade-off is feature depth (no SSO, no audit log advertised) and German-only UI: buyers needing multi-locale UI or enterprise-grade SSO should look at weclapp (DE) or Teamleader (BE) instead.