Pipedrive CRM Review

Pipeline CRM improves its small business-focused solution with advanced capabilities, chatbot creation for websites, and efficient reporting. But as we’ve seen with previous iterations, ease of use remains one of Pipedrive CRM’s best features.

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Pipedrive is a deal-driven customer relationship management CRM solution that also works as an account-management tool with the ability to assist with marketing and the entire sales process. Pipedrive’s proactive nature automatically tracks and organizes calls and emails and synchronizes schedules across devices. One capability that might be especially attractive to most small to midsized businesses (SMBs) is Pipedrive’s ability to visualize the sales process from start to finish. This can improve both efficiency and cut through a lot of second-guessing within teams, which is often the main reason CRM implementations fail.

Pipedrive is a sales-focused CRM that will be an attractive option for its ease of use and various tools and integrations. The 1,000 names on an email limit and lack of more robust marketing automation features slot it behind some competitors. There are other tools out there that offer similar feature sets at an even lower price than Pipedrive CRM, which starts at $12.50 per user per month. That’s what keeps it behind our current Editors’ Choice winners Zoho CRM and Salesforce Sales Cloud Lightning Professional. Still, this is a nice-looking tool, which we found easy to set up and use. So, if it has the features your organization needs, then Pipedrive is a fine choice. It has also expanded its offerings to accommodate large companies.

Pipedrive’s straightforward user interface (UI) is simple to pick up quickly, which is worth a lot compared to the time and expense some tools require for training and onboarding. Smaller SMBs and entrepreneurs charged with CRM tasks will welcome its ease of use. Still, while the visual appeal of the UI is top-notch, our third Editors’ Choice winner, Apptivo CRM, boasts the same functionality for even less money. All that means, however, is that you should investigate each package carefully to determine which best meets your needs.

Pipedrive CRM Pricing

When it comes to pricing, Pipedrive CRM keeps it simple with three tiers. The Essential tier (which we reviewed) costs $12.50 per user per month billed annually (or $15 month-to-month). It includes smart email, 2 gigabytes (GB) of storage per user, full sales management for unlimited users, native integrations and application programming interface (API) access, and support via chat, email, and phone. As far as an entry-level plan goes, Pipedrive CRM Silver gives you a lot.

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The Advanced tier ($24.90 per user per month, or $29 month-to-month) adds two-way full email sync and boosts storage to 5GB per user. Then, the Enterprise tier ($49.90 per user per month, or $59 month-to-month) gives enterprises 100GB of storage per user and dedicated hosting. With each level, Pipedrive gives businesses the first two months free if you pay annually as opposed to month-to-month. Finally, the company recently released an Enterprise tier that’ll run you $99 per user per month (with a minimum of 10 seats) but includes high-end features like a dedicated account manager, full phone support, and more.

When it comes to price comparison, however, Apptivo costs $10 per user per month and offers much more in terms of project management. Insightly CRM’s Basic plan is the same price when billed annually, but can handle more aspects of your business.

You can start your 14-day free trial from the Pipedrive homepage, and you won’t be asked for any billing information until it ends or if your decide to try out the new LeadBooster chatbot building functionality. After that, Pipedrive CRM will keep your data for two months; if you don’t subscribe within that timeframe, your data will be erased.

The Simplified User Interface

Just like its pricing, Pipedrive’s UI is straightforward. The design is simple and the minimalist layout is refreshing. Compared to Bitrix24 CRM and Insightly CRM and their never-ending customization options, Pipedrive CRM feels startlingly clean even as it feels less dynamic and responsive.

As its name suggests, Pipedrive CRM’s primary function is to provide a visual pipeline for deals. When you first log in, Pipedrive CRM starts you off with a standard sales pipeline. Many businesses will be able to immediately start entering their ideas and current deals here, but if you need to change the pipeline or create a brand-new one, you can easily do so in Settings. Your pipeline can be heavily customized to make your life simpler. Making the right tweaks in your settings will let you move deals along the pipeline with no more than a click and drag.

Pipedrive offers several features to help companies organize their contacts, teams, and correspondence. For example, Contact Timelines help sales reps see who they should contact next and when to conduct follow-ups. A Smart Contact Data feature pulls public information about your contacts so you can get a full picture of prospects, leads, and current customers. The software can also identify and merge duplicate contacts, so you don’t have more than one sales rep working a lead.

The software offers advanced user permissions to restrict what users can view and modify. Admins can also divide their sales department into teams, track their successes and failures, and create custom team goals.

When you get your settings just right, creating a deal in Pipedrive CRM is as simple as clicking the Add Deal button at the top of the Deals page. Then you indicate who the contact for the deal is (or create a new one), the organization, and the current pipeline stage and expected close date. Once you’ve entered all the details, your new deal shows up in the pipeline alongside your other ones. As far as pipeline-specific CRM platforms go, Pipedrive CRM isn’t as customizable as PipelineDeals, but it’s equally easy to use.

One of Pipedrive CRM’s most helpful features is the icon that appears next to each deal in your pipeline. At a glance, you can tell if you have any activities scheduled that are associated with this deal, if you are behind schedule, or if you still need to follow up. An Activity Scheduler feature conveniently adds existing appointments to your calendar to avoid double bookings.

The Mail tab also helps you keep track of critical emails if you’re using email forwarding. Pipedrive CRM has full email and calendar sync with Google, Microsoft Office, and iCloud, so there’s no need to toggle back and forth between it and your inbox. All emails related to a specific deal or contact are viewable within Pipedrive contact entries. Thus you can send email from Pipedrive CRM that will also appear in your email tool. Conversely, anything you send from Gmail or Outlook will be automatically logged in Pipedrive CRM, attached to the contact or deal of your choice.

You can connect emails with their associated deals as well, and quickly discern their monetary value, Pipedrive CRM stage, and next scheduled activity. From here you can add a new activity, or click the activities tab to view them, filter them by type, and quickly see which are overdue and which are upcoming. Pipedrive CRM utilizes easy-to-understand symbols and colors to help users grasp the information on screen.

Pipedrive offers a library of email templates and a tool with which users can build their own. Email signatures can include images, links, rich text, and other design elements. The templates can also automatically populate fields with customer data, and Gold and Platinum users can send emails to up to 100 users at a time.

The software also has filters to create and export fully customizable lists with a redesigned bulk editing feature to change multiple fields at once (there’s also a pen icon next to every cell in the list to edit individual fields). Plus you’ll find bulk export options such as Export to MailChimp in the top right corner of the dashboard. Additional new filters include public filters that you can share with colleagues and private ones to configure your dashboard view. Filter views can be changed by clicking Edit Filter and choosing Private or Shared under the Visibility setting.

The Statistics tab offers a link to the live dashboard. Here, you can see the value of all your new deals, which employee has the most, a summary of activities, and won and lost deals. You can filter this data by pipeline, project, and timeframe. Pipedrive CRM’s customization ability has also improved recently with the addition of custom columns per filter. Users can now define a different set of columns for each deal filter with the added option in the Edit Filter window.

A Customizeable Lead Generation Chatbot

New to Pipedrive is Leadbooster, a lead generation tool with a customizable chatbot that companies can add to their websites. You can set up preprogrammed questions to capture new leads, which Leadbooster then adds to your pipeline.

The software also includes workflow automation to standardize and automate repetitive tasks and save time, as well as alert employees if they’ve missed a step in the process.

Pipedrive CRM lets you quickly move contacts from one step in the pipeline to another by dragging and dropping. As a result, lead management is simple. Once you’ve interacted with a lead, you can drag it to the Contact Made column (or to a custom column). You can also change its status from the deal page for that person by using a visual timeline at the top of the page.

Although Pipedrive CRM doesn’t offer the sophisticated data collection features that Insightly does, it provides pipeline and contact information collection with Web Forms (found under the Settings menu). You can place these forms on your website or in a newsletter. You can add any of the custom text or single- and multiple-option fields that you’ve already created in Pipedrive to the form.

If you want to separate your lead management from, say, your post-sales support, you can create another pipeline using a simple form-based UI. You can then hand off a deal to the other pipeline by dropping it into a box labeled Other Pipeline at the bottom of the screen. This is also where you can move the deal to Won or Lost areas.

What Pipedrive CRM does not do is separate leads from contacts. When you begin a new deal, the person associated with that deal becomes a contact. This setup is okay for smaller companies that consider every new lead to be immediately qualified as a possible customer (and if you really want to set leads apart from contacts, you can add a field called Leads to the contact form). However, small companies that prefer to deal with their leads separately may be better off with something more focused, such as Less Annoying CRM.

Reporting and Third-Party Integration

Pipedrive CRM integrates with many big-name productivity tools, such as Google G Suite, Google Maps, MailChimp, and Zapier to name a few. It also works with Xero to generate and track invoices and enrich financial reporting. Pipedrive gives you a forwarding address so you can store your relevant emails and share them with the team.

To cover all aspects of your business, you will probably need to make use of a few of these integrations. For the price per user, I would have liked to have seen more native functionality, as you get with Apptivo CRM. And, of course, nothing beats the sheer size of the Salesforce marketplace. Zendesk Sell, previously known as Base CRM, is a comparable CRM solution, also has its own marketplace of integrations by way of its adoption into the Zendesk ecosystem.

You can access your deals on the go with Pipedrive CRM’s apps for Android and iPhone. Like the web version, the mobile apps are simple and easy to navigate. And on Android, the software integrates with Google Assistant for voice commands.

On both mobile platforms, you can quickly see your deals, activities, and contacts, or use the search function to dig out essential data. Pipedrive CRM also has several features that improve mobile app productivity. These include call tracking capabilities to log calls, take notes, link both to deals, and schedule follow-up activities. The apps also include activity push notifications and a new Day View that consolidates existing appointments in a mobile-optimized view for improved sales productivity.

In terms of reporting, the Live Dashboard offers you a look at the status of deals by Newness, Person, Activities, Wins, and Losses. Under the Statistics tab, you’ll find reports covering a specific user or the entire company. Like the rest of Pipedrive CRM’s interface, reports are visually appealing and easy to understand.

If you need to customize your dashboard, you may want to consider Zoho CRM instead. That said, Pipedrive CRM has substantially revamped its reporting capabilities over the years. It’s added several new views that incorporate Deals Won and Deals Lost charts, completed activity charts, and more in-depth pipeline conversion analysis. From the dashboard, you can see how many deals were started, won, and lost according to product, values, discounts, and the most active sales team members. There are also deal-centric views that show who started a deal, where it is in the pipeline, or the state of all deals that started within a specific date range.

If you need assistance getting Pipedrive CRM running smoothly, you have many support options. Aside from multiple in-depth demo videos, you can search the knowledge base, call toll-free in the U.S., U.K., or Canada, or check out the FAQs. Live chat and email support are available 24/7. You can also reach the company via social media; they’re responsive to tweets within 12 hours. All this support is impressive, but the software is so simple to follow that you may not need it. It’s hard to convey just how easy it is to get started with this package.

An Attractive and Straightforward CRM Solution

Pipedrive CRM is both reasonably priced and one of the most straightforward CRM services available. You’ll be able to get it up and running quickly, and the simple UI will let you spend less time working with the software and more time working on your next sale. Time and personnel strapped SMB’s will value how quick and easy it is to deploy Pipedrive CRM.

If you want a CRM tool to centralize all aspects of your business with deep database capabilities, then consider our Editors’ Choices Zoho CRM, Apptivo CRM, or Salesforce Sales Cloud Lightning Professional. If you’re looking for similar simplicity and ease of use, but craving a vast marketplace of integrations should check out Zendesk Sell. If you appreciate Pipedrive’s deliberate focus on the sales pipeline for teams actively managing sales, you might find it an excellent fit.

Apptivo CRM Review

A solid example of an all-round CRM solution that anticipates and meets the needs of SMBs. Powerful features, affordable pricing, and an intuitive interface make Apptivo CRM an outstanding Editors’ Choice pick.

The Bottom Line

Apptivo CRM is a CRM solution that ticks all the right boxes. Powerful features, affordable pricing, and an intuitive interface make Apptivo CRM an outstanding Editors’ Choice pick.

PCMag editors select and review products independently. If you buy through affiliate links, we may earn commissions, which help support our testing.

Apptivo which starts at $8 per user per month for the Premium edition (billed annually), is an affordable and customizable customer relationship management (CRM) platform. It is a great option for companies seeking a flexible solution with various strategic integrations and excellent mobile platform support. While not as recognizable as fellow Editors’ Choice winners Salesforce Sales Cloud Lightning Professional and Zoho CRM, it stands out as a robust platform and a good fit for small to midsize businesses (SMB) for its ease of use and reasonable price.

Apptivo Pricing

Apptivo CRM offers a free Starter plan and two paid plans, Premium and Ultimate. We tested the Premium plan ($10 per user per month, billed monthly, or $8 per user per month, billed annually), which gives you company branding, IMAP email, reports, message templates, 3 gigabytes (GB) of storage per user, license and insurance tracking, invoicing, third-party integrations, and much more.

Stepping up to Ultimate ($25 per user per month, billed monthly, or $20 per user per month, billed annually) adds more storage, more application programming interface (API) requests per day, 24-hour phone support, and access to select apps such as Properties, Sales Planning, and Territory Management. For higher-end needs, the company offers an Enterprise tier, which adds features like a dedicated instance and white labeling, though you’ll need to contact Apptivo for pricing.

To get started with Apptivo, you can sign up for the 30-day trial, explore the different tiers of service, or sign up for the free version of the software. On the Pricing page, you’ll find a comparison chart that shows the differences between the tiers and a link to Apptivo Enterprise. The latter is Apptivo’s way of helping larger companies get set up with the right functionality from the start; it has custom pricing with high-volume discounts available.

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Lead Management, Users, and Contacts

Signing into Apptivo reveals the agenda view with your weekly calendar and tasks, which are lined up in a navigation panel on the right. You can set it to list view, or view the day, week, or month. Likewise, you can customize your task view to see today’s tasks or overdue, upcoming, or completed tasks.

On the left side of the page are links to commonly used resources, including your calendar, tasks, call logs, work queue, follow-ups, emails, and notes. Along the top are drop-down menus that will take you to any apps you’ve added. When you first set up the software, Apptivo asks a few questions about the type of business you conduct. Your answers will generate a list of suggested apps that companies like yours find helpful in Apptivo.

Selecting among Apptivo’s 40-plus apps is a significant part of getting the software up and running, and luckily, you can customize them as you go. If you’re in retail sales, for example, you’ll want to add product management and supply chain tools to your suite, such as the orders, inventory management, and shipping apps. This level of customization is available in Zoho CRM, but Apptivo feels even friendlier in its approach.

Whatever you need to create, be it a project, deal, lead, or opportunity, you’ll find it under the Category link at the top of your page. For a project, click the Project Management drop-down menu, and then click Projects. You’ll land on your project’s newsfeed, where you can see all project activity from anyone on your team. Click the Create a Project button on the left, and you can choose whether to create a new project from scratch or modify an existing project. Optionally, you can add a https://jiji.ng/ budget so the software can generate an invoice or timesheet with the click of a button when it’s time to get paid.

Any tasks or scheduled activities that you attach to a project, lead, contact, or anything else within Apptivo will show up on your agenda. Any changes made or tasks needed will show up in your teammates’ newsfeeds, unless you choose differently in the settings. If you don’t like something in the software, you can change it.

Apptivo also has tools called triggers to build custom workflow automation rules for any given app. Rules can be based on specific events or by detecting events over time. The sales apps also include added tooling for managing multiple sales pipelines, and the ability to define built-in logic to control when deals can move to the next stage.

The platform also includes robust campaign management features. In addition to Apptivo’s ability to create email templates and send emails to your contacts, you get mass email marketing. Companies can develop targeted lists of CRM contacts for specific campaigns, for which they can create a custom email template using the platform’s visual designer.

This level of customization also extends to field options. A Reference Attribute field gives users the ability to form custom associations between data in different Apptivo apps, such as taking CRM data (like business addresses or payment terms) and displaying them in another app (such as an invoice). Another new field type is Custom Formulas, which can be used to calculate metrics such as a sales commission based on a specific deal amount. The final new option is Field Conditions, which allow administrators to create workflow rules inside a field layout—for example, constructing visibility rules that will hide or display fields and sections on a form based on a user’s input.

These customizations help Apptivo bridge the gap with Zoho CRM while putting it further ahead of out-of-the-box platforms like Pipedrive CRM and NetSuite OneWorld.

Power Tip: Custom Field Conditions

If you want your employees to love the software, you need to keep it simple. Make sure you leverage Apptivo’s powerful configuration tools to fine-tune every detail for your company. You don’t need to be a programmer to make complicated changes to the system; it just takes a little time and thought to reduce clutter, use correct terminology, enforce business rules, and facilitate actions for your team.

One key area to look at is in the Master Layout where you can select which fields are present in every Apptivo app and how they appear to your users. When determining what a contact profile looks like, take advantage of Field Conditions, which let you build a workflow that guides each user when they are updating details in the CRM.

Let’s say an employee is entering a new lead into the system. At this point, he or she only needs to input contact details. You can make the other fields conditionally visible, so they only display when needed. You might add a field for the type of service (Shipping, Consulting, Distribution) and then show the user the next set of required details when they select a type.

You can build your entire workflow using tools like this and let the software guide your users through each step of your business process.

Reporting and Third-Party Integrations

Apptivo’s list of compatible software is relatively short, but that’s because there is hardly anything that can’t be accomplished natively within Apptivo. Third-party options include Google G Suite, Office 365, Slack, QuickBooks, Xero, Paypal, RingCentral, and Dropbox. The RingCentral integration gives users the ability to automatically have calls logged into the CRM with corresponding contacts, or make an outbound call by clicking a contact’s phone number.

Apptivo offers so much functionality that you can conduct every aspect of your business within this app. However, if you use separate accounting or project management software, you’ll probably wish you could integrate these tools rather than move everything to Apptivo. For instance, you can’t import files from other accounting software, so you have to start from scratch if you choose to use Apptivo’s invoicing features. Third-party integrations are where Salesforce shines with its massive ecosystem.

There are versions of the Apptivo app for Android and iPhone. Like everything else about Apptivo, the mobile app can be customized to fit your company’s needs. Previously, Apptivo had separate apps for some functions such as invoicing or support, but as of 2020, all mobile functionality is in one app.

Chat support is incredibly responsive, and it’s a huge plus that it’s available 24 hours a day. A little button hovers at the bottom of every page offers you support via chat, so help is never far away. Phone support is also available 24 hours a day for the Ultimate plan, but the other packages have limited phone support hours. You can also contact the company by email or social media (the Twitter account is much more active than the Facebook page).

Apptivo also has granular security control for what actions different users can perform in each app within the CRM. Beyond controlling data, reports, and access to fields, Apptivo offers controls over searching capability and all individual actions inside the app. Administrators can restrict access to performing bulk operations, deleting records, emailing contacts, viewing notes, and importing or exporting contact data.

One-Stop Customizable CRM for SMBs

Apptivo’s wide range of functionality makes it a do-it-all CRM tool and companies that invest in it will get a solution that mirrors the functionality of higher-cost products like Salesforce, plus a ton of customization options. SMBs can tweak and tool Apptivo as their business grows.

It’s this flexibility that makes it a one-stop solution for just about any organization, regardless of size. All of this earns Apptivo our Editors’ Choice for CRM software, which it shares with Zoho CRM and Salesforce Sales Cloud Lightning Professional.

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