Pros & Cons
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- Guided setup process and high-quality tutorial videos
- Highly customizable workflows
- Straightforward automation builder
- Numerous integrations with third-party tools
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- Price increases quickly
- Base tier doesn’t support automations
- Unusual definition of leads might lead to some confusion
Pipedrive CRM Specs
| Automated Responses |
| Builds Forms to Collect Data |
| Creates Pipelines for Leads |
| Document Library |
| Email Routing |
| Multi-Currency Support |
| Pipeline Management |
| REST API |
Pipedrive helps you manage deals, <a href="https://ca.pcmag.com/email-marketing/318/the-best-email-marketing-software” rel=”nofollow noopener” target=”_blank”>email marketing, meetings, and other sales-related tasks in one place. It provides helpful onboarding resources and lets you easily customize its interface to suit your needs. Moreover, I like the effectiveness and simplicity of its automation and AI tools. Pipedrive can also integrate into your everyday business operations, thanks to its excellent range of third-party tools. However, the service’s leads system might be confusing if you’re migrating from another CRM, and the price jump from the somewhat limited base tier should give some budget-conscious businesses pause. Pipedrive is worth considering, but our Editors’ Choice winners remain Apptivo (for large companies that value flexibility), Bigin by Zoho CRM (for smaller teams that want to keep costs down), and Freshsales (for groups that prioritize ease of use).
Pricing: It Gets Expensive Quickly
A 14-day trial is available for all Pipedrive plans. The service’s base Lite plan ($14 per user per month, billed annually) includes a dashboard for managing calendar events, leads, and sales pipelines, as well as advanced activity-tracking tools. Each user can have 2,500 lead and deal records and 15 reports, and your company can create up to 30 custom fields. You also get access to Pipedrive’s full range of integrations. However, the Lite plan doesn’t include any automations or many email features.
The Growth tier ($39 per user per month, billed annually) expands the number of leads and deals to 5,000 per seat, increases the number of reports to 50 per seat, and lets you create up to 100 custom fields. You can create 50 simple automations and five sequences (repeatable workflows). This tier also includes more advanced reporting, inbox syncing, group emailing tools, email tracking, and scheduling capabilities for emails, meetings, and video calls. Some Growth users will also get a dedicated success manager, though Pipedrive isn’t clear about the exact eligibility rules.
With the Premium level ($59 per user per month, billed annually), you get AI summarization and creation tools, automatic assignment of leads and deals, and systems for organizing your salespeople into teams. The lead and deal limits increase to 15,000 per seat, and the report limit increases to 250 per seat. You can also increase your custom fields to 300, create 150 simple automations, and build 25 complex automation sequences.
Finally, the Ultimate plan ($79 per user per month, billed annually) unlocks email and phone data enrichment for improved personalization, enhanced security options, and extended phone support. The leads and deals limit increases to 20,000 per seat, with a full 500 reports per seat. Simple automations increase to 250, with the option to create 50 more advanced automation sequences.
Various add-ons are available, including Projects for full project and task management, and Smart Docs for sending digital contracts. These cost extra for lower-tier plans but are free at the Premium and Enterprise levels.
Pipedrive is on the pricey side. The starting tier costs about as much as competitors’, including Apptivo ($15 per user per month) and Zoho CRM ($14 per user per month, billed annually). However, the lack of automation features at this level significantly curtails its value. Most CRMs, including Apptivo and Zoho CRM, let you create some type of automated workflows with their starter plans. Pipedrive’s Growth tier is priced around the same as the top-end plans from Apptivo and Zoho CRM (both at $40 per user per month, billed annually), but it lacks key features like custom reports. Meanwhile, the Ultimate plan is more expensive than any other I’ve come across in testing, save for Insightly’s Enterprise plan ($99 per user per month, billed annually), though its features are in line with HubSpot CRM’s similarly priced Enterprise plan.
At the other end of the price spectrum, Bigin by Zoho (which has a viable free version) and Freshsales (which is especially intuitive) start at $7 and $9 per user per month, billed annually.
Setup: Fast and Flexible
Before you get started, Pipedrive asks you to verify your email with a code it sends. Then, you can move on to creating your account and entering information about your job title, industry, and number of employees. Pipedrive also asks about your primary goals, information it uses to guide the setup process.
My setup process began with pipeline customization, followed by the option to add contacts (individuals who’ve shared their contact information with) via a spreadsheet or by syncing contacts from Google or Outlook. When I imported a spreadsheet with sample contacts, Pipedrive automatically organized my information into fields it deemed appropriate and gave me the option to remap them. You can also create custom fields as necessary. To clarify, this process is for contacts; you import leads (sales opportunities) in a dedicated section. The final step in my guided setup process was to add activities such as meetings to the Pipedrive calendar. You can add activities manually or sync events from your Google or Outlook calendar.
From there, Pipedrive directed me to a handy checklist with more tasks, including mapping existing CRM systems to Pipedrive, connecting email addresses, and adding teammates. The latter step is simple. You can add up to 10 email addresses at once, then verify the permission sets you want to assign to them for various sections. However, only two default permission set options are available: Regular Access and Admin Access. Other CRMs, such as Freshsales, give you more flexibility here. You must subscribe to at least Pipedrive’s Premium level to add custom permission sets.
Once you get into Pipedrive’s main interface, you can import data from numerous CRMs, including Less Annoying CRM, Salesforce, and Zoho CRM, in a few clicks. If you want advanced help for building your contacts database, you can schedule an onboarding consultation with Pipedrive. I didn’t get a chance to try this, however, since the offer was buried at the bottom of one of the welcome emails I received, and I had already set up the basics before I noticed it.
Interface and Ease of Use: Accessible Enough for Beginners
Pipedrive’s user experience is pleasant, with clear buttons for key areas like leads and contacts in a left-hand menu. The purple color scheme is easy on the eyes, while color-coded labels for things like priority or lead status can help you quickly assess the health of your processes. Even first-time CRM users should find the interface quite welcoming.
Support: Phone Requests Require a Top Plan
I appreciate the vast library of help videos and on-demand webinars that Pipedrive provides. Previously, customer support was severely limited on most of these plans, but 24/7 live chat support is now available for everyone. However, you still need a Premium or Ultimate plan for phone support, so you might want to look elsewhere if that’s vital to your business. Apptivo does better here, offering 24/7 live chat and 24/5 phone support across all plans.
Contacts and Leads: Largely Effective, With a Unique Ability
Pipedrive doesn’t classify contacts and leads as two different groups of people. Instead, contacts are people who have shared their information, and leads are sales opportunities. You can connect individual contacts to multiple leads, allowing you to track the same person across multiple sales pipelines if you offer more than one product or service.
Contacts appear automatically in a table with the fields you selected during the setup process and any others in spreadsheets you import. You can customize the table via the button at the top-right corner. I appreciate the number of fields available, including various ones for recent communications and activities. Unfortunately, you can’t switch from this default view to a more approachable Kanban view. Many other CRMs, including Apptivo and Freshsales, have this option.
Contact profiles open on a new page rather than in an overlay. A left-hand sidebar displays identifying information, such as the contact’s name and phone number, along with an overview of recent activity and connected leads. The central area shows more detailed contact history, with options to attach relevant files, assign activities (such as tasks and deadlines), schedule meetings, send communications via WhatsApp or an email integration, and start calls (using a VoIP integration or your phone). You can connect contacts to leads or deals either via the sidebar or the Deal button at the top of the interface.
Lead profiles appear in an overlay and use a similar layout to contact profiles. The main difference is that the sidebar contains numerous action items, such as adding labels, connecting a lead to a personalized sequence, or establishing lead value. The functionality here is comparable to what I’ve experienced with other CRMs, with the main difference being the ability to connect one contact to multiple leads or potential sales opportunities. Most other CRMs convert contacts to leads (or vice versa) when they reach a certain stage of your pipeline and then let you connect those people to multiple existing deals rather than potential sales opportunities.
Deals: Delightfully Straightforward
Pipedrive’s Deals section shows all your open deals in a Kanban format. You can switch this to a list view (which mirrors the contacts spreadsheet) or a Forecast view (which shows your projected earnings for the next four months). This last option is interesting, since CRMs typically relegate sales forecasts to the reporting area, though Monday CRM has similar functionality.
Creating deals is easy. Simply name your deal, assign it to an existing contact or enter contact information for a new person, add the expected value, and select the closing date. You can then click the deal to add more details, such as the included products, and schedule meetings or other related tasks. It’s also possible to add notes or draft emails here. Alternatively, you can create a deal while viewing a contact profile or convert a lead to a deal; both methods require the same information.
Pipedrive’s AI assistant provides advice for nurturing leads and closing deals based on previous interactions. My ability to test this functionality was somewhat limited because my sample contacts had minimal information, but I did get some helpful suggestions and could imagine the system providing much more in-depth ones with more comprehensive customer profiles. Zoho CRM’s Zia Assistant can also identify customer sentiment, intent, and emotion, even setting goals and making recommendations based on CRM sales data. However, Zoho’s tools are more frustrating to set up.
Automations and Sequences: Streamline Your Workflows With Ease
Pipedrive offers numerous automation templates for tasks such as welcoming new leads, re-engaging inactive leads, and moving leads to new pipeline stages when their labels change. You can create custom automations from scratch using a simple visual builder that doesn’t require technical expertise or coding. I find this functionality helpful, but less expensive competitors, such as Bigin by Zoho CRM, provide similar abilities.
Sequences let you create repeatable workflows for various types of leads and deals. Pipedrive offers sequence templates for nurturing leadsild additional sequences from scratch using a visual builder similar to the one for automations. By default, you need to manually opt leads and deals into your sequences, but you can automate this process based on label changes
Emails: Helpful Tools, But Nothing Special
Pipedrive offers a Sales Inbox for syncing your existing inbox. It’s compatible with most major email systems, including Gmail and Outlook, and automatically logs all emails within the CRM, attaching them to contacts as appropriate. You can set the inbox to share all emails with your team, certain types only, or only upon specific instructions. Email templates are available for common tasks like introductions and follow-ups, and you can convert any email you create into a template. Apptivo and Freshsales provide similar features.
AI tools can quickly summarize long email threads with moderate levels of detail and high accuracy. You can also use AI to generate emails based on a short (up to 500 characters) description, a tone (such as professional or friendly), and a desired length. Like most AI tools, the generated text is generic and requires significant customization. These emails can be a fine starting point, but the effort required to create a deeply personalized email with AI is probably comparable with writing it yourself. Additionally, these features are available only on the Premium and Ultimate plans, whereas competitors such as Zoho CRM offer similar tools on lower-cost plans.
You can easily send bulk emails through the Contacts area. However, you won’t be able to create dynamic campaigns unless you’re on the Growth plan or higher and pay for Pipedrive’s Campaigns tool (formerly a core part of Pipedrive but now an add-on), which starts at $16 per month for 1,000 subscribers.
Reporting and Analytics: Fully Customizable Reports and Dashboards
Pipedrive’s default dashboard lets you review deal performance, revenue, and status at a glance, along with specialized reports for pipeline health and the like. You can create new reports for additional data points, add them to your dashboard, and control whether they show as a bar graph or a pie chart. You can also create new dashboards to view broad datasets across different pipelines. Dashboards and reports are exportable in either PDF or PNG format.
(Credit: Pipedrive/PCMag)
The reporting features here are comprehensive enough to give you the information you need to track and improve performance. They’re also very much in line with what you can expect from other high-quality CRMs, such as Freshsales.
Integrations: Robust Options for Expanding Functionality
You can connect hundreds of third-party apps to Pipedrive, including automation tools like IFTTT and Zapier, many Google apps, project management apps like Asana, and video conferencing apps like Zoom. The range of options is fairly broad, though some CRMs, such as Zoho CRM, offer more. If you can’t find the app you need, Pipedrive provides API access to build custom integrations.
Security: Suitable Protection for Most Companies
Pipedrive uses the AES-256 encryption protocol to protect all customer data. Multi-factor authentication and single sign-on are available on all plans, ensuring the safety of individual accounts. Ultimate users can enforce security rules for password requirements, receive instant security alerts about suspicious activity, and view audit logs of recent activity.
Final Thoughts
Pipedrive CRM Review: Competent Contact Management, Pricey Automations
Pipedrive provides all of the tools you need for customer relationship management, but you can get similar features and support from competitors for less.
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