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Pipedrive Alternatives: 7 CRMs to Consider for High-Powered Sales Teams

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Pipedrive CRM is a popular and well-rounded CRM used by over 100,000 companies in more than 170 countries. Their branding portrays them as a simple, well-rounded choice for businesses of any size and an instrumental tool for making salespeople’s lives easy. It’s undoubtedly a good CRM, but it isn’t a good fit for everyone, and some may need to consider Pipedrive alternatives. 

Pipedrive has its challenges and downsides, including a lack of marketing features, difficulty with integrations, and poor customer support. It’s crucial to compare Pipedrive’s features, reviews, and costs with the best Pipedrive alternatives to find the CRM that provides the best value for your team. 

Using this comparison guide can help you identify the alternatives and guarantee you’re really choosing a CRM that works for you.

Understanding Pipedrive CRM

Before we dive into the best Pipedrive alternatives, let’s review some essential information about the Pipedrive CRM. 

Pipedrive pros 

Pipedrive is a popular CRM for a reason. Here are some of the pros of using Pipedrive:

  • Ease of use: Users and prospective buyers appreciate Pipedrive’s clutter-free user interface. Pipedrive strives to provide a simple and intuitive experience so that its users can focus on selling.
  • Sales management features: Pipedrive also excels in its pipeline and sales management features. Customers on every plan can see an overview of their leads and communications, and customize their pipelines.
  • Useful extra features: Under the hood, advanced features like email sync, templated email automation, and one-click calling can propel any sales team toward their goals.

Pipedrive cons

Despite its benefits, Pipedrive also has a few cons. Take a look at some of the disadvantages we see most often with Pipedrive:

  • Open deals limits: One of the major downsides of Pipedrive’s CRM is the limit on the number of open deals you can have in your pipeline per plan. For example, if you’re on the Essential plan, you can’t have more than 3,000 open deals in your pipeline — or else you have to start paying nearly double for the next highest plan. What this means is that when your business grows and starts working more leads through its pipeline, Pipedrive forces you to pay more. 
  • Lack of comprehensive CRM features: Pipedrive is primarily built for sales teams, leaving marketing and support teams without much value. Furthermore, even the expensive plans often don’t report on what users actually want. Pipedrive’s reporting lacks capabilities like viewing how many touches a prospect got, setting custom date ranges, and reporting on activities across users.
  • Poor customer service: Pipedrive’s customer support — or lack thereof — is one of the most common complaints from their customers. Countless users express frustration with their phone support, citing long wait times and responses that don’t actually address the users’ concerns. 

Pipedrive pricing

Pipedrive’s price starts at $14 per user per month, which is an attractive number when compared to other CRMs.

But there’s a catch —  that entry-level price point lacks many of its marquee features. This “essentials” version leaves much to be desired. You’re left without the ability to sync your email account to Pipedrive, no email or task automation, and no user/admin permissions.

Bumping up to the $29 Advanced plan includes these features, but you still don’t get one-click calling, unlimited meeting scheduling, multiple dashboards, and revenue forecasting, which are reserved only for the $49 Professional plan.

Lastly, you have to pay for the Power plan or the Enterprise plan, which costs $99 per user per month, to get unlimited support.

The 7 best Pipedrive alternatives

If you’re considering Pipedrive, it’s likely that you’ve heard of these alternatives or seen them on software review sites. While the bulk of their features are similar, each has its own unique pros and cons, which, depending on your needs, could make or break your CRM experience.

Check out these seven Pipedrive alternatives:

1. Nutshell

Pricing: $13/user/month (billed annually) for Foundation, $25/user/month for Growth, $42/user/month for Pro, $59/user/month for Business, $79/user/month for Enterprise

Notable features: 

  • Sales automation features like pipeline customization, automated lead assignment and pipeline distribution, and team guidance
  • Flexible pipeline management that lets your team work how they want
  • Comprehensive filtering and sorting for leads and reporting
  • Contact management and unlimited CRM contacts and data storage — you’ll never have to upgrade your plan because your business is becoming too successful
  • Automated personal email sequences that can be triggered based on the pipeline stage
  • Email marketing automation (billed separately, based on the number of contacts) to connect your sales and marketing departments
  • Embeddable web forms that automatically sync to your Nutshell account and enable you to create outreach lists in seconds
  • Free onboarding assistance and free live support
  • Transfer your Pipedrive data automatically into Nutshell in just a few clicks, no setup required

Summary: Nutshell is an award-winning CRM platform and the best Pipedrive alternative. It helps B2B sales and marketing teams work together to close more deals. Powerful enough to support any element of your business and simple enough to implement without a paid admin or IT department, Nutshell is favored among small to medium-sized companies who know better than to overpay for software they’ll never use. Furthermore, according to customer reviews, Nutshell’s features often outshine the competitors in terms of both usability and comprehensiveness.

Watch out for: Users indicate that the feel of the mobile application doesn’t match the PC interface with which they are familiar.

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Compare Nutshell and Pipedrive

To learn more about how Nutshell and Pipedrive stack up, check out our in-depth, head-to-head comparison.

2. Salesforce CRM

Starter: $25/mo

Full package: $330/mo

  • Workflow customization tools
  • Analytics
  • Marketing leads management
  • Sales team communication

Summary: Another one of the standout Pipedrive alternatives is Salesforce. Salesforce is a comprehensive and robust software solution platform centered around its lead management and CRM functionality. With Salesforce (and its associated cloud applications), it’s possible to do just about anything: Customer journey-related custom sales workflows, plugin application builders, and integrations with your existing systems, to name a few. Be warned that the basic setup fee starts at around $5,000, but if you want the above-mentioned functionality, your setup will start at $50,000.

Watch out for: They charge nearly double their enterprise price ($165/user) for the version with unlimited support. According to users, this is because the software is extremely difficult to use and requires constant interaction with Salesforce representatives. Furthermore, very few of the (costly) add-ons actually apply to small or medium-sized businesses.

Related: Salesforce Contracts, Explained: 7 Things to Know Before Signing

3. HubSpot

Starter: Free starter version

Full package: $5,000/mo (Sales Hub)

Notable features: 

  • Website landing page builder
  • Customer journey-based workflows
  • Sales and marketing email template builder
  • Sales and marketing management tools

Summary: HubSpot is a CRM, marketing automation tool, and customer service hub all built into one. With HubSpot, you can create custom web pages, forms, and emails, and tie them together into complicated, automated workflows. HubSpot is a great option for sales and marketing teams who can afford the big spend and don’t have the time or resources to integrate their CRM with other similar features.

Watch out for: Don’t be fooled by the free version—it’s barely more functional than an Excel workbook. If you want to use all of HubSpot’s features, it will cost a small fortune. Furthermore, those who aren’t HTML pros will need HubSpot to design their marketing pages for them.

4. Zoho

Starter: $14/mo

Full package: $52/mo

Notable features: 

  • Integration with other Zoho apps
  • In-CRM emailing (limited #/user)
  • Dashboards and reporting
  • Integrates with Microsoft and Outlook
  • Workflow management

Summary: Zoho CRM is one application that exists in Zoho’s diverse ecosystem of bite-sized applications, which are typically sold in bundles. The CRM offers basic contact management tools, and automation, like automatically converting website visitors into leads. The reporting in Zoho is also top-notch, allowing users to report across products, locations, accounts, and statuses and providing useful sales forecasting.

Watch out for: Zoho has lots of add-on applications that vary in price, making it difficult to get a quote without going through demos, trials, and hassle. For the complete package, you may need to buy additional applications à la carte.

Looking for an easy-to-use CRM with all the features you need to boost sales?

Nutshell has what you’re looking for.

Explore Nutshell’s Features

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5. Insightly

Starter: $29/mo

Full package: $99/mo

Notable features: 

  • Integrates with G Suite, Microsoft, Mailchimp, and more
  • Custom dashboards
  • Custom pipeline builder
  • Opportunity reports

Summary: Insightly is a CRM favored by companies with straightforward sales processes and is fifth on our list of Pipedrive alternatives. Its simple user interface allows for the creation of custom pipelines and provides all the tools and functionality needed to manage them. Insightly offers strong filtering that allows large lists to be sorted into manageable groups.

Watch out for: Insightly makes their money with their extremely pricey onboarding and support plans, without which many of their customers would be lost. Users also report limited email customization, a lack of features with limited support, and reporting features that leave much to be desired.

6. Copper CRM

Starter: $9/mo

Full package: $99/mo

Notable features: 

  • Google-based CRM
  • Hangouts-based chatbot
  • Chrome extension, Gmail inbox, and other G Suite app support

Summary: Copper CRM is an innovative approach to customer relationship management. Describing itself as a “relational CRM” as opposed to a “transactional CRM,” its focus is to exist solely in the G Suite space to facilitate faster and more effective use of the Google app suite. Its Chrome extension comes in handy for scheduling meetings and creating follow-ups over email without going out of the way.

Watch out for: Copper is designed for Google users only, so it won’t play nicely with any of your non-Google software. Copper’s onboarding is expensive and is only included in their most expensive package.

7. Spiro.ai

🥉 Honorable mention 🥉

Price: Starts from $1,200 per user annually (contact Spiro for specific, tailored pricing)

Notable features: 

  • Optimized with AI
  • Very little manual data entry
  • Scans email correspondence to automate tasks

Summary: Spiro.ai is an AI-based CRM that uses algorithms to minimize the amount of busywork salespeople have to do, freeing them up to close more deals. For example, when you type someone’s email into Spiro, it finds all of their info on the web (so does Nutshell) and when you send an email with a line like “I’ll call you tomorrow,” the system actually reminds you to call them tomorrow.

Watch out for: Spiro has a tremendous price tag compared to their functionality; a salesperson who quickly creates tasks already won’t benefit much from having Spiro’s AI do it for them. 

How to find the best Pipedrive alternative

Shopping for a CRM is tough because you’re essentially choosing which software is going to run your sales operations for a while. There are many hidden factors at play that won’t show up on a typical CRM’s “features” page, like ramp-up time, implementation costs, additional services needed, quality of customer support, and more. In order to ensure you’re making the right choice, the best approach is to take a free trial and see if the CRM can really support all of your requirements without breaking the bank. Software review sites are also invaluable because customers will often tell the stories that CRM salespeople can’t.

Nutshell is the ideal Pipedrive alternative

Ultimately, the best CRM is the one that meets your company’s needs. And with its robust features, world-class customer support, and affordable pricing, Nutshell is a great choice. 

Try Nutshell out for yourself by starting a 14-day free trial — no credit card required! 

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