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Freshsales vs. Pipedrive

If you’re considering Freshsales and Pipedrive but struggling to choose between them, you’ve come to the right place. On this page, we’ll discuss the pros and cons of each tool. Then we’ll explore how they compare on several key aspects of a good CRM. Keep reading to learn more about how Freshsales and Pipedrive stack up!

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Freshsales vs. Pipedrive comparison

If you’re on this page, there’s a decent chance you’re trying to make a decision about whether to choose Freshsales or Pipedrive as your customer relationship management (CRM) software. Maybe you’ve narrowed it down to those two, or maybe they’re just two of several options that you’re looking at. Whatever the case, you’re here to find out which is better.

That’s just the question we’re going to answer. To do that, we’ll start out by looking at some of the biggest pros and cons of each tool. After that, we’ll go over how Pipedrive and Freshsales stack up when it comes to some key qualities of a good CRM.

To learn more about Freshsales vs. Pipedrive, just keep reading!

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Freshsales pros


There are plenty of things to like about using Freshsales. Those things include:

  • Ease of use: Freshsales is specifically designed to be user-friendly and easy to navigate. This is an especially big benefit for users who are new to the world of CRM.
  • Sales sequencing: Sales sequences are automated workflows that you can set up to help you with outreach campaigns—for instance, sending out an email in response to a specific customer touchpoint.
  • Customization: Freshsales is great for customization, allowing you to set up the platform to meet your company’s unique needs. You can set up everything from custom fields to specific activities.

Freshsales cons

Unfortunately, there are also some downsides to Freshsales, including:

  • Reporting: While Freshsales’s reporting isn’t outright bad, it’s definitely not the tool’s strong suit. Many users find that the reporting isn’t as robust as they’d like it to be.
  • Customer support: When you use a CRM, you want it to come with a customer support team to walk you through issues. Unfortunately, many people find Freshsales’s support team very unhelpful.
  • Integrations: Another common complaint about Freshsales is that it doesn’t offer enough integration options and that the options it does offer tend to be poor quality.

Pipedrive pros

If you choose Pipedrive as your CRM, you’ll experience several benefits, including:

  • Ease of use: Pipedrive features an intuitive and easy-to-use interface. That interface includes a simple dashboard to provide quick insights into your current data.
  • Reporting: Pipedrive’s reporting is excellent, with users having the ability to view many different performance metrics for their marketing and sales.
  • Automation: Pipedrive doesn’t force you to do everything manually—it comes equipped with many different marketing and sales automation features.
a positive review for pipedrive

Pipedrive cons

As nice as the advantages listed above may be, there are also some major downsides to using Pipedrive. Those downsides include:

  • Learning curve: Pipedrive isn’t so bad once you get the hang of it, but unfortunately, it takes a while to do that. Many users say the tool comes with a steep learning curve that delays results.
  • Customer service: Like Freshsales, Pipedrive doesn’t score so well on customer service. Users often report that the support team is slow to respond and not very helpful when it finally does.
  • Overreliance on add-ons: Pipedrive offers a lot of CRM features—that is, if you get a bunch of add-ons. The core platform lacks many of these features, such as email marketing.
a negative review for pipedrive

 

Freshsales vs. Pipedrive comparison

Now that we’ve seen which aspects of Pipedrive and Freshsales (both positive and negative) help them stand out, let’s see how they compare directly. Specifically, we’ll be looking at five key aspects of a good CRM. This comparison is summarized in the chart below.

Pricing
Ease of use
Reporting
Integrations
Sales automation
$16-$79 per month
Very intuitive and user-friendly
Excellent reporting features
Extensive integrations, including native, third-party, and custom options
Excellent sales automation
Free, or $15–$83 per user per mont
Very intuitive and user-friendly
Subpar reporting features
750+ integrations (via Zapier)
Excellent sales automation
$15–$99 per user per month
Steep learning curve, but intuitive interface
Excellent reporting features
300+ integrations (some native)
Excellent sales automation

Let’s now look at how Freshsales and Pipedrive compare to one another in a bit more depth.

Pricing

One of the most important factors to consider is pricing. So, how much do Pipedrive and Freshsales cost?

If you want to spend as little as possible, you may be in luck—Freshsales does offer a free plan, but only for up to three users. If you want more users or better features, you can choose from three different plans that range from $15 to $83 per user per month.

Pipedrive has similar pricing, with its cheapest plan being $15 per user per month and its most expensive being $99. Ultimately, though, since Pipedrive doesn’t offer a free plan, Freshsales wins this round.

Ease of use

Another key consideration is the ease of use. How user-friendly is each platform?

Freshsales does very well in this category, with users saying that the interface is intuitive and simple. This makes sense since Freshsales is designed with beginners in mind.

Pipedrive also boasts an intuitive interface. However, Pipedrive also comes with a steep learning curve, which means it can take a while to learn the ins and outs of the tool and start driving results. For that reason, Freshsales is the winner in this category.

Reporting

CRMs exist to help you gather and analyze your data, which means any good CRM will include some kind of reporting feature. That’s the case for both Freshsales and Pipedrive, but only one of them does it well.

Pipedrive is solid in this category, with advanced reporting features that go above and beyond when it comes to letting users customize the reports they want to generate. On the other hand, Freshsales falls short here. It might not be terrible, but it’s definitely not as optimized as many users would like it to be.

For that reason, Pipedrive wins in this category.

Integrations

For your CRM to pull data from other tools, it needs to integrate with those tools. Pipedrive definitely does well here, offering over 300 integration options that are a mix of native and API-based integrations.

With Freshsales, it’s a little more complicated. It offers over 750 integrations through Zapier, but users have been known to say that its integrations are low in quality, with some of them only seeming to work in one direction. So, while it has more integrations than Pipedrive, those integrations may also be worse.

Overall, this one comes out to a tie—the winner depends on whether you prioritize quantity or quality in your integrations.

Sales automation

Finally, we come to sales automation. Freshsales does a pretty good job here, especially with its sales sequencing feature that helps you build automated workflows. But Pipedrive’s sales automation capabilities are just as good, if not better. It has its own automated workflow builder, as well as several prebuilt workflow options.

It’s a close call, but ultimately, Pipedrive wins out in this category by just a hair.

Freshsales vs. Pipedrive: Which is better?

So, let’s get back to our original question—which is better, Pipedrive or Freshsales?

The answer is that it depends entirely on your business. Do you prioritize ease of use and integration quantity? If so, you should choose Freshsales. But on the other hand, if you’re big on reporting and sales automation, maybe Pipedrive would be better.

It’s also entirely possible that you don’t think Freshsales or Pipedrive is right for you, in which case you may choose another CRM altogether. It all comes down to your needs.

Nutshell is the perfect CRM for your business’s needs

If you’re looking for a third CRM option apart from Pipedrive or Freshsales, look no further than Nutshell. Nutshell offers a variety of top-tier CRM features like sales automation and advanced reporting, plus access to a friendly support team who can help you through any questions you have.

If you want to see firsthand what Nutshell can do for your business, check out our 14-day free trial today!

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