The CRM you choose for your organization makes all the difference in how strong your relationships are and how fast deals flow management. Whether your organization is a massive financial services team, a small real estate firm, a complex investment banking team, or a dynamic startup, how you use your CRM will directly impact your company’s success. Pipedrive has all of the features that traditional sales teams might need in a CRM, but there are many Pipedrive CRM alternatives that can accomplish the same tasks—and more.
In this article, you’ll learn about the six best Pipedrive CRM alternatives on the market today:
- Affinity
- Salesforce
- HubSpot
- Freshsales
- Insightly
- ZohoCRM
Let’s take a deeper dive into these six alternatives to Pipedrive. You may just discover a better fit for your team and your unique deal or sales process.
What is Pipedrive CRM?
Pipedrive is an easy-to-use sales CRM and pipeline management tool. It can visualize your sales pipeline to highlight important customer activities and conversations, and integrates well with other sales software solutions including Google Apps, MailChimp, and Zapier. With features like activity scheduling, booking, email marketing, lead management, and reporting, Pipedrive works well for small teams with traditional, linear sales processes like those in the software, retail, and hospitality industries.
Pipedrive CRM’s data-driven lead generation features have even recently stirred media interest. Pipedrive’s 24/7 customer support is also touted as a strength for this CRM solution. The user-friendly platform does offer some configurability and customization, but this flexibility is included primarily in the more expensive plans.
While Pipedrive’s simple, web-based interface works well for transactional customer relationship management and deal management, it has limits when it comes to complex sales stages and relationship-driven dealmaking processes that don’t follow traditional sales funnels, including venture capital, investment banking, and other financial and professional services teams. Pipedrive does not include workflow automation, automated file capture, or automatic contact entry. It also doesn’t provide any insight into relationship strengths that support long-term relationship building and dealmaking.
Considering these features and limitations, Pipedrive can be a good solution for small, transactional sales teams that are focused on short-term sales—but it may not be adequate for sophisticated, relationship-focused financial and professional services organizations that rely on long-term unstructured deals. Like most standard CRMs, it also requires a great deal of manual data entry to be feasible as a contact management tool.
Read on to learn more about some of Pipedrive’s current competitors.
Pipedrive Alternatives
Affinity
For teams focused on more complex deal workflows —from family offices to real estate firms to investment banking teams to VC—relationship intelligence, the insight into your team’s network, business relationships, and customer interactions that help you find, manage, and close deals—is a must. Affinity is the automated relationship intelligence CRM built as a centralized platform for deal pipeline management and relationship management, and designed for building and managing relationships.
Relationship-driven dealmakers will find that automating the capture of data exhaust—details including email communications, meetings, and contact information such as names, roles, industry, and source of introduction—saves the team hundreds of hours otherwise spent on manual data entry in a tool like Pipedrive. The simplicity, ease, and time-savings created by the powerful automated data capture encourages fast, frictionless adoption across the team—helping your organization take advantage of the advanced real-time analytics and business intelligence insights that help you close deals faster.
With deeper insights into your captured data, you can learn things like who has the best relationship to a contact who can advance a deal, whether anyone on your team knows anyone at a target organization, and whether that organization has new hires with whom your firm can build new relationships. . Relationship intelligence puts the momentum behind your dealmaking and helps you keep ahead of the competition.
With Affinity, you can often start leveraging these benefits in a matter of days—rather than months like with other CRMs. As dealmaking timelines continue to accelerate, rapid deployment and a user-oriented design that makes customization easy can make the difference between moving a deal to a closed/won status and a closed/lost.
Salesforce
Salesforce (SFDC) may be the best-known CRM platform on the market. It’s used by businesses of all sizes, from startup to enterprise, in all locations across the globe, making it a strong competitor against Pipedrive.
Salesforce CRM features include lead management, contact management, sales opportunity management, reporting, dashboards, workflow rules, and some basic workflow automation. The platform also boasts a bottomless list of integrations, add-ons, and partnerships that can connect your data to other software tools you may already be using. Salesforce also offers a wide range of training, which can be helpful to your team as they learn to use this broad, complex platform.
Salesforce offers so many powerful features and resources for sales teams, including a versatile mobile app, and it has great potential for virtually any organization willing to put in the work of setting it up—but it requires manual data entry to make it work. Additionally, the training mentioned above can take months to complete.
For organizations already suffering from having to spend so much time entering and managing their data, it can be a struggle to get Salesforce set up and maintained, much less encourage members of your team to use it consistently. Companies wanting to be able to move quickly on opportunities or that need a CRM solution that will be ready to use out of the box may need to look elsewhere.
Hubspot
HubSpot may be best known for its marketing software, but its cloud-based CRM is a strong contender in the list of Pipedrive alternatives. Especially for organizations with strong marketing and sales alignment (or that are hoping to create said alignment), HubSpot can help you create a customer experience cycle that seamlessly takes leads from marketing-qualified to happy customers to brand promoters.
Though its sales features are secondary to the platform’s marketing feature stack, HubSpot CRM offers easy-to-use, built-in call capabilities, templates, and email workflows for salespeople of any experience level to automate some of their sales activities.
HubSpot’s powerful marketing automation features may be the downfall of this CRM as a sales tool, however. Sales teams often find it has a steep learning curve and more limited functionality for their role. And like other transactional CRMs, it still requires manual data entry to add and update contacts.
So while the free plan lets you test out many of the CRM features, be aware that there is a cost involved in the time it takes to enter contact information. Finally, HubSpot CRM doesn’t offer the sales insights to help relationship-driven dealmakers drive deals and will often work better for traditional, volume and funnel-driven sales teams.
Freshsales
Freshsales, part of the Freshworks software platform serving a variety of business needs, is a feature-rich CRM that boasts AI-powered sales insights. With detailed email tracking, call transferring, and comprehensive reporting functionalities, this is a robust platform for sales teams of all sizes.
The 360-degree view of customers’ engagement history with their team promises to give salespeople more insight than a standard CRM, and sales emails can be forwarded straight to Freshsales to be converted into contacts, eliminating some manual data entry.
Unfortunately, many users complain that importing customer data is cumbersome, which eliminates much of the time savings. Freshsales does not include pipeline customization features, either, and the mobile app is awkward compared to the desktop version of the tool. While this CRM may be a good choice for teams with simple sales processes, it adds unnecessary complexity and limitations for teams with complicated business processes and non-linear deal pipelines.
Insightly
Insightly is a simple CRM for startups, small businesses, and midsized companies, though it does offer an enterprise plan for large teams. The features are designed so you can launch and start using the system quickly, with multi-step workflow automation, a long list of integrations, and straightforward email sending and tracking functionality.
Like Pipedrive, Insightly connects to your existing email provider (such as Gmail or Microsoft Outlook), so your team can send and track messages directly in the CRM. A free trial allows users to test most of the features before committing to a paid plan.
The downsides of Insightly include limited reporting and tracking capabilities, slow load times, and no true sales or relationship intelligence. Some users complain of a clumsy user interface and poor user experience as well. And if you have a large sales team that requires additional storage space for files and documents, Insightly may be too limited for your needs.
Zoho CRM
Part of the all-in-one Zoho software family, Zoho CRM is a traditional, transactional CRM that works seamlessly with Zoho’s other tools for finance, IT, HR, marketing, and project management. For organizations that prefer their sales CRM software to be part of the same vendor ecosystem as the rest of their business tech stack, Zoho CRM may be a good choice. It works impeccably with other Zoho software solutions.
However, with the required manual data entry and a 90-day average deployment time frame, Zoho can be a massive investment in time and energy for a tool you may not choose to stay with. If your team is looking to quickly test out a CRM and not take time away from closing deals, this likely isn’t the best Pipedrive alternative.
What makes Affinity the best Pipedrive alternative for dealmakers?
If your team is fine spending hours each week adding and updating contacts and deal stages, Pipedrive is a solid, traditional CRM. Pipedrive CRM software will let you fully customize your pipelines to fit your unique sales process, and you can pull simple reports to keep tabs on sales activities and deal movement over time.
However, for dealmakers who depend on building long-lasting business relationships, are looking to save time on data entry, and want to gain deep insight into the data in their CRM, Affinity may be a more suitable solution. With advanced automation and unrivaled relationship intelligence, Affinity saves you hundreds of hours per person per year, so you can focus on what is most important: building relationships and winning deals.
Talk to an Affinity expert today to learn how you can find, manage, and close deals faster with a relationship intelligence platform.
