What is Pipedrive?
Pipedrive is a simple CRM tool for small teams.
The creators of Pipedrive have a background in Sales, and saw a gap in the market for an easy-to-use CRM, built around the needs of sales reps rather than managers.
Even so, Pipedrive isn’t short of functionality. You’ll find all the common CRM capabilities, plus a library of add-ons and over 400 integrations to layer-on functionality.
But is Pipedrive the right CRM for your business? To find out, our experts put it through the Stackfix test process. Here’s our verdict.
Stackfix's Verdict
Pros of Pipedrive
Very easy for sales reps to use
Excellent add-ons for marketing & lead generation
Typically 30% cheaper than similar CRMs
Cons of Pipedrive
Limited ability to customize workflows
Time-consuming to set up email sequences
Expensive add-ons
Best for businesses who:
Small businesses with small sales teams
And source most of their leads via website forms or live chat
Or want a simple, easy-to-use CRM
Less good for businesses who:
Businesses with a large sales team
Or who source most of their leads via cold calling & email
Or want a highly customized CRM
What does Pipedrive do?
Pipedrive is a customer relationship management (CRM) tool.
Like many CRMs, it enables you to:
- Store, manage, and track customer-related data.
- Streamline core sales processes like prospecting, sales outreach, and managing a sales pipeline.
- Group, de-duplicate, and enrich contacts
- Create, send, and track email outreach messages
Pipedrive also has paid add-ons that bring more sales and marketing functionality:
- Setup and manage website forms
- Chat bots and live chat on your website
- Find cold leads from a prospect database
- Identify companies visiting your website
- Allow prospects to schedule meetings
- Send contracts, proposals, and quotes, plus capture signatures
- Project management
Pipedrive also has over 400 integrations to connect to your other software tools. You can add apps to bring new functionality into your Pipedrive workspace.
What does Pipedrive look like?
Pros of Pipedrive
1: Pipedrive is very easy for sales reps to use
Pipedrive’s user interface is really clean and simple.
Most of what you need in one-click via the left hand main navigation, and each of the main views makes all the information front-and-centre.
If you’ve used any CRM before, the pipeline view will feel instantly familiar. Stages, deals, and filters are all clearly visible and easy to use.
Unlike many other CRMs, it doesn’t feel like you have to keep clicking to see a lot of detail. For instance, if you want to see more about a contact related to a deal, hovering over a link to see a summary saves you from needing to click through.
The native iOS and Android mobile apps are just as easy to use as the web desktop app (except everything is a tap away). They're also fully featured - you won’t find yourself feeling stuck away from a desk when working on your phone.
We love how Pipedrive helps you prioritize your work day. On every Contact and Deal profile, the toggled “Focus” section highlights all the activities that need your attention right at the top. For example, upcoming meetings and email drafts.
Another way Pipedrive helps you to prioritize your work is the Lead Inbox. This is a separate space to review, qualify, and take action on new leads coming into your sales team.
2: Excellent add-ons for marketing & lead generation
Pipedrive offers many add-ons for marketing and lead generation. For small amounts each month, you can add new features such as:
- Website forms
- Website chat bots and live chat
- Email marketing
- Meeting scheduler
- Lead generation
Most of these feature add-ons are found in a tab on the Leads Inbox, so they don’t clutter or change how your sales reps work. New activities like form submissions show up in timelines on your Contact, Organization, and Deal profile pages too.
3: Typically 30% cheaper than similar CRMs
Pipedrive’s pricing is very competitive compared to similar CRMs. If you compare prices of Pipedrive’s plans like-for-like with other CRMs, you’ll find the cost per seat is typically 30% cheaper.
Although there isn’t a free tier, the entry level price is still low at $24/user/month with monthly billing. All plans offer a 14-day free trial that doesn’t need a credit card.
Their most expensive plan is only $99/user/month. This is a similar price point to mid-tier plans of CRMs like HubSpot and Salesforce. We think most small businesses will find their needs met with lower tiers, even as you grow your sales team.
If you can commit to annual billing, Pipedrive offers the most generous discounts of all the CRMs we’ve tested. Typically, the average discount from CRM providers for annual billing is 20%. With Pipedrive, the average annual discount of 27% works out as 3 months free, with the entry level plan offering 42% - that’s five months free!
There are a few ways that Pipedrive can become worse value for money.
You can get caught out paying for lots of add-ons, but features like live chat and prospecting could save you from buying another tool.
Watch out for what currency you pay in. Pipedrive keeps the same sticker prices as their US dollar pricing in different currencies. For example, the Enterprise plan is $99/user/month. If you’re in Europe, you’ll pay €99/user/month. In the UK, you’ll pay £99/user/month. There’s no adjustment to local pricing. If you can pay via a US entity, you might be able to save 10-20%, even after any bank charges for currency conversion.
Cons of Pipedrive
1: Limited ability to customize workflows
Pipedrive is not built to be as customizable as other CRMs. If you have a more complex sales process or use cases beyond your sales team, you might struggle to get Pipedrive to work well for your whole business.
For example, you can't add your custom objects (like a “Product”, “Subscription”, “Order” or similar) beyond Pipedrive's defaults. These include:
- Leads
- Deals
- Contacts
- Organizations
- Products
Pipedrive does let you add custom fields, choose what views you see in profiles and customize your pipeline stages. But these sorts of customizations are common across most CRMs.
Another way you can customize Pipedrive is with over 400 apps and integrations. But, you may need to pay extra for functionality that often comes included with other CRMs. For example, Pipedrive has the "LeadBooster" add-on for Forms and Live Chat, and a "Campaign" add-on for email marketing - functionality that comes included with HubSpot’s entry level Starter plan.
2: Limited email sequencing functionality
Pipedrive doesn't offer a dedicated email sequencing feature. Instead, you have to set up an email sequence through its workflow automation feature. The downsides of doing so is that you cannot track the overall performance of your email sequence, and it takes more steps to enrol contacts into a sequence.
The email sequencing is more suited to following-up quickly with inbound leads, rather than nurturing relationships (i.e. sending different messages, based on time or event-based triggers) over time.
3: Expensive add-ons
Pipedrive’s core CRM pricing is very competitive. But, the add-ons can sometimes be much more expensive than similar tools.
For example, the LeadBooster add-on is $39/month total for the company. You only get 10 credits per month for their Prospector tool to find a new lead. To source more prospects, you need to pay for credits, and these start at $1 each. The cost drops to $0.30 each after 251 per month. Even so, this is much more expensive than similar prospecting tools.
Similarly, the Website Visitor’s Add-on charges by the number of identified companies. The costs for these start at $0.25 per company they identify, dropping to $0.15 over 500 per month. The cost is based on monthly website traffic. If you have high website traffic, this add-on may be much more expensive than alternative providers.
Best for
- Small businesses with small sales teams. Most of your users will be sales reps, and Pipedrive is a great product for sales reps.
- And source most of their leads via website forms or live chat. The Lead Inbox is easy to set up and manage.
- Or want a simple, easy-to-use CRM. It is easy to get started quickly with Pipedrive.
Less good for
- Businesses with a large sales team. There isn't as much functionality for managers and operations teams as other CRMs.
- Or who source most of their leads via cold calling & email. Pipedrive's email sequences are a bit clunky to setup copmared to other CRMs.
- Or want a highly customized CRM. Pipedrive is designed to be simple instead of highly configurable.
Bottom line
Our verdict: We gave Pipedrive 7.4/10 (May 2024).
If you're a small team with simple relationship management processes (e.g. most of your leads comes from website visitors), Pipedrive's combination of a simple interface, relatively rich in a functionality, and reasonable pricing make it a strong option.
But larger teams with more complex processes, or organisations who make heavy use of email sequencing, may find Pipedrive insufficient.
But, don’t buy Pipedrive just yet…
There is no perfect CRM tool. Every software buying decision is a trade-off decision.
If you’re interested in Pipedrive, then we’ve found two other highly-rated CRMs that could be a better fit for your business. Both of these CRMs review well for value and rich functionality.
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