| Functionality | 6 <p>Bigin offers essential features for small teams, like flexible contact and pipeline management, built-in phone, email sequencing, workflow automation, and analytics—all at an affordable price. However, advanced features like email marketing campaigns and data enrichment require add-ons or integrations.</p> | 9 <p>Freshsales provides all the essential functionality most companies need, covering the majority of use cases.</p><p>The only notable gap we found was in more advanced features, like the ability to create branched automation workflows—something you’d typically see in platforms like Hubspot or Salesforce, which cater to the largest and most sophisticated organizations.</p> |
| Ease of Use | 7 <p>Navigating Bigin is straightforward and intuitive, and should take about an hour for most SMB users to get comfortable. Its "spreadsheet views" for contacts and pipelines are especially great for teams transitioning from spreadsheets. However, be aware of confusing terms like "touched records," and note that setting up email sequences can be cumbersome.</p> | 4 <p>Freshsales packs a ton of features and customization options, but it comes with a learning curve. For example, there are 12 different “quick” actions just for a single contact. The abundance of settings can make some workflows feel unnecessarily complex. Take email sequences—before you can even start composing, you’ll need to navigate through six different settings, including selecting between outbound, classic, or smart sequence types. This level of detail is fantastic for power users but might frustrate teams that value speed and simplicity.</p> |
| Look and feel | 5 <p>Bigin loads quickly, but its interface feels plain and uninspiring.</p> | 6 <p>Freshsales looks decent, but the experience is let down by slow load times—key pages like the deal pipeline or individual contact profiles take a few seconds to load, and that gets frustrating fast.</p> |
| Customisability | 7 <p>You can customize Bigin by setting up pipelines, adding custom fields, and saving filters. Its standout multi-team, flexible pipelines help track deals, projects, and support tickets. However, it lacks custom objects and advanced automation workflows.</p> | 7 <p>Freshsales is fairly customizable—you can add custom fields, create custom data objects, and even track customer user events with code.</p><p>That said, the pipeline feature feels narrowly focused on deals management, making it less versatile if you want to use your CRM for things like vendor or partner management, or tracking customer onboarding. It also falls short on more advanced capabilities, like building sophisticated automation workflows or running in-depth analytics, which platforms like Salesforce and HubSpot handle with ease.</p> |
| Ease of Setup | 8 <p>Bigin offers offers a simple, self-serve free trial for their platform. When tested, we found the initial setup to be straightforward (taking ~10 mins). Fully customising the platform can take 1-2 days given Bigin's breadth of features and integrations e.g. setting up call functionality, payment links, advanced automations.</p> | 4 <p>Freshsales offers a free trial without the need to speak to sales. Completing basic setup is simple, taking around 10 minutes to import contacts and set up pipelines. However, due to its extensive feature set and complex settings, fully customizing the platform—including chatbots, automation, and sequences—can take up to several weeks.</p> |
| Customer Support | 3 <p>Support is available via phone and email. Although there's a "Chat with Us" button, it was non-functional during testing. Online resources are limited and not very helpful.</p> | 6 <p>Freshales offer support via in-app live chat. We usually get a response within an hour, but agents often change halfway during the conversation, and aren't always the most knowledgeable.</p> |
| Integratability | 6 <p>Bigin integrates with key third party tools like Google and Outlook Calendar, Mailchimp, Shopify, and over 100 telephony vendors. It has a marketplace for third-party plugins like Slack, Twilio, and Eventbrite. While it integrates well with Zoho products, it lacks key integrations with major customer support vendors like Zendesk and Freshdesk. An API is available for custom integrations.</p> | 6 <p>Freshsales comes with a solid lineup of around 385 pre-built integrations and offers an API for custom setups. However, it’s missing some key pre-built integrations with widely-used tools like Zendesk and Intercom, which might be a dealbreaker for some teams.</p> |
| Ease of Migration | 9 <p>You can easily export key information such as contacts, deals, and reports from dashboards. All data can also be exported via API.</p> | 8 <p>Freshsales allows users to export key data data via self-serve. Export of most other data are also available via API or on request.</p> |
