Pipedrive is a customer relationship management (CRM) service that helps you manage deals, email marketing, meetings, and other sales-related tasks in one place. It integrates with more than 400 third-party tools, making it easy to incorporate into your everyday business operations. However, its limited flexibility and underwhelming customer service options for the base tier make it less appealing than similarly priced alternatives. Among that group is our Editors' Choice winner, Zoho CRM, which offers a deeper feature set, better customization options, and more advanced AI functionality.
How Much Does Pipedrive Cost?
Pipedrive doesn't offer a free tier, but you can try any of its paid plans for 14 days.
The base Essential plan costs $14 per user per month (billed annually). It includes a dashboard for managing calendar events, leads, and sales pipelines, along with advanced tracking tools. You also get access to Pipedrive's full range of integrations, including those for Zapier and Zoom. However, the Essential plan has significant limitations, notably regarding customer support. After the onboarding process, you can access just the self-serve online help center and a chatbot. This tier also restricts you to 3,000 open deals and 15 reports.
For human-based support, you need to pay for the Advanced plan ($34 per user per month, billed annually). It offers live chat support during business hours (9 a.m. to 5 p.m. in your time zone, Monday through Friday). This tier also includes group emailing and email tracking tools, as well as scheduling capabilities for emails, meetings, and video calls. If you pay for multiple seats, Pipedrive assigns you a Dedicated Success Manager who helps you create a personalized plan for your business. Open deals and report limits go up to 10,000 and 30, respectively.
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The Professional plan ($49 per user per month, billed annually) gives you access to 24/5 live chat support, all of Pipedrive’s AI features, sales forecasting tools, and systems for organizing your salespeople into teams. Open deals and reports allowances increase to 100,000 and 150,000, respectively.
If you want 24/7 live chat support, you need to spring for the Power plan, which costs $64 per user per month (billed annually). This plan also includes phone support from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. CST, Monday through Friday. It unlocks the SmartDocs (for creating and sending digital contracts) and Projects (for complete project management) add-ons, too. Once again, this tier supports even more open deals (200,000) and reports (250,000). The Enterprise tier goes for $99 per user per month (billed annually).
For comparison, Zoho's Enterprise tier with custom modules and Zia AI assistant features costs $40 per user per month (billed annually). A Freshsales Pro plan, which includes AI features and advanced customization options, goes for around the same at $39 per user per month (billed annually).
Getting Started With Pipedrive
Pipedrive lets you customize the onboarding process by selecting your job title and level of experience with CRM tools. It also asks what you want to do first before guiding you to that task.
Adding teammates is easy, but there are only two default options for permissions: Regular Access and Admin Access. This gives you less flexibility than other CRM tools like Freshsales, which offers several default roles for different types of representatives.
I imported a spreadsheet with sample contacts and used the default contact mapping system. Pipedrive automatically organized my information into fields it deemed appropriate, with the option to remap them. You can also create custom fields as necessary.
However, I encountered a surprise at the end of this process: Pipedrive had imported my spreadsheet, but the information wasn’t in the Leads area. After a visit to the help center, I determined that this was because my spreadsheet lacked a mandatory “Lead Title” field. Making this change and reuploading the spreadsheet fixed the issue, so I count this only as a mild frustration.
Pipedrive also has an AI mapping tool, which you can allow to use your input data for training purposes. You should consult the Supplemental Terms page for Pipedrive's AI functionality before you do to make sure it aligns with the legal requirements of your organization.
The software offers direct migration tools for numerous CRMs, including Less Annoying CRM, Salesforce, and Zoho CRM. These tools allow you to import your contact data with a few clicks.
If you want advanced help for building your contacts database, you can schedule an onboarding consultation. I didn’t get a chance to try this, however, since the offer was buried at the bottom of one of the welcome emails I received. I had already set up the basics when I noticed this option. I do, however, appreciate the vast library of help videos and on-demand webinars that Pipedrive provides.
Working With Contacts
Pipedrive's Leads area isn’t very beginner-friendly. The information in the spreadsheet-style view is limited, with no easy way to customize what you see beyond adding labels. You can't switch from this default view to a more approachable Kanban view, either. This is disappointing, especially given the flexibility of similarly priced CRM tools, such as Apptivo.
Profiles in the lead section show basic contact data on the left and have an area for notes and a Focus Task on the right. The Focus Task area lets you schedule the calls, emails, and meetings you need to close a deal. You can draft emails here but not assign a deal directly (there's just a field for overall value). This limitation adds an extra step you won’t encounter with most other CRM tools.
A separate Contacts section lets you manage leads who have subscribed to your email newsletters and view timelines of your interactions with them. You can also access a more advanced lead profile here, with the ability to add more details and assign individual deals. I wish these features were available in the main Leads section.
User Experience
Most of your work within Pipedrive happens in the Deals area. This section shows all your open deals in a Kanban format. (This is odd since there is no Kanban view for the Contacts area.) You can switch this to a List view (which looks similar to the contacts spreadsheet) or a Forecast view (which shows your projected earnings for the next four months).
Creating deals is easy. Simply name your deal, assign it to an existing contact, add the expected value, and select the closing date. You can then click on the deal to fill out more details, such as the products included, and schedule meetings or other tasks. You can also add notes or draft emails here.
Another key area of Pipedrive is Campaigns, where you manage bulk email marketing tasks. Pipedrive offers a variety of email templates, although they aren’t quite as extensive as what you get with dedicated services like Mailchimp. Alternatively, you can use the HTML builder to create and save custom templates. Pipedrive lets you schedule emails and enable tracking for open and click-through rates.
Higher-tier subscribers can automate email marketing campaigns. Pipedrive offers both premade automation flows and an editor for creating custom ones. You can configure multiple Campaigns (Pipedrive’s term for individual emails sent to a group), emails that appear to be from an individual sales rep, and other automated actions based on either time passed or actions your leads take.
The Sales Inbox syncs directly with your existing email tool and lets you create, send, and receive all of your emails within Pipedrive. This section includes tools for quickly categorizing contacts and assigning deals to specific emails. Similarly, the Activities area syncs with your existing calendar app so you can manage all of your scheduled tasks, including deal assignments, in one place.
Reporting and Analytics
Pipedrive offers a default report setup that lets you review deal performance, revenue, and status at a glance. For most of these information types, you can choose between a bar graph and a pie chart. You can also customize what appears by adding new Reports for things like email marketing performance. Pipedrive lets you rearrange these reports so you see the most important information first.
The Analytics section offers decent functionality, but there aren’t as many display options as with Zoho CRM. Like most of the Pipedrive features I tested, the analytics area does what it needs to but doesn't give you a lot of control over how it does them.
Spotty Customer Service
Pipedrive's stratified approach to customer support is significant compared with other CRM tools. For example, HubSpot offers 24/7 live chat support with human customer service representatives to users on all paid plans. Even Freshsales, a more affordable CRM, has 24/5 live chat support for all users.
I also had a negative experience with Pipedrive's customer support during testing. I contacted support via live chat on a Friday afternoon and didn’t receive a response until the following day. I didn’t log into my email over the weekend, and by the time I did, the agent had closed my chat because I hadn’t responded in over a day. I did receive a warning going in that chat volumes were unusually high, though I still expected a better resolution.
Integrations, Add-Ons, and AI
Pipedrive integrates with over 400 tools, including most Google apps, project management apps like Asana, and automation tools like Zapier. You can use these integrations to build your CRM directly into your existing tech workflows.
You can also customize your experience with add-ons, including Projects for full project/task management and Smart Docs for sending digital contracts. These cost extra for lower-tier plans but are free at the Power and Enterprise levels.
Pipedrive's AI assistant provides advice for nurturing leads and closing deals based on previous interactions. It can also generate whole emails based on a short (up to 500 characters) description. Like most AI tools, the text it generates is generic and requires significant customization. However, it can give you a good starting point. Zoho CRM's Zia Assistant can also identify customer sentiment, intent, and emotion. It goes further by setting goals and making recommendations based on CRM sales data.
Verdict: Functional, But Not Very Customizable
Pipedrive CRM technically has all the features you need to manage sales for your small-to-midsize business, and we appreciate all the add-ons it supports. However, it lacks in-depth customization options. You can’t switch the contacts area to a Kanban view, for example, and the choices for displaying information in the analytics area are rather limited. We would also like more generous support options at the base tier. Zoho CRM is more flexible and capable, so it remains our Editors' Choice winner.
Pipedrive provides all of the tools you need for customer relationship management, but you can get more features and support from alternatives that cost the same—or even less.
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About Dianna Gunn
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