Pipedrive CRM review

Pipedrive is an easy-to-use CRM that powers more than 95,000 small and medium-sized businesses. Find out if it’s the best CRM software solution for your company in our Pipedrive CRM review.

Pipedrive CRM review: Snapshot

Pipedrive is an extremely user-friendly CRM that’s ideal for small businesses turning to CRM software for the first time. It allows you to build an unlimited number of custom deal pipelines and move deals through them just by dragging and dropping. The platform also offers highly customizable reports, straightforward calendar and email integrations, and automated workflows to streamline your sales process.

While Pipedrive does a great job with the tools it has, it’s missing a lot of tools that growing businesses need. It doesn’t offer project management tools and there are relatively few email marketing tools. You also have to pay extra for web forms and chatbots that can help you generate new leads.

Overall, we enjoy the experience of using Pipedrive, but we don’t think the platform stands out in the crowded field of CRM software. For roughly half the price, Apptivo is just as easy to use, offers just as many customization options, and includes email marketing and project management tools.

Score: 3.5/5

Read on for our full and detailed review. 

5 reasons why a small business needs a CRM

Today's best Pipedrive CRM deal

Get Pipedrive CRM from $14.50 / £12.50 per user/month Ranging from Essential to Enterprise, Pipedrive's CRM pricing plans cover a great mix of features, allowing you to do everything from managing leads and forecasting revenue to e-signing documents on the go and customer data analysis. Pipedrive's CRM plans are billed annually to help you budget for the business year ahead. 

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Pipedrive’s competitors

Pipedrive CRM key features

One of the best things about Pipedrive is how easy it is to manage deals. The platform starts you off with a default deal pipeline that should work for most businesses. Alternatively, you can create an unlimited number of custom deal pipelines, each with as many steps as you need. The deal pipelines are essentially kanban boards, allowing you to drag and drop deals from one stage to the next as your sales team makes progress.

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Pipedrive includes a built-in calendar for easily scheduling meetings and tasks. If you use Outlook or Google Calendar, you can set up automatic two-way sync with your Pipedrive calendar.

The calendar module in Pipeline enables you to propose meeting times to a client by designating specific times that you’re available. Helpfully, upcoming meetings are shown in your deal pipelines by a series of icons.

Pipedrive offers a new suite of tools called Leadbooster to help you find new leads. This is a paid add-on to any of Pipedrive’s plans that costs $39 per month. It includes simple web forms that you can embed in your website as well as a live chat module with an optional chatbot. Leadbooster also comes with a web scraping tool that can help you find potential clients from a database of more than 400 million online profiles.

The reporting interface in Pipedrive is another highlight of this platform. You can create an unlimited number of custom reporting dashboards and dozens of custom reports. All data can be exported to Excel with a click if you want even more analytical power.

Pipedrive supports automated workflows to help your sales team stay on top deals. The software comes with more than 30 workflow templates that can automatically move deals through your pipeline, schedule meetings, or trigger emails. You can also create your own workflows using a straightforward visual editing interface.

Pipedrive CRM: What’s new?

Pipedrive has been busy making updates to its platform since we last reviewed this CRM. It recently added integrations for video conferencing with Zoom and Google Meet, project management with Monday and Trello, and accounting with Xero and Quickbooks. 

Pipedrive also added two-factor authentication and gave users the ability to group custom reports within the reporting dashboard.

Pipedrive CRM: Pricing

Pipedrive offers four pricing plans: Essential, Advanced, Professional, and Enterprise. All plans include unlimited deal pipelines, contacts and customizable reports. 

Pipedrive CRM Essential Plan

The Essential plan has only limited activity management features and doesn’t include workflow automation. 

Pipedrive CRM Advanced Plan

The Advanced plan adds automation, but lacks integration with cloud storage platforms like Google Drive.

Pipedrive CRM Professional Plan

The Professional plan enables you to organize your sales employees into teams, provides more detailed reporting options, and offers custom report fields. 

Pipedrive CRM Enterprise Plan

The Enterprise plan comes with phone support (in addition to live chat, available on all plans) and security alerts.

Plans can be paid monthly, or annually for a discount. You can try out Pipedrive for free for 14 days before purchasing a plan.

Testing Pipedrive CRM

We took Pipedrive for a spin to see how easy this software is to use and how much leeway the custom pipelines and dashboards afford.

Pipedrive CRM: Adding deals

We began working in Pipedrive by creating a set of deals. The process was incredibly simple, since you can add deals right from inside your deal pipeline instead of needing to first navigate to the relevant contact. 

A pop-up lets us add details about the contact behind the deal, the deal’s expected value, which pipeline to add it to, and what stage to put it in. Even better, Pipedrive offered the option of adding custom fields to the deal details, which would be great for scoring leads and assigning priority to deals.

Setting up an entirely new deal pipeline was just as easy. You can add as many stages as you want, and Pipedrive enables you to assign a probability to each stage to indicate the likelihood of a deal in the stage closing. (Pipedrive doesn’t use past data to automatically calculate these probabilities.)

Pipedrive CRM: Generating custom reports

Navigating the reporting module within Pipedrive was just as straightforward. The platform includes a default dashboard and 11 premade reports, which on their own will offer plenty of information for many small businesses. Reports in the dashboard can be rearranged just by dragging and dropping and filtered by date range or a set of employees.

Creating a new report only took a few clicks. Pipedrive offers a set of filters that you can combine with logical operators to create a highly specific dataset, which you can then plot onto several different chart types. Below the charts, you’ll find a summary table with all of the relevant data and an option to export a CSV for further analysis.

All custom reports can be saved and grouped into folders for quick access later.

Alternatives to Pipedrive CRM

Pipedrive stands out for being extremely easy to use. However, for the price, it lacks some advanced features that we’ve seen in comparable CRM software.

One of the most notable competitors to Pipedrive is Zoho CRM, which costs just slightly more than Pipedrive. Zoho CRM offers unlimited pipelines and dashboards just like Pipedrive, but it also offers unlimited workflow automations with its entry-level plan. It also offers email marketing - a critical function of a comprehensive CRM - as a standard feature.

The drawback to Zoho CRM is that its feature-rich interface isn’t easy to use, especially if you’re diving into CRM software for the first time. Our Zoho CRM review found that the platform has a steep learning curve. However, navigating that curve may be worth it if your business needs to know how to prioritize deals or wants to use email marketing to bring in new leads.

Another Pipedrive alternative that’s worth a look is Apptivo. This platform is unusual in that it provides only a basic set of CRM functions, then lets you customize the software with dozens of apps. That’s a major advantage if your business is scaling quickly, since you can easily add features to the software as you need them.

Our Apptivo review also found that this platform is impressively easy to use and offers plenty of customization options when it comes to reporting. The only thing missing in Apptivo is the ability to drag and drop deals through your pipeline. But that’s hardly essential, and for the price - paid Apptivo plans start at $10/user/month compared to $18/user/month for Pipedrive - we think it’s a better choice for most growing businesses.

Pipedrive: Final verdict

Pipedrive is one of the most user-friendly CRM platforms we’ve tested. It’s easy to navigate from the moment you first open the platform and allows you to simply drag and drop deals as they move through your sales pipeline. It’s also highly customizable, offering unlimited deal pipelines and excellent reporting capabilities.

While Pipedrive does a great job at helping your team manage deals and set up meetings with potential clients, we found that it’s much more limited in scope and functionality than competing CRM software. Pipedrive has only the most basic email marketing tools available and doesn’t offer any features for project management. In addition, lead generation features like web forms and chatbots require a paid add-on. 

Ultimately, that means that Pipedrive can work well for businesses that are upgrading to a CRM for the first time. However, it may not be the best option for businesses that are looking for a comprehensive, scalable CRM solution.

For that, we think Zoho CRM or Apptivo are better options. Apptivo in particular stands out because it costs significantly less than Pipedrive and offers much of the same functionality. Apptivo’s platform, which uses apps like building blocks, can also better grow with the needs of your business.

Further reading

For more information about CRM platforms, check out our guide to the best CRM for small business. If none of the software we mentioned in this review fits your business’s needs, we’ve also reviewed industry-leading CRM software from Salesforce and Freshdesk.