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Pipedrive Review
Table of Contents
- Pipedrive is a sales-focused CRM that's specifically designed to grow your business from your sales funnel.
- The AI-powered platform can automate routine tasks and administrative work to let you focus on closing more sales.
- The built-in meeting scheduler allows you to easily share your availability with a prospect and eliminate back-and-forth emails.
- Many key features — like advanced reporting, two-way email syncing and team goals — are included only in higher-tier plans.
- Many important tools — like custom fields, reports and deals — have user limits that could effectively force businesses into a more expensive plan.
- Due to its focus on sales, Pipedrive lacks some marketing and commerce features that are found in other CRMs.
Most customer relationship management (CRM) platforms are designed to serve the differing needs of sales, marketing and customer service professionals. However, Pipedrive CRM was created as a sales-first CRM to meet the needs of sales reps and managers without compromise. Unlike many other CRM systems that limit the number of funnels, Pipedrive offers unlimited pipelines on all plans to accurately reflect your various sales processes, departments and product lines. We chose Pipedrive as the best CRM platform for visual sales pipelines because it gives sales teams the tools they need to nurture leads and collaborate to close more deals.
Pipedrive Editor's Rating:
8.3 / 10
- Ease of use
- 9.2/10
- Feature
- 8.8/10
- Integrations
- 8.9/10
- Pricing
- 9.5/10
- Customer support
- 9/10
Why We Chose Pipedrive CRM as the Best CRM for Visual Sales Pipelines
Although not every company wants a sales-focused CRM platform, those that do will appreciate the features and user experience provided by Pipedrive. The entire platform is built around unlimited visual sales pipelines that can provide anyone at the company with an immediate and accurate view of every deal at every stage. The revenue projection feature shows each deal’s value and progress through the sales pipeline, and monthly totals indicate where attention is needed most.
See your projected revenue at a glance with green status bars that indicate how far each deal has moved through your pipeline. Source: Pipedrive
Pipedrive helps companies that operate on a recurring revenue model — like software-as-a-service businesses built around subscriptions — by allowing them to track annual and monthly recurring payments and integrating the metrics into the forecasts and reports. You can also filter your views to drill down into specific time frames, departments, categories, business units and individual sales reps to make sure the right team members are working on your biggest deals. What’s more, you can add your most frequently used filters to the Favorites tab for easy access.
With a full set of active automations running in the background, simple adjustments — like changing the status of a contact from “warm lead” to “customer” — can trigger a list of follow-up tasks. For example, you can share documents with a client, get notified when documents are opened, and close the deal with automatically requested e-signatures. As with many other features in Pipedrive, these automations can be built using a simple drag-and-drop interface. When you pair this functionality with the group emailing that’s available at some subscription levels, you can launch up to 100 emails per segmented group directly from your CRM dashboard.
Usability
The helpful templates and straightforward navigation make Pipedrive intuitive and easy to use. We appreciate how easy it is to customize dashboards and build workflows, using drag-and-drop elements. The system’s artificial intelligence (AI) assistant also helps create workflow shortcuts and suggests improvements, making it even easier to set up and manage seemingly complex tasks.
However, it’s more challenging to implement and master more advanced features, such as revenue forecasting and complex sequences. While cosmetic customizations are quite straightforward to make, it requires some experience to get the system to accurately reflect industry-specific processes. If you don’t know exactly what you need in a sales pipeline, Pipedrive’s array of options could be overwhelming.
Pipedrive’s LeadBoster add-on allows you to maintain a centralized customer database with a full history of calls, emails, meetings and notes. It also includes simple web forms and chatbots that help you generate quality leads from your website. We liked that you can segment new leads based on multiple predefined criteria and nurture them with fully automated lead-qualification flows and targeted email sequences.
This view shows a list of lessons in Pipedrive’s Sales Pipeline course, which is one of nine available academy courses. Source: Pipedrive
We also really like Pipedrive’s virtual training programs and online video courses, which help users make the most of their CRM system. The course catalog includes dozens of video lessons that teach you how to use the software, manage sales teams, sell more effectively, improve customer communication, market through email, and make sales results easier to predict.
Pipedrive Features
Rotting | Stay aware of idle deals in your pipeline by using Pipedrive’s rotting feature. |
|---|---|
Deal filters | Find unique deal opportunities and manage your team effectively thanks to the software’s wide array of deal filters. |
Automation builder | Automate repetitive tasks and data entry to help you save time and improve efficiency. |
Group emailing | Send templated bulk emails to anyone on your list at any stage in your pipeline. |
Rotting
Pipedrive’s rotting feature enables you to set specific time frames for progressing deals through your sales funnel. If you fail to move the deal to the next stage before the specified rotting time trigger, the system will automatically mark the stagnant deal in red, drawing your attention to a potentially solid lead slipping away due to inactivity. Like many of Pipedrive’s tools, the rotting feature adds another visual element to your sales pipeline, making it easy for everyone in your organization to see the deals’ progress and potential bottlenecks.
Once a deal has rotted, you can schedule a new activity for that deal or edit details such as the expected close date and deal value. Interestingly, the system keeps encouraging you to take action. Taking a second look at a deal that failed to close can allow you to approach it under different circumstances to increase your chances of closing it.
This screen shows the deal rotting feature, with examples of an eight- or one-day time frame. Source: Pipedrive
Deal Filters
Pipedrive’s visual sales pipelines are focused on making sales through the closing of deals. With an abundance of custom fields, deal filters allow you to zoom in on the data that matters most to you. For example, you can review all of your open deals worth at least $10,000 that are tied to one of your social media channels. You can use the expansive criteria to segment your deals or find different types of opportunities to capitalize on. Managers can use this feature to track all warm leads that have not been followed up on to ensure their teams are working effectively. You can also filter by individual rep to make sure team members are updating their deals in a timely manner for transparency.
We appreciate that Pipedrive allows users to save their most frequently used filters in a dedicated Favorites tab, which facilitates access and saves valuable time. We also like that custom filters can be shared with other team members to further streamline the sales process.
Set your conditions to quickly and easily find the deals or customer information you need. Source: Pipedrive
Automation Builder
Time-saving automations are among the most important features in a modern CRM platform. Pipedrive makes it easy to create your own custom automations to eliminate tedious and time-consuming tasks or customize one of the dozens of available templates.
Setting up a new deal from a template takes about two minutes and grants you the potential to save countless hours. It’s easy to build new automations from scratch; a sidebar provides a long list of trigger options or events to determine when to begin an automated action. For example, you can send a templated email when someone’s label changes from “warm lead” to “customer,” and once they reply to it or click a link, you can send a templated follow-up.
We appreciate that you can set up a delay between triggered actions — for example, if you want to send a follow-up message to a lead who hasn’t opened the initial email yet and don’t want to overwhelm them.
Pipedrive makes it easy to set up conditional workflows with its visual automation builder. Source: Pipedrive
Group Emailing
Another key time-saving feature that removes potentially tedious tasks is group emailing. You can contact up to 100 email addresses at one time. The system includes a 30-second delay; it sends the emails over a 50-minute period to prevent your provider from blocking scheduled emails.
Pipedrive allows you to use email templates, create your own, and even share them with your team. When sending a group email, you can ensure each message is personalized by including merge fields, like the contact’s name or the organization’s details.
Group emailing is available in Pipedrive’s deal, contact, contact timeline and activity lists. If you run into an incomplete contact card, Pipedrive will notify you of missing information to ensure you can reach everyone on your desired list. Once your email has been sent, you can view each one in your sent section or through each customer’s timeline.
You can also track whether an email has been opened so you can send a timely follow-up. If you want to nurture your leads with marketing workflows, you can add the paid Campaigns feature, which allows you to design, send, track and analyze targeted email marketing campaigns.
Pipedrive will let you know about incomplete information in your contact list before you send a group email. Source: Pipedrive
Pipedrive Cost
With five paid options, Pipedrive segments its features and tools a bit more than most of its competitors, which offer three or four dedicated CRM plans. In addition to the standard features with each plan, Pipedrive offers a handful of extra tools.
For example, the web visitor add-on can determine which organizations are browsing your website, how your visitors found you and how long they stayed. Most of the add-ons, including the lead-boosting tool and the Smart Docs contract signing tool, are billed once per company instead of per user. This helps curb costs when you’re customizing your plan.
Plan | Starting price (per user per month, billed annually) | Features |
|---|---|---|
Essentials | $14 | Lead management, deal management, unlimited pipelines, multilanguage support, deal rotting and alerts, 400+ integrations, one visual dashboard, 15 reports per user, 30 custom fields, single sign-on, two-factor authentication, Sales Assistant AI, product catalog, mobile apps, calendar sync, automatic call logging and 3,000 open deals |
Advanced | $39 | Everything in Essentials, plus 30 active automations per user, two-way email syncing, custom email templates, bulk email, a meeting scheduler, automated sequences, web-to-mobile calls, recurring revenue reports, 100 custom fields and 10,000 open deals per company |
Professional | $49 | Everything in Advanced, plus the Smart Docs add-on, advanced customization, AI-powered email tools, required fields, contacts timeline, 60 active automations per user, automatic lead assignments, revenue forecast reports, team goals, opportunity alerts, unlimited dashboards and 100,000 open deals per company |
Power | $64 | Everything in Professional, plus free project add-ons, customer support via phone and 24/7 live chat, custom onboarding services, 500 custom fields, 250 reports per user, 90 active automations per user and 200,000 open deals per company |
Enterprise | $99 | Everything in Power, plus unlimited reports, dashboards, open deals and customizations, security alerts, and 180 active automations per user |
Pipedrive Setup
Pipedrive makes it relatively easy to set up your account. True to its core focus, the first element that the system asks you to customize is your pipeline. Once that’s out of the way, you can import your leads from a spreadsheet or a previous CRM, invite your teammates, sync your email, and start customizing your system. Most companies should be able to get up and running and fully implement the CRM system within a few days, while larger accounts or those that require heavy automation may take up to a month to fine-tune.
Templates make it easy to build and customize your sales funnels, and many elements can be updated using drag-and-drop functionality. However, other tools — including custom field triggers, deal decay and forecasting — can take time to implement properly. The upper-tier Power and Enterprise plans include Pipedrive’s implementation program, which offers a personalized and guided onboarding experience.
Pipedrive Customer Service
Pipedrive includes 24/7 chatbot customer support at all subscription levels, as well as live chat on the Advanced plan and higher. According to the Pipedrive product specialists we spoke with during our live demo, issues are usually resolved within 48 hours. To access phone support, you’ll need to subscribe to one of the two upper-tier plans, which start at $64 per user per month.
Support is available in English, Spanish, Portuguese, French and German, with phone support limited to English and Portuguese. Pipedrive also has an online self-help resource center with detailed academy-style courses, video tutorials, webinars, blogs and an active community forum. We appreciate that you can access support materials and the chat right from the CRM by opening the Quick Help section in the top navigation bar.
Pipedrive Drawbacks
Although we really like Pipedrive’s focus on supporting sales teams, its tagline, “the first CRM designed by salespeople, for salespeople,” might exclude other departments that regularly interact with customers. As a result, the platform’s Kanban-style funnels may be too focused on the sales process to be the right fit for everyone.
Pipedrive attempts to compensate for this drawback by offering multiple pipelines, which can theoretically be tailored to different departments, and a project management add-on. However, these features seem like a workaround rather than dedicated functionality. Larger businesses with separate departments for marketing, customer service and sales may prefer a CRM such as Salesforce or NetSuite, which offer wider sets of tools to interact with customers in long-term marketing and service scenarios.
Some features — including active user automations, custom fields, insight reports, teams and open deals — have usage limits. For example, the entry-level Essentials plan limits you to 3,000 open deals and does not allow active automations. Similar limitations include the number of available scheduling links you can share with a prospect, which are restricted to one on the Advanced plan and not included in the Essentials tier. Some businesses will require one of the middle- or upper-tier plans to use the features they need.
Methodology
Our editorial team and contributing writers considered all of the major CRM software providers for review. After performing our initial research into each platform, we spent many hours participating in live product demos and testing each platform. Ultimately, we identified the providers that stood out from the crowd to help small business owners and managers choose the best CRM platform for their needs.
We took a deeper dive into our top performers to glean greater insight into the features and tools that separate these CRM systems from the competition. Pipedrive CRM is one of the few sales-focused platforms we reviewed. The customizable dashboards and user experience are built around sales funnels that emphasize deals and help sales teams identify the best opportunities to close a sale. We selected Pipedrive as the best CRM system for visual sales pipelines thanks to its ability to track the entire sales process at a glance, its easy-to-build automations, and its AI-powered tools to help close more deals.
Pipedrive FAQs
Overall Value
We recommend Pipedrive CRM for …
- Sales teams and any business looking for a sales-focused CRM platform.
- Small and midsize companies that are searching for an affordable CRM system.
- Businesses with operations built around a sales pipeline.
We don’t recommend Pipedrive CRM for …
- Businesses that are looking for an all-in-one CRM to support sales, marketing and customer service teams equally.
- Small companies that need phone support.
- Small and new businesses without enough reliable sales data to develop effective forecasting capabilities.
Nadia Reckmann contributed to this review.
