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Sales pipeline software are CRMs offering visual, customizable pipelines that help salespeople manage leads, opportunities, and customer relationships throughout the sales process. The top pipeline software also provide sales forecasting and analytics tools, basic marketing functionality, workflow automation, and more. To help you choose the right one, we’ve developed our list of the best pipeline software available, including an overall winner.
Here are the six best pipeline software for sellers and teams:
In our evaluation, we found that the overall best option is Zoho CRM, scoring the highest for core features, customization, and integrations while tying for cost. Check out how each software fared across all six categories below, including their primary use cases, pricing plans, and summary of features. To see how we assessed each option, jump down to our explanation.
Note: All per-user prices are with a one-year commitment unless noted.
Provides highly-customizable features focused on sales, marketing, and analytics.
Price Range: Free to $52 per user, per month (15- to 30-day free trial)
Zoho CRM is fully-featured sales and marketing software with a multichannel lead management system. Its smart web forms can capture leads from social media and landing pages, then place them into your sales pipeline and send them automatic, relevant nurturing emails. As you convert those leads into prospects and customers, track your progress using sophisticated but affordable pipeline tools such as list views, reporting dashboards, and AI sales forecasting.
Even though Zoho CRM takes our top spot, some of its tools are difficult to use. If you need more intuitive software with a good mix of pricing and features, check out Freshsales, which is our top-rated CRM software.
Helps you manage multiple sales pipelines efficiently through smart automation features.
Price Range: Free to $69 per user, per month (21-day free trial)
Freshsales by Freshworks is a visual sales pipeline software that uses AI-powered sales tools to help you nurture leads and close deals faster. Freddy AI's deal insights help teams analyze historical customer data through email content, call transcripts, and interactions and assign prediction tags to automatically categorize leads. Using these tags, you can prioritize promising leads by identifying how and when to engage with them or by running tailored campaigns.
While Freshsales has excellent AI-powered sales tools, it offers a limited amount of unique AI interactions even in its highest tiers. If having more of these is essential for you, check out Zoho CRM for its Zia AI assistant.
Offers user-friendly tools for automating deals and customizing milestones in your pipeline.
Price Range: Free to $73.59 per user, per month
EngageBay is an intuitive CRM and sales platform that offers powerful tools for managing multiple deals and pipelines. Track various products or services and create milestones for each deal, then customize each stage by integrating information on deal value, probability, close date, and more. Monitor your sales process with its list and milestone views, and pull advanced metrics from your dashboard for real-time updates sorted by revenue, funnels, and milestones.
Although EngageBay offers a user-friendly system to track your sales pipeline, it doesn’t have a built-in AI sales assistant for powerful automations. If you need software with AI, try Freshsales, which offers list and kanban views plus certain sales functions via Freddy AI.
Helps you store, track, and manage your contacts on a highly visual platform.
Price Range: $10 to $24+ per user, per month (14-day free trial)
monday sales CRM is a highly-customizable software offered by monday.com, featuring colorful boards that help teams keep track of leads and prospects. Its visual contact management tool provides a full picture of the sales process with an instant overview of contact details, deal progress, and more. Use its kanban-style boards to move deals into the next stage of your sales pipeline, then see each lead’s status and follow-up deadlines via color-coded status tags.
While monday sales CRM is a great sales pipeline tool, it lacks the customization and automation that other CRMs tend to have. If you need a CRM with powerful automation across all tiers, check out Freshsales, which is also one of our best contact management software.
Provides powerful add-ons for sales pipeline management and lead generation.
Price Range: $14 to $99 per user, per month (14-day trial)
Pipedrive is a visual software that includes visual pipeline management, lead generation, and sales automation features. One of its defining features is the ability to pay for add-on upgrades a la carte, such as LeadBooster, which captures high-quality inbound and outbound leads using chatbots, prospector tools, and web forms. Its Campaigns add-on then helps you create and send customizable email campaigns based on leads’ engagement with your previous emails.
Although Pipedrive doesn't offer a free plan, its most affordable tier includes customizable pipelines and an AI-powered sales assistant. However, lower tiers have limited reporting and forecasting features. For a robust free plan and affordable tiers, check out Zoho CRM.
Offers a free-for-life plan with robust sales and marketing features, among others.
Price Range: Free to $1,200+ per month (Sales Hub)
HubSpot CRM is a fully-featured free software for sales, marketing, and service. Add deals to a visual pipeline from contact records, then the CRM will autopopulate them with relevant info to eliminate manual data entry. Also included in the free tier are pipeline tools like custom fields, reports and dashboards, and email templates. If you upgrade into Sales Hub for more users or features, you’ll maintain access to its free marketing, service, CMS, and operation tools.
While HubSpot offers a robust free plan, its higher tiers and upgrades can get pricier than other softwares. For those needing more cost-effective yet feature-rich upgrade options, try Zoho CRM for sales and marketing tools or Freshsales for more sales-focused features.
The best sales pipeline software offer features such as:
Sales pipelines are visual representations of your sales process stages and where each lead is within them. Pipeline management tools help you track these stages and identify bottlenecks and opportunities to close more deals.
Qualify, analyze, and nurture leads using various strategies — for instance, using web forms to capture leads from landing pages, prioritizing the ones most likely to close, then engaging with them via email, phone, and more, and tracking their activity along the way.
Store and organize lead and customer data from different channels into a centralized location with this feature. You can also see a complete picture of each contact’s interactions, which helps you meet the exact needs of your prospects and clients.
Manage repetitive tasks that are essential to the sales process, such as sending follow-up emails, nurturing leads, and tracking opportunities. By setting up triggers or sequences, teams can automate manual tasks and focus more on increasing sales or refining sales strategies.
This feature helps you predict future sales and revenue using historical data, current pipeline status, and external data sources. It also enables teams to track individual sales progress and make informed decisions to improve sales strategies and meet their revenue goals.
To determine the best CRM software for salespeople needing to track their pipelines, we divided our scoring into six major categories, each of which included several weighted subcriteria. We then assigned scores for each subcriteria, which totaled an overall score out of five, and the sales pipeline software scoring the highest was identified as our winner. Finally, we determined a primary use case for each option that scored highly enough to make it onto our list.
The ability to view your sales pipeline will change the way you do business. A visual sales pipeline tracks sales activities and helps you identify tasks that are most effective in getting a deal to close. Many CRMs include them as part of their suite of CRM features, but our list will help you find the one that will fit your needs. If you’re specifically looking for software to help you analyze sales activities and deal stages, read our review of the best sales tracking software.
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