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Pipedrive and Salesforce are high-quality CRMs, each with unique advantages for different buyers. Pipedrive is affordable and easy to use, and its features are focused on the sales aspects of contact management. Meanwhile, Salesforce is pricier and more complex but has a breadth of robust features, including functionality for sales as well as marketing and support. Learning about the differences between these CRMs will help you select the right one for you.
Here are the situations when businesses use Pipedrive or Salesforce:
Although Pipedrive and Salesforce are both great choices in general, it could be that neither is right for your business. If you’re looking for other options, read our articles on the best overall CRM solutions and the best industry-specific CRMs. Otherwise, read on for at-a-glance information about these two CRMs.
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Price Range (Annual) | $14 to $99 per user, per month | $25 to $330 per user, per month |
Core Features | Essential CRM features, but a focus on the sales tools | Deep functionality spanning sales, marketing, support |
Ease of Use | Easy to set up and use, even for those new to CRMs | Steep learning curve, even for experienced CRM users |
Customer Service | 24/7 email and chat support for all plans; phone support starts at Power plan | Business hours phone, email, and chat support for all plans |
Reporting | Focused on revealing insights about sales performance | Custom and template reports for all CRM activities |
Sales Automation | Can automate various sales and communication actions | Build custom workflows to automate any CRM task |
Mobile App | CRM app with great task management features | Find information and get AI-backed analytics on the go |
App Integrations | Integrate with 400+ apps via Pipedrive Marketplace | Access over 7,000 apps to further customize platform via AppExchange |
Visit Pipedrive | Visit Salesforce |
Pipedrive and Salesforce are similar in many ways, but they contrast in various dimensions as well. Continue reading to learn more about the differences between the two platforms in six main criteria as well as in crucial CRM features such as sales automation, reporting, and mobile application, or skip down to see how we evaluated each software.
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Free-for-Life Option | No | No |
Free Trial | 14 days | 30 days |
Starting Price (Annual) | $14 per user, per month | $25 per user, per month |
Enterprise Price (Annual) | $99 per user, per month | $330 per user, per month |
Add-Ons | From $6.70 per user, per month | From $5 per user, per month |
Monthly Billing | Yes | No |
Visit Pipedrive | Visit Salesforce |
Winner: Pipedrive is the thriftier choice because of its low-priced plans, especially its Advanced plan, which gives affordable access to CRM automation.
Pipedrive is an economical option for businesses in that its plans start at $14 per user, per month, offering basic contact management features, and end at $99 per user, per month, giving users access to advanced customization, reporting, and support. Notably, its entry point to workflow automation functionality is lower than that of most other CRMs, clocking in at $29 per user, per month with the Advanced plan. Pipedrive also has a 14-day free trial.
Salesforce is the more expensive choice, especially for businesses that want complete access to platform customization and automation. Its Unlimited plan is $330 per user, per month. While you can get Salesforce’s Starter plan for the low cost of $25 per user, per month, this is best for users who just want basic CRM features like contact and deal management. But, because of Salesforce’s complexity, these buyers might be better off purchasing a more user-friendly CRM.
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Contact Management | Overview of lead’s activity, communications, and history | Holds all crucial data about each of your contacts |
Lead Management | Lead pool filtering, integrated chatbots, lead prioritization | Automatic lead scoring and routing, lead tracking |
Pipeline Management | Visual pipeline view, custom pipelines reflecting process | Sales opportunity tracking, activity-needed notifications |
Advanced Features | AI Sales Assistant, sales goal setting, custom fields | Einstein GPT, marketing campaign tracking |
Visit Pipedrive | Visit Salesforce |
Winner: Salesforce’s cross-departmental feature set beats out Pipedrive when it comes to its depth and flexibility.
Built by salespeople for salespeople, Pipedrive has all the CRM tools a sales team needs. It helps you perform the right actions at the right time to move deals forward while providing you with basic reporting to measure performance, standard automation to eliminate repetitive tasks, and sales tech stack tools to optimize your sales processes. Where Pipedrive’s functionality falls short is in other aspects of customer management, primarily marketing and business analytics.
Salesforce, on the other hand, has features for marketing and customer support as well, making it a more holistic CRM. And when it comes to sales, Salesforce still outshines Pipedrive, providing its users with top-notch lead and opportunity management tools for tracking deals and deeper analytics to uncover ways to close more sales and get more out of the software. Its Enterprise and Unlimited plans offer incredibly powerful reporting and automation functionality.
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Ease of Setup | Fairly quick and simple | Labor-intensive |
Learning Curve | Gentle | Steep |
Common Positive Reviews | Clean interface, visual pipelines, simple navigation | Customizable, easy to use features once learned |
Common Negative Reviews | Limited AI, analytics, email marketing capabilities, and integrations | Setup can be confusing, hard to get team-wide adoption |
Knowledge Base | ✔ | ✔ |
Community Forums | ✔ | ✔ |
Certification Programs | Pipedrive Academy | Trailhead Academy |
Visit Pipedrive | Visit Salesforce |
Winner: Pipedrive is one of the easiest CRMs to use because of its clean user interface, simple setup process, and visual pipelines.
Pipedrive was built from a salesperson’s perspective with a remarkably easy-to-learn user interface and intuitive navigation, which receives glowing reviews from real users online. You can also customize its Kanban-style pipelines to visualize and track a deal’s progress from start to finish, as well as drag and drop contacts into different stages. Users can leverage its blogs, knowledge base, and forums to find answers and learn CRM courses via Pipedrive Learn.
Salesforce is notoriously difficult to learn in full, but once you’ve mastered it, the platform is pretty simple to navigate. Of course, its sprawling feature set makes this education quite the undertaking, inspiring many users to join Salesforce’s Trailhead Academy or, unfortunately, just give up on some of its advanced functionality. Managers might run into adoption problems where their team isn’t using the platform to its fullest, which can reduce the ROI in the CRM.
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Standard Business Hours | 24/7 support | Weekdays during local business hours |
Support Channels | Phone (Power and Enterprise plans only), email, live chat | Phone, email, live chat for all plans |
Visit Pipedrive | Visit Salesforce |
Winner: Pipedrive gets the nod here because of the overall quality of its support staff based on customer reviews.
Pipedrive provides access to email and live chat support 24/7, regardless of your plan, and its Power and Enterprise plans add phone support to the mix. Notably, compared with Salesforce, its average quality of support ratings on review sites such as G2 and Capterra are higher, and its average score is tied to TrustRadius. On top of its inclusions per plan and great ratings, users state that Pipedrive’s staff is quick to respond and comprehensive in their assistance.
All Salesforce plans come with email, phone, and live chat support during local business hours. Regardless of their current plan, users can pay extra for premium support that includes features like 24/7 support, one-on-one sessions, faster response time, and even discounts on Trailhead Academy courses. For larger businesses that can afford this premier option, Salesforce might be a good option. But companies that want to avoid extra costs might want to look elsewhere.
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Basic Report Templates | All plans | All plans |
Custom Reporting | Professional: Max 150 reports per user Enterprise: Unlimited | All plans |
Advanced Reporting | Professional and Enterprise | Enterprise and Unlimited |
Reporting Dashboard | Essential and Advanced: 1 dashboard per user Professional and Enterprise: Unlimited dashboards | Limit of 20 reports per dashboard |
Visit Pipedrive | Visit Salesforce |
Winner: Salesforce gives you reporting functionality to extract insights about your opportunities, customers, and performance to make data-driven choices.
Pipedrive offers basic deal, activity, and goal reporting templates across all plans, allowing users to find insights like the likelihood of a deal closing and why, the average number of cold calls it takes to generate a lead, or how close they are to their revenue quota. Pipedrive only starts to offer advanced reporting like custom fields and reports or revenue forecast reports at the Professional tier. Ultimately though, its reports are easy to build but lack sophistication.
Salesforce, by contrast, gives all users the fields, filters, groupings, and charts to build deeply insightful custom reports on almost anything they’d like to know regarding sales performance, deal management, or forecasting. Its advanced features, reserved for its Enterprise and Ultimate plans, include cross filters and bucketing that allow users to easily organize data. Plus, Einstein GPT provides reps with advice on what actions to take or the score of a lead.
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Workflow Editor Interface | Visual drag-and-drop | Visual point-and-click |
Workflow Types | Updating deals, sending emails, deal assignment | Deal management, task creation, approval requests |
Workflow Rule Limits | Essential: 0 rules Advanced: Up to 30 rules Professional: Up to 60 rules Power: Up to 90 rules Enterprise: Up to 180 rules | Starter: 0 flows Professional: Up to 5 flows Enterprise: No limits Unlimited: No limits |
Workflow Templates | ✔ | ✔ |
Workflows From Scratch | ✔ | ✔ |
Visit Pipedrive | Visit Salesforce |
Winner: Salesforce wins because it can automate numerous CRM and sales tasks, helping managers to enforce standard operating procedures and reps to save time.
Pipedrive offers simple automation features meant to increase the productivity of salespeople. Its Professional plan and above come with 36 premade automation templates and customizable workflow templates that can automate five types of tasks: creating and assigning activities, sending emails, creating opportunities, moving deals to new stages, and converting leads to deals. However, its automation is limited in relation to comparable CRMs.
Salesforce, on the other hand, has more complex automation functionality. Its Process Builder provides a point-and-click interface where you can create processes to automate countless administrative and client communication tasks, from deal discount approval processes to email follow-up. You can also create workflows that guide salespeople through their deals, recommending the right action to take next, thereby enforcing your best practices.
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Mobile App Cost | Free | Free |
Mobile App Platforms | iOS and Android | iOS and Android |
Mobile Sync With CRM | ✔ | ✔ |
Offline Mode | Multiple items | Multiple items |
Standout Features | Voice notes, task management, email templates, visual pipelines, smart contact data | AI-backed insights, customizable interface, marketing features, dashboards and reports |
Visit Pipedrive | Visit Salesforce |
Winner: Salesforce wins this category thanks to its customizable user interface and access to AI-powered analytics while on the go.
Pipedrive offers a simple mobile app designed to help salespeople stay on schedule, track essential tasks, and find and update contact information in real time, even offline. The organized dashboard shows reps their upcoming calls or meetings, and the search function allows them to quickly find notes or information to prepare for those events. It also comes with convenient features like pre-written email templates to reschedule meetings as well as voice notes.
Salesforce offers an easy-to-navigate mobile app that makes it easy for salespeople to log emails and calls and access critical information about their prospects while on the move. Reps also are able to pull up real-time reports on the app, along with dashboards displaying important metrics. Reps can also easily customize the layout to personalize it to their needs (no coding required). The coolest of all is the ability to talk to Einstein GPT to make data-driven decisions.
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App Marketplace | Pipedrive Marketplace | Salesforce AppExchange |
Number of Total Apps | 400+ | 7,000+ |
Number of Free Apps | 100+ | 1,700+ |
Visit Pipedrive | Visit Salesforce |
Winner: Salesforce edges Pipedrive in app integrations because of the sheer number of apps users can add to customize their experience.
Pipedrive supports a healthy number of third-party integrations with many popular tools like PandaDoc, Slack, and QuickBooks via Pipedrive Marketplace. Users can integrate with 400+ integrations and choose from various app categories like lead generation, phone solutions, email marketing, and more. Pipedrive also offers an API for users to build out their own apps.
Salesforce integrates with apps most reps are already using, like Google Cloud, Mailchimp, and LinkedIn. Moreover, the Salesforce AppExchange offers 7,000+ pre-integrated apps you can install to the CRM to further tailor the platform to your specific needs. Over 1,700 of these apps are free, but the rest require payment, typically in the form of a subscription.
Pipedrive and Salesforce are both excellent CRM options. But some people still might be better off selecting a different CRM altogether. Below are some types of businesses and teams that may want to avoid buying either of the two platforms.
The following types of businesses and teams could be a poor fit for Pipedrive:
If Pipedrive seems like a poor fit, don’t immediately hop over to Salesforce’s website. Instead, take a look at our complete Pipedrive review for an editorially-independent analysis and user roundup. You can also check out the reasons below why you might not consider Salesforce.
The businesses below may want to consider a CRM other than Salesforce:
Don't be too quick to discount Salesforce if these use cases sound like you. Instead, check out our full Salesforce CRM review for an independent analysis of the software and its alternatives. If neither option sounds like a good choice, check out our top-rated alternatives below.
Pipedrive and Salesforce are both high-quality platforms with thousands of happy customers, but there’s a chance neither is right for you. Whether you want a free CRM or more affordable CRM software with marketing and project management features, you have options. The below software platforms are the top substitutes for Pipedrive and Salesforce:
Freshsales is our top-rated CRM overall, which offers a great alternative for those needing robust sales features and an easy-to-use interface for a reasonable price. They offer a free version for up to three users as well as premium paid tiers with advanced AI automation and lead generation features. Check them out today to see if it's a better option for you. However, if you need a more robust free version with a better mix of marketing features, try HubSpot CRM.
Check out our lists of the best Pipedrive alternatives and the best Salesforce alternatives to learn about the other options and pick which is best for your business. In the articles, you’ll learn their pricing, feature sets, use cases, and more.
To help you choose which CRM is more suitable for your business, we picked six main factors that are most important for sellers who need a strong sales CRM. From there, we identified six weighted categories, divided them into key subcriteria, and assigned an overall score out of five to determine the winner of each category.
We placed most emphasis on core features and pricing since salespeople who are considering Pipedrive and Salesforce need an affordable CRM software with robust sales-focused tools and options to upgrade as they scale. Next, we looked into the platform’s ease of use, customer support available, customization capabilities, as well as advanced features offered.
We assessed each CRM’s feature set, paying special attention to the availability and functionality of essential tools for pipeline and contact management, sales automation, reports, and more.
We took into account starting rates, premium pricing, free plans and trials if available, as well as add-ons and billing options.
We pored over user reviews and evaluated the user interface to assess how easy it is to set up, learn, and use each CRM. We also looked into each option’s knowledge base, training and certifications, and community forums.
This reflects the level of access to customer service reps via live chat, phone, and email. We also checked real user feedback and ratings on certified review sites.
We looked into how many third-party integrations each platform offers, the ease of making these integrations, and the malleability of the CRM software.
Does the CRM offer lead scoring and routing, forecasting, artificial intelligence, and more?
Although Salesforce wins when it comes to features and customization, Pipedrive is on top for usability and affordability. Ultimately, the ideal CRM will solve your business’s current issues, fit into your budget, and offer tools that align with your team’s goals. Consider scheduling a live demo with one of their sales reps to learn more about one of these software, or read our guide on the top CRM features to know which tools you should look for in each CRM option.
This article was written by Sam Rinko and updated by Kezia Jungco.
Sam is a former SaaS sales rep turned freelance writer. He spent his career selling real estate technology to C-suite executives before switching over to blogging, where he now covers sales, marketing, and small business topics. Sam specializes in lead generation, lead nurturing, and deal closing articles for Selling Signals. When he’s not researching the latest sales trends, he’s either penning short stories, hiking, or reading in NYC’s Washington Square Park.
Selling Signals delivers actionable advice for sales and marketing professionals. Learn strategies that help you hit targets, strengthen customer relationships, and win more business. Get expert advice on lead generation, sales processes, CRM software, sales management, and account management directly to your inbox.
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