Pipedrive vs Salesforce: Pick the Best CRM for Your Needs

Pipedrive is an economical option for businesses in that its plans start at $14.90 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 $24.90 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 Ultimate plan is $300 per user, per month. While you can get Salesforce’s Essential 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.

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 Ultimate plans offer incredibly powerful reporting and automation functionality.

Pipedrive was built from a salesperson’s perspective. It’s remarkably easy to learn and use, courtesy of its organized user interface and intuitive navigation. It also offers easily customizable, Kanban-style pipelines. That means salespeople can easily visualize and track a deal’s progress from start to finish and drag and drop contacts into different stages. All this makes Pipedrive a great choice for companies wanting complete buy-in from their sales team.

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.

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, its Einstein AI assistant provides reps with advice on what actions to take or the score of a lead.

Pipedrive offers simple automation features meant to increase the productivity of salespeople. Its Professional plan and above come with 36 premade automation templates, 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.

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). Coolest of all is the ability to talk to Einstein AI to make data-driven decisions.

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 1,200 of these apps are free, but the rest require payment, typically in the form of a subscription.

Pipedrive provides access to email and live chat support 24/7 regardless of your plan, and its Enterprise plan adds phone support to the mix. Notably, its average quality of support rating on the popular product review site G2 is 8.3/10, while Salesforce’s is 7.9. Customers commonly state that Pipedrive’s staff is quick to respond and comprehensive in their assistance. On top of live help, Pipedrive users can use video tutorials and the knowledge base to find answers.

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 to 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.