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The CRM for small + medium teams (200 or less) that are using Microsoft 365.
Pipedrive is known for its simplicity and visual sales pipeline management. We typically recommend Copper CRM for Google Workspace users, and Pipedrive for Microsoft 365 users.
When comparing Pipedrive to Copper, HubSpot, and Salesforce, Pipedrive has taken the approach of heavily focusing on the CRM for sales-focused teams. Because of this, a lot of Pipedrive's features are centered around helping sales teams close more deals.
Pipedrive has an activity-based selling approach. Like with all CRMs, you can track activities such as calls, texts, emails, DMs, and meetings. But Pipedrive takes it a step further and encourages sales teams to set these activities as future tasks to optimize the chances of closing a deal through follow-up.
While it makes sense in theory, when we've used their activity based selling approach, the CRM very much ended up being overloaded with activities (tasks) and the manual logging + creating of your next activity was manual and quite time consuming, not to mention a tad kludgy (slow).
Pipedrive offers customizable web forms that can be used for lead generation, which is something you can't currently get with Copper (although we hear it's coming soon 👀). These forms can be directly linked to the sales pipeline making following up with leads a pretty seamless process.
Pipedrive includes a built-in calling feature, allowing users to make and track calls directly within the CRM. That said, this is only available for the higher paid tiers, and we'd say using a VoIP that was built specifically for the job, like Dialpad or Aircall, is a much better experience.
Overall, Pipedrive is designed with simplicity in mind, making it more approachable for small to medium-sized businesses that require a straightforward CRM solution without the complexity that might come with Salesforce or even HubSpot.
The marketing automation tool (and CRM) for mid + large teams (200–1,000) who require a robust and all-in-one tool like Salesforce.
HubSpot CRM offers a broad range of marketing, sales, and service tools, often appealing to businesses looking for an all-in-one inbound marketing solution. In general, if you are a small team (under 200 employees), HubSpot CRM is likely too robust and you can likely get away with using a CRM like Pipedrive or Copper. Not to mention, with HubSpot you can easily end up paying $40-$60k in subscription costs alone (after their heavily discounted first-year offer).
HubSpot is known for its comprehensive inbound marketing tools, including email marketing and marketing automation. The marketing automation features are also deeply integrated within the CRM, with the idea that marketing and sales teams can more easily work together, so if your business relies heavily on marketing automation and sales, it's probably one of the best scenarios for when to use HubSpot.
HubSpot has continued to add to its inbound marketing tools, building features that help with content creation, SEO, social media but there are generally sub-par features. HubSpot also includes a native CMS platform, allowing you to create, manage, and optimize your website's content directly within the HubSpot ecosystem, but again, it's not something we would encourage. In general, HubSpot is a well-resourced software company that continues to build features in all directions, trying to get businesses more and more hooked on their platform but it doesn't mean they are the best features 😅
HubSpot provides tools for marketing, sales, customer service, and content management, all integrated into one platform. While Salesforce offers similar breadth, HubSpot's platform is more user-friendly and less complex to set up.
HubSpot provides a more user-friendly interface for analytics, particularly for marketing data, with a focus on inbound marketing metrics than it's alternatives.
Overall, if your business can benefit from marketing automation and sales working together, HubSpot could be helpful to consider at a certain scale. If you have a more relationship based business, where marketing automation isn't as core, then one of the other alternatives like Pipedrive or Copper would be much better suited.
folk is a simple yet powerful spreadsheet-like CRM for individuals.
folk CRM is a great CRM alternative for professionals and teams who want to prioritize detailed contact organization and collaborative contact management.
folk is the only CRM on this list that would also be suited for individual professionals who want to manage their personal networks as well as smaller teams.
Through folk's Chrome extension, folk offers one of the easiest ways to add contacts to the CRM. Once installed, you can add contacts to folk from LinkedIn, X and Gmail with a click of a button. folk's enrich feature will also help you find the correct contact details for the person you just added to the CRM.
folk has a beautiful design and is quite intuitive to use. You can easily add contacts to different groups, write notes about personal interactions, and easily bulk email contacts if needed.
They also recently added Magic Fields, which allows you to write a prompt, and AI will help enrich that field for you. Like with all AI, it's still experimental, but something that can help get the ball rolling when it comes to writing cold yet personalized emails from scratch, for example.
Try folk for free. (Use code FOLKXEFFICIENT for 10% off your first year).
The CRM for enterprise teams (1,000+) with highly complex processes.
Salesforce is known for its extensive customization and scalability, targeting larger enterprises with complex CRM needs.
Salesforce can be tailored to fit the needs of large enterprises and complex organizational structures, more so than any other CRM on the market. If you're an enterprise with 1000+ employees with complex processes, you'll likely want to use Salesforce.
At this scale, you'll work with a Salesforce consultant that will help you configure the CRM for your specific business needs. Expect to spend a couple hundred thousand dollars to invest in a proper Salesforce consultant to help map your processes to it.
The CRM for enterprise teams (1,000+) with highly complex processes.
Monday.com markets itself as one of the best all-in-one project management tools. Monday has done a good job at giving Asana a run for their money when comparing Monday vs Asana head-to-head. Monday.com has built robust project management features that an enterprise can use, yet they also really hit the ground running with amazing marketing to appeal to the average business owner.
Many folks are drawn to Monday because of their great marketing, pretty user interface with lots of vibrant colors that seem to make project management more fun. But in reality, like Asana, it's not a super opinionated project management software tool, meaning that you can "set it up however you want" which can be confusing for an average business that doesn't have a dedicated project manager on their team.
Monday has highly customizable workspaces and dashboards and because of this can accommodate super complex projects. For example, teams that want advanced project management features like risk registers, RACI charts, retro logs, submittal/RFI/ASI logs, dashboards for PMO-Level, and file versions would enjoy Monday. Monday also has a ton of native integrations with third party tools like Slack, Google Sheets, Jira, and Salesforce among many others.
With Monday, you'll get all your typical task list views that other project management tools offer, including gantt charts, and calendar views. Also, dashboards can be customized with various widgets for more dynamic reporting and data visualization, offering a more comprehensive overview of project metrics and insights.
Monday and ClickUp are the two project management tools that offer native time tracking. While we prefer dedicated apps for time tracking, (like Harvest), if you're looking for a project management tool with time tracking, Monday would be an Asana alternative to consider.
If you're looking for a more traditional project management tool as an Asana alternative, check out Monday.
Get started with Monday for free.
Monday is first and foremost a project management software, but in their efforts to gain more market share, they expanded into the CRM category. The main reason someone may want to use Monday as a CRM is if they are already using Monday for project management, and want to stay within the Monday ecosystem. Because the CRM + project management software are built by the same company, they integrate seamlessly which is the main benefit.
In general, we don't recommend Monday as a CRM as you're going to get a much better experience with a tool that was built primarily to be a CRM (not an after thought). You'd be much better with the other CRM alternatives listed here, including Copper, Pipedrive, HubSpot or Salesforce (enterprise).
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The CRM for enterprise teams (1,000+) with highly complex processes.
Notion is part of a category of apps often referred to as an "all-in-one", for which we aren't particularly fans of.
The main problem we have with this is it feels more like a cop-out when asked to define what you are—we do everything.
Notion is first and foremost a knowledge base app, or a more simply put, a more advanced note taking app.
Start your free trial of Notion here.
Because of Notion's flexibility, you are technically able to use it for task management or project management but in terms of functionality, it doesn't compete with the likes of Motion, Sunsama, Akiflow, Asana, Monday, ClickUp, etc.
Those who tend to lean towards using Notion for any sort of task management or project management tend to be more technical and like "building tools". This means that the majority of time spent is building the task management tool, rather than...you know, just getting your work done 😄 Therefore, it takes the productivity out of productivity app for most teams.
We'd say you're better off with any other alternative listed other than Notion in this category.
Because Notion can technically be customized to "be anything", some use it as a CRM—although we don't recommend it for this category either. While Notion can be used for basic contact management, it lacks proper CRM features like email integration (one of the main features of a proper CRM). A CRM should ingest all your teams emails, so that anyone at the company can view communication history, making it useful for sales and customer support teams especially.
Further, trying to use Notion as a CRM will likely lead to poor adoption for the team, especially since it has little guardrails and the setup and configuration of how it use it falls on one person at the company (typically someone with little product experience).
All this being said, if you're tempted to use Notion as a CRM, check out folk instead. It offers a minimal learning curve and you can likely be up and running, using it within the day.
Airtable is a database (you can use it as a replacement to Google Sheets for example). Because of it's versatility, some folks get excited about the idea of what Airtable can do since it is almost endlessly customizable.
Because of Airtable's flexibility, you are technically able to use it for task management or project management but in terms of functionality, it doesn't compete with the likes of Motion, Sunsama, Akiflow, Asana, Monday, ClickUp, etc.
Airtable won't work well as a project management for complex projects, it will easily become confusing to navigate. While Airtable might work for very basic project management if you're a super small team (1-3), the time you spend setting it up and figuring out "how to best use it" is better spent on actually getting your work done. With that, using another alternative on this list that is more opinionated in terms of project management and has more features pre-built for managing projects, will be a much better choice long-term.
Airtable is not a traditional CRM software, it's first and foremost a database (you can use it as a replacement to Google Sheets for example). Just like some people use Google Sheets as a CRM, you can also "technically" use Airtable as a CRM—though it's not something we ever recommend.
The reason is because Airtable lacks the main features of a CRM, like ingesting all your teams emails in one place. Further, because there is unlimited flexibility with Airtable, you can get stuck spending dozens, if not hundreds of hours, configuring Airtable to function as a CRM. And more likely than not, the tool will lack proper adoption as there are little guardrails when using the tool for CRM purposes and everyone can kind of use it "how they want".
In general, while Airtable tries to position itself as a contender in the CRM space due to it's customization abilities, it's the main reason why we advise teams not to go down this path. It will likely lead to overwhelm and sunken time that could have gone into setting up a proper CRM that will scale with time.
If you're tempted to use Airtable as a CRM, we'd recommend folk instead as it will still give you a similar database like structure, all while providing CRM features at the core.
Google Sheets is a tempting choice for a barebones CRM, especially if you're using the software in other areas of the business. There is no learning curve, it's free to use and may be sufficient for very basic needs.
That said, it's first and foremost a spreadsheet tool, and will lack any proper CRM features such as pipeline management, automated workflows, email ingestion, proper data security, and privacy. It's very easy to corrupt data if you're using Google Sheets for contact management, and there are no automations to keep it updated with important information, like email correspondences.
We strongly recommend against using Google Sheets as a CRM. If you're merely tempted by the simplicity of Google Sheets, check out folk instead. With folk, you have a minimal learning curve and it will offer you the basic features of a CRM like contact management, email integration and give you the ability to set reminders against contacts.
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