Pipedrive

Pipedrive is best known for its visual pipeline. Deals appear as cards in a Kanban (board-style) layout, and reps can simply drag them from stage to stage as conversations progress.

One feature we appreciate in particular is that you can move a deal back to being a lead if it turns out the opportunity wasn’t as qualified as you thought. That might sound small, but many CRMs don’t allow this, so once something becomes a deal, it stays there. Being able to move it back keeps your pipeline a lot cleaner.

Pipedrive also has an integration with the best email client, Superhuman Mail where you can manage your deals from within it's sleek inbox.

Track all your activity across calls, emails, and meetings.

This is so helpful in situations where a sales rep called a prospect six times, sent two follow-up emails, and then scheduled a meeting; all of that can be logged and attached to the deal. It creates a clear timeline of the relationship so anyone on the team can see exactly what’s happened and pick up where someone else left off, if needed.

So if your teams are heavy on outreach, organization-wise, this feature is going to be a favorite for you.

Workflow automations let you trigger actions when something happens in your pipeline. This could look like:

• Sending an automated email when a deal moves to a new stage
• Creating a task when a new lead is added
• Notifying a sales rep when a deal hasn't been touched in a while

The automation builder uses a visual editor, which makes it mostly approachable even for teams that aren't very technical. I used it many times and didn't have issues navigating my way around, it was super intuitive.

The only catch is that automation is only available starting on the Advanced pricing tier and above, so that's something to keep in mind when choosing your plan.

If you're looking for an AI first CRM, skip Pipedrive.

Like most software companies right now, Pipedrive is trying to incorporate more AI into its product. They've introduced a handful of AI-powered features that help suggest the next best action on deals that need follow-up and generate summaries for email threads.

The feedback from users has been a bit mixed so far. Some people appreciate the ability to quickly draft emails or get a quick recap of conversations. But at the same time, others feel like some of the AI features, especially things like deal summaries, still need refinement before they’re truly useful.

Overall, the AI features can provide helpful insights here and there, but they don’t yet feel like a true AI assistant that can actually operate your CRM or meaningfully reduce your workload. It’s an okay start, but there’s definitely room for improvement.

Deals can take a while to close, and as time goes on, email threads get longer and longer, so Pipedrive allows you to sync your inbox so emails can be tracked alongside deals and contacts.

However, this is one area where we think the experience could be better. Unlike Copper, which can go back and pull in past email history (up to an entire year), Pipedrive tracks emails from the moment syncing is enabled going forward.

So if you’ve already been emailing a prospect before adding them to the CRM, those earlier conversations will not appear in the record unless you manually log them. It's a pain.

In my previous sales role, I was on the road a lot and relied heavily on the Pipedrive iOS app. It worked as it needed to. A bit clunky, but it was reliable 95% of the time to get me where I needed to be.

Pipedrive includes reporting dashboards, but the built-in reports are a bit bare bones. When we were using Pipedrive we ended up exporting the data and creating our reporting in Airtable. The reporting in Pipedrive just wasn't enough.

Pipedrive’s API is flexible and robust, making it easy to connect with most third-party tools. If you want your CRM to act as the central hub across your stack, Pipedrive fits.