Pipedrive VS Zoho CRM: Two Sales CRMs to Manage Your Pipeline, and Scale Your Revenue Ops

In cases where your success is contingent upon your sales team adopting the CRM, Pipedrive is generally a better solution due to the user experience (UX) being designed around the daily activities of a salesperson. Therefore, users will always know what to do next without needing to develop a playbook.

However, when you have a complex process requiring enforcement of certain processes, Zoho CRM is generally better than Pipedrive. If the main issue is that your sales team does not update the CRM, a more flexible system may cause additional issues as long as you are willing to invest time and money into developing processes to support the new system and enable/mandate your team to adopt the new process.

Pipedrive is ideal for teams that utilize the traditional pipeline sales model: prospecting, qualification, meetings, proposal development, negotiation, closing. Pipedrive is especially suitable for companies seeking a CRM that promotes discipline to take the next step versus providing a passive method of record-keeping.

Additionally, Pipedrive is suitable for founders and sales managers who desire to regularly conduct pipeline reviews and coaching sessions since the tool will illustrate how the sales process is performing and where the bottle necks are located.

Yes - if you are utilizing Zoho CRM primarily for managing basic contact, deal, task, and automation functionality and do not require the use of complex custom modules or multi-app suite workflow capabilities. In doing so, you will likely reduce your administrative overhead while increasing the speed of execution.

No - if your Zoho CRM is heavily integrated into many different areas of your business (e.g., multi-team approval workflows, complex routing logic, intricate customizations, etc.) and is highly coupled with other Zoho applications. While replacement is theoretically possible, it would most likely be a systems migration and not simply a simple CRM swap.

Generally, when comparing first costs for entry into a competitor's solution, Zoho CRM can be lower than competitors (which could make the apparent cost difference even greater when considering the totally free version). When solely considering the cost per user for the lowest cost solution, Zoho will generally be less costly than competitors.

However, in addition to the "cost per user", there are other costs to consider within the total cost of ownership; including time-to-value, onboarding time, training, compliance/governance costs, and administrative time. If Pipedrive can get customers up and running quickly and if the pipeline data is easier to maintain (the cleaner the data, the less time spent maintaining), then it could ultimately be a lower-cost solution overall.

If you want to reduce cost immediately, you can also claim the Pipedrive offer through our CRM software deals page.

Beginning with, better depends on the type of optimization you are seeking. For instance, if you need a full featured set of all your marketing, sales, and service needs in a single system, a CRM with a broad ecosystem (suite) would be a better choice. On the other hand, if you require a platform with a data model that can be customized deeply to meet specific needs, you may prefer a Platform First CRM.

As a possible alternative to Pipedrive, I would recommend beginning by comparing Pipedrive with an example of a suite style CRM, such as Pipedrive vs HubSpot.

Zoho has a potential to replace some elements of a "Google" type solution for a number of organizations as they evaluate combining their email, document, project, CRM functions into one organization-wide platform and managing those from a single source.

One of the greatest benefits of using Zoho is reducing the number of vendors that need to be integrated and managed, along with the number of places to integrate your applications and data. Replacement rarely occurs in a black and white manner. Most replacement decisions involve defining the specific workflows you wish to standardize (e.g. sales, support, invoicing, collaboration) and evaluating the complexity of migrating from one application to another, and the amount of end-user adoption required. If the decision to utilize.

Zoho is strictly for CRM, it is likely better to focus on the CRM application that provides the best opportunity to drive growth within the revenue-generating processes of your organization; and once that decision is made, you can then consider adding additional solutions to your overall strategy.

Zoho CRM is generally limited in its ability to customize when a business requires specific entity forms, unique relationships among records, and specific layouts for each user/role. At that point, Zoho CRM starts to feel more like a customizable business platform and less like a CRM.

While Pipedrive does offer some level of customization, its design is heavily centered around optimizing the sales workflow. Although that will contribute to greater adoption, it may limit the potential to utilize the CRM as an operational backbone across various departments.

When the system must reflect the complexities of the real world, select Zoho CRM. When you want the system to simply sell quickly and easily, select Pipedrive.

While Pipedrive is a great "citizen" in an ideal best-of-breed solution stack - you can integrate with many other tools including scheduling, data enrichment, proposal generation, chat and customer service to your Pipedrive instance without ever having to be part of a single vendor's world.

When you elect to pursue a suite strategy (consolidate), Zoho CRM becomes a more viable option to you. The benefits of a suite include fewer seams between applications due to integration, central administration and better cross-functional visibility if your company is capable of executing on this type of strategy.

Therefore, Pipedrive gives you much more freedom than Zoho CRM. However, if your goal is to build a unified CRM environment, then Zoho CRM may give you a better strategic fit.

Teams that wish to create automation for the movement of a process within a company, such as approval levels, routing based on rules, multi-level automated processes to increase consistency in an organization should consider using Zoho CRM. Zoho's workflow depth is one of its strong points in companies that run multiple pipelines for different departments, or those that need to strictly follow processes.

I would refer to Pipedrive as high leverage simplicity when describing automation. This is best suited to maintain the "housekeeping" aspect of operational health, move deals through stages, create tasks, send internal notifications, etc., and prevent items from becoming silent stalls.

If you view your automation needs as part of the "revenue operations" model, Zoho CRM is likely going to be a better fit. If your automation needs simply mean you want to keep your team on task, without hindering their work, Pipedrive is probably a better choice.

Support in this situation can be simply defined by what is termed as response time; however, more importantly, it is also determined by how difficult it is for your support team to find the root cause of the issue when a workflow breaks down; or when an integration fails to perform as desired; or when an end-user is unable to find an item in the application. In many cases, Pipedrive's narrow focus will make it easier to identify and resolve issues that arise.

While Zoho CRM allows you to create very complex applications and systems, its broader capabilities can also create new areas of potential configuration that can create more friction throughout your organization. However, most organizations will have enough personnel to manage the complexity of developing such systems through designating someone to act as the "CRM Owner".

Therefore, while organizations that are resource-challenged administratively and require the maintenance of a healthy CRM system without excessive overhead costs; Pipedrive is likely to provide a more practical solution than Zoho CRM.

As a result of being built specifically as a sales environment and not as a settings interface, representatives are able to navigate deals through different stages via drag-and-drop, document interactions with customers, and schedule follow-ups with minimal knowledge of where to find the needed information. As ease of use is not merely a surface-level feature of an application, the usability factor has a significant effect on the reliability of forecasts and the overall quality of the data within the system.

Although Zoho CRM is capable of being easy to use after you have configured the layout, field names and permissions, most users will find it difficult to easily use Zoho CRM until they configure their system. Pipedrive, on the other hand, is immediately usable.

In general, if you're looking to rapidly deploy a system across a small to medium sized business (SMB) sales team, Pipedrive provides the superior usability advantage. If you want to see a feature by feature comparison of suites, please refer to Pipedrive vs HubSpot.

Pipedrive has the best pipeline management features. It ensures that pipeline management becomes a habitual practice for reps. It continuously reminds reps to take the next step in their pipeline, and it clearly displays when an opportunity has sat idle. For managers, this means they spend less time debating where their deals are in their pipeline, and more time teaching their reps how to close their opportunities.

Although Zoho CRM can be used to manage pipelines just as well as Pipedrive, Zoho does not have the same level of focus on deal hygiene. Without proper governance, teams may create multiple fields and workflows that look right on paper, but ultimately slow down the speed of execution.

If you hold regular pipeline review meetings and want a CRM system to promote accountability by design, then Pipedrive is typically going to provide a more refined experience, and fewer barriers to entry than Zoho CRM.

Zoho CRM is priced reasonably for small teams and provides a great way to test the product at no cost which makes it an attractive option when the organization does have a very small budget to spend on sales software and/or needs a lot of functionality from the sales software.

If Pipedrive can get the organization to adopt the product quicker and adhere to using the pipeline more accurately than Zoho CRM then Pipedrive will likely provide the best ROI; and also minimize the hidden costs of utilizing a CRM such as user training time, varying degrees of usage by the user base and quality of forecasts produced. (See Pipedrive vs. Zoho CRM)

If you wish to consider incentives in your decision-making process, please reference our CRM software deals page to compare offers for both products before you commit.