Salesforce vs Pipedrive Comparison

Salesforce vs. Pipedrive Highlights

Below, see a comparison of Salesforce and Pipedrive at a glance.

Who is Salesforce for?

The Salesforce CRM is ideal for companies that want to achieve better results from their sales and marketing activities. The system comes equipped with a highly capable and fully customizable multiplatform marketing suite and a sophisticated multi-channel communications platform. It has superb workflow automation control to improve efficiency and excellent reporting and analytics capabilities that shine a light on what’s working well and what isn’t in your business. In addition, this solution’s companion apps and 4,000-plus plugins make Salesforce an adaptable, intelligent and flexible CRM that can help deliver a significant revenue boost to your business.

Our full review of the Salesforce CRM breaks down important information, such as the system’s ease of use and the vendor’s customer service options.

Who is Pipedrive for?

The Pipedrive CRM is specifically designed for companies that use sales representatives to close complex, customizable deals, often involving multiple decision-makers. Sales is a difficult, frustrating and time-consuming process and, in our review, we found Pipedrive to be the personal organizer salespeople have been wanting for years. It’s always there keeping an eye on deals in a rep’s sales funnel and reminding them when to get in touch with a decision-maker and why. The system also boasts a smart and easy-to-use integrated multichannel marketing suite to keep new leads coming into your pipeline. 

Read our full review of the Pipedrive CRM for details on implementation, usability and more.

Salesforce vs. Pipedrive Comparison

Salesforce provides an all-purpose CRM for sales, marketing and customer service, while Pipedrive’s offering was built to serve businesses focused on their dedicated sales teams. However, these CRMs share many similar features. See how they compare below.

Pricing 

Salesforce

Companies can do a lot with Salesforce’s entry-level plan, but once you go from 10 users to 11, your subscription costs will triple. In any case, the range of features at every subscription tier should cover most businesses’ needs. Be aware, however, that you’ll pay extra for many third-party plugins and standalone Salesforce packages (like certain Einstein AI apps). 

For enhanced customer support, including 24/7 assistance, an account manager and an expert coach, add 30 percent to your monthly subscription costs. Also, note that you must pay for your first year upfront unless you opt for the Essentials plan, which allows monthly payments.

Pipedrive

*”Open deals” means the total number of live deals allowed and “custom fields” are extra fields (like columns in Excel) you can add to the records you build for a product, organization, person, deal or lead.

Pipedrive is much more affordable than Salesforce, and we like how they stack their valuable features at lower subscription levels. You pay higher fees mainly to increase the number of open deals and custom fields you can access.

That said, many third-party apps cost extra as do Pipedrive’s native plug-ins like Web Visitors ― visitor internet protocol (IP) identification to see who is checking out your site ― Projects (Kanban-chart-based project management tool), Campaigns (access to the vendor’s email marketing platform) and SmartDocs (a document-signing service).

Winner: Pipedrive

Pipedrive stands out here thanks to its competitive, feature-rich plans. They’re well priced, not just in comparison to Salesforce but to many other CRM options too. Salesforce does have much greater and deeper functionality than Pipedrive, but that’s why it’s more expensive.

Workflows and automations 

Salesforce

• Customizable dashboard layouts: Managers can keep salespeople focused by adding widgets to their dashboards, showing them metrics like call time, number of calls and conversion rate. Salesforce’s dashboards are so customizable that you can even change their font and colors to suit your tastes.
• Control over processes: We like how you can add buttons to screens and forms that require a specific rep or agent action before a deal can move to the next stage. You can check which colleagues moved a deal along the funnel for greater transparency.
• Automated tasks: We were impressed by how you can automate tasks in the Salesforce CRM with its intuitive drag-and-drop interface. You can, for example, identify and merge duplicate records, apply routing logic so a lead goes to a particular rep and map out steps on the customer journey automatically.

In our evaluation, we loved the easy-to-build workflow automations in Salesforce. Source: Salesforce

Pipedrive

• Out-of-the-box automations: Pipedrive has 36 customizable and shareable automations. There are three types — sales, leads and workflow optimizations. [See how workflow automation can help your business.]
• Data enhancement: We were impressed by Pipedrive’s Smart Contact feature, which scours the internet for information on companies and decision-makers and then populates the relevant contact record.
• CPQ: The CPQ tool keeps live quotes up to date for sales reps based on real-time information like supplier and shipping prices. This saves them from having to phone around for the details. A similar feature is also offered as a plug-in for the Salesforce CRM.

Winner: Salesforce

Salesforce beats Pipedrive here because it offers far greater automation and customization opportunities. That said, Pipedrive’s workflow automations are particularly ideal for sales teams.

Communications platform features 

Salesforce

• Connect via email: Send and receive individual emails with the CRM’s native email client and send campaigns with Salesforce’s bulk emailing platform. You can send up to 5,000 emails a day and create professional, responsive emails from a range of customizable templates.
• Connect on social media: Use the CRM to have secure conversations with customers through private messaging tools for every major social media platform. Salesforce’s excellent Social Studio allows you to manage, plan and create social media posts too. You can also monitor which posts get the best client engagement.
• Connect on multiple channels: We like how all email and social media interactions are added to the system’s client histories, whether you’re having a conversation with the customer or they’re responding to an ad campaign. This includes interactions on WhatsApp, short message service (SMS), multimedia messaging service (MMS), Facebook Messenger, Telegram, the telephone and more.

Pipedrive

• Email connectivity: Pipedrive’s email client and marketing suite are easy to use and intuitive. That’s very important because, in this digital age, email is sometimes the best way to generate cold leads and keep deals alive. 
• Phone connectivity: There’s a great selection of VoIP plug-ins available, so you can make and receive calls from the Pipedrive dashboard. There are also auto-dialers like Ring.io if you want to run an outbound telemarketing campaign through the CRM.
• Multichannel connectivity: We like how you can communicate with clients directly by SMS, MMS, WhatsApp, social media messaging, web chat and more via Pipedrive’s CRM. 

The automated email campaigns in Pipedrive are a great way to nurture leads and engage existing customers. Source: Pipedrive

Winner: Salesforce

Salesforce and Pipedrive both excel in one-to-one communication and with marketing campaigns executed across multiple channels. However, Salesforce wins here primarily because of its inclusive 5,000 email-a-day allowance.

Reporting and analytics 

Salesforce

• Track results accurately: We were impressed by how the Salesforce CRM tracks, analyzes and reports on both customer journey and marketing campaign outcomes. If you sell online, you’ll find the revenue and purchase funnel reports particularly useful.
• Ready-made and customizable reports: Speaking of reports, Salesforce offers a variety of prebuilt reports that you can modify. You can also customize the analytics dashboard so that it displays the information you want, such as revenue trends and levels of customer engagement.
• Trustworthy data: We like how Salesforce’s Duplicate Management tool cleans up your database and how integrations like Data.com Clean check for accuracy with external sources. Another app, LASER Credit Access, even adds credit scores to your records.

You can build dynamic reports in the Salesforce CRM. Source: Salesforce

Pipedrive

• Customizable dashboards: We appreciate the 25 prebuilt performance widgets that come with the Pipedrive CRM. You can customize these, add them to the dashboard and change the time periods they’re monitoring easily. You can also have more than one dashboard and share them with colleagues.
• Sales forecasting: We were impressed by Pipedrive’s sale forecasting feature, which uses past data to predict which deals will close, when and for how much. You also get greater insight into when funnel dropout happens too.
• Live rep and deal monitoring: See right away the deals your sales reps are working on, including their current status and past leads won and lost. You can also see how long it takes a salesperson to move deals through the stages of your sales process.

Winner: Salesforce

Pipedrive excels in sales forecasting and rep analysis and is better than Salesforce without requiring any extra plug-ins. However, Salesforce ultimately takes this round because of the quantity and quality of the reporting and analytic tools they offer for both sales and marketing.

AI enhancements 

Salesforce

• AI for sales teams: Salesforce’s AI tool, Einstein, helps sales agents get better results. We particularly like the Next Best Action feature, which advises reps on live opportunities to upsell and cross-sell on a call or during an email conversation. 
• AI for decision-makers: Einstein is also excellent for the C-suite, especially through its Discovery tool, which provides live analysis of company performance to help guide decision-making. Discovery also listens for and reports on social media conversations about your brands and products.
• AI for everyone: We were impressed at how deep the AI capabilities are with the Salesforce CRM. The program can help salespeople create great product presentations, free up customer service teams with website chatbots, improve performance with workflow suggestions and more.

Pipedrive

• AI for sales teams: Using real-time performance metrics, Pipedrive’s Sales Assistant AI suggests ways managers can improve team and sales rep outcomes. We liked the Kara app integration ($30 a month), which helps sales teams manage their pipelines better by getting them to focus on prime leads based on deal size, client profile, likelihood of closing and rep conversion rates. [Check out our top lead conversion tips.]
• AI for LinkedIn: The Engage AI plug-in ($30 a month) also stands out thanks to its ability to engage in quality conversations and interactions with leads on LinkedIn. It even creates custom comments for what it determines are high-priority posts from your leads.

Sales task automation in Pipedrive is boosted with the assistance of AI. Source: Pipedrive

Winner: Salesforce

Salesforce’s AI integration is much deeper and more developed than Pipedrive, so it’s the winner in this category. We believe Einstein’s Next Best Action and Discovery tools are potential game-changers for businesses.

Integrations and apps 

Salesforce

• Huge variety of plug-ins: We like how easy Salesforce makes it to find the right app among the thousands it offers. You can either use the search box or industry drop-down to locate the integration you want.
• Developer support: The Salesforce CRM is coder-friendly, with an excellent API interface and extensive support documentation. We were impressed by the 300 Components for developers too. These are prebuilt programming blocks that programmers can drop into projects to save time.
• Salesforce-only add-ons: In addition to apps and Components, you can make use of a Flow solution (drag-and-drop automation creator tool) and a Bolt option (task-specific product template for software product delivery, recruitment management and more).

Pipedrive

• Wide app selection: Pipedrive’s CRM has more than 400 integrations, with many designed specifically to help sales teams close more deals. There are standard apps like Microsoft Teams, Calendly and Zoom, along with many others.
• Partners: Choose an official Pipedrive partner to customize the integration to your exact requirements. Search by rating, language or location in Pipedrive’s app market.
• API integration: Pipedrive’s API platform and documentation are superb. For even greater flexibility, your developer can use either a GraphQL or RESTful API.

Winner: Salesforce

Pipedrive’s app store and API are tailored precisely to its target audience’s needs and their intended use. They get this right, but on quality and quantity terms, Salesforce takes this category. The vendor offers thousands of highly rated integrations.

Salesforce vs. Pipedrive Summary

Salesforce is best for businesses that want better results from their sales and marketing teams.

Salesforce is the market leader in the CRM sector because the vendor and its system are very good at what they do. Many smaller companies will need to stretch their budget to have access to the platform’s valuable reporting and analytics, unified marketing hub, automations and communications platform, but it’s a worthy investment. This solution, which is part of the vendor’s broader business software ecosystem that many companies use to run their entire organization, is the most feature-packed and detailed CRM available. For any business focused on improving performance in sales, marketing and customer service, it’s easy to recommend Salesforce.

Pipedrive is best for companies with sales reps who close deals.

Pipedrive knows the businesses it serves well and has built an excellent CRM system around their needs. Sales reps will find this program invaluable in closing complex, multistage, customized deals involving multiple decision-makers. The marketing suite is intuitive and, used correctly, will generate a healthy flow of leads into your business. Salesforce has a greater number of apps and better AI integration, but Pipedrive’s progress on both is ongoing and impressive. If you have sales targets to hit and a more limited budget, Pipedrive is the CRM most likely to help you achieve your goals at a price you can afford.