Discover folk - the CRM for people-powered businesses
On the market for a new CRM? Pipedrive and Brevo are two popular platforms designed to support sales and marketing workflows. Pipedrive centers on sales pipeline management and activity tracking, making it ideal for teams focused on streamlining their sales process. Brevo, on the other hand, provides a more diverse range of tools, including email marketing, SMS, and CRM features, geared toward enhancing multi-channel engagement and customer relationship management. In this blog post, we will examine key features, ease of use, pricing, and more. However, if you’re looking for a well-rounded solution that balances user-friendly features with enhanced contact management, folk CRM might just be the better alternative.
What is Pipedrive?
Pipedrive is a web-based CRM for small businesses, offering lead management, automation, email integration, and customizable pipelines to optimize sales.
Key features of Pipedrive
- Lead and deal management: Centralized tools to manage customer data, interactions, and sales pipelines, helping teams act quickly on opportunities.
- Sales automation: Workflow automation to handle repetitive tasks, such as lead routing, follow-ups, and email sequences, allowing sales teams to focus on closing deals.
- Email integration: Full email sync, templates, and tracking features, enabling users to manage all communications directly from the CRM.
- Advanced reporting and analytics: Real-time data analytics and custom reporting tools to track sales performance, forecast revenue, and gain actionable insights.
- Customization and security: Options to customize pipelines, fields, and user permissions, with robust security measures to protect data.
What is Brevo?
Brevo, formerly known as Sendinblue, is a comprehensive customer relationship management (CRM) and email marketing platform tailored for small to mid-sized businesses. Brevo offers a wide range of tools, including email and SMS marketing, chat, CRM, and marketing automation to help businesses effectively engage with their audience across multiple channels.
Key features of Brevo
- Marketing platform: Provides tools for email, SMS, and WhatsApp campaigns, as well as marketing automation to improve multi-channel campaign engagement and streamline marketing efforts.
- Sales platform: Helps manage pipelines and track sales activities with tools like automated deal tracking, meeting scheduling, and call recording, making it easier for teams to follow leads and close deals.
- Conversations platform: Allows businesses to offer customer support through live chat, a shared inbox, and multi-channel communication solutions, ensuring seamless customer interaction.
- Customer data platform: Enables businesses to unify, manage, and analyze customer data across platforms with a multi-table data model, sourcing library, and customer analytics, improving data-driven decisions.
- Messaging API: Provides APIs for sending emails, SMS, and WhatsApp messages, with features for transactional emails, inbound parsing, and integrations with other applications for customized communication.
Pipedrive vs. Brevo: Feature Comparison
Let's break down the key features of two CRM software solutions and take a closer look at their sales automation, email marketing tools, and contact management.
1. Sales pipeline management
While Brevo provides basic analytics for data insights, you may need to customize further to meet specific requirements. Both platforms offer valuable tools for managing sales pipelines, but the choice between them may depend on the level of customization and automation your team requires. Pipedrive offers a user-friendly Kanban-board interface that aligns closely with traditional sales pipeline management processes, allowing teams to visualize and manage sales activities effectively. Brevo's Pipeline feature is designed to streamline the sales process with customizable deal pipelines. It enables teams to track deals across various stages, organize tasks for follow-ups, and schedule meetings. Users can tailor deal stages to fit their specific sales cycle and automate repetitive tasks to enhance efficiency.
2. Ease of use
Pipedrive and Brevo both prioritize user-friendly interfaces, but Pipedrive's intuitive design is particularly praised for its simplicity in managing sales pipelines. Brevo, with its comprehensive suite of marketing tools, offers a slightly steeper learning curve but compensates with extensive features for multi-channel outreach.
3. Contact enrichment
Pipedrive excels in contact enrichment by integrating with tools to gather additional data from external sources. This feature automatically updates contact profiles with details such as job titles, company information, and social media profiles, enhancing the depth of customer insights. Brevo includes contact enrichment capabilities as part of its Customer Data Platform. This feature allows businesses to unify, manage, and sync customer data, making it easier to create a more complete customer profile.
4. Outreach
Pipedrive's outreach is focused on email campaigns, ideal for newsletters and responsive marketing. Brevo offers a robust Marketing Platform that supports email, SMS, and WhatsApp marketing, enabling businesses to execute cohesive, multi-channel outreach strategies with automation options for optimal engagement.
5. Automation
Pipedrive automates sales processes by handling repetitive tasks like data entry and follow-ups. Brevo offers extensive automation across its platforms, enabling users to set up automated campaigns based on customer behavior, and includes AI-driven personalization features to enhance marketing effectiveness.
6. Integration
Pipedrive supports over 300 integrations, allowing users to seamlessly connect with various third-party tools across categories like marketing automation and email platforms, enhancing CRM functionality.
7. Artificial Intelligence
Pipedrive's AI integration focuses on its Sales Assistant, offering insights and recommendations to optimize sales activities. Brevo leverages AI in its marketing platform, enhancing email marketing through personalized and optimized content to boost engagement.
Price and plans comparison
Let's take a closer look at the price and plans of both Pipedrive and Brevo.
Pipedrive prices
Pipedrive offers two types of plans, both for their CRM product. It comes as either a monthly or an annual subscription basis. Their annual subscription plan is as follows.
- Essential plan: Starts from $24 per user, per month.
- Advanced plan: Starts from $44 per user, per month.
- Professional: Starts from $64 per user, per month.
- Power plan: Starts from $79 per user, per month.
- Enterprise plan: Starts from $129 per user, per month.
Brevo prices
Brevo has a limited free version that gives you access to 300 emails. After that, the price plans provide you with the number of emails you can send per month. As well as other features. You then also have the option of customizing your plan, so that it can be based on the number of emails you send a month and the number of contacts.The following is an overview of their annual plan.
- Starter: Starting from $8.08/month.
- Business: Starting from $16.17/month.
- Enterprise: Undisclosed.
Introducing folk CRM: the best alternative to Pipedrive and Brevo
Looking for an affordable alternative? We recommend folk. A multiple award-winning CRM platform loved for its easy-to-use, plug-and-play CRM system. folk can support multiple business functions including sales, marketing, recruitment, investment and more. You can also use folk as a solopreneur, small to mid-size team, and large enterprise.
Key features
- Contact management: Bring all your contacts into one place seamlessly, from social media platforms such as LinkedIn, Instagram and X to multiple inboxes including Gmail and Outlook.
- Notes and reminders: Attach notes directly to a contact's profile in folk, and access them on the go. And assign reminders so you know exactly when to follow-up.
- Sales pipeline dashboard: Manage your entire sales cycle and leads with a highly customizable sales pipeline dashboard that can be used in Kanban-board view or listicle.
- Ease of use and customization: Easily customize the pipelines, dashboards, automation, email sequences, so that you can use it across your sales cycle and pipeline management – and other business functions such as recruitment, marketing, and more.
- Social media integration: Import people and companies from LinkedIn, Sales Navigator, Instagram, and X within a click thanks to folk’s Google Chrome extension.
- Contact sync from Gmail and Outlook: Full email sync enabling users to manage all communications directly from the CRM.
- Find email addresses in a click: Contact enrichment powered by Apollo, and Dropcontact so you can fill in missing data points with 1-click.
- Email sequences: Send email sequences with reminders if your leads don’t reply to your first emails. It includes an AI integration allowing you to personalize email at scale.
Price and plans
folk has a 14-day free trial. After that, there are affordable monthly or annual subscription plans. The annual subscription plan is as follows.
- Standard: $20 per user, per month.
- Premium: $40 per user, per month.
- Custom: Starts from $80 per user, per month.
Pipedrive vs. Brevo: What's the verdict?
In comparing Pipedrive and Brevo, it's apparent that both offer robust CRM solutions tailored to different business needs. Pipedrive excels in sales automation and customization, making it ideal for sales-driven teams. Brevo, on the other hand, stands out with its comprehensive email marketing integration, perfect for businesses focusing on customer engagement. However, for companies that need a more personalized approach to relationship management, folk provides a flexible alternative to these traditional CRM options, blending ease of use with customization. Try folk today, free.
Discover folk - the CRM for people-powered businesses