Zoho vs Brevo

Are you in the market for a new CRM solution? Zoho and Brevo are two prominent platforms that have captured attention with their distinct features and functionalities. Both are designed to optimize business processes, boost customer engagement, and accelerate sales growth. Yet, they serve different business requirements and priorities. In this blog post, we'll explore their offerings, comparing key features, pricing, and benefits to guide you in choosing the right CRM for your business. We'll also introduce folk – which tends to be a popular alternative.

What is Zoho?

Zoho is a CRM system with a strong sales focus. It has journey orchestration, sales process management, and workflow automation features. There's also something for marketing teams, including event management and customer segmentation.

Key features of Zoho

• Sales automation: Automates sales tasks like lead management, deal tracking, and follow-up actions.
• Customizable dashboards and reports: Allows users to create and customize dashboards and reports for in-depth analytics.
• Multi-channel communication: Integrates with email, phone, social media, and live chat to manage customer interactions.
• Lead and contact management: Manages customer information, tracks interactions, and segments contacts for targeted campaigns.
• Workflow automation: Automates routine tasks and processes to improve efficiency and reduce manual effort.
• AI-powered sales assistant (Zia): Provides predictive analytics, task automation, and intelligent suggestions to enhance sales performance.
  

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 alsooffers 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.

Zoho vs. Brevo: Feature Comparison

Let's break down the key features of two CRM software solutions and take a closer look at their sales pipeline dashboard, email marketing tools, and contact management.

1. Sales pipeline management

Zoho CRM's pipeline management feature provides a visual overview of the sales process, allowing users to track deals at various stages and manage the flow of opportunities effectively. It offers a customizable interface that helps sales teams prioritize tasks and identify bottlenecks, ultimately enhancing the efficiency of the sales cycle. On the other hand, Brevo's Pipeline feature is designed to help manage the sales process by offering custom deal pipelines. It enables teams to track deals across various stages and organize tasks for follow-ups and meetings. Users can customize deal stages to match their sales cycle and automate some repetitive tasks. The feature also supports bulk contact import, allowing teams to link contacts and deals for easier organization. Basic analytics provide data insights, though it may require further customization to meet specific needs. Both platforms offer robust tools for managing sales pipelines, but Zoho CRM may appeal more to users seeking a more comprehensive and visually intuitive tool, while Brevo offers flexibility with its customizable stages and automation capabilities.

2. Ease of use

Both Zoho and Brevo offer user-friendly interfaces, but Zoho CRM stands out with its intuitive navigation and customizable dashboards, making it easier for teams to adapt quickly. Brevo, while straightforward, focuses more on its marketing platform, which may require additional learning for users unfamiliar with integrated marketing tools.

3. Contact enrichment

Zoho CRM's contact enrichment feature, powered by its AI assistant Zia, automatically updates and enriches records using data from various online sources. The feature can fill in missing details, such as email addresses, phone numbers, company information, and social media profiles. 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

Zoho CRM supports multichannel outreach, enabling businesses to connect with leads through email, social media, and other platforms. The platform automates workflows such as lead assignment and follow-up reminders, while AI-driven sentiment analysis helps prioritize customer responses for timely engagement.
Brevo's outreach capabilities come from its Marketing Platform, which includes tools for email, SMS, and WhatsApp marketing. These features allow businesses to reach their audience across multiple channels, creating a cohesive outreach strategy. The platform also offers automation options, enabling users to set up campaigns that send messages at optimal times based on customer behavior.

5. Automation

Zoho CRM provides comprehensive automation features that streamline tasks like sending emails, updating fields, and triggering alerts through workflow automation. It includes Blueprint for standardizing sales processes, Macros for automating repetitive tasks in bulk, and Zia AI for predictive automation that suggests workflows and actions based on data patterns.
Brevo offers automation across several of its platforms. Within the Marketing Platform, Brevo provides marketing automation tools that enable users to set up automated email, SMS, and WhatsApp campaigns based on customer actions and behavior. The Sales Platform includes automation for repetitive tasks, such as reminders for follow-ups and meetings, helping streamline the sales process.

6. Integration

Zoho integrates with a wide range of third-party applications to expand its functionality, including popular tools like Google Workspace and Microsoft Office. It also connects with accounting software such as QuickBooks and more. Brevo offers extensive integration options, connecting with over 150 digital tools, including CRM, CMS, e-commerce, and analytics platforms. This allows businesses to easily sync data across systems, streamlining workflows and enhancing the functionality of their existing tech stack.

7. Artificial Intelligence

Zoho CRM integrates AI through its assistant, Zia, which enhances productivity by automating tasks like data entry, lead prediction, and workflow recommendations. Zia provides predictive analytics for sales forecasting, identifies anomalies in sales processes, and suggests the best times for customer engagement based on past interactions.
Brevo integrates AI into its platform, particularly within its Marketing Platform. The AI tools in Brevo are focused on enhancing email marketing, such as AI for email that helps personalize and optimize content to increase engagement.

Price and plans comparison

Let's take a closer look at the price and plans of both Zoho and Brevo.

Zoho prices

Zoho offers a Free plan limited to three users suitable for small businesses. After that, an annual subscription plan is as follows.

• Standard: $20 per user, per month.
• Professional: $35 per user, per month.
• Enterprise: $50 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 Zoho 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 and more. You can also use folk as a solopreneur, small to mid-size business 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.

Zoho vs. Brevo: What's the Verdict?

In the Zoho vs. Brevo debate, it's apparent that both platforms offer robust CRM systems tailored to different business needs. Zoho stands out with its comprehensive suite of sales-focused tools and integrations, making it ideal for businesses seeking extensive customization and automation. On the other hand, Brevo excels with its user-friendly interface and strong emphasis on marketing automation, perfect for small to mid-sized businesses aiming for seamless multi-channel engagement. 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.