Discover folk - the CRM for people-powered businesses
When it comes to managing customer relationships and streamlining sales processes, choosing the right CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tool can make all the difference. Two popular contenders in the sales CRM space are Pipedrive and Instantly CRM. While both platforms aim to enhance sales productivity, they cater to different types of users and offer distinct features. In this blog post, we'll break down the key differences between Pipedrive and Instantly CRM, looking at their features, ease of use, integrations, and pricing to help you decide which platform is right for your business.
What is Pipedrive?
Pipedrive is a CRM platform designed with sales teams in mind. Known for its intuitive, visual approach to managing leads and deals, it is particularly popular with small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) that want a simple, effective way to track their sales pipeline. Pipedrive was developed with a focus on providing users with a sales-first experience, offering tools to improve productivity, communication, and customer insights.
Key features of Pipedrive:
- Visual sales pipeline: Pipedrive's hallmark feature is its Kanban-style sales pipeline, which offers a bird’s-eye view of all deals, making it easy to track progress.
- Activity-based sales approach: Pipedrive encourages users to focus on activities that lead to closing deals, such as follow-up calls or meetings.
- Customizable fields: Easily tailor your CRM by customizing data fields to fit your sales process and unique business needs.
- Reporting and insights: Generate detailed reports to understand sales performance and bottlenecks.
- Mobile app: Take your CRM on the go with a powerful mobile app that syncs all data.
- Integrations: Connect with a wide range of tools, such as Slack, Google Apps, Zapier, and more.
What is Instantly CRM?
Instantly CRM is a newer player in the market that focuses on automation and email outreach, helping teams send high-volume personalized emails and track responses. Instantly CRM is geared more toward businesses looking to maximize lead generation and email outreach campaigns, often used by outbound sales teams and marketers.
Key features of Instantly CRM:
- Email outreach automation: One of Instantly’s standout features is the ability to automate and send thousands of personalized cold emails at scale.
- Advanced email warm-up: Instantly ensures that your emails land in inboxes rather than spam by providing email warming and reputation management tools.
- AI-based insights: Use AI-powered analytics to gain insights into the success of your outreach and optimize future campaigns.
- Multi-account management: Run multiple email accounts and campaigns seamlessly from one dashboard.
- Performance tracking: Track open rates, click rates, and other key metrics to measure campaign performance in real time.
- Integrations: Instantly CRM integrates with tools like Zapier, Google Sheets, and other productivity apps to help streamline workflows.
Pipedrive vs. Instantly CRM: feature comparison
Let's breakdown 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
When it comes to sales pipeline management, Pipedrive has a more user friendly Kanban-board that is closer to the traditional sales pipeline management process. Whereas Instantly CRM provides more of a campaign feature-rich interface.
Pipdrive is tailored for pipeline management
Instantly CRM doesn't provide a clear pipeline
2. Outreach
When it comes to outreach, both CRMs provide useful features.
Instantly CRM caters more towards cold outreach campaigns, while Pipedrive's email builder is more geared towards campaigns such as newsletters, and more responsive email marketing campaigns.
3. Automation
If there’s one thing both of these CRM solutions excel at, it’s automation. Let’s take a closer look at how.
Pipedrive focuses on sales and marketing automation, simplifying repetitive tasks such as lead assignment, sales assistance, follow-ups, smart contact data, and personalized email templates. However, it is more oriented toward internal processes rather than email outreach.
On the other hand, email outreach is highly automated with Instantly CRM.
4. Analytics
Pipedrive comes out as a more versatile option when it comes to analytics. Offering some advanced features when it comes to robust sales reporting tools, including custom reports, insights, and analytics dashboards that help you track individual and team performance.
Instantly CRM provides detailed email campaign analytics with AI-powered insights, though it lacks the same depth in sales performance tracking compared to Pipedrive.
5. Integrations
Pipedrive provides 400 third-party apps in its market place such as email marketing tools, communication platforms, and more. But Instantly CRM requires an extension through Zapier or Make.
Price and plans comparison
Let's take a closer look at the price plans of both Pipedrive and Instantly CRM.
Pipedrive
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.
- Enterprise plan: Starts from $129 per user, per month.
- Professional plan: Starts from $64 per user, per month.
- Power plan: Starts from $79 per user, per month.
Instantly CRM
Instantly offers a few types of plans depending on whether or not you're after its CRM product, leads generator, or outreach campaign product. Their CRM price plan comes as either a monthly or annual subscription. Their annual subscription plan is as follows.
- Growth CRM: Starts from $37.90 per user, per month.
- Hyper CRM: Starts from $77.60 per user, per month.
Introducing folk CRM: the best alternative to Pipedrive and Instantly
Looking for an affordable alternative? We suggest considering folk. There’s a reason why folk is a multiple award winning CRM platform loved for its easy-to-use, plug and play CRM system.
Key features
- Easy 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, recruitment, marketing, needs and more.
- Social media integration: Import people and companies from LinkedIn, Sales Navigator, Instagram, X within a click thanks to a Google Chome extension.
- Contact sync from Gmail and Outlook: Full email sync enabling users to manage all communications directly from the CRM.
- Find emails addresses in a click: Fill in missing data points with 1-click with folks contact enrichment feature.
- Email sequences: Send multiple emails sequences with reminders if your leads don't reply to your first emails.
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. Instantly CRM: What's the verdict?
Ultimately, when it comes to the best CRM software the choice between Pipedrive and Instantly CRM depends on your business goals. If you want to streamline the traditional sales process, Pipedrive is a great option. However, if cold email campaigns are central to your strategy, Instantly CRM might be the better choice. Pipedrive is best if your business needs a comprehensive sales CRM that focuses on deal tracking, activity management, and pipeline visibility. It’s ideal for businesses that rely on managing longer sales cycles and need in-depth reporting. Instantly CRM is best if you’re focused on high-volume email outreach, lead generation, and cold emailing campaigns. It's perfect for teams that prioritize email marketing and need automation to scale their outreach efficiently. For those who want an Instantly CRM and Pipedrive alternative we suggest checking folk out instead. With its lead management features, mail merge and email sequences. folk proves to be a powerful all-in-one solution.
Discover folk - the CRM for people-powered businesses