Pipedrive vs. Salesmate: Which is best? [2024]

Your customer relationship management (CRM) software might just be your most important resource when growing your business. It helps you turn strangers into leads, leads into customers, and customers into the kind of customers that leave glowing reviews.

I spent time testing two fan-favorite CRMs, Pipedrive and Salesmate, to see how they stack up, from usability to pipeline management to workflows and automation. Read on for my takeaways from testing Pipedrive vs. Salesmate.

Pipedrive vs. Salesmate at a glance

Pipedrive and Salesmate are both really solid sales-focused CRMs. They both offer customizable visual sales pipelines, customer and lead management features, team collaboration tools, task automation, and much more.

Here are the most notable differences between the two platforms:

• Pipedrive is better for businesses looking for a user-friendly CRM with the budget for premium add-on features.

• Salesmate is better for small businesses on a budget that want an effective and feature-rich CRM.

Pipedrive has a more user-friendly interface

Let me preface this by acknowledging that user-friendliness is a relatively subjective metric (though there are some objective reasons most of us can agree on). But overall, Pipedrive is easier to use and has a more polished interface.

Both platforms offer in-app feature walkthroughs and tip callouts as well as links to guided demo videos. Salesmate has a genuinely helpful dedicated walkthrough hub for new users, but I appreciated Pipedrive's handy, ever-present Quick Help tab that suggests articles and features a knowledge base search.

That said, I found Pipedrive's videos to be far more put together and easier to follow. While Salesmate's demos were helpful, they felt more like amateur walkthroughs compared to Pipedrive's polished videos.

I also ran into some frustrating (albeit minor) roadblocks in Salesmate. When naming a shared inbox, I received an error message saying, "Please provide valid name," without any indication of what a "valid name" is. Turns out, apostrophes are a no-go, but it would've saved me some confusion if the app had pointed out that this was the issue.

Pipedrive provides users trialing the platform with sample data—a big win for those of us who hesitate to make a purchase before playing around with some data in the platform. It also offers several helpful pre-built views that use color coordination to make your sales pipeline easy to digest at a glance. For its part, Salesmate preloads a few contacts with just enough data to show a tiny bit of reporting data, but Pipedrive gives you a much better sense of its capabilities with more robust hypothetical lead and sales data.

The Forecast view above shows all in-progress deals and highlights won deals, as well as how they both contribute to monthly earnings. There's also a List view showing all deals—won, lost, and in progress—and a Pipeline view, where you can drag and drop prospects through the stages of your custom-built pipeline.

Salesmate also offers a List and Board view—they just lack the visual appeal of Pipedrive's views. Plus, there's no Forecast view that takes into account won deals alongside in-progress ones—you'd have to create a report to see this data.

That said, both platforms do offer visual drag-and-drop sales pipelines that are easy to navigate and customize, making customer journey management simple.

Another feature where Pipedrive's user-friendliness and aesthetic appeal shines is its reporting. When opening the app's Insights tab, I was impressed with the lead, deal, revenue, and activity data made super digestible by a color-coded and flexible drag-and-drop dashboard. 

Plus, after generating a new report, I could simply drag and drop it into the dashboard and customize its data viz format—pie chart, column, table, scorecard, and more—as well as its appearance.

I found Salesmate's reporting to be slightly less visually digestible and user-friendly. For one, reports and dashboards live in separate sections, which didn't make much sense to me. Rather than dragging and dropping specific reports into the dashboard, I was taken to another page where I had to sort through a list (granted, an impressively extensive one) of metrics to add to my dashboard. Plus, each Salesmate dashboard has a limit of 10 widgets—a limitation I didn't encounter on Pipedrive.

Salesmate gives you more bang for the buck

Despite its usability shortcomings, in a value-for-money game, Salesmate has Pipedrive beat. (Though Pipedrive's Essential plan is by far the cheapest for either software, it's designed for much more limited use and lacks core features like automation-building, email sequences, and scheduling.) With Salesmate's Basic plan (which costs about $6 less than Pipedrive's comparable Advanced plan), you get many features that Pipedrive gates as costly add-ons.

Reports and deals

First, let's talk about "unlimited." Pipedrive's reports may be pretty, but they're very limited. With its Essential plan, you can only create 15 (which bumps to just 30 at Advanced). The only option that offers unlimited reports is its $99 per-user-per-month Enterprise plan. Salesmate, on the other hand, doesn't put any limits on the number of reports you can create, even on the Basic plan (though custom reports start at tier two).

Likewise, you can have unlimited open deals on every Salesmate plan, whereas Pipedrive caps you out at 3,000 deals on the Essential plan and only offers unlimited with Enterprise.

Workflow automations

Pipedrive also makes workflow automations only accessible to those with its Advanced plan and up, while Salesmate makes this feature available to all plans, with just a few limits on the tier-one plan—you won't get email scheduling, bulk emails, and smart reminders. 

Granted, it's not the clean-cut automation feature that Pipedrive makes available with its Advanced plan (which even allows you to share automation sequences you've built with other team members or transfer ownership), but it offers solid options for automating campaigns and pipeline management. In short, it gets the job done. 

To enjoy a similar (and arguably much more enjoyable) workflow builder, known as Automation Journeys, in Salesmate, you can get the add-on, starting at $30 and increasing in price depending on how many contacts you have.

The interface is vibrant, flexible, and even comes with some fun annotations you can add to your workflow builder to add some color (pun intended) to your customer journey.

Team inbox and text messaging

Salesmate also offers some valuable collaboration features for cheaper than Pipedrive. Starting at the lowest tier, you get a Team Inbox with shared visibility into messages and auto-assignments to the right team member, enabling internal collaboration on deals and other projects. You also unlock full Teams and Team Collaboration features at the Pro plan, which Pipedrive reserves for its Professional plan for $10 more per month for just three total teams, compared to Salesmate's 10.

It also offers built-in text messaging for all its plans, providing an easy way for customers and leads to communicate with representatives.

Overall, a good chunk of the features that Salesmate makes available at a budget price, Pipedrive makes you pay a pretty penny for.

Pipedrive is the only option with AI features (for now)

Are we really approaching the mid-2020s if we aren't talking about how these platforms stack up when it comes to artificial intelligence? Here's the simple reality: Pipedrive offers an AI assistant, and Salesmate doesn't—yet.

I didn't have enough historical data in Pipedrive's platform to comprehensively test it. But here's the gist: it takes past performance data and turns it into insights, notifying you when it's time to reach out to leads and take other actions to improve your success and profitability. It also sends through period-over-period performance metrics to show your progress.

Pipedrive's other AI offerings are novel but definitely not as comprehensive as CRMs like Zoho, many of which feature dedicated AI assistants and richly integrated generative AI. But do you get AI-powered app recommendations and smart search in the app marketplace? Sure. Do you get a couple of email-specific generative AI tools? Also sure—specifically, the nifty ability to sync your inbox and have Pipedrive automatically summarize your emails or generate text for new messages.

Again, as far as the CRM landscape goes, these are pretty basic AI features, but they're not nothing, which is what Salesmate currently has.

That's not for much longer, though. As of this writing, Salesmate is offering its AI copilot, Sandy AI, by invite only for Pro users and above to beta test. It promises to be more comprehensive than Pipedrive's current offering, with the ability to do things like schedule meetings, respond to messages, and generate new content. This time next year, Pipedrive may also have its own amazing AI assistant that's even better than Sandy, but for right now, Pipedrive is the AI winner by default.

Pipedrive has more integrations, but both connect to Zapier

With an app marketplace of over 400 products, Pipedrive has a decent number of integrations. A lot of the usual players are there, like Mailchimp, Microsoft Teams, and Docusign, but you might find it a little more limited than some premium CRMs like Salesforce and HubSpot. 

That's still more than Salesmate, which surprisingly has no dedicated app marketplace. What it does have is 45 native integrations for tools like Zoom, Shopify, Slack, and many Google products.

If that's not enough integration capability, note that Pipedrive and Salesmate both connect with thousands of apps through Zapier. Learn more about how to automate Pipedrive with Zapier, or check out these examples to get you started.

Pipedrive vs. Salesmate: Which is best for you?

There are two big questions to answer when deciding between Pipedrive and Salesmate:

• How much do you care about aesthetics and user-friendliness?

• How much money do you have to spend on a sales-focused CRM?

If your answer to both these questions is a lot, go for Pipedrive. If it's not much, you'll be more than happy with Salesmate. Also be sure to explore both platforms' many paid add-ons to see if they offer something you need.

Overall, both apps are very solid small business CRMs that combine pipeline and customer management while offering some reliable workflow and reporting features for less money per user than some more popular CRMs. The decision mostly comes down to personal preference and affordability.

Related reading:

• The beginner's guide to CRM

• The best CRM software

• The best lead management software

This article was originally published in July 2023 and has since been updated with contributions from Bryce Emley. The most recent update was in July 2024.