Pipedrive and Active Campaign started out as fundamentally very different products.
Pipedrive is a deal-centric, sales-pipeline-focused, CRM solution which is built primarily for sales teams. It fits particularly well with outbound-heavy sales processes, or high volume low LTV businesses because of its excellent collaboration tools and user experience in general. If adoption is a concern, Pipedrive should really be on your shortlist.
Active Campaign started out as marketing automation software. Which makes for a very different culture. Marketers work with customer or lead segments, while sales teams work with accounts and individuals.
Recent years, however, have brought both products much closer, and it’s interesting to see how they’re both merging into all-in-one customer relationships management suites, with automation features front and center.
You’ll find a detailed, point by point comparison below, but the main highlights are this:
- If you’re running a very small business with a highly qualified team, relying heavily on automation, and trying to avoid spending too much time on the phone, Active Campaign is definitely the way to go. The automation features are extremely powerful, and while the learning curve might be a little steep at the beginning, you’ll make up for it in under a year, guaranteed.
- If most of your business depends on human relationships, keeping track of several conversations, potential deals, customers, accounts, and leads, I’d really recommend checking out Pipedrive. It’s probably the easiest CRM software on the market, and it’s more than capable of handling complex sales operations.
- If you’re hoping to leverage the same tool for both marketing automation and sales pipelines, Active Campaign can actually challenge solutions like Hubspot now in terms of feature depth. The main issue you’ll face is that Active Campaign is a lot less widely used, so you might have a hard time getting help. And the interface is pretty horrendous on the sales side if we’re honest, which will definitely be an issue for adoption.
- Going with Pipedrive for both use-cases is a really tough sell at this point, even though Pipedrive has been investing heavily in their new Campaigns suite for the past few years.
Keep in mind that it doesn’t necessarily have to be either or. We’ve been using both solutions on different projects for years, and quite frankly things would have to go really wrong for us to change. We also run Sendinblue on some of our smaller, marketing intensive projects (like this website Salesdorado for example)
For more insights about Pipedrive and ActiveCampaign, check out our full Active Campaign CRM review, our review of the marketing automation suite on Active Campaign, and our detailed Pipedrive review.
