Used For

• +**Your follow-ups live in chaotic email threads and deals fall through cracks** → Visual timeline shows every call, email, and note in one place so nothing gets lost
• +**You're guessing which deals will close this month** → Drag-and-drop pipeline shows exactly what stage each deal is in and forecasts revenue automatically
• +**Sales reps waste time figuring out what to do next** → Activity overview tells you exactly who to call and when, prioritized by close date
• +Email tracking shows opens and clicks - so you know when prospects are actually reading your proposals
• +Customizable pipelines match your actual sales process - not some generic 'Lead > Opportunity > Close' template

Best For

• >Your sales team is losing deals because nobody knows who promised what
• >You're tracking deals in spreadsheets and missing 20% of follow-ups
• >Tried Salesforce but need something that doesn't require a computer science degree

Not For

• -Teams under 5 people — you're paying per-user fees for features a free HubSpot account handles fine
• -Companies wanting deep marketing automation — this does sales, period
• -Anyone hoping the 'Essential' plan works — you'll hit the 3 custom fields limit in week one and upgrade anyway

Pairs With

• *Gmail or Outlook (syncs automatically but sometimes misses emails, so keep that BCC trick handy)
• *Zoom or Microsoft Teams (for the demos you're tracking in your pipeline stages)
• *DocuSign (to close those deals sitting in your 'Proposal Sent' stage for weeks)
• *Zapier (to connect the 400+ tools Pipedrive doesn't integrate with natively)
• *Google Sheets (where your CEO still wants that 'simple' revenue report every Monday)
• *Aircall or similar (for call logging, but expect to pay extra per user)
• *Mailchimp or similar (because Pipedrive's email campaigns are basic compared to real marketing tools)

The Catch

• !The sticker price doubles with add-ons — LeadBooster is $32/month extra, integrations like Aircall add $20-50 per user
• !Email sync is buggy for large pipelines — you'll end up manually BCC'ing emails to make sure they log properly
• !Lower tiers limit you to 100 activities per user per month — active sales reps blow through this in two weeks

Bottom Line

The CRM that actually focuses on selling instead of drowning you in features you'll never use.