6 Best Sales Pipeline Software for People & Teams 2023

Sales pipeline software are CRMs offering visual, customizable pipelines that help salespeople manage leads, opportunities, and customer relationships throughout the sales process. The top pipeline software also provide sales forecasting and analytics tools, basic marketing functionality, workflow automation, and more. To help you choose the right one, we’ve developed our list of the best pipeline software available, including an overall winner.

Here are the six best pipeline software for sellers and teams:

• Zoho CRM: Best overall pipeline software for pricing and features (free starting price)
• EngageBay: Best pipeline for sales and marketing automations (free starting price)
• Freshsales: Best sales pipeline software for AI-powered sales tools (free starting price)
• monday sales CRM: Best option for visual contact management (free starting price)
• Pipedrive: Best sales pipeline software for robust add-on upgrades (14-day free trial)
• HubSpot CRM: Best free software option with premium upgrades (free starting price)

While several sales pipeline software scored highly in one category or another, we found that the overall best option is Zoho CRM, scoring the highest for its core features and level of customization and tying for cost and integrations. Check out how each software scored across all six categories below, including a summary of features, pricing plans, and primary use cases. To see how we evaluated each option, jump down to our explanation.

Note: All per-user prices are with a one-year commitment unless noted.

Zoho CRM: Best Overall Sales Pipeline Software

Provides highly-customizable features focused on sales, marketing, and analytics.

Price Range: Free to $52 per user, per month (15- to 30-day free trial)

Overall Rating

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Core Features

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Cost

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Customization

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Ease of Use

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Integrations

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Customer Support

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Pros:

• Customizable pipelines

• Free forever plan

• Robust marketplace integrations

Cons:

• Limited customer support

• Advanced features only in higher tier

• Complicated interface

Zoho CRM is fully-featured sales and marketing software with a multichannel lead management system. Its smart web forms can capture leads from social media and landing pages, then place them into your sales pipeline and send them automatic, relevant nurturing emails. As you convert those leads into prospects and customers, track your progress using sophisticated but affordable pipeline tools such as list views, reporting dashboards, and AI sales forecasting.

Even though Zoho CRM takes our top spot, some of its tools are difficult to use. If easy-to-use software and great customer support for setup are important to you, check out EngageBay.

Zoho CRM Pricing

• Free Version: Supports up to 3 users
• Standard: $14 per user, per month
• Professional: $23 per user, per month
• Enterprise: $40 per user, per month
• Ultimate: $52 per user, per month
• Free Trial: 15 to 30 days

Zoho CRM Key Features

• Digital Marketing: Enrich your pipeline through social media, email, and more.
• Lead Management: Segment customer lists and manage follow-ups for your leads.
• AI Analytics: Turn sales performance data into insights to focus on high-priority leads.
• Inventory Management: Create price books, sales quotes, sales orders, and more.

Visit Zoho CRM

EngageBay: Best for Sales & Marketing Automation

Features simple yet highly-integrated tools for automating sales and marketing processes.

Price Range: Free to $91.99 per user, per month

Overall Rating

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Core Features

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Cost

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Customization

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Ease of Use

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Integrations

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Customer Support

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Pros:

• Intuitive interface

• Robust sales & marketing tools

• Excellent customer support

Cons:

• No built-in AI sales assistant

• Pricey higher tier plans

• Customization requires upgrades

EngageBay is an intuitive all-in-one CRM with comprehensive tools to automate your sales pipeline and marketing processes. Use its marketing automations like a social suite to launch campaigns on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn plus email sequences to customize emails for certain segments. Then use its sales automation features like appointment scheduling, deal management, and 360° customer view to track deals through your pipeline.

Although EngageBay has powerful sales and marketing automation features, it doesn’t have a built-in AI-powered sales assistant. If having an AI companion for your sales efforts is important to you, check out Freshsales, or try Zoho CRM for both sales and marketing AI tools.

EngageBay Pricing

• Free Version: Support for unlimited users
• All-in-One Basic: $13.79 per user, per month
• All-in-One Growth: $45.99 per user, per month
• All-in-One Pro: $91.99 per user, per month

EngageBay Key Features

• Sales Automation: Nurture leads and automate your funnel using smart tools.
• Deal Management: Add deals and track your sales process automatically.
• Multiple Views: Filter your pipeline and see specific components of your process.
• Separate Deal Pipelines: Create multiple pipelines that show different metrics.

Visit EngageBay

Overall Rating

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Core Features

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Cost

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Customization

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Ease of Use

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Integrations

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Customer Support

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Pros:

• Robust AI sales assistant

• Highly customizable pipelines

• Great customer support

Cons:

• Custom reporting needs upgrade

• Free version lacks AI

• Fewer integrations than competitors

Freshsales is a visual sales pipeline software that uses AI-powered sales tools to help you nurture leads and close deals faster. Freddy AI’s deal insights help teams analyze historical customer data through email content, call transcripts, and interactions and assigns prediction tags to automatically categorize leads. Using these analyses, you can prioritize promising leads in your pipeline by identifying how and when to try to convert them into prospects or customers.

While Freshsales has excellent AI-powered sales tools, it offers a limited amount of unique AI interactions even in its highest tiers. If having more of these is essential for you, check out Zoho CRM for its Zia AI assistant.

Freshsales Pricing

• Growth: $15 per user, per month (free for 3 users)
• Pro: $39 per user, per month
• Enterprise: $69 per user, per month
• Free Trial: 21 days
• Access to Freshworks Marketplace

Freshsales Key Features

• AI Assistant: See rich insights into customers and future revenue using smart tools.
• Automated Workflows: Schedule calls or send emails or texts to leads automatically.
• Lead Management: Create drag-and-drop pipelines to view different buyers’ journeys.
• Communication & Lead Gen: Use web forms, live chat widgets, and built-in dialers.

Visit Freshsales

Overall Rating

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Core Features

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Cost

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Customization

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Ease of Use

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Integrations

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Customer Support

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Pros:

• Customizable visual dashboards

• Easy to use & set up

• Highly-customizable automations

Cons:

• Free plan only supports 2 users

• Customizations need upgrade

• No live chat

monday sales CRM is a highly-customizable software offered by monday.com featuring colorful boards that help teams keep track of leads and prospects. Its visual contact management tool provides a full picture of the sales process with an instant overview of contact details, deal progress, and more. Use its kanban-style boards to move deals into the next stage of your sales pipeline, then see each lead’s status and follow-up deadlines via color-coded status tags.

While monday sales CRM’s free plan allows you to store up to 1,000 contacts, it lacks certain automations and other features that many CRMs tend to offer. If you’re looking for a more robust CRM that’s still very visual, check out Pipedrive’s tiers and add-ons.

monday sales CRM Pricing

• Free Version: Support for 2 users
• Basic CRM: $10 per user, per month
• Standard CRM: $14 per user, per month
• Pro CRM: $24 per user, per month
• Enterprise: Contact for quote
• Free Trial: 14 days
• Access to App Marketplace

monday sales CRM Key Features

• Contact Management: Store and organize your contacts’ information in one place.
• Visual Boards: Customize your board with various column types, templates, and colors.
• Funnel Chart: Follow the flow of your deal stages using this built-in dashboard tool.
• Customizable Dashboards: Organize custom reports for real-time deal insights.

Visit monday sales CRM

Pipedrive: Best for Robust Add-Ons

Provides robust add-ons for sales pipeline management and lead generation.

Price Range: $14.90 to $99 per user, per month (14-day free trial)

Overall Rating

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Core Features

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Cost

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Customization

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Ease of Use

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Integrations

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Customer Support

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Pros:

• Unlimited customizable sales pipeline

• Robust lead generation add-ons

• Integrates with 300+ apps

Cons:

• No free plan

• Limited deal & activity reports

• No phone support for lower tiers

Pipedrive is a visual software that includes powerful pipeline management, lead generation, and sales automation features. One of its defining features is the ability to pay for add-on upgrades a la carte, such as LeadBooster, which captures high-quality inbound and outbound leads into your pipeline using chatbots, prospector tools, and web forms. Its Campaigns add-on then helps you create and send customizable email campaigns to segmented lists based on engagement.

Although Pipedrive doesn’t offer a free plan, its most affordable tier includes customizable pipelines and an AI-powered sales assistant. However, lower tiers have limited reporting and forecasting features. For these tools, check out Freshsales, which also has add-ons.

Pipedrive Pricing

• Essential: $14.90 per user, per month
• Advanced: $24.90 per user, per month
• Professional: $49.90 per user, per month
• Enterprise: $99.00 per user, per month
• Free Trial: 14 days
• Pay for sales and marketing add-ons
• Access to Pipedrive Marketplace

Pipedrive Key Features

• Add-On Upgrades: Pay for upgrades like LeadBooster, Campaigns, and Projects.
• Deal Management: Track deals and anticipate close dates through pipeline stages.
• Document Management: Create contracts and get them signed online with esignature.
• Calendar & Email Sync: Integrate with Google, iCloud, Microsoft Office, and more.

Visit Pipedrive

HubSpot CRM: Best Free Sales Pipeline Software

Offers a free-for-life plan with robust sales and marketing features, among others.

Price Range: Free to $1,200 per month (Sales Hub)

Overall Rating

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Core Features

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Cost

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Customization

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Ease of Use

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Integrations

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Customer Support

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Pros:

• Has a free forever plan

• Easy integration process

• Highly customizable deal pipelines

Cons:

• Dashboard is difficult to set-up

• Limited AI tools

• Reporting feature needs improvement

HubSpot CRM is a fully-featured free software for sales, marketing, and service. Add deals to a visual pipeline from contact records, then the CRM will autopopulate them with relevant info to eliminate manual data entry. Also included in the free tier are pipeline tools like custom fields, reports and dashboards, and email templates. If you upgrade into Sales Hub for more users or features, you’ll maintain access to its free marketing, service, CMS, and operation tools.

While HubSpot offers a robust free plan, its higher tiers and upgrades can get pricier than other software. For those needing more cost-effective yet feature-rich upgrade options, try Zoho CRM for sales and marketing tools or Freshsales for more sales-focused features.

HubSpot CRM Pricing

• Free Version: Support for unlimited users
• Sales Hub Starter: $45 per month for 2 users
• Sales Hub Professional: $450 per month for up to 5 paid users
• Sales Hub Enterprise: $1,200 per month for up to 10 paid users
• Additional users can be purchased for extra
• Integration with HubSpot’s free marketing, service, and other tools

HubSpot CRM Key Features

• Email Management: Send personalized emails or create sequences and smart sends.
• Web Forms: Build forms and banners to capture lead information from website visits.
• Live Chat Widgets: Offer support to site visitors and collect their info to generate leads.
• Free Feature Integrations:

  Integrate with free lead gen, help desk, and other key tools.

Visit HubSpot CRM

Top 5 Sales Pipeline Software Features

The best sales pipeline software offer features such as:

Pipeline Management

Lead Management

Account & Contact Management

Sales Automation

Sales Forecasting

Sales pipelines are visual representations of your sales process stages and where each lead is within them. Pipeline management tools help sales reps track these stages and identify bottlenecks and opportunities to close more deals.

Sales reps can qualify, analyze, and nurture leads using various strategies — for instance, they can use web forms to capture leads from landing pages, prioritize the ones most likely to close, then engage with them via email, phone, and more, tracking their activity along the way.

With this feature, sales reps can store and organize lead and customer data from different channels into a centralized location. Reps can also see a complete picture of a contact’s interactions, which helps them to meet the exact needs of their leads and prospects.

Sales automation tools help teams manage repetitive tasks that are essential to the sales process, such as sending follow-up emails, nurturing leads, and tracking opportunities. By setting up triggers or sequences, teams can automate manual tasks and focus more on increasing sales or refining sales strategies.

This feature helps sales teams predict future deals using historical data, current pipeline status, and external data sources. It enables teams to track individual sales progress and make informed decisions to improve sales strategies and meet their revenue goals.

How We Evaluated the Best Sales Pipeline Software

To determine the best CRM software for salespeople needing to track their pipelines, we divided our scoring into six major categories, each of which included several weighted subcriteria. We then assigned scores for each subcriteria, which totaled an overall score out of five, and the sales pipeline software scoring the highest was identified as our winner. Finally, we determined a primary use case for each option that scored highly enough to make it onto our list.

Evaluation Criteria

For our scoring, we put the most emphasis on each option’s core features and cost since these tend to be the most important aspects for salespeople when choosing a sales pipeline software. We then reviewed each option’s customization, ease of use, and integrations with third-party apps. We also looked at the level of customer support offered by each CRM to round out our evaluation.

Core Features:

25%

Cost:

20%

Customization:

20%

Ease of Use:

15%

Integrations:

10%

Customer Support:

10%

Core Features Overview

We looked at each sales pipeline software’s core offerings, such as pipeline management, lead management, account management, sales automation, and forecasting.

Criteria Winner: Zoho CRM

Cost Overview

We checked out any free trial periods, subscription plans, and/or features offered within a free-forever plan.

Criteria Winner: Multiple winners

Customization Overview

This covers the different customizations for fields, deal stages and milestones, dashboards, metrics, and reports.

Criteria Winner: Zoho CRM

Ease of Use Overview

We evaluated any knowledge bases offered and read user reviews covering whether the sales pipeline software is easy to use.

Criteria Winner: Multiple winners

Integrations Overview

We reviewed the integrations offered, such as ones for calendar, email, social media, accounting, and others often used by sales reps.

Criteria Winner: Multiple winners

Customer Support Overview

We combed through real user reviews and evaluated whether each platform offers phone, email, and chat support.

Criteria Winner: EngageBay

Bottom Line: Best Sales Pipeline Software

The ability to view your sales pipeline will change the way you do business. It’s an important tool because it allows you to use data to determine how well your sales process is performing. And because a visual pipeline tracks sales activities, you can see which tasks are the most effective in getting a deal to close. Many CRMs include them as part of their suite of CRM features, but our list will help you find the one that will fit your needs and sales practices.