Trying to choose between Pipedrive vs Salesforce as the CRM for your business and WordPress website?

Pipedrive and Salesforce are both well-regarded customer relationship management platforms, but there are some important differences between the two that might make one or the other the better option for your business.

Instead of trying to pick a single “winner”, we’re just going to compare and contrast these tools across the following areas so that you can make the right choice for your own unique situation:

• Target audiences
• Functionality and scope of features
• Ease of use
• Customizability
• Pricing

If you’re using WordPress for your website, we’ll also dig into how the Gravity Forms plugin can help you integrate both Salesforce and Pipedrive into your WordPress website, including syncing WordPress form submissions to your CRM.

Target audiences: Who uses Pipedrive and Salesforce?

Let’s start off by talking about the types of businesses that are most likely to use Pipedrive and Salesforce.

In general, you’ll find the following:

• Pipedrive is primarily built for and used by small businesses. If you read Pipedrive’s FAQ, it describes Pipedrive as “a sales pipeline CRM designed to help small businesses manage leads, track sales activities and close more deals.”
• Salesforce is most popular with enterprises, thanks in large part to how incredibly customizable it is. While Salesforce does offer plans targeted toward small businesses with its Starter Suite and Pro Suite offerings, it’s best known as being an enterprise-level platform.

These are by no means absolute rules, especially when it comes to Salesforce. But in general, the feature set and experience of both tools are focused in these directions.

Functionality and scope of features: What can you do with each tool?

Next, let’s look at some of the key functionality and scope of features in Pipedrive vs Salesforce, as this will help reinforce the differences that we discussed in the previous section.

Pipedrive

Whereas Salesforce segments its features into different “clouds”, Pipedrive mostly combines all of its functionality into a single plan.

There are a few optional add-ons for certain functionality, but, for the most part, everything is available in one package.

Pipedrive is primarily a sales CRM. It covers all of the essential features that most small-to-medium-sized businesses need to manage their sales processes, including the following:

• Contact and deal management
• Visual sales pipeline management that lets you manage pipelines using a Kanban-like interface (or other views)
• Activity and task tracking, including automating sales workflows
• Reporting dashboards
• Sales email templates and tracking, including integrations with Gmail and Outlook

In addition to the sales CRM, Pipedrive does offer some optional add-ons that branch into additional areas:

• Email marketing and campaigns – You can send marketing emails and set up automation sequences.
• Project management – You can manage projects using a Kanban-like interface. It’s sort of like Trello, but already integrated with your team and connected to your CRM.
• Website visitor analytics – You can track which organizations are viewing your website and connect that data to your sales CRM.
• Document management – You can manage all of the documents in your sales processes, including features like autofill, e-signatures, open tracking, and more.

Salesforce

Salesforce offers a broad array of features, encompassing sales, marketing, customer support, and much more.

For its primary features, it divides its offerings into different “clouds”. By separating its offerings, you can choose the specific tools that you’ll use (and only pay for those offerings).

There are also small business-focused plans (Starter Suite and Pro Suite) that combine essential, but limited, features from different clouds (for a much lower price).

Here are some of the core features that Salesforce offers:

• Sales Cloud – In addition to the core Salesforce CRM, you can also access tons of other tools to optimize your sales processes.
• Marketing Cloud – You can access omnichannel marketing features, including email marketing, marketing automation, social media marketing, and more.
• Service Cloud – You can offer customer support across multiple channels, using human or AI agents (or a mix of both). Pipedrive doesn’t currently offer customer support features, so this is unique to Salesforce.
• Commerce Cloud (Unified Commerce) -This can help you power your e-commerce efforts, which is another unique detail to Salesforce.
• Experience Cloud (formerly Community Cloud) – You can create Salesforce-powered websites or other online experiences (such as a customer support forum).
• Agentforce (formerly Einstein) – This houses AI agents and tools, most of which integrate into Salesforce’s other offerings.

As you can see, Salesforce’s offerings go beyond just sales, which is a broader scope than what Pipedrive offers.

Salesforce also offers a number of industry-specific clouds that contain functionality specific to their target industries, which is another area that Pipedrive doesn’t currently address:

• Nonprofit Cloud
• Health Cloud
• Financial Services Cloud
• Education Cloud
• Manufacturing Cloud
• Government Cloud

All in all, Salesforce generally offers a broader scope in terms of the features that it offers. While it does offer everything that you need to run your sales processes, it can also handle marketing, customer support, commerce, and more.

Ease of use: Which tool is easier to use?

While ease of use is always a bit subjective, most people will probably find Pipedrive to be easier to use and less complex than Salesforce.

A big part of this is because Pipedrive is designed for small businesses, which may not have the resources to have a dedicated administrator for their CRM, which is often the case for many larger organizations that use Salesforce.

Even if you’ve never used Pipedrive and you don’t have much technical knowledge, you can jump in and be up and running pretty quickly.

Compared to Salesforce, Pipedrive’s interface is simple and easy to use. The terminology that Pipedrive uses will feel familiar right away, the interface design is simpler and less intimidating, and so on.

In comparison, Salesforce definitely has a bit more of a learning curve. The interfaces are not quite as intuitive, and it takes some time to learn the terminology and how things work (though the Starter Suite and Pro Suite do try to address this with a slightly more user-friendly interface).

For example, Salesforce heavily uses “object types”, which let you store data such as accounts and contacts, along with custom object types that are unique to your business. While using a more abstract term/system like “object types” has advantages when it comes to flexibility, it can also make Salesforce feel a bit more complex when you’re just getting started.

This is just one example to highlight how Salesforce can feel a bit more intimidating than Pipedrive when it comes to the learning curve and ease of use.

Because of this (and other reasons), many larger organizations will actually hire a dedicated Salesforce administrator, and “Salesforce Administrator” is a popular job type (with entire courses and certifications designed to help people get into the field).

Customizability: Which tool gives you more options for customization?

The tradeoff of Salesforce being more complex from an ease of use perspective is that it’s able to offer much more advanced customization than what Pipedrive allows.

In fact, Salesforce just generally offers more customization options than most other CRM platforms.

You can access customization at different “levels”, depending on your specific needs and knowledge level.

At a basic level, you can set up customization via the interface, including custom objects, flow builders, logic builders, and more. You can also access 9,000+ apps via Salesforce AppExchange, which helps you add more features and connect to other services.

On a more technical level, Salesforce also offers its own programming language called Apex, which developers can use to programmatically create custom automation and logic processes. You can also access many APIs for further customization.

Pipedrive does offer a decent amount of customizability that can certainly fit the needs of many small businesses. For example, you can add custom fields, customize your pipeline, integrate with 500+ other tools, access a visual automation builder, and more.

But if you want enterprise-level customization, Salesforce is the winner.

Pricing: What will you pay for Pipedrive vs Salesforce?

Comparing Pipedrive vs Salesforce pricing on a 1:1 basis can be a bit difficult because there are a lot of variables.

With that being said, we can draw some general conclusions about Pipedrive vs Salesforce pricing that will hold true for most users:

• Both services bill you based on the number of users/seats. That is, how many people in your organization will be using the service.
• Pipedrive is generally cheaper than Salesforce, which makes sense given its focus on small businesses. However, we encourage you to do the math for your specific situation.
• Pipedrive has generally less complex pricing, with four core plans and five optional add-ons.

Free plans and free trials

Neither Pipedrive nor Salesforce offers free plans, but both services do offer free trials:

• Pipedrive offers a 14-day free trial for any of its plans.
• Salesforce offers a 30-day free trial for many, but not all, of its plans.

Pipedrive pricing

Pipedrive will often be cheaper than Salesforce.

As we mentioned earlier, Pipedrive mostly puts all of its features in one unified plan, rather than separating them into different “clouds” like Salesforce does.

There are four different pricing tiers for the core CRM functionality, starting at $14 per user per month and going up to $69 per user per month (with annual billing).

In addition to the four core pricing plans, Pipedrive also offers five different optional add-ons to “enrich your plan with more features”:

• LeadBooster add-on – “Capture more leads” – from $32.50 per month.
• Projects add-on – “Deliver projects and reach goals faster” – from $6.67 per month.
• Campaigns add-on – “Send awesome email marketing campaigns” – from $13.33 per month.
• Web Visitors add-on – “See who’s browsing your site” – from $41 per month.
• Smart Docs add-on – “Manage all of your documents in one place” – from $32.50 per month.

Salesforce pricing

In general, Salesforce will work out to be more expensive for most organizations, though the exact differences will depend on your specific use cases.

The cheapest entry point to Salesforce is via one of its two small business-focused plans, which offer a more “all-in-one” approach that’s closer to what Pipedrive offers (though you don’t get access to all the functionality in Salesforce).

• Starter Suite – from $25 per month per user.
• Pro Suite – from $100 per month per user.

If you go beyond those two small business-focused plans, Salesforce will be significantly more expensive than Pipedrive.

You can contact Salesforce’s sales team for an exact quote, but here are the starting prices for some of Salesforce’s popular clouds:

• Marketing Cloud – From $1,500 per month per organization for Marketing Cloud Growth Edition (billed annually).
• Sales Cloud – From $165-$175 per month per user for Enterprise (billed annually).
• Service Cloud – From $175 per month per user for Enterprise (billed annually).

WordPress connections with Pipedrive and Salesforce

Regardless of whether you choose Pipedrive or Salesforce, the Gravity Forms plugin can help you connect your WordPress site to your CRM.

Gravity Forms offers a dedicated add-on for Salesforce, while you can use other add-ons, such as Zapier, to connect to Pipedrive.

You can use these add-ons to create dedicated lead generation forms. Or, you can also sync data from other types of forms to your CRM, such as syncing a customer’s data to your CRM after they make a purchase via a payment form that you’ve created with Gravity Forms.

Here’s a quick summary of how Gravity Forms can integrate with Pipedrive and Salesforce…

Gravity Forms Pipedrive integration

Gravity Forms does not currently offer an official add-on for Pipedrive, but you still have multiple options for connecting your WordPress forms to Pipedrive using Gravity Forms.

First off, you can use the official Gravity Forms Zapier Add-On to connect your forms to Pipedrive via Zapier. While this does add an intermediary service, Zapier still gives you tons of options for mapping the data from your form to different fields in Pipedrive.

If you’d prefer to connect your forms directly to Pipedrive, you can also find multiple third-party community add-ons that offer this functionality.

These add-ons come from third-party developers and have not been directly certified by the Gravity Forms team, so we recommend reading reviews and doing your due diligence before installing them.

You can find multiple third-party Pipedrive add-ons in the Gravity Forms Community Add-Ons directory, including the following:

• Pipedrive For Gravity Forms
• Pipedrive for Gravity Forms
• Gravity Forms to Pipedrive CRM

Gravity Forms Salesforce Add-On

For Salesforce, Gravity Forms offers its own official Salesforce Add-On, which is available with an Elite or Nonprofit license.

It lets you connect your forms directly to Salesforce using the Salesforce API:

• Choose how to connect to Salesforce – If you’re connecting your own Salesforce account, you can use the Salesforce authorization flow. If you’re connecting someone else’s account (e.g. a client website), the add-on also supports manual connections.
• Connect to any object type – You can sync your form data to any Salesforce object type. If you need more flexibility, you can also connect a form to multiple object types, including using conditional logic to control when to use each object type.
• Map form fields to Salesforce fields – Map all of the data from your form fields to any fields in Salesforce.
• Add conditional logic rules – Use conditional logic rules to control whether to sync data to Salesforce and/or how you want to sync data.

If you’d like to learn more, you can read our guide on how to connect WordPress to Salesforce.

It’s important to note, that to utilize the Gravity Forms Salesforce Add-On, your Salesforce account must have access to the Salesforce API. You can check if your Salesforce account supports the required APIs for our Gravity Forms integration by using our Salesforce Connection Verification Tool.

For more information, refer to this Salesforce developer article that outlines the license types known to provide API access. We recommend you check with your Salesforce account executive or Salesforce support if you have more questions on this.

Final thoughts

Because both are quality tools, choosing between Salesforce vs Pipedrive really comes down to the unique circumstances of your business.

Pipedrive can be a good option for small businesses that want essential sales CRM functionality in an easy-to-use package. It’s also generally going to be more affordable than Salesforce, which can be good if you’re looking to keep costs down.

On the other hand, Salesforce can be a good option for organizations that need more advanced functionality and customization. While it does have a higher learning curve and might cost more than Pipedrive, it’s just generally one of the best tools out there when it comes to accessing advanced functionality and customizing everything to the unique needs of your business.

Regardless of whether you choose Pipedrive or Salesforce, you can use the Gravity Forms plugin to connect all of your WordPress forms to your CRM.

For Salesforce, you can connect WordPress directly using the Gravity Forms Salesforce Add-On, which is available with Elite and Nonprofit licenses.

For Pipedrive, you can connect WordPress using Zapier and the Gravity Forms Zapier Add-On, which is available with Pro, Elite, and Nonprofit licenses.

If you’re not already holding one of these Gravity Forms licenses, you can purchase a new license here or upgrade your existing license and only pay the prorated difference.