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Pipedrive vs Trello: Which is The Best App to Steer Your Business to Success?

Explore how Pipedrive and Trello reshape project and sales management, their key features and functions, and the best-suited app for your unique business requirements. Understand Pipedrive vs. Trello in a whole new light!
by Chris Allmer | Nov 17 2023

In a rapidly advancing world where deliverables reign supreme, effective project and team management can often mean the difference between success and failure. Often, the key to unlocking this potential lies in the tools we use to organize our tasks, manage our teams, and streamline operations.

Today, we are immersed in a digital age, and with the advent of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and project management tools like Pipedrive and Trello, managing projects and teams has never been more effortless.

Exploring digital solutions to traditional problems usually poses the question of ‘which tool is best for my needs?’. If you have found yourself entangled in the “Pipedrive vs Trello” debate, you are not alone.

These two giants are renowned for offering stellar solutions to business operations. This article aims to equip you with a comprehensive review of both tools, helping you decide which suits your needs best.

 

Pipedrive vs Trello: The Overview

Pipedrive, characterized primarily as a Sales Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool, has carved a niche for itself in the competitive digital market and it’s the perfect tool for sales teams. It owes a substantial part of its popularity to its user-friendly design and uncluttered approach.

Pipedrive centers its attention on managing leads and deals, ensuring that no potential client or project slips through unseen. It provides a simple yet potent platform for tracking profits and losses in real time, making way for calculated decisions and strategic planning.

Contrastingly, Trello adopts a different, more adaptable approach, making it a go-to choice for those seeking project management applications. Trello’s selling point is its renowned flexibility and adaptability, aided by its unique card system.

This innovative feature allows users to convert all their tasks into visual components, making it convenient to organize and monitor progress. What’s more, the Trello board warrants easy modification, accommodating changes in project stages or task status seamlessly.

In essence, Trello’s actionable and accessible layout empowers users to streamline their workflows with clarity and coherence, thereby promoting better productivity.
 

Pipedrive vs Trello: The Facts

Pipedrive Trello
Free version available No (only 14-day trial) Yes
Premium Fee From $14.90 From $5
Third-party Integrations Over 350 integrations: Trello, Zapier, Facebook Messenger, Outlook, Hubspot, Slack, Zoom, DocuSign, WhatsApp, Zapier and more Over 200 integrations: Zoho, Salesforce, Slack, Twitter, Mailchimp, HubSpot, Google Drive, Dropbox, Jira, WordPress, Evernote and more
Automation Yes Yes
Views Kanban, Calendar, Contact Timeline, Insights & Activity Reports Kanban, Timeline, Calendar, Dashboard, Table and Map.
Customer Support 24/7 live chat and email 24-hour response limit
Drag-and-drop design Yes Yes

 

Pipedrive: A Definitive Guide to Reinforced Customer Relations

As a forward-thinking CRM tool, Pipedrive has set the stage to revolutionize the way businesses manage their lead pipelines and customer journeys. Its primary aim is to drive increased sales, leveraging insightful prospects data gathered via CRM platforms and website forms.

Once this data gets captured, Pipedrive diligently creates detailed profiles for each prospect, which serve as the basis for highly personalized, data-driven services. These services strengthen the ties between businesses and their customers, spearheaded by dedicated marketing experts, sales team, and customer support representatives.

But the tool’s allure doesn’t stop there. Beyond lead management, Pipedrive boasts a bounty of complementary features – from lead pipeline dashboards, efficient email automation, and extensive integrations, to insightful sales reports – it sponsors a seamless sales process.

Pipedrive’s standout feature, however, is its AI-powered automation. Specifically designed for small businesses, this sophisticated technology continually gathers data on current deals and sales. It analyzes this data, offering actionable recommendations on how best to close sales and optimize the usage of CRM features. Not only does it provide guidance on existing deals, but also offers tips on how to implement integrations and other features to enhance overall business performance.

Taking it a step further from a CRM tool, Pipedrive is currently developing its own project management software. This exciting addition allows users to select an industry-specific project management template and customize it proactively to their unique project needs. Furthermore, it uniquely connects projects to the deals, sales, or contacts existing within Pipedrive.

To put it into perspective, consider a renovation contractor who has just sealed a new deal. Following this, the contractor can efficiently open a project within Pipedrive’s state-of-the-art management software to oversee the forthcoming remodeling process.

This ability to integrate sales and project management highlights Pipedrive’s commitment to providing a complete, coherent, and connected solution to manage and grow businesses.

Pricing

One factor to consider when deciding between Pipedrive and other CRM tools is that Pipedrive is a premium tool, meaning it doesn’t offer a free version. However, it does provide immense value for its cost.

The price tag is justified by its sophisticated and tailor-made features that go beyond the typical capabilities found in free tools. Its pricing structure is designed to accommodate different business sizes and needs, with multiple plans available to choose from.

While an initial investment is required, the tangible increase in sales efficiency and customer relationship management that Pipedrive offers can be seen as a valuable return on investment for many businesses.

Pipedrive offers a tiered pricing structure that caters to various business needs. The four main paid plans include Essential, Advanced, Professional, and Enterprise.

Essential: Priced at $14.50 per user per month, with annual billing, the Essential plan acts as an entry point for businesses. It primarily covers basic CRM functionalities such as contact and deal management, customizable pipelines, email sync, a basic meeting scheduler, an AI sales assistant, and of course, mobile apps.

Advanced: For $27.90 per user per month, billed annually, the Advanced plan houses additional features, going beyond the elementary CRM functions. Apart from the Essential features, it includes full email sync and customizable templates, an advanced automation builder, and advanced integrations like scheduling.

Professional: At $49.90 per user per month on annual billing, the Professional plan is designed for businesses aiming to optimize their sales processes effectively. It offers revenue forecasting, and team management capabilities on top of all earlier provided features. Importantly, it introduces the convenience of a dedicated single point of contact for support.

Enterprise: Priced at $99 per user per month, billed annually, the Enterprise plan may seem like quite an investment. Still, it’s strategically built for businesses in need of a highly customized solution. It offers everything integrated into the Professional plan, along with tailored onboarding, advanced user access controls, and professional services, all under the vigilant eyes of your dedicated Customer Success manager.

On top of Pipedrive’s robust core offerings in each of its pricing plans, it also extends the opportunity to enhance your user experience with additional features and add-ons available for purchase. For instance, the LeadBooster add-on empowers you to amass more quality leads with its captivating Chatbot and Live Chat features.

It also includes a Prospector service that aids in finding high-quality leads, a Web Visitors add-on, and other Project features available. Keep in mind, that these add-ons do come at additional costs but provide valuable resources to fully personalize and optimize your use of Pipedrive.

It’s noteworthy to mention that Pipedrive offers a 14-day free trial for all these plans, ensuring your business finds the best fit according to its unique needs. Remember, the crown merits the cost, so a wise plan selection would certainly reap ample benefits in the long run.
 

Trello: Harnessing Simplicity in Project Management

Trello is a captivating project management software, setting itself apart with its intuitive card-based list or Kanban board interface. This dynamic tool is routinely used for planning and tracking projects or workflows, providing a bird’s eye view of all operations.

Users can create cards to represent entire projects or specific project steps, thus enabling effective management of a project’s development, workflow, and eventual completion. Additionally, by establishing more than one board, companies can conveniently use Trello cards to manage multiple projects or workflows simultaneously, making it an ideal platform for multitasking.

But what are these Trello cards? Essentially, they’re the driving force behind Trello’s intuitive project management. Upon clicking a card, users can access many features such as checklists, a project timeline, a calendar for tracking due dates, task assignment capabilities, and even maps showcasing project event locations.

Beyond this, cards incorporate collaboration tools such as comment sections, permissions, and file attachments, thereby promoting teamwork. As projects progress, users can effortlessly relocate cards between columns – from “to do” to “in progress” to “complete”, epitomizing organized workflow management.

Trello proves to be an invaluable tool for teams working under the Scrum-Agile methodology. Known for its inherent flexibility and adaptability, Trello seamlessly mirrors the incremental and iterative project approach that characterizes Agile. The card-based list or Kanban board aligns perfectly with Agile’s user stories and Scrum’s sprints, enabling teams to prioritize tasks, track progress, and deliver value incrementally.

Users can easily create cards for each user story or task, assign them to different sprints, and manage backlog items. As each sprint progresses, teams can move cards from the “to do” to “in progress” and then to the “done” column, effectively visualizing the movement of work across the Scrum board.

If your interest has been piqued by the potential of Trello in a Scrum-Agile environment, we highly recommend that you delve into Jeff Sutherland’s book, ‘Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time.’ This illuminating read, penned by one of the creators of the Scrum software development methodology, unveils the secret to managing and accomplishing more work in less time.

Sutherland adeptly breaks down the complex concepts of the Scrum framework into easy-to-understand narratives, laced with real-life examples. ‘Scrum’ is more than just a book; consider it your guide to navigating Agile project management’s landscape, ultimately enabling you to unleash the full potential of tools like Trello.

However, where Trello truly shines is in its customization. Its remarkable automation feature, named Butler, is designed to amplify efficiency. Users can set up automations that perform tasks based on specific triggers by integrating other popular applications like Slack.

Using the example given, once a project is checked as “complete” on a Trello board, Butler can automatically announce the achievement on a Slack channel. Not only does Butler perform task automation, it also carefully observes user activity, and identifies repetitive tasks, later suggesting improvements to streamline workflow.

In short, Trello combines the best of project management essentials with user-friendly technology to deliver an engaging, efficient platform for managing projects.

Trello’s payment plans

Embrace efficiency with Trello’s versatile premium plans and pricing. Whether you’re a freelancer or a large corporation, Trello offers a range of cost-effective options tailored to suit your needs. Its basic plan is free, offering impressive benefits.

For more advanced features, you could consider the “Standard”, “Premium” or “Enterprise” options. Trello offers this four tiered plans to cater to different project needs and team sizes, each packed with comprehensive features.

  • Free: Priced at $0, this plan is a perfect economical choice for organizing any project. It offers unlimited cards, up to 10 boards per workspace, unlimited power-ups per board, and unlimited storage of up to 10MB per file. Additional perks include 250 monthly workspace command runs, custom backgrounds, stickers, and a salient activity log. Mobile apps for iOS and Android combined with 2-factor authentication enhance accessibility and security.
  • Standard: With an annual price of $5 per user per month ($6 billed monthly), this plan is ideal for small teams looking to upscale their collaboration process. It covers everything in the ‘Free’ plan while adding unlimited board access, advanced checklists, custom fields, and expanded storage up to 250MB per file. Reap the benefits of 1000 workspace command runs per month, single board guests, and saved searches for an enhanced team management experience.
  • Premium: Crafted for teams that require advanced project management and visualization tools, this plan is priced at $10 per user per month ($12.50 billed monthly). Apart from the ‘Standard’ benefits, it offers a variety of views (calendar, timeline, table, dashboard, and map) and workspace views. Enjoy unlimited workspace command runs, added admin security features, workspace-level templates, collections, observers, and simple data export for an enriched collaborative experience.
  • Enterprise: Starting at $17.50 per user per month (billed annually and depending on the users), this plan boosts security and control measures across expanding teams. Enjoy everything in the ‘Premium’ plus unique advantages like unlimited workspaces, organization-wide permissions, organization-visible boards, public board management, multi-board guests, and attachment permissions. Also, administrative control of Power-Ups and free SSO with Atlassian Access makes this plan a prime choice for large organizations.

These diverse plans are a testament to Trello’s flexible approach to task management, making it a noteworthy competitor in the Pipedrive vs Trello comparison.
 

Comparing Features: Pipedrive vs Trello

Task Management

When comparing Pipedrive and Trello in terms of task management, the former being a CRM and the latter a project management tool, they cater to different segments of business operations. 

Trello focuses on project execution and completion, offering a diverse set of tools such as email marketing, calendars, website forms, progress reports, and a flexible digital platform. The main objective here is to manage tasks related to individual projects and ensure their successful closure.

On the contrary, Pipedrive’s focus lies in nurturing leads and customers with the ultimate aim of boosting sales. Here, task management involves employing key features like data gathering and storage, pipeline dashboards for lead tracking, comprehensive sales reporting, and efficiency-boosting automation and integrations.

Hence, while Trello is about managing project-centric tasks, Pipedrive excels at handling tasks that directly or indirectly influence sales.

Ease of use

When it comes to the ease of use, both Pipedrive and Trello have made conscious efforts to provide a user-friendly interface tailored to their target audiences. Pipedrive centres on simplicity, ensuring even the non-tech savvy can easily navigate it.

On the other hand, Trello shines with its visual appeal. By leveraging the card system to manage tasks, it offers a straightforward and intuitive way of visualizing project workflows that many users find engaging.

The process of creating and moving cards is an easy drag-and-drop operation, making it quite manageable even for those not familiar with traditional project management software. Thus, both tools have a moderate learning curve and emphasize simplicity and intuitiveness in their interface design, making them accessible to a broad range of users.

Workflows

Creating workflows in Pipedrive and Trello can be distinctly different experiences, given their specific focus areas. Pipedrive, as a sales-oriented tool, helps users visualize their sales pipelines effectively.

The process is streamlined and straightforward, ensuring each stage of a deal’s lifecycle can be meticulously tracked. Workflow creation here revolves around tracking interactions with potential leads and moving them through the sales pipeline toward deal closure.

On the flip side, Trello, with its project management foundation, uses a card-based system allowing users to create workflows in the form of Trello boards. Each board can represent a project, where individual tasks get demarcated as cards. Users can effortlessly create stages of workflows in the form of columns (like “To Do”, “In Progress”, and “Completed”) and move these cards across as the project progresses.

Also, Trello’s Butler feature provides automation capabilities to create rule-based triggers, thus allowing for more complex workflow scenarios. Thus, while both tools offer effective workflow creation features, they cater to essentially different business processes – sales for Pipedrive and project management for Trello.

Automations

Pipedrive and Trello embrace automation in their design but apply it differently according to their functional emphasis. Pipedrive’s automations are directly tied to optimizing the sales process. Its AI-powered system constantly gathers data on current deals and sales and provides recommendations on closing deals. It also suggests how various Pipedrive features can be used to improve business performance to maximize sales efficiency.

Conversely, Trello’s automated feature, Butler, is woven into its core project management functionality. Butler enables the automation of routine tasks based on rule triggers and due dates, such as moving cards to different lists or assigning tasks to team members. It even learns from usage patterns to identify repetitive tasks and suggest automation to improve efficiency.

In essence, while Trello’s automation is about streamlining project workflows and reducing manual work, Pipedrive harnesses automation to drive sales outcomes and improve business strategies. Both leverage automation to significantly enhance user experience, albeit in different domains.
 

Pipedrive vs Trello: Final Recommendations

Finding the right tool to aid your business processes is a critical step, a task this “Pipedrive vs. Trello” comparison aims to simplify. Both tools provide unique yet effective solutions for sales and project management, respectively.

If meticulous sales tracking, lead management, and sales-centric processes are your primary concerns, Pipedrive is a reliable companion. However, if your business operations involve diverse projects, require consistent collaboration, and need a visual representation of tasks, Trello rises to the occasion.

The ultimate deciding factor is your unique business needs and goals. Always select a tool that aligns with your workflows, processes, and organizational culture. Whether that’s with the sales driving power of Pipedrive or the project management prowess of Trello, you’re taking substantial strides towards improved operations.

For readers preparing to venture deeper into project management, we enthusiastically recommend exploring Blinkist’s curated collection ‘This is Project Management.‘ A vast array of concise breakdowns of the best project management books available will help you understand and master the nuances of this vital business discipline.

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