Sales and marketing teams are using more apps than ever to help streamline their workflows and automate many of the processes they previously had to do manually. This can create enormous efficiencies when done correctly. A single sales representative can now manage far more leads and deals than they could in the past.
However, this is only possible when using the right software tools for the job. Using the wrong software for your specific team, even if that tool is highly rated, will end up slowing down your processes and causing more harm than good. This is why it’s so important for teams and organizations to choose the right applications for their specific needs, not just the ones that are most popular or have the most glowing reviews.
Pipedrive and Trello are two tools that you’ve likely heard of when it comes to teams managing their various workflows. Both of these tools are effective for creating marketing and sales initiatives across a wide range of industries. But each one excels in different areas and for different tasks. When matched properly with the job at hand, both can do a remarkable job streamlining your projects.
To help you choose which one is right for your organization, we’ll review both Pipedrive and Trello as well as go over their key features and differences.
When you’re finished reading, you should have a clear idea of which of these tools will work best for your next sales or marketing project.
What is Pipedrive?
Pipedrive is a specialized customer Relations management (CRM) tool designed for managing leads and deals all the way from the initial contact through to the final closing.
Pipedrive derives its name from sales “pipelines”, which are essential to the flow of the sales process your team uses to go from lead qualifying to the final sale. Pipedrive excels with sales pipelines that may involve different stakeholders along the way when each one needs to stay updated, authorize a deal, or interact with the sales process along the way.
To help your team stay organized, Pipedrive allows you to represent your sales process in a kanban-style board layout. Leads and deals are represented by cards and you can move the cards through different columns as they progress. Clicking on any of the cards as they move through columns allows you to see the details of the deals and all parties involved, along with dependencies and tasks that are still outstanding. All of these actions for each lead and deal are carefully tracked within Pipedrive and can be used to create extremely detailed reports and analytics. This reporting allows managers to see their team’s performance at a glance and quickly determine where bottlenecks or other issues are occurring.
The goal of Pipedrive is to give you a tool to both streamline your sales workflows and also give you powerful insights to optimize them at every stage of the process.
Features
Pipedrive offers some great features that are highly specialized and specific to the Pipedrive workflow. Below, we go over the standout features you can find within Pipedrive.
Customization Options
The most significant key feature of Pipedrive is its overall customization possibilities. CRM tools are nothing new, but many lock you into a specific workflow and style. If your leads and sales differ from that workflow, you often need to find workarounds or “hacks” to make things work. This creates inefficiencies and is essentially the opposite of what you want your CRM to do for you.
Pipedrive allows you to customize your sales and lead workflows to fit your business, industry, and team. From adding whatever custom data fields you want to creating automation, Pipedrive can adapt to your workflow instead of the other way around.
Chatbots
Chatbots have become a bit of a buzzword in the business world, but the reality is they can add a great deal of functionality to your lead-generation workflows when implemented correctly. Chatbots in Pipedrive are part of their Leadbooster suite, which is designed to help you capture leads more easily and prevent leads from falling through the cracks.
Within the Leadbooster menu, you use a simple interface to build a chatbot to embed on your site or just about anywhere else you want it. You can create “playbooks” that determine how the chatbot will interact with leads and what the goal of the chatbot will be. You can then select options to have the chatbot hand over the conversation to a live sales representative after certain triggers or keywords are used.
Overall, it’s a very easy way for teams to take the plunge into the world of AI without the need for extensive coding.
Automation
Most CRMs have automation tools and Pipedrive is no different. What is unique is how the automation works within the Pipedrive ecosystem to take full advantage of the customization features within the software.
As you move your leads and deals through your pipeline, you can trigger different automation to send out documents, emails, or other communications. You can even use automation to create entire sales workflows from scratch when a lead comes into the system.
The Pipedrive automation is designed to help you eliminate many repetitive tasks that can slow down your team. The automation also helps you do more with less, which makes this perfect for teams looking to scale their sales efforts. Similar to the chatbot features, the automation within Pipedrive is no-code and works on a simple trigger/condition/response logic system.
Integrations
Pipedrive has over 400 ready-made integrations. Most of these integrations can be set up to work with Pipedrive’s internal automation tools, further extending the capabilities.
Clean & Simple Interface
Pipedrive is one of the easier CRMs to manage, especially for newcomers. The interface is straightforward and you aren’t presented with countless menus and options when you first step into the workspace.
Most processes are guided where the software asks you what you want to do and presents you with options. So even those with no experience can get up to speed without having to watch. tutorials or scour the internet for answers.
However, the more advanced features do require a little digging and we suggest learning the software inside and out to get the most out of it.
Pricing
PipeDrive has a lot of pricing options, something we don’t particularly like to see in a software product. It makes things more difficult for the consumer and complex pricing structures are generally designed to get you to “trade up” to a higher level of service.
Essential Plan: $14.90 per month/user
- Lead and deal management
- Customizable pipelines
- Products Catalog
- Leads Inbox
- Deal rotting
- Data import and export
- Merge duplicate data
- Custom fields
- 3K open deals
Advanced Plan: $27.90 per month/user
- Everything in Essential
- Multiple email accounts sync
- Customizable email templates and signatures
- Merge fields
- Email open and click tracking
- Group emailing
- Email Scheduling
- Meeting scheduler
- Video call scheduling
- General availability scheduling links
- Contacts timeline
- 10k open deals
Professional Plan: $49.90 per month/ user
- Everything in Advanced
- Formula fields
- Pipeline-specific fields
- Deal card customization
- Projects add-on
- Revenue forecast reports and view
- Subscription revenue reports
- Dashboard collaboration
- Custom fields options
- Team management
- Team goals
- 100K open deals
Power Plan: $64.90 per month/user
- Everything in Professional
- Phone support
- Custom onboarding
- 200k open deals
Enterprise Plan: $99.00 per month/user
- Everything in Power
- Security alerts & rules
- Unlimited deals
What is Trello?
Trello is a highly flexible project management app that can be used by sales and marketing teams as well as almost any type of business. Trello isn’t designed for one specific type of business operation like sales. Instead, it works as a project management template that can be adapted to any initiative, project, or goal within your organization. These can be short-term goals, long-term goals, projects, and even ongoing initiatives with no definite end date. At the core of Trello is its kanban board layout. This lets you create customized “cards” that contain task data. You then move the cards through different columns or stages of completion. Trello really excels at visual project management. You can select different images and layouts for cards so you can immediately see and remember what each project task consists of.
For those who prefer a visual workflow, Trello is one of the best in that regard for project management.
Unlike Pipedrive, Trello is not a CRM specifically. It can be used for certain sales and marketing purposes, but it doesn’t have robust lead management tools built in. Interestingly, you can integrate Trello with Pipedrive. So if you want the best of both worlds, that’s possible as well.
Overall, Trello is not specifically designed for sales leads and deal management. But it can be used by sales teams and marketing teams to develop and execute initiatives involving different stakeholders and departments.
Features
Trello has some great project management features and the developers worked hard to keep them simple and visually appealing.
Below are some key Trello features that make it stand out among other project management tools.
Visual Project Management
Trello’s greatest asset is its visual style and approach to project management. Let’s be serious, project management can be a little dry and boring at times. Having a way to keep your project looking fresh and exciting can help with overall productivity and keep engagement as high as possible. But beyond just the psychological impact, many teams prefer the visual style of Trello. This is especially true for creative teams that are using visual mediums within the project.
For example, a fashion brand can use images of their new spring lineup on cards. Each card can be for a specific clothing item as it goes from ideation to final approval for production. The visual tools are more than just for cards though. Data visualization and reports are also highly visual in Trello.
Strong Mobile App
Because of the visual nature of Trello, it adapts to the mobile environment far better than some other project management tools.
You can also do a surprising amount of work directly within the app. Some other project management tools have limitations on what you can do with the app. If you or your team spend a lot of time on the go or traveling, Trello’s strong mobile app can be a real benefit over other project management options.
Automation
Trello has built-in automation that you can configure using its AI-style bot named Butler. When setting up an automation, the bot asks you various questions and presents you with options.
It’s a straightforward way to quickly build automation into your project. For example, when a card is moved, it can trigger notifications internally or externally via another app, such as Slack.
Ease of Use
Another strong feature of Trello is its ease of use. Team members will require virtually no onboarding to learn the software. As long as the project manager is versed in Trello, the rest of the team can quickly jump in as guests or users.
The one drawback here is that Trello doesn’t work well for complex projects. Certain projects with deep dependencies or that cross many different departments can quickly overwhelm Trello’s capabilities.
Trello definitely shines with individualized projects instead of sprawling projects that span across entire organizations.
Integrations
Like most project management tools, Trello has a list of great integrations with most of the productivity apps you already use.
Currently, Trello has over 200 integrations with the top business apps. This includes an integration for Pipedrive.
Pricing
Trello is priced affordably and the pricing plans are kept to a minimum, which makes choosing one easier.
There are also a number of Power-Ups, which are essentially paid plug-ins for things like applicant tracking, different views, or adding dashboards.
Free Plan: $0 per month
- Unlimited cards
- Up to 10 boards per Workspace
- Unlimited Power-Ups per board
- Unlimited storage (10MB/file)
- 250 Workspace command runs per month
- Custom backgrounds & stickers
- Unlimited activity log
- Assignee and due dates
- iOS and Android mobile apps
- 2-factor authentication
Standard Plan: $5 per month/user
- Everything in the Free Plan
- Unlimited boards
- Advanced checklists
- Custom Fields
- Unlimited storage (250MB/file)
- 1,000 Workspace command runs per month
- Single board guests
- Saved Searches
Premium Plan: $10 per month/user
- Everything in the Standard Plan
- Views: Calendar, Timeline, Table, Dashboard, and Map
- Workspace views: Table and Calendar
- Unlimited Workspace command runs
- Admin and security features
- Workspace-level templates
- Collections
- Observers
- Simple data export
Enterprise Plan: $17.50 per month/user
- Everything in the Premium Plan
- Unlimited Workspaces
- Organization-wide permissions
- Organization-visible boards
- Public board management
- Multi-board guests
- Attachment permissions
- Power-Up administration
- Free SSO and user provisioning with Atlassian Access
Pipedrive vs Trello: Comparison
Pipedrive and Trello can both be used for extensive sales and marketing purposes, but they serve very different purposes. Pipedrive is a purpose-built sales pipeline tool that also happens to include a kanban-style board for monitoring deals. It’s a great approach to a CRM and it makes collaborative deals and lead management much easier.
Trello on the other hand is designed for managing top-level marketing or sales initiatives. For example, creating a new marketing campaign. For those purposes, it works great and can help a team stay organized and in communication throughout the entire process. Sales leads can be worked into Trello, but for that purpose the application would be best for organizations that are managing a relatively small number of leads. In that type of setting, Trello could be used to nurture and build those leads in a very direct way.
But beyond a small number of leads and deals, it would start to become difficult to manage.
Pipedrive is tailor-made for businesses that capture a large number of leads and need automated workflows to manage those leads through the entire deal and closing process. For that type of workflow, Pipedrive really excels and does an amazing job keeping everything organized and moving along.
Final Pipedrive vs Trello Final Review
Overall, these two apps serve very different functions, although they happen to have some overlap. But despite that overlap, one doesn’t really wander too far into the other’s territory enough to make them competitors.
If you’re looking for an easy and visual project management tool with light CRM capabilities, then Trello is definitely worth a look. With a decent free plan, you can easily see if it’s right for you.
However, if you are capturing leads by the thousands and need powerful tools to automate those deals, Pipedrive really delivers.
There’s no free plan with Pipedrive, but you can try the service for 14 days. We generally prefer some sort of free plan so users can take their time evaluating the software, but a free trial is better than nothing.
