Pipedrive review (2026): pricing, features and who it's for

No free plan, and a 14-day clock

A free tier lets you load three months of quotes at your own pace. You decide in February whether the habit stuck, and you pay only if it did. Pipedrive gives you 14 days of full access with no card. So you have to commit live data fast, or the trial tells you nothing.

Billing is per seat, which means per login, per month. Pipedrive charges for a seat whether a person is using it or not. Buy the logins you will use and add more when you hire. There are two ways to pay. Month to month, or pay for the whole year up front at a lower rate. On Lite the gap is $14 against $24 per seat. That is $120 a seat a year. Three seats costs $504 paid yearly, against $864 paid monthly. There is no long contract either way. Paying yearly is a discount, not a lock-in.

The starting price is not what sets it apart either. Zoho's paid Standard plan is also $14 per user per month on the yearly cycle. The difference is the free plan underneath it, and Pipedrive has never had one.

What the $14 login gets you

There is no cap on contacts on any plan, including the cheapest. Each person and company holds notes, files, and the record of what you quoted and when. So the customer you bid in March is still there in September with the paper trail attached.

The pipeline is the product. A pipeline is a board with one column per step of a sale, and those columns are called stages. You name your own stages. You drag a job from one to the next as it moves along. You can run more than one board if residential and commercial work behave differently. Each stage can carry a next step, so you know what to do when a job lands in it.

Quotes that go stale get flagged for you. You set a rotting period on each stage, which is the number of days a quote can sit untouched. Past that, the board flags it. In a shop that quotes far more than it closes, that one feature can pay for the subscription. Reminder emails go out ahead of anything you have scheduled. The phone app pushes a notification any time from two days before an event up to the moment it starts. Mark one activity done and it asks you to book the next before you close the window.

Calendar, activities, notifications and pipelines you build yourself are all on Lite in Pipedrive's own plan table. The limits there suit a small crew. Leads and deals run to 2,500 per seat, so three logins carry 7,500. Lite allows 30 custom fields, which are extra boxes you add to hold your own information.

Owners describe the same tradeoff from both sides. On Reddit, small-business owners call it much cheaper than HubSpot, quick to start, and not much more than a contact list with a deal board attached. That is the honest shape of the product. If the board is what you came for, Lite is the whole thing and nobody pushes you up a tier. If you assumed a CRM comes with marketing built in, this one does not.

Email is the second bill

Lite cannot connect to your inbox. No templates, no signatures, no mass emailing, no automations. All of that starts at Growth, at $39 per user per month on the yearly cycle, or $49 month to month. That is a $25 jump per seat per month, close to triple the entry price. On three seats the year goes from $504 to $1,404. That is $900 a year more for what most buyers assume every CRM does.

Decide this before you sign. If you will run quotes through the board and keep writing email from Gmail or Outlook, Lite is honest value. If you want the CRM to send the follow-up, log the reply, and blast a maintenance reminder to 400 past customers in March, Lite does none of it. Growth is your floor.

Texting is a separate gap. The built-in messaging inbox handles WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. Plain SMS, the kind a US homeowner expects when you say you will text them, is not in there. You need a marketplace app such as the Twilio integration, priced by whoever supplies it. That holds on every plan.

Ask about support before you sign, too. Pipedrive's own pages do not agree on which plans include live chat. If chat matters to you, get it confirmed for the tier you are buying. Phone support is clear and limited. It is Premium ($49 per seat per month yearly, $79 monthly) and Ultimate ($79 yearly, $99 monthly) only, Monday to Friday, 7:00 to 23:00 CET. Watch that time zone. If you are on the US west coast, that phone line shuts in the early afternoon.

Older articles name plans you cannot buy

Essential, Advanced, Professional, Power and Enterprise are all retired. Any article still using those names is describing a lineup that no longer exists. There are four plans now: Lite, Growth, Premium and Ultimate. Pipedrive maps them itself. Lite replaces Essential. Growth replaces Advanced. Premium covers what used to be split between Professional and Power. Ultimate replaces Enterprise.

The limits go up as you climb. Leads and deals run 2,500 per seat on Lite, 5,000 on Growth, 15,000 on Premium and 20,000 on Ultimate. Custom fields go 30, 100, 300 and 500. LeadBooster comes included from Premium up instead of being sold separately. None of those ceilings is what pushes a small trade shop up a tier. Email does, and then phone support.

Where we would draw the line

The owner we would put on Lite quotes far more work than they book. They keep losing jobs in the gap between sending an estimate and hearing back. One to five people. Email already fine in Gmail or Outlook. A standing need to see every open bid on one screen with the forgotten ones marked. At $14 a seat on the yearly cycle, that is a cheap fix for an expensive habit. The board takes an afternoon to build.

Three readers should spend the money elsewhere. If you want the CRM handling your email, skip Lite and budget Growth at $39. Or weigh that against tools that include email further down the ladder, because $39 a seat is not an entry price. If your customers all reach you by text, price the SMS add-on and the extra vendor before you commit. And if you want months rather than two weeks to judge a CRM against live data, the answer is easy. Take HubSpot's free plan for two users, or Zoho's free version for three.

One more line to draw. This is a sales CRM, not field service software. It will not dispatch a tech, build a schedule or raise an invoice. So do not weigh it against tools that do on the monthly figure alone.

Owner reports back that call and sharpen one part of it. What owners raise first is whether their office uses it. Owners a couple of years in say the board stays clean enough that their team opens it instead of working around it, which is more than they could say for the CRM they left. A CRM nobody opens is a bill for nothing. The gripes are about scope, not about things breaking. People wanted email, marketing or texting and had to go buy it somewhere else. Nobody described the software falling over on them. Most of these owners run small businesses rather than trade shops, which fits what this is. It is a sales tool, not a job tool.

What owners actually say