DEV Community: Owais Khan

HubSpot vs Pipedrive: Which CRM Fits a Sales Team Under 50?

Owais Khan — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 03:54:43 +0000

HubSpot and Pipedrive end up on the same shortlist constantly, and comparing
them feature by feature makes them look more similar than they are. Both track
contacts and deals, both give you a drag-and-drop pipeline, both do email sync,
activity logging, and reporting. On a checklist they nearly tie.

They are not the same kind of product. Pipedrive is a sales pipeline tool that
has grown outward carefully. HubSpot is a platform with a CRM at the centre of
it, where sales is one of several products sharing a database. That difference
predicts almost everything about how each one feels at twenty seats, what it
costs at fifty, and how hard it is to leave.

The core difference in one paragraph

Pipedrive is organised around the deal and the next activity. Its central
question is "what do I do next, on which deal, and when," and its interface is
built to make that impossible to avoid. HubSpot is organised around the contact
record and everything that has ever touched it: marketing emails, site visits,
support tickets, deals. Its central question is "what do we know about this
company, across every team." Both are legitimate. They suit different companies.

Where Pipedrive is the better answer

If your sales motion is outbound or relationship-led, your reps live in the
pipeline all day, and marketing is either one person or an agency, Pipedrive is
usually the faster path to a CRM people actually update. The learning curve is
short, the pipeline view is the product rather than one tab of it, and the
activity-based model creates useful pressure to book the next step before
closing the record.

It is also the easier system to leave, which is worth more than it sounds. Your
data is deals, people, organisations, and activities, and it exports cleanly. A
CRM you can leave is a CRM you can evaluate honestly in year two.

The trade-off is scope. Marketing automation, forms, landing pages, chat, and
documents are add-ons or integrations rather than the same product, so a stack
built around Pipedrive tends to be several tools that you are responsible for
wiring together.

Where HubSpot is the better answer

If marketing and sales need to see the same contact history, if inbound is a
real channel for you, or if you expect a support function to want the same
records, HubSpot's advantage compounds. One contact timeline shared across
teams removes an entire class of argument about attribution and duplicate data.
The app marketplace is large, the reporting at higher tiers is genuinely strong,
and the free tier is unusually generous for getting started before anyone has
approved a budget.

The trade-off is gravity. As marketing data, workflows, and content accumulate
in HubSpot, the cost of moving anywhere else rises, and pricing scales along
more than one axis at once: seats, tiers, and in some products the size of your
contact database. A team that starts free can find that the feature it now
depends on sits two tiers up.

What to check before you commit

Pricing and packaging in this category change often, so treat any figure you
read anywhere, here included, as something to verify on the vendor's own pricing
page. What is worth checking directly:

Price the tier that has the feature you need, not the entry tier. Sequences, custom reporting, and required fields are common tier gates on both products.
Ask about mandatory onboarding fees at higher tiers. They are a real one-off cost that does not appear on a per-seat comparison.
Count non-selling seats. Founders, marketers, and support staff who need read access can change the total more than the headline per-seat number does.
Test an export in the trial, not after you have twelve months of history in the system.

A reasonable default

For a sales-led team under about fifty people with no significant inbound
marketing function, Pipedrive is the lower-risk choice: cheaper to run, faster
to adopt, and easier to reverse. For a team where marketing owns real pipeline
and multiple functions need the same customer record, HubSpot's shared database
is worth the higher ceiling on cost and the higher switching cost that comes
with it.

If you genuinely cannot tell which description fits you, that itself is the
answer: you are not marketing-led yet, so start with the simpler tool and
migrate when the second team actually asks for access.

Best Free CRM in 2026: Pick by the Job You Need Done, Not the Brand

Owais Khan — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 03:54:41 +0000

Why the "Best Free CRM" Question Gets You the Wrong Answer

Most buyers search for "best free CRM" and get a list of brand names. That's the wrong frame. A CRM isn't a product you evaluate on a checklist — it's a tool you hire to do a specific job. The solo founder running cold email, voice, and SMS campaigns needs a different tool than the three-person team that lives inside Zoho's app suite, and both need something different from the team that wants to build their own CRM from open-source components. The sources make this clear: FreeCRM positions itself as a "modern HubSpot alternative" that unifies email marketing, voice calling, and SMS campaigns in one platform with no contact limits on the free plan. Zoho's free edition caps at three users but includes integrations to the rest of the Zoho ecosystem. Zapier's 2026 roundup explicitly categorizes tools by job: "best free all-in-one CRMs" versus "best for building your own CRM". Gene Marks warns that many "free" CRMs are watered-down versions of paid products with security and support risks. The decision starts with naming the job.

Job 1 — Run Multi-Channel Outbound Sales (Email, Voice, SMS) From One Workspace

If your day looks like: open contact record → send email sequence → power-dial 30 numbers → follow up with SMS → log everything automatically → repeat, you're hiring for multi-channel outbound execution. FreeCRM is purpose-built for this job. Its free plan includes native email marketing (drag-and-drop templates, automated sequences that pause when a lead replies), click-to-call and power-dial voice campaigns with local presence numbers and call recording, and two-way SMS campaigns with opt-out compliance and delivery receipts — all on the same contact timeline. There are no contact limits on the free plan and no credit card required. Sales managers get real-time visibility into activity, response rates, and pipeline velocity; reps get a prioritized daily task list. Security is a first-class feature: TLS 1.3 in transit, AES-256 at rest, SOC 2 Type II certified data centers, GDPR and CCPA-aligned handling. Migrations from HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive, Zoho, and spreadsheets are supported out of the box. Upgrade to Pro or Enterprise only when you need higher limits, advanced automation, call recording, and API access. HubSpot CRM also markets itself as a free all-in-one with "lots of native integration options" per Zapier's testing, but FreeCRM's free tier includes voice and SMS campaigns natively — channels HubSpot typically gates behind paid hubs or add-ons.

Pick for this job: FreeCRM. It's the only free CRM in the sources that ships email, voice, and SMS campaigns together without contact limits or a credit card wall.

Job 2 — Manage a Small Team's Pipeline Inside an App Suite You Already Use

If your job is: three people need shared leads, deals, contacts, tasks, and calendar — and you already use Zoho Books, Zoho Desk, or Zoho Campaigns — you're hiring for suite integration, not channel breadth. Zoho CRM's free edition supports up to three users and includes leads, deals, contact management, tasks and events, multichannel marketing, and integrations to other Zoho apps. No hidden costs, no trial period, no forced upgrade, no credit card required. It's trusted by over 250,000 businesses worldwide. Zapier's 2026 testing calls Zoho CRM the pick for "automation and suite integrations" among free all-in-one CRMs. The trade-off: the three-user cap is hard. Gene Marks notes Zoho is a well-established Indian company with good security, unlike some newer free offerings from less transparent origins. But if your team grows past three seats, you're on a paid plan.

Pick for this job: Zoho CRM Free Edition. The three-user limit is a feature, not a bug — it aligns with the small-team, suite-centric job.

Job 3 — Build Your Own CRM Without Writing Code

If your job is: "I have a weird sales process, I don't want someone else's opinionated pipeline stages, and I want to own the data model," you're hiring for a platform, not a product. Zapier's 2026 roundup names Twenty as the "best for building your own CRM" — an open-source option that lets you define custom objects, views, and workflows. The sources don't detail Twenty's free-tier limits, but the category distinction matters: this isn't a sales tool you adopt; it's a CRM you assemble. Bitrix24 also appears in Zapier's "full business feature set" category, suggesting a broader platform play. Gene Marks would flag the security and support risks of lesser-known open-source or foreign-built tools, so factor in who maintains the code and where your data lives.

Pick for this job: Twenty, if you have technical capacity to self-host or configure. Otherwise, this job usually pushes you toward a paid platform with extensibility (e.g., Pipedrive's API, HubSpot's custom objects) — which is outside the free scope.

When You're Really Hiring for Two Jobs at Once

The most common trap: you need multi-channel outbound (Job 1) and suite integration for finance/support (Job 2). FreeCRM doesn't have a native accounting or help desk suite. Zoho's free edition doesn't include native voice/SMS campaigns. HubSpot CRM bridges some gaps — Zapier notes its "lots of native integration options" — but its free tier doesn't include the calling and SMS volume FreeCRM offers. The honest move: split the decision. Run FreeCRM for outbound sales execution; push closed deals into Zoho (or your ERP) via integration or CSV. Or accept the three-user Zoho limit and add a separate dialer/SMS tool. Forcing one free CRM to do both jobs usually means neither job gets done well.

Match Your Dominant Job to a Concrete Pick

Dominant job = multi-channel outbound (email + voice + SMS) from one screen, no contact limits, no credit card: FreeCRM. It's the only free CRM in the sources that delivers all three channels natively on the free plan.
Dominant job = three-person team pipeline inside Zoho's ecosystem (books, desk, campaigns): Zoho CRM Free Edition. Three users, full suite integrations, free forever.
Dominant job = custom data model, self-hosted control, technical team: Twenty (open-source). Zapier's 2026 testing places it in the "build your own" category.
Dominant job = "I don't know yet, just give me a safe start": HubSpot CRM. Zapier's broad testing ranks it high for native integrations, and HubSpot's own page markets it as a free CRM to "streamline your entire business". But expect upsell pressure when you hit channel or automation limits.

Gene Marks' skepticism is worth keeping in your pocket: many free CRMs are loss leaders for paid upsells, and support/security vary wildly. The sources show FreeCRM and Zoho CRM Free Edition as the two most credible, feature-complete free tiers for their respective jobs. Pick the job first. Then pick the tool.

The Best CRM for Real Estate Agents: Lead Engine or Relationship Database?

Owais Khan — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 19:04:25 +0000

"Real estate agent" describes two very different software buyers, and most
"best CRM" lists blur them together. There is the agent or team whose problem is
speed-to-lead on a firehose of paid internet leads, and there is the agent whose
problem is staying in front of a database of past clients and referrals for
years. A CRM that is excellent at one is usually only adequate at the other, and
the price tags reflect it. Comparing these tools feature by feature makes them
look interchangeable; they are not.

It helps to hold two questions in mind before you look at any product. First: do
you want a purpose-built real estate CRM, or a general sales CRM you configure
yourself? Second, within the purpose-built group: do you need a lead-conversion
engine, or a relationship and database manager? Almost every real complaint
about a real estate CRM traces back to buying the wrong one of these.

The lead-conversion engines

Follow Up Boss is the tool teams converge on. Reviewers price it around $58 per
user per month billed annually, which is roughly $69 month to month, and it is
built around routing leads to the right agent quickly and never letting a
follow-up slip. It integrates with a lot precisely because it does not try to be
your website or your lead source: the vendor's own pricing page lists 200-plus
integrations, and review roundups count 250-plus. There is a pricing detail
worth catching early. On the entry Grow tier, calling and texting is a paid
add-on of roughly $33 to $39 per user, and unlimited calling and texting only
arrives on the Pro tier, which the pricing page lists at $499 per month for ten
users. Follow Up Boss has no built-in listing management and no IDX website. You
bring the leads; it makes sure you actually work them. It is also month to month
with no contract, which matters more than it sounds.

BoldTrail sits at the opposite end of the design. It bundles lead generation and
IDX websites into the CRM itself. One review lists it at $500 per month for one
to two users with a $1,000 one-time setup fee. That buys a genuine all-in-one
system, but the setup cost and a steep learning curve are real, and the more of
your lead flow and website that lives inside it, the harder the platform is to
leave later.

Lofty leans on AI and heavier automation, and like CINC it is quote-only, so you
contact sales for a number rather than reading one off a page; reviewers peg
CINC's minimum at roughly $900 per month. Watch the billing model with Lofty
specifically: its calls and texts are pay-as-you-go, which reviewers flag as
hard to predict month to month. The through-line for this whole group is that
they assume you have, or intend to buy, a real volume of internet leads, and
they price like it.

The relationship and database managers

If your business is repeat-and-referral rather than paid-lead volume, a cheaper,
calmer tool is usually the better fit, and the money you save on the CRM is money
you can spend on the relationships themselves.

Wise Agent is the common budget pick. It runs around $49 per month month to
month, or about $42 billed annually, and that price covers up to five team
members rather than charging per seat. It includes 24/7 U.S.-based support, which
is unusual at this price point. The trade-offs reviewers name consistently are a
dated interface and texting that costs extra: SMS runs through a paid credit
add-on with a one-time registration fee, and there is no built-in auto-dialer, so
the communication tooling is lighter than the lead engines carry.

IXACT Contact is the other affordable database manager, listed somewhere between
about $46 and $55 per month depending on the source, and notable for a six-month
free trial for new agents. That trial is genuinely useful if you are in your
first year and not ready to commit budget. It leans toward contact management and
light marketing rather than aggressive lead conversion.

Top Producer is the veteran of this group at around $179 per month, and it offers
direct MLS integration that the cheaper database tools lack. The catch reviewers
flag is a twelve-month contract, which is exactly the kind of commitment worth
avoiding until you have tested an export and know you can leave.

The general-CRM route

You can also run a real estate business on a general sales CRM and accept that
you will configure it yourself. Pipedrive is the usual candidate, priced from
around $14 to $24 per user per month depending on the tier, with a clean visual
pipeline but no built-in phone or texting and nothing real-estate-specific out of
the box. HubSpot has a genuinely free tier and scales up from there, though
reviewers note the jump to its Professional plan is steep. Salesforce is the
enterprise-grade option starting around $25 per user per month, powerful and
endlessly customizable, but it usually needs an admin or a specialist and is not
real-estate-specific either.

This route makes sense if you already like one of these tools, your "leads" are
relationships rather than portal leads, and you do not need IDX or MLS features.
It is also, worth noting, the easiest group to leave. A general CRM stores
contacts, deals, and activities that export cleanly, and a system you can leave
is a system you can evaluate honestly in year two.

What to check before you commit

Pricing and packaging in this category move constantly, and the sources behind
this article already disagree with each other by a few dollars, so treat every
number here as something to confirm on the vendor's own page rather than a fixed
quote. What is worth checking directly:

Price the feature you actually need, not the entry tier. Calling and texting, unlimited SMS, and MLS integration are common upsells. Follow Up Boss gates unlimited calling and texting above its entry tier, and Wise Agent charges separately for SMS.
Ask about setup fees and contracts. BoldTrail's one-time setup fee and Top Producer's twelve-month contract do not appear in a per-seat comparison but change the real cost of the first year.
Separate the CRM from the lead source. The all-in-one platforms couple them on purpose, which is convenient right up until you want to change one without losing the other.
Test an export during the trial. Your database of past clients is the asset. Confirm you can get it out cleanly before you have three years of history locked inside a tool you have outgrown.

A reasonable default

For a team buying and working internet leads, Follow Up Boss is the low-drama
default: it is the tool most integrations target, it deliberately stays out of
the website and lead-generation business, and it is month to month with no
contract. Just price the calling add-on into your real number before you compare
it to anything. For a solo or small-team, referral-led agent, Wise Agent covers
the core at well under $50 a month, and IXACT Contact is worth a look in your
first year specifically for its long free trial. Reach for an all-in-one such as
BoldTrail only when you genuinely want the CRM, the IDX website, and the lead
generation to be a single system, and you have accepted both the setup cost and
the switching cost that come bundled with that convenience.

If you cannot tell which description fits you, you are probably referral-led and
not yet running real lead volume, which is itself the answer: start with the
cheaper database tool and move up when paid leads, rather than the software,
become the thing holding you back.

Best CRM for Nonprofits: Match the Tool to How You Raise Money

Owais Khan — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 19:04:23 +0000

Nonprofit CRM shortlists collapse into feature checklists fast, and on a
checklist most of these products look interchangeable. They all store donors,
track gifts, send email, build donation forms, and report on who gave what.
Comparing them column by column makes them look far more alike than they are and
hides the one decision that actually predicts your bill and your regret in year
two: the pricing model. How a nonprofit CRM charges you is the clearest signal of
who it was built for.

There are roughly three billing models in this category, and they rarely overlap.
Pick the one that matches how you raise money and how you are staffed, then
compare products inside it. Comparing across models -- a per-record subscription
against a "free" platform that takes a slice of every donation -- is comparing a
fixed cost to a variable tax, and the winner flips entirely depending on your
donation volume.

The split that decides everything

The three models are:

Per-record (per constituent). You pay for the size of your database, and users are usually unlimited. Bloomerang, Little Green Light, and DonorPerfect work this way. Built for donor-retention shops that want everyone -- staff, board, volunteers -- in the system without counting seats.
Per-seat plus implementation. You pay per user, but the real cost is the configuration project. Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud and Blackbaud sit here. Built for larger, multi-program organizations with technical capacity.
Free software, transaction fees. The platform is free and earns a percentage of what you raise, usually through optional donor tips. Givebutter is the clearest example. Built for small and online-first organizations.

Almost everything else -- the reporting depth, the migration pain, whether the
tool suits you at all -- follows from which of these you are shopping in.

Where per-record tools fit: donor-retention shops

If your work is classic donor stewardship -- annual appeals, thank-you letters,
lapsed-donor re-engagement -- and you want the whole team in one database, the
per-record tools are the natural home.

Bloomerang is built around donor retention as its organizing idea, with
LYBUNT/SYBUNT reporting and engagement scoring in the core product rather than as
add-ons. Its pricing is constituent-based, and the CRM starts at $125 per month
billed annually, with unlimited users on every plan. Note the packaging: the
Bloomerang Fundraising module starts at $40 per month but must be purchased
bundled with the CRM, so price the combination you actually need, not the lower
line.

Little Green Light is the transparent budget option in the same model. It runs
$45 per month for up to 2,500 records, rising through $135 per month at 50,000
records, then adds $15 per month for each additional 10,000, up to a hard ceiling
of 200,000 constituents. Users are unlimited, there are no contracts or setup
fees, and annual billing saves 10 percent. For a small shop where board members,
volunteers, and part-time staff all need access, paying by database size instead
of by seat usually wins outright.

Where Salesforce earns its complexity

Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud is the opposite trade. Eligible 501(c)(3)
organizations can get their first 10 licenses free through the Power of Us
program; beyond that, additional users run around $60 per user per month, and the
number that matters most does not appear on the license line at all --
implementation commonly runs into five figures, often $15,000 or more.

What you get for that is extensibility: a platform that scales to very large,
multi-program organizations and bends to almost any data model through its app
ecosystem. What it demands in return is administrative capacity. This is not a
tool a one-person development shop configures on a Friday. If you do not have a
Salesforce admin or a consultant budget, the 10 free licenses are a trap, not a
gift, because the licenses were never the cost. Confirm, too, exactly which products your Power of Us entitlement covers before
you build a migration around it: eligibility and edition terms are worth pinning
down in writing rather than assuming.

Where free-with-fees fits: small and online-first

Givebutter inverts the whole equation. The platform is free, with unlimited
users, contacts, and campaigns, and it makes its money from optional donor tips.
With tips enabled -- the default -- the platform fee is 0 percent and Givebutter
covers payment processing. With tips disabled, a flat 3 percent platform fee
applies on top of payment processing (2.9 percent plus 30 cents for cards). A
paid Givebutter Plus tier adds CRM depth starting at $29 per month.

The catch is in the model, not the marketing. "Free" is genuinely free only as
long as your donors keep covering tips, so the honest way to evaluate it is to
model that variable cut against your actual annual online donation volume. For an
organization under a few hundred donors raising most of its money online, that
math usually favors Givebutter. For a large recurring-gift program, a percentage
of every transaction can quietly exceed a fixed per-record subscription.

Membership and multi-program organizations

If dues and renewals are core to your work -- associations, alumni networks,
chapters, faith communities -- most donor-only CRMs will fight you, because they
treat membership as a bolt-on to donations. Neon CRM is the common answer here.
It starts around $99 per month and treats memberships as a first-class object
with renewal workflows, which is the difference between a system that fits and
one you are constantly working around.

DonorPerfect deserves a mention for a narrower case: teams that want deep
customization -- custom fields, reports, and workflows -- without committing to a
Salesforce implementation. It prices by number of records through a personalized
quote rather than a public tier, and it is among the more configurable
donor-management systems short of Salesforce. Expect to invest real time
configuring it, which is exactly the point for the teams it suits.

What to check before you commit

Pricing and packaging in this category change often, so treat any figure here or
anywhere else as something to verify on the vendor's own page. What is worth
checking directly:

Price the database, not the seat. Per-record tools jump at tier boundaries. Estimate where your record count will be in two years, not today, and price that tier.
Test an export and a re-import during the trial. Migration rarely moves everything cleanly: gifts, pledges, notes, relationships, and attachments may not survive intact, and in some systems donations and notes cannot be edited after import. Find that out on sample data, not after a year of history.
Budget implementation as a line item. For Salesforce or Blackbaud, the configuration project, not the per-user price, is the real number.
Model the transaction cut. For free-with-fees platforms, multiply the percentage against your annual online revenue before calling it free.
Get discount terms in writing. Free-license programs and nonprofit discounts have edition and eligibility conditions worth confirming before you commit a migration to them.

A reasonable default

For a small, donor-only shop coming off spreadsheets, start with Little Green
Light if budget leads and Bloomerang if built-in retention discipline is worth
paying a little more for. For an online- or event-first organization under a few
hundred donors, Givebutter is the lower-risk start, revisited when its reporting
starts to feel thin. For a membership or association model, Neon CRM's
first-class membership handling saves you from constant workarounds. For a large,
multi-program organization that has -- or can hire -- administrative capacity,
Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud's ceiling is worth the implementation, provided you go
in counting that cost honestly.

If you genuinely cannot tell which description fits you, you are almost certainly
a retention shop that has not scaled yet. Start with a per-record tool you can
export from cleanly, and migrate when a second function actually asks for access.

Best CRM for Lead Management: Capture, Score, and Route Compared

Owais Khan — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 10:06:18 +0000

"Best CRM for lead management" is a narrower question than "best CRM," and the
difference decides more than most roundups admit. A lead-management CRM has to
do three specific jobs before a deal ever exists: capture a lead from wherever
it lands, score or qualify it so reps know what to work first, and route it to
the right person fast enough that it stays warm. Almost every product on a
shortlist claims all three. The honest split is which ones do them natively,
which gate them behind a higher tier, and which make you buy the capture step as
a separate add-on.

That split, not a feature checklist, is what should shape your shortlist. A
generic "best CRM" list rewards breadth. A lead-management list should reward how
cleanly these three jobs connect for the way leads actually reach you, inbound
through forms and chat, or outbound through a dialer.

Capturing leads: native, or a paid add-on

This is where products that look similar diverge first. HubSpot's free CRM
includes native lead capture through forms, pop-ups, chatbots, and landing
pages, so a small team can start collecting and organizing leads before anyone
approves a budget. Zoho CRM likewise builds web forms into its paid editions,
and Salesforce and Freshsales treat inbound lead capture as core rather than
optional.

Pipedrive is the instructive exception. It is a sales-first, drag-and-drop
pipeline CRM, and its clean pipeline is genuinely the point. But native lead
capture, the chatbot, live chat, web forms, and the Prospector database, comes
through the LeadBooster add-on, which is a paid add-on available on any plan
starting from $32.50 per month per company. Prospector alone draws on a database
of over 400 million profiles and 10 million companies. None of that is a
criticism of the pipeline; it is a reminder that with Pipedrive, capture is a
separate line item, and its native marketing features are otherwise minimal, so
you lean on integrations. If your leads mostly arrive from a website or ad
campaign, price the add-on, not the base seat.

Scoring and routing: the features that get gated

Capture gets a lead into the system. Scoring and routing decide whether anyone
works it in time. These are the two jobs vendors most often move up a tier, so
read the plan table carefully here.

HubSpot's free tier captures well, but automated lead routing and multi-step
sequences live in its paid Sales Hub tiers, and its more advanced lead scoring
sits behind paid plans too. That is a reasonable model, but it means the free
tier is a starting point for capture, not a complete lead-management system.

Freshsales makes the tier gate unusually easy to read. Contact scoring and sales
sequences appear on its Pro plan, listed at $39 per user per month billed
annually, rather than the entry Growth plan at $9 per user per month. It also
bundles built-in phone, email, and chat on the contact record, which matters if
your reps qualify leads by calling them, and its Freddy AI provides the
scoring and deal insights. Zoho leans on its Zia AI assistant for lead scoring
and predictions, and its editions add web forms, workflow rules, assignment
rules, and sales forecasting as you move up; several reviewers describe Zoho as
offering good lead scoring and segmentation at a low price point.

Salesforce Sales Cloud is the heavyweight for this job specifically. It is built
for sophisticated web-to-lead processes, complex lead assignment rules, and
advanced lead scoring, with enterprise-grade routing, scoring, and approval
flows designed for multi-team handoffs. That power is real, and it is also the
reason Salesforce typically needs weeks-to-months implementation and, in
practice, a dedicated administrator. It is the right tool when routing rules are
genuinely complex, and overkill when they are not.

The free tier and the real budget picture

Several strong options here have a free or near-free entry point. HubSpot's free
CRM is unusually generous, Zoho CRM offers a free edition for up to three users,
and Freshsales is listed with a free plan for up to three users as well. For a
founder-led team testing whether a CRM will get updated at all, starting free is
the low-risk move.

The catch is the same one the pricing pages are built around: the entry price is
rarely the price you end up paying, because the scoring and routing you actually
want usually sit a tier above the headline number. Zoho's paid plans start
around $14 per user per month, Freshsales Growth at $9, monday sales CRM around
$12 with most useful features on its Standard tier near $17, and Salesforce's
Starter Suite around $25 per user per month before rising steeply at Enterprise
tiers. Those figures are useful for ranking, not budgeting. Treat any price you
read here, or anywhere, as something to confirm on the vendor's own pricing page,
because packaging in this category changes often.

Where each one fits

If your leads are inbound and you want native capture plus a free start,
HubSpot and Zoho are the natural first look; HubSpot for the marketing-adjacent
tooling, Zoho for the lower price and heavy customization. If your reps qualify
by phone, Freshsales earns its place because calling and scoring live in the
same record, and phone-first tools like Close exist for genuinely
high-velocity outbound. If you already run a tidy pipeline and are happy to pay
for capture as an add-on, Pipedrive stays the cleanest pipeline in the group.
And if lead routing across several teams is genuinely complicated, Salesforce is
the one built for that specific problem.

What to check before you commit

Price the tier that has scoring and routing, not the entry tier. On Freshsales that is Pro, not Growth; on HubSpot the routing and sequences are a Sales Hub upgrade. The gate is usually exactly the feature that made you look.
Confirm whether lead capture is included or an add-on. With Pipedrive, LeadBooster is a separate paid add-on; with HubSpot and Zoho, forms are built in. This one line changes the real per-month cost.
Ask how pricing scales. HubSpot's cost climbs as your contact database grows, which is easy to miss when you are ten leads in and painful at ten thousand.
Budget for implementation on the enterprise options. Salesforce's power assumes setup time and an administrator; that is a real cost that never appears on a per-seat comparison.
Test an export in the trial, before you have a year of lead history you cannot easily move.

A reasonable default

For most small and mid-size teams whose leads arrive inbound, start with a CRM
that captures natively and has a real free tier, HubSpot or Zoho, and add paid
scoring and routing only when a rep actually asks for it. If your qualification
happens on the phone, Freshsales is the tidier fit because the call and the
score share a record. Reach for Salesforce when multi-team routing is the actual
problem you are solving, and keep Pipedrive on the list when a clean pipeline
matters more than built-in capture and the LeadBooster add-on math still works
for you.

If you genuinely cannot tell which description fits, that is itself the answer:
your lead flow is not complex yet, so start with a free tier that captures
natively and migrate the day scoring or routing becomes the thing slowing you
down.

Best CRM for Insurance Agents: Why Life/Health and P&C Need Different Tools

Owais Khan — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 10:06:16 +0000

Search "best CRM for insurance agents" and most roundups rank general-purpose CRMs and insurance-specific tools on the same list, as if choosing between them were a matter of taste. It isn't. The question that decides your shortlist sits upstream of any feature comparison: what line of business do you sell, and are you buying a CRM, or a full agency management system (AMS) that happens to include one? Life and health agencies live on commission tracking across many carriers and an annual enrollment cycle. P&C agencies live on carrier connectivity, rating, and policy servicing. A tool built around one of those jobs is usually a weak fit for the other, regardless of its review score.

The fork that actually matters

Before comparing any two products, sort them into two buckets. The first is purpose-built insurance CRMs and AMS platforms — AgencyBloc, Radiusbob, EZLynx, Applied Epic — that ship with carrier integrations, commission logic, and renewal workflows already modeled. The second is general CRMs like Zoho, which know nothing about insurance until you build it in yourself. Inside the purpose-built bucket, the line-of-business split matters just as much: AgencyBloc and Radiusbob are built for life, health, and senior-market agents; EZLynx and Applied Epic are built for P&C. Buying the wrong bucket, or the wrong side of that split, is the single most common mistake in this category.

AgencyBloc — the default for life, health, and senior-market agencies

AgencyBloc is built specifically for the "individual health, group benefits, and senior insurance space," not for P&C, and it says so directly on its own pricing page. It's sold as three separate products: AMS+ for CRM and servicing workflows, Commissions+ for commission tracking, and Quote+ for quoting. Commissions+ is the strongest reason to pick it — carrier data import, customizable rate tables, missed-commission identification, and bonus, advance, and override tracking, which is exactly the workflow generic CRMs handle badly. AMS+ integrates with Connecture, Ease, Employee Navigator, Lead Advantage Pro, and SunFire. None of the three products publishes flat pricing; Commissions+ and Quote+ are priced by transaction and quote volume, and AgencyBloc directs you to request a custom quote. One independent comparison site puts its higher AMS+ tiers in the $165–260 per month range and notes that commission reconciliation handles straightforward carrier statements well but struggles with complex contingency bonuses or multi-carrier splits — worth testing with your actual commission structure before you commit, not a generic demo.

Radiusbob — the budget option, now owned by AgencyBloc

Radiusbob was founded in 2010 and was acquired by AgencyBloc in February 2023, so functionally you're choosing between AgencyBloc's flagship product and its lower-cost sibling. It targets the same life, health, and Medicare/senior market as AgencyBloc, with a built-in Twilio-powered VoIP dialer (click-to-call, auto-dialer, call recording), over 30 lead-vendor integrations for automatic lead import, and quote-engine integrations with Compulife and Ninja Quoter. Published pricing starts at $34/month for a single agent on the CRM-only plan, rising with team size, and VoIP-enabled plans start at $78/month for 3,000 outbound and 1,000 inbound minutes. One competing CRM's cost breakdown argues the real total is higher once you add the third-party quoting, texting, and e-signature tools Radiusbob doesn't include natively — treat that claim as a competitor's framing, but the underlying point (price the full stack, not the base plan) is sound regardless of who's making it.

EZLynx — the P&C default for independent agencies

EZLynx is built for independent P&C agencies of any size, from new shops to multi-location agencies, and it's structured as a true AMS rather than a CRM bolted onto one. It includes a built-in personal-lines comparative rater and a commercial submission tool, so you can quote without leaving the system, plus real-time policy updates and an automated renewal workflow EZLynx describes as a "patented retention workflow" that prioritizes at-risk policies. Commission calculations, billing management, and digital payment processing sit in the same platform. EZLynx's own pitch is that it's natively integrated rather than "cobbled-together integrations" — a fair distinction from stacking a separate CRM on top of a separate rater. Pricing isn't published; EZLynx offers a free trial and routes everyone else to sales.

Applied Epic — enterprise-scale AMS for P&C and benefits together

Applied Epic is aimed at "growth-minded, mid-size, and enterprise independent agencies" rather than solo producers, and Applied Systems states it's used by seven of the top ten largest insurance agencies by Business Insurance's rankings. It manages P&C and benefits business in a single platform, connects to carriers through Ivans technologies for submissions and servicing, and includes embedded personal- and commercial-lines rating so quoting happens inside the AMS. It's browser-native, which the vendor frames as lower software-management overhead. Applied Epic collected several G2 awards in Winter 2025, with 91% of reviewers rating it four stars or higher. Pricing isn't published, and nothing about this product suggests a fast or cheap rollout — it's the right shortlist entry once you've outgrown a single-line, single-location tool, not before.

VanillaSoft — for high-volume telesales, not relationship management

VanillaSoft is a sales-engagement platform, not a traditional CRM, and it's worth including because a meaningful share of insurance sales — especially Medicare and other high-volume life/health telesales — happens through outbound call centers rather than field agents nurturing relationships. It combines queue-based lead routing with a multi-mode dialer so reps work the next-best lead automatically instead of cherry-picking, and it prioritizes contacting fresh inbound leads within minutes. It serves both small brokerages and larger insurance groups, syncs with Outlook and Google Calendar, and supports lead-vendor and quoting-tool integrations. Pricing isn't published. If your team's bottleneck is call volume and lead freshness rather than policy or commission administration, this is a different tool than everything else on this list, and it's usually paired with a separate AMS rather than replacing one.

Zoho CRM — the general-purpose option, if you build it yourself

Zoho is honest about what it is on its own insurance page: "Zoho CRM is not an out-of-the-box vertical CRM solution. It is an industry-agnostic CRM platform that can be customized to suit various industries." That's the real trade-off. You get omnichannel communication, workflow automation you can point at renewal reminders, multi-policy management with conditional fields, a Blueprint tool for standardizing your sales process, and over 100 pre-built app integrations plus an open REST API — a bigger, cheaper, more flexible platform than any insurance-specific tool. What you don't get is any of it pre-modeled for insurance; carriers, policies, and commission structures are yours to build as custom fields and workflows. A vendor-supplied case study attributes over $100,000 a year in savings to one insurance customer, which is worth reading as a best-case data point rather than a typical outcome.

What to check before you commit

Pricing and packaging in this category change often and several vendors quote by request only, so verify any number here directly with the vendor before you budget against it.

Confirm which line of business the tool is actually built for. "Insurance CRM" covers both life/health commission tracking and P&C carrier connectivity, and the two rarely overlap well.
Test commission reconciliation against your real comp structure, especially overrides and multi-carrier splits, not a demo dataset.
Price the full stack, not the headline plan. Dialer minutes, SMS, quoting, and e-signature are often billed separately even when a base plan looks cheap.
Ask what happens to your data if the vendor is acquired. Radiusbob's absorption into AgencyBloc is a live example of a tool's roadmap changing under a new owner.
Test a data export in the trial, before a year of policies and renewal dates live in a proprietary system.

A reasonable default

If you're a life, health, or senior-market agency and commission tracking across carriers is your actual daily pain, AgencyBloc is the more complete system and Radiusbob is the lower-cost entry point into the same family. If you're an independent P&C agency, EZLynx fits small-to-mid shops well and Applied Epic is built for the scale beyond that. If your team's bottleneck is outbound call volume rather than policy administration, VanillaSoft solves a different problem than any AMS will. And if none of the purpose-built tools fit your mix of lines and you're willing to spend setup time modeling insurance data yourself, Zoho is the honest general-purpose fallback — just budget the configuration work as a real cost, not a rounding error.

Best CRM for Gyms: PushPress, Wodify, Zen Planner, Mindbody, and Glofox Compared

Owais Khan — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 17:24:16 +0000

Search "best CRM for gyms" and the results split into two unrelated categories.
Some lists point you to general-purpose CRMs like HubSpot. Others point to
gym management platforms — PushPress, Wodify, Zen Planner, Mindbody, Glofox —
that bundle membership billing, class scheduling, and a lead-follow-up module
into one system. For almost every gym owner, the second category is the right
one. A general CRM tracks contacts and deals; it has no concept of a
membership, a recurring dues charge, a class roster, or a waitlist, and you'd
spend months bolting those on. The products gym owners actually compare each
other against are the all-in-one platforms, and "CRM" inside that world
usually means one module — lead capture and follow-up — sitting on top of
billing and scheduling, not the whole system.

The real split within that category is by gym type and growth stage: tools
built for a single independent box or studio, tools built specifically for
CrossFit affiliates, tools built for martial arts schools, and platforms built
for multi-location or franchise operators who need a branded app and
centralized reporting across sites.

PushPress: the default for independent boutique and CrossFit gyms

PushPress positions itself for "CrossFit gyms, martial arts academies,
boutique yoga and pilates studios, and other independent fitness businesses
running between 50 and 500 members," according to its own comparison content.
Its base plans run from a free tier through Core Pro at $159 a month and Core
Max at $229 a month, all month-to-month with no long-term contract, and Core
Max advertises card processing as low as 2.75% plus $0.30 per transaction.

The CRM layer, called Grow, is a separate add-on: $329 a month on top of a
Core plan, with a $699 one-time setup fee for new customers. A "Full Stack"
bundle that combines Core Pro, Grow, and the workout-tracking and
branded-app add-ons runs $599 a month. In other words, the headline entry
price is not the price of the lead-follow-up features — those sit a tier up,
which is worth knowing before you shop on the $0 or $159 number. On Capterra,
PushPress holds a 4.7-out-of-5 rating across 186 reviews, though its
billing-and-invoicing score there is a comparatively weak 3.0.

Wodify: built specifically for CrossFit affiliates

Wodify is the narrower, CrossFit-specific option. Its own pricing page lists
an Essentials tier at $79 a month per location, covering billing, scheduling,
client management, and digital waivers; the Accelerate tier adds lead
management, insights dashboards, and pre-built automations; Ultimate adds
performance tracking and a custom website. Plans are month-to-month with no
long-term contract required, and processing runs 2.6% plus $0.25 on credit
cards or 1.5% plus $0.30 on ACH.

On Capterra, Wodify rates 4.5 out of 5 across 154 reviews, with a strong
billing-and-invoicing score of 4.7 — better than PushPress's on that specific
metric — but weak third-party integrations (2.0) and, by its own tier
structure, only "minimal" marketing automation until you're on Accelerate or
above. If your gym's identity is built around tracked workouts and leaderboard
culture, that's Wodify's actual strength; the CRM piece is closer to a
bolt-on than a differentiator.

Zen Planner and Gymdesk: martial arts and small-box specialists

Zen Planner and Gymdesk both skew toward martial arts schools and smaller
single-location operations rather than CrossFit boxes or boutique studios.
Zen Planner rates 4.3 out of 5 on Capterra across 270 reviews, with strong
marks for payment processing (4.5) and membership management (4.5), alongside
complaints about "frequent software bugs and glitches." A rival comparison
(PushPress's own "Zen Planner alternatives" post, so read it with that bias in
mind) describes Zen Planner customers reporting "a steep learning curve, an
app that feels limited next to newer tools, support that can be slow to
reach, and a payments setup that locks you in," and estimates migrating card
data out at $1,000 to $1,500 — a concrete number worth confirming directly
with Zen Planner before you sign, since a competitor is the one citing it.
The same comparison places Gymdesk around $75 to $200 a month with 2.9% plus
$0.30 processing, month-to-month, and best suited to smaller martial arts and
BJJ schools rather than larger, multi-program gyms.

Mindbody: the option for multi-location and marketplace reach

Mindbody is the platform most likely to come up if you run more than one
location or want to be discoverable through a consumer booking marketplace.
Its own pricing page starts the Starter tier at $99 a month per location, with
no per-user charge — pricing scales by number of locations, not staff seats —
but email/SMS marketing and lead management are reserved for the top Ultimate
tier, not included at entry. On Capterra, Mindbody's review base is by far the
largest in the category at 2,993 reviews, yet it lands at a middling 4.0 out
of 5, and "high and unpredictable pricing" is the complaint reviewers raise
most. Read that combination honestly: Mindbody has reach and reporting depth
that smaller platforms don't, and it costs more to find out whether that
depth is worth it for your gym specifically.

Glofox: boutique studios and franchise brands wanting a branded app

Glofox's own comparison content pitches it at "boutique studios, growing
gyms, and multi-location operators (including global brands)," with a
branded member app included in the price rather than sold as a separate
add-on, plus support for 17-plus languages and payments in 100-plus markets —
relevant if you operate, or plan to operate, outside a single country. That
same Glofox content is a useful outside read on its competitors, too: it
describes PushPress as best for "boutique fitness studios... and small
single-location gyms," with CRM and workout-tracking sold as separate add-ons
on top of the base plan, and it describes Zen Planner's strength as workout
and skill-progress tracking, with a weakness in language and currency support
for gyms operating internationally.

TeamUp: the budget class-scheduling option

TeamUp is the leanest of the group and the one most focused on class
scheduling rather than a full CRM. Glofox's own comparison describes it as
best for "class-based studios (yoga, pilates, HIIT, group fitness)," priced
as a flat monthly fee based on active member count rather than per booking.
On Capterra it posts the best reviewer sentiment in this comparison — 4.8 out
of 5 across 346 reviews, with the category's highest ease-of-use score
(4.7) — but a marketing-automation score of only 2.3, which tracks with its
positioning as a scheduling tool first.

What to check before you commit

Pricing, tier gating, and processing rates in this category change often, so
treat every number above as a starting point to confirm on the vendor's own
current pricing page, not a final quote.

Find out which tier actually includes the CRM/lead features. On PushPress and Wodify, lead management and automated follow-up are add-ons or higher tiers, not part of the base plan — the entry-level price you see first is rarely the price of the feature you're shopping for.
Ask what it costs to leave, specifically around payment processing. Migrating stored card data between processors is where lock-in tends to live in this category, not in the software itself.
Match the tool to your program, not just your budget. Martial arts schools have real use for belt/rank tracking that a boutique-studio platform won't have, and CrossFit boxes have real use for workout and leaderboard tracking that a scheduling-first tool like TeamUp doesn't attempt.
Read the processing-rate fine print, not just the software subscription. Two platforms with similar monthly fees can differ meaningfully once card and ACH processing rates are added on real transaction volume.
Weigh the review pattern, not just the star average. A platform with a high average built on a small review count reads differently than one with a merely good average built on thousands of reviews.

A reasonable default

For a single-location, independent gym or studio — CrossFit, boutique
fitness, yoga, or pilates — PushPress is the lower-risk starting point: a
usable free or low-cost core plan, month-to-month terms, and a clear (if
separately priced) upgrade path to lead management once you actually have
lead volume to manage. If your gym's culture is built around tracked workouts
and CrossFit-specific programming, Wodify's Essentials-to-Ultimate ladder is
worth pricing against PushPress directly, since the two overlap closely on
audience. If you run a martial arts school, Zen Planner's or Gymdesk's belt
and rank tracking will save you more real work than a generic CRM module
ever would. And if you operate, or plan to operate, more than one location,
Mindbody's or Glofox's higher price and steeper review complaints are the
cost of the multi-site reporting and marketplace reach that single-location
tools simply don't build for.

If you can't yet tell which of those you are, that's the answer itself: you
don't have a multi-location or franchise problem yet, so don't pay for a
platform built to solve one.

Best CRM for General Contractors: Sales Pipeline vs Run-the-Job Platform

Owais Khan — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 17:23:16 +0000

"Best CRM for general contractors" is a search that hides a fork in the road.
General contractors get pushed toward two very different kinds of software that
both call themselves a CRM, and picking the wrong kind is more expensive than
picking the wrong brand inside the right kind.

One kind is a sales CRM: a pipeline for leads and bids, built to track
relationships up to the moment you win the work. The other is a construction
platform with a CRM bolted to the front of it, built to carry a job from lead
through estimate, schedule, change orders, and closeout. The deciding question
is not which has more features. It is whether the tool has to run the project
after you win it, and how it charges for the crowd of estimators, PMs, field
staff, and subs who touch that project.

Why a general sales CRM usually stops short

The first names you meet are the horizontal ones: HubSpot, Pipedrive,
Salesforce, Zoho, monday. They are genuinely good at tracking leads and deals,
and they are cheap to start. monday's own construction roundup lists a Basic
tier around $12 per user per month and Pipedrive an Essential tier around $14,
and HubSpot ships a free CRM tier. For a general contractor whose problem is
purely "I lose track of bids and follow-ups," one of these can be enough.

The catch is structural, and it is the same for all of them: a general CRM is
built around a linear sale that ends at Closed Won. In construction, winning the
job is the beginning, not the end. Scopes change, estimates get revised, and the
work moves from sales into execution across several people and systems. A
horizontal CRM stops at that handoff, which means you rebuild the job, its
contacts, numbers, and documents, in whatever runs your projects. If that
describes you, you do not want a better sales CRM. You want a construction
platform.

The run-the-whole-job platforms: Buildertrend and JobTread

These are the tools built around the construction flow, from bid to backlog to
build, rather than around a single deal record.

Buildertrend is the incumbent for residential custom-home builders, remodelers,
and commercial builders under about 100 employees; roundup profiles put more
than 20,000 builders on the platform. Its pricing model is the important part:
it includes unlimited users with no per-seat fee, sold on flat monthly tiers
rather than by headcount. Reviewers list those tiers in the rough neighborhood
of $499, $799, and $1,099 a month, and it syncs with QuickBooks and Xero. Treat
any tier figure as something to confirm on a live quote, though, because pricing
in this category moves and reviews disagree on the exact numbers.

JobTread is the newer, more transparent challenger aimed at essentially the same
buyers: home builders, remodelers, commercial and specialty contractors,
roofers, and pool or outdoor-living firms. It publishes its pricing plainly: a
$199-per-month base, then internal users that tier down from $20 each (users 2
through 10) to $5 each past 30, with unlimited free customer and vendor portal
users and no setup fees. Annual billing knocks off roughly 20%, and monthly
plans carry a 30-day money-back guarantee. That structure is friendly to a
general contractor with a big field crew and subcontractor roster, because the
people who only need to view a job cost you nothing.

When the job is enterprise scale: Procore

Procore is the answer that shows up when a general contractor is large and
commercial. It is not priced per user at all. It is priced on your annual
construction volume and bundled across modules, which is why one roundup pegs
typical commitments around $20,000 a year and up and points it at enterprise
GCs in the $50M-plus revenue range. A separate review lists a Project Management
plan around $375 a month with unlimited users, and $549 with financial
management added, while noting it is less suitable for subcontractors. The
spread between those figures tells you what to expect: Procore quotes are
individual and opaque, so the real number comes from their sales team, not a
pricing page. It is overkill, and over budget, for a small residential GC.

When you only need the front of the funnel: Followup CRM and Pipeline CRM

Some general contractors already run projects in something they like and only
need discipline on the bidding side. That is a real, narrower category, and two
products fit it well.

Followup CRM is built for exactly the pre-award problem: bid tracking with
customizable stages, follow-up automation, and win/loss analysis with reason
codes, aimed at commercial subcontractors and mid-market construction sales
teams. It integrates with construction ERPs such as Foundation, Sage, and
Viewpoint, plus QuickBooks Online, so it can sit in front of accounting you
already run. The gap called out in reviews is the lack of a native mobile app,
which matters if your estimators live in trucks.

Pipeline CRM is the more general sales pipeline of the two, running about $25 to
$49 per user per month across its Start, Develop, and Grow tiers billed
annually, with QuickBooks Online and Zapier integrations. Its own positioning is
honest about the fit: construction sales teams of roughly 5 to 50 reps that
already have separate project management software. If you do not have that
separate software, you are back to the rebuild-the-job problem above.

The small or field-heavy GC: Jobber

If you are a small general contractor whose work looks more like scheduled field
jobs than long multi-phase builds, Jobber is worth a look. It runs from a Core
plan at $49 a month for one user up to a Plus plan at $499 a month for five, with
extra users at $29 each, and every plan includes quoting, scheduling, invoicing,
and a client hub for approvals and payments. Job costing and QuickBooks sync sit
on the higher tiers, so price the plan that has the feature you actually need,
not the entry one.

The pricing model decides more than the sticker

The trap in this category is comparing headline prices across different pricing
models. Per-seat tools (the horizontal CRMs, Jobber, Pipeline CRM) reward small
teams and punish you as office, field, and read-only staff pile on.
Unlimited-user platforms (Buildertrend, JobTread) charge a flat rate regardless
of headcount, which is usually the better deal precisely for general
contractors, who have a lot of people touching each job. Procore's volume-based
model is its own thing again. Two products can look a dollar apart per seat and
be thousands apart per year once you count everyone who needs access.

What to check before you commit

Count everyone who touches a job, not just salespeople: estimators, PMs, field leads, subs, and read-only office staff. That headcount, against the pricing model, is the real cost.
Decide whether you need one system from bid to closeout or just a bidding pipeline in front of tools you keep. Buying the all-in-one when you only needed the pipeline is money spent, and the reverse is a rebuild.
Price the tier that has the feature you need. Job costing, change orders, and financials are common tier gates.
Test an export during the trial. Construction platforms accumulate documents and photos fast, and lock-in here is heavier than in a plain sales CRM.

A reasonable default

For most established general contractors who want one system to carry a job from
lead to closeout, an unlimited-user construction platform is the lower-risk
default: JobTread if you want transparent, published pricing you can model
yourself, Buildertrend if you want the larger, more mature ecosystem and do not
mind a sales conversation to get a number. Reserve Procore for genuinely large
commercial operations that can absorb its commitment, and reserve the horizontal
CRMs and the bid-only tools for the specific case where you already run your
projects somewhere else and just need the front of the funnel fixed.

If you cannot tell which case you are in, that uncertainty is itself a signal:
you probably do not yet have a separate project system worth keeping, so start
with an all-in-one platform you can grow into rather than a sales CRM you will
outgrow at Closed Won.

Best CRM for Financial Services: Match the Tool to Your Segment

Owais Khan — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 17:18:23 +0000

Search "best CRM for financial services" and you get a single ranked list that
drops Salesforce Financial Services Cloud, Wealthbox, Affinity, and HubSpot into
the same table, as if a solo financial advisor and a venture-capital fund were
shopping for the same product. They are not. "Financial services" is not one
market, and neither is the software that serves it. The decision that actually
matters is which segment you sit in, because that determines the data model, the
compliance regime, and the integrations you cannot do without.

Why "financial services CRM" is not one category

Roughly three groups end up under this banner, and their shortlists barely
overlap. Wealth managers and registered investment advisors (RIAs) organize
everything around the household and its accounts, and they answer to SEC and
FINRA record-keeping rules. Private-capital firms — private equity, venture
capital, private credit, family offices — organize around deals and the
relationships that source them. Banks, lenders, and insurers run high-volume,
regulated workflows like onboarding, KYC, and AML. A CRM tuned for one of these
groups tends to be the wrong shape for the others, which is why a generic
ranking misleads: Affinity and Wealthbox never actually compete for the same
buyer.

Wealth management and RIAs: Wealthbox and Redtail

For independent advisors and small-to-mid RIA practices, the advisor-native
tools are Wealthbox and Redtail. Both are built around households, contact roles,
and integrations with custodians and portfolio and planning software rather than
around a marketing funnel.

Wealthbox publishes its pricing openly, which is worth something in a category
that mostly hides it. Its Basic (Starter) plan is listed at $59 per user per
month, Pro at $75, and Premier at $99, with a 14-day free trial and no credit
card required. The tier gates are the usual ones: Basic gives you a single
opportunity pipeline and three contact roles, while higher tiers add pipelines,
custom object types, and role-based homepages. There is also an AI Notetaker
add-on at an introductory $49 per user per month, which is easy to forget when
you compare sticker prices.

Redtail is the other default here and starts around $39 per user per month for
up to five users, historically priced per database rather than strictly per
seat. It is now part of Orion, and its main pull is the Orion ecosystem plus a
large roster of integration partners — which is also its main source of lock-in.
If your portfolio accounting, planning, and reporting already run on Orion,
Redtail is the path of least resistance; if they do not, that gravity is a
reason to look harder before you commit.

Private capital: Affinity and the deal CRMs

If you source deals rather than manage households, the advisor CRMs are the
wrong tool and you are in a different market: relationship-intelligence and
deal-flow software. Affinity is purpose-built for private equity, venture
capital, private credit, and family offices. Its central bet is that
professionals will not reliably log every email and meeting by hand, so it
captures that activity automatically and uses it to surface who inside the firm
has the warmest path to a given target. It integrates with the data providers
this segment lives on, including PitchBook, Preqin, and Crunchbase.

DealCloud is the heavier alternative, aimed at mid-market private equity and
real estate, with configurable deal workflows — but expect an implementation
measured in months and consulting time rather than a same-week setup. Across
this segment the real trade-off is automatic capture and relationship
intelligence versus deep configurability, not price against features.

Banks, lenders, and insurers: Salesforce Financial Services Cloud

At the institutional end, Salesforce Financial Services Cloud (FSC) is the
industry-specific build aimed at banks, wealth managers, and insurers that need
deep customization, household relationship mapping, financial-account
aggregation, and enterprise-grade security. It is also the most expensive option
on any of these lists by a wide margin. Public per-seat figures land in the
several-hundred-dollars-per-user-per-month range — one comparison lists FSC
around $325 — and that is before implementation, which the same comparison puts
in the tens of thousands of dollars and up. FSC buys you Salesforce's ceiling:
Einstein AI, thousands of AppExchange integrations, and close to unlimited
customization. It also buys you Salesforce's floor: you will likely need an
admin or a consulting partner, and the switching cost rises with every workflow
you build on top of it.

Practifi is worth knowing as a related option — a wealth-management CRM built
natively on the Salesforce platform — if you want something FSC-adjacent with
more of the advisor workflows already assembled.

The general-purpose option and its compliance catch

HubSpot and Zoho both appear on these lists, and for defensible reasons: they
are cheaper and much stronger at marketing and inbound. HubSpot runs from a free
tier up through Starter, Professional, and Enterprise, at roughly $20, $100, and
$150 per user per month at the paid tiers, and Zoho spans roughly $20 to $65 per
user per month. The catch for regulated firms is compliance. HubSpot was not
built for SEC/FINRA record-keeping, and firms that need supervised archiving
typically bolt on a third-party service such as Smarsh or Global Relay to close
that gap. That is a real recurring cost and integration burden that never shows
up on the per-seat sticker, and it is exactly the sort of thing a feature
checklist hides.

What to check before you commit

Confirm the compliance story explicitly. If you are an RIA or broker-dealer, ask whether archiving and supervision are native or require a Smarsh- or Global-Relay-style add-on, then price that add-on in.
Price the tier that has the feature you need, not the entry tier. Pipelines, custom objects, and reporting are common gates.
Add implementation to the number. Enterprise tools like FSC and DealCloud carry setup costs and multi-month timelines that dwarf the monthly fee.
Check the one integration you truly depend on — your custodian, portfolio system, or data provider like PitchBook or Preqin — before anything else.
Test an export during the trial, while your history is still small.

A reasonable default

There is no single best CRM for financial services, because the buyers do not
overlap. If you are an independent advisor or small RIA, start with Wealthbox or
Redtail and let your existing portfolio and planning stack break the tie. If you
source deals, look at Affinity first and treat automatic activity capture as the
deciding feature rather than a nice-to-have. If you are an institution with
compliance requirements, customization needs, and an admin budget, Salesforce
Financial Services Cloud is the segment's default despite the cost. And if
marketing is your real bottleneck and you can add a compliant archiving layer, a
general-purpose CRM like HubSpot can work — as long as you price that layer in
from the start rather than discovering it after go-live.

Best CRM for Financial Advisors: Redtail, Wealthbox, or Salesforce?

Owais Khan — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 17:17:24 +0000

The real split among CRMs marketed to financial advisors runs along two axes,
not one: whether the product was built for the compliance and custodian
realities of advisory work, and whether your firm's size matches what its
priciest tier assumes. Two products, Redtail and Wealthbox, dominate the
independent-RIA and solo-advisor end of the market on close to the same terms.
Salesforce Financial Services Cloud dominates the other end, priced and built
for firms where compliance, multi-line business, and enterprise integration
matter more than fast setup. A general-purpose CRM like Zoho sits outside both
categories: cheaper, but not built for what an advisory practice actually
needs to track. None of this is a checklist tie once you look at who each one
is really for.

The core difference in one paragraph

Redtail and Wealthbox are both purpose-built for financial advisors: contact
and household records, compliance-aware texting and notes, and integrations
aimed at the tools advisors already run, including custodians and planning
software. Salesforce Financial Services Cloud is a vertical build on top of a
general enterprise CRM platform, which buys real KYC and audit-trail
infrastructure but also enterprise pricing and an implementation project
rather than a signup form. Zoho CRM is neither: a capable general-purpose CRM
that some advisors adopt for its price, not because anyone designed it around
how a fee-only RIA works day to day. Which one belongs on your shortlist
depends less on features than on your seat count and how much of your
compliance burden you expect the CRM itself to carry.

Where Redtail is the better answer

Redtail prices per user, not per database, despite how it's sometimes
described in older roundups: a Launch plan capped at five users, and a Growth
plan at $59 per user per month billed annually ($65 monthly) that removes the
user cap. It bundles Redtail Speak for compliant texting and frames its
feature set around staying audit-ready for SEC and FINRA expectations, and it
ships a Finmate AI note-taking integration at no additional fee, unlike
Wealthbox's paid AI add-on. Redtail is also, as of this writing, a subsidiary
of Orion Advisor Solutions, which matters if you already use or plan to use
Orion for portfolio accounting and reporting — the tie between the two runs
closer than an arm's-length integration. Named integration partners include
Schwab, Orion, and eMoney, on top of a broader library the vendor describes
only as "100+ tools."

Where Wealthbox is the better answer

Wealthbox's advantage is speed to a usable system, not price. Its Basic plan
starts higher than Redtail's Launch plan, at $59 per user per month, rising to
$75 for Pro and $99 for Premier, with Enterprise quoted individually. What
that money buys is a modern interface, a claimed integration library of more
than 150 custodial and wealthtech platforms, and — per Wealthbox's own
comparison page — a migration process with an assigned specialist, aimed
squarely at advisors moving off Redtail or a spreadsheet. Its AI notetaker is
a paid add-on at $49 per user per month at introductory pricing, stacked on
top of the plan fee, which is a real ongoing cost that Redtail advisors don't
carry for the roughly equivalent feature. For a solo advisor or small team
standing up a CRM for the first time, that combination of interface and
hand-held migration is often worth the higher list price.

Where Salesforce Financial Services Cloud is the better answer

Financial Services Cloud starts at $325 per user per month for the Sales or
Service edition alone, and $350 per user per month for the combined
Sales-plus-Service bundle — a different budget category from either Redtail
or Wealthbox before you add whatever AI or compliance add-ons Salesforce sells
separately. What that premium buys is real: built-in KYC data capture, audit
trails through Salesforce Shield, a Wealth Management Console for
consolidated household views, and enterprise integration paths through
MuleSoft and Data Cloud for firms that also run banking, lending, or insurance
lines through the same Salesforce org. This is the right shortlist entry for a
multi-advisor firm or institution where compliance and cross-business-line
data sharing are requirements rather than nice-to-haves, and the wrong one for
a solo practice that would use a fraction of what it's paying for.

Where a general CRM like Zoho fits, and where it doesn't

Zoho CRM undercuts every purpose-built advisor CRM on this list: a free tier
for up to three users, then Standard at $14 per user per month, Professional
at $23, Enterprise at $40, and Ultimate at $52, all billed annually (monthly
billing runs higher on each tier). What you're not paying for is the
advisor-specific work Redtail and Wealthbox have already done. Zoho's own
pricing and plan pages make no mention of custodian integrations, compliant
texting, or an advisor-facing compliance framing the way Redtail's and
Wealthbox's do. It's worth considering only if your firm is cost-sensitive
enough that generic sales-CRM features and manual workarounds for compliance
and custodian data are an acceptable trade, and even then, budget real time to
build the workflows Redtail or Wealthbox would have shipped with.

The planning software question

None of these products replace financial planning software, and it's worth
being precise about that distinction before you shop. RightCapital, eMoney,
and MoneyGuide are planning tools, not CRMs, and the buying decision that
actually matters is whether your planning tool and your CRM talk to each
other. RightCapital specifically integrates with Wealthbox, Redtail,
SmartOffice, and Advyzon, syncing client data so it isn't entered twice. If
you already have a planning tool locked in, check its supported CRM
integrations before you shortlist a CRM, not after.

What to check before you commit

Price the plan that removes the seat cap you'll actually hit, not the entry tier. Redtail's Launch plan stops at five users; Wealthbox's and Zoho's cheapest tiers may not include the reporting or automation your team ends up needing.
Confirm your custodian and planning-tool integrations by name, not by a vendor's "100+" or "150+" integration count. A large library doesn't guarantee the one connection you actually need.
Separate CRM notes from compliant recordkeeping. Activity logs help, but they are not automatically the compliant email and instant-message archiving that SEC Rule 204-2 expects; that's often a distinct product or module layered on top.
Ask what the AI notetaker costs at scale. Wealthbox and Salesforce price it as a per-user add-on; Redtail bundles a comparable feature at no extra charge. Multiplied across a team, that difference compounds fast.
Test the export, especially if you're deep in Redtail's Orion-adjacent ecosystem or heavily customized inside Salesforce — both make a clean exit more work than a lighter product like Wealthbox does.

A reasonable default

For a solo advisor or small independent RIA setting up a CRM for the first
time, Wealthbox is the lower-risk starting point: the interface needs less
training, the migration support is real, and the per-user price is easy to
reason about even though it isn't the cheapest option here. Once you're past
roughly five seats and comfortable with a less polished interface, Redtail's
uncapped Growth tier and free AI note-taking usually cost less for the same
headcount, especially if you're already inside the Orion ecosystem. Neither is
the right choice for a multi-advisor firm with real KYC, audit, and
cross-line-of-business requirements — that's Salesforce Financial Services
Cloud's territory, priced accordingly. And if cost is the binding constraint
above everything else, Zoho is a legitimate fallback, provided you're honest
with yourself about the integration and compliance work you're taking on by
choosing the CRM that wasn't built for this industry.

Best CRM for Dentists: You're Probably Shopping the Wrong Category

Owais Khan — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 17:12:30 +0000

Type "best CRM for dentists" into a search engine and the results don't agree
with each other. Some lists open with Dentrix and Open Dental. Others push
Weave, RevenueWell, and NexHealth. A few recommend HubSpot, Zoho, or
GoHighLevel. These are not competing answers to one question. They are three
different kinds of software that happen to share a search term, and the
expensive mistake in this category is buying the wrong kind.

So before comparing products, it helps to name the three jobs the word "CRM" is
standing in for in a dental practice: running the clinical operation, keeping
existing patients coming back, and turning new inquiries into booked treatment.
Almost no single product does all three well, and the tool that is excellent at
one is usually mediocre at the others.

Three products wearing one name

The first category is the practice management system (PMS): the software that
runs the chair-side reality of scheduling, charting, treatment planning,
imaging, insurance, and billing. Dentrix is the most widely deployed of these in
U.S. dentistry, with Open Dental, Eaglesoft, Curve Dental, and CareStack also in
common use. These carry built-in patient communication, such as reminders,
recalls, and online booking, that functions as a light CRM layer, but they are
clinical systems first. Their marketing and lead-tracking depth is shallow by
design.

The second category is the patient communication and recall layer: Weave,
RevenueWell, Doctible, and NexHealth sit on top of your PMS and handle the
messaging around visits, including appointment reminders, recall outreach,
two-way texting, digital forms, review requests, and payments. They are strong
at retention and reactivation and weak at anything resembling a sales pipeline.

The third category is the lead-and-conversion CRM: the tool that catches a
new-patient inquiry, follows up fast, and tracks it to a booked consultation.
This is closest to what "CRM" means everywhere outside dentistry, and it is
where general-purpose platforms like HubSpot and Zoho and dental-specific ones
like DenGro and GoHighLevel compete.

Which of these you need depends on which problem is actually costing you money. A
practice losing patients to missed recalls has a different problem, and needs a
different tool, than one losing web inquiries because nobody replied before the
prospect booked elsewhere.

If the job is running the practice

If you don't yet have a clinical system, or you're replacing one, this is the
decision that matters most, because everything else integrates around it.
Dentrix is the incumbent; Henry Schein One sells it through demos and
contact-based quotes rather than a public price, with packaging that depends on
your modules and setup. Open Dental is the more customizable, transparently
priced alternative: its U.S. ordering page lists a $199 per month, per-location
support fee on a 12-month contract, covering the software, support, and updates.
It leans on integrations for anything CRM-shaped, though, so you'll need someone
comfortable wiring tools together. Curve Dental is a cloud-native option with
built-in patient communications, review requests, and new-patient tracking.

The thing to be honest about: a PMS will cover a lot of existing-patient
communication, but none of these are built to nurture a prospect who hasn't
booked yet or to run a real acquisition pipeline. If that's your gap, a PMS
upgrade won't close it.

If the job is keeping patients coming back

This is the layer most general dentists actually mean when they say they need "a
CRM." Weave bundles VoIP phones, two-way and bulk texting, reminders, online
scheduling, forms, reviews, Text to Pay, and dental-specific extras like
insurance verification and practice analytics; its published pricing starts at
$199 per month across Pro, Elite, and Ultimate tiers. RevenueWell covers similar
communication and marketing ground; it doesn't post clear list pricing, and
third-party directories peg its Starter plan at roughly $189 per month with
quote-based tiers above that. Doctible focuses on reminders, recall,
HIPAA-compliant texting, forms, payments, and review management, with plans
starting around $199 per month on an annual agreement.

NexHealth is worth a separate mention because its selling point is integration:
it claims real-time, two-way sync with 70-plus record systems, Dentrix among
them, through its "Synchronizer." That matters because a recall tool that
doesn't truly sync back to your PMS creates duplicate-entry work rather than
removing it. None of these publish enough detail to skip a demo, but they solve
one slice, outreach, cleanly, and none of them are trying to be your pipeline.

If the job is converting new inquiries

This is where the general CRMs live. A platform like HubSpot or Zoho can
absolutely capture leads and run follow-up sequences, but it has no
dental-specific structure out of the box, so you build treatment stages and
recall logic yourself, and HIPAA handling can be a real constraint. One
comparison notes HubSpot's HIPAA support arrives only on its Enterprise tier,
quoted at $1,200+ per month, with an add-on, and that Salesforce Health Cloud
implementations often run past $5,000 per month, which is sensible only for
large multi-location groups with an administrator on staff.

The dental-specific options in this lane are more interesting for most
practices. DenGro is built around new-patient enquiry management and
treatment-coordinator workflows, with a unified inbox for WhatsApp, email, and
SMS and native syncs to UK systems like EXACT, Dentally, Aerona, and Software of
Excellence, which is useful if you're a UK practice and less relevant in the
U.S. GoHighLevel is a marketing-automation platform that dental agencies deploy
for missed-call text-back, lead follow-up, review requests, and reactivation;
its Starter plan is $97 per month, it connects to a PMS only through Zapier,
webhooks, or an API (native Dentrix or Eaglesoft links need middleware), and it
offers a BAA for HIPAA. Capsule is the lightest option: a clean general CRM with
a free tier for up to two users and 250 contacts, paid plans from $18 per user
per month, and AI features from $36, used alongside rather than instead of your
clinical software.

What to check before you commit

Pricing and packaging in this category change often, so treat any figure here,
or anywhere else, as something to confirm on the vendor's own page. What is
worth checking directly:

Does it sync with your PMS, both ways? A recall or lead tool that only reads from your practice management system, or that you have to update by hand, adds work. Confirm the integration is native and bidirectional, not a nightly one-way export.
Get the HIPAA answer in writing. Ask specifically whether a BAA is included, and on which tier. With general CRMs it's often gated to the top plan.
Price the tier that has the feature you need, not the entry price. Recall automation, review requests, and campaign tools frequently sit a tier or two above the advertised starting number, and several vendors here quote rather than publish.
Test an export before you're locked in. Your PMS holds years of clinical history and is the hardest thing to leave; the communication and CRM layers should be easy to leave, so verify that in the trial.

A reasonable default

If you already run a solid clinical system and your losses are recalls and
no-shows, add a patient-communication layer such as Weave, RevenueWell, or
Doctible, and prioritize the one that syncs cleanly with your specific PMS over
the one with the longest feature list. If your losses are new inquiries going
cold, a lightweight conversion CRM (Capsule in the U.S., DenGro in the UK)
sitting beside your PMS will do more than any all-in-one promise.

And if you can't yet say which of those is bleeding more, that itself is the
finding: you're a retention practice, not an acquisition one, so fix recalls
first and revisit lead tooling when new-patient volume actually justifies it.

Best CRM for an Ecommerce Store: Retention Engine or Sales Pipeline?

Owais Khan — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 17:11:33 +0000

Search "best CRM for ecommerce" and you get lists that drop Klaviyo, Salesforce,
and Pipedrive into the same table, ranked one through ten as if they were the
same kind of thing. They are not. The word "CRM" is quietly doing two different
jobs in ecommerce, and the tools that do each job are priced differently,
integrate differently, and lock you in differently.

One job is retention: knowing who bought what, then automating the email and SMS
that brings them back — abandoned carts, post-purchase flows, win-backs. The
other job is sales: tracking people working deals through a pipeline — wholesale
accounts, B2B quotes, the high-value orders someone actually closes by hand.
Klaviyo is very good at the first and does not really do the second. Pipedrive is
the reverse. Deciding which job you are hiring a CRM for settles most of the
shortlist before you compare a single feature.

The split that actually decides this

The tell is how the product is priced. Retention-first CRMs bill by the number
of contacts or profiles in your database. Sales-pipeline CRMs bill per seat — per
person who logs into the tool. That pricing axis is not an accounting detail; it
maps straight onto the two jobs. A store with 80,000 subscribers and two staff
wants per-seat pricing (cheap) and dreads per-contact pricing (expensive). Which
one hurts tells you which category you actually live in.

Retention-first: Klaviyo, ActiveCampaign, Drip

If you run a direct-to-consumer store where nobody "sells" — customers self-serve
through checkout — the relationship you manage is a marketing one, and this is
the category you want.

Klaviyo is the default here and is a native official Shopify partner, so order
and browsing data syncs without middleware. It has a free plan capped at 250
active profiles and 500 email sends a month, and paid pricing starts around
$20/month and scales with your contact count. That scaling is the catch: a
50,000-contact list can run $350 or more per month, and the marketing analytics
add-on starts at a separate $100/month. Klaviyo rates 4.6 out of 5 on G2, and for
a retention-led store it is often the only "CRM" you need.

ActiveCampaign covers similar ground with heavier automation branching. It starts
around $19/month for 1,000 contacts and, like Klaviyo, climbs with list size —
expect $189 or more per month by roughly 25,000 contacts. Drip is the
ecommerce-native alternative, starting near $39/month for 2,500 contacts with a
native Shopify app. All three share the same trap: your cost is a function of a
number — contacts — that you are trying very hard to grow, so success makes the
tool more expensive on a curve you do not fully control.

Sales-pipeline: Pipedrive, Zoho, Freshsales, Salesforce

If you have wholesale, B2B, or high-value orders that a person negotiates, you
need deals, stages, and follow-up tasks — the marketing platforms above barely
model any of that.

Pipedrive is the lightweight pick, starting around $14/seat/month and organized
entirely around the pipeline and the next activity. Note that it has no native
Shopify app; you connect it through third-party connectors, which is fine for a
sales layer that sits beside the store rather than inside it. Zoho CRM runs from
a free tier (up to three users) to roughly $52/user/month at the top, with strong
customization; its Shopify link is commonly made through middleware rather than a
native app, and sources disagree on this, so confirm it for your own setup.
Freshsales spans free (three users) up to about $59/user/month and bundles
built-in phone and email. Salesforce sits at the top — roughly $25 to
$350/user/month across editions — and earns its keep only if you have the
complexity and the admin time to justify it. For most ecommerce sales teams it is
more platform than the job requires.

HubSpot and the middle ground

HubSpot is the product people reach for when they want both jobs in one place.
Its Shopify integration is native, syncing orders and abandoned checkouts, and
the free tier is genuinely usable. The thing to watch is the tier cliff: Starter
is around $20/seat/month, but the Professional tier where the serious automation
and reporting live jumps to roughly $100/seat/month, and Enterprise to about
$150. As tends to happen across this niche, the feature you end up depending on
sits a tier or two above where you started, and the marketing data accumulating
in HubSpot steadily raises the cost of ever leaving.

Worth naming for completeness: if your "relationship" is really support, a
help-desk-shaped tool like Gorgias (from about $10/month, built natively for
Shopify) may be the CRM you actually want, because it centers the conversation
history rather than the deal or the campaign.

The integration question

For an ecommerce CRM, native beats Zapier, and it is not a small preference. A
native Shopify integration pulls orders, customers, and cart events in real time,
which is what lets an abandoned-cart flow fire within minutes instead of hours; a
Zapier bridge adds latency and one more thing to break. Klaviyo, Drip,
ActiveCampaign, HubSpot, and Freshsales offer native connections; Pipedrive and,
usually, Zoho lean on connectors. If real-time cart events matter to your
revenue, treat native sync as a requirement rather than a nice-to-have.

What to check before you commit

Pricing and packaging in this category move constantly, so treat every figure
here as something to verify on the vendor's own page before you buy.

Price the axis that actually grows. For retention tools, model your bill at the contact count you expect in a year, not today's — the curve gets steep past roughly 10,000 contacts.
Confirm the integration is native, and test the sync in a trial with real orders before you rely on it.
Count non-selling seats for pipeline tools. Founders and support staff who need read access move the per-seat total more than the headline number does.
Check the tier your feature lives in, not the entry tier. Automation branching, custom reporting, and required fields are common gates.
Test an export before you have a year of history you cannot easily move.

A reasonable default

If you run a self-serve DTC store and your growth lever is repeat purchases,
start with Klaviyo — or ActiveCampaign if you want deeper automation — accept
that the bill grows with your list, and do not bolt on a sales CRM you will never
update. If you have people closing wholesale or B2B deals, start with Pipedrive
for a pure pipeline, or HubSpot if marketing and sales must share one record, and
price the tier that has your feature rather than the free one. If you genuinely
do both at volume, HubSpot's shared database is the usual answer, with the higher
cost and switching cost that its gravity implies.

If you cannot tell which side you are on, you are probably retention-led and not
selling by hand yet. Start there, and add a pipeline tool the first time someone
is actually working deals.