Pipedrive vs Zoho Bigin

Both of these are easy to start with — Pipedrive and Zoho Bigin both score 5 for ease of setup, and very little else in this directory does. What separates them is what each intends to be in two years.

Starting without paying, or not starting at all

Zoho Bigin has a free tier, then paid tiers at seven and twelve dollars a user. Those are among the lowest published per-seat prices in this field, and Zoho Bigin scores 5 for value on that basis.

Pipedrive has no free plan at all and a trial that ends after fourteen days. Its cheapest tier is fourteen dollars, and mailbox sync, automation and forecasting all begin on the second tier at thirty-nine — so the entry price is rarely the price. Pipedrive scores 3 for value.

If you want to put a real pipeline in front of a real team without a purchase order, that is a one-sided comparison and Bigin wins it.

What happens when you outgrow the cheap one

Zoho Bigin is deliberately shallow. That is not a criticism the vendor would dispute — it is the design. Zoho Bigin scores 3 for pipeline depth and 3 for scale headroom, and moving beyond it eventually means moving to a different, larger product rather than a higher tier of the same one.

Pipedrive scores 5 for scale headroom and 5 for integrations, and its ladder runs from Lite to Power without changing shape. It also carries the machinery a team accumulates need for: a shared inbox, an audit log, single sign-on, calling, forecasting and quotes. Bigin has quotes, an API, documented data migration and mailbox integration for Gmail and Outlook, and stops well short of the rest.

Neither position is wrong. One is priced to be outgrown and says so; the other is priced to be kept.

Which should you choose?

Choose Zoho Bigin if you are one person or a few, you want to start today without paying, and you accept that a future move may be a migration rather than an upgrade. Choose Pipedrive if you already know the team is growing and you would rather buy the thing you will still be using.

If the migration risk is what bothers you about Bigin and the missing free tier is what bothers you about Pipedrive, HubSpot Sales Hub's free tools sit between them — though its own step up is the steepest here.