Pipedrive is a pipeline.
Your business is more than a pipeline.
Pipedrive is good at the thing it was built for. If your work genuinely is a list of deals moving left to right toward a close, it's a fine tool and a hundred thousand companies use it happily. Most businesses aren't shaped like that. Here's where you find out.
It only tracks the things
Pipedrive thought of.
Pipedrive gives you deals, people, organizations, leads, products, activities, and projects if you pay for the add-on. That is the entire list, and you cannot add to it. You can add custom fields to those. You cannot add a new kind of thing. So count what your business actually runs on.
Pipedrive has a home for these
A plumbing company6 tracked
- customers
- contacts
- deals
- jobs
- equipment
- invoices
and nowhere for these
A wholesaler6 tracked
- customers
- contacts
- deals
- orders
- shipments
- invoices
A property manager6 tracked
- customers
- contacts
- deals
- units
- leases
- invoices
An agency6 tracked
- clients
- contacts
- deals
- retainers
- deliverables
- invoices
A job is not a deal: a job comes back next year. So you do what everyone does. You call them deals anyway and live with a pipeline full of things that aren't sales, or you keep them in a spreadsheet on the side, which is the exact thing you bought a CRM to stop doing. Here you make a new kind of record and give it the fields that make sense. Jobs, units, shipments, invoices, whatever your business is actually made of, on every plan including the free one.
Pipedrive's entity types, from their developer documentation, read 10 September 2026.
And the fields you can add
are rationed too.
The obvious workaround is custom fields: if you can't have a job, put the job details on the deal. That runs into its own wall. From Pipedrive's own documentation, the number of custom fields you can have depends on which plan you're on. And the controls that make fields useful are held back.
- Required fields, which block saving until the key data is filled in. Premium
- Formula fields, which calculate a value automatically. Premium
- Read-only fields, which control who can edit what. Premium
- Pipeline-specific fields, which show a field only where it applies. Premium
- Field descriptions, which tell your team what a field is for. Growth
Quoted from support.pipedrive.com, Custom fields, read 10 September 2026.
There's a limit on how many
automations you're allowed to have.
Not how often they run. How many exist. You can tell without reading a feature chart, because Pipedrive sells you more of them: their billing documentation lists a top-up for Automations, +50, up to ten packs, from the Growth plan. Nobody sells you top-ups for something that isn't capped. And it isn't only automations.
From support.pipedrive.com, How does pricing work in Pipedrive, read 10 September 2026. We don't sell top-ups, because there's nothing to top up. What we meter is usage, in AI credits a month: 1,000 on Free, 10,000 on Pro, 100,000 on Business. You'll never delete a working automation to make room for another one.
No cap, and nothing
to buy in packs of fifty.
Type chase unpaid invoices politely until they're paid, in plain English. Autopilot shows you the plan, you approve, and it runs with your laptop shut.
Have as many as you like. Not on Pro, not on Business, not on the free plan. You will never think of a useful automation and find you're at the ceiling.
You already pay for ChatGPT.
Why pay for a worse one?
Pipedrive has an AI sales assistant. It suggests, it summarises, it sits in the corner. You already pay $20 or $200 a month for ChatGPT or Claude, which does all of that better. So we didn't build a worse chatbot: connect Claude or ChatGPT and it operates SoftSync directly, creating customers, moving deals, sending email, cleaning up duplicates, on every plan including the free one.
Five people,
one year.
We're comparing Growth, because it's the cheapest Pipedrive plan with two-way email sync and workflow automation, and those are usually why anyone leaves a spreadsheet in the first place.
Pipedrive Growth
5 seats · 12 months
- Per seat, per monthBilled annually, from their own worked example.$39
- Five seats, twelve months$2,340
- CampaignsAn add-on on all four plans, Ultimate included.paid add-on
- Web VisitorsAlso an add-on on all four plans.paid add-on
- Projects, Smart Docs, LeadBoosterAdd-ons at this tier. Included from Premium.paid add-ons
- Automation capTop-ups sold in packs of fifty.yes
Lite is $14 and has no workflow automation and no two-way email sync, so it isn't the same purchase. And from their own documentation: you're charged per seat, whether it's assigned to a user or not. If somebody leaves, you keep paying for the empty chair until you change the subscription.
SoftSync Pro
5 seats · 12 months
- Per seat, per monthAnnual billing. $39 if you pay monthly.$29
- Five seats, twelve months$1,740
- Email campaignsincluded
- Add-onsThere are none to buy.$0
- Automation capnone
Every feature we have is on every plan we sell, including the one that costs nothing. Paying gets you more room, and that's all it gets you.
Pipedrive's per-seat figures are their own, from pipedrive.com's blog, which states plans run from the $14 Lite tier to the $79 Ultimate option per seat per month billed annually, and gives Growth at $39. Add-ons and the seat-charging rule are from support.pipedrive.com. All read 10 September 2026. Ours from softsync.ai/pricing. If a figure here is wrong, tell hello@softsync.ai and we will fix it and re-date it. pipedrive.com, plan prices · support.pipedrive.com, pricing and add-ons · softsync.ai/pricing
When you should
pick Pipedrive instead.
Real reasons, and the first one is the big one.
- Your problem is an empty top of funnel. Prospecting, web visitor identification and a chatbot are demand generation. We don't do any of it. Buying us plus three other tools to cover it would cost more and work worse.
- You genuinely only want a pipeline. Then Lite at $14 is cheaper than we will ever be, and you should take it.
- Integrations. Their marketplace has 500+ apps. We have no integrations directory at all. We gave your assistant a way in instead. For many businesses that's better. If you need a specific connector on day one, check before you switch, because the answer is usually no.
- You want to hire someone who already knows it. Everybody has used Pipedrive. Your next sales hire is productive on Monday morning. Nobody arrives knowing us.
- You want years of public reviews to read. They have thousands. We're young and we don't.
Questions.
Isn't $14 just cheaper than you?
Can't I just use custom fields instead of a new record type?
Can we move from Pipedrive to SoftSync?
Do you have a prospector?
Pipedrive will have an MCP server eventually. Then what?
What does Pipedrive cost?
Count what your
business is made of.
Write down what your business is made of: the jobs, the invoices, the shipments, the renewals. If everything on the list is a deal, Pipedrive is a good tool and you should use it. If it isn't, you already know where those things are living, and it's a spreadsheet. Free forever, no card, no top-ups.