Bigin by Zoho CRM vs. GridBuddy Connect

Startups Needing Quick Setup with Low Overhead
Startups that need a CRM quickly and don’t have the time or resources to onboard heavy tools can set up Bigin in a matter of hours. It covers all the basic CRM needs out of the box, making it ideal for teams just getting started.

GridBuddy is a very good tool for allowing users to work with multiple records simultaneously and saves a great deal of time for staff who have to view and edit multiple similar records. We have used it very happily for a number of years at our nonprofit organization. I would rate it more highly than 7 except for the fact that GridBuddy was acquired by a larger software company and the pricing has been raised significantly. It used to be a very affordable solution for small and mid-sized nonprofit organizations but it is now much harder for organizations in this market to afford the product.

Incentivized

• Zero-friction onboarding
• Imported 200 Google-Sheet leads in under 5 min via copy-paste wizard; field mapping was drag-&-drop, no CSV-headache.
• Email templates – yes, but the editor is limited.
• Merge-tags work, yet you can’t drop in advanced HTML; our logo had to be linked from an external URL. On the plus side, a bulk send of 25 emails went through without a hitch and none landed in spam – big win for us.
• Reports – fast but shallow.
• The dashboard quickly shows “deals closed” and “average stage duration,” yet you can’t pull conversion rates by lead source without digging into an export. Good enough for the board, too thin for an analyst.
• Automation – paywalled only.
• We wanted Bigin to auto-send a survey when a deal moved to “Won,” but workflows are a paid feature. You can test them during the trial; once it expires it’s back to manual clicks.

Incentivized

• Layered Reporting: The ability to bring in data from 3 objects, unlike Salesforce reports.
• Mass Edit: In comparison to inline editing, it allows the ability to create multiple views, personalized layouts, and again seeing, more than one object at a time.
• Workspaces: Ability to create a space with all the important grids a user needs.

Incentivized

• I would like to link the same contact to more than one company.
• I would like to be able to use only the name field, but I need to use first and last name
• I would like to have a plan where there is no limit on the number of customizable fields

Incentivized

• We have used GridBuddy with both Salesforce and SAP C4C. We didn't have any problems when it was synced to Salesforce, but when synced to SAP C4C we have had a few problems, which makes me think the integration with it isn't as mature. See subsequent points with details.
• When synced with SAP C4C, we are unable to use multi-level sorting on custom fields. Multi-level sorting is apparently only functional on standard C4C fields.
• Our current instance of GridBuddy synced with C4C has been stuck in a metadata refresh for four weeks, so we can't use new C4C fields until this is resolved.
• Support has been slow and not too impressive at least since using GridBuddy with C4C. It took a couple of months to finally diagnose the issue with multi-level sorting with different employees giving us different answers and eventually they told us the sorting wasn't working with C4C custom fields. It has been over three weeks since we reported that our metadata refresh was stuck and other than an acknowledgment that our issue had been forwarded to the product team, I have had no updates.

Incentivized

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Incentivized

- Easy of use - Visual nature of using the product (as compared to Dataloader) - Quickness of making changes/updates/edits to long lists of records, live and real-time

Incentivized

Bigin has really helped us with selling our monitoring services to our customers, which is primarily farmers in the UK. We often need to talk to customers before, during and after a sale, and Bigin helps us keep our contacts and leads organised as we track all these interactions. We recommend it very strongly

Incentivized

- Ease of use - Real-time and visible nature of making mass changes - Ease of setting up a Grid - Ease of filtering the Grid to see the records that I need to change

Incentivized

The support is all international and it takes a while to get support as you have to go through chats and set up times, not as easy to just call and get the support you need. They are very nice when you do finally connect with someone and they are knowledgeable, just challenging being international sometimes.

Incentivized

GridBuddy was very easy to implement

Incentivized

Simplicity, usability, and a modern, intuitive UI.
Easy to learn and simple to guide customers through. Flexible enough to fit diverse business scenarios with seamless integration. Enables managing marketing, operations, customer service, sales, and even assets all in one place. Smooth connections with external services.
Delivers huge value at a fair price.

This is the 1st inline editing product we have tested. The only reason we would ever go with another product is the price.

Incentivized

• Reaching more possible customers quickly and with less effort. The fact of being able to automate sending to our contact database, which has previously been tagged and categorized, has allowed us to send information in a more agile way (previously we simply used Outlook, without any type of automation).
• Automatically consulting all the email history you have with any of the contacts has allowed us to be more efficient and avoid duplication in communications.
• The process of implementing and integrating Bigin in our company, although it was not difficult, we found some difficulties to synchronize the database loaded in Bigin by Zoho CRM with our Office365 account.

• GridBuddy has allowed us to make more outbound calls and handle more concurrent tasks that using Salesforce alone would have allowed. Considering the costs of Salesforce, the small additional expense is well justified under the correct circumstances. We were very disappointed with the vanilla Salesforce UI. GridBuddy means that we actually engage with salesforce now.