Bigin by Zoho CRM vs. Keap

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.

Keap is very good at contact management and automation creation but weaker at email campaign creation. I was particularly interested in a function where when manually entering a new contact, you are then able to email that contact using a premade HTML template. It will currently not do this. There is a workaround, but it is unnecessarily ponderous.

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

• Pricing: Keap Max Classic (formerly Infusionsoft) is affordable for nonprofits and small businesses and includes all the automation features we need!
• Customer Support: Our onboarding and success coaches have been so helpful, taking into account some unique processes we have and finding solutions.
• Updates: Keap is constantly providing more and better solutions!

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

• More articles and videos on how to use the various functions of Keap
• Having representatives designated to certain regions or companies for a point of contact when help is needed
• More options when building the emails. While the click and drop options can be a plus, they can also be negative because you are limited to image and text sizing and positions

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Incentivized

We have invested a lot into Infusionsoft and are using it to automate our processes and marketing. Changing CRMs would have a HUGE cost for us and based on our evaluations, the grass isn't greener elsewhere. Infusiosoft fits most of our needs and is slowly getting better each year. Their support is great and we will continue to use them until something much better comes around or our company outgrows a small business CRM.

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

You do need to spend some time on-boarding and implementing the software in order to have full functionality. We were lucky - we had colleagues at the university with experience with Keap and then hired an intern familiar with the software to get us set up and ready to use it. We've had some functionality issues with it along the way and that has frustrated myself and the other uses in our department.

Incentivized

There have been few outages since we became a customer, and when they have technical issues they are typically resolved rapidly.

I haven't had any performance issues with Infusionsoft. Every time I use the software everything seems to run quickly and smoothly.

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

Generally, very responsive support for even our more complicated issues. We do have some open issues that we need resolutions on and that I understand are complicated and will take longer to resolve but the open issues are significantly impacting to our business.

Incentivized

This training is taught often to the lowest common denominator so as to help as many customers of theirs as possible. We do the training and coaching and implementations for our clients. But clients who I know who have been to their training get trained well. The gap that can exist lies in you doing your part and really investing in using and building out the application. The training and education is only as good as your willingness to apply it.

The results of training online are often based on how people learn. The training was great but with feature updates, you just have to get in there sometimes and do it! The training definitely lays a firm enough foundation for you to be successful even if its can't be updated with every feature update.

If you do this by yourself it will likely take you 6-9 months to get it entirely set up, unless you have a full-time dedicated person handling it. I recommend hiring a prof service company to implement it for you. They should be able to do it all in 90 days or less.

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.

Keap is fast. The learning curve is shorter and they have an academy for learning with videos quite extensive that explain a lot of different scenarios, specially when you need to customize scenarios of automations and segments. Is cheaper if you consider that this services CRM + Mailing don´t come often in one package and the realiability to send mails is quite good.

Incentivized

You get a lot of features included, but you don't need to use them all at once to start seeing an effect. When you are ready to use them, they are there. It also scales without costing too much money.

• 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.

• Automation has allowed us to be more engaged and invested in our customers by reminding us about birthdays and other important events in their lives so that we can celebrate with them.
• We lacked the manpower to sell and distribute orders online before setting up the payments and automation features. We now collect $5k+ a week in lost sales through online ordering.
• List cleaning functionality and engagment settings have allowed us to run a 40-50% email open rate that allows us to create an engaged community around local events and opportunities as well as sales and special offerings.

Incentivized