Bigin by Zoho CRM vs. vCita

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.

It makes client communication extremely easy - we can message and schedule online appointments. Clients really like those options. We also like the online payment portal. That way clients can pay at their convenience, and we don't end up with credit card information that requires PCI compliance. It also helps with payments. It would also help with invoicing, but unfortunately, there are only 3 linked payment options (Square, Stripe, and PayPal). If you don't use one of those payment processors, you cannot link to billing.

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

• Very easy implementation of a contact/scheduling widget.
• Allows for scheduling of appointments with clients. The setup is easy and the allotted times can be changed as needed. Easy for the client to use as well.
• Managing communication between individual clients is easy as well.

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

• Syncing with our google calendars has some flaws or is just not clear
• Messages show unread when they have been read

Incentivized

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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

Overall - easy to use. There are some missing features (like fillable pdf forms), and it also requires using certain credit card processors to link billing (otherwise it doesn't work).

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

I do miss the days when I could easily call up a rep and talk to them about any issues I had with the service. But I still do hear back from the customer service rep during the week within 24 hours.

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.

vCita has been very responsive to our needs and desires for improvement in certain areas. We have appreciated the level of support we receive when a problem arises. Our biggest gain when moving was the reliability of this product's teleconferencing integration with Zoom. With OnCall we had trouble onboarding people, difficulty with the app they used going down, etc. We also had expectations about progress with Forms that we unmet.

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.

• The initial cost was high compared to other options but the features in the base level allowed even the smallest of business to grow into the paid version of the service.
• The time saved with self service bookings and profile management for customers has been a big plus and made the purchase of the service worthwhile.
• The constant improvements to the platform have been enough to continue to use the service as it develops into a competent CRM.

Incentivized