The Pipedrive alternative for digital marketing agencies

What changes on Phloz

• Per-active-client pricing — plans sized by the clients you're working on, with team seats included
• Delivery is core: tasks, subtasks, messages, recurring work, department views
• Native typed tracking-infrastructure map per client (no spreadsheet)
• Free unlimited client portals with magic-link access

Should you actually switch?

A switch is real cost — a few days of structural mapping, a parallel-running week, training time, and the friction of breaking habits your team has built. Worth it when the new tool meaningfully changes how you work; not worth it when the gain is incremental.

The five signals that you're ready to leave Pipedrive: (1) you're paying for seats or contacts you don't use, (2) you're running the tracking stack in a separate Sheet because the CRM has nowhere for it, (3) onboarding a new team member takes more than a day because the configuration is tribal knowledge, (4) clients ask "where do I see progress?" and you don't have a clean answer, (5) you're duplicating client data across two or three tools because no single tool fits.

If three of those five describe your agency, the structural upgrade is likely worth the switching cost. If only one or two, stay where you are and revisit at the next pricing renewal — switching for marginal gain is usually a worse decision than the marginal gain.

When Pipedrive is still the right choice

The honest counter-positioning. Pipedrive isn't wrong for everyone — these are the cases where staying makes more sense than switching. If any of them describe you, weigh the trade carefully before migrating.

• New-business sales is your bottleneck — prospecting, deal stages, email sequences, activity reminders. Pipedrive is best-in-class for SMB sales; Phloz doesn't replace a sales-engagement CRM.
• You sell a product, not an agency service, and the pipeline IS the business. Pipedrive is shaped for deal-by-deal selling.
• Your team lives in the Pipedrive pipeline view daily and the visual deal flow is the core ritual. Phloz is delivery-first, not pipeline-first.
• You've invested in Pipedrive automations and the LeadBooster / Campaigns add-ons that drive real revenue. Switching erases that.

Migration: what to plan for

Pipedrive exports deals, contacts, and organisations to CSV. Map organisations to clients, persons to client_contacts, and won deals to active clients; bring the clients and contacts in with Clients → Import, which reads a CSV and lets you match its columns, and re-create the rest by hand. Open deals (your live sales pipeline) generally stay in Pipedrive — Phloz isn't a sales-engagement tool, so keeping Pipedrive for new business and running delivery in Phloz is the natural split. Plan about a day for the structural mapping and re-entry.

The structural rethink — mapping Pipedrive's shape to Phloz's opinionated agency model — matters more than the data move. Read the marketing agency CRM buyer's guide for the six capabilities that should drive the decision, and the pricing page to run the per-active-client math at your client count.

Pipedrive migration FAQ

The questions agency owners ask before signing the switch decision. Honest answers — same data we'd give a friend evaluating the move.

Can I keep Pipedrive for sales and use Phloz for delivery?

Yes — this is the natural split. Pipedrive owns the sales side (lead → deal → won); Phloz owns everything after the deal closes (client → retainer → ongoing work + tracking). The handoff happens at deal-won: create the Phloz client and its contacts by hand (there's no Pipedrive sync, Zapier connector, or CSV importer). You keep Pipedrive's sales strengths and stop forcing it to be a delivery tool.

Does Phloz have a sales pipeline like Pipedrive's?

No — Phloz has clients and contacts, not a deal-stage sales pipeline with sequences and lead scoring. It's an agency-delivery CRM, not a sales-engagement CRM. If your agency's constraint is closing more deals, keep a sales CRM; if it's delivering across 20+ clients without things slipping, that's the gap Phloz fills.

What does the move actually cost a 30-client agency?

The higher Pipedrive tiers are priced per seat, so a 6-person sales-plus-delivery team pays six times over. Moving delivery to Phloz Growth ($119/mo for 30 active clients, 8 seats included) and keeping a small 2-seat Pipedrive for sales only can lower the total — whether it does depends on your plan and headcount — with the tracking infrastructure map included. Run your numbers on /pricing.

What you keep when you migrate

The honest list of what survives the move from Pipedrive. Your client list and contact records. Your active tasks and their assignees, statuses, due dates. Your custom fields only in part: Phloz has no custom fields, so map each one to a fixed client or task field, or into notes, as you go. Clients and contacts import from a CSV (Clients → Import); tasks are re-created by hand, so budget the time. Your inbound email addresses if you set up forwarding (re-pointed at the per-client Phloz inbound addresses).

What doesn't survive: historical activity logs (keep your old tool's export if you may need them). Bespoke automation rules built on Pipedrive's specific automation engine — these need to be re-expressed in Phloz's patterns (recurring tasks, assignment notifications, inbound thread routing) or kept as manual steps; Phloz has no Zapier connector, webhooks, or public API. Past time entries stay in your old tool's export — Phloz doesn't import them, but new time is logged in Phloz against each client (optionally a task) and rolls up against the retainer.

The trade is a lighter, more opinionated tool that runs your agency's shape natively — at the cost of some per-tool customisation that, in retrospect, was usually a workaround for a missing primitive. See agency project management software for the broader buyer's guide on what to evaluate alongside this switch decision.

Want the head-to-head, not the switch story?

The Phloz vs Pipedrive comparison covers what each tool does, what each doesn't, and when Pipedrive is the right choice — for the cases where you're evaluating rather than already unhappy.

Other alternatives

Other tools agencies sometimes weigh as a Pipedrive alternative.

• Salesflare alternative
• NetHunt CRM alternative
• Pipeliner CRM alternative
• Zoho CRM alternative
• Freshworks CRM alternative
• EngageBay alternative
• GoHighLevel alternative
• Salesforce Sales Cloud alternative
• All alternatives→