Act! CRM (formerly Swiftpage) aims to empower small businesses to build and manage client relationships and leads, so the user always has a pipeline of new, repeat, and referral business under control. Users can manage their businesses with Act! CRM every day, since it’s more than a CRM – it’s designed to present everything needed to stay on top of relationships, see what’s most important and actionable, and run sales and marketing in one place.
$22
per month
Bigin by Zoho CRM
Score 8.3 out of 10
N/A
Bigin by Zoho CRM is a simplified customer relationship management (CRM) software designed specifically for small businesses, startups and teams. Bigin helps small businesses unify customer-facing operations— marketing, sales, onboarding, delivery, and support, and it offers features that help to manage these customer relationships effectively.
$9
per month
Pricing
Act! CRM
Bigin by Zoho CRM
Editions & Modules
Essentials
$22
per user, per month
Act! Premium - Basic
$37.50
per user, per month (billed annually)
Standard
$40
per user, per month
Expert
$55
per user, per month
Select - Extra Features
$79
per user, per month (billed annually)
Complete - Extra Features
$199
per user, per month (billed annually)
Advanced - Extra Features
$399
per user, per month (billed annually)
Express
$9.00
per month per user
Premier
$15.00
per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Act! CRM
Bigin by Zoho CRM
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
For SaaS version, discount available for annual subscription.
Swiftpage ACT! would be well suited if you are using a desktop computing environment. ACT! is an old product and they were on the desktop for many years (and still are). Also, ACT! would also be well suited if you are not as concerned about implementing a CRM product that might require a little more training (e.g. if you had employees/salespeople that needed to be trained). Also, ACT! seems to be more generic than some of the industry focused products you see nowadays. For example, MethodCRM works well with non-profits that are on the cloud.
Bigin by Zoho CRM is suitable for medium-size or small-size companies. In our case, being a small company, all the functions that Bigin by Zoho CRM offers are more than enough. If in the future we need features that are not currently covered by the platform, we will evaluate the possibility of migrating to Zoho CRM. But for the moment (until now we had never used a CRM), everything that Bigin by Zoho CRM offers us fits our needs perfectly. Perhaps for other very large companies, Bigin by Zoho CRM surely does not cover all needs, although I couldn't give examples.
Integrated Email Marketing: For a small business, you can have a strong method to handle email marketing in an integrated non-disparate solution.
Tailoring: There are no limits on what data you can store in the system and the ease of making changes can be done by a nontechnical person.
User Interface: The tool is easy to get around in both the desktop (fat client) and (webclient) which both are quite similar in functionality.
Integration: The tool integrates with Word, Excel, and Outlook nicely. And, it integrates with Google Mail and Contacts. There is a nice selection of third party tools available for various needs like AddressGrabber which allows for easy input of contacts from various sources such as email signatures, webpages, etc.
Templates: I have enjoyed being able to store tons of various templates for letters which we use over and over for various communications like sales proposals, quotes, and nudging clients along the funnel and sales process.
Automation: SwiftPage ACT! has a small business automation engine which allows for reminders and workflow to be administered by the system. It's not as sophisticated as some enterprise workflow automation solutions but for the price it's an awesome addition.
Maintenance: Very rarely have a problem which needs to be dealt with and costs to upgrade are minimal at best. We hosted the system internally for the web client and implemented it ourselves initially but had upgrades subsequently done by a local partner simply due to time/cost scenario. In other words, less to have someone else do it.
There are a lot of good SaaS options on the market but SwiftPage ACT still has a place in the mix today. It depends on your needs, goals, processes, and people
Try printing reports with each record's notes section - really awful output that you are embarrassed to show anyone. Want to add a new record to a group, ACT will present another record for the group assignment. Want to work seamlessly with email? Forget it!
It has some great functions that are very easy to use and user-friendly, however overall it is not a very robust system and the fact that it only does sales and not the rest of the cycle for an organization makes it very limiting. There are a lot of functions that are very basic, but for the price it does offer a lot of value for a smaller company that just needs basic functions to track.
There has been an ongoing problem with Google synchronisation which no one seems to be bothered about fixing, even though it clearly states on the website that the software synchronises with Google. When the customer-facing support team are on the phone, they are brilliant, it's the back-end development support which is severely lacking.
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.
ACT! CRM is more cost effective than like a Salesforce, but that is for a reason, it lacks a lot of the functionality that a Salesforce has. Pipedrive is actually another cost effective platform I've been evaluating as a potential ACT! CRM replacement. I like it's modern day look and feel versus ACT!.
The price is much more attractive than equivalent tools. Pipe drive is as good, but the cost is a big factor when you are a small company, especially at the beginning. So that is why we chose BIgin, and we are delighted with it. With five members, it saves a few hundreds of euros a year.
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.
