Act! CRM vs. Teamgate CRM

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.

Incentivized

Teamgate CRM is well suited for companies that want to centralize leads, current clients, and communication history in one CRM. A scenario where team gate is appropriate is if a company wants to use custom sales pipelines and stages to track a sales lead that will transition to a deal. A scenario where team gate is NOT appropriate is for a company that doesn't need a cloud-based CRM because there don't travel a lot and will always use the same computer that you might as well have a CRM server on-site and save money.

Incentivized

• 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.

• Integration with SMS gateway and Mailchimp is fantastic
• Great looking dashboard and graphics
• So easy to use and customise even I could do it

• The auto saving function is not great. It means a simple slip or mistype can change an entire record easily.
• The reports are clunky and if you've changed the field names, that doesn't get reflected in the reports.
• The interface is still clunky. It is hard to see all the information for a contact all in one place. It gets broken up too much.

Incentivized

• As this is cloud-based software, we find that the servers are down at least twice a month, this is too much.
• The speed of page loading can be improved also it takes long to open reports if you use a big date range.
• There should be a way to reset another users password.

Incentivized

Once our current subscription expires, we no longer plan to use ACT. We are moving to a more complete CRM system that allows us, as a project based service company, to track projects, contacts, time and employees all with one software program. ACT has very limited modules to integrate these functions and therefore is no longer a good fit for us.

Incentivized

The product exceeds our needs usability-wise.

Incentivized

ACT follows the basic rules you would expect for this type of software, but actually doing anything sophisticated with it is near impossible without assistance or training. Unless you use it regularly it is difficult to use. I wouldn't recommend it unless you have internal IT support and it will be used regularly.

I rated this product an 8 for overall usability because Teamgate is very user-friendly and this helps the CRM meet the required use case that companies who buy it have. The feature to sign in from anywhere that has a net connection is huge For example the home page being the leads section and the fact that each lead has all the past and current communication with the potential client allows support agents, and the sales team to be on the same page I didn't give it a 10 because the slowness issue affects performance and usability.

Incentivized

Unplanned outages do cause issues with this cloud platform, as they occur twice a month.

Incentivized

Performance can be faster especially when running reports.

Incentivized

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.

I haven't had to contact the support team as of yet but my co-worker expressed his frustration with the amount of technical product knowledge the Teamgate support team had. He said he felt he knew the product better than the Teamgate helpdesk.

Incentivized

Delay your upgrades! ACT appears to ship out new software with virtually no checking and no concern about bad installs do to their customers.

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!.

Incentivized

When I say we evaluated other CRMs I think that's an understatement, we tried about ten different systems and Teamgate was by far the best.

The sales team can use this product as much as the support as lead generating teams.

Incentivized

• It's been easy to keep track of progress of goals with the software. This provides the opportunity to know what is working and what is not.
• We have had to adjust a lot of things since the Virus issue took a foothold, but it is providing invaluable to make those adjustments.
• Our ROI has increased at least 30%.

Incentivized

• The amount of time we have free now, due to having everything organised with the platform is phenomenal