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
Highrise CRM (discontinued)
Score 4.0 out of 10
N/A
Highrise is a simple CRM, allowing the user to track leads and manage follow ups with zero learning curve. Highrise is only available and supported for existing customers. As of August 2018 Highrise is no longer available to new customers. Existing customers may still take advantage of Highrise.
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.
We chose to work with the Basecamp product and along with it came Highrise. They're a great 37 signals package together. So we chose to work with Highrise because of Basecamp
Easy batch upload of new contacts - if you gathered names and contact info for a bunch of people at an event or conference or what have you, put it in a spreadsheet and upload it for easy and efficient adding to the database.
Simple communication and outreach tracking - each user has an individualized dropbox email address; you can BCC:, CC:, or forward an email to or from a client or contact, and Highrise automatically associates and records that email with the contact in the database.
Task assignments - users can create and task assignments associated with specific contacts (ie - Send Suzy J. a gift box on Oct 1; Follow Marla K. and Billy Z. on Twitter & Facebook; Get an updated address from Nathan R.)
Tags - easily create lists of contacts who fit certain needs (I need a: food blogger, in TX, who has a Facebook page - we have "food blogger", "TX," and "Facebook" tags in our system) that is then exportable; also useful for knowing the important associations of a particular contact.
Im actually pretty happy with the system as it is. The best aspect of Highrise is that it is very easy to work with - no need to struggle with manuals and lengthy training.
Not really a problem I suppose but I pay for Highrise as part of a suite which includes other products - Basecamp, Backpack and Campfire. It would be nice to see more integration between these products.
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.
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.
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.
Highrise is simple to use and is run by the same folks who build Basecamp and 37Signals. We wanted something that would do the essentials without the cumbersome bells and whistles. Salesforce is almost too complicated if you don't have a whole sales operation and analytics division. One day we will probably outgrow Highrise, but not yet.
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.
