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
monday.com
Score 8.4 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
monday.com Work OS is an open platform designed so that anyone can create the tools they need to run all aspects of their work. It includes ready-made templates or the ability to customize any work solution ranging from sales pipelines to marketing campaigns, CRMs, and project tracking.
Bigin by Zoho CRM is a very easy to use tool at a very fair price the small companies can afford. At the same time it is very robust technology thet brings the best features from other competitors. The best of Bigin by Zoho CRM is that it has been designed with small companies …
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.
Prior to monday.com, we were using Trello as our team task management tool. What monday.com has allowed us to do is to easily create sub levels to tasks, create multiple stages for each task and to easily assign people to different tasks in a way that is visually appealing and easy to understand.
Automation/integrations - Choosing from template automation or creating your own, integrate across platforms.
Dashboards - Different views i.e. kanban, gantt chart, tables, forms.
All info in one place - Add all of the necessary files for each task inside of Monday; don't need to go looking for ages in different folders on our internal system, add comments, and add assignees to each task—very content-rich way of presenting information.
Ensuring I have set up a Private board vs public board is not clear - it would be useful to have an additional alert when creating a board as I work with sensitive information. It will eventually be used in a team based environment but while I test the boards, they needs to be private.
Time tracking is clumsy, could be easier to record
Teams involved in content creation, such as marketing or editorial teams, could use monday.com to manage the entire content lifecycle. Boards might track content ideas, assignments, drafts, reviews, approvals, and publication schedules, helping teams collaborate and keep content production on track.
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.
On the surface, monday.com looks easy to use - it is indeed easier to use than almost all competing products. (There is one exception where they are on par.) But, I've come across so many organisations that start well with monday.com and then struggle because of the disorganised mess that is created. You have to have clear frameworks *before* you adopt monday.com as the ones that come out of the box are too simplistic for the average organisation. Otherwise, you need a system owner internally who can guide and help the organisation with monday.com adoption. At our organisation we have both.
Everything performs fairly well. Every now and then there are user errors where an employee will not click "ok" on a note they've created and simply exit out (I do wish that something was in place to prevent this, such as a pop "are you finished?")
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.
I used this capability last week for the first time and scheduled a call. Michael was so helpful. He listened to what I was wanting to accomplish and got back to me within a few hours with a screen recording of different options. I had one question on one of the options and when I replied, I got a new person that wanted to set up a call. I declined because that would be like starting all the way over with what I'm wanting and what he presented to me. I think if we have follow-up questions, we should be able to ask them to the same person we just worked with.
To have someone walk you thru the features and capabilities of Monday.com is priceless. Someone also coming along later in the contract to see if you are maximizing the program to suit your company needs is beyond helpful. The staff that have provided this training are fun, creative and very patient.
We signed up for the accounts. Created the accounts. Ran the trial version and tested it live while we were running multiple projects and found that it was fitting our needs perfectly. When the trial ended and we were asked to purchase the full version, we did. We have found other ways to use it and it's a breeze.
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.
Airtable served us well for data management. However, our senior management told us Project Managers we would no longer be using Airtable. monday.com serves us well with project management AND light-weight database usage. Workfront served we Project Managers very well. However, Workfront was never going to be accepted by our non-Project Managers for managing their projects. monday.com's ease of use and colorful UI build adoption among our non-PMs
For it to work across multiple departments and sites, I would like to see improvements made with integrations and automation. For this question, I am acknowledging not only the addition of internal triggers/automation, but also an expansion on external ones.
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.
My favourite example? We used it to take a failed start-up, one where the prime investor was considering pulling out - to being a listed business (EURONEXT) within 18 months. That business now has a market cap at around $200m.
Turnaround of a struggling health tech venture that was buried under endless spreadsheets by its investors - from loss-making to £2M EBITDA in two -years.
Offshoring - Through the adoption of Monday as a key workstream management tool (moving off JIRA) we were able to reduce resource costs by over £2m per annum, without any change in efficiency or quality.
