Copper CRM vs. Drupal

If you need to track contract expiration dates of your clients or your prospects that you're trying to sell - Copper is your tool. If you want to track specific products, solutions, vendors, etc. Copper can do it. I use it to track many brands of IT products and services with the use of custom fields to track which prospects/clients have any number of these items. Rather than taking notes, I can select the product from a drop down list that I created VERY EASILY within Copper.

If you want to set up a basic Not For Profit (NFP) Membership system and content base, Word Press is easier than Drupal. However, if you have specific needs that require a fair bit of customisation then Drupal is the best CRM available. If the webmaster is confident with PHP and SQL, Drupal allows a lot of creativity.

Incentivized

• Allows for contacts to be synced and organized directly from Gmail.
• Gives a flexible style and customizable settings to match our company's specific needs.
• Does a great job of helping us keep track of projects. We easily created a customized "Status" field with several status options that help us update the many phases of our project.

Incentivized

• Drag and drop functionality is easy to use
• Easy to switch between straight text and HTML content
• Ability to easily have multiple environments so that pages can be built in b/c-stage before they are approved and published
• Solid user experience where it's clear how to navigate the platform

Incentivized

• Window change: for mobile - when you tap on a card from a pipeline it takes you to the lead’s basic info. I wish it would immediately just open all activities so I can quick see notes
• I usually use Copper on the go. When you open the Copper app, it immediately opens a collab window. I wish it had some sort of easy dashboard….plus a notes area. I open Copper on mobile to quickly search for someone’s name or to take quick notes from a sales meeting

• This is not an easy CMS to work with if you don't have a good understanding of website development. It isn't "plug-and-play" like Wordpress or Shopify.
• Over time, doing major updates to the system can be taxing, especially if you aren't well-versed enough in doing system updates in line with your "child" theme and code.
• The CMS can become somewhat cumbersome with server resources if not carefully optimized while you build and customize it to your liking.

Incentivized

The time and money invested into this platform were too great to discontinue it at this point. I'm sure it will be in use for a while. We have also spent time training many employees how to use it. All of these things add up to quite an investment in the product. Lastly, it basically fulfills what we need our intranet site to do.

Copper is simple to use and it's simple to figure out the additional functionality you may need or want to use. There are a lot of support articles and the support itself is great. But it's also fairly simple to figure out on your own. It integrates easily with Google Workspace as well.

Incentivized

As a team, we found Drupal to be highly customizable and flexible, allowing our development team to go to great lengths to develop desired functionalities. It can be used as a solution for all types of web projects. It comes with a robust admin interface that provides greater flexibility once the user gets acquainted with the system.

Incentivized

Drupal itself does not tend to have bugs that cause sporadic outages. When deployed on a well-configured LAMP stack, deployment and maintenance problems are minimal, and in general no exotic tuning or configuration is required. For highest uptime, putting a caching proxy like Varnish in front of Drupal (or a CDN that supports dynamic applications).

Drupal page loads can be slow, as a great many database calls may be required to generate a page. It is highly recommended to use caching systems, both built-in and external to lessen such database loads and improve performance. I haven't had any problems with behind-the-scenes integrations with external systems.

Incentivized

There have been a few times when I contacted the "help desk" or "support team" and they just told me to watch a video or join a seminar to learn what I am looking to do. I would have expected someone to take a few minutes and literally walk me through the steps one by one until either I figured it out or accomplished the goal of my request.

As noted earlier, the support of the community can be rather variable, with some modules attracting more attraction and action in their issue queues, but overall, the development community for Drupal is second to none. It probably the single greatest aspect of being involved in this open-source project.

Incentivized

I was part of the team that conducted the training. Our training was fine, but we could have been better informed on Drupal before we started providing it. If we did not have answers to tough questions, we had more technical staff we could consult with. We did provide hands-on practice time for the learners, which I would always recommend. That is where the best learning occurred.

The on-line training was not as ideal as the face-to-face training. It was done remotely and only allowed for the trainers to present information to the learners and demonstrate the platform online. There was not a good way to allow for the learners to practice, ask questions and have them answered all in the same session.

Plan ahead as much you can. You really need to know how to build what you want with the modules available to you, or that you might need to code yourself, in order to make the best use of Drupal. I recommend you analyze the most technically difficult workflows and other aspects of your implementation, and try building some test versions of those first. Get feedback from stakeholders early and often, because you can easily find yourself in a situation where your implementation does 90% of what you want, but, due to something you didn't plan for, foresee, or know about, there's no feasible way to get past the last 10%

Incentivized

We selected Copper over these other CRMs mainly because of its ability to integrate with Google Workspace. Members of our team have used Salesforce in the past and found it to be a nightmare to work with/on. Candidly, Copper doesn't fill all of our needs so we supplement that with the use of Asana.

Incentivized

Drupal can be more complex to learn, but it offers a much wider range of applications. Drupal’s front and backend can be customized from design to functionality to allow for a wide range of uses. If someone wants to create something more complex than a simple site or blog, Drupal can be an amazing asset to have at hand.

Incentivized

Drupal is well known to be scalable, although it requires solid knowledge of MySQL best practices, caching mechanisms, and other server-level best practices. I have never personally dealt with an especially large site, so I can speak well to the issues associated with Drupal scaling.

Incentivized

• Copper has simplified our CRM and makes it easy for the sales team to keep track of leads and opportunities.
• Copper has allowed us to save money as it is a fairly competitively priced platform.
• Copper has simplified our workflow, allowing us to work more efficiently and save time from tedious data entry.

Incentivized

• Given the endless possibilities that Drupal can have, we tend to have great support going on when we get a website launched
• It has become much much faster and easier for us to launch a new project due to reusability
• Configuration management in Drupal helps greatly with CI/CD, saves us costs