Highrise CRM (discontinued) vs. Kintone

I am not familiar with other contact management systems; before Highrise, we used a paper rolodex. But for our purposes, which have certainly changed over the last several years, we've been able to adapt Highrise to our needs. We've changed our tagging protocol - now, for example, we have social media tags, so I can narrow a contacts search down by contacts who have Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc. And we've added fields in the Contact Info so that we can include links to those pages when they exist, and you can click on it to go directly to those pages. It definitely meets our needs, though we are a fairly small marketing department, under 50 employees who utilize Highrise, and probably far fewer who use it frequently. Particularly with the tagging system, I could see a large number of users creating useless and overwhelming numbers of tags

Incentivized

I recommend Kintone for companies that need the ability to customize standalone applications or to provide a 'hub' to employees as a jumping-off point. I also recommend Kintone for any company that is drowning in spreadsheets, or is using 10 apps for 10 different purposes - you can consolidate everything into one place. Kintone, I think, needs a larger team for customization as your company grows. If you are a small office of 20 people, using it out of the box will likely be just fine for your needs. If you're working with 200 people out of an office, it'd likely be good to have someone with a bit of CSS, Java, and API experience in order to maximize what you get out of it - though you won't need that if you're keeping it simple.

Incentivized

• Able to see all activity, this helps if you need to find out who made updates last.
• You can create different tags for clients. We have tags labels for each product the client has with our company, so when we need to pull reports it saves a lot of time.
• If a client has multiple people in the office you can add all their informaiton.

Incentivized

• Flexibility. You can build apps (without coding) to serve a wide range of processes and projects.
• Ease of use. The interface is intuitive.
• Training. There are resources readily available to train new users. Even starting from scratch, I felt like I was up to speed in just a few hours.

Incentivized

• Would like to be able to copy information from the right sidebar more easily without having to open up & edit the contact (like Skype or email info)
• When I start a search by tags and pull out information, I have to re-do the tagged search to pull it up again
• Takes a while to export a custom list

Incentivized

• I feel that Kintone is not well enough known yet. This means that other apps/APIs are not necessarily easy to connect with Kintone. Yes, you can use Zapier though for interfacing with other apps.
• It would be great if it could give more customized options to change the look and format of certain things. You can make price quote apps, for example, but have to rely on 3rd party apps or programming skills to customize the look and fields.
• If you make a table as an input field, it cannot connect to other internal Kintone apps for lookups and such.
• I think there is more potential to make more customized data graphs.

Incentivized

It's become the heart of our contact management system - it's low cost, simple to use and high impact for us. We are using a version that allows for unlimited employees, 50,000 Highrise contacts and 100 Gb or file storage. This means to us that this is scalable and sufficient for the foreseeable future. By using some other apps we can add some things that we need that aren't built into the product. We use infusionsoft but not as a contact manager for clients. When a contact in infusionsoft reaches a certain stage and we get more "hands on", we use Zapier to setup the contact in Highrise and create an embryonic deal. We like Mailchimp for email newsletters and Mailchimp syncs nicely with Highrise. Finally we use SalesClic to give us a more refined sales pipeline.

We have been quite happy with our use of Kintone thus far. We looked at several options before choosing Kintone and believe it had the best value and best features, while allowing for complete customization, rather than being locked into preformatted apps that may not address exactly what we need or be more than what we need.

Incentivized

It's quick and easy to setup and use. There isn't any feature "bloat". Nothing to struggle with

Kintone is extremely user friendly and self explanatory. Very little knowledge is needed to build or use the apps. Kintone has a very robust help section to guide you through anything you might need assistance with while building out apps. The process of building apps is basically drag and drop, making it easy for anyone to create what they need.

Incentivized

Yes, it is always available

Incentivized

No issues.

Incentivized

They are quick and SO nice. They are very friendly and are eager to help.

Incentivized

I am very happy with Kintone and support it fully. I think that it is a great place for any company that wants to create a platform for better management. It is easy to use and pretty affordable. It is straightforward and has many tools that can be used by anyone. There are many helpful tutorials available too to guide users

Incentivized

The training was seamless and easy to follow

Incentivized

Everyone has their own tastes of things and way they want to work. Asking them to adapt to the changes with the new tools or apps is always difficult. We would want to start with a very small but best example within the organization, which in our case was that the employees will not be bothered by the bosses by being asked to find the documents, status of the progresses, or major things/requests/projects.

Incentivized

We use to use Connectwise and Highrise is a breath of fresh air compared to Connectwise. We love that the 37 signal services are all web based. We can connect anywhere making working on the go much easier for everyone. Our challenge with Basecamp was that it was a computer program based product which made it very slow and inefficient. It also conflicted with our Mac computers because it only worked on a Windows platform. None of this is the case for Highrise. I've never had a load issue nor has it ever run slow. It's up to the minute with any updates and entries. The categories it offers is wonderful and very appreciated. Organization is key, and it's the best way to keep everyone on task. Overall, we are very happy with the product

Incentivized

I don't know if this is the right Salesforce platform we used, but it was way too clunky and not built for the metrics we actually wanted to collect. Kintone doesn't have all the bells and whistles of Salesforce, but I don't really need them. For our small organization's needs, we needed something a little smaller and a little more versatile.

Incentivized

I could see this work for all departments if implemented correctly.

Incentivized

• We use it to streamline and assign inbound sales calls.
• Sales reps use it to automatically store correspondence , schedule follow ups, and note requirements.
• We download the text data and apply big data techniques to learn about customer needs and product requirements in the aggregate.

Incentivized

• It used to take us 15-20 minutes to create a quote for a client. It now takes less than 3.
• It allows a few of our employees to work remotely, which was essentially impossible prior.
• We can see raw data for success/failure rates, which we actively use in our employee review process.

Incentivized