Act! CRM

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!.

Salesforce is a cloud based application. If you are using an internet based product and you lose internet services, you lose the ability to work. If you are using a computer based/desktop program and lose internet, you still have the program to work.

At this point we know we can only go up, we have hit bottom with version 21. Version 23 that we just installed says we are still where we were. No improvement.

Many years ago, I used GoldMine at a different company. ACT! seems easier to use. I also appreciate its "all in" support. I can contact support any time at no extra charge (and I don't get questioned about whether I can do so, like some companies do). It's been too many years to do a fair comparison, but my recollection is that at that time GoldMine was more difficult to use.

Swiftpage ACT! allows you to maintain your database locally, which we preferred to storing all records in the cloud. Many of the other programs had monthly subscription fees and were higher in cost--on the surface--than Swiftpage ACT!. We thought the email marketing add-on would be useful, but discontinued it after 6 months for a variety of reasons. Price for maintaining software escalated every year since we purchased, yet any improvements did not affect our daily use.

Although other CRM's like HubSpot offer a free solution, I found that it didn't give much and the add-ons were very expensive. Many other companies have interfaces that are clunky or hard to understand. Also I found that many just offer way too many features that we would never use that just made it more difficult to use what we needed. The customized options are just way to expensive for the simplistic offering we need. Swiftpage ACT! just provides a solution that works for us.

I use QuickBooks more for financial management and invoice generation. Swiftpage ACT! is more for information storage and resource management.

Swiftpage ACT! is easy to use and simple compared to Salesforce. Salesforce had too many fields and we were not able to customize, because we used it at a company enterprise level. Salesforce was nice to use with multiple people and teams where you can set permission levels, etc.

We were able to receive more support for Swiftpage ACT! to get our data transferred into the system. Because HubSpot was a free software, they don't offer this support included with the system like ACT!. HubSpot has a simple interface, but a bit less functionality as a free platform.

Swiftpage ACT! comes at a lower price.

As far as picking a database product to use, you really have to know what you are looking for—not just who will enter the data, but what reports and other output you are going to want from it. Every product has its good points and bad points but if you are looking for something that is easier to use and setup right out of the box, I would suggest using ACT!

I came from a company that wrote their own CRM package in Lotus Notes. The package was amazing but also bulky. There was a ton of overhead and a huge amount of data to synchronize. ACT! is a much lighter package. As it's a pre-packaged deal, it is easier to upgrade users than a self built program. However, in self built programs you control all the content you get and features.

Swiftpage ACT! was selected and used as it was tightly integrated with Sage accounting products and the fact that the product had a long history and a strong position in the marketplace for two decades. As more products have emerged in conjunction with the advent of cloud computing, ACT! has had a lot more competition. Many other products have come to market that are easier to use and "bolt on" seamlessly to other cloud platforms and ecosystems such as QuickBooks Online. Although ACT! has been a trusted product and is well known, it is not necessarily the most appropriate or best selection of a CRM system depending on the client's existing platform and industry.

ACT! in combination with Swiftpage is the most cost effective team. But they do lack some of the more advanced (marketing automation) features of the rest. We recently switched to Agile CRM for this reason. It is also cost effective, but has no CRM functions. For that I would love to get Ontraport, but this is more expensive.

Goldmine