If you are in the market for a Zoho CRM alternative and comparing Nimble and Zoho CRM, this post is for you. Zoho CRM has gained popularity for its wide range of features, but is it the best option for your business? This guide explores the differences, features, and pricing of both Nimble and Zoho CRM, helping you find the right fit for your needs.
Pros & Cons of Zoho CRM
Pros:
- Feature-Rich: Zoho CRM offers comprehensive features, especially on their more expensive plans, like Enterprise and Ultimate. Zoho CRM also provides deep integration with other Zoho products, offering a comprehensive suite of business tools.
- Affordable: Zoho provides cost-effective plans. Depending on what your needs are, Zoho offers multiple different pricing options from free to Ultimate.
- Customizable: The platform allows for a high degree of customization to tailor workflows to your business processes.
- Integration-Friendly: Zoho integrates with many other Zoho apps and third-party platforms.
Cons:
- Customer Support: Many reviewers on G2 voiced problems with Zoho’s customer support. Users noted that many times it takes too much effort and time on their end to get to a resolution with Zoho’s support. Some noted a language barrier being a problem as well.
- Outdated Interface: This may be a matter of preference, Zoho’s interface is very simple and it may work for many. However, if you’re looking for a modern interface, Zoho CRM might not cut it for you. To be completely transparent, other Zoho’s products, like Zoho Begin, already offer an updated, more modern interface. The inconsistency of the interface and sometimes naming structure was listed as a downside among some G2 reviewers.
- Price: If you start with Zoho’s free plan or their Standard plan, you should carefully review the list of features available as well as the limitations and compare to other CRMs that might offer what you need from the get-go.
Methodology
When comparing Zoho CRM vs. Nimble, we evaluated the following key factors:
- Ease of Use: How user-friendly is the platform, especially for non-technical users?
- Features: Does the CRM offer the right features for small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs)?
- Pricing: Is the pricing structure affordable and flexible?
- Integration Capabilities: Can the CRM easily integrate with other essential business tools?
- Customer Support: How responsive and helpful is customer support?
Why is Nimble the Best Zoho CRM Alternative? 5 Reasons
When looking for the best Zoho CRM alternative, Nimble stands out for its simplicity in terms of pricing structure and the number of features offered without hidden upgrades.
Here are five reasons why Nimble is a top contender:
1. Big Bang for a Buck
Nimble’s pricing is straightforward. You can either opt for a monthly plan or an annual one. It includes features like Email Sequences with no additional cost as well as other automation features that will make your life easier and your pocket happier.
2. Relationship Management Focus
Nimble excels at what matters most: building meaningful relationships. It’s been created to focus on the importance of nurturing relationships. The heart of Nimble is the customizable contact record where you can quickly and easily find the what and when about your customers.
All emails, including group messages used for personalized sales outreach at scale or email sequences used for drip campaigns, are sent from your email address connected to Nimble. This means that all emails will land in your recipients’ inboxes looking like a 1:1 rather than mass outreach. You can rely on higher open and response rates while ensuring a good user experience.
3. Powerful Automation
As mentioned above, Nimble provides powerful automation features without the price tag. You can automate lead engagement, manage workflows, and send personalized emails and rely on features like web forms, workflows, and email sequences seamlessly integrating with each other.
4. Superior Customer Support
Nimble is known for its exceptional customer support. Users have access to timely, helpful responses through various channels, ensuring any issues are resolved quickly—including 1:1 calls when needed.
5. Nimble Works Where You Work
Thanks to Nimble Prospector, a browser and email extension, you can create and update contact records from platforms like LinkedIn or any other web page in seconds.
Zoho CRM vs. Nimble CRM
Features
Let’s dive deeper into the individual features mentioned in the above graphic.
Multiple Customizable Kanban Boards & Automation
In addition to regular sales pipelines, you can use Nimble’s Workflows to manage business processes that don’t have a direct dollar value attached. You can work in a list view like you would in a spreadsheet or switch to a Kanban board. The drag-and-drop feature will make it easy for you to visualize every stage of your relationship with prospects and customers to ensure nothing slips through the cracks. Maximize productivity by integrating Workflows with Web Forms and Email Sequences.
Google Workspace Integration
Nimble works for you by automatically combining your Google Workspace contacts, email history, and calendar appointments into an easy-to-use relationship manager that works with you inside Gmail and everywhere else on the web via Nimble Prospector, a browser extension available on all main browsers.
If you run your business on the Google suite of products, you can rely on Nimble to handle your contact, email, and calendar sync, and you can also easily upload files to individual contact records from Google Drive.
Browser Extension for Lead Generation
Imagine browsing LinkedIn and coming across an interesting person that you’d like to develop a business relationship with. Nimble Prospector allows you to hover over their name and create a rich contact record with additional social media profiles and other information and add them to your database with one click.
Email Integration
Nimble integrates with Microsoft 365, Outlook, personal Gmail, Google Workspace, and many other email providers.
Nimble only supports IMAP email as it allows you to sync your email messages across multiple email clients, such as Mail, Outlook, iPhone, Gmail, and Nimble.
If you are using a third-party service provider, and are still using POP3 email, you can
switch to IMAP, as this will allow you to use your email account across multiple devices.
Google Calendar Sync
Nimble features full two-way syncing with multiple Google Calendars.
Once you connect your calendar to Nimble, you will be able to see the history of meetings with individual prospects and customers on contact records in Nimble.
Gmail Add-on
The Nimble Prospector App for Gmail amplifies your workflow by giving you visibility into emails, social signals, activities, and follow-up reminders — all without having to leave your Gmail Inbox.
When you are in an email thread, just open the Nimble Prospector App and all contacts within the thread will display. If this is an existing contact, you will be able to pull up their full contact record and if this is a new contact, you can build a live profile and add the contact to your Nimble database.
Admin Tools for Configuration Management
As an administrator, you can grant access and create a sense of hierarchy by way of setting individual or team permissions. By setting groups, you can enable your sales team to manage pipelines while keeping deals private. You can also create an admin team that can manage billing services, remove users, manage contact deletion, and perform periodic backups of contact data.
Whatever the case may be, Nimble now provides more control over how your data is shared and managed by your team.
Tags for Contact Records
Nimble’s Tag feature enables you to quickly group your contacts. Tags can be applied upon import for swift organization or within the app either in the Contacts tab or on an individual contact record. They can also be applied to activities.
Multiple Sales Pipelines
There are a lot of moving parts when it comes to managing your deals. Because the sales process is different for every company and the products within the company, your deal pipelines should be unique but reflect the standard buyer’s journey.
Many businesses can utilize multiple deal pipelines to track their various services or products, to track different sales processes for different customers, or to continue engagement post-sale in order to maintain the relationship.
Mass Email
Nimble allows you to send targeted email messages to 1,000 contacts per month provided your email service provider can sustain this volume. This is a great way to send targeted sales outreach or marketing messages to lists of your contacts.
All messages are sent over your personal email address’ SMTP, so they will appear as if they were sent from you, not an email marketing system.
Email Sequences
Effective communication is key to building and maintaining meaningful relationships with customers. However, it typically takes 5 to 8 follow-ups to reach a prospect, but many reps stop after only one or two attempts. Entrepreneurs and small businesses often struggle to follow up consistently due to wearing multiple hats.
That’s why we’re excited to introduce Email Sequences!
Email sequences are carefully crafted series of pre-written emails sent automatically to your contacts in response to their actions or based on a set schedule.
These sequences are designed to nurture leads, build relationships, and ultimately drive desired actions, like making a purchase or scheduling a demo.
Email sequences can be used in a variety of ways like welcoming new subscribers, reaching new or cold leads, onboarding new users, promoting an event, or upselling products and services.
Email Scheduling
Whether you’re a sales representative, customer service agent, or marketing professional, being able to schedule messages in advance can be a huge time-saver.
With Send Later, you can draft your messages ahead of time and set them to go out at a specific time or date. This way, you can keep your inbox organized and avoid the rush of sending messages during busy times of the day.
As an added convenience, the Send Later feature is available across our entire platform – from the Message tab in the app on your phone, to the Prospector app, and also on your Nimble contact or deal record. Whether you’re on the go or working from your desktop, you can easily queue up emails to be sent at a later time, without interruption to your regular workflow.
Prices
Let’s start with Nimble’s pricing, which is straightforward. Nimble offers one plan that you can pay for monthly or annually.
Nimble Monthly plan will cost you $29.90 per seat per month and Nimble Annual comes down to $24.90 per seat per month.
Nimble offers 25,000 contact records, 2 GB per seat storage, Microsoft 365 & Google Workspace Integration, unlimited contact tagging, unlimited customizable sales pipeline, mass emailing for the entire organization of up to 1,000 per license/month, email scheduling, and unlimited customizable Kanban boards for the entire company.
Zoho Free
Zoho offers a free forever plan for up to 3 users.
In this plan, users can add up to 2,000 contacts and send up to 6,000 emails. In addition to that, this plan is extremely limited. Here’s a breakdown of the missing features from the Zoho Professional plan.
The free plan lacks email and calendar synchronization, only offers one sales pipeline, and lacks mass email capability, custom fields, merge and deduping options, and any type of customization that you might need like reports and dashboards.
Zoho Standard
Zoho Standard will cost you $20 per month per user or $14 per month per user annually.
Mass email is limited to 250 messages a day per the entire organization. In addition to that, it’s only limited by your sales organization. If you wish to use it for marketing purposes, you will have to get the Zoho Campaigns add-on. There is a free version limited to 2,000 contacts and 6,000 emails.
Sales pipelines are limited to 5 and custom fields to 10 fields/module. There’s also no IMAP or Gmail API access on this plan and attachments in emails are limited to 10MB. No email scheduling on this plan. Contact organization using tags is limited to 5 tags/record and 20 tags per module.
Zoho Professional
The Zoho Professional plan will cost you $35 per user per month or $23 per user per month if you pay annually.
Mass emailing for sales activities is limited to 500 messages per day for the entire organization. You can schedule 10 mass emails per module. Individual email scheduling is not available on this plan. You can use up to 10 sales pipelines and create up to 50 custom fields. Contact tagging is limited to 10 tags/record and 60 tags/module.
Zoho Enterprise
This plan is $50 per user per month on a monthly basis. If you want to pay annually, it goes down to $40 per user per month.
Your sales team can send up to 1,000 messages per day per the entire organization and schedule up to 10 mass messages per module. You can use up to 20 sales pipelines. This plan also offers regular email scheduling. Contact record tagging is limited to 10 tags per contact and 100 tags per module.
Depending on your company’s requirements, you can find the complete feature breakdown here. If you are interested in more advanced features, you can also consider Zoho’s Ultimate plan which starts at $65 per user per month on the monthly plan and $52 per user per month on the annual one.
Free Trial
Nimble offers a free 14-day trial.
Zoho offers a free 15-day trial.
Starting Price
The starting price will depend on your individual needs, but if you are ok with starting with a super limited plan, you can do so for free on Zoho’s free plan. The cheapest Zoho plan will cost you $20 per month per user.
While Nimble’s starting cost will be a bit higher ($29.90 per user per month on the monthly plan), it’s good to go through the comparison table to determine what features are important to you and to what extent. For example, if you want to use mass messaging for other than sales purposes and not worry too much about how many sales pipelines, tags, and custom fields you can use, a few dollars per month might be worth the peace of mind.
What To Look For in a Zoho Alternative
When searching for a Zoho CRM alternative, look for a platform that combines a modern user-friendly experience with access to features you will be using on a daily basis from the get-go without having to worry about the need to upgrade to a more expensive plan in a few months. Nimble also offers intuitive social integration, streamlined workflows, and pre-built email sequence templates, ideal for teams who need to quickly connect with leads and automate follow-ups without extensive setup. Plus, Nimble’s straightforward pricing keeps costs predictable, making it easy for growing businesses to scale.
Is Zoho the Best CRM?
Zoho CRM is popular for its extensive feature set and integrations with other Zoho products, but whether it’s the “best” CRM depends on your needs. If you’re looking for an alternative that’s simpler, more affordable, and tailored for relationship-building, Nimble CRM could be a better fit.
Is There a Free Alternative to Zoho?
If you are looking to compare the Zoho Free plan to another free-forever option, take a look at HubSpot CRM. Don’t forget to keep an eye on the limitations to features that are important to you specifically and the separation of sales and marketing contacts.
Summary
Nimble CRM offers a strong alternative to Zoho CRM, especially if you’re looking for simplicity, relationship management, and automation without hidden costs. Nimble’s all-inclusive pricing at $29.90 per user per month (or $24.90 annually) covers essential features like email sequences, customizable Kanban boards, Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 integrations, and unlimited contact tagging. Unlike Zoho, which reserves many features for higher-tier plans, Nimble provides robust automation, mass emailing, and 1:1 customer support in one plan. Nimble is designed for businesses focused on meaningful relationships, offering unique tools like Nimble Prospector to build contact records directly from sites like LinkedIn, making it easy to grow your network.
