Agile CRM

Pros

Agile is so clean. The UI is easy to use right out of the box.
Great for small to medium customer bases that use social media.
Quick and easy to set up.
Support is FANTASTIC!
Great automated features.
All the great things you would expect from a cloud based CRM: Customer + Deal tracking, notes and communication history, marketing analytics, scheduling, etc.

Cons

It's hard to call all of these "cons", but let's say "growing pains". Agile is still a young software.

We had some problems setting up links between our WordPress site. They were quickly resolved to 100% satisfaction, but they had my boss pulling his hair out for a few days.

We have run into a few other issues that I would call "buggy". Some graphical, some needing to refresh a page, but nothing has halted production. All have resolved themselves.

Pros

- Super affordable for the amount of tools, features and applications it includes. Starting at $10/user/month for it's starter version.
- Great user interface
- Easy to setup and use
- Lots of native integrations with lots of web-based (Saas) apps such as Gmail, Quickbooks, Twilio and many many others.
- Integration with Zapier, which basically let's you now integrate AgileCRM with 700+ other web apps, so this feature was a KEY for me.
- All your emails automatically load from your Gmail inside AgileCRM, no need to BCC some email address.
- Lots of sales, marketing, support, landing page, and amazing features added on at no additional cost.
- Now you can purchase add-ons such as user permissions, triggers, additional automation campaigns and others without having to upgrade all your users to the next subscription level (this is something I requested, and their team listened and did implement this).
-Their tech support is great, they care, they listen, and they modify/improve their system based on your feedback
- Their team update the app every few days

Cons

- Their standard subscription is $30/user/month if pre-paid for 2 years, otherwise $50/month, without too many added benefits for this level
- Their starter subscription limits your marketing campaigns (automation) to only 5 campaigns, with 10 nodes (steps) on each. The standard gives you 10 campaigns, with 25 nodes each (much better).
- Some updates happen without prior notifications to the user, and sometimes changes the User interface too drastically for some features.
- Their E-mail templates are limited, but you can still bring in your HTML templates or use their WYSIWYG editor.

Pros

Agile CRM is purpose built (according to the makers) for keeping up with a growing start-up or small business. It handles the usual contacts, appointments, lead tracking and so on, but has a strong email and social marketing component. You can optionally tie in your email and telephony to Agile CRM to keep track of lead and customer interactions (though I have not implemented either at this time.)

They are fairly generous with the free level, there are enough core features enabled to allow a fair trial and limits on number of contacts, emails, even API calls are sufficient for a small business. Their free tier is actually not a trial, you can stay on free as long as it meets your needs.

One more thing, Agile has quite a few integrations available, among them Stripe, PayPal, FreshBooks, QuickBooks, and Xero. They have a functional API so if you are so inclined you can integrate Agile with almost anything, whether there is a widget for it or not.

Cons

There are a lot of moving parts, which is not necessarily a bad thing if they all help push your goals ahead. But it is more complex than many small business web applications, because it tries to do more. So it takes more of a time investment to begin to benefit from Agile. I am phasing into each component and I haven't reached some yet.

I have wished for a few more customization options, in display attributes - layout, colors, and also data - what fields are displayed in lists, what sort criteria,

Pros

I used this platform for a solid year and put in hundreds if not thousands of contacts into this CRM. I liked how many categories there were to define a lead or a contact, the system that you set up to see how much potential revenue you had to win based on your leads was helpful, and the price is unbeatable. I mean truly, you can use this platform for free for up to 50,000 contacts. That's pretty amazing.

Cons

There's a reason why I call this particular platform a good "first step." Agile CRM says it offers marketing automation, gamification, and project management - but this is a far from complete product. In the free version you can only create so many marketing automation blocks before it makes you pay, but even if I did upgrade I'm not sure the platform could handle the sales process I wanted to have set up. Something else to mention about this platform is there customer service. I'm fairly certain the CEO is their only customer service rep. Every time I had a problem with the platform (roughly 1-2 times a month) it was the same man who picked up the phone - and when my problem was solved he made me delete the Tweet I sent out when I asked for help, and then made me publicly thank him. I found that very strange. Overall you should try this platform out if you're just starting out, but upgrade to something like Infusionsoft if you're really looking to up your game.

Pros

Tags make it easy to compartmentalize different customers and the path to completion.

Cons

Organization is a bit tough, and the separation of different features between Sales, Marketing, and Service areas is a bit disconnected. Creating a "path" for different actions can be quite confusing, and the fact that LOTS of actions (such as send an email when a certain tag is entered) do not happen. I think these run on cron jobs (say, every 15 minutes) and I feel like LOTS of the actions get missed. This is my biggest beef. The price structure is a bit nickle and dimey as well, and it seems like a big jump between I can do 3 actions and I can do 5 actions.