Pipedrive vs monday : Which CRM for agencies wins?

Agencies don’t struggle with “finding tools.” They struggle with keeping pipeline execution consistent while delivery stays on track. When prospect context lives across inboxes, calendars, and spreadsheets, follow-ups slip, handoffs break, and forecasting becomes guesswork. A CRM for agencies has to keep new business moving fast while preserving enough account history to support renewals, upsells, and referrals.

Pipedrive and monday CRM tackle these challenges from distinct perspectives. Pipedrive offers a streamlined, visual pipeline and focuses on activity-driven selling to ensure deals progress smoothly without unnecessary complexity. On the other hand, monday CRM provides a highly customizable platform built on adaptable boards that cater to the unique workflows of agencies, allowing for seamless integration between sales operations and project management.

The right choice between these two solutions hinges on your agency's specific process requirements, the level of customization needed, and the resources available for ongoing setup and management.

What is Pipedrive?

Pipedrive is a sales CRM designed around a visual pipeline and activity-driven selling. It’s especially favored by agencies seeking efficient deal tracking, clear next steps, and minimal process enforcement. Users can maintain multiple pipelines to distinguish between new business, renewals, or partnerships, while scheduled activities ensure follow-ups are always visible. The automation features streamline repetitive tasks like updates and reminders, making it ideal for teams that value speed and pipeline execution over a comprehensive “suite” solution.

What is monday?

monday CRM is a customizable CRM built on monday.com boards, allowing for adaptable columns and views to shape sales and account workflows. It's ideal for agencies already utilizing monday.com for delivery, seeking to integrate sales, onboarding, and client operations within a unified workspace. With pipeline views and dashboards for enhanced visibility, automations facilitate smooth handoffs and reminders triggered by status updates. Integration capabilities connect various marketing, form, and communication tools according to your tech stack, making it a preferred choice when flexibility and workflow modeling take precedence over conventional CRM practices.

Feature comparison of Pipedrive and monday

Multi-pipeline and custom stages

Pipedrive enables you to create multiple deal pipelines directly from the pipeline view, with each pipeline featuring its own unique stages. You can edit stage attributes such as names and probabilities, and easily add or remove stages as processes evolve. This flexibility allows you to differentiate agency activities like new business, renewals, and partnerships into separate pipelines, ensuring that each process has tailored stage definitions.

In monday CRM, pipeline setup typically occurs on the Deals board, where deals progress through a clearly defined set of stages. These stages can be customized to align with your agency's sales process, and the pipeline view provides a visual representation of advancement through each stage. Depending on your account organization, you can model different workflows by separating boards and stage structures. The logic of each stage is closely linked to the configuration of the board and its columns.

Client and Deal Activity Tracking

In Pipedrive, activities signify scheduled actions associated with individuals, organizations, leads, deals, or projects, including calls, meetings, and follow-ups. You can configure calendar sync as either one-way or two-way, ensuring that Pipedrive activities and external calendar events remain in harmony. Logged activities are displayed on the relevant records, facilitating the tracking of past actions and upcoming plans for each account or deal.

In monday CRM, activity tracking is managed through Emails and Activities, which integrates with Gmail or Outlook to log communications and present them on a timeline. This feature not only supports email logging and tracking but also includes various activity types like meetings, call summaries, and notes. You can add custom activities to ensure the activity log reflects how an agency records client interactions. Consequently, the timeline serves as an essential resource for reviewing past events and planning future actions.

Automation and Workflows

In Pipedrive, reporting is facilitated through Insights, featuring custom reports, dashboards, and goal tracking. Dashboards can be shared with team members internally, and public links can be generated for stakeholders to view the dashboard without needing direct account access, depending on permissions. Additionally, Insights tracks goals to monitor progress across deals, activities, and forecasts, tailored to your configuration and plan limits.

Monday CRM's automation rules utilize trigger-action recipes that respond to various changes, such as status updates, due dates, item creation, and movement between boards. These automations can send notifications, assign owners, update fields, and create items based on specified conditions. Common applications include standardizing handoffs when a deal changes stage or generating follow-up tasks as deadlines approach. The specific actions depend on the chosen recipe and the setup of the columns.

Reporting and Analytics

Pipedrive manages reporting through Insights, featuring custom reports, dashboards, and goal tracking. Dashboards can be shared with teammates internally, and public links can be created when permissions permit, allowing stakeholders to view the dashboard without direct account access. Goals in Insights monitor progress across deals, activities, and forecasts based on configuration and plan limits.

In monday CRM, reporting typically utilizes dashboards that aggregate data from one or multiple boards, presenting it through widgets like charts and tables. While dashboards facilitate real-time monitoring, reports offer more in-depth analysis generated as needed based on the workflow. Pipeline visibility is determined by the structure of the Deals board and the metrics displayed on the dashboard. Access and sharing are governed by account permissions and dashboard settings.

Integrations and Data Hygiene

Pipedrive offers a range of integrations available through the Pipedrive Marketplace, allowing users to install various apps and integrations directly from their account. To ensure data hygiene, the Merge Duplicates feature identifies potential duplicate contacts and organizations, providing a streamlined process for merging records. Additionally, Pipedrive clearly outlines how duplicate identification adheres to its import logic, influencing how duplicates are recognized and proposed for merging.

For monday CRM, integrations can be implemented using native connectors or external automation platforms like Zapier, enabling seamless synchronization of items and workflows across different applications. monday.com’s documentation emphasizes the importance of CRM integration for syncing customer data across various business tools, thereby minimizing manual data entry. To maintain data hygiene, monday.com also features a Manage Duplicates option that helps identify and resolve duplicate items on boards, which is crucial when leads are imported or integrated. The effectiveness of data cleanliness largely hinges on the design of board structures and the flow of incoming data.

folk: The Best CRM for Agencies in 2026!

folk is an AI-driven CRM designed to streamline the management of contacts, conversations, and deal contexts without making setup a cumbersome task. It caters specifically to agency teams where multiple members engage with the same account throughout prospecting, onboarding, delivery, and renewals. This system ensures that the relationship history remains clear and accessible, eliminating reliance on memory or scattered notes during handoffs.

• Multi-pipeline functionality with custom stages tailored for various agency workflows
• Comprehensive contact and deal timelines to consolidate interaction histories
• Email and calendar synchronization to link conversations to the appropriate records
• Task management, reminders, and follow-up tracking to ensure consistent next steps
• Contact enrichment features to automatically populate missing company and contact information
• Deduplication tools to merge duplicates and maintain a clean database
• User-friendly pipeline reporting for monitoring stage health and deal progression
• Integrations and automation connectors to minimize manual data entry

For agencies, the primary advantage lies in achieving operational clarity across multiple relationships. Pipelines can be organized to represent various revenue streams such as retainers, projects, partnerships, and referrals, while tasks and reminders ensure that follow-ups are uniform across the team. Data hygiene features like enrichment and deduplication help prevent duplicate records and incomplete fields, keeping pipeline reporting reliable over time.

Conclusion

In conclusion, Pipedrive excels in visual pipeline management and activity-driven selling, making it ideal for agencies focused on deal tracking and speed. Meanwhile, monday CRM offers robust customization and integration capabilities, catering to teams that prioritize workflow adaptability. However, for agencies that rely heavily on email integration, automation, and seamless sequencing, folk emerges as the superior choice. With its AI-driven features designed specifically for relationship management, folk ensures operational clarity and consistent follow-ups, making it the best alternative for today's agency needs.

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