The 8 best pipeline management software in 2025 | Zapier TechTricks365

As anyone who’s ever seen a cartoon plumber knows, the best pipeline management tool is a monkey wrench. But if you want to know the best sales pipeline management tool, unfortunately, you should probably read the next several thousand words of in-depth software analysis.

The best pipeline management software helps sales teams by keeping prospects engaged and the data you have about them organized. These apps offer the AI, automation, documentation, and reporting features that you need to keep the lead pipes (the ones pronounced leed, not led) flowing smoothly.

Based on dozens of hours of testing from me and the Zapier team, as well as lots of research into what makes the best pipeline management software, these are my picks for the best pipeline management tools—other than the monkey wrench.

The best pipeline management software

What makes the best pipeline management tool?

Assessing the best sales pipeline software is, in many ways, just another way of assessing the best CRMs. At the end of the day, a CRM is designed to move customers from their entry in the wide end of the sales funnel through the narrow end (and… whatever is beyond the tip of the funnel).

But in this case, I’m focused more specifically on how tools designed for customer relationship management help sales teams design, optimize, and automate pipelines. So here’s what I was looking for as I researched, reviewed, and tested pipeline management software:

• Ease of use: Much like a monkey wrench, a good pipeline management solution should be easier to use than the alternatives. That means both out-of-the-box functionality for fast onboarding, and a simple user experience once you’ve boarded on. 

• Customization capabilities: Pipeline management software should be easily customized to fit your business’s needs.

• Contact management: Even the best-orchestrated sales funnels don’t do much good if they have no one to funnel through the sales process. These tools should make it easy to store, score, and implore (the three “ores” of sales) contacts at any point in the pipeline.

• Automations: As with the pipe connected to your sink, no one should be expected to handle all their leads by hand. Each of these tools can help you create workflows that take care of many of your sales processes automatically.

The best pipeline management software at a glance

Best pipeline management software for AI orchestration

Zapier (Web)

Zapier pros:

• Highly customizable with built-in AI

• Integrates thousands of apps

• No-code sequence and dashboard building

Zapier cons:

Zapier isn’t a dedicated sales platform in itself with a ready-made dashboard designed for lead management. But that’s because Zapier can be basically whatever you want it to be.

Starting with Canvas, you can use AI to build out custom workflows that integrate all the apps, triggers, and AI features you need to take in leads wherever they come to you and convert them however you convert them. Start by using an AI prompt to describe your ideal sales flow, check out the prompts to enrich them, and then refine them as your processes evolve.

If you don’t have all the tools you need yet, there’s a good chance Zapier has a native app for it. Build chatbots to qualify leads, create AI agents to enrich data, build lead intake forms on Interfaces, and automate your lead data management with Tables. Along the way, you can even fill in the gaps with apps you already use for everything from email to team messaging to scheduling and reporting. All backed by the power of automation.

Is this a shameless plug? No, because my religious upbringing prevents me from eluding shame in all circumstances (TMI for a sales app listicle?). Zapier allows you to create customized pipelines that meet your customers where they are and scale your sales with the solutions you already have. But since this is the Zapier blog, I suggest you get a second opinion (your own), and try it for yourself.

Zapier pricing: Free; Professional ($29.99/month, starting at 750 tasks/month); Team ($103.50/month, starting at 2,000 tasks/month)

Best pipeline management software for end-to-end pipeline management

HubSpot (Web, iOS, Android)

HubSpot pros:

• Scalable features for just about any business size

• Thorough knowledge base to support and troubleshoot

• Simple, familiar-feeling dashboard

• AI available even at free tier

HubSpot cons:

If you’re looking for all-in-one software you can use to map out and monetize your whole sales funnel, HubSpot is it.

For the kind of enterprise-grade functionality you get, Sales Hub Professional is kind of in the sweet spot of not-that-cheap but also not-that-premium. Starting at $100/month, you get pretty high-end features like forecasting, lead scoring, automated sales call recordings (and even feedback), and upwards of 500 email sends per day.

Individual users can kick off at $20 per month for reduced-yet-still-solid features like simple automations and automated conversation routing. (Individuals and enterprises also have limited free plans that are still surprisingly useful.)

Whether you go free, paid, or really paid (Enterprise accounts incur a $3,500 small-print onboarding fee), HubSpot gives you a really intuitive interface to create the sales structures you need. Add contacts and companies, track deals, schedule (and record) meetings, even create tickets for your support team—then feed all your data into the reporting hub to see how you’re doing. 

More helpful still is Breeze, the ubiquitous AI agent that allows you to enrich just about every view with generative and conversational AI features. You can ask it to research the company you’re trying to land, generate a sales email, write a blog post to help you gain qualified leads, and get more compelling facts about monkey wrenches—even at the free level.

HubSpot is also impressive as an all-in-one tool, with a built-in CMS, social platforms, chatbot capabilities, customer portals… pretty much every platform imaginable. No matter where you get your leads—landing pages, forms, social media, chat, email, homepage, you name it—HubSpot’s CRM can probably help you build it easier than most other sales pipeline software can, and is about as comprehensive as it gets. 

And if that’s not comprehensive enough, consider that HubSpot integrates with Zapier to connect to other sales enablement and marketing apps like Google Ads, Mailchimp, Webflow, and more to automate your pipeline. Learn more about how to automate HubSpot, or get started with one of these pre-made templates.

HubSpot pricing: Free; Starter ($20/month/seat); Professional ($100/month/seat); Enterprise ($150/month/seat)

Best pipeline management software for simple pipeline automation

Pipedrive (Web, iOS, Android)

Pipedrive pros:

• Straightforward workflows and no-nonsense design

• Purpose-built for pipeline optimization

• AI available at all pricing tiers

Pipedrive cons:

The core of Pipedrive is essentially a Kanban board for tracking your leads. Sure, you can pivot to a list view, but the structure essentially highlights the point of Pipedrive: watching leads pass like water through your pipelines. 

Unlike some other pipeline management tools on this list, Pipedrive was really designed from the ground up for sales pipeline management—and like a Craigslist plumber with no website or business card, it’s got just the tools to prove it. For a nominal fee, for example, you can add LeadBooster to your sales flow to give you a suite of sales pipeline software. With a dedicated lead prospecting tool, live chat capabilities, human-enabled chatbots, and additional templated webforms, you can use it to funnel leads into your pipeline with dedicated omnichannel marketing campaigns. 

Are they features HubSpot doesn’t offer? No. But are they sales-forward features you can use to enrich a dedicated pipeline manager with flexible pricing? Needlessly complex question, but yes. Plus, it’s got an intuitive automation designer and an AI-powered sales assistant to help you create assets, research leads, and create reports.

And Pipedrive integrates with Zapier, so you can move leads across Facebook ads, Google Ads, Calendly, and just about anywhere else you have touchpoints with them. Learn more about how to automate Pipedrive, or try one of these templates.

Pipedrive pricing: Essential ($24/seat/month); Advanced ($49/seat/month); Professional ($69/seat/month); Power ($79/seat/month); Enterprise ($129/seat/month)

Best pipeline management software for constructing sales pipelines

Membrain (Web, iOS, Android)

Membrain pros:

Membrain cons:

• Somewhat complex

• Premium pricing

You can tell Membrain means business because its main work hub is a pipeline builder. You can also tell it means business because its lead structure is based on companies, not individuals, so it’s literally designed for business. 

As a B2B product, Membrain solves for a global perspective that some platforms might miss with a really simple solution: Story Stream, an overhead view of team user activity broken down by projects and timelines. While this isn’t technically novel, this is the kind of view most software hides away in a reporting view, and it gives sales managers a quick way to keep up with team progress.

Like many of the software types on this list, Membrain is a lead tracker with some built-in CRM tools, like a document hub, an inbox, a calendar, forms, a meeting app, and general project management functionality. Its layout feels somewhat distinctive, prioritizing its core lead management tools above everything else, specifically for B2B. And if security is your thing, Membrain is SOC 2 Type 1 compliant, which not every platform is.

Membrain automations are pretty standard stuff—conditional branching, triggered emails based on templates, automatic status updates, etc.—and AI tools are oddly lacking. But with Zapier, you can build out even more Membrain automations to do things like round up new wins in a Google Sheet, create prospects from Zoom meetings, and port over Drift prospects automatically. Here are some more examples to show you what I mean.

Membrain pricing: Prospecting ($49/user/month); Active Pipeline ($69/user/month); Account Growth ($89/user/month); Elevate ($299/user/month)

Best pipeline management software for pipeline customization

Salesmate (Web, iOS, Android)

Salesmate pros:

Salesmate cons:

Maybe it’s the red-blooded American in me that prefers software that does what I tell it to over software that tells me what I can do with it. Whatever my underlying consumer psychology profile might be, Salesmate is definitely in the former camp.

I appreciate that Salesmate offers the best of two worlds: it can easily automate and make decisions for you to fill out lead profiles, suggest follow-ups, and connect profiles across modules, but at the same time, it lets you edit just about any field on any profile, getting your pipeline tailored to every last detail.

There are at least a dozen nearly identical software choices competing for just about any use case, but Salesmate fills a market gap by being whatever you need it to be at a reasonable price. Basic contact management to support other pipeline solutions in your stack? Sure. Custom automation sequencing that can carry leads from intake through conversion? Alright. End-to-end management with API to build bespoke pipelines? Go off, seller. Robust Zapier integrations that help you automate across forms, social ads, accounting software, and countless other apps? Check it out.

Salesmate’s omnipresent AI bot can schedule meetings, find contacts, summarize your day, and write emails for you—par for the course, but that tracks: Salesmate is pretty good at everything and lacking for virtually no feature. I wouldn’t say it’s a major standout at any one thing, but for pure value, you’d be hard-pressed to get much more for much less.

Salesmate pricing: Basic ($29/user/month); Pro ($49/user/month); Business ($79/user/month)

Best pipeline management software for free pipeline management

Vtiger (Web, iOS, Android)

Vtiger pros:

Vtiger cons:

• Interface can feel a little needlessly complex

• Big price jump from Standard plan, and changes in pricing are complicated

Do I know why Vtiger is named after a striped apex predator? No. Do I know that Vtiger has multiple (arguably too many) paid tiers that dramatically alter its utility? Yes. But I’ll be focusing on its free plan to prove a point.

Vtiger is a tad on the lo-fi side, which can be a pro or a con depending on who you are. It’s not the most polished or dynamic interface, but its scaled-down feel makes it a good fit for those who like a more grassroots-style software that gives you lots of freedom. 

One small thing I like about Vtiger as a pipeline tool is that it has an entire dashboard dedicated to quotes. This feels like an underrated offering for sales teams, in that most CRMs don’t offer a way to structure offerings for you to scale your direct sales processes, which feels like a glaring omission. 

Like a good CRM, it’s also got the standard features, like modules for tasks, reports, deals, and contacts, which aren’t always a given for free CRMs. But as a bare-bones offering, Vtiger gives you a whole suite of essential CRM-ish features for literally zero money, packaged in a perfectly functional interface.

Which brings me to really the core of Vtiger: it’s a decent tool with lots of decent features, which is hard to come by for those with a budget of zero decent dollars. That amounts to a free CRM—albeit one whose costs scale up pretty quick and don’t necessarily stack up with paid plans for other apps. But as an app with a legitimate free plan with no expiration date, it’s potentially the best you can do.

Plus, Vtiger’s Zapier integration lets you do some of the things you’d probably turn to a paid tier for, for free. Just sign up and automate across your entire tech stack. Learn more about how to automate Vtiger, or get started with one of these workflows.

Vtiger pricing: Standard ($15/user/month); One Professional ($42/user/month); One Enterprise ($59/user/month); One AI ($66/user/month)

Best pipeline management software for simple, affordable pipeline automation

Salesflare (Web, iOS, Android)

Salesflare pros:

• Straightforward, transparent pricing

• Simple, streamlined interface

• Automations built foundationally into workflows

Salesflare cons:

One thing I like about Salesflare is that it’s a no-nonsense product with three distinct product tiers that fit really neatly into typical user boxes:

• Its base tier comes with solid features and doesn’t gate-keep much functionality.

• Its premium tier unlocks a few SMB-level technical perks that most standard users can get by without, like custom dashboards and user permissions.

• Its enterprise tier just tacks on scalability perks like out-of-the-box data migration and unlimited prospecting credits.

That’s kind of it. And let’s be real here: just about every sales CRM offers similar functionality these days, so sometimes it’s better to cut to the chase. 

I don’t mean to imply this isn’t strong sales software for the price. All the usual suspects are here: opportunity monitoring, Kanban-style task tracking, contact enrichment, reporting, automated lead finessing, and so on. But it’s almost got more of a beginner-friendly vibe that I think a lot of team-of-ones and SMBs will appreciate.

For example, it imports your contacts automatically right from setup, almost instantaneously—I didn’t even ask it to do it when I made my first profile, it just kinda happened. From there, its suggestion tool finds groupings and organizations to suggest new accounts to build based on your past interactions. To round out your accounts, you can even use integrated “email finding credits” to source new contacts from across Salesflare’s network and LinkedIn, effectively offering basic lead enrichment within one tool.

Salesflare’s interface is also pretty bare-bones, in a good way. Get right to your tasks, sales opps, reports, or accounts from the intuitive menu, and then hunt through approximately zero convoluted dropdown menus to get what you’re looking for. It’s kind of refreshing to have so few things to click on and still feel like you have all the dashboards you need (or if you need more, upgrade to get custom dashboards). Meanwhile, the workflow automation builder is a core feature that essentially serves as the foundational architecture of your workflows, fusing automation right into your sales funnel from day one of your account. 

Plus, you can integrate Salesflare with Zapier to get even more impactful automations across apps like Outlook, Gmail, and Calendly. Here are a few automated workflows to show you what I mean.

The downside of Salesflare is that you’ll probably need to supplement it as your needs grow—which is probably ok if you’ve got your own stack of preferred tools already. Additional data enrichment, AI productivity tools, generative AI, social media managers, and more sophisticated content management platforms would all go a long way in expanding its functionality.

Salesflare pricing: Growth ($35/user/month); Pro ($55/user/month); Enterprise ($115/user/month)

Best pipeline management software for prospecting and lead nurture

Nimble (Web, iOS, Android)

Nimble pros:

Nimble cons:

Is Nimble the sharpest-looking pipeline management tool out there? No. Is it still, like, pretty sharp? Sure. Does that matter if you’re closing deals? Not really. Do I ask (and answer) too many rhetorical questions when I compare software? Debatable.

Nimble’s not flashy, which is reflected in its pricing: it has just one package (which you’ll have multiple opportunities to add on to, to be fair). That means you can roll out full functionality for some of the more robust lead management tools in the game.

While some CRMs pay lip service to lead enrichment, Nimble puts your money where its mouth is. Build out full histories with your leads to provide agents with the context they need to nurture relationships, set payment terms, view interaction history maps, schedule activities, and fire off emails via the app or a connected domain through an Outlook or Google Workspace integration. You can even add attachments, which is one of those features that admittedly sounds not that cool but is really helpful when you need it, and many platforms surprisingly don’t allow.

Nimble’s best feature is that it serves as its own lead enrichment tool—if your business were a Western, Nimble would be one actor playing both the by-the-books bank manager and the kooky prospector. With its browser and email extensions, just highlight a hyperlinked prospect name, and you can automatically build or edit an entire lead profile on the spot. We’re talking LinkedIn, X, a prospect’s website, your inbox, even within other browser-based apps. You can even link multiple contacts at once to create a group if you’re scanning through a team page.

Once you’ve got those leads locked down, you can customize automated sequences, group them, templatize your best-converting messages, and assign leads to applicable sequence groups so you can move said leads along unique pipelines by type. Then, while you watch these leads flow, you can segment pipelines to specify your messaging even further.

Nimble may not have fancy features like generative AI or flashy, modular dashboards, but it offers some of the most useful prospect-to-lead conversion features out there. And for all the other stuff you want a CRM to do, you can always integrate Nimble with Zapier to add leads from other sources, link up with your CMS of choice, or create tasks in your favorite agile PM tool.

Nimble pricing: $29.90/user/month

Other software you can use for sales pipeline management

Alright, so you just read my whole list of what I consider to be the best pipeline management software, and you’ve realized you don’t really want a CRM. I guess that means you came for the recs and stayed for the poorly executed puns, which is also cool.

In either case, you can still do pipeline management with lots of other types of tools that may or may not be built specifically for that function, some of which you may already be using.

• Sales tools: Maybe this is an obvious one, but there’s a whole world of sales tools out there that include lead acquisition, management, and outreach features, from CRMs to dedicated prospecting tools to sophisticated messaging platforms.

• Project management apps: That’s right, the humble project management app can be used in a pinch to map pipelines, assign agents, establish timelines, and even automate documentation.

• Email apps: If you do most of your prospecting and lead nurturing via email, a good inbox integration can help you stay on top of your leads, campaigns, templates, and pending deals.

• Email marketing tools: If you’d like to outsource email (and in many cases, intake form) lead generation campaigns, you can piecemeal together a tech stack pretty easily with a dedicated email marketing platform—many of which have similar features to these pipeline management tools.

• Gantt charts: While the Kanban board is the go-to lead-nurturing organizational framework, a Gantt chart app can also help you map leads and campaigns to the agents who will nurture them.

• AI sales assistants: While they can’t handle your pipeline from end to end autonomously, AI sales assistants can streamline lead intake, organization, and follow-up efforts.

• Marketing automation software: Marketing and selling may not be the same thing, but marketing automation platforms can help you streamline essential parts of the sales flow by handing over outreach and lead acquisition to the robots.

• Client management apps: Managing clients is half the battle of managing a pipeline—these apps may not be as helpful with lead acquisition actions, but if you’ve already got leads flowing in, one of these may be all you need to keep them moving.

• Spreadsheet apps: Even a simple spreadsheet app can fill a software need if you apply a little bit of creativity (and patience). For example, you can DIY your own Kanban board, Gantt chart, KPI dashboard, and even spreadsheet CRM.

Automate pipeline management with Zapier

There’s more than one way to skin a sales cat. While a lot of these pipeline management platforms are basically just CRMs repackaging similar features, there are also plenty of other apps that can help you see your little fledgling prospects blossom into paying customers. 

My take is that the right one for you depends on your existing sales infrastructure. Some users might prefer a big, sprawling, all-in-one solution like HubSpot or Salesmate that can do everything from blogging to social scheduling to reporting. Others might have a puzzle of favorite apps in place that just needs one more strategic piece to complete their beautiful pipeline portrait. 

In either case, Zapier can enrich your entire sales flow with AI orchestration across your entire tech stack. Learn more about how Zapier can automate your sales pipeline.

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