Capsule’s fast factsOur product rating: 4/5 Pricing: Offers a limited free CRM software. Key features:
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Capsule is customer relationship management software that offers a mixed bag of sales and marketing features at competitive prices. Its contact management and pipeline tools help businesses visualize individual leads and entire projects from one dashboard with all the updated information for detailed live reporting. Capsule even offers an AI content assistant to help reps create engaging emails to nurture leads closer to a sale.
Capsule can support startups looking for a cost-effective tool and small and mid-sized companies wanting intuitive online software. If you’re looking for a platform that can handle a larger capacity of users, offers more robust tech features or has specific industry specializations, there are other options to consider.
Capsule has a sister company called Transpond that the CRM software seamlessly integrates with. Transpond is a special marketing tool that pulls and syncs all the contact information, profiles, custom fields and more directly from Capsule to help organize them into segmented marketing lists (Figure A). Any updates to information in one tool automatically update in the other, making it easy for businesses to run marketing campaigns and engage with top leads.
Capsule offers a variety of sales reports where users can pull specific insights around individual sales reps, clients and projects. These reports include won / lost opportunities, leaking pipelines, average time to won, average sales value and lost reasons. Capsule’s unique lost reasons insight page tracks every lost sale and defines the top reason it didn’t close (Figure B). This feature can help individuals or entire teams identify gaps in their sales process to prepare better rebuttals.
Capsule’s workflow automation tools help businesses reduce manual work, speed up their processes and help close out tasks effectively and consistently. Users can set up workflows and triggered activities to support sales reps and managers at every stage of their sales cycle.
In addition to sales tasks, Capsule’s automations can be applied to other business processes. For example, within the project management feature, users can automate new hire processes to get new employees ready to work quicker (Figure C).
Having sales pipeline management software allows organizations to view a summary of all sales opportunities, including potential profits, their status in the pipeline and what needs to be done next. Capsule’s pipeline feature offers detailed opportunity tracking and total sales process customization. Capsule also offers a special multiple sales pipeline view where businesses can create pipelines that represent different products, services and markets (Figure D).
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| 14-day free trial. | Doesn’t offer an assigned sales team or account manager. |
| Users report responsive and helpful customer support. | Free plan lacks reporting features. |
| Admins can add two-factor authentication for mobile app access. | Limited marketing integrations available. |
Capsule provides a standard free trial in addition to an entirely free CRM tool. This free tier does come with limitations around how many contacts it can support, no workflow automations and capped integrations. Because of this, it makes sense to see how Capsule compares to other providers with free versions of their tool or that might cater to similar sized businesses. Top alternatives to capsule include Zoho CRM, Insightly and HubSpot.
| Software | Capsule | Zoho CRM | Insightly | HubSpot |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Marketing features | Limited | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Industry specializations | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Integrations | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| AI-powered tools | Limited | Yes | Limited | Yes |
| Free-for-life version | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Starting price for premium tiers | $18 per user per month | $14 per user per month | $29 per user per month | $20 per two users per month |
Zoho CRM is leading CRM software that offers marketing and sales teams a flexible 360-degree view of customers and ongoing deals. Both Zoho CRM and Capsule have AI tools. Capsule offers an AI assistant that helps create written emails on sales reps’ behalf, while Zoho CRM has an AI assistant that can help monitor lead activity and more. Compared to Capsule, Zoho CRM also has more advanced multichannel marketing features that span across phone and email marketing and social media campaigns.
Read our Zoho CRM review for more insights into its pricing, features and more.
Insightly is a cloud-based CRM tool that helps sellers track deals from end to end. Insightly and Capsule both provide detailed email management tools. Both can track email campaigns, activities such as open or clicks, and more. All of which help reps manage important client interactions. Beyond that, Insightly also offers advanced project management tools that specifically track deals and client activity on post-sale deals.
To learn more, head over to our Insightly review.
HubSpot is a very popular customer platform that connects sales, marketing and data teams through customized dashboards and open-source CRM integrations. Both HubSpot and Capsule offer sales analytics and reporting tools that can display pipeline revenue and individual and team reporting. HubSpot uniquely offers over 1,500 additional technologies that can be integrated into the platform to make the tool extremely customizable.
For more information, check out our independent HubSpot review.
To critically and effectively review CRM providers like Capsule, I used an inhouse rubric with criteria and subcriteria that cover general CRM software offerings. I compared Capsule’s features, pricing plans, intuitiveness and more against top CRM providers and their standards. I referenced Capsule’s online resources as well as real CRM user feedback.
Capsule was scored with the following criteria breakdown:
