Pipedrive vs. monday: Which is best? [2026] | Zapier

As an account manager in the mid-2010s, my entire relationship with our sales team consisted of two interactions: formal customer handoff calls and random run-ins at the water cooler. Despite working for the same company and having the same goals, our teams existed in different parts of the office and used entirely separate apps for work. I had no visibility into their CRM, no advance warning about incoming customers, and relied entirely on individual sales reps’ written summaries to understand customer needs.

This fragmented sales-to-delivery handoff was commonplace a decade ago. Today, it’s entirely unnecessary. Modern platforms like monday.com and Pipedrive allow seamless coordination between teams and transparently record every customer interaction. This creates a new question, though: which app should you choose?

Until recently, the choice was clear: Pipedrive for sales CRM, monday for project management. But now, both apps can do both things.

I’ve tested Pipedrive’s and monday’s CRM and project features to gauge their relative strengths. In this comparison, I’ll walk you through what I discovered so you can choose the right app for your team.

Table of contents:

Pipedrive vs. monday at a glance

Here’s a breakdown of the key differences between these two platforms.

monday is best for teams that need all-in-one workflow management. Its sales CRM is missing some specialized lead gen tools, but its powerful project management features, flexible interface, AI agents, and seamless sales-to-delivery handoffs make it ideal for organizations where sales is just one piece of a larger operational puzzle.

Pipedrive is best for teams laser-focused on sales performance. While its project features are limited, its purpose-built deals pipeline, impressive lead generation tools, and sales-specific AI assistance make it perfect for businesses where closing deals drives everything else.

monday is a project management app with a CRM option

“Did you put it in monday yet?” 

This grammatically-challenged phrase echoes through offices worldwide due to monday’s popularity as a project management app. (Funnily enough, one of the main gripes users have with monday.com relates to its awkward branding rather than the product itself.)

With hundreds of thousands of users, monday is one of the most popular project management apps (or “work management” apps, as monday likes to position itself). By organizing your projects into boards and setting up custom fields and variables, you can get way more done using monday than you’d be able to in a simple project spreadsheet.

One reason for this is improved collaboration: monday’s boards make it easy for anyone on your team to see how projects are progressing. You can set up sophisticated automations to keep teammates informed and keep projects humming along smoothly. (For example, if a project’s due date is approaching and certain tasks haven’t been completed, you can set up a trigger that notifies the project manager.)

monday also lets your team collaborate within the app itself, rather than just reporting on work that happens elsewhere. With monday workdocs, you can set up collaborative docs that seamlessly integrate with your project. For example, you can create a product launch plan doc that embeds a live project schedule so the document stays relevant even after the project launches.

If you’re a project management pro, you’ll find everything you need in monday. Gantt charts, a staple of professional project management, are easy to spin up on any board. It’s simple to create tons of other project views too, like Timeline, Kanban, and Calendar, along with custom charts that show how key aspects of the project are coming along.

In addition to monday’s preset views, you can also create any views you want just by describing them, using its new AI widget creator.

Need a custom view that shows you exactly how many hours you’re budgeting per project or client? You can now do so in a few seconds.

monday is adaptable enough to fit into all sorts of work scenarios. It’s so flexible, in fact, that many teams were already repurposing it as a makeshift CRM system before any official sales tools existed. This unofficial use case clearly caught monday’s attention, and eventually, in 2022, they launched monday CRM.

At first glance, monday CRM feels a little like monday slapped a different color of paint onto its existing Work OS product. But while monday CRM is far from the most advanced option on the market, it has useful sales-specific features that aren’t available in monday’s core product:

• CRM data enrichment with Crunchbase to automatically fill in prospect company details

• Deal stages widget, leaderboard widget, and sales pipeline view

• Shared email inbox, campaign tools, mass emails, and tracking capabilities

• Quotes and invoices to streamline the closing process

• Automated sequences and task reminders to nurture prospects

• AI sales reps that qualify leads, conduct outreach, and capture interactions

• Lead agents that identify prospects based on your ICP

• Lead scoring to prioritize prospects (Enterprise plan only)

If you’re already using monday for project management, you only need to buy seats in monday CRM for your sales team and other customer-facing staff. (Everyone else can keep using monday work management.) Your project management and CRM interfaces show up as separate workspaces in the same account, making it easy to jump between them if you have access to both products.

Data flows seamlessly between monday CRM and monday work management. For example, when your sales team closes a deal in monday CRM, they can automatically trigger a new project in monday work management—complete with pre-populated customer information and tasks assigned to the appropriate team members.

monday CRM’s most recent product improvements have closed some of the gap with dedicated CRMs, particularly new features like lead scoring, AI-powered SDR agents, and email sequences. Still, it’s missing specialized lead generation tools like built-in website visitor tracking, a deep prospecting database, native email marketing, and integrated eSignatures—all of which Pipedrive offers.

Pipedrive is a sales CRM with a projects add-on

Pipedrive has been a sales-focused piece of software since its inception in 2010, when a team of Estonian salespeople hacked together a custom CRM that made sense for their sales process. (Fun fact: NBA legend Shaquille O’Neal was one of Pipedrive’s early investors.)

The heart and soul of Pipedrive is its deal pipeline, a Kanban-style board that gives you a bird’s-eye view of opportunities across all stages in your sales process. If you’ve got multiple sales processes—some products that only need a quick demo, others that require sign-off from multiple C-suite decision-makers—you can easily set up different Pipedrive pipelines.

When you zoom into the deal itself, you can see the full scope of every rep’s interaction with that deal to date: calls, meetings, notes, emails, documents, and comments.

Another way Pipedrive streamlines the sales process is with its new Sequences feature, which is a hybrid between email automation and traditional sales activity. You can create sequences with step-by-step best practices for following up on certain types of deals: when to email, when to call, when to set meetings, and when to take a break. Once you’ve added a deal to a sequence, the activities in that sequence automatically populate in the dashboard of the sales rep who owns the deal. You can automate the email portion of your sequences, but you don’t have to—you can also just use sequences to guide your reps or streamline your own sales activities.

Once your sales efforts are in full swing, you need a reliable way to see how they’re doing. As a sales-first platform, Pipedrive has oodles of reports to keep sales managers happy, including metrics like pipeline health, sales activity, lead conversion, deal duration, and win rate and loss rate.

While Pipedrive’s interface is more finely-tuned to the sales process than monday’s, you could create a solid approximation of this experience in monday CRM. But in many cases, you’d be hacking a system together yourself rather than stepping into something that’s preloaded with everything you need.

For example, monday has a sequences feature, but it’s not as tightly designed around the pipeline and deal infrastructure that’s so core in Pipedrive. And monday CRM’s Leads section is essentially a table of contact information and statuses, while Pipedrive’s Leads inbox feels like a command center for actually generating leads, nurturing them, and moving them into your sales process.

Pipedrive’s LeadBooster add-on, at $39/month extra per company, adds a chatbot, live chat, web forms, and prospecting software to your Pipedrive subscription. (LeadBooster is included in Premium and Ultimate plans.) Web Visitors, a $49/month add-on, gives you insight into the organizations that are browsing your website.

All of this can add up to a meaningful increase in lead volume, which means that although these add-ons cost more, Pipedrive can often add more value than monday CRM. Pipedrive can also handle other aspects of your sales process, like lead nurturing campaigns, sales documents, and eSignatures.

Once you’ve closed a deal, you can convert it directly into a Pipedrive project in one click. (You can also set up an automation that handles this for you.) Once you’ve done that, it’ll migrate from your Deals dashboard to your Projects dashboard.

Notice any similarities? Like monday CRM, Pipedrive Projects (an $8/user/month add-on) is a repurposed version of Pipedrive’s original product. But that high-level Kanban overview that works so nicely for managing deals feels like an overly sales-like way of thinking about project management. (“Where is it in the pipeline?” isn’t always the best question when you’re managing complex projects.) While Pipedrive Projects probably works fine for 60-day software implementations, it’s hard to see it being the best choice for a 12-month SEO project or an ongoing content production workflow.

What’s odd, and (to me) kind of a deal-breaker in the project management space, is that you don’t find Kanban features where you actually need them: at the project level. Instead, you get a minimalist dropdown list of tasks and activities. Since there’s no timeline or Gantt chart view, it’s tough to understand whether your project is on track. And without Kanban to manage your tasks, it feels like a fancy to-do list rather than a way to manage your project’s workflow.

Want to set up project-focused automations, like assigning a piece of content to your editor for review after a writer completes it? You’re out of luck with Pipedrive. And forget about more advanced team management features like workload balancing and resource allocation. Sales-focused teams with simple implementation processes should definitely try Pipedrive Projects out—there’s a big benefit to having your data in one place—but Pipedrive simply isn’t built for complicated projects with a lot of moving parts.

monday AI is more ambitious, but both apps integrate AI in useful ways

Both monday and Pipedrive avoid the “AI hype” trap and deliver AI features that genuinely improve the user experience. Pipedrive’s AI features are fairly limited and focus pretty narrowly on the sales experience. monday AI is a broader effort that includes both targeted improvements (like AI-powered columns) and ambitious agentic capabilities.

Let’s start with Pipedrive. The first thing you’ll notice is that its AI Sales Assistant is accessible throughout the platform. (You can access it by clicking the purple AI-looking star icon at the top of the app.)

Sales Assistant has access to all of your deal information and can answer strategic (or mundane) questions. You can ask it to help you:

• Forecast revenue

• Identify bottlenecks

• Remind you of opportunities

• Compare your team’s performance across different time frames

• Recommend next steps to keep deals moving forward

Pipedrive can also write and summarize emails with AI if you use its Sales Inbox feature. I found this to be of some use, but it has limitations. I couldn’t get it to insert variables for [first name] or [company name], for example, so you’d have to do that on your own. For a large sales operation, creating Pipedrive sales email templates that cover every circumstance might be a better use of energy, and it would definitely increase the consistency of your messaging.

Finally, Pipedrive also offers AI-generated reports. While this doesn’t sound all that exciting, it’s actually pretty neat: since you can continue prompting after your report is generated, it’s easy to fine-tune the data conversationally.

What Pipedrive doesn’t have, at least for now, are AI sales agents or lead agents. You can integrate with AI prospecting apps like Overloop and pull that data into Pipedrive, but there’s no native functionality. 

monday now bills itself as an “AI work platform,” and while there’s some marketing hype in that positioning—isn’t there always?—monday really is one of the most AI-forward project management and CRM apps you’ll find.

Let’s start with one of monday’s smaller AI features that improves day-to-day productivity: AI-powered columns. This is handy whether you’re using monday for project management or as a CRM.

A few examples of what AI-powered columns can do:

• Translate content

• Assign labels

• Assign people

• Detect sentiment

• Extract info

• Write with AI

• Summarize

For certain workflows, this can be a huge time saver. For example, imagine you’re sorting customer feedback. You could add raw data to your table, then use AI-powered columns to automatically summarize the feedback, detect sentiment, assign labels, and assign customer support reps to follow up on anyone with negative sentiment.

AI can also proactively suggest new columns that could save you time based on the way you work. Below, for example, monday has suggested adding a Due Date Priority column to flag items that need attention.

monday has plenty of other productivity-boosting AI features. You can also:

• Generate workflows

• Add AI steps to automations

• Write emails and other content

• Generate formulas

• Generate templates and content inside docs

• Search through every document

• Get pipeline insights (like at-risk deals)

• Take notes with AI (paid add-on)

I won’t linger on any of the above, since they’re all fairly self-descriptive. Plus, there are still three other major areas of monday AI to cover: monday sidekick, monday vibe, and monday agents.

monday sidekick is an AI assistant that works a lot like Pipedrive’s sales assistant. It’s available throughout the platform—whether you’re using monday work management or monday CRM—and it understands the full context of your projects. You can use it to draft emails, write content, create subitems, assign project owners, and create columns. It’s also useful for repetitive “project management hygiene” tasks like updating columns or changing status fields.

monday vibe is, as you might have guessed, a vibe coding app. Its integration with the monday ecosystem is what makes it unique: you can create apps that pull from data in your monday boards, and make them available to anyone in your organization. 

monday agents are already live for a couple of sales functions, and more are in the works. Currently, you can activate an AI sales agent and an AI lead agent. 

I tested both, and they’re surprisingly good. When the sales agent called me, its voice was slightly robotic, but the fact that monday has added fake “office background chatter” makes the experience feel kind of organic. You can choose from a few different personalities and define the goal of the calls so your AI rep has a playbook to operate from.

On a test call, I tried to confuse my agent (“Tim”) by half-answering a question and then saying I couldn’t hear him. He did a good job of getting the conversation back on track. Then, I told him I had to run, and he politely let me go, presumably because he’s an AI with the capacity to call me back tirelessly. Once your AI SDR finishes a call, the transcript and recording are logged automatically in your CRM.

Right now, monday’s Sales Agent can only make calls, but soon it’ll also be able to send emails and LinkedIn messages.

monday’s Leads Agent automatically suggests an ICP, helps you define the information you want to collect (like company name and LinkedIn URL), and proposes a lead generation schedule. You can then funnel new leads to any board you want, and it’s easy to set up a flow whereby your Leads Agent gathers leads and your Sales Agent automatically follows up to qualify them.

More AI agents are in the works, including specialized project management agents who can do things like competitor research, recruitment, and vendor sourcing.

monday is more affordable than Pipedrive

Pipedrive isn’t expensive in the world of sales CRMs, which can cost hundreds of dollars a month per user (and sometimes include hefty setup fees). But if you’re comparing it with monday, Pipedrive feels pricey: it’s roughly twice as expensive as monday work management or monday CRM, and costs even more if you go for add-ons like Projects ($8/user/month) or LeadBooster ($39/company/month).

Pipedrive’s entry-level Lite plan costs $24/user/month. For automations, you’ll need the Growth plan at $49/user/month, and if you want lead gen and full-cycle sales tools, you’ll need the Premium plan ($79/user/month) or Ultimate plan ($99/user/month). One benefit of upgrading to Pipedrive’s Premium or Ultimate plans is that they include three paid add-ons: LeadBooster, Projects, and Smart Docs with eSignatures. If you’re considering those add-ons anyway, it’s worth doing the math to see if the higher-tier plans make sense.

monday’s work management tool starts at $14/user/month with the Standard plan, which gives you the project management essentials plus 250 automations per month. The Pro plan costs $24/user/month and adds time tracking and more boards, automations, and integrations.

If you’re signing your sales team up for monday CRM (instead of monday work management), their seats will cost slightly more: $18/user/month for Basic, $25/user/month for Standard, and $41/user/month for Pro.

Finally, there are a couple edge cases to consider.

If you’re a solopreneur or your organization only has two users, Pipedrive is probably your best option since monday requires a minimum of three seats for any paid plan. (Though if you really want to use monday as a solo user, you can pay for the extra seats without using them.)

If you’re looking for a “forever free” plan, only monday work management offers one. You only get a maximum of three boards, though, and it’s a significantly stripped-down version of the full product with no automations, no AI, and no integrations. monday’s free plan could work for a handful of limited use cases, but most users will have to upgrade to keep getting value out of it.

Both integrate natively with hundreds of apps—and thousands more with Zapier

monday connects with over 200 apps directly through the monday marketplace, which integrates with a wide set of project management and collaboration tools. And Pipedrive offers 500+ integrations through its app marketplace, covering everything from email marketing platforms to accounting software.

Using Zapier, you can connect either monday or Pipedrive to thousands of other apps. Orchestrate workflows across your entire tech stack and build AI-powered systems that move your work forward.

If you want the best of both worlds—a powerful project management app and a state-of-the-art sales CRM—you can connect monday and Pipedrive via Zapier to pass projects and contacts from one app to the other. Learn more about how to automate monday.com and how to automate Pipedrive, or get started with one of these pre-made workflows.

monday vs. Pipedrive: Which is better for you?

If you’re not quite sure which platform makes sense for you, here are some final thoughts to help you decide.

• Choose monday if your business revolves around complex project delivery or if you really want built-in AI agents. monday’s lower price point, powerful project management platform, impressive AI features, and functional CRM make it a solid choice for teams looking for an all-in-one workplace solution.

• Choose Pipedrive if closing deals is your primary focus. Pipedrive’s sales-first approach provides specialized tools that monday’s CRM can’t match, including lead generation, website tracking, and AI-powered deal guidance. While Pipedrive’s project management features are basic, they’re enough for straightforward implementations.

Related reading:

This article was originally published in February 2025. The most recent update was in February 2026.