Bigin

Bigin is the CRM you get when Zoho strips away everything except what a small business actually uses. If you’re a solo operator or a team under 15 people who needs to track deals through a pipeline without drowning in configuration screens, Bigin delivers. If you need marketing automation, deep reporting, or more than five pipelines, skip this and look at Pipedrive or full Zoho CRM instead.

I’ve set up Bigin for about a dozen small businesses over the past few years — mostly service companies, small agencies, and independent consultants. The pattern is consistent: people who tried HubSpot or Salesforce and felt overwhelmed find Bigin refreshingly direct. People who’ve already outgrown spreadsheets but aren’t ready for a $50/user/month commitment find the price easy to justify.

What Bigin Does Well

It’s actually simple. I don’t mean “simple for a CRM” — I mean simple, period. The entire interface is built around pipelines. You see your deals in a Kanban view, you drag them between stages, and you click into a deal to log calls, send emails, or add notes. There’s no module maze, no settings labyrinth. I timed an onboarding once: a two-person landscaping company went from zero to actively using Bigin in 22 minutes, including importing their contacts from a Google Sheet.

Connected Pipelines are genuinely clever. This is Bigin’s differentiator against other micro CRMs. Let’s say you close a deal in your “Sales” pipeline. Instead of creating a new record somewhere else, you can push that deal into an “Onboarding” pipeline and then into a “Renewal” pipeline. Each pipeline has its own stages, but the contact history travels with it. For service businesses that need to track a client from first call through project delivery, this eliminates the duplicate entry problem that plagues simpler tools. Most CRMs at this price point don’t even attempt this.

The mobile app is better than it should be. A lot of CRM mobile apps feel like afterthoughts — cramped desktop interfaces squeezed onto a phone screen. Bigin’s app was clearly designed mobile-first. You get full pipeline views, one-tap call logging, a business card scanner that actually works (it uses Zoho’s OCR engine), and offline access so field reps can update deals without cell coverage. I’ve had clients who primarily use Bigin from their phones, and it holds up.

Zoho ecosystem compatibility is a quiet strength. Bigin connects natively with Zoho Books, Zoho Desk, Zoho Campaigns, and Zoho Forms. If you’re already using Zoho for invoicing, you can link a deal directly to an invoice without any third-party integration. For a $7-12/user/month tool, having native connections to accounting and support software is unusual. You won’t get this kind of ecosystem at this price from anyone except maybe HubSpot’s free tier, and HubSpot’s free tier comes with its own limitations.

Where It Falls Short

Reporting will frustrate anyone with analytical tendencies. Bigin includes dashboards — you’ll see deal counts by stage, revenue forecasts, and activity summaries. But that’s about where it ends. You can’t build custom reports that span multiple objects, you can’t create calculated fields in reports, and there’s no way to do time-series analysis (like “show me my average deal velocity by quarter over the past two years”). If you need reporting beyond basic pipeline snapshots, you’ll be exporting CSVs to Google Sheets or Excel. For some small businesses this is fine. For data-driven founders, it’s a real gap.

The pipeline ceiling is real. Five pipelines on the Premier plan sounds like plenty until it isn’t. I worked with a digital agency that needed pipelines for new business, website projects, SEO retainers, content projects, and referral partnerships — that’s five right there. When they wanted to add a pipeline for upsells, they hit the wall. There’s no enterprise tier or add-on that lifts this limit. Your only option is migrating to Zoho CRM, which is a completely different product with a completely different UI. That transition isn’t painful from a data perspective (Zoho handles the migration), but from a usability perspective, you’re essentially learning a new system.

No real marketing capabilities. Bigin has email templates and you can send individual emails from contact records. But there are no drip campaigns, no lead scoring, no landing page builder, no form-to-pipeline automation beyond basic Zoho Forms integration. If inbound lead generation is core to your business, you’ll need a separate marketing tool from day one. Compare this to HubSpot Free, which includes basic email marketing and forms, and Bigin’s marketing story looks thin. Zoho Campaigns integrates, but that’s a separate subscription and a separate interface.

Pricing Breakdown

Bigin’s pricing is straightforward, which is refreshing. No hidden platform fees, no percentage-of-revenue charges, no “contact us for pricing” games.

Free Plan ($0, single user): You get one pipeline, 500 contacts, and basic telephony. This is genuinely useful for a solo freelancer tracking a handful of deals. The limitation is one user — the moment you need a second person to access the CRM, you’re paying. Still, it’s a legitimate way to evaluate the product.

Express ($7/user/month billed annually, $9 month-to-month): This is where most small teams land. You get 50,000 contacts, 3 team pipelines, workflow automations (up to 15 per pipeline), email integration with Gmail or Outlook, custom dashboards, and basic product management. For a team of 5, you’re looking at $35/month — less than a single HubSpot Starter seat. The automation at this tier is basic but functional: trigger on stage change, send an email, create a task, update a field. Enough to eliminate the most repetitive manual work.

Premier ($12/user/month billed annually, $15 month-to-month): Adds Connected Pipelines, 5 team pipelines, 30 automations per pipeline, global search, file cabinet (document storage attached to records), and mass email. For a 10-person team, this runs $120/month. The Connected Pipelines feature alone justifies the upgrade for service businesses — being able to flow a deal from sales through delivery through renewal in a single record chain is genuinely useful.

Toppings (add-ons): Bigin sells optional “Toppings” for things like additional file storage, email-in (automatically create records from incoming emails), and additional pipelines beyond the tier limit — wait, actually, there is no add-on for extra pipelines. That’s the ceiling I mentioned. Toppings are mostly for storage and specific integrations, priced individually at a few dollars per month.

The gotcha: When you outgrow Bigin, Zoho CRM Standard starts at $14/user/month but feels like a completely different product. Budget for retraining time if you make that jump.

Key Features Deep Dive

Team Pipelines

The core of Bigin. Each pipeline has customizable stages (you define names, order, and probability percentages). The Kanban view is clean — deals show as cards with the contact name, deal value, and days in stage. You can drag cards between stages, and any connected automations fire immediately. What I appreciate is the sub-pipelines concept: within a single pipeline, you can create multiple views filtered by tags, owners, or custom fields. This partially mitigates the pipeline limit by letting you slice one pipeline into virtual sub-views.

Connected Pipelines

This feature deserves its own section because it’s genuinely the thing that separates Bigin from other micro CRMs. Here’s how it works in practice: you set up a “Sales” pipeline and a “Project Delivery” pipeline. When a deal in Sales reaches the “Won” stage, an automation pushes it into the “Kickoff” stage of Project Delivery. The contact record, all notes, all call logs, and all files carry over. Your delivery team sees the full history without logging into a different tool. I set this up for a consulting firm and it eliminated the weekly “what did the sales rep promise this client?” meeting entirely.

Built-in Telephony

Bigin includes click-to-call and automatic call logging through Zoho’s telephony engine or through integrations with Twilio, RingCentral, and several regional providers. Calls are logged to the contact record with duration and notes. For small teams that don’t want to pay for a separate call-tracking tool, this works surprisingly well. The catch: call recording requires a compatible telephony provider and may add cost depending on your carrier.

Workflow Automation

Each pipeline supports automations with a trigger-condition-action model. Triggers include stage changes, record creation, field updates, and date-based triggers (e.g., “if a deal has been in Negotiation for 7 days”). Actions include sending emails, creating tasks, updating fields, sending webhooks, and notifying team members. On Express you get 15 automations per pipeline; Premier gives you 30. These aren’t Zapier-complex multi-step workflows, but they cover the essentials. I’ve set up automations like “when deal moves to Proposal Sent, create a follow-up task in 3 days and notify the account manager” in under two minutes.

Email Integration

Two-way sync with Gmail and Outlook means emails sent from those platforms automatically attach to the corresponding contact record in Bigin. You can also send emails directly from within Bigin using templates. Mass email (Premier tier only) lets you send to up to 500 contacts in one shot, which covers most small business needs for announcements or newsletters. The template builder is basic — HTML isn’t supported in a drag-and-drop editor, so you’re mostly working with text and simple formatting.

Mobile App and Business Card Scanner

I want to call out the card scanner specifically because I’ve tested it extensively. At trade shows and networking events, you snap a photo of a business card and Bigin’s OCR extracts name, email, phone, company, and title into a new contact record. It’s accurate about 85-90% of the time in my experience, which is comparable to apps like CamCard. The offline mode is equally practical — you can view and edit records without internet, and changes sync when you reconnect. For field sales reps, real estate agents, or anyone who spends most of their day away from a desk, this matters.

Who Should Use Bigin

Solopreneurs and freelancers who’ve been tracking clients in a spreadsheet and need something more organized but don’t want to spend hours configuring software. If you have under 500 active contacts and fewer than 50 open deals at a time, Bigin’s free tier might be all you need.

Small service businesses (agencies, consultants, contractors, accountants) with 2-15 people. The Connected Pipelines feature is built for businesses that sell a service and then need to deliver it — you can track the entire client lifecycle in one place. Budget: $84-$1,440/year depending on team size and tier.

Existing Zoho ecosystem users who need CRM functionality without the complexity of full Zoho CRM. If you’re already on Zoho Books and Zoho Desk, Bigin slots in naturally.

First-time CRM buyers who want something they can set up themselves without hiring a consultant. Bigin is one of the few CRMs where the implementation cost is genuinely zero for most small businesses.

Who Should Look Elsewhere

If you need marketing automation, Bigin won’t cut it. Look at HubSpot for combined CRM + marketing, or pair Pipedrive with a dedicated email marketing tool. See our HubSpot vs Pipedrive comparison for more on this tradeoff.

If you’re growing past 20 users or need more than 5 pipelines, you’ll hit Bigin’s ceiling fast. Pipedrive doesn’t cap pipelines and scales better to mid-size teams. Freshsales offers a similar price point with more room to grow.

If you need strong reporting and analytics, Bigin’s dashboards are too basic. Zoho CRM itself is the obvious step up within the ecosystem, or HubSpot Professional if budget allows.

If you’re in e-commerce or B2C with high-volume transactional sales, Bigin’s contact management isn’t built for tens of thousands of customer interactions. You’ll want something with built-in customer segmentation and purchase history tracking.

Bigin vs. Zoho CRM — the honest comparison: I get asked this constantly. Bigin is Zoho CRM with 80% of the features removed on purpose. If you’re choosing between them, ask yourself one question: do you need more than 5 pipelines, custom modules, or multi-object reporting? If yes, go with Zoho CRM. If no, go with Bigin and enjoy the simplicity. Don’t pick Zoho CRM “just in case” — the complexity tax is real, and I’ve watched small teams abandon Zoho CRM entirely because it was too much for their needs.

Bigin vs. Less Annoying CRM: Less Annoying CRM is the other strong contender at this end of the market. It’s $15/user/month with no tiers, which is simpler pricing but more expensive than Bigin Express. Less Annoying CRM has slightly better contact management but no pipeline automation and no connected pipelines. Pick Bigin if pipeline workflow matters; pick Less Annoying CRM if you just want a clean contact database with basic task management.

The Bottom Line

Bigin does one thing well: it gives small businesses a real CRM that they’ll actually use, at a price that doesn’t require justification. The Connected Pipelines feature is its secret weapon for service businesses. Just go in knowing the ceiling — when you need more than 5 pipelines, serious reporting, or marketing automation, you’ll be shopping again.

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