Capsule CRM Review (2024): Features, Pricing, Pros & Cons

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.

Pricing

• Free tier: Free for up to 250 contacts and 50MB of storage per account.
• Starter: $18 per user per month when billed annually, or $21 per user when billed monthly. This includes everything in the free tier, plus 30,000 contacts, 1 sales pipeline, 1 project board, 50 custom fields and more.
• Growth: $36 per user per month when billed annually, or $38 per user when billed monthly. This tier supports everything in Starter, plus 60,000 contacts, 5 sales pipelines, 5 project boards, advanced sales reporting and more.
• Advanced: $54 per user per month when billed annually, or $60 per user when billed monthly. Features in this tier include everything in Growth and 120,000 contacts, 1,000 AI content assists and more.
• Ultimate: $72 per user per month when billed annually, or $75 per user when billed monthly. This tier offers everything in the Advanced tier plus a dedicated account manager and unlimited custom fields.

Key features of Capsule

Email marketing

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.

Loss reason reporting

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.

Workflow automation

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).

Pipeline management

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).

Capsule pros and cons

Alternatives to Capsule

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.

Zoho CRM

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

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

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.

Review methodology

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:

• Cost: Weighted 25% of the total score.
• Core features: Weighted 25% of the total score.
• Integrations: Weighted 15% of the total score.
• Customizations: Weighted 15% of the total score.
• Ease of use: Weighted 10% of the total score.
• Customer support: Weighted 10% of the total score.