Home » CRM » EngageBay CRM

 
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Rating:
4.3

The Best

  • Affordability
  • Useful automations and workflows

The Worst

  • Limited integrations
  • Only available in English

Starting From

$12.99 / month / user

  • Free plan

EngageBay Review 2024: An affordable CRM, but at what cost?

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Inka Wibowo

Inka Wibowo

Author

Robert Brandl

Robert Brandl

Researcher

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It might surprise you to learn that EngageBay, the all-in-one marketing, sales, and support powerhouse, is a relative newcomer to the scene, having emerged in 2018. However, in just a short time, it has managed to position itself as a formidable contender alongside heavyweights like HubSpot, Infusionsoft, and Pipedrive.

After all, what’s not to love about a tool that offers a feature set to rival big-name CRMs, at a fraction of the price?

In this EngageBay review, I'll dive deep into the CRM's sales management and marketing capabilities. I've put these features through rigorous testing to provide you with an hands-on perspective and help you determine if EngageBay is the right fit for your business needs.

EngageBay Summary

EngageBay is an affordable and feature-rich CRM solution that is ideal for small to medium-sized businesses, startups, and sales-driven organizations. It offers robust automation and workflow capabilities, powerful email marketing tools, and responsive live chat support.

However, its main drawbacks include a limited range of integrations, and language support only for English. I was also disappointed by the knowledge base, which lacked a lot of key information.

Regardless, EngageBay is a cost-effective option with comprehensive features, making it worth considering if your business is focused on sales and marketing efficiency.

EngageBay CRM Screenshots

engagebay sales dashbord
engagebay deals
engagebay contact profile
engagebay sales report
engagebay automation options
engagebay workflow
engagebay sales dashbord
engagebay deals
engagebay contact profile
engagebay sales report
engagebay automation options
engagebay workflow

EngageBay CRM Pricing

$ 12.99

500 contacts

Basic CRM & Sales Bay plan. Includes reports dashboard, calling and predictive lead scoring.

$ 49.99

20k contacts

Growth CRM & Sales Bay plan. Includes workflows and automations, custom fields and proposals.

$ 79.99

30k contacts

Pro CRM & Sales Bay plan. Includes all CRM features.

EngageBay offers a free plan for its CRM, allowing up to 250 contacts and 1,000 branded emails per month, plus extras such as live chat, email tracking, appointment scheduling, and 1 landing page.

To upgrade and access features such as automations, proposals, and custom reports, you can purchase its CRM as a standalone product from $12.99/user/month on the CRM & Sales Bay plan.

You can also opt for its All-in-One plan, which includes email marketing, landing pages, live chat, SMS marketing, and a helpdesk. This starts at $14.99/user/month. A limited free plan is also available.

Pros and Cons

  • Pros
  • Cons

Pros

  • Affordability

    EngageBay stands out for affordable pricing plans, including a free option with useful features. The CRM & Sales Bay plan starts at just $12.99/user/month, making it a cost-effective choice for small businesses.

  • Useful automations and workflows

    EngageBay’s automation capabilities are a strong point, allowing you to automate both sales and marketing tasks through its workflow builder. This includes setting up automations for different pipelines or tracks, triggering actions based on various events, and applying conditions and filters.

  • Email marketing

    EngageBay provides robust email marketing features, including customizable templates and a drag-and-drop email editor. Automated email sequences let you target communication with contacts, helping to improve engagement and conversion rates.

  • Live chat and support features

    Aside from offering its own responsive live chat support, EngageBay lets you add a live chat widget to your website and manage support tickets from within the platform.

Is EngageBay CRM the right CRM software for you?

  • Recommended if:
  • Not recommended if:

  • Small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs)

    EngageBay’s affordability and feature-rich CRM make it an excellent choice for SMBs looking for cost-effective customer relationship management solutions.

  • Sales-driven businesses

    EngageBay’s focus on sales management and automation features make it a strong fit for businesses that prioritize sales-driven lead generation and need efficient sales processes.

  • Startups

    The availability of a free plan allows startups with limited budgets to access essential CRM tools, making EngageBay a practical choice for early-stage companies.

  • Email marketers

    Businesses that heavily rely on email marketing will find EngageBay’s email marketing features, including templates and automated sequences, beneficial for their campaigns.

Rating Details

Ease of Use Info popup

As soon as you sign up, you’ll be taken through key sales and marketing tasks (adding contacts, setting up calendar etc) via a quick onboarding process. It’s all fairly easy to navigate, although the outdated design of the dashboard might be a little off putting, as well as the fact that sales and marketing tasks are separated into different dashboards.

Pipeline Management Info popup

You can view and manage deals in a kanban-style board. It’s also possible to create multiple pipelines (EngageBbay calls these “tracks”) and edit stages, although this process is not as intuitive as it could be.

Contact/Deal Management Info popup

Adding contacts is a breeze, and you can even purchase credits to use Engagebay’s email validation service to weed out soft and hard bounces.

Contact profiles are detailed and give you the ability to add custom fields. Plus, it’s very easy to jump from a contact to viewing and creating associated deals, tasks, proposals and even workflows.

Email Features Info popup

2-way email integration is available with Gmail, IMAP accounts, Office 365, Outlook, and Exchange accounts.

There are also extensive email marketing features, including templates, a drag-and-drop email editor, and automated sequences (see more below).

Automation Info popup

EngageBay lets you build both sales and marketing automations through its workflow builder. Sales automations can be set up for each pipeline/track and can be triggered by various events (e.g. when a deal is created/updated, or a tag is added). A wide range of follow-up actions and conditions/filters can also be set up, including assigning owners, updating deal statuses, sending emails or SMS, and adding lead scores.

Overall, it’s pretty impressive, covering the key automated tasks that most sales teams would need. However, I didn’t see a way to test workflows, which is something that competitors like Hubspot offer.

Note: automations are only available on the Growth and Pro plans.

Reporting Info popup

You can customize your Sales dashboard by choosing from 20+ reports to display, including deals count, total appointments, and sales funnels.

Within the Reports section, a good range of reports are available by default, including deal analyses, sales forecasts, calls stats and task reports. You can also set up custom reports for contacts, deals and activities.

Lead Scoring

Contact scoring can be set up via automations, letting you both increase and decrease scores based on contact activity (e.g. email clicks, webpage views). You can then trigger a wide range of follow-up actions. Predictive scoring is also available, although it’s a little hidden away under ‘Account Settings’.

Note that many lead-scoring related features are only available within their Marketing dashboard, meaning you’ll need to opt for the All-in-One to take full advantage of lead scoring features.

Unfortunately, their knowledge base doesn’t include a lot of information about how to set lead scoring up, which means you’ll need to figure out a lot of it on your own (or contact support for help).

Live Chat

EngageBay lets you add a live chat widget and form to your website, and you can even set up a chatbot. This is available in all pricing tiers, including the Free plan.

Web Tracking

The Web Analytics feature, which uses a cookie to track web visits from contacts who have filled out a form or opened/clicked an email, is only available on the Pro plan. You’ll get information on the page they landed on, which other pages they viewed, and how long they spent on each page. You can also trigger automations to these contacts.

Separately, there is also an add-on Visitor Tracker feature (in beta), which gives you a deeper view into all your website visitors, and even lets you initiate a call with them. Although, with prices starting at around $100/month, you’d really need to make the most of it!

Security Info popup

It’s possible to set up 2-factor authentication, and also manage user permissions quite granularly (granting read, edit, create and/or delete permissions for different areas of the platform).

EngageBay is GDPR-compliant and certified with the DPF.

Languages

EngageBay is currently only available in English, although Spanish, French and Portuguese are on the roadmap.

Integrations & Apps

Only a few dozen native integrations are available with platforms including Shopify, SendGrid, Amazon SES, Twilio and Trello. But you can use tools like Zapier to connect EngageBay to more apps.

Support

Their live chat support is very responsive. However, their knowledge base could be more comprehensive and detailed – it seemed to lack a lot of key information.

Overall Rating

4.3

EngageBay is a cost-effective CRM that offers an efficient all-in-one solution. Unlike other marketing-focused platforms, EngageBay leans towards sales management, making it better suited for sales-driven business with a need for a user-friendly CRM.

Conclusion

If you’re on the hunt for a budget-friendly CRM that supports you across sales, marketing, and service, EngageBay is worth a closer look.

What really caught my eye was the huge range of features it packs, from handling appointments and automations to diving into live chat and support tickets. All of these essential tasks can be seamlessly carried out within a single platform, not only saving you precious time, but also being a pocket-friendly move.

One excellent feature is EngageBay’s workflows, which help you automate impromptu tasks that fall outside the trigger conditions of your regular automations. Think of scenarios like swiftly marking multiple deals as “Won” and excluding them from ongoing sales pitch automations – a simple process that could prove a huge timesaver for sales teams.

Digging in deeper, though, I did stumble upon a couple of nuances. Take lead scoring, for instance. While EngageBay lets you score leads, it stops short when it comes to deals or companies, and the precision level doesn’t quite match up to the finesse of platforms like HubSpot.

I also found their list management features to be slightly limited. While you can insert static lists into automations, the same doesn’t extend to smart lists, which keep segments dynamic but miss out on this particular automation perk.

In a nutshell, if HubSpot seems to approach CRMs with a marketing-first mindset, EngageBay pivots more toward the sales management game. Which is obviously great news if your focus is on sales-driven lead generation.

So, if you’re in the market for a user-friendly platform that bolsters your sales team (with a sprinkle of email marketing on the side), EngageBay might just be the CRM for you.

> Try EngageBay for free

The authors

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Inka Wibowo

Senior Content Manager

Hi, I'm Inka! I spent the earlier part of my career in agency land, helping businesses of all sizes get their email marketing campaigns up and running. Now, at EmailTooltester, I'm using my experience to help businesses like yours find the best email marketing services for your needs.

Robert Brandl

Founder and CEO

Hello! I'm Robert, an email marketing expert with over 15 years of experience. After honing my skills at an agency by serving major corporations, I founded EmailTooltester as a passion project to help small and medium-sized businesses. Connect with me on LinkedIn where I regularly share my best email marketing knowledge.

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Our Methodology

This review has been written and researched following our EmailToolTester methodology.

Our Methodology

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