Switch from Zoho Bigin to HelloGrowthCRM

Bigin exists because Zoho CRM is too much for a five-person team, and it does that job honestly. The free edition covers one user, five hundred records, one pipeline and three automations. Express, at 400 rupees per user per month billed yearly, opens it up to fifty thousand records, three pipelines and thirty automations. Premier at 720 rupees adds more custom fields, data enrichment and a monthly pool of AI credits, with five pipelines and fifty automations. Bigin 360 at 1,080 rupees goes to fifteen pipelines and a hundred automations. In dollars the same ladder runs roughly seven, twelve and eighteen per user per month on annual billing. That structure is clear and reasonably priced, which is exactly why so many small Indian sales teams start there.

The problem is not the price of any single tier. It is what happens to the sales process while you stay inside the tier you bought. Three pipelines sounds like plenty until you discover you need one for new business, one for renewals, one for channel partners and one for a second product line. Thirty automations sounds generous until reminders, stage-change alerts and assignment rules eat twenty of them in the first month. Teams then start folding distinct processes into a single pipeline with a stage list that means different things depending on the deal. Reporting gets vague, forecasting gets argumentative, and nobody quite remembers why. That is the quiet cost of a starter tool: not the invoice, but the compromises baked into how you sell.

The second pressure is the add-on stack. Bigin covers pipelines and contacts well, but calling runs through a connected telephony provider, richer messaging arrives through integrations, and billing means Zoho Books or Zoho Invoice. Each is a separate contract, a separate login and a separate line on the card statement. HelloGrowthCRM takes the opposite approach and puts them in the base price: an auto-dialer with call recording and AI call summaries, two-way WhatsApp, SMS and email sequences, AI lead scoring, a quote builder and GST invoicing, plus native IndiaMART and JustDial lead capture. For an Indian SME buying leads from portals and closing them over the phone and WhatsApp, that list is the actual daily workflow rather than a feature grid.

Do the arithmetic properly before you move, because a headline comparison flatters us unfairly. At 899 rupees per user per month, HelloGrowthCRM costs more than Bigin Express at 400 and more than Premier at 720. It costs less than Bigin 360 at 1,080. If your team runs one pipeline, sells over email, has no use for a dialer and already owns Zoho Books, Bigin wins on price and you should stay. The comparison flips when you total everything: Bigin plus a telephony provider plus an invoicing subscription is usually more than one seat here, and it is certainly more moving parts. Compare stacks, not products, and use your last three months of invoices as the input.

The mechanics of moving are straightforward. Bigin exports each module as CSV inside a ZIP under Settings, Data Administration, Export Data, and paid editions permit up to a hundred exports a day, so there is no rationing. Pull contacts, companies, pipelines, notes, tasks and calls separately, keep the original ZIP as an untouched backup, and clean copies instead. Import contacts and companies before deals so relationships resolve. Test with two hundred records on the free plan and check owners, custom fields and date formats before committing the full file. Setup on our side is about fifteen minutes, and the honest total for a small team is half a day. Keep both systems live for a week, then cancel the Bigin renewal rather than the account.