Lumo or Pipedrive: an honest comparison

Pipedrive is a sales CRM built around the pipeline. You see deals per stage, drag them forward, and the product nudges you to the next activity. It works, which is why we have set it up for clients for years. Sales Surge has done more than 150 CRM implementations, and a large share of them were Pipedrive. You do not become a Pipedrive Platinum Partner by accident.

But we kept seeing the same pattern. Sales works in Pipedrive. Support lives in a separate helpdesk. Marketing sends from a third tool. Quotes go through a fourth. Each tool keeps its own copy of the customer, and we built the integrations that hold them together. Pipedrive covers part of this with its own add-ons and a large marketplace. That is a good route if you are happy to assemble the stack yourself.

Lumo takes a different route. The pipeline will feel familiar if you come from Pipedrive: stages with a win probability, a deal board with weighted value, a warning when a deal sits still too long. Next to it, quotes with e-signatures, email campaigns, web forms, a helpdesk with a customer portal, live chat and customer success share the same database. A person exists once, and everything that happens with that person hangs off that record.

So the question is not which CRM is better. It is whether you want one system for the whole customer journey, or a strong sales CRM with separate tools around it. Both can work well. Below we go through the themes one at a time: pipeline, email and calendar, quotes, service, marketing, reporting, AI, data and security, and the switch itself. For each one you will see what Lumo does, where Pipedrive works differently, and what you should know before you choose.

Pipeline and leads

This is where the two are closest. In Lumo every stage has a win probability and a setting for how many days before a deal starts to rot. On the board you see the count, value and weighted value per stage, and there is a totals per stage table. Every stage change is stored with its duration, so later you can measure how long deals hang in a stage. Products on a deal have a billing frequency, from one-time to annual, and the deal value is the sum of the lines. Leads move through New, Working, Nurturing, Qualified, Disqualified and Converted to deal. The Today screen puts tasks, leads to follow up, stalled deals and tickets close to breaching in one place.

What you should know: Lumo has no separate forecast screen. You build a weighted forecast as a report, using the win probability per stage. And the lead score is a number you fill in yourself.

Email and calendar

Lumo syncs with Gmail and Google Calendar today. Only mail that involves a known contact is stored, and the body of other mail is never fetched. Mail is private by default. You send from your own Gmail with variables such as first name and organization. The calendar works both ways and never sends invitations on your behalf. Pipedrive connects to more providers. The Outlook and Microsoft 365 integration is planned for Lumo. Until then the personal BCC address works with any mail client: put it in Bcc or forward a mail to it, and it lands on the right person, organization and deal.

Quotes and e-signatures

In Pipedrive you usually create quotes with an add-on or an integration with a document tool. In Lumo the quote lives on the deal. Its lines are a copy of the deal products, numbering runs per year (OFF-2026-0001), and the PDF carries your logo and the customer's. The customer signs with a typed name and a six-digit code sent by email. The signed PDF gets an evidence page with time, IP address, device and a SHA-256 hash. Read more about quotes and e-signatures.

Service and helpdesk

Pipedrive is a sales CRM. For support, most teams pick a separate helpdesk and connect it. That works, but the account manager often cannot see that three tickets are open for the customer he calls tomorrow. In Lumo the helpdesk is part of the same product. Tickets move through New, Open, Pending, On hold, Solved and Closed. You set first-response and resolution targets per priority, with business hours and holidays, and a warning appears at 75 percent. After a ticket is solved a satisfaction survey goes out. Customers get a portal with a passwordless login link, and there is a knowledge base in Dutch and English.

Marketing and forms

Pipedrive offers its own campaigns add-on. In Lumo email campaigns are part of the product: a four-step wizard, segments from your filters with a live preview of who is excluded and why, HTML templates with variables, and a follow-up to people who did not open or click after a number of days. An unsubscribe applies to the whole workspace, and consent is checked again at the moment of sending. Web forms create a person and a lead, and an anonymous submission never switches consent on by itself but sends a confirmation link.

What you should know: there is no drag-and-drop editor, templates are HTML. And there are no multi-step sequences beyond the follow-up rule.

Reporting

In the report builder you pick a source, a measure and a breakdown, and see a live preview. There are nine chart types, from KPI and funnel to waterfall and table. You can draw goal lines, drill down to the records and export to CSV. Dashboards are private or shared with the team. You can also ask the AI assistant to build a report from a sentence. Reports that combine tickets and campaigns with deals are on the backlog, and scheduled email reports do not exist.

AI

Pipedrive builds its own AI features into the product. Lumo has an AI assistant that lets you search in plain language, create records, set up segments and campaigns, build automations and create reports. It has 52 tools: 21 to read, 23 to draft and 8 to commit. Anything irreversible or outward-facing waits for your click on Approve and run. The assistant runs with your own role and permissions, is off per workspace until an admin switches it on, and runs on Google Gemini by default.

Data and security

Lumo has its own login with two-factor authentication through an authenticator app, which you can make mandatory for admins. There are four roles: owner, admin, member and viewer. Every table is separated per workspace. The audit log is append-only. For GDPR you can export everything about a person or erase them, with a check afterwards. Data is hosted in London, in the United Kingdom. There is no SSO.

Implementation and switching

Of all switches, the one from Pipedrive is the easiest, because Lumo has its own import wizard for Pipedrive. You connect with an API token, pick what to bring and start with a dry run. Then you choose the mode Only here, or Pipedrive stays the source. In that second mode, changes to activities, notes, deals and leads go back to Pipedrive. Sales Surge handles the implementation if you want: pipeline, fields, roles and training.

We are a Pipedrive partner and we will stay one. So this is not politeness. Pipedrive is strong on a few points where Lumo makes a different choice.

• Simplicity for reps. Pipedrive is known for how quickly a salesperson gets going with it. If all you need is a pipeline, you are up and running fast.
• Mobile apps. Reps who spend a lot of time on the road have an app for it. Lumo is a web app.
• The marketplace. Pipedrive has a large marketplace of ready-made integrations. Lumo has an API, webhooks and an MCP server, but no marketplace.
• A large ecosystem. There are many partners, training resources and users who can answer your questions.
• Calm. If you are happy today and the problem is your process rather than your tools, a better Pipedrive setup will help more than a new CRM. We do that too.

If you mainly sell, do not need a helpdesk or campaigns inside the CRM, and everything runs well, there is little reason to switch.