Communication and document management

Irwin allows you to track all your communication and integrates with Outlook calendar, so you are always on top of the latest interactions with your investors, even with a large team. They present this information in an activity feed:

It doesn’t have integrated emails though, so you need to manually enter this information. In addition, there are no options to upload documents or manage signatures.

Reporting and analytics

Irwin provides powerful reports and analytics, including investor databases, allowing you to find potential investors.

In addition, there are reports for the events and activities you create using Irwin. With these reports, you can see how effective your marketing actions are.

Customization

There is very little space for interface customization, but you can add custom data fields and generate your own investor databases.

Irwin gets a lot of praise for its support team as well, who frequently help customers with small issues that could be considered custom work.

Pricing

Its pricing isn’t public, but it looks like Irwin is quite expensive based on the reviews I’ve found. In general, Irwin is geared towards enterprise-level founders rather than solo founders.

The Verdict

Pros

• Very responsive support team
• Easy to use
• Built as an investor relations CRM from the start
• Allows you to search for new investors

Cons

• Expensive for solo founders
• Very little integration with external tools
• Doesn’t provide automatic email integrations.

Irwin is a great choice if you have a big team and want to use it to find new investors. However, it is hard to justify its price for small companies that just want to manage their current investors.

Communication and document management

With Softr, you can manage your investors in a pipeline just like you can with other CRMs. There is no direct email integration, but you can apply email automation with Airtable/Google Sheets or even access it with webhooks.

At the end, you can always manually log your activities if you want, just like you would do in Irwin.

You get full control over document management, uploads, and signatures. You can control which users can see pages or download files.

Reporting and analytics

You can easily create charts, reports, and dashboards.

You can create custom metrics and generate reports for virtually any metric you want.

Customization

Softr is fully customizable since you create the interfaces using a no-code builder. You can use a template to get started quickly though.

Pricing

Softr has a free tier, and all paid plans have a 30-day trial. There are 4 plans as well as custom pricing for enterprise clients. All plans have discounts in yearly billing (2 months for free), and prices listed here are the discounted prices.

The free plan allows 100 external users per app, while the basic plan ($49/mo) allows 1,000 external users. So, if you have a CRM with up to 1,000 users, the basic plan works fine.

The professional plan is $139/mo, and it removes all Softr branding and allows loading more records per dynamic blocks – up to 25,000, as opposed to 1,000 for the free plan and 5,000 for the basic. You can have up to 5,000 external users, as well as advanced blocks, such as inboxes, calendars, and kanbans.

The business plan is $269, and it allows more external users (10,000 per app), more records per block (50,000), more blocks (timeline and org charts) and downloadable apps.

The Verdict

Pros

• Fully customizable
• Easy to get started with templates
• The free plan works well for solo entrepreneurs

Cons

• There is no native email integration out of the box, so you’ll need to use webhooks or an API to send emails straight from your CRM

Softr is a flexible option for an investor relations CRM for big and small companies, as it's fully customizable and easy to get started with.

Communication and document management

Visible.vc allows you to communicate with investors in bulk, similar to a newsletter with the Investor Updates tool.

You can share your pitch deck with investors and track their profiles. In addition, you can find potential investors on their database.

There are no methods to generate or track direct one-on-one interactions though.

Reporting and analytics

Visible.vc provides custom reporting tools, using premade charts to display your metrics.

Customization

There is very little room for customization. Visible.vc does have some integrations with external services though, which can be quite useful.

However, there’s no room for custom workflows, so you’ll need to adjust to the tool.

Pricing

Visible.vc prices range from $49/mo to $399+/mo. All plans have a 25% discount on yearly billing, and prices described here are the annual discounted prices.

The lite plan costs $49/mo, and it includes the core features for an investor relations CRM. It includes communication features, dashboards, and 2 fundraising pipelines.

The pro plan costs $99/mo, and it adds data integrations, Zapier connection, 5 fundraising pipelines, and custom branding for the pitch decks.

The scale plan is currently $149/mo. It removes all Visible.vc branding, allows you to use custom domains and have no limits for how many fundraising pipelines you can create.

There is no information on what the enterprise plan adds, but it starts at $399 per month.

The Verdict

Pros

• Bulk-emails feature
• Easy reports
• Investors database

Cons

• It lacks one-on-one tracking tools
• There is no free plan

Communication and document management

Foundersuite contains email integration, which allows you to send, read, and track emails directly from the platform. You can manage emails, tasks, downloads, and anything else you might want to manage in an investor relations CRM.

The communication features are much closer to a “pure” CRM like Pipedrive than to an investor relations CRM like Irwin.

Reporting and analytics

There is very little admin-level reporting on Foundersuite. With it, you can easily generate reports for your investors (clients), but your own team won’t have a lot of data at hand regarding how effective your CRM usage is.

Customization

There are no customization options on Foundersuite. You are limited to the workflows that they give you, and that’s it.

Pricing

Foundersuite plans range from $0/month to $150/mo. The free tier can be quite limited though, as you can use it to store only up to 25 CRM entries.

The Verdict

Pros

• Direct email integration
• Complete tools to manage investors communication
• File downloads for documents
• Free plan

Cons

• Very little reporting
• The free plan is quite limited, so it’s likely that you’ll reach the limit quite fast while you are hunting investors
• The paid plans are billed yearly or through a very expensive monthly plan ($150)

Communication and document management

You can manage your pipeline, and investors, add fields, manage documents, and send emails. This is probably Pipedrive’s strongest point against the other CRMs in this list.

Reporting and analytics

There are some analytics features, but they aren’t as customizable as those in Softr. With Pipedrive, you can create custom dashboards and custom reports, but you still need to get creative when it comes to getting and processing data.

Customization

Pipedrive provides automated workflows and hundreds of connections to other services such as Slack, Zoom, and Trello. You can’t create 100% custom pages in Pipedrive, but it is as powerful as it can be, given that it isn’t a no-code builder.

Pricing

Pipedrive starts at $15/user/mo and can cost up to $99/user/mo. The key factor here is that this is the price per user. So if you have a big team, it can get expensive.

There are discounts in all plans on annual billing. The prices here are the discounted yearly prices (around 17% discount).

The essential plan costs $12.5/user/mo, and it provides basic features for an Investor relations CRM.  

The advanced plan is $24.90/user/mo, and it includes email sync, automated workflows, and email tracking.

The professional plan costs $49.90/user/mo, and the main improvements on this plan are the document sharing and signing tools.

The enterprise plan is $74,90/user/mo, but there are no big differences for investor relations CRMs. There are improvements in other aspects such as unlimited deals, unlimited reports, security alerts, and security rules.

The Verdict

Pros

• It has incredibly flexible communication tools
• Hundreds of connections to other apps
• Integrated emails

Cons

• It can get quite expensive if you have a big team
• There is no way to completely customize pages and reports, given that it isn’t a no-code builder.

Communication and document management

It is as powerful as Pipedrive when it comes to customer communications. You can manage your pipeline, send emails, manage downloads, and add notes to investors.

In addition, you can use it to create client portals, support sites, and so on.

Reporting and analytics

It allows you to build some reports and dashboards. Not as much as you’d see with other tools from this list though.

Customization

You can connect HubSpot with more than 1,200 apps via their marketplace. So, although you don’t control everything right off the bat, you can code apps if you want to.

Pricing

HubSpot has a free tier with limited features. When it comes to paid options, there are 4 plans:

• Starter - $29.97/mo (annual commitment) - $50/mo (monthly commitment)
• Professional - $1,600/mo (annual commitment and upfront payment) - $1780,01/mo (annual commitment and monthly payment)
• Enterprise - $4,999.99/mo (billed at $59,999.96/year)

The free plan might work for you if you don’t do any billing, and you don’t mind not being able to customize the interface. It includes basic tools such as email communication, basic tasks management, and even a blog.

The Starter plan adds billing options, so if you have any plans of collecting payments in your CRM, that’s the way to go. This plan includes 1,000 marketing contacts.

The Professional plan allows you to customize the interfaces, and segment users into multiple lists. So you can create different interfaces for different types of investors. There are many other features from other Hubspot hubs, such as ads management, SEO, support management, and so on.

The Enterprise plan includes further layout options with conditional elements and more customization. It adds even more options for the other Hubspot hubs, with more capabilities than the Professional plan and some exclusive features.

The Verdict

Pros

• Complete tools for communication and pipeline management
• A lot of apps for external integration
• Complete tool to create a marketing portal

Cons

• Their pricing structure is quite intimidating, since they include a lot of different apps (CMS, support ticket system, and more) out of the box
• If you just want a simple investor relations CRM, this is probably not the best option.