Nimble vs Act
Side-by-side trajectory, velocity, and editorial themes.
Nimble is turning its CRM into a full outbound-email hub for small teams.
Nimble keeps its small-business CRM core but the recent shipping is dominated by email marketing and outreach: drag-and-drop templates, AI-generated emails, multi-sender campaigns, group messages with team collaboration and per-link click analytics, and category-based unsubscribe lists. CRM-side work is mostly polish — customizable list views, fresh navigation, an AI-revamped business card scanner. Forms get incremental design controls.
Nimble is repositioning from a relationship-tracking CRM into an integrated outreach platform — the kind of customer that previously stitched HubSpot Free with Mailchimp. The AI work shows up as assistive (email composition, business card OCR) rather than agentic, and the email-marketing primitives (lists, unsubscribes, multiple senders, template editor) are becoming first-class rather than add-ons.
Expect the email surface to keep widening — automation/sequencing logic across senders, deliverability tooling like warmup or domain authentication helpers, or AI-driven send-time and segment recommendations using the new per-link click data.
Act! pivots from CRM-only to payment processor while modernizing its Cloud UX.
Act! is in the middle of a methodical Cloud modernization, rebuilding list views, navigation, and notifications to match the consistency users expect from modern CRMs. Alongside that polish work, Act! has just shipped Act! Payments via Propelr — turning the CRM into a place where credit card transactions close, not just leads. The product is still recognizably a small-business CRM, but its surface area is widening.
The release cadence shows two parallel tracks: weekly UX rationalization (notification center, list parity, faster task editing) and category expansion through embedded financial services. Act! is following the same playbook HubSpot and Pipedrive have run — keep the legacy users happy with quality-of-life work while quietly bolting on revenue-bearing features that compete with Stripe-adjacent SMB tools. Payments is the most directional move in years.
Expect deeper payments integration next — recurring billing tied to opportunities, dunning workflows from the contact record, and likely a payments-driven pricing tier that monetizes transaction volume rather than seats.
See more alternatives to Nimble →
See more alternatives to Act →