Alternatives

How Lightng compares to other CRMs

Every comparison here follows the same three rules: every figure is read from the other vendor’s own page and dated, every page has a section on when to buy the other product instead, and no claim is made about a competitor that we have not checked. Where a rival is cheaper or better at something, the page says so.

Comparisons available now

Lightng vs Streak

Streak is a CRM built inside Gmail, and Google Workspace only. The comparison turns on whether everyone who needs the CRM is on Gmail, and on Streak's genuinely free tier, which Lightng has no answer to.

Lightng vs Copper

Copper puts open tracking, click tracking and bulk email on Professional at $69 a seat. Lightng includes all three at $39. But Copper Basic at $23 is cheaper than anything we sell, if you do not need email reporting.

Not written yet, and listed rather than implied: Attio, folk, Pipedrive, monday CRM, HubSpot, Close, Capsule, OnePageCRM, Salesflare, Nutshell, Zoho. Each ships when it has been researched properly rather than when it would be convenient to have it.

How to compare CRMs without wasting a month

Most CRM comparisons fail in the same three places, and knowing them shortens the exercise considerably.

Price the tier that has the feature you came for. Pricing pages lead with an entry plan, and the entry plan very often excludes the thing you are buying the product for. Email tracking, bulk sending and sequences are the usual three. The real cost is the tier that includes them, and it is frequently double the headline.

Check the mail provider constraint before anything else. Some CRMs require Gmail. Some support open tracking on Microsoft 365 but not on Google Workspace. This is usually settled in a sentence and it eliminates more options than any feature table will.

Count the bills, not the seats. A $24 seat plus a $13 email add-on is a $37 seat, bought twice, administered twice, and renewed twice. Compare total monthly cost for the capabilities you will actually turn on.

And one that applies to every product on this page: open rates are directional in all of them. A vendor quoting open-rate precision as a differentiator is quoting a measurement nobody can make.

Comparisons that are not about us

We also publish comparisons between two other vendors, with Lightng kept out of them entirely, useful if you are still choosing between two products that are not this one. See those here.

FAQ

About these comparisons

How do you decide which CRM is better?

We do not decide; we publish the figures and the constraints and let them decide it. Every price and feature claim on these pages was read from the other vendor's own pricing page or documentation on a stated date, and every page carries a 'when to pick them instead' section listing the cases where the other product is the better buy. Those sections are real: they name the free tier we do not have and the features we do not build.

Are these comparisons biased?

They are published by a competitor, so treat them the way you would treat any vendor comparison: check the sourced figures against the vendor's own page, which is why we date every one of them. What we can control is that nothing here is untrue and nothing material is omitted. Two claims from our own earlier research were corrected during writing because they were out of date, and the corrected versions are less flattering to us than the originals.

Why are there so few comparison pages?

Because a comparison written without reading the other product's pricing page is guesswork, and guesswork about a competitor's pricing is how you end up publishing something false. Pages ship as they are researched, in the order set out in our build plan. The list of what is not written yet is on this page rather than hidden.