Big Contacts compared to Highrise

Here are some of the things that we have noticed about Highrise compared to Big Contacts.

(It is certainly possible that this is not 100% accurate. And features do change over time.)

Highrise
Contacts	Users	File Storage	SSL	Price
250	2	None	No	Free
500	3	250MB	No	$12/month
5,000	6	500MB	No	$24/month
20,000	15	3GB	Yes	$49/month

 

Big Contacts
Contacts	Users	File Storage	SSL	Price
500	2	500MB	Yes	Free
1,000	3	1GB	Yes	$12/month
10,000	6	10GB	Yes	$30/month
25,000	12	25GB	Yes	$70/month

With Highrise, you have to pay $49/month just to get SSL. Highrise does not think you need security if you're not paying a lot for their service. ALL plans including the Free Edition of Big Contacts include SSL. Your data is encrypted when sent over the Internet. Not so with Highrise.

Highrise is a wiki for people data. It is not really a contact manager. It is free form, Big Contacts is more highly structured. Highrise is not very well organized once you have a lot of information,  files, tasks, notes, etc about a contact. Highrise does not have any reports. Big Contacts has extensive reporting capability and integration with Excel. With Highrise, there is no way to get information into an Excel spreadsheet for mail merge or any other need.

Basecamp can only import contacts from Outlook, ACT9, vCard and Basecamp. You cannot import custom data. With Big Contacts you can import data from a CSV file, a Tab delimited file, Outlook, Outlook Express, Thunderbird, Palm Desktop, Mac Address Book, vCard, Hotmail, Yahoo Mail and GMail.

Highrise does not have a calendar. You cannot see when you have met with a contact or when you have upcoming meetings with them. With Big Contacts, you get a full team calendar and can schedule meetings for anyone on your team. You maintain a full contact history including all your meetings.

Highrise is limited in the area of tasks. In Big Contacts, tasks and to-dos can be assigned to a specific person.  You can see all of the tasks assigned to you in the 'My Tasks' section  of Big Contacts. Big Contacts has multi-step tasks. Big Contacts allows you to quickly add asks by letting you create common tasks in advance (including multi-step tasks). You can track in a contact's history when a task was completed and who completed it. None of this is available with Highrise. 

You can also track your team's activity. Big Contacts 'Recent Activity' link lets you see everything that is going on with your team or narrow it down to a specific person or time period. There is nothing like this in Highrise making it diffcult to manage a team.

With Big Contacts, you can view tons of contact details in the "business card" in the center of the screen - it is quite easy to find a phone number or email address. You can also save tags, interests - all sorts of data about a contact. You can have multiple user-defined contact types. With Highrise you have to dig around for basic stuff like a phone number.

Big Contacts is all about having a well organized approach to running a  business or sales team and tracking all of the people and events and tasks that make your business run well. Unlike Highrise, Big Contacts allows you to track sales opportunities and define your own products and your own sales pipeline with a sophisticated sales manager.

Hihgrise and Big Contacts both let you upload files and attach them to a contact. In Big Contacts, you can add a file description and we track when you uploaded the file any information you saved about. All the files are in  one place in a table. With Highrise you have to scroll down the page looking for files. If you send an email with Big Contacts, any attacments are saved with the contact's file area.

We will keep adding to this list as we learn more about the differences between Big Contacts and Highrise.

Comments

[Email and contact manager]

Paul and the BigContacts team:

Great comparison, it really attenuates your novel approach to contact management.

One part that is missing in BigContacts is the ability to receive email. It's great to be able to SEND email, but then the reply goes to an outside email application.

IMHO, you should consider implementing email send/receive integration with contacts and calendar the way Relenta CRM does it:

http://www.relenta.com/blog/faq/how-does-relenta-compare-to-other-software

Relenta have a full-featured webmail client that lets you share workload among team members.

Email is by far the killerest Internet app of all times. Add it to BigContacts and you will be the best.

[Paul Freet]

B is right, Highrise does offer 10GB for $99/month and 50GB for $149/month. The table is accurate, I did not include their high end plans in the comparison table.

[B]

Just a quick FYI: Your storage limits on Highrise are way off. Their top end is 50 GB then 10 GB then 3 GB, etc.

[Gabrielle]

A key difference for us in preferring Big Contacts over Highrise is the fact that you can get all your data out again if you need to - including contact history. I feel better being able to take our own backups of essential business data.
All the other extra features are an added bonus!

[Matthew]

Big Contacts seems like an ideal solution for a small business. One of the most difficult things for a company is choosing a contact management software and then implementing it into their daily business practices. The FREE version solves one of those hurdles and after only tinkering with it for a bit, I was hooked. It's not that it's intuitive, it's just plain simple. Big Contacts is the future as more and more people are tired of bulky memory-eating software like Goldmine or ACT and over-priced web-based software like Salesforce. Keep up the great work!

[Rabia Yeaman]

We've been using Big Contacts for a couple of months and it has satisfied almost all of our client contact needs. We looked at a lot of products including BaseCamp and Goldmine, but Big Contacts ability to allow us to connect anywhere, quickly find and update contacts, upload documents, and now email capability have proven to be just the right amount of CSM for our insurance and financial planning office.

[Lori Richardson of Score More Sales]

This is great to see. The SMB market has been overlooked. Many smaller companies are still using ACT and Goldmine because salesforce.com is beyond their budget. Glad to see another program in this space - I'll be trying it out!