Pipedrive imports directly from a spreadsheet or another CRM and connects to 500+ app integrations, so the pieces around the CRM (email, calendar, lead capture) reconnect without custom work. The trial is fully functional, so you can migrate a copy of your pipeline and confirm it works before committing a seat.
The risk that actually matters
It is not the software; it is your data. A CRM migration fails when the source is messy: duplicate contacts, deals with no owner, custom fields that map to nothing. The interpreted risk is that you import the mess and now distrust the new tool. The fix is to clean the export first: dedupe contacts, confirm every open deal has an owner and a stage, and decide which custom fields survive. Migrate a subset, verify it, then bring the rest. The answer is a cleaner import, not a heavier tool.
This is also where implementation-heavy CRMs differ sharply. Keap, for example, leans the other way; it expects paid onboarding: required implementation services (strategy consulting, data import, migration, done-for-you). It charges a single flat platform price, not feature-based plans, starting at $299/mo. That hands-on approach can be the right call for a team with no time and tangled data, but it is a cost and a dependency Pipedrive does not impose. Choose the assisted path deliberately, not by default.
Your go / no-go signal
Go now, self-serve, if your contacts export cleanly and your open deals are current; you will be live within the trial and can cancel costlessly if it does not fit. Hold if your data lives in three places and nobody trusts any of them; clean it first, or budget for assisted onboarding (Keap's model) rather than importing chaos into a tool you will then blame. Once you have picked a plan, size the ongoing cost in the cost worksheet, and if you are still comparing tools, start at the Pipedrive small-business guide.
Start a free Pipedrive trial and test your import See Keap's implementation packages