When you want to see how people really feel about software, you go to G2.

It’s where over 3 million people have left verified reviews about the tools they use in their day to day.

Once a year, the G2 team puts out a series of Best Software Awards, based on those reviews and publicly available market presence data. And the bar to get on this list is high.

G2 rejects more than a third of all submitted reviews for failing authenticity checks (based on over 43 data points).

In this post, we feature the top tools in six sales-focused categories, from CRM to auto dialers to demo automation – along with pros and cons from real users.

To qualify, a product needs a minimum of ten verified reviews from the prior calendar year. From there, G2’s algorithm scores each product on two dimensions:

1. Customer satisfaction
2. Market presence

Which are weighted against the competitiveness of each category.

The software listed below has hundreds or thousands of reviews, plus wide adoption and momentum (which G2 defines by increase in employee count, growth of social following, and web presence).

Of the 4,664 sales products evaluated this year, just 446 met the eligibility threshold, and 50 made the final cut.

30 of those are first-time winners.

That means roughly 60% of the list changed from last year – a sign of just how fast this space is moving, and how actively buyers are seeking out tools that prove their value.

Salesforce has been the dominant CRM for a very long time.

But SaaS teams have a complicated relationship with it. It’s powerful enough to run huge revops orgs, and complex enough to require an entire team to support it.

Salesforce’s latest bet is Agentforce. For Sales Cloud, this means a suite of autonomous AI agents is grabbing fresh leads, researching prospects, and personalizing outreach.

How Teams Use It

• To centralize accounts, leads, opportunities, and activity history so managers get consistent pipeline visibility and more accurate forecasting.
• To automate sales workflows (think lead assignment, follow-ups, opportunity stages) to reduce manual work and keep reps focused on selling.
• To create tailored reports and dashboards (or integrate Tableau) for data-driven decision making and executive reporting.
• To integrate marketing and service touchpoints to improve handoffs and cross-team collaboration.
• To extend the platform with custom apps, Apex/Lightning components, or autonomous agents (Agentforce) to automate complex, industry-specific processes.

What Users Like

• Centralizes pipeline visibility. “It gives complete visibility into accounts, opportunities, activities, and forecasting, which makes sales tracking much more transparent and organized. It also improves collaboration between marketing and sales by ensuring clean handoffs, proper lead tracking, and clear ownership.” (G2 Review)
• Highly customizable and scalable. “Once configured, it is easy for sales teams to use on a daily basis, with a clean interface, customizable layouts, and powerful dashboards that give quick visibility into pipeline and performance. The platform offers a wide range of features like automation, reporting, lead management, and AI-driven insights, all in one place. It also integrates smoothly with other Salesforce products and third-party tools, which makes implementation and ongoing usage much more efficient.” (G2 Review)

What Users Don’t Like

• Steep learning curve and complexity. Users say things like, “I gotta be honest, one of the toughest parts is dealing with how complex it can get. The sheer volume of features means that while the frequency of use is high, you sometimes feel like you’re only scratching the surface. Customizing it to fit niche business processes often requires specialized, and sometimes expensive, expertise. Advanced setup has a steep learning curve” (G2 Review), and “It’s not a plug-and-play setup. Customization and maintenance require time, technical skill, and sometimes external consultants. The user interface, while improved over the years, can still feel clunky and slow, especially for new users.” (G2 Review)
• High cost. “The licensing, add-ons, customization, and ongoing maintenance can be expensive. For small businesses or companies with tight budgets, this makes it hard to justify.” (G2 Review)
• Not ideal for small businesses or startups that need a lightweight, low-cost CRM with minimal setup.

Pricing

Salesforce CRM has three pricing plans:

• Free Suite, at $0, comes with 2 seats, Lead, Account, Contact, and Opportunity Management, service Case management, simple email marketing, and connected Slack conversations.
• Starter Suite, at $25/user/mo, comes with Lead, Account, Contact, and Opportunity Management, dynamic email marketing and analytics, built-in Flows and Lead Routing, and connected Slack conversations.
• Pro Suite, at $100/user/mo, comes with everything in Starter plus enhanced, real-time Chat, greater customization and automation, sales Quoting and Forecasting, and access to the AppExchange.

Gong enhances sales conversations by capturing and analyzing calls and meetings.

Gong also has several AI agents designed to help sales teams role-play and automate the tedious parts of the job, like auto-filling CRM fields and drafting personalized emails to prospects.

How Teams Use It

• To analyze recorded calls and transcripts to reveal recurring objections, competitive threats, and customer pain points across calls.
• To coach. AI can scan calls for teaching moments and offer objective feedback to improve rep consistency and performance.
• To improve deal management. Gong can aggregate touchpoint timelines and next-step predictions to reduce deal blindness and accelerate decision-making.
• To run org-wide GTM analytics. AI agents review conversation data to surface trends and guide strategy across sales, CS, and product.

What Users Like

• Turns conversations into actionable insights. “Gong connects what customers actually say to coaching, deal health, and strategy, so teams can improve faster based on reality, not guesswork. The visibility it gives across sales, CS, and product makes alignment way easier and decisions a lot smarter.” (G2 Review)
• Strong visibility. “Being able to review calls, see key moments, and understand what actually happened in a deal is incredibly valuable. The call recordings, transcripts, and AI insights make it easy to spot patterns around objections, competitor mentions, and next steps without having to rewatch full calls.” (G2 Review)
• The AI agents. “I love the new AI Agents. It became my go to resource each time I need to analyze any business context, from summaries to analytics, reviews or insights.” (G2 Review)

What Users Don’t Like

• Technical setup. “While the interface is powerful, the initial setup for mapping complex CRM stages and custom deal warnings can be a bit technical to navigate.” (G2 Review)
• Time for calls to analyze. “My main complaints are the time it takes for calls to analyze, especially when they are over 45 minutes in length. Sometimes for last minute meetings they do not get captured by Gong and require me to manually upload the call.” (G2 Review)
• Integrations can be clunky. Users say things like, “I've noticed some bugs with Gong Everywhere, particularly if I have multiple Salesforce tabs open. Sometimes the icon will appear in one Salesforce tab and not another, which is irritating” (G2 Review), and “Sometimes the phone calls from Outreach don't carry over into Gong very well. It would also be nice to be able to see some valuable info from each account/deal directly in Salesforce without having to go into Gong.” (G2 Review)

Pricing

You have to fill out Gong’s form for pricing. According to their website, it will depend on the number of users you have and your tech stack.

They also charge a flat platform fee.

PandaDoc is a document management platform that lets teams build, send, and track proposals and contracts all in one place.

Reps can input a company name, have it auto-populate across the proposal, MSA, and SOW simultaneously, and send it off for signature (with a red line audit trail).

PandaDoc also gives users control over signing order, has built-in recipient identity verification, and even supports notarization.

How Teams Use It

• To build professional, on-brand proposals from templates so reps spend less time formatting and more time selling.
• To send documents for e-signature so prospects can sign in minutes without printing, scanning, or emailing attachments.
• To track document activity: who opened it, how long they spent on each section, so reps know when to follow up.
• To automate approval workflows so proposals move through legal or management sign-off without chasing people down.
• To see which proposals correlate with closed deals and refine quoting workflows over time.

What Users Like

• Intuitive UI. “What I like most about PandaDoc is its ease of use and clean interface. Even team members who are not very technical were able to get started quickly because of the ease of implementation. The platform offers a large number of features, including document templates, e-signatures, tracking and analytics, yet it does not feel overwhelming.” (G2 Review)
• Automated workflows. “I appreciate how it integrates with HubSpot and authorize.net. It effectively eliminates the need for manual entry in contract creation, reducing errors and saving time. I find the immediate payment collection feature after contract signing really boosts cash conversion thanks to authorize.net's 'Charge' feature.” (G2 Review)
• Content libraries reduce proposal turnaround time. Users say things like, “The template system and content library make it easy to standardize proposals and agreements while still allowing quick customization when needed” (G2 Review), and “Templates help us standardize documents instead of creating them from scratch. I really value the e-signatures and templates in PandaDoc.” (G2 Review)

What Users Don’t Like

• Limited editor. Users say, “The limitations in editing images can make things difficult at times when needing more precise control over image size after inserting them into your document. This is why I generally edit my visual elements before adding content as a pdf,” (G2 Review), and “Occasionally, the editor can feel a bit rigid when working with more complex layouts, and small formatting changes don’t always behave as expected, which can slow things down when you’re trying to move quickly” (G2 Review)
• Hiccups in field fills. For example, “I don't like the automatic filling in repeating fields (like initials)” (G2 Review) and “PandaDoc typically doesn't detect checkboxes for optional fields in our documents. It would be great if it could detect those checkboxes, as their absence makes upselling and cross-selling customers a bit more challenging.” (G2 Review)

Pricing

PandaDoc has four pricing plans:

• Free, at $0/mo, comes with unlimited seats, includes 60 docs for free/year, media drag and drop document editor, real‑time tracking and notifications, and 24/7 email and chat support.
• Starter, at $19/mo, comes with unlimited document uploads and e‑signatures, media drag and drop document editor, real‑time tracking and notifications, and 24/7 email and chat support.
• Business, at $49/mo, comes with everything in Starter, plus: custom quotes and sales agreements, CRM integrations (Salesforce is a paid add-on), custom branding and content library, deal rooms, approval workflows, web forms (requires usage credits), and bulk send (also requires usage credits).
• Enterprise, talk to sales for pricing (it’s per-seat or per-document), comes with everything in Business, plus: CPQ (for an additional fee), workflow automation (requires usage credits), smart content, SSO, team workspaces, notary (additional fees apply), and API use (requires usage credits).

Navattic is demo software that enables teams to capture their product once and turn it into reusable interactive demos and sandbox demos.

Reps can share Navattic demos before, during, or after calls to give prospects a taste of how the product might fit into their workflows – and it’s biggest value adds.

SEs use Navattic’s Launchpad feature to better understand prospects’ interests before a live call, share the right demo at the right stage, surface stakeholder activity, and reduce repetitive demos.

How Teams Use It

• To publish gated or embeddable interactive demos on web pages and in email campaigns to generate and qualify inbound leads quickly.
• To enable reps with reusable 1:1 demo templates and rep-facing playbooks, so discovery calls start from a more advanced product-aware position.
• To run sandbox demos and hands-on trials without provisioning production access, reducing engineering overhead for trials.
• To prioritize high-intent prospects based on demo engagement analytics and design Slack/CRM alerts to feed account-based workflows.
• To create internal enablement content, such as onboarding flows, launch kits, and even conference demos, for consistent product storytelling across teams.

What Users Like

• Very fast, intuitive no-code builder. “We had a fully branded demo template, custom domain, and our first gated product demo published and posted on our website within days of digging in. It’s only been about 9 months since launch, but this demo has become the single most influential marketing asset on our website for lead generation.” (G2 Review)
• Measurable impact on pipeline. “It allows us to give prospects a hands-on feel of the platform early in the journey and significantly shortens our discovery calls because prospects come in already 'product-qualified' after taking the tour.” (G2 Review)
• Strong customer support. “The level of commitment Navattic shows in helping our company succeed feels truly unmatched. Navattic has also served as a training resource in building the demos as well as getting input on the demos from the Product, UX, and Sales teams. As a Product Marketing Manager, I am always looking for the best ways to showcase our Product(s) through compelling storytelling. Navattic helps to do just that.” (G2 Review)

What Users Don’t Like

• Managing large demo libraries requires discipline. “Occasionally, making updates across multiple demo flows can feel manual, and more dynamic or modular editing options would help scale faster.” (G2 Review)
• Verbiage takes getting used to. “Getting used to the terminology takes some time, and building the first demo can be a bit tedious.” (G2 Review)

Pricing

We have 5 pricing plans at Navattic (including a freemium plan):

• Starter (free) gets you 1 builder license, 1 demo (HTML or media), unlimited demo views, basic analytics, default theme, and Starter Copilot (generate, default use cases).
• Starter Plus, at $40 per month, gets you 1 HTML demo, unlimited media demos, Checklists, Slack integration, Webhook, custom themes, and Starter Plus Copilot (write, AI voiceover).
• Base, at $500 per month, gets you 5 seats, unlimited HTML demos, unlimited integrations, embedded forms, Navattic JS, in-app demo suggestions, a dedicated CSM, and Base Copilot (Media & chart edits, prompt, brand & tone context, review).
• Growth, at $1,000 per month, gets you 10 seats, account identification, A/B testing, advanced analytics, demo translation, in-app collaboration, custom domains, SSO and directory sync, everything in Launchpad, plus Growth Copilot (AI avatars, advanced AI voiceover, custom use cases).
• Enterprise plans get you offline demos, HTML capture translation, audit logs, priority support, professional services, priority support, and expert demo consultations. Talk to sales for pricing.

ZoomInfo Sales is a B2B data and intelligence platform that helps sales teams find buyer contact information.

With a database of over 420 million global contacts, 70 million phone numbers, and 174 million verified emails, it’s one of the most comprehensive prospecting tools on the market.

ZoomInfo also tracks intent signals so reps can prioritize outreach on accounts that are already in buying mode.

How Teams Use It

• To build targeted prospect lists and export leads into CRMs to shorten research time and increase outreach velocity.
• To enrich existing records and clean lead lists to improve email/phone accuracy and reduce manual data entry.
• To run account-based marketing and sales plays by surfacing buying signals, org changes, and likely stakeholders.
• To automate parts of outreach and deal progression with AI-guided tools and integrations (e.g., Salesforce, HubSpot, Zoho).

What Users Like

• Accuracy. “I like how it provides accurate data such as names, last names, emails, phone numbers, and mobile numbers. It’s a big help because I have clients all over the USA. I really enjoy how accurate the information is, about 90% accurate. The updates keep giving me new information all the time, and I can easily download leads and enter them into my CRM.” (G2 Review)
• Good filtering and enrichment capabilities. “They rolled out a lot of new features and enhancements, such as algorithms to predict who might be seeking a product like yours, such as a company that is actively looking for a new IT provider, etc.” (G2 Review)
• Smooth CRM integrations. “Implementation was straightforward, and we were able to integrate it smoothly with our existing CRM tools like HubSpot and Salesforce. It’s become part of our daily routine—we rely on it for building lists, enriching contact profiles, and identifying the right decision-makers fast.” (G2 Review)

What Users Don’t Like

• Not ideal for B2C companies, solo founders, teams that only need internal analytics, or organizations unwilling to use third‑party data brokers (platform is focused on team-scale B2B GTM work).
• Accuracy. Yes, it’s a con as well, since it can vary by role, region, or niche. Users say things like: “I give grace in the instances where the person changed roles / the roles changed personnel within the last 3-6 months but there are definitely still some struggle spots” (G2 Review), and “It’s frustrating when the system points me to a contact who has been deceased for seven years, or when I find a great lead and it’s missing contact details or even a proper address.” (G2 Review)
• Lack of contacts outside the US. Users say things like “ZoomInfo is less effective for sourcing leads in the EMEA market, where several competitors offer stronger coverage and more accurate data” (G2 Review), and “I wish there were more Canadian-based contacts and insights available.” (G2 Review)

Pricing

The Sales plan includes accurate email addresses, direct-dial phone and mobile phone numbers, company insights and buying intent signals, and engagement apps and integrations.

ZoomInfo does not display pricing publicly, though, so you have to contact sales for a quote.

Orum is an AI-powered dialer built to get reps into live conversations faster.

It filters out bad numbers, voicemails, and dial trees in real time, connecting to live calls in less than a second across 20 languages.

Beyond dialing, Orum has AI coaching tools (objection detection, post-call scorecards, context-aware roleplay) to make sure the volume of conversations actually translates to closed-won deals.

How Teams Use It

• To maximize talk time through parallel dialing, connecting reps only when a live person picks up.
• To prioritize outbound momentum through power-dialing or list-based sessions, with AI surfacing the best numbers to call first.
• To reduce admin and accelerate rep onboarding with AI-generated call summaries and coaching feedback on tone, pacing, and objection handling.
• To keep CRM records current by automatically syncing call activity to tools like HubSpot and Outreach without manual logging.
• To replicate the energy of an in-person outbound floor with virtual sales floor features like peer listening, live coaching overlays, and team visibility.

What Users Like

• Dramatically faster outreach with parallel dialing. “In my previous role, I only had access to power dialing, which meant calling one person at a time and spending a lot of time waiting through rings, voicemails, and no answers. With Orum, I can dial multiple prospects simultaneously and connect only when a live person answers. That alone massively increased my efficiency, talk time, and overall output.” (G2 Review)
• Easy to adopt and great customer success. “The platform is intuitive, easy to adopt, and requires minimal ramp time for reps. The Orum team is also extremely responsive—whenever we’ve needed support or had questions, they’ve been quick to help and proactive in offering solutions.” (G2 Review)
• AI and automation features. “The AI call scoring is a game-changer - it gives real-time feedback on tone, pacing, and objection handling, which helps me improve with every call. The Boost Connect feature saves me so much time by eliminating manual dialing, and Hot Numbers ensures I’m prioritizing the right prospects.” (G2 Review)

What Users Don’t Like

• Not ideal for inbound-focused teams, solo operators, or non-sales teams without high-volume outbound dialing needs.
• Lags with CRM. Users say things like: “I’ve noticed occasional lags and minor sync issues with the CRM. Those slight delays between dials or hiccups with the CRM sync can interrupt my workflow” (G2 Review), and “Taking the time to move contacts from Zoominfo to Hubspot and then to Orum. There are a lot of clicks, but once they are added, the rest of my experience is simple and efficient.” (G2 Review)
• The dialer can be too fast. “Even the power dial goes a little too fast, like I don't have time to really prepare for a call. Even just a one-second delay would not make calling that much longer, and it would allow me to take a second, breathe, and best prepare for the call.” (G2 Review)

Pricing

Orum has two plans:

• Launch, with a minimum of 3 seats, comes with unlimited dials, 5 caller IDs/mo, parallel dialing up to 5 lines, analytics, Salesfloor, Boost Connect, and multiple integrations.
• Ascend, with a minimum of 3 seats, comes with international calling (160+ countries and regions), data enrichment (200 credits/mo), parallel dialing up to 10 lines, AI Conversation Acceleration, coaching, plus advanced roles and permissions.

But they don’t publicly post their actual pricing. You have to contact a rep to get a quote.

Want to give one of these a try?

You can make your first Navattic demo for free.