Cirqll alternative: how Tribe CRM compares

Where Tribe differs from Cirqll

Four things to check before you pick either one.

Tribe and Cirqll serve the same starting need, a CRM for managing customers and a sales pipeline, but they’re built from different premises. Cirqll is a small company founded in 2021, built around a minimal feature set: its own marketing calls this “the art of leaving things out.” Tribe is part of the Efficy Group, a European SaaS group with 20 years of history and a dedicated HQ in Utrecht.

Tribe moves leads through named stages, New, Working, MQL, SQL, then Qualified or Disqualified, with automatic conversion into a linked opportunity built from four parts: details, phases, products, and activities. Lead enrichment and scoring are included from the entry plan, automatic assignment routes a qualified lead to the right rep, and Ask AI checks for duplicates before creating a new record. Cirqll’s “Kansbeheer en Pipeline” view and “Klant-alarm” reminder system cover opportunities and follow-ups, its workflow is built around logging an activity in a few clicks with a note prompt after each call, and it adds a map view for locating customers geographically, an audit log with undo, and tasks and subtasks with deadlines and assignment. Both connect to the Dutch KvK business register for company data, though differently: Tribe’s integration, from its Advanced plan, keeps existing records automatically aligned with ongoing KvK changes, while Cirqll’s is a lookup tool for adding a new relation, which doesn’t update it again afterward. 

Where they diverge is three specific things: invoicing, time registration, and AI, all included from Tribe’s entry plan. Cirqll has none of the three natively: invoicing happens in a connected accounting system, not inside Cirqll itself; hours worked aren’t tracked at all, and no AI feature at all. Cirqll does have a native mobile app on both the App Store and Google Play, while Tribe’s mobile access runs through the browser. 

Invoicing: native in Tribe, an accounting integration in Cirqll

Tribe’s invoicing feature converts a quote directly into an invoice, on the same record as the deal, with e-signature available through a connected provider like ValidSign. Recurring billing and subscriptions work the same way, from the entry plan up.

Cirqll tracks finances differently. You get an overview of financial standing with its “Registratie van opdrachten” (order registration) that tracks which deals have closed and when they’re due for delivery, and its contract management tracks start and end dates with renewal alerts. For invoicing, Cirqll connects to an external accounting system: its own site names a live, two-way integration with Exact Online, where converting an opportunity into an order or contract automatically creates the customer record in Exact, and further integrations exist with AFAS, Ridder iQ, 4PS and Business Central. The invoice is created and sent from that connected system, not from Cirqll.

The difference is that integrations won’t be necessary with Tribe as invoicing works natively from the entry plan, with the integration there as an option rather than the only way to bill a client.

Time tracking: Cirqll has none

Tribe CRM registers time through a timer that starts and stops from the top navigation bar, through manual entry later, or by switching on hour registration directly on a task or appointment. In every case, hours link to a project, opportunity, work order, subscription, or contact, split into billable and non-billable time, with dashboards showing hours per project, customer, month, or year. Logged hours can also be sent straight to billable status, a new invoice, or an existing draft invoice, connecting time tracking directly to the invoicing already covered above.

Cirqll’s complete feature list, covering everything from tasks and subtasks to contract management, has no equivalent anywhere, and no dedicated time-tracking integration is named on its site either, beyond a general Zapier connection. This is a gap for a consultancy, agency, or any business billing by the hour. Without time tracking or native invoicing, Cirqll has no built-in way to connect logged hours to an invoice.

Projects: milestones and budget, or orders and contracts

Tribe’s project management, from its Advanced plan, opens from a won opportunity and tracks milestones with their own budget and timeline, hours split between billable and non-billable, external costs, and a running profit figure, all on the same record as the deal and the invoice. A work order can be added directly to the project for on-site registration of time and delivered products, and logged hours can be sent straight to billable status, a new invoice, or an existing draft invoice from the project record itself.

Cirqll’s “Registratie van opdrachten” shows which orders have closed and their delivery date, viewable per customer and at company level, and its contract management tracks a recurring agreement’s term and renewal date, each with optional attachments. Both are real, useful features, just narrower than a dedicated project module: neither tracks a budget, a profit figure, or hours logged against the work.

AI: no feature set on Cirqll to compare against

Tribe’s built-in AI assistant, sentiment analysis on emails and AI-Assisted ICP are included from the entry plan. Advanced adds AI lead enrichment, lead scoring, manual fine-tuning on the ICP and Competitive landscape analysis. The data behind it stays EU-resident: Tribe’s CRM application and database sit on EU infrastructure at rest, and each feature sends only the specific records a task needs to a third-party model, mainly Anthropic’s Claude, with Google’s Gemini used for AI-Assisted ICP and Competitive landscape specifically. Nothing from that exchange is stored afterward, none of it trains a model, and any new record an AI feature creates needs a human to approve it first.

Cirqll’s own site, across its features page and full feature list, makes no mention of AI anywhere. This is consistent with its stated philosophy, “no groundbreaking features,” rather than an oversight, but the practical result for a buyer is the same: there’s no AI feature set to compare against Tribe’s.

Customisation: no-code on both

On Tribe’s side, this starts with how your team sets up its own product prices and products. Price lists hold your prices for a customer group, a promotion or an order volume, and Tribe applies them to each quote, with products carrying their own settings for partial quantities, who can change a price, and description edits on a single quote, all native from the entry plan. Its second plan adds activity type creation, for defining new activity types rather than working within fixed ones, unlimited custom widgets, and conditional roles and rights. Custom fields scale alongside this: relationship-level on the entry plan, activity-level from the second, and full composability across relationship, activity, and entity levels on the top plan, which also includes custom entities, built with what Tribe calls an exclusive designer, for defining new overview pages, quick-select functionality pages, or customer portal pages without writing code.

Cirqll offers its own real no-code customisation: custom fields at the customer level, custom fields at the contact-person level, custom fields at the financial level (which can be turned into charts), and what it calls “dynamic fields” for adding information as needed. This is a real capability with substance behind it, and it holds up as a fair point of parity rather than a Tribe advantage, even though Tribe’s ceiling goes further once custom entities come into the picture.