DevRev is a developer-specific CRM that doubles as a software development work management platform. This tool helps dev teams manage SLAs, ticketing, and customer support from a single source of truth. It comes with live chat features, automation tools, and AI assistance designed to streamline workflows and improve the customer experience. Read on for our in-depth review to see if DevRev is right for you and your team.
DevRev: The Good and the Bad
If you’re looking for a robust solution for communicating with customers using your software, DevRev is a reliable option to consider. But, before you make any decisions, it’s important to know where this tool shines and the areas where it falls short. Our research team here at Crazy Egg identified the top strengths and weaknesses of DevRev based on verified user reviews to ensure you’re getting accurate information as you’re shopping around.
What DevRev Is Good At
DevRev rises above the rest of the pack in some capacities, especially in terms of its ability to help you field tickets, handle requests, and manage data. It’s a complete ticketing solution with SLA management features and detailed reporting. We’ll break down these strengths in greater detail below.
Automated request management: Arguably the best part about DevRev is that your customers can reach out for support directly within the software you’re providing them. They can send you a message via live chat or submit a ticket for help.
To ensure a prompt reply, you can set up automated responses using DevRev Turing—the platform’s AI copilot for user support. This feature can turn a live chat message into a ticket request or a self-help article recommendation without a real person ever having to respond to the customer. If the message does require human support, the engagement can turn into an audio or video call with a single click from within the platform.
SLA management: You can set up all of your unique service-level agreements for each customer within DevRev. This can help your team prioritize which tickets or messages need a prompt reply. See the status of everything from within your SLA inbox, including breached SLAs and those that are close to being breached.
It’s a really simple and useful tool to keep your team on track and organized—even at scale. Aside from improving your internal efficiencies, it also ensures you’re delivering what you’ve promised to your customers.
Built-in ticketing: Beyond its CRM features, DevRev delivers a complete ticket management solution. Tickets can be created based on customer inquiries or internal initiatives. DevRev organizes everything into a single ticket queue, where you’ll see the status, priority level, and owner of each ticket. You’ll even have direct access to conversations related to each ticket.
Another unique standout of DevRev compared to other ticketing tools is its ability to clear similar tickets faster. Using AI, DevRev will recommend and batch tickets with similar issues so your team can work on them in a logical order. For example, a small bug may be causing an issue for multiple customers, and this feature can help you apply a single fix that resolves several tickets at once.
Reporting and insights: DevRev’s CRM helps give development teams a big-picture view of customers. You can see which customers are generating the most revenue and even see how many users are using your software in real time, separated by client. DevRev will help you prioritize the needs of top customers first if that fits your strategy. You can also send out customer satisfaction surveys to see where your team can improve when it comes to delivering white-glove support.
Free credits on introductory offer: DevRev doesn’t have a traditional free trial period. Instead, they’ll offer you free credits when you sign up for a plan. The Starter plan comes with $1,000 in free credits, while the Pro plan comes with $3,000 worth of free credits. Depending on your usage and team size, this structure could grant you access to several months of DevRev without paying a dime. Once your credits expire, you’ll start being charged based on active users and consumption.
What DevRev Is Lacking
DevRev is a solid product, but even the best tools have some shortcomings. There are a few areas where DevRev could use some improvement. None of these weaknesses should stop you from considering DevRev, but you should weigh them against the benefits to see if this is the platform that will fit your needs completely.
Support availability: While DevRev is an excellent way for development teams to provide support to customers, the platform itself, ironically, doesn’t offer amazing support to developers. Teams on the entry-level starter plan will have to rely on self-service documentation or community support to troubleshoot any problems with DevRev. Even teams on a Pro plan only have access to support five days per week, and the only way to unlock 24/7 support is by upgrading to the custom-priced Ultimate plan.
While some support is better than nothing, it’s common for developers to work on weekends, holidays, and other odd hours. This shortcoming may not impact you too often, but you should be aware that you’ll need to troubleshoot things on your own or make sure you only reach out for help on weekdays.
Simple pricing: Trying to decipher DevRev’s plans and pricing isn’t very straightforward, and it’s tough to estimate exactly how much the platform is going to cost you. Like many software solutions on the market, tiered plans are based on feature availability. But DevRev’s billing is a mix of monthly active user licenses and consumption of services.
So, depending on your plan, you’ll pay different rates for a platform license and a support license. DevRev also charges for things like active conversations, extra file storage, and extra base storage. These consumption add-ons won’t necessarily break the bank, but your bill also won’t be perfectly predictable every month.
Integrations: DevRev plays nice with several popular business platforms and developer-specific tools. You can integrate it with GitHub, Jira, Slack, Gmail, Salesforce, and more. But as of the time of this writing, DevRev currently doesn’t integrate with GitLab, Bitbucket, GitHub Actions, or CircleCI. These are just a handful of tools that are popular amongst the development community that can’t sync with DevRev.
If your team is using development tools that don’t integrate with DevRev, your workflow may not be as seamless when using the platform and setting up automations. Let’s say you currently have all of your customer data on a CRM that won’t integrate with DevRev. You’d have to set up a manual workaround to import that data into the DevRev CRM—which obviously isn’t as ideal as a simple connection.
Support for solo devs: DevRev is a great option for small and mid-sized development teams. But there’s no plan that’s really geared toward solo developers that want a better way to manage their customer support and SLAs. You could definitely sign up for the DevRev Starter plan as a solo developer, but you’re going to end up with a bunch of features that you likely won’t use.
One good thing about DevRev’s pricing structure is that you pay based on consumption. So, you won’t be forced to pay for extra seats if it’s just you. However, it would be nice to see a plan option that helps individual developers and freelancers manage their clients and software more specifically.
Proven results: DevRev is a relatively new software company. While it’s not fair to fault them for incidents that haven’t actually occurred yet, it’s worth noting that the organization and software haven’t yet been proven to stand the test of time. DevRev seems well-funded and well-run, but there’s always some risk when you’re using a new software tool that’s still in the startup phase.
DevRev Pricing & Options
DevRev is a single-product SaaS provider. The solution itself, DevRev OneCRM, has three different plan tiers to choose from: Starter, Pro, and Ultimate.
The Starter plan is built for smaller development teams and is limited to just 15 users. The Pro plan is ideal for growing teams and supports unlimited collaborators. DevRev Ultimate is reserved for complex organizations with advanced needs.
Within each tier, there are individually priced add-ons for the platform license and support license, as well as additional consumption services. We’ll take a closer look at DevRev OneCRM’s features and associated costs below before we break down the individual licenses.
DevRev OneCRM
DevRev OneCRM is an all-in-one developer solution for customer support and work management. You can use it to manage and nurture customer relationships while simultaneously maintaining SLAs and development flows.
It’s truly one of the most unique developer-centric CRMs on the market in the sense that it’s not useful for any other department or situation. There are other CRMs out there that are marketed towards development teams, but they can be applied to varying use cases. Everything in DevRev OneCRM is aligned with a development-first approach, and the platform really stands out for programming and coding experts who also want to provide excellent customer service to their clients.
In terms of pricing, plans start at $9.99 per user for the platform license and $9.99 per user for support. It doesn’t make sense to use one without the other, as the combination is OneCRM’s entire reason for existence.
You can get $1,000 in free credits if you sign up for the Starter plan and $3,000 in free credits for the Pro plan. Pro subscriptions are also eligible for 20% discounts on annual billing.
DevRev Platform License
Any DevRev user who needs to interact with the platform or make changes is considered a monthly active user, or MAU. The Starter plan platform license costs $9.99 per MAU and the Pro plan costs $24.99 per MAU.
The easiest way to understand the platform license is that it essentially grants users access to everything in DevRev OneCRM that doesn’t involve customer support or client interactions.
The features you do get access to include:
- Internal collaboration
- AI-powered ticket management
- Airdrops
- Real-time updates and notifications
- Customer management
- Cross-object work
- Identity linking
- Product visualization
- Rich text editing
- REST API access
Platform licenses also include all DevRev’s building tools for issue management, custom issue vistas, and dependency tracking.
For larger teams and organizations with clearly defined internal roles, the platform license on its own helps save you money on the total cost of your monthly DevRev bill. If a user never interacts with customers or doesn’t have the need to access the customer support features, they can still access the platform without having to pay for unused features.
For example, not every backend developer needs the ability to live chat with clients. But they’d need to see the reports and manage development tasks.
Beyond the base platform MAU license costs, additional consumption services include:
- $0.01 per anonymous user monthly active conversation
- $0.45 per verified user monthly active conversation
- $2 per additional GB of file storage
- $25 per additional GB of base storage
- $10 per MAU authorization role and profile
These consumption-based add-ons are the same rate for both the Starter and Pro plans. But MAU authorization roles and profiles are only included on a Pro license.
DevRev Support License
DevRev OneCRM support licenses are billed for users who communicate with customers and interact with any records regarding customer communication.
The support license costs $9.99 per monthly active user on the Starter plan and $34.99 per MAU on the Pro plan.
At nearly triple the cost, the two plan tiers are nearly identical in terms of the features you’re getting for the support license. The biggest difference is that Pro users have access to multi-language chat translation, which is really useful if you’re dealing with clients in other countries.
The Pro plan also saves messages and events for 365 days and comes with additional storage, whereas the Starter plan only saves this information for 90 days.
It’s also worth noting that if you have more than 15 monthly active collaborators in your organization, DevRev forces you to upgrade from the Starter plan to the Pro plan.
DevRev’s support features, integrated with its CRM, are fantastic. You’ll have access to the unified communication inbox with multi-channel support, SLA tracking, ticket-to-issue management, ticket linking, auto-routing, and more.
You can use DevRev OneCRM to manage both internal communications regarding tickets and chat with your customers in real time. You can even turn a live chat with your customers into a video call to further explain situations and get more information.
To help ensure you respond to customer messages as quickly as possible, DevRev OneCRM also sports built-in AI features for reply suggestions, and it can even help you set up automated responses when your team is busy or away.
Summary
Overall, we can confidently recommend DevRev to software teams and developers looking for a way to improve customer support, ticketing, and SLA management from a single interface. DevRev helps keep everything organized, ensuring your customers are getting high-quality support and prompt responses every time.
From live chat to video calls and a unified communication inbox, DevRev has everything you need to manage builds and maintain your software in a better, more user-conscious way. Sign up today and get up to $3,000 in free credits.
