How to Migrate from Pipedrive Without Losing Custom Fields, Notes, or Activities

Most people start their Pipedrive migration with the same Google search: "export pipedrive to CSV". They get the file, import it into the next CRM, and discover three days later that their custom fields, deal notes, and six months of scheduled activities are gone. The contact names are there. Everything else has to be rebuilt.

This guide is for the people who'd rather skip that step. We'll walk through the three actual migration paths, what each one preserves, and the one that takes 10 minutes and doesn't lose anything.

The trigger: why people search "how to migrate from Pipedrive"

Almost nobody migrates a CRM because they want to. They do it because something specific pushed them to look:

• Renewal sticker shock. Pipedrive raised prices in 2025 and again in 2026. Customers who signed up at $12/seat are now at $14+, with the next tier ($39 Growth) suddenly required for features that used to be in Lite.
• Add-on stack. LeadBooster ($32.50), Web Visitors ($49), AI add-on (~$50), Campaigns, Smart Docs — a 5-person team that started at $70/month routinely hits $200–$250 once add-ons stack.
• Support friction. The cancellation flow, in particular, has generated a consistent set of complaints in public reviews — billing for deactivated seats, slow response on edge cases.
• Feature drift. The product moved upmarket. AI features, dashboards, predictive scoring — all live in higher tiers. Small teams pay more for features they don't use.

If you're reading this, you probably know which of these applies. The good news: the actual switch is far less painful than the renewal email feels.

What you actually need to preserve

Before picking a migration path, write down what you can't afford to lose. Most teams' answer is some subset of this:

1. Pipelines and stages. The exact stage names, their order, and which pipeline is which. Reps' muscle memory lives here.
2. Deals — and their custom field values. Not just the deal name and value — the BANT fields, the lead-score, the call-recording link, the "company type" enum. The values are years of qualitative judgment by your team.
3. Persons and Organizations. Including multi-value emails and phone numbers (someone has 3 emails; you don't want to lose 2 of them).
4. Notes. The free-text context that lives on deals — discovery-call summaries, objection notes, who said what when.
5. Past activities. Calls, emails, tasks, meetings already logged against deals and persons. These tell the story of every relationship.
6. Owner assignments. Which rep owns which deal.
7. Linkages. The Deal ↔ Person ↔ Organization relationships. Without these, your CRM is just three disconnected lists.

One thing that doesn't usually need to come over: full historical audit logs (every stage change, every value edit, ever). The current state matters; the granular history rarely does. Most teams check this list and realize "current state + notes + activities" is what they actually care about.

The three migration paths

There are exactly three ways to get data out of Pipedrive into another CRM. They differ wildly in what survives the trip.

Path 1: CSV export → CSV import (the default — and the lossy one)

Pipedrive lets you export Deals, Persons, and Organizations as CSV files from Settings → Tools and apps → Export data. The destination CRM imports those CSVs. This is what most "how to migrate" articles recommend.

What you get:

• ✅ Deal names, values, currency, status, expected close date
• ✅ Person names, primary email, primary phone
• ✅ Organization names, websites
• ✅ Owner names (as text, not as linked user references)
• ⚠️ Custom fields, but as raw column headers — the destination CRM has to recreate the field definitions before the import can map values. Most CRMs' generic CSV importers don't do this automatically.
• ❌ Multi-value emails / phones (Pipedrive's CSV picks the primary; secondary emails and phones disappear)
• ❌ Notes (not exported at all by the standard CSV — only by the per-deal "Export from filter" path, and even then as a separate file you have to manually reconcile)
• ❌ Activities (same — separate export, no automatic linking on import)
• ❌ Deal-to-Person-to-Organization links (you get IDs, but most destination CRMs renumber on import and the links break)

If your destination CRM is Less Annoying CRM, Capsule, or any other CRM without a Pipedrive-specific importer, this is the path you'll use. Plan on 4–8 hours of manual cleanup afterwards.

Path 2: Third-party migration service (Trujay, Import2)

Services like Trujay and Import2 talk to Pipedrive's API on your behalf and write to the destination CRM's API. They preserve more than CSV — including custom field mappings and basic links — but they're priced per migration ($300–$2,000 depending on volume) and the typical turnaround is 2–5 business days.

For a one-time migration of a large workspace where you don't want to manage the move yourself, these services are reasonable. For a small team that wants to be live the same afternoon, the price-to-benefit ratio is hard to justify.

Path 3: Native API importer (built into the destination CRM)

Some destination CRMs ship a first-party Pipedrive importer that talks to Pipedrive's REST API directly. You paste in your Pipedrive API token, confirm field mappings, and the destination pulls everything via API — preserving custom fields, multi-value emails, notes, and activities natively.

This is the fastest, cheapest, and most accurate path — when it exists. In 2026, the CRMs we've seen ship a real native Pipedrive importer:

• crm2crm — 3-phase wizard, free during the migration, runs in ~8–10 minutes for typical workspaces
• Salesflare — has a Pipedrive import wizard, paid plan required
• Capsule — has a basic importer, fewer custom-field options
• Most other CRMs (HubSpot, Zoho, Folk, Close, Monday CRM, LACRM) ship generic CSV importers without Pipedrive-specific awareness

The rest of this guide focuses on the API importer path, because it's the one that delivers the "10 minutes, nothing lost" outcome most people are looking for.

The 10-minute migration: step by step

Using crm2crm's importer as the concrete example. The same shape works for any API-based importer.

Step 1: Get your Pipedrive API token (60 seconds)

In Pipedrive: Settings → Personal preferences → API. Click "Show personal API token" and copy it. This token has full read access to your workspace — keep it private, and revoke it after the migration if you don't need ongoing sync.

Step 2: Open the import wizard (10 seconds)

In your destination CRM, find the migration / import section. In crm2crm: Settings → Migrations → "Import from Pipedrive." Paste the token. Click "Validate." The wizard reads your Pipedrive workspace and confirms it can see your pipelines, deals, and custom fields.

Step 3: Confirm field mapping (3–5 minutes)

This is the only step that requires a human. The wizard shows every Pipedrive custom field on the left side and suggests a mapping on the right:

• "Match" — the field name already exists in the destination CRM (either as a standard column like location or as a custom field you already created). The wizard maps to it.
• "Create" — the field name is new. The wizard will create a custom field with the same name, type, and options.
• "Skip" — you don't want this field migrated.

For most workspaces, the auto-suggested mapping is correct 80–90% of the time. Spend a couple of minutes confirming the rest. Three things to check carefully:

• Enum fields with renamed options. If you renamed a Pipedrive option ("Hot lead" became "Sales-qualified" recently), tell the wizard to use the current label.
• Date format expectations. Pipedrive stores dates as ISO; some destinations expect YYYY-MM-DD only. The wizard handles this automatically but worth a visual scan.
• Currency. If your Pipedrive workspace uses a custom currency code (we've seen "9_9", "FTE", and other internal units), most destination CRMs will normalize these to USD. Deal values stay numerically identical — only the currency code changes.

Step 4: Start the import (5–10 minutes, runs in background)

Click "Start." The wizard runs in 5 phases:

1. Field schemas — creates the custom field definitions in the destination CRM. Seconds.
2. Pipelines — recreates your pipelines and stages exactly as named. Seconds.
3. Deals — imports every deal with its current state, owner, custom field values, and links to person/organization. The slow part — about 100ms per deal due to Pipedrive's API rate limit of 80 requests / 2 seconds.
4. Notes — for each imported deal, pulls all attached notes via /deals/{id}/flow?items=note. About 100ms per deal.
5. Activities — same path, ?items=activity. Pulls calls, emails, tasks, meetings.

For 100 deals, this takes 8–10 minutes start to finish. For 1,000 deals, around 30–45 minutes. The job runs in the background — you can close the browser tab.

Step 5: Sanity-check the result (5 minutes)

Once the wizard reports "done," spot-check three deals across different stages:

• Open the deal. Are all custom field values present?
• Check the linked Person. Are all their emails and phones there?
• Check Notes and Activities. Are they attached to the right deal with the right timestamps?

If any of these are off, it's better to find out now than two weeks later when your reps are using the system in anger.

Honest take: what doesn't migrate cleanly

Even the best API-based importer has trade-offs. Things we've seen drop or change shape during real migrations:

• Custom currency codes. Pipedrive lets you define non-ISO-4217 codes (we've seen "9_9," "BTC," "FTE" used as deal-value units). Most destination CRMs reject these and normalize to USD. Numeric value stays the same, code changes. Confirm this before importing.
• File attachments. Files attached to deals/persons via Pipedrive's UI typically need to be re-uploaded. The migration imports metadata (filename, upload date) but not the binary. crm2crm handles this with a one-click re-upload step after the main migration.
• Rich-text formatting in notes. Pipedrive stores notes as HTML; most destination CRMs store plain text. Bullets and bold survive; tables and inline images don't.
• Granular audit history. The "Activities" we preserve are scheduled tasks/calls/emails — the future-and-past timeline. The audit log of "User X moved Deal Y from Stage A to Stage B at 14:23 on 2024-09-12" is generally not migrated. Most teams don't need this; if you do, exporting Pipedrive's Insights / Reports module separately is the workaround.
• User accounts and roles. The migration writes owner_name as text; you have to recreate user accounts in the destination CRM and re-link owners. A 2-minute task for small teams.
• Email integration history. Past synced emails from Gmail/Outlook need to be re-authorized in the destination CRM. The migration brings the deal/person; the email history reconnects on first sync.

None of these is a blocker for typical small-team migrations. They're things you want to be aware of before you switch, not surprises you find after.

What to do after the import lands

Four steps that pay back the next morning:

1. Invite your team. Add user accounts in the destination CRM, re-assign deals from "owner_name = Alex Davidson" to the actual user. Most destination CRMs do this with a single name-match step.
2. Re-authorize email sync. Connect Gmail or Outlook in the new CRM so future emails log against the imported deals automatically.
3. Move one rep's daily workflow over. Don't switch the whole team at once. Pick one rep, give them the new CRM for a week, fix anything they hit, then roll out.
4. Cancel Pipedrive only after a week of clean use. Don't burn the bridge on day one. Keep both running for 5–7 days. Once you confirm nothing's missing, cancel Pipedrive and pocket the saving.

That last point is the most-skipped step and the most-regretted one. Cancelling Pipedrive in week one feels efficient. In week three, when you realize the email-sync history didn't come over for one specific rep, having Pipedrive still active means a 5-minute fix instead of a 2-hour reconstruction.

Migration by destination CRM

Quick reference for what to expect on each common destination:

Destination CRM	Pipedrive import path	Custom fields preserved?	Notes & activities?
crm2crm	Native API wizard (3-phase)	Yes — schemas + values	Yes — both, anchored to deals
HubSpot	CSV (no native Pipedrive importer)	Manual recreation	Manual, separate export
Zoho CRM	CSV; Zoho Wizard supports limited mapping	Partial — schemas yes, values manual	Partial — notes yes, activities limited
Salesforce	Data Loader (CSV) or paid integrator	Manual; complex schema mapping	Manual
Folk	CSV with field mapping	Manual mapping required	No — Folk's data model differs
Close	CSV	Manual	Manual; Close has its own activity model
Less Annoying CRM	CSV	Manual (LACRM has minimal custom fields)	Manual
Salesflare	Native Pipedrive importer	Yes	Yes

Two destinations on this list — crm2crm and Salesflare — have native Pipedrive importers. For everyone else, you're looking at a CSV path plus manual cleanup.

What about rep adoption after the migration?

Migration anxiety is half technical (will the data come over?) and half social (will my reps complain?). The technical side is solved by an API importer. The social side comes down to one question: does the new CRM feel similar enough to Pipedrive that reps don't push back?

The answer depends on the destination's data model. CRMs that mirror Pipedrive's pipeline-first shape — drag deals across stages, same Persons/Organizations/Deals hierarchy, same custom-field model — onboard reps in under 15 minutes. CRMs with a different model (Folk's relationship graph, HubSpot's full-platform interface) require more retraining.

If rep pushback is your main fear, pick a destination that mirrors Pipedrive's data shape. The mental model carries over and reps barely notice the switch.

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