Stillpoint CRM vs Groundhogg

Groundhogg exists because its authors took the same view we did: renting your customer relationships from a cloud vendor is a strategic risk, and WordPress is already a perfectly capable application platform. Everything it stores stays in your database, on your hosting, in your jurisdiction.

It has also earned a reputation for automation depth. Its funnel builder handles multi-step behavioural flows — tags, waits, conditional branches, email steps — of a kind that many hosted marketing platforms charge substantially for.

So this comparison is not self-hosted versus cloud. It is marketing automation versus sales process, plus modular versus all-inclusive.

Groundhogg's centre of gravity is the funnel. The question it answers well is "what should happen automatically after someone does something?" Contacts flow through automated journeys, get tagged, get emailed, and convert.

Stillpoint's centre of gravity is the deal. The questions it answers are "what is open, what is it worth, who owns it, what stage is it at, when will it close, and has the invoice been paid?" Every pipeline stage carries a win probability, so deal value times probability gives a weighted forecast rather than an optimistic total — a $50,000 deal at 20% and a $10,000 deal at 100% are not the same thing, and a raw pipeline number hides that.

Stillpoint does have automations, but they are pragmatic trigger-and-action recipes fired by CRM events — a deal created, a deal moving stage — that create follow-ups, send notifications or fire webhooks. They exist so routine follow-through happens without anyone remembering, not to replace a marketing funnel builder.

This is a clean structural difference rather than a matter of degree. Groundhogg is not an invoicing product; commerce is generally handled by WooCommerce or a payments extension, with the funnel reacting to it.

Stillpoint treats commercial documents as core. Quotes and invoices carry line items with quantities and per-line totals, tax handling, your own numbering scheme, issue and due dates and status tracking. PDF export is branded and generated inside the plugin, with no third-party service in the path. Invoices accept multiple payments, so partial settlement updates the outstanding balance automatically. Company name, logo, currency symbol and a legal or registration footer are configured once in Finance settings.

For a business that quotes work and chases payment, having that in the same tool as the pipeline removes a whole category of copy-paste.

Groundhogg sends email as a system: campaigns, funnel steps, transactional messages. That is the correct model for automation.

Stillpoint gives each person a mailbox. Every user connects their own IMAP account for reading and SMTP for sending, with their own from-name and HTML signature, then reads, composes and replies from inside the CRM. Sent messages are logged against the contact, templates support merge placeholders, and mailbox passwords are encrypted at rest with OpenSSL. Honest caveat: inbox reading requires the PHP imap extension — if your host does not enable it, sending, templates and the sent log still work.

Around that sits the rest of the rep's day: follow-up tasks tied to a deal or contact with overdue items surfacing on the dashboard, sub-tasks, a per-user ICS calendar feed you can subscribe to from Google, Outlook or Apple Calendar, in-app notifications and @mentions.

Both products can react to a WooCommerce store; the shape of that reaction differs. In Groundhogg, a purchase is primarily a marketing signal that moves someone through a funnel.

In Stillpoint, a purchase is pipeline. Orders sync on checkout, status change, admin edit and refund, idempotently, so re-syncing never duplicates. Each order becomes both a ledger record — order number, status, total and currency, item count, payment method, billing country, created and paid dates, and every line item with product, SKU, quantity, unit price and line total — and a deal in an auto-created Orders pipeline whose stages mirror WooCommerce statuses, with completed counting as won and cancelled or refunded as lost.

On top of that: lifetime value and configurable RFM segments per customer, a store dashboard with paid revenue, average order value, repeat-purchase rate, refunds, twelve months of revenue history and top products, a daily win-back scan for lapsed customers and unpaid checkouts, and a one-click batched backfill of your whole order history. Included in Pro and Agency.

Groundhogg follows the WordPress extension convention: a core product with capability distributed across paid extensions and plan tiers. It is a fair model — you pay for what you use — but it means your total depends on your feature list, and you may discover a needed piece sits a tier above where you started.

Stillpoint is a flat licence with the whole stack in the box: $19/mo or $149/yr for one site, $29/mo or $299/yr for up to five sites including the WooCommerce suite, $49/mo or $499/yr for up to twenty sites with priority support and onboarding. Unlimited users on all three, no per-contact tiers, and a 30-day money-back guarantee.

Both vendors deserve credit for avoiding per-seat billing, which is the mechanism that makes cloud CRMs expensive as teams grow.

Groundhogg is the better choice in several genuine cases:

• Deep visual funnel automation and behavioural email flows are your primary workflow.
• You need broadcast campaigns, tagging and subscriber journeys rather than a deal board.
• You are comfortable assembling capability from extensions and prefer paying only for the pieces you use.
• Your revenue model is content, courses or memberships driven by automation rather than quoted, negotiated deals.
• You already run a separate invoicing and accounting stack you have no intention of replacing.

If instead your team lives in a pipeline, sends quotes, chases invoices and wants store orders visible in the same place, an all-inclusive sales CRM will fit the working day better.