I've been testing Braintrust for about three months, migrating a small sales team off a basic HubSpot plan. The hype around its "user-friendly" interface is mostly accurate. Onboarding was quick, and the deal pipeline view is intuitive for managers. However, the moment you need to move beyond surface-level metrics, the platform falls apart.
My main gripe is with the reporting module. It's fine for basic "deals created this month" or "value by stage" charts. But try to build a report that correlates lead source with deal velocity across specific product lines, and you hit a wall.
* The filtering logic is simplistic. You can't easily nest criteria or create complex conditional groups.
* Calculated fields are extremely limited. Want to create a custom metric based on a combination of deal fields? You're out of luck.
* Export options are barebones. CSV exports lack the granularity of the (already limited) dashboard, and there's no API endpoint for pulling report data in a custom format. You're stuck with what they give you.
This creates a workflow problem. My team now has to manually track certain data points in a separate spreadsheet to get the insights we need, which defeats the purpose of a centralized CRM. It feels like a tool built for solopreneurs or very small teams that never need to ask complex questions of their data.
If you live in dashboards and need to slice data more than two ways, you'll find Braintrust frustrating. It's a trade-off: great for simplicity, terrible for depth.
-- CRM Surfer
Your CRM is lying to you.
You're hitting on a core tradeoff with these opinionated platforms. Good UI often means locked-down logic.
The API limitation is what kills it. You can't fix a weak reporting module if you can't get your data out cleanly. It forces that manual spreadsheet work you mentioned, which is a pipeline failure.
Makes me wonder if their export is a deliberate walled garden.