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If you’re considering Salesforce and Zoho but struggling to choose between them, you’ve come to the right place. On this page, we’ll discuss the pros and cons of each tool. Then, we’ll explore how they compare on several key aspects of a good CRM. Keep reading to learn more about how Salesforce and Zoho stack up!
There are a lot of tools out there that help you with your marketing and sales. One of the most important is a customer relationship management (CRM) tool, which gathers, stores, organizes, and analyzes data about your customers.
If you’ve been researching CRMs, you probably already know that two of the biggest names out there are Salesforce and Zoho. In fact, maybe you’re trying to decide which of these two tools to get. Which is better, Salesforce or Zoho? Well, that’s just the question we’ll answer on this page.
We’ll start by going over some of the pros and cons of each tool, and then we’ll compare the two based on several key qualities of a good CRM. Keep reading to learn more!
Let’s start off by looking at some of the benefits of using Salesforce as your CRM. Advantages of this platform include:
As handy as it is, Salesforce also comes with some disadvantages. Those disadvantages include:
Zoho also has its share of advantages. Some of those advantages include:
Zoho is a good tool, but it has some downsides. Those downsides include:
Having gone over the pros and cons of each tool, we’ll now compare Zoho and Salesforce directly. We’ll do that by looking at how they stack up when it comes to five key qualities of a good CRM. This comparison is summarized in the chart below.
As we’ve already mentioned, Salesforce’s pricing is all over the place. That’s because it offers 15 different plans. And while some of those plans come in reasonably cheap at around $25 per user per month, the most expensive ones cost as much as $15,000 per month!
Zoho, meanwhile, offers far fewer—but also far more affordable—options. You can pay $35 per month for an annual plan or $45 per month for a monthly plan. Zoho even offers a free plan. For that reason, even though Salesforce has more options, Zoho wins when it comes to sheer affordability.
Another key consideration for any CRM is the user experience. Which tool is more user-friendly, Salesforce or Zoho?
The answer to this one is easy—Zoho. While it’s not exactly flawless in this category, as it does come with a steep learning curve, it’s at least simple enough to use once you do eventually become familiar with it.
Salesforce, on the other hand, is such a complicated tool that, as mentioned earlier, companies often hire Salesforce specialists just to work the platform. That makes it pretty clear that Salesforce scores incredibly low when it comes to ease of use, leaving Zoho the clear winner.
CRMs are designed to track data, which means they’re not of much use if they don’t offer any kind of reporting on that data. So, how do Zoho and Salesforce stack up in this category?
The answer is that both tools perform well here. Given how advanced of a platform Salesforce is, it’s probably not surprising that its reporting features are equally advanced, offering plenty of different options for which metrics to focus on and which data to take into account.
But Zoho also does very well here, with its reporting allowing you to see vital information like who’s buying from you and what they’re interested in. Technically, Salesforce wins this category purely on the basis of being more advanced, but Zoho is no slouch when it comes to reporting.
Integrations are another category where Zoho doesn’t do so well. It does offer some integrations with the paid plan, but those integrations are few and far between, which users have been known to express frustration with. Meanwhile, the free plan offers no integrations at all.
Contrast that with Salesforce, which offers more than 2500 integration options—one of the largest amounts of any CRM platform. Those integrations do require an API, but even so, there’s no contest—Salesforce is the obvious winner here.
Finally, we can assess Salesforce and Zoho based on their sales automation capabilities. Once again, we have a category where both tools perform admirably. Zoho offers all the standard automation features, as well as an artificial intelligence (AI) assistant called Zia that recommends specific automated workflows.
Salesforce, meanwhile, provides highly advanced automation features as well. It even offers a separate marketing automation platform called Pardot that you can integrate with the main CRM.
Overall, this category is a bit too close to call, so we can consider it a tie between the two tools.
Now that we’ve gone over both tools, we can go back to the question at the beginning of this page: Which is better, Salesforce or Zoho?
The answer depends entirely on the unique needs of your business. If your priority is reporting and integrations, Salesforce is definitely the better option. But if you have a low budget or don’t want to hire an outside specialist, Zoho is the way to go.
Of course, it’s also entirely possible that neither of these tools seems ideal to you. If that’s the case, there are plenty of other crm options out there.
If you don’t think that Salesforce or Zoho are for you, you might now be looking for other CRM options. If so, you’re already in the right place. Nutshell is an affordable, user-friendly CRM that makes it easier to organize customers and opportunities, automate complex tasks to sell more with less effort, send sales and marketing emails to segmented audiences, and more.
In addition to its powerful CRM features, Nutshell offers free live support to all users, white glove data migration, and automatic data imports (even during your free trial!).
If you’re interested in seeing what Nutshell can do for your business, just start a 14-day free trial today!
The perfect blend of function and ease of use! I can’t believe how good Nutshell is!
Alan P. Skytop Business Loans
Don’t get sucked in by ‘featureitis.’ Buy what your staff will actually use. Nutshell beat out Insightly, Nimble, Zoho and Salesforce for our needs.
Chris B
Nutshell has helped my staff clear up literally 50% of their time.
Jennifer A. Eclectic Music
I’ve honestly had more problems than solutions when it comes to using Monday. It was very visually pleasing, but that’s as far as the benefits went.
Kevin K. Media Production
Great way to track management with clients. Love that I can BCC and the from my google account goes right into the right account in Nutshell. Also love that I can set tasks to remind myself to follow up
Holly C
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