No more typing reviews! Try our Samantha, our new voice AI agent.

Outreach vs Zoho CRM comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 2, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Outreach
Ranking in Opportunity Management
6th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
4.6
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Zoho CRM
Ranking in Opportunity Management
3rd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
61
Ranking in other categories
CRM (3rd), Sales Force Automation (3rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Opportunity Management category, the mindshare of Outreach is 3.6%, up from 2.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Zoho CRM is 6.9%, up from 6.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Opportunity Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Zoho CRM6.9%
Outreach3.6%
Other89.5%
Opportunity Management
 

Featured Reviews

Evelina Mungai - PeerSpot reviewer
Digital Marketing Manager at Unilever
Targeted outreach has boosted engagement and improves collaboration across the sales cycle
According to my experience, the best features Outreach offers are its helpfulness and effectiveness. It also offers a set of free trial and an intuitive, user-friendly interface. It offers sales engagement, revenue intelligence, and revenue operation functionality in a unified platform. Outreach leverages automation and artificial intelligence to help revenue leaders decrease the inefficiency and ineffectiveness of go-to-market activities and personnel across the revenue cycle. Outreach helps automate sequences and ensures consistent and timely customer engagement. I also appreciate that it provides clear analytics on opens, clicks, and replies to refine the outreach strategy. Additionally, the use of AI captures real-time meeting notes and action items, saving time and preventing missed details.
NaveenKumar S - PeerSpot reviewer
Software Engineer at Maximus
Zoho CRM improves lead conversion with AI assistance but could have better technical support
Zoho Zia has helped our lead conversion process by serving as a private AI of Zoho CRM that assists in boosting lead conversation by analyzing customer data, predicting outcomes, and automating workflow follow-ups. Regarding how Zia helps with lead conversion, there's lead scoring and conversion predictions, sentiment analysis, and workflow suggestions. For lead scoring, Zia analyzes past lead conversation patterns and assigns scores to new leads, and high score leads get prioritized for faster follow-up. In terms of conversation predictions, Zia predicts the probability of lead conversion based on demographics and engagements, helping the sales team focus on the most promising leads. Another point is sentiment analysis, where Zia scans customer emails, chats, and notes to detect tones such as positive, negative, or neutral, guiding us on how to approach the leads better. For workflow suggestions, it recommends automated workflows such as sending emails and assigning tasks to agents, improving our engagements. Additionally, the conversational AI feature through Zia chatbot can interact with leads via website chat or capture details and push them into Zoho CRM automatically. The analytics and reporting features in Zoho CRM helped me understand sales patterns and customer behavior through standard reports that include pre-built reports for leads, deals, sales activities, and campaigns. We can customize reports as well, creating reports based on any module fields, and we can integrate with Zoho Analytics for direct capture of reports from our modules. We can merge leads reports to contact reports using SQL, allowing for effective sales funnel tracking to identify drop-offs and optimize conversation strategies. Auto-generated reports are also available for daily scheduling, ensuring that admin receives daily basis reports through automation. With advanced BI features such as drag-and-drop dashboards and predictive analysis using pivot tables, we can create insightful dashboards while pulling CRM and external data from sources such as Google Ads and Facebook Ads for unified analytics. The automation capabilities in Zoho CRM have helped streamline our organization's sales and marketing tasks by handling repetitive tasks such as sending follow-up emails, assigning leads, and updating fields. For example, if a lead score is greater than 80, it automatically assigns that record to the senior sales representative. There are also blueprint options to define the step-by-step sales process, ensuring every sales representative follows the same process. Automation includes assignment rules, lead scoring, priority load options, sales signals, macros, and territory management, which automatically routes leads based on geography, revenue, and industries. Additionally, deal stage automations trigger actions when a deal moves stages, such as sending a contract when it moves to negotiation. For marketing, there are tools for email campaign automation, behavior-based triggers, campaign to lead sync, and social media automations. The overall benefits I have seen from using Zoho CRM include centralized customer data, where all customer interactions are visible in one place, providing a 360-degree view. Improved lead conversations through AI-powered scoring and automation helps us focus on the right leads, with end-to-end sales automation managing tasks from lead capture to deal closure, thereby saving time on repetitive tasks. This leads to better marketing ROI, as we can track campaigns, ad spend, and lead sources, connecting marketing efforts to revenue. Enhanced collaboration through shared notes, tasks, and role-based access enables teamwork within our internal users and sales teams, contributing to customer satisfaction. Moreover, Zoho CRM is scalable and customizable, adapting to startups, SMBs, and enterprises with its flexible modules and fields. Lastly, it is cost-efficient compared to Salesforce and HubSpot while including a wide range of features.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"Outreach has positively impacted my organization by helping us reduce the sales cycle from nine months to six months, which is very significant."
"Outreach has positively impacted my organization by streamlining how we work individually and allowing us to see what others are doing."
"The best features Outreach offers are the organization of having the tasks for the day lined up and showing activity as far as being able to put down notes and record activity that I have had within Outreach."
"Outreach has impacted our organization positively because it has become a medium for us to reach out to an audience which we were not able to reach out to earlier."
"When it comes to time saved, I would say approximately half an hour of an SDR's time daily, which is quite a significant improvement, and when it comes to meetings booked, especially from cold calls, we managed to book almost two times more cold calling leads."
"Outreach is an essential tool for doing outbound work and speeds up my workflow significantly."
"The solution facilitates Git workflow management, enabling me to handle various pull requests from team members. Additionally, I use these tools to deploy applications to different cloud providers, such as GCP and AWS, including AWS EC2 services. The automation tools also streamline testing processes for the code submitted by other developers."
"Outreach is also very cost-effective compared to Freshsales and other alternatives, and it has helped us achieve our marketing goals and reach out to more customers easily, improving my organization's productivity for the last five years."
"The initial setup is pretty fast."
"The most valuable feature of Zoho CRM is its ease of use."
"Customer tracking, order management, sales tracking and PO tracking provide efficiency."
"The most valuable features include the dashboards, deal tracking, email tracking, notes, managing notes and the ability to manage databases in one place."
"For startups, it's an absolutely brilliant product to start with."
"Highly configurable, enabling graphically built workflows, and the writing of customized scripts if required."
"The camera feature is valuable because it provides a look and feel."
"Zoho CRM can be used by both registered users and potential users; we use it for creating and managing modules, email broadcasting, integrating with email marketing tools, and data sharing between users."
 

Cons

"Outreach crashed, especially when we were making cold calls. The call recordings frequently were not being recorded when they should have been, which was frustrating."
"Outreach can improve because it can be overwhelming due to its robustness."
"Reporting at the 20,000 foot level needs to be improved. I want to be able to see how many emails are opened twice vs three times vs four times."
"Outreach can be improved in several ways. Every now and then, it will have sync issues, especially with voice headsets."
"In terms of improvements, one significant area for the product is efficiency, particularly when processing large data loads. Similar to other platforms, long recording times lead to extended processing times, which can be inconvenient for users. For instance, a previous client encountered delays due to lengthy recording times. To address this, I implemented a live transcription approach where data is transcribed in real-time, immediately sent to the AI model, and returned quickly. This optimized the process, but enhancing the platform's inherent efficiency would be beneficial."
"Outreach can be improved because its AI features are not strong."
"Improvements can be made to accommodate sponsors who are not physically available in the same state. If sponsors are open to it, meetings could be conducted on an online platform to finalize deals more effectively."
"Outreach can be improved by embedding a significant amount of AI and LLM models within the tool itself to fast-track or improve the productivity of sellers reaching out to their audience."
"Since Zoho CRM is not made for the enterprise kind of company, its stability for enterprise businesses could be improved."
"I'd like the solution to offer more integrations with other products."
"The MCR capabilities have some limitations."
"There should be easy access to feature recommendations in the solution"
"Custom development is often necessary to make such extensive changes, and it does come with associated costs."
"Some of our clients could not develop their requirements using the product."
"It does require some technical background before starting to do anything with Zoho CRM."
"The login process could be improved as some users find it unfriendly. The documentation could also be more user-friendly and better organized."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Outreach uses a request-based pricing model. It's pretty affordable. They offer different packages for various scenarios, depending on how you're trying to develop your platform using Outreach. I think that's a good starting point. If our organization scales up or needs more services from the tool, we'd consider upgrading."
"We have an annual license fee that costs $12,000."
"We pay for an annual license to use this solution."
"Zoho CRM is available at a fairly average price"
"There is a license required for this solution."
"I have no information about the pricing for Zoho CRM because the finance department handles that."
"Compared to other CRMs, it is very cheap."
"Professional plans cost $35 per user in the USA and EUR 35 in Europe."
"If you compare the pricing with SAP, it is well priced and you are able to pay as you go."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Opportunity Management solutions are best for your needs.
909,725 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
14%
Comms Service Provider
9%
University
9%
Retailer
9%
Construction Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Outsourcing Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Large Enterprise5
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business48
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise10
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Outreach?
Outreach can be improved by embedding a significant amount of AI and LLM models within the tool itself to fast-track or improve the productivity of sellers reaching out to their audience. The usabi...
What is your primary use case for Outreach?
Outreach is primarily used by our BDR, sales, and marketing team for email marketing and email nurtures. We formulate email templates and send automated emailers to our prospects using Outreach. We...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Outreach?
I do not have any visibility into pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Outreach. I am an end user.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Zoho CRM?
Zoho CRM and all of Zoho's software are quite affordable because they are specifically designed for small and medium businesses.
What needs improvement with Zoho CRM?
While applying some integrations or automations, if we need to take an action between two modules' fields, we have to write SOQL, and it can miss the data. I had a scenario where I had to use two f...
What is your primary use case for Zoho CRM?
I am a consultant and Zoho CRM developer who implements Zoho CRM for clients. I have worked extensively on Zoho CRM where I set up modules and gather requirements from clients. I customize fields a...
 

Comparisons

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

cloudera, monogDB, eventbrite, DocuSign, Adobe, Microsoft, Zillow
JetHub, Anderson Sales Advantage, ActionCoach, Milagro Advisory Group, TECO Pneumatic, Proteomics Consult
Find out what your peers are saying about Outreach vs. Zoho CRM and other solutions. Updated: August 2026.
909,725 professionals have used our research since 2012.