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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
7th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
5.1
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Zoho CRM
Ranking in Opportunity Management
3rd
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
59
Ranking in other categories
CRM (3rd), Sales Force Automation (3rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the Opportunity Management category, the mindshare of Outreach is 3.7%, up from 1.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Zoho CRM is 5.9%, down from 7.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Opportunity Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Zoho CRM5.9%
Outreach3.7%
Other90.4%
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

"It's allowed us greater visibility into the number of touches it takes to generate a real opportunity as well as overall visibility to seller activity."
"It's allowed us greater visibility into the number of touches it takes to generate a real opportunity as well as overall visibility to seller activity. We are getting better data on what messaging works when reaching out to prospects."
"Outreach is very good when engaging with sponsors to understand their expectations."
"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."
"I think the whole pipeline tracking is most useful for us."
"The most valuable features are the lead, opportunity and task management as well as dashboard creation, reporting, contact management and campaigns."
"I would definitely recommend this solution to others."
"Being able to have the solution in the cloud has made this a cost effective solution for us as we don't need to invest in hardware."
"Zoho CRM by contrast is easy to use, customizable and you don’t need training to use it."
"Customer tracking, order management, sales tracking and PO tracking provide efficiency."
"The user interface, especially the dashboard, offers good navigation."
"One of the most important features is that it's a cloud base and, it's also quite cheaper when compared to other solutions."
 

Cons

"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 as analytics sometimes feel quite rigid."
"Reporting at the 20,000 foot level needs to be improved."
"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."
"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."
"Support could be more knowledgeable."
"In Creator, you can do calculations and change another field immediately after you enter any value. If you add the quantity or price in any field, you can immediately change the total in Creator. The same functionality is not directly available in CRM because it is prebuilt."
"There was a challenge while deploying Zoho when we brought an API code. Because integrations "aren't perfect" for every organization."
"Customer Service: It's poor. Technical Support: Poor, as they don't answer your call or emails at your first attempt."
"One area of Zoho CRM that could be improved would be email support. The email support is really slow, but the in-app support is superb."
"Some of our clients could not develop their requirements using the product."
"Zoho CRM could benefit from predictive analysis based on historical trends to forecast future performance over the next two to three years, particularly from a sales pipeline perspective."
"Zoho CRM has a rule engine or a place where you can set certain rules. That's not evolved very much. They could improve this within the platform."
 

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."
"There is a license required for this solution."
"The basic plan has changed from $15 to $25 or $30."
"The solution has standard pricing plans."
"Compared to other CRMs, it is very cheap."
"Its price is lower than the other software."
"This solution is less expensive than Salesforce."
"Compared to other solutions, I would say Zoho CRM is very, very affordable because we can use different applications with one license."
"We pay for an annual license to use this solution."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Manufacturing Company
14%
Marketing Services Firm
9%
Outsourcing Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business45
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise10
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Outreach?
Outreach can be improved as analytics sometimes feel quite rigid. Customizing reports is quite difficult, and we often rely on other tools for reporting. The features of Outreach mobile app are sti...
What is your primary use case for Outreach?
Outreach helps set up sequences and track activities such as notices and whether customers read email messages. It integrates with our CRM, which is Salesforce, and tracks contact name and informat...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Outreach?
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is that the price is very affordable and the setup was easy. The customer support has always been supportive in case we have any questions.
What do you like most about Zoho CRM?
Zoho CRM integrates easily with customer service workflows.
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?
I think areas of Zoho CRM that need to be improved or enhanced include the permission structure, which can be easy to set up custom permissions within Zoho Creator using different filters and runni...
 

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: March 2026.
885,311 professionals have used our research since 2012.