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Pega CRM vs Salesforce Sales Cloud comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 19, 2024

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

Pega CRM
Ranking in CRM
23rd
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
CRM Customer Engagement Centers (6th)
Salesforce Sales Cloud
Ranking in CRM
1st
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
117
Ranking in other categories
Opportunity Management (1st), Sales Force Automation (2nd), Conversation Intelligence Software (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2025, in the CRM category, the mindshare of Pega CRM is 0.8%, down from 1.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Salesforce Sales Cloud is 2.8%, down from 10.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
CRM Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Salesforce Sales Cloud2.8%
Pega CRM0.8%
Other96.4%
CRM
 

Q&A Highlights

it_user735081 - PeerSpot reviewer
Oct 03, 2017
 

Featured Reviews

Srinivas Ganisetti - PeerSpot reviewer
Case management feature is valuable but the pricing is expensive
I would like to suggest the solution but it really depends on your specific requirements, your business use cases and future plans. There is a significant investment involved in this solution and therefore it is very crucial to reevaluate your future necessity including automation potential and modernization plans. I would suggest that you select any kind of solution and explore alternatives of similar functionalities at a lower cost. This might help you to achieve more with less. In my experience, I would rate it between seven to eight because it offers robust capabilities. But please be aware that other BPM tools are emerging with similar features at a lower cost. Pega CRM is perceived as bulk care compared to order tools, as many of its capabilities are potentially underutilized. I would rate it 7 out of 10.
Kamal Deep - PeerSpot reviewer
Experience exceptional project enhancements and seamless automation integration
Salesforce Sales Cloud itself is a wonderful solution, and there are two different versions: Lightning and classic. The Lightning version is a new generation version compatible with any mobile device, whether it's a phone, iPad, or any size of screen. The reporting and analytics functionalities, especially with the Einstein feature, are wonderful because it allows for analysis of data regarding your opportunity pipeline, giving insight into how long it will take to close deals. This gives a great understanding of running different levels of campaigns and defining smart workflows, where if one task is done, the other task can automatically get created and assigned to different team members. This flexibility is a key benefit of Salesforce Sales Cloud. Lead management is a great feature in Salesforce Sales Cloud because if you go for enterprise and above licenses, you can define different record types. For example, if one company is into two different businesses such as real estate and car reselling, both being opposite, this can be defined in Salesforce Sales Cloud, allowing for different workflows, fields, and mechanisms that do not affect each other's operations. The predictive insight feature known as forecasting is a very old feature of Salesforce Sales Cloud, giving predictions based on your pipeline and previous opportunity closings. The new Einstein analytics feature is more advanced and is enabled with AI, providing better forecasting based on your current pipeline. Salesforce Sales Cloud is working smartly with AI to help close more deals based on opportunity stages, trends, and industries, advising on the steps to take next. Lead generation is the most important thing because every sale starts from the lead. At the lead level, different stages and resources can be defined. You can capture leads from various resources, with Salesforce Sales Cloud offering a web-to-lead feature and integrations with LinkedIn to fetch data. Once a lead is qualified and converted into opportunities, there are stages with percentages, and workflows can help in easily closing deals.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Great flexibility and its locking mechanism enable multiple users to work on the same case seamlessly."
"We can effortlessly manage the data within it, and it offers ease of use and high flexibility to present the data across various vendors."
"The solution is very easy to use."
"The case management feature is really valuable."
"It also reduces the duration per call, and it ensures a first time resolution of the issue."
"One of the most valuable features of Pega CRM for our team's productivity is its ease of setup, thanks to its configuration-driven approach."
"The product's deployment phase was easy."
"Pega offers a clear parent-child case relationship that's easily created and maintained. Dependencies can be configured, where reaching a specific stage in a parent case automatically triggers a child task in a child case, while the parent case remains on hold until a certain condition is met before moving forward. This configuration allows multiple users to work on cases in parallel. Many of these settings are readily available within Pega case settings. Overall, Pega's case management is unparalleled compared to other options."
"Salesforce helps up keep track of candidates."
"You can capture all the contacts that relate to an account or business, including personal details."
"Salesforce is such a widespread software in terms of what it can do and its scope. Theoretically, you can run a whole company off of it. There are many valuable features, such as reporting and analytics. You can customize almost the whole environment is what appeals to so many companies the most."
"Sales Cloud's reporting and analytics capabilities influenced our sales strategy quite a lot. We can build every report as a dashboard, and there are various sorts of things."
"The scalability is good."
"On the high level, it's all about managing the clients, managing the opportunities around those clients, managing the tasks, calls, activities, all those things."
"The most valuable features of Salesforce Sales Cloud are code hub management and sale opportunity management."
"I have found Salesforce Sales Cloud to be stable."
 

Cons

"The disadvantage of the tool stems from the fact that it does not allow users to make database-level modifications."
"The UI is lagging and needs to be improved."
"For many of the clients, they have a separate system or separate layer of UI and a separate layer of the business rules engine, which Pega has taken care of in the recent releases."
"They should enable the data-driven streaming feature inside it."
"Price is always a concern for many organizations. They often think Pega is expensive, and sometimes they don't fully understand the pricing model."
"It would be beneficial to enhance the pricing and support implementation options as they are currently quite expensive."
"There has been a common acknowledgment among customers that this solution is an expensive tool and they often opt for cheaper tools like Comodo"
"The solution has room for improvement around decisional and real-time data analysis."
"As a cloud solution with web browser, it's different than my classical way of thinking. It's modern, but for older people, maybe it's not that understandable. It could be more user-friendly, maybe with an option to switch between interfaces."
"The deployment of data from the development environment to production is also a weaker point because their solution is not powerful."
"Auto clean for duplicate leads, accounts, and contacts needs improving."
"The monitoring is very good, but it could be better."
"It is a bit pricey."
"Salesforce Sales Cloud overall is too complex. There is too much functionality, it's hard for the user, at the beginning. It takes a lot of time to update the information."
"It is very clunky. Its interface can be more user-friendly. There is always way too much information going on in Salesforce. It puts too much on your screen. It gives you every piece of information in the world, whereas I need less. It would be nice for it to be cleaned up a bit."
"Salesforce is a powerful tool and you need specialists to create or to develop new functionalities. It is a difficult platform to learn to manage and you need years to know the whole product."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing is on the higher side."
"We have numerous uses of the solution in our organisation. Almost 72 applications are integrated with Pega CRM, and some of them are shutting down for various reasons including the high licensing costs. There is a strong focus in the market and offices on cost reduction."
"It is expensive."
"It is a premium product, so it is not the cheapest solution. I think if it's implemented well, and you're getting the soft cost benefits, the efficiencies, it's justified. But not if you're looking at just apples for apples as a subscription, without the complexity that you can achieve. It can deal with complex business requirements. Some other CRMs can't. But you certainly pay, so it's a premium-charged solution. It's one of the more expensive ones."
"The subscription is on a monthly basis."
"The main issue is the price. Because it's SaaS, you will have to pay on a monthly or yearly basis."
"The price is fair."
"It's expensive, storage being the most costly aspect."
"The price of the Salesforce Sales Cloud is expensive. We pay monthly for the solution but we are billed quarterly."
"Price-wise, the product does not fall under the category of cheaply priced products."
"We have a yearly license, and there are no hidden costs. Considering the Indian market, the pricing is reasonable. I don't consider it to be on the high side."
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Answers from the Community

it_user735081 - PeerSpot reviewer
Oct 3, 2017
Oct 3, 2017
My advice is to compare the full investment of the CRM implementation - software, cloud and services - as from a general perspective, all top level "costs" are generally comparable. It is the cost-to-value ratio that you will want to focus upon. Also, you’ll want to assess whether you will be looking to deploy AI or not, as some vendors’ offerings are not quite as real and ready-to-deploy as ot...
See 2 answers
it_user70698 - PeerSpot reviewer
Oct 3, 2017
Hi thanks for your request. Each of the ERP CRM listed above has certain functionalities in common and comparing the cost between them will completely depends upon the need. Overall Salesforce and SAP CRM has CRM functionality and it is Tier 1 CRM product. Pega is not a CRM product and it specializes in BPM ( Business Process Management). Please email me and I can discuss over the phone with you for further details.
it_user747921 - PeerSpot reviewer
Oct 3, 2017
My advice is to compare the full investment of the CRM implementation - software, cloud and services - as from a general perspective, all top level "costs" are generally comparable. It is the cost-to-value ratio that you will want to focus upon. Also, you’ll want to assess whether you will be looking to deploy AI or not, as some vendors’ offerings are not quite as real and ready-to-deploy as others. Note that I am biased, as I am with Pega, running their CRM practice. With this said -- in terms of unbiased independent reviews, Gartner's latest Magic Quadrant for the CRM Customer Engagement Center for 2017, cites “Reference customers gave Pegasystems' overall package the best cost-to-value rating of any solution assessed for vendors in the Leaders quadrant.” A free copy of Gartner's report may be downloaded here: https://www.pega.com/gartner-crm-cec-2017 Best of luck in your research. Just let me know if I can be of any further assistance. Regards, Jeff Nicholson
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
25%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Comms Service Provider
6%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
University
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise8
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business54
Midsize Enterprise26
Large Enterprise40
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Pega CRM?
The product's deployment phase was easy.
What needs improvement with Pega CRM?
The disadvantage of the tool stems from the fact that it does not allow users to make database-level modifications. In Siebel CRM, you have complete control over your database, you can do any datab...
What is your primary use case for Pega CRM?
Pega CRM uses a layer cake architecture. Basically, the tool is a convenient application to use even if you are not a technical person, like a business analyst. I use the solution for the CRM modul...
What do you like most about Salesforce Sales Cloud?
The features of Sales Cloud most useful for testing and running email campaigns are highly valuable.
What needs improvement with Salesforce Sales Cloud?
From a customer perspective, it's a very stable system, and people are used to its functionalities, good and bad. Improvement, in my opinion, would be to include AI functionality in a simpler way; ...
What is your primary use case for Salesforce Sales Cloud?
For managing two different things, I'm managing some sales pipeline, the pipeline of sales of some products, and also doing marketing automation for after-sales.
 

Also Known As

Chordiant
Sales Cloud, SFDC, Salesforce
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

The State of Maine, Aegis, Aegon, AIG Japan, ING
Coca-Cola Enterprises, Kuoni Global Travel Services, Financial Times, Just Eat, Jobsite, H.R. Owen, PlayerLayer, O2, DMGT, Philips, Xtreme.ie, Business Stream, Remote Asset Management, Dialogue Group
Find out what your peers are saying about Pega CRM vs. Salesforce Sales Cloud and other solutions. Updated: November 2025.
872,869 professionals have used our research since 2012.