Zoho CRM and Salesforce Essentials are major contenders in the CRM market. Zoho CRM has the upper hand with its strong customization and affordability, making it ideal for startups and small businesses, while Salesforce Essentials excels in AI capabilities for sophisticated customer management.
Features: Zoho CRM offers extensive customization options, API access, and seamless integration with Google Apps, which benefits pipeline management and reporting. Salesforce Essentials provides advanced AI features and a comprehensive Sales and Service Cloud, enhancing customer interactions with efficient automation tools.
Room for Improvement: Zoho CRM could improve its email templates, social integrations, and mobile usability, along with enhancing scalability and third-party integrations. Salesforce Essentials needs better analytics, pricing flexibility, and support for mixed languages. Its interface complexity and lack of intuitive automation are also areas for enhancement.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Zoho CRM supports both public and private cloud deployments, offering flexibility, while Salesforce Essentials primarily uses public clouds. Zoho's customer service receives mixed reviews, contrasting with Salesforce's criticized high response times despite generally effective support.
Pricing and ROI: Zoho CRM is cost-effective with competitive pricing and diverse plans, showing strong ROI through productivity gains. In contrast, Salesforce Essentials is more expensive, with higher pricing and added professional service costs, yet it provides solid ROI by reducing manpower needs.
The ROI was always in a positive direction.
Their service and uptime is phenomenal.
Salesforce Essentials has excellent customer service.
I would evaluate their support and customer service with Salesforce Essentials as pretty decent, diligent, and to the point.
Sometimes, they don't understand what my actual needs are.
The 1.5 deduction from 10 is due to cultural communication differences based on where we're getting the support, as sometimes it takes a couple of times to communicate clearly enough for them to understand the issue.
There are multiple blogs and articles available online for self-help.
It is one of the most scalable systems available.
The system is easy to understand, implement coding, and conduct training.
Zoho CRM is quite scalable; I have worked with clients who started with ten companies and have scaled up to managing 500 employees effectively within Zoho CRM.
The platform's global data centers across regions such as the US, EU, and India ensure data security and privacy through ISO certification and strong role-based security, which is essential for handling sensitive customer data.
Salesforce Essentials has proven stable, with no downtime that affects my work.
Zoho CRM guarantees 99% uptime, with downtime incidents being very rare.
I find Zoho CRM to be 100% stable and reliable as far as I know.
It is usually compliant with data regulation laws and is HIPAA compliant.
Instead of requiring users to think about system navigation and clicking procedures, they can simply follow a workflow that guides them through the process.
There are other competitors, like Zoho CRM, that offer similar features at a lower cost.
Salesforce Essentials operates in a table format where the entire user interface is based on tables, more specifically pivot tables.
The platform does not save code versions similar to GitHub, where you can compare new versions with previous ones.
Some organizations may prefer not to have their data on the internet since Zoho CRM runs as a cloud service.
The main improvement needed for Zoho CRM is introducing SQL code for reports, similar to what's in Zoho Analytics.
The cost of running Salesforce Essentials is significant.
The costs associated with Salesforce Essentials are substantial, which is a drawback compared to competitors who offer similar services for less.
Zoho CRM and all of Zoho's software are quite affordable because they are specifically designed for small and medium businesses.
In terms of my experience with the price and licensing cost, as with setup cost for Zoho CRM, it might not be quite affordable because there are cheaper solutions available.
Their reporting and analytics features have a very significant impact on my company's operational efficiency.
Salesforce Essentials is excellent because it is one of the most flexible CRMs available.
It is very customizable to specific needs.
The most valuable aspect of CRMs, including Zoho CRM, Salesforce, and Microsoft Dynamics, is automation capabilities.
The most valuable feature I have found in Zoho CRM is custom functions. You can achieve anything with it. From integrations with other applications, it is instant.
You can customize everything—what you sell, be it products, services, or projects.
Product | Market Share (%) |
---|---|
Zoho CRM | 1.8% |
Salesforce Essentials | 0.6% |
Other | 97.6% |
Company Size | Count |
---|---|
Small Business | 5 |
Midsize Enterprise | 3 |
Large Enterprise | 7 |
Company Size | Count |
---|---|
Small Business | 44 |
Midsize Enterprise | 6 |
Large Enterprise | 10 |
Salesforce Essentials is a cloud-based CRM tool for businesses seeking flexible, scalable, and customizable solutions to enhance sales and customer support processes.
Designed for seamless integration across multiple channels, Salesforce Essentials includes Sales and Service Cloud to simplify sales tasks and customer management. It enhances finance, credit, and quality processes with user-friendly AI capabilities and predictive analytics. Despite its strengths, there is room for improvement in SAP integration, interface simplicity, and report generation. Cost-effectiveness and support for diverse languages are also potential upgrade areas. Businesses use this CRM solution for lead management, opportunity tracking, and automating sales workflows, transitioning from paper-based methods to digital efficiency.
What are the essential features of Salesforce Essentials?In the retail industry, businesses employ Salesforce Essentials for customer data management and transparency in order processing. Healthcare providers use it for patient engagement and streamlined communication. Financial services utilize it for billing management and compliance, harnessing automation tools for efficient data handling.
Zoho CRM empowers organizations with a complete customer relationship lifecycle management solution for managing organization-wide Sales, Marketing, Customer Support & Service and Inventory Management.
We monitor all CRM reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.