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Salesforce Sales Cloud vs Salesforce Service Cloud vs ServiceNow comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

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

ROI

Sentiment score
6.7
Salesforce Sales Cloud boosts data visibility, efficiency, team collaboration, and productivity, enhancing nonprofits' fundraising and grant competitiveness.
Sentiment score
6.5
Salesforce Service Cloud achieves 135% ROI by enhancing efficiency, productivity, and service business, despite implementation costs.
Sentiment score
6.6
ServiceNow enhances efficiency and cost savings, providing ROI within a year, despite initial costs and adoption challenges.
Salesforce Sales Cloud is a fantastic tool but requires disciplined data entry by sales personnel and operations teams to maintain data quality.
We are not just implementing Salesforce Sales Cloud; we need to understand what the customer wants to achieve in 5 to 10 years.
Salesforce Service Cloud requires significant maintenance effort to see ROI.
They have removed the costs associated with on-prem infrastructure, including data center costs, power costs, and physical server costs.
The return on investment is good when implementing for ourselves and for other clients.
Manually, there are huge numbers that come up because these integrated tools help organizations make the right decisions with all the information in one place, while manual methods lack visibility.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.0
Salesforce Sales Cloud's support is efficient and helpful when paid, but free support is slow and basic.
Sentiment score
5.6
Salesforce Service Cloud is praised for helpful support and community, despite some critiques on initial response and proactiveness.
Sentiment score
6.9
ServiceNow support is praised for responsiveness and resources but experiences mixed reviews due to delays and inconsistencies.
Support requires a subscription and when taken, the service is pretty nice.
Unless you have premium support, assistance is restricted.
Salesforce directly does not give you the support, and it is through the partner that you have to go, leading to some time delays.
The support is exemplary and deserves a perfect rating.
Obtaining support for maintenance is the current challenge because they don't have a presence in the local market.
I have contacted them four to five times over the past two years, and they have been quite helpful.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.7
Salesforce Sales Cloud is scalable and adaptable across organizations but faces challenges with performance and licensing impact on scalability.
Sentiment score
8.1
Salesforce Service Cloud offers exceptional scalability for enterprise growth, handling increased users and transactions seamlessly across industries.
Sentiment score
7.4
ServiceNow is scalable and effective for global operations, though performance issues and pricing concerns exist for some users.
Salesforce is highly scalable and operates efficiently.
Salesforce Sales Cloud is totally cloud native, requiring no additional effort for scalability.
Salesforce Service Cloud is the most advanced in scalability, rating around nine to ten.
Nobody can compete with Salesforce Service Cloud's scalability.
There are no limitations or performance issues with ServiceNow; it is cloud-based, so it is highly scalable and performs well.
It is capable of vertical scaling with no issues.
I rate the scalability of ServiceNow as an eight on a scale of one to ten.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.1
Salesforce Sales Cloud is stable and reliable, with high ratings, minor issues from configuration, and occasional performance slowdowns with large datasets.
Sentiment score
7.9
Salesforce Service Cloud is highly stable, reliable, quickly resolves issues, and is positively rated across industries for dependability.
Sentiment score
7.7
ServiceNow is widely praised for its stability and reliability, with efficient support and minimal downtime, making it dependable.
Salesforce Sales Cloud is very stable.
I have not experienced any degradation in Salesforce's performance.
We rarely encounter stability issues with Salesforce Service Cloud, although when they occur, they cause significant disruption.
It is cloud-based, so it is highly scalable and performs well.
I haven't faced any issues with stability; I've rarely seen any downtime.
ServiceNow is stable enough.
 

Room For Improvement

Salesforce Sales Cloud is complex and expensive, with user interface, integration, scalability, and customization challenges impacting usability.
Salesforce Service Cloud requires improvements in email integration, UI/UX, reporting, analytics, and cost efficiency for better user experience.
ServiceNow needs to enhance user interface, licensing, support, integration, and analytics to improve user experience and satisfaction.
Compared to AWS, it is slower, which could be a hindrance.
With today's generative AI capabilities like ChatGPT, it should be possible to directly communicate with the software rather than navigating through the entire system manually.
Salesforce Service Cloud should focus on simplification.
Configuring Flows in Salesforce Service Cloud is very difficult.
The pricing of Salesforce Service Cloud is expensive compared to other solutions like our current SAP CRM, which is much cheaper.
It makes no sense in my opinion, and they should offer the team at the front to help customize the product to fit each company's needs, as every company has different demands and forms of submitting a request that need adjustment over time.
There is a need for bug or error tracking in ServiceNow.
Their customer support could make it a great solution, not just product support but also their relationship with partners and training initiatives in different regions.
 

Setup Cost

Salesforce Sales Cloud is costly but valued for ROI, with pricing varying by edition and negotiable for discounts.
Salesforce Service Cloud is seen as costly but negotiable, with user-based pricing offering potential ROI through strategic use.
ServiceNow is costly with complex licensing, requiring negotiation and flexibility, especially burdensome for small and regional businesses.
Without negotiation, costs can become expensive.
This happened for the first time because of the new CEO, Arundhati, who revolutionized pricing strategies, allowing discounts of 60-70% for Salesforce Sales Cloud in India.
I would rate the price for Salesforce Sales Cloud as a three, where one is a high price.
The approximate licensing costs for Salesforce Service Cloud are around three hundred dollars a year per user.
Salesforce Service Cloud is expensive.
ServiceNow's pricing can be justified if more functionality is required.
ServiceNow does come with a price.
ServiceNow is expensive for all regions.
 

Valuable Features

Salesforce Sales Cloud enhances sales efficiency with customization, integration, automation, and analytics, appealing to organizations seeking seamless processes.
Salesforce Service Cloud is praised for customization, integration, automation, user-friendliness, scalability, and features enhancing productivity and visibility.
ServiceNow offers flexible customization, fast development, and strong integration, enhancing efficiency across IT, HR, and finance with robust reporting.
Its easy-to-navigate interface aids in delivering clear vision and organization, especially for sales and business management.
The Einstein Analytics and the inbuilt reporting are very useful for keeping track of pipeline movement.
The biggest benefit of the Salesforce Sales Cloud is a centralized point, a centralized source of truth for customer-related information; you centralize all the information in a single database, and that's the biggest benefit.
Salesforce Service Cloud improved our organization with its mobile capabilities.
Salesforce Service Cloud offers pre-built packages that are best in class.
Usability is one of the strongest characteristics of Salesforce Service Cloud.
ServiceNow provides a wide range of functionality, covering all the necessary modules, unlike Jira which is primarily for IT.
Automation capabilities are impressive, bolstered by a vast repository of out-of-the-box connectors and plugins that facilitate integration with various applications worldwide.
The features of ServiceNow that I find most valuable include its ability to easily access ticket details if you know the ticket number, monitor the timeline of when the ticket was created, and see the current status.
 

Mindshare comparison

CRM Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Salesforce Sales Cloud3.7%
Microsoft Dynamics CRM4.5%
SAP CRM4.1%
Other87.7%
CRM
CRM Customer Engagement Centers Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Salesforce Service Cloud13.7%
Microsoft Dynamics CRM19.1%
ServiceNow Customer Service Management9.3%
Other57.900000000000006%
CRM Customer Engagement Centers
IT Service Management (ITSM) Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
ServiceNow21.5%
JIRA Service Management8.8%
BMC Helix ITSM8.1%
Other61.6%
IT Service Management (ITSM)
 

Featured Reviews

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.
MARIA PILAR CANDA - PeerSpot reviewer
Improved customer service and post-sales support saves time
The solution could be more affordable as it's quite expensive for some organizations, particularly middle-sized companies. Additionally, finding technical talent for improving the solution is challenging. Configuring Flows in Salesforce Service Cloud is very difficult. There are very few technical people in the market capable of implementing all the flows that clients need at this moment. It's primarily a matter of talent limitation, and flow is the technical mechanism of Salesforce Service Cloud for process automation. In general, while they have the knowledge and help solve problems, finding the right person to address specific issues is very challenging.
Nikhil Gohil - PeerSpot reviewer
Enables effective incident management and seamless workflow automation with valuable mobile accessibility
I haven't thought deeply about improvements for ServiceNow or what might be missing right now. There are so many modules and features in ServiceNow that I haven't explored them all, so it's hard to say what might be missing or should be improved. I suggest making the cost more affordable for smaller companies.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
University
6%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Performing Arts
9%
Computer Software Company
9%
Computer Software Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Government
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business54
Midsize Enterprise26
Large Enterprise40
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business19
Midsize Enterprise13
Large Enterprise24
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business54
Midsize Enterprise36
Large Enterprise163
 

Questions from the Community

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. Imp...
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...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Salesforce Service Cloud?
The approximate licensing costs for Salesforce Service Cloud are around three hundred dollars a year per user.
What needs improvement with Salesforce Service Cloud?
The solution could be more affordable as it's quite expensive for some organizations, particularly middle-sized compa...
What is your primary use case for Salesforce Service Cloud?
We have many clients with Salesforce Service Cloud and numerous use cases. The main use is in the sales area rather t...
Which solution is better for developing non-ITSM applications: OutSystems or Service Now?
The short answer is that OutSystems is far better for 2 main reasons. Firstly, with Service Now you are locked into t...
Would you choose ServiceNow over Microsoft PowerApps?
Hi Netanya, I will choose ServiceNow because ServiceNow is a very good tool compared to Microsoft PowerApp. Because ...
What do you like most about ServiceNow?
The solution has a user-friendly interface.
 

Also Known As

Sales Cloud, SFDC, Salesforce
Service Cloud
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

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
Stanley Black & Decker, Coca-Cola, Activision, Wells Fargo, Spotify, Aldo, Philips, The Red Cross, Blue Shield of California, Sprouts Farmers Market, Direct Energy Solar, Inspirato, Kiva
AAA, AstraZeneca, Becton, Dickinson and Company, Broadcom, Christus Health, Epicor, Equinix, GE Capital, Intuit, KPMG, Loyola Marymount University, OshKosh, Quantas, RedHat, Royal Bank of Scotland, Swiss Re, U.S. Department of Energy, Safeway, Yale University, and Zillow    
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Salesforce, SAP and others in CRM. Updated: August 2025.
867,349 professionals have used our research since 2012.