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Salesforce Sales Cloud vs Zendesk 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:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
6.7
Salesforce Sales Cloud boosts data visibility, efficiency, team collaboration, and productivity, enhancing nonprofits' fundraising and grant competitiveness.
Sentiment score
6.7
Zendesk enhances organizational efficiency and productivity, reducing costs despite licensing fees, with varied but significant financial benefits.
Many first-time CRM users are unaware of all features and best practices, so we guide them with use cases, sample work, or sometimes create a POC to show them how their system will look and the expected outcomes.
Salesforce Sales Cloud is a fantastic tool but requires disciplined data entry by sales personnel and operations teams to maintain data quality.
 

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
6.3
Zendesk excels in responsiveness and issue resolution, though reliance on documentation may delay human support replies.
Support requires a subscription and when taken, the service is pretty nice.
Their support team from Zendesk is excellent, similar to what you have in Freshdesk.
The technical support provided by Zendesk has been very satisfactory.
 

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
7.4
Zendesk scales well for various team sizes; praised for customization, integration, though challenges include data backup and departmental customization.
Salesforce Sales Cloud is totally cloud native, requiring no additional effort for scalability.
Salesforce is highly scalable and operates efficiently.
Zendesk can scale from very small companies to very large ones.
The scalability of Zendesk is still in the same range as Freshdesk.
 

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
7.7
Zendesk is stable and reliable, despite occasional outages, making it ideal for small businesses and startups globally.
Salesforce Sales Cloud is very stable.
I have not experienced any degradation in Salesforce's performance.
The stability has been quite reliable.
 

Room For Improvement

Salesforce Sales Cloud is complex and expensive, with user interface, integration, scalability, and customization challenges impacting usability.
Zendesk users face challenges with interface clumsiness, slow performance, customization, integration, and pricing, affecting overall usability and efficiency.
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.
There could be improvements in integration, which can be achieved with APIs or tools like Zapier.
 

Setup Cost

Salesforce Sales Cloud is costly but valued for ROI, with pricing varying by edition and negotiable for discounts.
Zendesk pricing varies, perceived as high, but offers value and flexibility; negotiation advised for larger teams to optimize costs.
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.
Without negotiation, costs can become expensive.
I would rate the price for Salesforce Sales Cloud as a three, where one is a high price.
It is not the cheapest solution nor the most expensive, but it provides value for money.
 

Valuable Features

Salesforce Sales Cloud enhances sales efficiency with customization, integration, automation, and analytics, appealing to organizations seeking seamless processes.
Zendesk offers user-friendly integration, robust features, and valuable tools, enhancing efficiency and streamlining customer support processes effectively.
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.
It allows us to handle more support cases with fewer people due to its advanced artificial intelligence capabilities.
The benefits I have seen from using Zendesk include faster response times.
 

Categories and Ranking

Salesforce Sales Cloud
Ranking in CRM
2nd
Ranking in Sales Force Automation
2nd
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
117
Ranking in other categories
Opportunity Management (1st), Conversation Intelligence Software (3rd)
Zendesk
Ranking in CRM
17th
Ranking in Sales Force Automation
9th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
61
Ranking in other categories
CRM Customer Engagement Centers (6th), Help Desk Software (8th), IT Service Management (ITSM) (8th), Reporting (15th), Knowledge Management Software (5th), Community Platforms (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2025, in the CRM category, the mindshare of Salesforce Sales Cloud is 3.7%, down from 10.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Zendesk is 1.2%, down from 1.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
CRM Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Salesforce Sales Cloud3.7%
Zendesk1.2%
Other95.1%
CRM
 

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.
JohanSkibdahl - PeerSpot reviewer
Automating customer support with advanced AI capabilities and seamless communication
Zendesk has been invaluable in automating communications such as email and phone calls. It allows us to handle more support cases with fewer people due to its advanced artificial intelligence capabilities. This intelligent tool can manage complex queries before users even realize they are interacting with a non-human. Additionally, we have integrated Zendesk with Datto and Klaviyo, enhancing our workflows.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
University
7%
Computer Software Company
22%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Educational Organization
6%
Performing Arts
6%
 

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 Business29
Midsize Enterprise20
Large Enterprise11
 

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. 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.
What do you like most about Zendesk Support?
I found the user experience with vendors on Zendesk to be straightforward, especially when it comes to understanding and searching for specific tickets. The search and navigation tools are easy to ...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Zendesk Support?
Zendesk's pricing is reasonable. It is not the cheapest solution nor the most expensive, but it provides value for money.
What needs improvement with Zendesk Support?
I'm going to piggyback on what I said regarding Freshdesk concerning what could be better in Zendesk: incorporate more AI. I know many CRM tools are already on the way to do that.
 

Also Known As

Sales Cloud, SFDC, Salesforce
Zendesk Support, Zendesk Guide, Zendesk Sell
 

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
Mailchimp, Tesco, Vimeo, Instacart, Mediaocean, Slack, Uber
Find out what your peers are saying about Salesforce Sales Cloud vs. Zendesk and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
867,370 professionals have used our research since 2012.