Zoho CRM alternatives and competitors

I am a Salesforce consultant for multiple clients, and we have different scenarios wherein the Salesforce Sales Cloud has been used. Use cases include different scenarios and different industries, so from banking to automobile industries, to NGOs, nonprofits too.

One use case is for a client in the automobile industry. There is a sales process, sales funnel, that has been built for the particular company, according to the region. When there is a lead that comes into Salesforce, according to the region, they will be assigned to a particular salesperson. If the lead is converted, then an opportunity has been created and the opportunity is nurtured through Salesforce. There are different tasks that will then be allotted to the particular salesperson in each opportunity stage.

Sales Cloud in particular is a very, very powerful tool, and we can build on top of the existing platform for the requirements each company has. So if there is a particular workflow that we need to build, particular validation, or there is a particular scenario that we need to capture which is not there in Salesforce, or not in the inbuilt system -- then Salesforce is a very powerful tool that helps us to build that through tools like Process Builder or Flows, or even write code to achieve these scenarios. It's a very dynamic system.

One valuable feature with Sales Cloud is the opportunity for nurturing leads, and there are different sales processes that we can establish in Salesforce to do this. Having different sales processes helps us to diversify the whole system for different regions or different products. The same processes will help a lot in managing or helping out the salespersons to nurture those opportunities.

I've been totally into Salesforce, and almost everything can be achieved through either the configuration part or doing customization. One area that needed improvement though was with the record views. The record views were not aligned, and they have no split views. So to see each record, we had to go back and then select another one from the list, but that has been fixed. One current issue is the system requirement for running Salesforce Lightning. For current computers, it works fine, but for people who are using old systems, there is a lag in loading the Lightning pages. Lightning is the new interface that Salesforce has for the records and seeing the whole data. So if there is an old system used, or if the infrastructure is not correct, then customers are having an issue and it's taking a lot of time to load.

An additional feature that could be added is the email templates. At the moment, it is actually still not a feature to set up email templates. There are two views in Salesforce, the Classic and the Lightning. To set email templates and have those processes, we have to go back to Classic and then do the whole process. It would be beneficial if everything was happening in Lightning itself so that people don't have to switch back and forth. But I think that's down the roadmap of Salesforce to have everything in Lightning.

I've been working with Salesforce for the past five to six years.

With the cloud infrastructure, the stability of the solution is pretty good. There has not been much downtime, or I've never seen any downtime happening in my experience with Salesforce at all. They are evolving in performance, too. The transition from Classic to Lightning was a major shift they had, and that has increased a lot of performance. The solution has been more powerful since it was transitioned to Lightning. If you don't have the right infrastructure, then we see performance issues.

Salesforce is super easy to scale. If you want to add users, you just need the licenses. If you want to add additional features, scalability is not an issue with Salesforce.

The solution is suitable for every sized company. It makes things easier, even for small companies. The amount of manual work can be reduced if they have a proper automated system in place.

We've been in contact with technical support multiple times. They're very responsive and it seems we get an immediate response back from the technical team. In the case where the issues has not been resolved from the lower level, they escalate it to the technical team. I would say they say the technical support process is quite good. But for that too, there is a package I think needs to be bought for high-end technical support. For regular users, there is a certain level of technical support that Salesforce offers, and then if you need more, we need to have an engagement for that.

We have some experience with Zoho CRM, but I wouldn't say it is as comparable as Salesforce. It has a different set of Salesforce setups in Zoho.

With adding multiple sales processes or more fields to the layouts, Salesforce is more flexible and bigger than Zoho.

The initial setup of Salesforce is pretty straightforward. The deployment process is quite easy. With that being said, I would say there are a lot of instances where this pretty straightforwardness has been misused. There need to be some guidelines or DevOps processes in place so that people don't just push things to production.

The solution does not require any onsite maintenance; since it's cloud, the maintenance is done automatically. Since the platform is evolving, there are cases where they add in a few security points or depreciate a few old processes. Then we might need some enhancements done to the work that we did.

Just one developer can have test classes built in and then push it over to production. There have been cases where we see that even one admin team in companies just does the whole end-to-end, adding the component, then pushing to production. It is not an extensive, manpower-required process.

Pricing wise, I'm not sure how affordable the solution is, because for each market it's different. For small companies, I don't know how the pricing point works, but feature wise, I would say it is a very useful tool for all sized companies.

My advice to any company implementing any product is to have their processes lined up, at least on paper first, rather than going to a system. I've seen this happen with a few clients. Their structure is not set, but they come into the CRM and then they build on the go, which creates a lot of best practice issues when they do that.

Before implementing any CRM, I would suggest that any company should have a proper sales process or their processes lined up, and have a clear idea of what they want to happen in the system so that that can be translated easily onto the system.

I would rate Sales Cloud a nine out of ten because I'm totally into Salesforce and I appreciate the product a lot.

Pipedrive's is a CRM solution that handles deal management, daily sales activities, arrangements, monitoring, and workflow automation. It covers the whole sales chain from lead generation to closing. We use Pipedrive with WhatsApp because less than half of our salespeople communicate by email. We text through WhatsApp for daily communication.

When a sale is made on the website, any information the customer enters into the e-form, chatbot, global meeting feature, etc. is fed into Pipedrive, which can automatically reply to the customer by email or WhatsApp. It also forwards those files to the salesperson servicing that account. 

Pipedrive reduced our workload by enabling us to automate many daily tasks. 
When you do things the traditional way, it's hard to generate a proposal, sales quotation, sales order, etc. You can create a template in Pipedrive to make it easier, so it's less hassle to generate and send documents. The e-signature feature makes it effortless to go paperless and do everything electronically.

Pipedrive's most valuable feature is reporting and insights. The CRM shows the database and lets the salespeople arrange their daily activities. The insights are essential from a management point of view because it helps the sales staff improve or adjust their whole sales cycle, activities, and quality.

Pipedrive could be more efficient. I want the management to be more transparent so it's easier to monitor the sales team's activities and results and do business forecasting. It would help them to improve the quality of the sales cycle.

We've been using Pipedrive for more than a year.

Pipedrive is relatively stable, but the performance is lackluster compared to other solutions in this space. 

Our team has only three people, including sales, but Pipedrive may not be enough for a huge enterprise. Salesforce or HubSpot might be more appropriate. Pipedrive could work at a company with upwards of 500 users. Still, HubSpot or Salesforce would be a better fit for a huge corporation like Apple or Tesla.

I was using HubSpot before Pipedrive. I primarily switched because of cost.

Implementation is simple. It depends on your customers. Some of our customers are doing configuration and setup themselves and others are only business users. Our IT team knows how to set it up. We can call in an implementation service when we need help, but most of this is lightweight.

Pipedrive is straightforward from a technical point of view. They have a lot of partners doing further development on plugins you can use to integrate with other systems. If you don't want to develop integration yourself through API, you can acquire Sapphire to do it.

Pipedrive offers a lot of value for the money. It isn't an expensive solution, and it has some additional functions we need. For example, a document solution that offers e-signature and document generation costs around $50 per user monthly, but Pipedrive includes all those features plus CRM and workflow automation. 

Pipedrive is the most cost-effective in terms of the balance between cost and features. I would take Pipedrive over HubSpot or Zoho CRM. It's well-positioned on the market.

I rate Pipedrive seven out of 10. I recommend it. I would rate it higher, but it's not a complete solution. It's mainly for sales. Other products integrate and automate sales and marketing functions. I think Salesforce is better than Pipedrive because it has that marketing module.  However, Pipedrive is more suitable for small or medium-sized businesses. I rate it nine for smaller companies. Pipedrive can operate globally because it's easy to sell to different countries. We do business with Australia, Hong Kong, Singapore, and England.

An example of our use of HubSpot CRM is for our client based in the UK, e.g. a company with many small offices, which requires us to buy a professional solution such as HubSpot, or another cloud-based solution, as it can be useful for them.

Our clients have employees who work remotely, and employees who work from the main office, which can be difficult, but HubSpot CRM makes it easier and is very useful in that type of situation.

It's also a solution that can be used for marketing purposes.

HubSpot CRM is a software that's very easy to use. It's very useful and setting it up is very easy. I can set it up myself without any problem, as it's a web solution. These are the things I like about it.

HubSpot CRM integrations could be improved. I'd also like to see better pricing for the paid version of this software.

I've been using HubSpot CRM for three years.

HubSpot CRM is a stable product.

I find HubSpot CRM scalable.

We have customers we had to switch from other CRM solutions to HubSpot CRM, upon request, or on demand. If our customers ask about a growth CRM that's free to use, we can provide them with HubSpot CRM.

If the customer needs a CRM solution for a large project, or if the customer is from a large company or organization, we can provide Microsoft Dynamics instead.

HubSpot CRM has a straightforward setup.

HubSpot CRM has a free version, and small companies, e.g. our clients with only 10 to 15 employees, like to use solutions which are free.

We're on a yearly subscription with HubSpot CRM. This is the standard for any project in my country. The paid version of HubSpot CRM needs to be priced better.

I was able to use other CRM software, e.g. Zoho and SugarCRM.

We have 1000 users of HubSpot CRM in our company. Its deployment and maintenance is handled by 10 technical specialists. We have administrators for it, but no developers, as it is a web solution.

We have not contacted their technical support team.

When our customers ask us about other CRM solutions, e.g. Marketo and HubSpot, we  And we kind of propose other CRM solutions.

HubSpot CRM is a standard resource for small companies which has a very easy setup. It's a standard solution that workers use. I will recommend it to others.

I'm rating HubSpot CRM an eight out of ten, especially because it's used by businesses.