Zoho CRM vs Salesforce Comparison 2023: Which Is Best?

The battle of CRM leaders continues with our in-depth Zoho vs Salesforce Comparison article where we examine the strengths and weaknesses of each platform. 

As businesses worldwide seek to enhance their customer relationships, the choice between these industry giants becomes increasingly important. 

Which customer relationship management option comes out on top? Which one offers more value for your investment? And, ultimately, which platform provides the most powerful tools and features to boost your sales and customer satisfaction? 

Read on as we dive into the nitty-gritty of Zoho CRM and Salesforce to help you make an informed decision.

What is the difference between Zoho and Salesforce?

The main difference between Salesforce and Zoho is their target audience and pricing structure. Salesforce, known for its robust and comprehensive features, is often geared towards larger enterprises, while Zoho provides a more cost-effective solution aimed at small to medium-sized businesses. Of course, this is just scratching the surface.

Salesforce is renowned for its vast ecosystem, offering a wide array of features and integrations. It’s highly customizable and can be tailored to accommodate even the most complex business requirements. However, this extensive functionality often comes with a steeper learning curve and higher costs, making it less accessible for smaller organizations.

On the other hand, Zoho offers a more streamlined, user-friendly platform that still provides a rich set of features, but at a lower price point. While it may not have the same level of customization as Salesforce, Zoho is designed to be easy to use and quick to deploy, which makes it an attractive option for startups and businesses with limited resources or CRM experience.

To gain a deeper understanding of each platform, be sure to read our in-depth Zoho review and Salesforce review to make an informed decision.

Zoho vs Salesforce comparison chart

We've created a handy Zoho vs Salesforce comparison chart that presents their features side by side for your convenience. This easy-to-read visual guide will allow you to quickly identify the strengths and weaknesses of each CRM platform, ultimately helping you choose the solution that aligns best with your business requirements and goals.

Zoho CRM vs Salesforce CRM: a deeper look

Before we dive into the features and functionality of the two platforms, let’s first analyze their pricing plans, free versions, customer support, and knowledgebase resources. 

Zoho vs Salesforce pricing

At the time of this review, Zoho offers four pricing tiers, with costs ranging from $14 to $52 per user per month. Here's a brief overview of the monthly plans:

• Standard: $14/month/user

• Professional: $23/month/user

• Enterprise: $40/month/user

• Ultimate: $52/month/user
   

There’s also an additional plan called Zoho CRM Plus that’s geared toward businesses looking for an all-in-one CX solution to address sales, marketing, and customer service challenges.

Salesforce has four paid plans, ranging from $25 to $300 per user per month. Let’s briefly look a the pricing structure of the Salesforce Sales Cloud: 

• Essentials: $25/month/user

• Professional: $75/month/user

• Enterprise: $150/month/user

• Unlimited: $300/month/user

Salesforce also offers an additional subscription level called Sales Suite that starts at $600/user/month. 

Winner: Zoho

When comparing the pricing plans of both platforms, Zoho emerges as the more budget-friendly option. Its pricing plans are more affordable, which makes it an attractive choice for businesses that want a powerful CRM solution without breaking the bank.
 

Salesforce vs Zoho free versions

Zoho CRM's free plan allows for up to 3 users and offers all the essential features small businesses need. These key functionalities include lead, deal, and contact management, task and event organization, multichannel marketing, and seamless integration with other Zoho applications, among others.

Salesforce doesn’t have a free plan, only a free demo and a trial period. 

Winner: Zoho 

Zoho takes this round as it’s the only one of the two that offers a free plan. 
 

Customer support

Zoho's customer support has some limitations, as phone support is not available even for users on the highest-tier plan. However, you can access chat and email support during business hours.

Salesforce includes standard support in all plans although this is mostly self-service, and you can submit support issues online. There are also paid support plans that include online submissions and telephone service, along with coaching and account management.

Winner: Tie

This round is a tie as both platforms lack in customer support. 

Knowledgebase & learning

Zoho boasts an extensive knowledge base that contains a wealth of learning materials for its users. This includes an engaged online community, free ebooks, tutorials, and instructional videos to enhance your understanding of the platform.

Salesforce provides all users with a range of self-service options through its Salesforce Success Center. This hub allows you to explore content by topic, giving you access to a vast array of FAQs, guides, tutorials, and other valuable resources for a seamless Salesforce experience. 

There’s also Salesforce University, now known as Salesforce Trailhead, which is an online learning platform designed to educate users about Salesforce products and services. 

Winner: Salesforce

When comparing the knowledge bases and learning resources of both platforms, Salesforce comes out ahead, thanks to its richer knowledge base and the comprehensive Salesforce University (Trailhead) program. 
 

Zoho or Salesforce for ease of use?

Zoho stands out for its user-friendly design, which makes it an excellent choice for businesses that can’t afford to invest a great deal of time onboarding their employees to the software. 

Although the interface may not be the most visually striking, its simplicity could be precisely what your business needs. One downside is that you’ll need to do extensive customization and initial setup before it becomes fully operational.

Salesforce offers a user-friendly experience once it's operational; however, similar to Zoho, the setup process can be time-consuming and may present a learning curve for beginners. 

Its wide range of features makes it a potent CRM tool, but this extensive functionality can also make it somewhat challenging to use or become proficient in quickly. In fact, many businesses use a dedicated administrator or a managed services provider (MSP) to handle the CRM implementation and management.

Winner: 

If you’re looking for a platform with a quicker set-up, go with Zoho. But if you have the budget and resources for implementation and management, Salesforce can be a fantastic CRM option. 

Salesforce vs Zoho features & functionality

Now that we've covered the basics, let's dive into each CRM's specific features and tools to see which one performs better in each category.

Email marketing 

Zoho CRM comes with solid email marketing features. Free plan users have access to 10 email templates, email opt-out, and email authentication. The paid plans open the door to features like segmentation, auto-responders, and email relay. 

Connecting the software with platforms like Mailchimp and Zoho Campaigns is also possible with a paid subscription. By integrating Zoho CRM with Zoho Campaigns, you can easily create a mailing list containing all the leads or contacts you want to send campaigns to.

Salesforce users can access customizable templates, personalize emails with dynamic content, and automate their campaigns. The platform includes analytics and reporting tools to track performance and supports A/B testing for optimization. 

Salesforce also integrates with various email marketing tools like Marketing Cloud and Pardot, to offer a seamless experience across platforms. 

Winner: 

While both Salesforce and Zoho CRM offer robust email marketing features, Salesforce generally has a more comprehensive set of tools, such as advanced analytics, reporting, and A/B testing. In addition, Salesforce's seamless integrations with Marketing Cloud, Pardot, and other applications make it a more powerful and versatile email marketing solution.
 

Contact and lead management 

Zoho CRM offers contact and lead management features to help businesses manage sales and customer relationships. Key features include capturing leads from various sources, scoring leads for prioritization, and organizing detailed contact information. 

You can segment leads and contacts for targeted campaigns, nurture leads with automation tools, and integrate Zoho CRM with other applications for a unified customer view. Contact profiles in Salesforce store your complete interaction history with a contact to make it easy to reference previous exchanges for context. 

Additionally, the social listening feature enables you to view messages sent by contacts through social media platforms.

Salesforce CRM comes with advanced contact and lead management features to help businesses manage sales pipelines and customer relationships. You’ll be able to collect leads from multiple sources, assign scores to leads based on different criteria, store and organize detailed contact information, and categorize your leads and contacts. 

New leads can be automatically assigned to the most suitable sales representative to enhance the likelihood of converting the lead into an active opportunity. There’s also an AI tool called Einstein that can sort through leads and prioritize the most important ones, or the biggest deals.

Winner: 

The choice ultimately depends on your business's specific needs, budget, and desired level of complexity. Zoho CRM might be a better fit for smaller businesses or those looking for a more budget-friendly option with essential contact and lead management features. 

Salesforce is more suitable for larger organizations or those that require a higher level of sophistication and additional functionalities such as AI-powered lead prioritization.
 

Sales pipeline and forecast management

With Zoho CRM, you can customize your sales pipeline to suit your business needs and ultimately close more deals. The platform streamlines lead generation, scoring, and conversion, while ensuring that the pipeline stays synchronized. 

Additionally, Zoho CRM provides you with customer insights, an easy way to create notes, tasks, and comments, and tracks relevant customer information. You can also view purchase histories, monitor your sales pipeline, and prioritize prospects.

By customizing your pitches, you can increase your chances of closing deals, and by using funnels, you can identify potential churn points and measure overall sales process efficiency. The two highest-priced plans have access to the Zia prediction builder and AI tools. The Zia prediction builder lets you estimate the likelihood of winning or losing a deal, the likelihood of a user buying a product, and more.

Salesforce CRM uses real-time data to generate accurate sales forecasts, which can help your business make informed decisions and set achievable sales goals. You can easily capture and manage leads, assign them to sales reps, and track progress through the sales pipeline. 

What’s more, the software lets you track deals through every stage of the sales process, from initial contact to closed-won or lost. 

You can create personalized dashboards that display real-time data and performance metrics, and assign tasks to sales reps to ensure they follow up on leads and opportunities in a timely and effective manner. 

Salesforce uses data insights and predictive AI to clarify business decisions that drive revenue.

Winner: 

Both Zoho CRM and Salesforce CRM offer robust sales pipeline management features, which makes it challenging to determine a clear winner. 

Salesforce CRM is known for its advanced features and integration capabilities with a wide range of applications, which is ideal for larger businesses or those requiring a more comprehensive solution. 

On the other hand, Zoho CRM is budget-friendly and offers essential sales pipeline management features that are ideal for smaller businesses.
 

Workflow automation

Using workflow rules in Zoho CRM can help you automate routine tasks by triggering specific actions when certain conditions are met. You can set up to 10 conditions for a single rule, and increase the power of a single workflow 10 times. 

For lead management, Zoho CRM offers assignment rules that help you assign leads based on specific conditions. For example, you can auto-assign hot web form leads to your best closer or cold-call leads to your champion persuader. 

To make repetitive tasks easier, Zoho CRM suggests macros that can be triggered with a single click. Macros can execute a set of actions, such as sending an email, updating a record, and creating a task.

Salesforce offers a simple workflow builder that uses basic "if-then-that" sequence logic. When setting up workflow rules, users can choose between automated actions that occur immediately or time-dependent actions that execute after a set duration. However, Salesforce's automation benefits are gated behind higher plans. 

For example, features like lead registration, collaborative forecasting and rules-based lead scoring are available with a Professional plan subscription, while the workflow and approval automation features are available with the Enterprise plan and higher. 

You can even add on Pardot, the B2B marketing automation solution to automate your marketing efforts. 

Winner: 

While Salesforce provides extensive automation options, they may come at a high price. On the other hand, Zoho is a more budget-friendly option and offers accessibility to businesses with limited budgets.
 

Integrations

Zoho CRM integrates with a wide range of third-party tools, including online meeting apps such as Zoom and GoToMeeting, customer service platforms like Zendesk and Zoho Desk, and popular services like Google, Quickbooks, Microsoft Outlook, Zapier, Trello, Paypal, Google Analytics, and more. 

The platform also integrates seamlessly with other Zoho applications, such as Zoho Meeting and Zoho Cliq, which is particularly beneficial for customers who use multiple Zoho products.

Salesforce is a major player in the CRM industry, but integrating it with other SaaS applications may still be necessary. The platform offers integrations with various software, such as Quickbooks accounting software. Zoho Flow can be used to integrate Salesforce with Zoho, while syncs can be set up with HubSpot or Outlook. 

Users can also use Salesforce AppExchange to create new features by drag-and-dropping. Additionally, for more integrations and add-on flexibility, Salesforce offers an entire API family.

Winner: 

Both tools are great in terms of integration with other business applications. 

A note on Salesforce Zoho integration

Yes, there are options to integrate Zoho CRM with Salesforce. You can easily create a Zoho Salesforce integration via Zoho Flow, which is a platform made by Zoho that lets you connect various third-party apps and automate your workflows. 

You can create flows that trigger actions in one app based on events in another, facilitating seamless data exchange between Zoho CRM and Salesforce. Zapier is another popular integration platform that supports thousands of apps, including Zoho CRM and Salesforce. 

With Zapier, you can create Zaps (automated workflows) that connect your apps and automate tasks. By setting up triggers and actions, you can facilitate data synchronization between Zoho CRM and Salesforce.
 

Analytics and reporting features

Zoho's free plan provides access to standard reports, while custom reports require a paid subscription. The Standard plan allows for 100 custom reports monthly with up to 10 custom fields per module, and the higher three tiers offer unlimited reporting. All paid plans include report scheduling.

Salesforce enables the creation of custom analytics dashboards and reports without coding knowledge, using a user-friendly drag-and-drop system featuring groups, filters, charts, and customizable fields. 

This benefits lead and deal tracking, as well as monitoring sales and customer support team performance. Additionally, the analytics dashboard looks visually appealing on the Salesforce mobile app.

Winner: 

Zoho delivers a wide variety of reports at an affordable price, whereas Salesforce provides top-tier analytics for those willing to invest in its higher cost.
 

Product limitations

Zoho CRM has limitations, including less extensive customization, a less intuitive UI/UX, limited reporting and analytics, and fewer native integrations. It may not scale well for larger enterprises and has received mixed reviews regarding customer support. However, Zoho CRM continuously evolves to address user feedback and improve its platform.

Salesforce CRM's limitations include high costs, complexity, customization challenges, additional integration expenses, and a steep learning curve. Despite these drawbacks, it remains a popular, robust CRM solution for businesses of various sizes, offering extensive features and customization options.

Winner: 

This round is a tie as both tools come with their own limitations. 

Which is better, Salesforce or Zoho? Our conclusion

Choosing between Zoho CRM and Salesforce CRM depends on your business needs, budget, and required features:

Choose Zoho CRM if:

• You're a small or medium-sized business with a limited budget.

• You need a feature-rich CRM at an affordable price.

• You prefer a simpler interface and easier setup process.

Choose Salesforce CRM if:

• You're a medium to large-sized business with a larger budget.

• You require extensive customization and advanced analytics.

• You need a highly scalable CRM solution to grow with your business.

Both Zoho and Salesforce are powerful CRM tools, but your choice ultimately depends on your unique business requirements and priorities. Carefully assess your needs and compare the features of each platform to make an informed decision.

We encourage you to explore our comprehensive post analyzing 15 of the best CRM tools available on the market. By diving into this extensive guide, you’ll discover even more options tailored to your specific needs so that you make the most informed decision for your business.