Top 15 Salesforce Competitors & Alternatives

With a rich suite of third-party integration options, a powerful mobile app, AI capabilities, and excellent lead & Project management tools, Salesforce lets businesses obtain a comprehensive view of their customer lifecycle. This includes streamlined workflows, automation tools, opportunity tracking, real-time analytics, centralized cloud-based data management, and more. 

Salesforce is among the most popular names in customer relationship management (CRM). So if you aim to hire Salesforce experts, our team at InboxArmy can take your campaign to the next level.
. You can explore the following range of Salesforce alternatives and see which is a perfect amalgam of the features you need to manage your prospects and customer expectations. 

15 Effective Salesforce Alternatives (comparison table)

15 Powerful Salesforce Alternatives (Detailed comparison)

1) Microsoft Dynamics 365

Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales helps team to achieve desired goals. It helps facilitate customer relations, maintain accounts, manage contacts, cultivate sales leads, and develop sales collateral. It has a mobile app to make it easy to manage tasks for smoother customer experiences. 

Salesforce caters to businesses of all sizes across industries, spanning retail, manufacturing, healthcare, and others.

Where Microsoft Dynamics365 outperforms Salesforce

While both software has nearly similar features, but as a competitive Salesforce alternative Microsoft works better for more extensive and more established enterprises, more so the ones already extensively using the Microsoft Office suite. 

As Dynamics 365 offers on-premise server deployment (unlike the entirely cloud-based Salesforce), it’s a suitable option where CRM software is on-site. Moreover, it offers more automation and integration of lead generation and superior online case management compared to Salesforce. It’s also considered easier for creating and customizing reports.

Regarding pricing, both software provides users a free, 30-day trial period, no credit card required plan. In fact, Dynamics 365 offers attractive discounts as you add more software, which may make it more attractive as you start to scale up.

Where Salesforce beats Microsoft Dynamics 365

Salesforce’s starting plans are relatively cheaper in the beginning, which makes it a better alternative for new companies and smaller businesses. It releases new upgrades and updates regularly, thereby addressing loopholes much faster than Dynamics 365, which releases large chunks occasionally.

Furthermore, Salesforce has a more modern user interface (UI). Its CRM tools and capabilities are among the best in the market. Also, it offers developers its framework resulting in 3,000-plus third-party integrations that make it a powerhouse in the CRM marketplace.

2) Hubspot 

HubSpot email marketing and sales software tool to enable businesses to attract and convert potential leads. 

Organized into five specialty hubs, Hubspot is designed as a one-stop shop for all your sales, marketing, CMS, and customer service requirements. 

You can link the HubSpot CRM to your social media profiles, email provider, and more and centralize information. The CRM tools help you host web and landing pages, create email sequences and blogs, and manage interactions with prospects and customers while tracking campaign output and user behavior.

Where Hubspot outperforms Salesforce

Hubspot has a Free plan for unlimited users, while Salesforce does not. The plan’s valuable features include a blog, email marketing segmentation, ads, deal/contact management, and user access controls.

Also, HubSpot’s App Marketplace offers a more tailored and user-friendly experience, a superior interface, and more resourceful sales and marketing tools at accessible price points. In sum, HubSpot is a better salesforce alternative for SME organizations seeking a CRM solution.

Where Salesforce beats Hubspot

Salesforce’s sales reporting, analytics, and forecasting capabilities are more organically built into the software than HubSpot. 

Also, with more customization tools, users can implement specific new features with standalone apps, mix-and-match additional tools, and even access custom coding. The extensive CRM features give Salesforce an advantage over Hubspot. 

Salesforce is better for medium to large-sized businesses seeking to manage leads and leverage sales opportunities across a unified platform using superior collaboration and opportunity assessment tools. It’s more cost-friendly than Hubspot’s automated lead assignment, scoring, and management capabilities.

3) Keap (earlier Infusionsoft)

Keap is a sales and marketing solution providing CRM, marketing automation, and e-commerce functionalities on a single platform.

Keap offers built-in invoicing, a wide range of payment processing integrations, and checkout cart features to drive sales. Its user-friendly automation drastically reduces manual tasks, including sending emails and texts and recording new leads once they submit a form on a business’s website’s landing page or social media page.

Keap offers a dedicated customer success manager. Its straightforward drag-and-drop sales pipeline builders let you set up and run the CRM quickly while providing clear insights into business opportunities.

Where Keap outperforms Salesforce

Keap email marketing is a good fit as salesforce alternative for small businesses across various industries seeking to streamline their sales and enhance customer experiences. It is better equipped to automate their sales and marketing processes compared to CRM-oriented Salesforce.

Furthermore, Keap is also much more focused on automation than Salesforce. It’s comparatively more straightforward to use than Salesforce, and it has a smaller learning curve, which can be easily overcome via phone, email, and FAQ support.

Monthly subscription-based pricing makes it suitable for new users trying out email marketing and those with budget restraints.

Keap offers a quick-start training program, with a 3-day optional on-site training program with live demos also available. This compulsory onboarding initiative starts at $99. It is much cheaper than Salesforce’s Jump Start program, which is priced at $5,000 extra.

Where Salesforce beats Keap

Salesforce is primarily designed as a CRM platform (Keap is primarily for small level business sales and marketing), providing medium and large businesses with tools for sales, marketing, customer service automation, data insights, and integrations. 

Salesforce offers more wholesome enterprise-level features, customization options, and analytic reports for tracking ROI. Salesforce’s core CRM functionalities have greater scope for complexity and extensive customization, and its AI tool helps spot opportunities and automate workflows.

Every Salesforce subscription comes with the Standard support plan, which features guided user experiences and online training paths (response time is a two-days).

4) Zoho CRM

Zoho CRM is another well-established salesforce alternative that enables businesses to generate leads, drive sales and monitor performance. It leverages AI, and its business intelligence capabilities empower remote workforces to achieve desired outcomes efficiently. 

The user-friendly platform offers a suite of features, including sales pipelines, superior analytics, marketing and customer support automation, segmentation, and more, while seamlessly integrating with hundreds of apps and software, facilitating a custom CRM for a wide array of businesses.

Where Zoho CRM outperforms Salesforce

Zoho CRM is not as complex software as Salesforce. It offers industry-specific solutions and is significantly more accessible for beginners to get going quickly. Overall it is more suited to the needs of smaller businesses – chiefly those new to CRM platforms.

One of the key differences between the two is the price, with Zoho CRM being significantly lower than Salesforce. In addition, Zoho CRM’s free edition and monthly billing prevent businesses from being locked into an annual rate.

Zoho focuses on certain factors which Salesforce charges extra. For example, Zoho CRM’s built-in social media capabilities extract data from Google, Twitter, and Facebook to track interactions with leads and existing customers. In Salesforce, you need an add-on for this feature.

Where Salesforce beats Zoho CRM

Overall, even on the lower-priced plans, Sales force automation CRM has richer features and fewer limitations. With almost 3,000 integrated apps offered to users, it easily outshines Zoho CRM regarding third-party app integrations. This is a critical factor for businesses that rely on specific third-party software. 

Though priced higher, it is more scalable and cost-efficient than Zoho and is designed to manage virtually any complex operation. Its analytics and reporting capabilities, customer support, and training are more extensive than Zoho CRM.

In sum, Salesforce is a better alternative for medium to large businesses planning rapid growth.

5) Monday.com

Monday.com is a comprehensive work management platform that helps businesses manage their sales pipeline and CRM in a single workspace, access insights into the sales, calendars, and files.

Where Monday.com outperforms Salesforce

Onboarding and set-up is easier with monday.com. It can be accessed online or downloaded from the Windows or macOS app store and set up in a few minutes.

monday.com’s bright colors, big fonts, intuitive layout, and well-organized features give it a sleeker and more modern UI than Salesforce.

monday.com is an excellent Salesforce alternative as it tops up CRM with a wholesome work management platform. It is flexible and straightforward with workflow automation and has customizable features suitable for businesses without budget limitations or needing an entire CRM tool suite.

Cost-wise, monday.com can also be a salesforce alternative as it is more affordable; its cheapest plan starts at $8/month and has a forever-free plan for those on a tight budget.

Where Salesforce beats Monday.com

Salesforce is a more reliable long-term platform for large enterprises with deep sales cycles and interconnected departments that require a more expansive suite of services.

Salesforce’s comprehensive features and integration capabilities help it manage large volumes of data. It also offers more customer service options, including telephone and email.

6) ActiveCampaign 

ActiveCampaign is a powerful salesforce alternative and user-friendly marketing automation & sales CRM platform catering to the needs of small level businesses on a budget. The web-based software offers email marketing, sales CRM, contact management, and task automation capabilities.

Its enterprise plan focused on the marketing solutions required by larger companies.

Where ActiveCampaign outperforms Salesforce

ActiveCampaign’s email marketing & wide range of automation workflows can be used by businesses of all sizes. It offers those just getting started a seamless experience with a free trial that is easy to sign up for and access all features. Additionally, it doesn’t require any prior training to get started.

ActiveCampaign’s automation builder is more straightforward and more direct than Salesforce, especially for first-time users. The interface enables users to locate the features they need quickly.

ActiveCampaign’s platform, in general, is more user-friendly and more affordable than Salesforce and comes with a wide range of user-friendly tools.

Where Salesforce beats ActiveCampaign 

Compared to ActiveCampaign, Salesforce has more advanced CRM capabilities, stronger reporting, and more robust and plentiful features for managing sales.

In addition, Salesforce’s user-friendly email builder has more features and templates to help write captivating emails. Its dashboards are easy to use and understand, more insightful, and highly customizable.

Though Salesforce’s platform can benefit small scale businesses, it is a better fit for enterprises and large corporations.

7) Zendesk 

Zendesk is one of the leading CRM tools & salesforce alternative offering AI-powered automation and versatile workspaces to boost team productivity and outcomes.

The platform offers a suite of advanced analytics tools, custom dashboards, tools for third-party integrations, and a document library.

Zendesk also has a range of plans, including Teams, Growth, Professional, and Enterprise, catering to businesses of all sizes.

Where Zendesk outperforms Salesforce

While both platforms cater to the CRM needs of large organizations, Zendesk Sell’s CRM is comparatively intuitive and very easy to implement. For this reason, onboarding sales teams is more straightforward than Salesforce. Likewise, it optimizes conversion across the sales funnel.

Also, both CRMs include plans for all business sizes, but Zendesk starting plan at $19 per user/month is more economical than Salesforce’s, starting at $25 per user/month.

Where Salesforce beats Zendesk

Both Zendesk and Salesforce offer similar sales features, and most of the basics teams need to drive sales. However, Salesforce CRM has more complex and advanced features compared to Zendesk.

Furthermore, it boasts more than 3,000 app integrations, which gives much more than Zendesk’s capabilities. This gives businesses more tools for managing sales activities, team collaboration, analytics, and other critical functions.

8) FreshSales 

Freshsales is a robust account management CRM platform & another salesforce alternative. Its predesigned account management module facilitates the storage of data, communications history, customer activity, and specific account-related tasks. The higher-cost plans offer automated data enrichment on those specific profiles.

Freshsales’ account and contact engagement capabilities are well designed with a built-in phone system, live chat, and email facilities.

Where FreshSales outperforms Salesforce

FreshSales offers new users a free plan. Moreover, its paid plans are more scalable and more affordable than Salesforce. The Freshsales’ Growth Plan is free for up to three users, and even the low-cost paid plans are more attractive than Salesforce.

Freshsales is considered significantly more intuitive to implement than Salesforce. Furthermore, features, including account management, phone communications, workflow automation, email, and live chat, are relatively less costly than Salesforce.

For small scale businesses that primarily want to attract and manage more leads and customers, Freshsales CRM with built-in integrations and capabilities is ideal.

Where Salesforce beats FreshSales

For starters, Salesforce is focused on data gathering and processing compared to Freshsales. Likewise, its activity dashboard – the front line of every CRM – is more dynamic, allowing users to conveniently view business activities on a single platform.

If you’re seeking a CRM that has the capabilities to handle a broad spectrum of CRM functions, Salesforce, with its extensive features and rich integrations, scores over Freshsales. The data it collates is highly accurate and can help you make informed business decisions.

9) Less Annoying CRM

Less Annoying CRM is a simple, straightforward CRM tool for small scale businesses seeking to boost sales based on informed decisions and proper organization. It provides tracking leads, contacts, leads, and effective follow-ups sans the extra clutter.

Less Annoying CRM’s uncomplicated pricing offers unlimited contacts, companies, custom fields, and pipelines, 25GB file storage per user, mobile access, and more at $15.00 per user/month. You can manage users or opt-out at any time. Furthermore, the platform offers 30 days of free usage for you to decide.

Where Less Annoying CRM outperforms Salesforce

The most significant advantage of Less Annoying CRM is its excellent customer support. The platform offers every customer free, personalized support, regardless of size.

This gives users a relatively effortless learning curve based on the support in understanding how to use the platform optimally for desired outcomes. 

Where Salesforce beats Less Annoying CRM

Though Less Annoying CRM offers excellent support, it lacks the advanced automation features of Salesforce CRM. So, for businesses looking for email automation and set up campaigns, Salesforce definitely offers much more.

Another area where Salesforce outperforms Less Annoying CRM is in terms of functionalities, which is rather generic in the latter. In sum, Salesforce is an obvious choice for established businesses looking to scale up operations and growth.

 10) Neon CRM

Neon CRM is a cloud-based CRM software suite designed for nonprofit organizations of all sizes.

It provides a range of capabilities to facilitate fundraising, donor and membership management, event registration and management, customized reporting, and more.

Where Neon CRM outperforms Salesforce

Neon CRM is easier to learn and significantly more affordable than Salesforce. It’s an ideal choice for organizations seeking people-focused donor database capabilities. It offers personalized training and consulting for present clients by industry experts.

Neon CRM enables organizations to build communities, scale their footprint, and motivate audiences to support the mission through industry-specific tools and capabilities for automation, connected payment features, compliances, donation pages, forms, and more.

Where Salesforce beats Neon CRM

Salesforce, with its advanced features, accessible real-time data, robust reporting tools, and superior integrations, is more suitable for organizations in the mid to large market segment. Moreover, its advanced social and mobile features let you connect with customers wherever they are.

Salesforce’s excellent relationship-linking capabilities also make it ideal for organizations seeking to manage relationships better by ‘linking’ customer (donor) records and interactions.

11) Insightly

Insightly is a cloud-based platform squarely focused on small and medium businesses, with tools that support every phase of the customer lifecycle.

The software lets organizations achieve sales activities, build customer relationships and manage projects to meet customer requirements. Several larger companies have also successfully leveraged this platform.

Where Insightly outperforms Salesforce

Though Insightly has fewer features than Salesforce, it’s suitable for small and medium businesses with numerous features focused on their specific needs. It is much easier to use than Salesforce.

One of the most significant advantages of Insightly is you can leverage the critical CRM functionalities in a flexible pricing structure, depending on your budget and needs.

Price-wise, though the base plan at $29 is more costly than Salesforce, the subsequent plans are significantly cheaper.

Where Salesforce beats Insightly

Salesforce is one of the leading CRM systems because of its wide-ranging features and integrations with other SaaS platforms. In contrast, Insightly lacks Salesforce’s advanced reporting features, CRM mapping, and automation capabilities.

Salesforce is a better option for large enterprises seeking to scale up operations. Likewise, businesses looking for a CRM with strong analytic tools for their sales operations and outstanding workflows will benefit from using Salesforce.

12) Bitrix24

Bitrix24 is designed as an online workplace with solutions for managing tasks and projects, video conferencing, chats, telephony, building websites, CRM marketing and analytics, and much more.

Aimed at simplifying and boosting efficiencies of business processes, Bitrix24 can be accessed via the browser, desktop, or mobile app, which is fully connected as a single online service.

Where Bitrix24 outperforms Salesforce

Bitrix24’s adaptability to professional requirements, make it a good Salesforce alternative. Its features perform equally well, sometimes even outperforming Salesforce, in nearly all aspects. Bitrix24’s multi-operational platform lets you create business sites and then integrate its CRM.

Some of Bitrix24’s features, including integrated telephony, document and time management, email server, partner portals, self-hosted option, and sales training, are unavailable in Salesforce. Bitrix24 has mobile and web-based versions, making it easy to access anywhere.

Finally, Bitrix is more affordable. Though Salesforce starts at $25 per user/month, it quickly jumps to $300 per user/month while trying to lock you in an annual contract. And, Salesforce charges extra for implementing even slight modifications.

Where Salesforce beats Bitrix24

Bitrix24 primarily caters to advanced users having prior experience in CRMs. In contrast, Salesforce enables businesses to automate sales and conveniently maintain customer relationships.

Salesforce’s sales forecasts and third-party integrations outshine Bitrix 24. Salesforce also boasts a great community based on its position as one of the most popular CRMs worldwide.

Overall, being a cloud-based CRM, Salesforce is more user-friendly and does not require any set-up or installation.

 14) Pipedrive

Pipedrive is an established sales pipeline tool aimed at helping businesses to close deals. Designed as a CRM platform explicitly made for sales teams by salespeople, Pipedrive facilitates pipeline tracking across a transparent, visual platform and is suited for sales teams of any size.

Users can implement customized pipelines with actions, monitor progress, and automate workflows to reduce time wastage on admin tasks. 

Where Pipedrive outperforms Salesforce

Pipedrive offers many essential CRM features, including visual sales pipelines, mobile apps, and custom dashboards.

Pipedrive simplifies many business processes saving time on admin tasks while offering an excellent overview of your pipelines. Along with being visually more appealing, Pipedrive’s detailed reporting and forecasting capabilities make it a powerful tool.

Furthermore, it’s much more user-friendly and affordable than Salesforce. With a small learning curve and access to support center resources, Pipedrive is ideal for beginners and CRM experts.

Where Salesforce beats Pipedrive

Salesforce has more complex lead management tools, social media tracking, and leadership tools for team members, which are not present in Pipedrive.

Furthermore, in contrast to Pipedrive’s limited integration capabilities, Salesforce offers around 3000 third-party integrations and highly advanced features, though at a higher price tag. For this reason, Salesforce is better for enterprises and big companies that need a CRM which supports thousands of built-in tools to handle complex sales processes.

 15) Salesflare

Salesflare is a cloud-based solution that enables small B2B companies and start-ups to automate data collection and engagement tracking. This helps streamline sales, manage customer relationships, and boost conversions while minimizing time on manual tasks like data collation.

The platform facilitates collecting contact data from different sources, tracking customer interactions, scanning opportunities, lead management, and monitoring outcomes and revenue growth. Requiring zero manual input, Salesflare can be accessed through desktop, mobile, and the sidebar of a user’s email account.

Where Salesflare outperforms Salesforce

For starters, Salesflare CRM focuses on small or new businesses. Though relatively new, Salesflare CRMs’ promising capabilities make tasks easier for users. Its built-in dashboards and intuitive interface are easier to use compared to Salesforce. 

Both offer a free trial. Salesflare plans start at $29 per user/month compared to Salesforce’s starting plan at $25 per user/month. However, Salesflare is more affordable than Salesforce, as the jump between packages is less steep.

Salesflare collates data from different sources, thus making contact and campaign management simple and easy. Its robust social integrations, sales analytics, email tracking, and pipeline management capabilities make it a worthy Salesforce alternative.

Where Salesforce beats Salesflare

Salesforce is a reputed name in the CRM space. Businesses of any size can benefit from Salesforce. However, its in-depth customization functionalities for dashboard creation and capabilities are more suited to the needs of bigger companies with more complex processes and good data literacy. This includes organizing customer contact data, managing leads and opportunities, tracking outcomes, and sales forecasting.

 16) Leadsquared CRM

LeadSquared CRM provides marketing, sales, and onboarding automation. It caters to high leads and high-velocity businesses with a vast range of sales channels and teams. 

LeadSquared’s lead scoring, marketing and sales insights, segmentation capabilities, landing pages, role-based user access, and other capabilities serve businesses in different industries. 

The platform runs on most web browsers and has an Android and iOS app.

Where Leadsquared CRM outperforms Salesforce

LeadSquared’s adaptive platform is comparatively a lot easier to use and learn than Salesforce. It is also significantly more cost-effective compared to Salesforce. More so, with Salesforce, you have to purchase separate modules. This pushes up customization costs and the implementation time too.

Also, LeadSquared provides individualized services to meet industry-specific CRM requirements. Its critical advantages include lead management, marketing and sales process automation and management, and integration capabilities with different tools used in sales and marketing.

Furthermore, being GDPR and HIPAA-compliant, LeadSqaured is also a suitable alternative for the healthcare sector.

One of the biggest benefits of LeadSquared CRM is that, being a younger company, it frequently launches updates to enhance its service. This gives it an advantage over Salesforce, which is not as regular with updates.

Where Salesforce beats Leadsquared CRM

Salesforce’s scalability is its biggest plus-point – it has the ability to meet the volume and complex needs of fast-growing businesses.

In addition, Salesforce CRM users benefit from a shared main framework that integrates all the sales, marketing, sales, and commerce functionalities in one place.

Although Salesforce may be a bit steeper than LeadSquared, its comprehensiveness, integration capabilities, and efficiencies make it a wholesome CRM package for advanced users.

Summary

Whether your business is a new start-up or already established, a reliable technology partner can help you leverage data-driven insights to spot new opportunities to drive growth. 

You’re in the right place if you’re looking for a suitable CRM software that will best fit your business.

InboxArmy is an email marketing creative agency offering helping businesses of all sizes make the most of CRM solutions. Learn more about how we can help you with expert vendor evaluation and migration here. We will help you find the perfect platform that meets your needs.