Best Alternatives to Salesforce

Our research found that HubSpot is the best Salesforce alternative, offering a similarly scalable platform with lots of features and impressive analytics. Plus, HubSpot offers a robust free plan with plenty of functionality to get started right away.

Salesforce is the most popular CRM in the world and for good reason. It’s become an incredibly comprehensive platform over its 20+ years of life, known for its in-depth reporting dashboards and helpful tools for sales, marketing, and customer service organizations. It’s not perfect, though, with a high price tag, no free plan, and a complicated interface, which is why we’ve collected some alternatives to Salesforce for you to choose from.

So, with all these great Salesforce alternatives on the market, would we ward you off choosing Salesforce entirely? No chance – Salesforce is a market leader for good reason, and between best-in-class features and some surprisingly competitive tailored pricing plans there are plenty of reasons to opt for Salesforce.

In this guide, we’ll examine the merits of each of Salesforce’s main competitors, and those of Salesforce itself, helping you to decide which is the best CRM software for your own business, whether it be for marketing, sales, or customer service.

In This Guide:

Choosing a CRM platform is all about finding the right fit – something that offers the features you need, and the customizability every business requires. Our advice is to always seek out a personalized quote for the needs and scale of your business – and you can do this using our simple, no-obligation CRM quotes form. That way, you can make sure you’re investing in a CRM solution that’s fit for your purposes and budget.

Top Alternatives to Salesforce CRM

It’s tempting to think that all CRM platforms must be the same, since they all have similar goals in mind, but nothing could be further from the truth. Each platform has its own focus and specialization, as well as various supporting services that will create a unique fit for each company. Here’s a quick rundown of the Salesforce alternatives we’ll be looking at in this article:

• • • HubSpot — A “freemium” CRM that offers its basic-tier CRM platform for free, and features stellar marketing tools for your business.
    • Freshworks CRM — A highly intuitive, feature-packed CRM that has a respectable free plan.
    • Microsoft Dynamics — A top choice if integration with existing Microsoft business services and platforms is key.
    • SugarCRM — A flexible, intuitive CRM platform with loads of customization options.
    • Zoho CRM — An easy to use CRM that is ideal for small businesses that still need a lot of functionality.

Customer Relationship Management is a key part of any business strategy. With the right CRM platform, companies can keep better track of their customers, convert leads into recurring customers, and retain current customers with the right attention. If you’re having trouble deciding which CRM platform to use, this article will help by running through the highlights of the biggest competitors to Salesforce, as well as taking a brief look at Salesforce itself.

HubSpot CRM

The key appeal of HubSpot is also its biggest differentiation from Salesforce: it starts by offering the basic HubSpot CRM for free, with virtually no limits on users or features for the basic CRM for following up on leads, opportunities, and tracking your customer database. The company prides itself on offering a product that takes “minutes to learn,” and provides a dashboard with an at-a-glance view for all ongoing deals. It also integrates with Gmail and Outlook to easily pull in email data, for better visibility of customer interactions within your organization.

HubSpot Features

For any business that needs to go beyond the basic CRM, HubSpot offers additional CRM-related platforms called ‘hubs’ for one-to-one marketing, sales (beyond the basic CRM), and customer service. All of these hubs have free tiers; however, the added features that most businesses would want requires a monthly subscription.

HubSpot Pricing

HubSpot pricing varies pretty dramatically based on which hubs you’re interested in taking advantage of, with each adhering to three pricing plans: Starter, Professional, and Enterprise. If you’re interested in marketing, sales, and service hubs, the price is going to be pretty hefty, particularly for the enterprise-level plans. That’s the benefit of HubSpot, though: you can mix and match depending on your needs to save a bit of money.

Why HubSpot Is a Good Salesforce Alternative

HubSpot is a better alternative to Salesforce because of the marketing features available. In fact, HubSpot is the best CRM available for marketing features, according to our research. HubSpot’s marketing hub offers ad management and retargeting, conversational chatbots, and landing pages, and that’s all found in the Starter plan. Simply put, if you’re looking for a CRM with marketing capabilities, HubSpot is your absolute best bet.

On top of that, HubSpot offers a free plan, which Salesforce doesn’t, but it’s also better than other free plans on this list, like Zoho CRM. It offers significantly more functionality across sales, marketing, and customer service, with Zoho CRM offering the most basic options compared to HubSpot’s surprisingly advanced free offerings.

Check out our guide HubSpot Pricing for more, or see our full HubSpot vs Salesforce guide

Freshworks CRM

Freshworks is the umbrella under which Freshsales, Freshmarketer, and Freshdesk operate under. These offerings are typically a bit more affordable than your average CRM and offers enough features to get you through. With a highly intuitive UI and a powerful feature set including built-in phone and email, AI-based lead scoring, visual deal pipeline, intelligent workflow automation, and customizable visual reports and dashboards, it gives businesses everything they need to manage their sales without having to juggle multiple tools.

Freshworks CRM Features

At these prices, it’s understandable that Freshworks doesn’t have all the features of a Salesforce or a Hubspot, particularly when it comes to data visualization and analytics. However, at this price, it offers quite a lot of features, especially those that are used to engage new customers online. Simply put, if you’re trying to save a bit of money without sacrificing a lot, Freshworks is a great place to start.

Freshworks CRM Pricing

Freshworks CRM offers three different pricing plans across its many offerings: Growth, Pro and Enterprise. You’ll also get access to a free plan across the board, allowing you unlimited users with obviously stripped-down functionality compared to the paid plans. Still, it’s a great way to test out the software before making a financial commitment.

Why Freshworks CRM Is a Good Salesforce Alternative

It’s got to be the price on this one. Freshworks is infinitely less expensive than Salesforce, as well as other options on this list like HubSpot, even when it comes t infamously expensive marketing plans. In fact, on average Freshworks plans are nearly ten times less expensive than their Salesforce counterparts, making it a good to budget option that doesn’t sacrifice too much.

Microsoft Dynamics

Microsoft’s newest mission is to bring its software to every platform with seamless integration between its various products, and the company’s CRM, Microsoft Dynamics, is no exception. If your company already lives and breathes the Microsoft platform, with products such as Office 365 and Outlook for email, then the Dynamics CRM can make a lot of sense. Dynamics is also a good platform if you’ve been wanting to try out Microsoft HoloLens as a business tool, since it integrates with that as well. Dynamics feels very much like a tool that is ideal for large enterprises and active medium-sized businesses but may be overkill for smaller companies.

Microsoft Dynamics Features

Microsoft offers some unique tools that go beyond the CRM within the Dynamics umbrella of services. These include platforms for finance, operations, and talent recruiting, as well as services we’ve seen elsewhere, such as customer service and marketing platforms. It’s incredibly robust as far as features are concerned, which is why it’s such a great option.

Microsoft Dynamics Pricing

The Microsoft Dynamics pricing scheme is certainly different than what you might be used to. Like HubSpot, it offers a wide range of specific options, so that you can mix and match exactly what you’re looking for. It can get pretty expensive if you’re looking to add every piece of it, which includes field service, customer service, marketing, sales, finances, operations, commerce, and human resources, but hopefully you’re only looking for a few of these.

Why Microsoft Dynamics Is a Good Salesforce Alternative

Microsoft Dynamics is similarly robust when it comes to comparisons with Salesforce, but the biggest edge it has over everyone’s favorite CRM is that it’s from Microsoft. This means that it integrates flawlessly with Office, Outlook, and many other Microsoft systems. So if your company is already set up with Microsoft, then the Dynamics platform is the way to go.

Along with all that, Microsoft Dynamics allows for seamless integration with other Microsoft services like Teams and Outlook. And while options like Zoho CRM and Pipedrive offer similar integrations through third-party services, you really can’t beat the original when it comes to functionality.

Interested in Microsoft Dynamics? Head to our Microsoft Dynamics review

SugarCRM

SugarCRM isn’t the biggest name in the business, but it prides itself on being able to hang with the big boys. It has a simple, easy to understand interface, with deep customization options — making it incredibly flexible and adaptable. Sugar also has no hidden fees, offering three standard pricing plans ranging from $40 to $150 per user, per month, each providing a different service: Sugar Sell, Sugar Market, and Sugar Serve.

SugarCRM Features

SugarCRM has a range of tools to facilitate collaboration between different business functions and works seamlessly across mobiles and tablets making it great for mobile workers. SugarCRM is easy to integrate with your existing IT infrastructure, offering SaaS and on-premises installations.

SugarCRM Pricing

SugarCRM’s pricing model is similar to that of HubSpot, with different options for service, marketing, and sales. Additionally, you can combine all of them in two different plans, Professional and Enterprise, which cater to small and large companies depending on your needs.

Why SugarCRM Is a Good Salesforce Alternative

Customizability is the name of the game when it comes to SugarCRM. With a widely flexible platform designed for particular needs, this platform can be molded to suit whatever metrics and functionality you need. Plus, with a stylish, easy to use interface, you can’t go wrong with SugarCRM when it comes to customizability.

Additionally, the starting price may seem a bit higher than average, but you get a lot, which makes it actually more affordable than Salesforce and HubSpot when it comes to lead conversion features at nearly half the price of both.

Zoho CRM

To be clear, Zoho CRM isn’t exactly a good alternative to Salesforce, as it doesn’t offer a good solution for enterprise-level businesses. However, if you’re a smaller business that needs a high-powered CRM to handle your sales, marketing, or customer service needs, Zoho CRM is the best option out there, according to our research. It has low-cost plans, including a free forever version, more than enough features to handle your needs as a small business, and a very easy to use platform, even for beginners.

Zoho CRM features

Lower prices doesn’t mean Zoho CRM skimps on features. Even at the Standard plan, you’ll get access to tools like sales forecasting, custom reports, and workflow automation. The problem with Zoho CRM in comparison to Salesforce is that it’s enterprise plan has a lot of limitations, which could pose a problem for larger businesses. Overall, though, small businesses can’t do much better than Zoho CRM on features.

Zoho CRM pricing

Zoho CRM pricing is pretty low, but it offers a lot of different pricing plans along the way. The CRM offers five different pricing plans, including a free forever plan that can get you started. You’ll also be able to take advantage of a 30-day free trial for all paid plans, so you can really test it out before you buy. It’s worth noting, also that Zoho CRM’s most expensive plan is less expensive than Salesforce’s second cheapest plan.

Why Zoho CRM Is a Good Salesforce Alternative

Zoho CRM is a better Salesforce alternative for small businesses, because it offers low-cost pricing plans and a robust free plan to get you started. On top of that, you don’t miss out on features with these low-cost plans, but there will be limits on actions, so enterprise-level businesses in need of an alternative to Salesforce at scale could run into some issues. Honestly, if you’re looking for an enterprise-level replacement for Salesforce, options like HubSpot are much better suited than Zoho CRM.

Reasons to Choose Salesforce

And then there’s Salesforce, a popular choice among businesses of many different sizes. The key with Salesforce is the absolute breadth of its services beyond the basic CRM platform, including services for running ecommerce, one-to-one marketing, customer service, and many others.

While we’ve stated that Pipedrive, Freshworks, and Zoho are all cheaper than Salesforce, that doesn’t mean it’s expensive by any means. In fact, compared to contemporaries like HubSpot and Zendesk, Salesforce is extremely affordable.

Salesforce also has a robust application programming interface (API), allowing developers to create custom apps for Salesforce and integrate your Salesforce data with programs you might already be using.

While Salesforce might have more services than a small or medium-sized business might need, it can still be a useful platform for companies of any size. Plus, as the CRM platform in widest use, it’s much easier to find support and tutorials on how to get the most from your subscription.

Salesforce also offers a wide range of great add-ons that can really improve your growing business if you can afford them. Salesforce Anywhere, for example, is perfect for a newly remote business due to the pandemic, as it allows for team collaboration, real-time chat, and document sharing. Plus, with Tableau, the platform’s new analytics tool, you’ll get all the data you need about your customers to make the best decisions every time.

Check out our full guide to Salesforce Pricing for more

Salesforce Alternatives for Sales

As the name might suggest, Salesforce is a great CRM for sales. However, it can be a bit intimidating to smaller teams that don’t need all those features and data visualizations, which opens the door to some of the alternatives below. Whether it be lead capture or the ability to accept payments, these providers offer a lot when it comes to sales. Take a look at some of our top picks below:

Salesforce Alternatives for Marketing

We mentioned earlier that HubSpot is easily the best CRM for marketing, but there are plenty of other options out there that do a great job. Like Salesforce, HubSpot is geared towards larger businesses, so if you’re looking for something a bit less intense, these alternatives should get the job done without too much of a hit to your budget. And don’t forget to check out our best CRM for marketing guide for a more in-depth look at these providers:

Salesforce Alternatives for Customer Service

The importance of customer service cannot be overstated when it comes to business, and a good CRM can help a lot. Salesforce does a fine job of this, but there are plenty of other options that are specifically geared towards helping customers that might be a better fit. Take a look at some of the options below to get a better idea of what kind of CRM are aimed at customer service:

Salesforce Alternatives for Small Businesses

While Salesforce is considered one of the top CRM around the world, it’s not exactly suited to small businesses. Between the extensive feature catalog and the high price, smaller teams can take a larger hit to their budget than they need, for a lot of functionality they might not need. Plus, given the robust nature of Salesforce, your small team could get bogged down by complicated dashboards, which is never helpful.

Fortunately, we’ve done some research and found out which options are the best CRM for small business. Take a look at the table below of small business alternatives to Salesforce.

Automation

The whole point of CRM software is to save you a little time, which is why automation features are so necessary in a good provider. After all, what’s the point of installing business software if it isn’t going to take care of the small projects for you? Finding the right software means discovering exactly what each provider can do for your automation needs, so make sure not to overlook that.

What’s more, automation allows you to expedite leads through your sales pipeline based on pre-programmed criteria, making it easier for your business to generate sales.

Ease of Use

Whether you’re an expert or a beginner, having an easy to use platform can make a huge difference when it comes to improvements in productivity. Salesforce, in particular, is quite complicated for beginners due to its robust feature catalogue and reporting tools. If you’re giving CRM software a go for the first time, ease of use needs to be at the top of your list.

Support

Speaking of beginners, having a little help from an expert support team can go a long way when adapting to new software, which is why noting the customer service options is invaluable to understanding a provider. From 24/7 service to sporadic ticket systems, providers run the gamut as far as customer support goes, so if you’re just starting out, it’s certainly worth noting.

Pricing

Let’s be honest of course you’re looking at price when it comes to CRM software. From pricing plans to providers, there are hundreds of different price points to consider. Fortunately, compared to Salesforce, most CRM software is markedly more affordable, but the range is still pretty substantial. Not that we have to say it, but seriously: take a look at your pricing options before pulling the trigger on your new CRM software.

Methodology: How We Test Salesforce Alternatives

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