How does Zoho CRM stack
up to Salesforce?
Salesforce and Zoho CRM are two feature-rich, powerful CRMs available for your business. Looking for a Salesforce alternative? This page provides a detailed side-by-side feature comparison with everything you need to make the right decision.
Sign Up For FreeDoes Salesforce have all that you need?
Salesforce approached the CRM market with a top-down ideology and built their solution with enterprises in mind from the beginning. They have more recently started to provide more SME-oriented solutions. As a result, the end user experience is often disjointed. For example, the user has to constantly switch between the old interface and the new Lightning interface to do their job.
The user interface is overloaded, lacks the modern touch users have come to expect in SaaS, and requires a lot of customization to use it effectively. You can only get the most out of Salesforce if you have a dedicated implementation team.
Here's what Zoho CRM
can do for your business.
Streamlined user experience with Canvas
Uncompromising security and compliance
End-to-end implementation support
Ecosystem of 45+ integrated business applications
No hidden costs. No contracts.
Improvement in lead conversion rates.
Revenue increase per sales person.
Improvement in customer retention.
Shorter sales cycles.
* Growth metrics reported by our customers in an internal survey.
Why Zoho CRM wins over Salesforce
Nucleus Research, a global provider of ROI-focused technology research, outlines factors to determine why SMBs and enterprises opt for Zoho CRM in lieu of Salesforce.
Read the report hereWhat's the annual price difference?
Number of users: 550
With Zoho CRM, you save $ or upto in savings annually.
Feature comparison
When choosing a Salesforce alternative, you need to ensure it not only retains all the important features necessary to maintain your traditional sales activities with ease but also empowers your organization with industry leading CRM capabilities such as artificial intelligence, journey orchestration and advanced analytics. See how Zoho CRM Enterprise and Salesforce Agentforce Sales (formerly Salesforce Sales Cloud) compare head-on-head when it comes to the most critical CRM functions.
Salesforce's lead management functionality gives you the basic tools to capture, qualify, and nurture leads. But Salesforce fails to deliver some key lead management features, with no built-in card scanner and only a bare bones web-to-lead capture function.
Zoho CRM offers a comprehensive set of tools to help businesses contact, capture, nurture, and convert as many leads as possible. For sales reps on the move, the Zoho CRM mobile app comes with business card scanning, voice-to-text notes, and many other handy features to help capture and track lead information in the field.
| Leads and contacts | ||
| Accounts and deals | ||
| Deal stages | ||
| Web-to-contact form | ||
| SalesSignals | ||
| Multiple Pipelines | Requires customization |
Leads and contacts
Accounts and deals
Deal stages
Web-to-contact form
SalesSignals
Multiple pipeline management
Requires customization
Salesforce Agentforce Sales integrates with Outlook and Gmail giving sales reps the power to sync information directly to CRM from their inbox. Salesforce Agentforce Sales does not offer native live chat capabilities and requires you to buy Agentforce Service (starts at $25). Salesforce dosent offer any way to respond to social posts, monitor customer social activity, or manage your social accounts.
Zoho CRM delivers omnichannel communication as a native part of the sales workflow, bringing email, telephony, live chat, messaging apps, and social interactions into a unified interface. Conversations are automatically linked to CRM records, giving sales teams full context across channels. By embedding omnichannel engagement directly within the CRM, Zoho reduces tool sprawl and enables faster, more consistent customer interactions.
| Telephony and PBX | $ | |
| Automated call logging | ||
| Email insights | ||
| Email parser | ||
| Enrich data from Twitter | $ | |
| Enrich data from Facebook | $ | |
| Automated social media lead generation | $ | |
| Live chat | $ | |
| Online meetings | $ |
Telephony and PBX
$
Automated call logging
Email insights
Email parser
Enrich data from Twitter
$
Enrich data from Facebook
$
Automated social media lead generation
$
Live chat
$
Online meetings
$
Salesforce supports process automation using tools such as Flow Builder, approval processes, and automation rules. These capabilities allow organizations to design complex workflows, but often require careful configuration, testing, and ongoing administration. Advanced use cases—such as enforcing stage progression or building guided selling flows—typically rely on Flows and higher editions, increasing setup effort and dependence on specialized admin skills.
Zoho CRM provides built-in process management and automation through Workflows, Blueprints, Wizards, and Cadences that are designed for sales teams. Organizations can define stage-by-stage processes, enforce mandatory actions, and automate follow-ups with minimal configuration.
| Assignment rules | ||
| Approval rules | ||
| Review process | ||
| Validation rules | ||
| Macros | ||
| Process builder | ||
| Journey builder | ||
| Cadences | $ |
Assignment rules
Approval rules
Review process
Validation rules
Macros
Process builder
Journey builder
Salesforce offers customization through record types, page layouts, Flows, Apex, and Lightning components. While this provides high flexibility, many customizations require advanced configuration or development effort, increasing dependency on administrators and developers. As complexity grows, ongoing maintenance and testing become necessary, making customization powerful but time-consuming and costly to manage at scale.
Zoho CRM enables customization through a low-code approach using layouts, fields, workflows, Blueprints, Wizards, and client scripts. For advanced needs, Zoho also supports custom functions and APIs, allowing teams to extend CRM capabilities while keeping setup and maintenance simpler and more accessible.
| Page customization | ||
| Page layouts | ||
| Layout rules | ||
| Subforms | ||
| Custom fields | ||
| Custom modules | ||
| Picklist history tracking | ||
| Canvas | ||
| Sandbox | ||
| Portals | $ | |
| Kiosk studio |
Page customization
Page layouts
Layout rules
Subforms
Custom fields
Custom modules
Picklist history tracking
Canvas
Sandbox
User portals
Kiosk studio
Salesforce provides reporting and dashboard capabilities that are primarily built on top of reports. While this offers flexibility, it also means most analytics views require report creation and customization before they become usable for sales teams. More advanced analytics—such as trend analysis, comparative insights, and predictive views—typically require higher editions and, in many cases, CRM Analytics (Einstein Analytics) or Tableau as add-ons.
Zoho CRM delivers sales-ready analytics with a wide range of prebuilt dashboards and reports available out of the box. Zoho CRM consolidates data across leads, deals, activities, campaigns, and revenue into a unified analytics layer, enabling managers to quickly identify bottlenecks and trends. With AI-assisted insights from Zia and built-in BI through Zoho Analytics (bundled in Ultimate), teams gain deeper visibility without relying on external analytics tools.
| Standard reports | ||
| Custom reports | ||
| Charts | ||
| KPIs | ||
| Funnels | ||
| Target meters | ||
| Cohorts | ||
| Quadrants | ||
| Anomaly detectors | $ | |
| Webform analytics | ||
| Webform A/B testing |
Standard reports
Custom reports
Charts
KPIs
Funnels
Target meters
Cohorts
Quadrants
Anomaly detectors
$
Webform analytics
Webform A/B testing
Salesforce's Agentforce for Sales ($125/user/month add-on) delivers agentic AI to handle tasks autonomously. Core Einstein features (included in Enterprise+ editions) offer predictive lead/opportunity scoring and forecasting. More advanced agentic capabilities (e.g., autonomous agents, custom prompts) may require additional configuration or Data Cloud integration. Conversation intelligence and note-taking are enhanced via the separate Einstein Conversation Insights add-on ($50/user/month).
Zoho CRM’s built-in AI assistant, Zia, helps sales teams prioritize the right leads, predict deal outcomes, and act on insights without relying on separate AI products. Zia continuously analyzes CRM data and sales activity to surface next-best actions, flag risks, and detect anomalies across the sales pipeline. All capabilities are natively available in Zoho CRM Enterprise and Ultimate editions.
| Lead conversion prediction | ||
| Deal closure prediction | ||
| Data enrichment | $ | |
| Zia voice | $ | |
| Best time to contact | ||
| Macro suggestion | $ | |
| Prediction builder | $ | |
| Recommendation engine | $ | |
| Image validation | $ |
Lead conversion prediction
$
Deal closure prediction
$
Data enrichment
$
Zia voice
$
Best time to contact
$
Macro suggestion
$
Prediction builder
$
Recommendation engine
$
Image validation
$
Salesforce provides core sales enablement capabilities such as products, price books, and basic quoting. However, more advanced sales workflows—such as guided selling, complex quote configuration, inventory visibility, and subscription-based pricing—typically require additional products like Salesforce CPQ or integrations with external systems. Compared to Zoho’s more unified approach, Salesforce’s sales enablement experience is powerful but more fragmented and admin-dependent.
Zoho CRM includes a comprehensive set of built-in sales enablement tools designed to support reps throughout the entire sales cycle. From lead capture to deal closure, Zoho provides native capabilities for guided data entry, quoting, order management, and customer access—all within a single platform. Through its tight integration with the Zoho Finance Suite, sales reps can generate quotes, sales orders, and purchase orders directly from Zoho CRM, while also accessing expense, inventory, and subscription information without leaving the CRM.
| Price books | ||
| Sales quotes | ||
| Sales orders | ||
| Documents | ||
| File versioning | ||
| Reviews | ||
| Wizards | ||
| SalesInbox | ||
| CPQ | $ |
Price books
Sales quotas
Sales orders
Documents
File versioning
Reviews
Wizards
SalesInbox
CPQ
$
Salesforce Agentforce Sales provides basic email functionality for one-to-one communication and limited outreach use cases. However, advanced marketing automation capabilities—such as bulk campaign execution, behavioral segmentation, journey orchestration, attribution modeling, and cross-channel engagement—are not part of core Sales Cloud.
Zoho CRM includes built-in marketing capabilities that allow sales and marketing teams to work from the same dataset. Users can run email campaigns, associate leads and contacts with campaigns, segment audiences, and track campaign performance directly inside the CRM. These capabilities help teams understand lead sources, engagement levels, and downstream revenue impact without requiring a separate marketing automation product.
| Email templates | ||
| Mass email | ||
| Marketing campaigns | ||
| Marketing attribution | $ | |
| Customer segmentation | $ | |
| AdWords integration | $ | |
| Auto response |
Email templates
Mass email
Marketing campaigns
Marketing attribution
$
Customer segmentation
$
AdWords integration
$
Auto response
Agentforce Sales provides collaboration features such as Chatter for internal discussions and activity updates. However, many critical collaboration workflows depend on connector-based integrations with external products. Scheduling meetings or running webinars typically requires tools like Zoom or Webex, along with separate licenses. While integrations with platforms like Microsoft Teams exist, they require additional setup and do not offer the same level of native, CRM-embedded collaboration as Zoho offers.
Zoho CRM is built for native, in-context collaboration across sales, marketing, and delivery teams. Conversations, tasks, meetings, and project updates happen directly inside CRM records, giving teams shared context and real-time visibility without relying on expensive third-party tools.
| Motivator for Zoho CRM | $ | |
| Calendar | ||
| Calendar sync through CalDav | $ | |
| Calendar booking | $ | |
| Groups for team collaboration | ||
| Tagging | ||
| Collaboration chat tool | $ |
Motivator for Zoho CRM
$
Calendar
Calendar sync through CalDav
Calendar booking
Groups for team collaboration
Tagging
Collaboration chat tool
$
Pricing comparison
| Free | $00 | - |
| Standard | $1420 | $25 |
| Professional | $2335 | $10080 |
| Enterprise | $4050 | $175175 |
| Ultimate | $5265 | $350350 |
Free
$ 00
-
Standard
$ 1420
$2525
Professional
$ 2335
$100100
Enterprise
$ 4050
$175175
Ultimate
$ 5265
$350350
Here's what our
customers say
Switch to a better
CRM experience with Zoho
Disclaimer: All names and marks mentioned here remain the property of their original owners. Prices are as published by the named competitors on their website(s) as on 12-01-2026 (without taking into account the taxes or discounts), and are subject to change based on the pricing policies of the competitors. The details provided on this page are for general purposes only and cannot be considered as authorized information from the respective competitors. Zoho disclaims any liability for possible errors, omissions, or consequential losses based on the details here.