Freshsales vs. Salesforce Sales Cloud

Generally speaking for small to mid sized team I really cannot recommend it enough. It has an excellent feature set, good amount of integrations, fairly customisable and backed by solid support. And the pricing is very competitive too. I feel like if your team is larger than that, you might want to look at other alternatives but for teams that size, its really perfect.

Incentivized

It’s great at bringing in members from different sources and streamlining their journey — making it easier for our staff to manage follow-ups and tailor actions based on where each member is in their path. As for where it’s less suited, I’d say it depends on company size — it might be a bit too much for a very small organization.

Incentivized

• Leads: organization, capture, integration
• Sales: organization, intelligent data about metrics, forecast
• APIs are very simple and stable to use, Zapier and 3ªpart integrations provided
• User experience, almost no training is needed to use the solution, more over, a great app for iOS and Android

Incentivized

• Logging notes: SF makes it easy to log notes in the timeline or static notes that live in an easy-to-see spot for longevity.
• Logging activities: It's easy to post a call, text, email, etc.
• API data: Once connected, SF is critical to automation, such as website activity, login activity, pages visited, etc., which saves the Customer Success side time in understanding account activity.
• Custom fields: you can add custom fields to really personalize your experience. We use quite a few and it's brilliant.

Incentivized

• Persistent and pervasive down time
• Lack of scalable integrations with data source (e.g., their Segment integration is barely functional and they won't improve it)
• Slow and unhelpful customer service
• Account management doesn't understand our business or what we're trying to accomplish
• Email campaign feature is barely functional and only allows you to have 10 campaigns, even with the most expensive plan
• Lead and contact records have gone missing and FreshSales is unable to recover data

• I have hard-coded the auto-update of the phone number format and state format from some codes shared by the community, but I do not know where to do it. I cannot reset it either.
• It is unclear what functionalities each version has. We use the enterprise version, and it seems we can only have one design of the pipeline. But different business segments would have very different sales cycles, and hence, pipeline tracking would be different. It would be nice to have this available in our version.
• It seems I cannot create a report to pull notes logged at the account levels.

Incentivized

There are days when I wish we hadn't switched, but I know that if we put in the time, we will get to where we want to be with the software and that it has many more capabilities than anything else we looked at. However, the amount of time and onboarding we need to do is also far greater than we realized/were told when we originally bought the product. They told us we should hire onboarding support, but at the end, after we had already reached our budget maximum for this, so it's been slower than we had hoped.

Incentivized

I would give Freshworks CRM's overall usability a 7 out of 10. Although the software has improved since we first obtained it, it still could use improvements to make functionality more intuitive and easier for the average user. It is not that challenging but there is definitely a learning curve

Incentivized

Salesforce has been designed on the basis of "Clicks, not code". So anyone willing to learn the Salesforce user interface (which is quite good as far as management software platforms go) is able to become a Salesforce user or even a Salesforce administrator. You don't have to know coding language to work in the Salesforce environment. Also, Salesforce has one of the best software training resources (Trailhead) that I have ever encountered. It is free to all, easy to use, and most importantly it is interactive. No scrolling through endless text in a user manual. There are hands-on modules and related videos interlaced and through it all you earn points and badges to display your level of learning.

Incentivized

All Force.com apps run on world-class data centers with backup, failover, and disaster-recovery facilities. Force.com has had a proven 99.9 percent uptime record for years. Accordingly, I only recall our instance of Salesforce having one unscheduled, brief down time over 6 years. I can't remember for sure, but it may have been due to our Internet Service Provider (ISP) versus Salesforce itself. Also, Salesforce does it's best to keep customers in the loop:

Trust.salesforce.com is the salesforce.com community's home for real-time information on system performance and security. On this site you'll find:

Live and historical data on system performance
Up-to-the minute information on planned maintenance
Phishing, malicious software and social engineering threats
Best security practices for your organization
Information on how we safeguard your data

For a SaaS provider, I'd rate their performance to be one of the best. At times, reporting tends to slow down if the data set is very large, which is the case in any system. But, that's a very rare phenomenon

When you initially log in to Freshworks, you get snippets to guide you on how to set up. You have a chat option on every page so you can reach out to the support agent and get your issues resolved in real time. The agents are fast, responsive, and experienced in handling even a person who introduced CRM to the world...

The overall support has been good. More and more features are being released quite frequently. Very small features are also making big difference in how the tool can be adapted and used better. If there is anything we need or are stuck, the support team sets up a call and helps in resolving the issue/provides workarounds.

I attended two training sessions. I would rate them a 4 as an advanced user. It was very basic – great for someone new – would give 8+ for new person.

I had 3 years of experience at the time. I skipped basic and went onto advanced and still not helpful. A lot of it was best practices that didn’t feel relevant for our business

I have gone through multiple. The content that’s delivered is quite basic – I wish they had more advanced training.

We are grandfathered into premium support plus training. We get unlimited access to instructor led and online training for free. We have taken advantage of this

Just from an organizational standpoint - we standardized our data prior to moving to Salesforce. But we essentially standardized it wrong. That's created a big disgusting mess for us know that I'll have to deal with as the Admin. Be sure you think through use cases prior to doing something like that - seek outside opinions on how the data will work best, especially depending on what else you're going to integrate with Salesforce.

We are a smaller company and simply were not seeing the value in what we were paying Salesforce. We needed a robust opportunity and lead management system that was affordable and [Freshworks CRM (formerly Freshsales)] has provided us with that. We are now able to track leads, opportunities and funnels easily and quickly report on these to senior staff who rely on this information for their board meetings.

Incentivized

Salesforce sales can do everything Front does regarding email integrations and communicating with your peers. Still, it provides even more insight for our salespeople and leadership team. Although Front is cheaper, we decided the added productivity and visibility provided to the team would be well worth the higher price tag.

Incentivized

Salesforce Sales Cloud is highly scalable and designed to accommodate the needs of businesses of all sizes, from small startups to large enterprises. It offers flexible subscription models and can easily scale up or down based on the organization's requirements. Whether a company is expanding its sales team, increasing its customer base, or adding new features and functionalities, Sales Cloud can adapt to support growth without sacrificing performance or reliability. Additionally, Salesforce's cloud-based architecture ensures that users have access to resources and capabilities as needed, making it a highly scalable solution for organizations looking to automate customer relationship management at scale.

Incentivized

• Freshsales has definitely had a positive impact on our sales. It's difficult to nail down the ROI it has generated, but it's well worth the cost.
• The savings is mostly in time spent on lead and client follow up, so we can handle more leads and projects with a smaller team.

Incentivized

• It is easy for the sales team to track how well the dealers in their region are selling products.
• It is easy to generate reports and see how well sales are each month compared to past months.
• Quicker time to get products shipped to customers.

Incentivized