Freshsales vs Salesforce: Which CRM Is Right for You?

Freshsales is the less expensive choice compared to Salesforce. While Freshsales’ free-for-life option is admittedly bare-bones, it serves as a useful tool for contact and account management. Their three paid plans offer a denser suite of features and higher customization options, and their low prices give you exceptional value for your money. Their monthly rate is slightly more expensive, but offers further flexibility for your budget.

Salesforce is the more expensive option, especially considering the costs of higher-tier plans. However, the starter tier offers a robust suite of tools for sales cycle management, as well as custom reports and dashboards. Higher levels offer further customization and insight features, including opportunity and lead scoring, along with comprehensive workflow automation options. The unlimited plan includes a suite of built-in Einstein AI insights.

Freshsales has a solid suite of features. The software’s Freddy AI enables users of the Pro plan and up to retrieve useful insights from their leads and deals, using historical data to provide real-time recommendations. Its lead scoring features are also available on more plans than Salesforce. Its customization is limited, however, only offering up to 10 pipelines on its highest tier.

Salesforce, meanwhile, has a richness of features that is rarely matched. It extracts contact data from Gmail and Outlook, and its lead and opportunity pipeline management tools are incredibly customizable. Salesforce’s contact pages allow you to store comprehensive client information, and easy search filters and views let sales teams draw all manner of insights and forecasts.

Freshsales has a very user-friendly interface, as reported by a multitude of customers. Higher levels of customization do increase complexity, but its easily-navigable support page contains answers to many possible user questions, sorted by a dozen different subjects. Negative reviews reported bugs and an unhelpful customer support team, but overall, Freshsales is incredibly accessible.

Salesforce’s suite of tools and features comes with the side-effect of a steep learning curve. Many sales teams will hire a software expert to streamline the process, but that requires time and resources. Once that curve is surmounted, though, many customers praise Salesforce’s breadth of options and depth of customization. In addition, Salesforce’s learning center Trailhead supplies helpful classes and modules for subscribers to upgrade their CRM skills.

Freshsales’ customer service is available all day on weekdays, and has comprehensive phone, email, and live chat support. While some people have had less helpful experiences with the support team, the breadth of availability increases the chances that someone will be able to help with your concern. Freshsales also includes complimentary 1:1 sessions with an expert to onboard your organization and tailor the software to your goals.

Salesforce, meanwhile, does have strong customer service options available–for a price. Its Premier Success Plan offers 24/7 support, but it only comes with Unlimited; users of other plans must pay 30% of their net license fees. On the Standard Success Plan, phone support is limited to business hours and serious issues. Salesforce has a customizable onboarding system that organizations can set up to teach their employees relevant basic skills with the software.

Freshsales has strong visual dashboards that allow up to six reports each. Its reports allow for viewing of granular metrics, along with custom and premade widgets for graphs and displays. These graphs can present several metrics at once, allowing you to group relevant data and visualize how certain measures affect one another. Advanced dashboards on higher plans can show team performance insights and sales trends.

Salesforce offers basic and custom reports and dashboards for all plans, with advanced reporting features like joint reports and buckets available at higher tiers. Its dashboards allow up to 20 reports, giving sales teams a truly comprehensive view of their sales and pipelines. Salesforce offers a wide variety of filters, views, and variables for you to customize reports to your organization’s precise needs.

Freshsales users can create custom workflows for leads, contacts, accounts, deals, tasks, meetings, and call logs. Its workflow interface is easy to understand, and it contains a variety of options for triggers, conditions, and actions. Pro and Enterprise plans provide time-based workflows that operate daily, weekly, or monthly.

Salesforce offers more customization and variety for workflow automation. From data and task management to marketing functions to report creation and beyond, Salesforce has the tools to help you automate whatever processes your team needs done so you can focus on sales. Its flow-chart process builder allows for high levels of process management, delivered in an easy-to-see visual fashion.

Freshsales’ mobile app offers access to many of its core desktop features and unique mobile functionality. Its most useful feature is its virtual phone number, which allows salespeople to make calls from their personal devices without surrendering their own number to a client or business. Its offline functions are a bit limited, only containing three available functions: Read access, create new records or sales activities, and sync later when online.

Salesforce’s mobile app lets you access smart dashboards and custom notifications. Its offline mode is incredibly customizable, allowing you to select up to seven items to be available when not connected to the internet; options include tasks, dashboards, contacts, accounts, leads, and more. However, like its desktop counterpart, its interface can be unintuitive and possess a steep learning curve.

Freshsales’ lack of app integrations is one of its biggest downsides. However, it does have access to several crucial integrations, such as email, calendar apps, and Slack. You will probably be able to satisfy whatever basic integration needs you have; if you want to do something fancier or use more niche apps, though, you might have some difficulty accomplishing that with Freshsales.

Salesforce’s AppExchange offers a staggering number of free and paid integrations, from the basics and beyond. Its app compatibility adds to the customizability of the software. Alongside email, calendar, and communication integration, Salesforce has access to thousands of apps that improve efficiency, manage data, add ecommerce options, and more. Some integrations may take more work to implement, though, so choose carefully based on your needs.