While popular among business circles and forever immortalized as one of the grandfathers of cloud software, Salesforce CRM is no longer the top CRM system on the market and there are several alternatives that are better for small and mid-sized companies.
Why do you need an alternative to Salesforce CRM?
Why wouldn’t you want alternatives to Salesforce? If your buying list is one vendor, then you’re doing something wrong. You have to compare apples to apples amongst the vendors that really stand out to find a good list of alternatives. Salesforce is a popular system, but at most levels it lacks the functionality that most businesses need, or results in significantly higher costs when you begin to add in all of the other features and apps you need to purchase to get the platform you want.
List of Salesforce Alternatives
Below is a link to a resource that information on several different Salesforce CRM alternatives, but I’ll go through a few nitpicks of some of the systems.
Granted the CRM that’s best for your business will vary by company size, needs, and several other factors. However, several CRM systems are always brought up when people are looking for alternatives to Salesforce.
Zoho CRM
Zoho CRM is a popular alternative to Salesforce for small businesses, and I’ve used this in several instances. What I always find is that Zoho is just a stop-gap until a business finds a better solution, or they grow to the point where Zoho doesn’t meet their needs. I’ve never been a fan of Zoho and have found that the system requires far too many clicks to get things done, but as a cost-effective alternative to Salesforce it’s a decent choice.
SugarCRM
SugarCRM is known for being an “open source” CRM. SugarCRM mostly comes up as an alternative of Salesforce when companies are looking for cost-effective options to help drive their sales and marketing processes. As a CRM tool, SugarCRM offers a decent product, but falls short on a number of levels.
Sugar CRM is slow. We’re talking really slow. We have good screen-by-screen comparison of SugarCRM speed vs. 1CRM where you can see the snail-like pace that SugarCRM operates on. I even have memories of when I used CRM and had my computer literally sit there frozen.
Additionally, SugarCRM can lead to unexpected costs when you realize that the system needs to be customized to meet your needs.
Act!
Act! was a very popular “CRM” back in the day, and can still be considered an alternative to Salesforce and other CRM platforms. Act! has a very cult-like following that keeps it from going away, but the platform itself is simply a contact management system. If you’re looking for anything more than a superpowered email inbox, then Act! will not meet your needs.
Act! offers very basic level functionality that may be ok for businesses not in need of marketing automation, complete sales force automation, or workflow automation, but hey? aren’t you on the market because you want a solution that will help you manage and automate your sales, marketing and more?
Highrise
Another popular option for companies looking for more cost-effective CRM solutions, Highrise is streamlined contact management system that doesn’t have the complete capabilities of a marketing automation and sales force automation tool. In short, High-rise is all about simplicity. Leveraging a user friendly interface, new customers are able to quickly learn the software with little to no training. However, once a business begins to grow, customers begin to find that Highrise’s lack of features fails to meet their needs.
Microsoft Dynamics
Microsoft Dynamics CRM is one of the top dogs in the market, and one of the most sought after alternatives to Salesforce. I remember being a part of an organization that had an enterprise Salesforce installation, and after a long debate we decided to switch to Microsoft Dynamics. What followed was a year long mess of trying to migrate over all of our data, install Dynamics, and create the proper lead protocols and workflows.
The result was basically the same system, with the same strengths in features, we had no need to expand to use their marketing automation tools because we used Marketo as well. The one main perk that our sales and support teams saw — better integration with our suite of Microsoft products… Overall, Microsoft Dynamics is a good alternative to Salesforce with a strikingly similar feature set.
The Best Alternative to Salesforce CRM
Most of the time when businesses are looking for alternatives to Salesforce CRM, they’re looking for options that are more cost-effective, include more functionality, and further streamline their processes. 1CRM hits all of these points right in the head. At $8/user/month, 1CRM offers a low cost that includes all sales force automation, customer service, marketing automation, project and order management, and more. Additionally, the 1CRM team continuously improves the UI of 1CRM to be more user friendly, and even make frequent updates to increase the speed of the platform. With 1CRM users get a single system to manage their entire business, eliminating multiple platform costs and inefficiencies that occur managing several different systems.
If you’re interested in learning more about 1CRM click here for free trial.
