Salesforce vs. monday: Definitive Comparison

In today’s business world, using a top CRM software is no longer optional; it’s critical for success. A good customer relationship management (CRM) software will help you expedite your business growth by streamlining your workflows, boosting sales and improving customer engagement.

However, given the plethora of options available, choosing the right tool can be hard. In this article, we will dive into a detailed comparison of two popular CRM platforms, which we’ve covered extensively in our Salesforce CRM review and monday Sales CRM review. This guide offers helpful insights so you can make an informed choice that best suits your business needs.

Let’s now dive into a detailed comparison of the two platforms.

Both Salesforce and monday Sales CRM  have a vast range of features. However, Salesforce is richer in more advanced CRM features compared to monday.

Salesforce

Salesforce is a comprehensive CRM platform that offers a vast range of features, including sales automation, customer service, marketing automation and analytics. It offers lead management, opportunity management, customer service and contact management features. It also comes with a high degree of customization and integration features. This makes it suitable for businesses with complex sales and marketing operations.

monday 

monday is mainly focused on project management. As such, it’s not as heavy as Salesforce in terms of CRM features. However, monday also includes extensive project and team management, human resources, and software development features. This makes it fit for businesses that need an all-inclusive tool for improving sales and customer experience as well as team management.

Winner: Salesforce

Salesforce offers a wider range of features and functionalities to manage customer relationships and support sales and marketing efforts. This makes it the winner in terms of CRM features. However, if you are interested in more than just CRM features, monday is a better option.

Both Salesforce and monday offer a range of pricing options to suit businesses of different sizes.  They also come with a free trial, which allows users to try the tools’ features before committing to them. 

Salesforce

The pricing model for Salesforce is a bit complex and can be confusing. The pricing plans are based on the size of the business. Generally, the pricing plans for Salesforce are much more expensive than those of monday. The following are the four pricing plans that Salesforce offers:

monday

monday’s pricing plans are considered more affordable than those of Salesforce. These pricing plans are based on the number of features and users. In addition to the free plan, which accommodates up to two users, monday offers the following pricing options:

Winner: monday

monday beats Salesforce hands down, as it offers more affordable and simple pricing plans, with the cheapest plan costing $10 per user per month. Although Salesforce has more comprehensive and robust features, monday also offers similar features at more friendly rates.

Both sales platforms come with excellent customization capabilities.

Salesforce

Salesforce offers a high level of customizability. It comes with a broad range of customization options allowing businesses to tailor the platform to suit their unique needs. With Salesforce customization options, you can change the platform’s interface, including the colors, logo and graphics, to reflect your company’s identity. You can also alter the dashboards to display important business information as well as create personalized applications using AppExchange. This platform also offers flexible plans to accommodate businesses of different sizes, making it appropriate for both small and large enterprises. This means that it will be able to adapt and cater to your business needs for performance and reliability as it grows.

monday

While monday also provides pretty good customization capabilities, its options are not as extensive and advanced as those of Salesforce. The app comes with a wide range of fully customizable templates designed to suit specific activities. With Salesforce, you can modify the dashboards to suit your specific needs. Generally, monday’s customization options are easy and straightforward, which makes it a good fit for beginners and small companies.

Winner: Salesforce

Salesforce outshines monday, as it offers more advanced customization options. The downside to this, however, is that you may need a highly tech-savvy team to create custom applications and make optimal use of all the features the platform has to offer.

Both platforms have impressive integration capabilities, which allow you to connect different tools to enhance your team’s productivity and boost performance.

Salesforce

Thanks to its AppExchange, Salesforce integrates with over 3,000 other business apps. Salesforce integrates seamlessly with apps such as Slack, Stipe, Shopify and Google Drive, among many others.

monday 

While monday’s integration capabilities are not as extensive as Salesforce’s, the platform also has smooth integration with other apps, including project management, marketing and team collaboration tools. It integrates seamlessly with more than 30 apps, including Shopify, Gmail, Outlook, DocuSign, Microsoft Teams and Slack. It also has an Apps Marketplace that allows smooth integration with a range of other apps, for a total of 200 integrations.

Winner: Salesforce

Salesforce wins over monday in terms of integration capabilities, thanks to its AppExchange, which gives access to a wide range of apps.

Salesforce

Due to its vast collection of advanced features, Salesforce has a complicated user interface with various buttons to click, which can be overwhelming, especially to new users. It will thus require some time for users to fully master and use its features optimally. As such, Salesforce is most suited for large enterprises with complex CRM processes.

monday

Compared to Salesforce, monday has a more friendly and straightforward user interface, which makes it favorable for new users. Its vibrant and colorful dashboard allows you to quickly locate all the functions you require. In addition, the platform offers extensive resources to help you get started easily. 

Winner: monday

In terms of ease of use, monday takes the crown. The platform boasts a simple interface and hence has a shallow learning curve. Further, given the platform’s rich resources, you’ll get running in no time.

Customer support is a crucial consideration when choosing a CRM platform.

Salesforce

In addition to the various learning resources, Salesforce offers a range of options to businesses to efficiently deal with customer service inquiries, including a 24/7 phone support and an online forum. However, the level of support depends on your plan, with more support avenues available in the higher tiers.

monday

monday offers customer support through various channels, including videos, webinars, articles, a knowledge base and a community forum. It also offers 24/7 support phone support plus a ticketing system and a dedicated customer success manager for enterprise plan users.

Winner: monday

monday is the winner in terms of customer support, as its 24/7 support is available across all its packages, including the free version.

7 Best Marketing CRM Systems of 2024

Zoho CRM shines with its wide-ranging CRM tools that do more than just marketing. Email marketing and landing page tools included with Zoho are easy to use and allow businesses to automate their lead generation process quickly. Zoho also has a generous free plan and competitive pricing that allows it to scale up well from small organizations to larger businesses.

Pros of Zoho CRM

Cons of Zoho CRM

Freshsales leans heavily into A.I. for tracking leads and categorizing them based on engagement and other factors that influence how likely they are to convert. This level of enhanced automation, along with a simple, straightforward interface, makes Freshsales great for businesses and team members who feel overwhelmed by other marketing CRMs.

Pros of Freshsales

Cons of Freshsales

Due to its origins in project management, Monday.com excels in collaborative marketing environments where different teams need to be involved in managing sales and leads. Large campaign management is also easier due to Monday.com’s board features. Marketing teams already familiar with Kanban-style workflows will feel right at home with Monday.com and its added CRM features.

Pros of Monday.com

Cons of Monday.com

The core features of Hubspot are geared toward sales. A paid add-on module handles marketing features. The marketing module immediately integrates with the existing HubSpot features and allows for inbound marketing campaigns across all popular channels. This includes email, social, chat and website interactions.

Pros of HubSpot Marketing Hub

Cons of HubSpot Marketing Hub

Zendesk Sell is the CRM from helpdesk software maker Zendesk. This sales-focused CRM was behind many of its competitors, but a recent update added many needed marketing functionalities, such as adding third-party information sources for lead generation. The interface is simple to use, and for users of Zendesk helpdesk, it integrates perfectly for a streamlined sales and service solution.

Pros of Zendesk

Cons of Zendesk

Salesforce is the best choice for businesses that need deep customization along with proven scalability and power. Complex or unique marketing and sales workflows can be easily implemented with Salesforce. The Salesforce Marketing Cloud feature allows for integration with social media, apps and websites. Users can create email and other automation campaigns that are integrated with the rest of Salesforce’s features.

Pros of Salesforce

Cons of Salesforce

For a sales pipeline workflow, Pipedrive is the perfect choice. This CRM is built for sales and lacks certain enhanced marketing features. However, its visual style of pipeline management makes it easy for sales teams to track leads and deals. Despite being sales-focused, marketing campaigns are built-in and feature Pipedrive’s easy drag-and-drop interface.

Pros of Pipedrive

Cons of Pipedrive

Insightly is an easy to use and affordable customer relationship management (CRM) tool for real estate, startups and sales operations teams. It is best for small to medium sized businesses looking for a top notch operational CRM that has the need for tracking ongoing leads, managing different activities and events. Through the Insightly platform businesses will be able to build relationships with customers, partners, vendors and suppliers.

Insightly is known for its simplicity, user-friendly design and customizable features that help increase customer and partner relationships; however, it can be considered overpriced. Potential users should weigh the learning curve, pricing structure and other limitations to determine if Insightly aligns with their goals and desires for what they are projecting to achieve.

Pros

Cons

Less Annoying CRM is designed to help small businesses and individuals across a variety of professions. Less Annoying CRM is geared toward helping clients manage contacts and track leads.

As you review to determine the best CRM for your business, consider the following advantages and drawbacks for the Less Annoying CRM.

Pros

Cons

When choosing a CRM for marketing, the most important consideration is to find the solution that fits your needs and workflows. Having the most features or latest add-ons won’t benefit your business if it doesn’t solve your most pressing problems. 

Decide which areas of your marketing workflow could improve through various workflow automation and tracking. Then, seek out these features when choosing your CRM. For example, do you need advanced email campaign features and landing pages that can be created quickly for various promotions? 

Finally, when you have your features chosen, set your budget and find the CRM that includes the features you need in either the base plan or with minimal add-ons.

Overall, a CRM solution for marketing can help you in the following ways:

*Scores range from one to five, with five being the easiest to learn.

Our team spent more than 100 hours testing more than 15 CRMs. Each business owner is looking for something unique to support their business needs and growth trajectory. Plus, each CRM has a different array of features, which makes comparing them like comparing apples to oranges. Some CRM products focus on data collection and reporting, while others push project and task management for teams.

Our top five picks for marketing CRMs scored highest across all criteria including user experience, features, value, customer support and reputation. But the best marketing CRM for you may come down to just one of these categories. Take a closer look at our testing criteria, then dive into all of the CRM providers we’ve reviewed.

Our weighted rating system takes into account five broad categories. Here’s a brief breakdown of each one.

This rating system is intended to give readers a comprehensive overview of each CRM provider. However, our top providers may not be the best fit for all businesses. Learn more by reading each individual provider’s CRM review.

Microsoft Azure Tapped As Public Cloud Provider For Salesforce Marketing Cloud

'By bringing together the power of Azure and Microsoft Teams with Salesforce, our aim is to help businesses harness the power of the Microsoft cloud to better serve customers,' says Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.

Salesforce has chosen Microsoft Azure as its public cloud provider for its Salesforce Marketing Cloud and announced a new integration to connect the Salesforce Sales and Service Clouds with Microsoft Teams.

Moving its Marketing Cloud to Microsoft Azure will allow Salesforce to optimize its performance as customer demand scales, cutting onboarding times and enabling customers to expand more quickly under Azure's global reach while helping to address local data security, privacy and compliance requirements, the companies said.

To date, Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud has primarily run on the company’s own infrastructure, according to a spokesperson for the San Francisco-based, cloud computing software-as-a-service company, which specializes in customer relationship management (CRM).

The Salesforce Sales and Service Clouds integration with Microsoft Teams -- Microsoft’s communication and collaboration platform combining workplace chat, video meetings, file storage and application integration -- is expected to be active in late 2020. Many customers actively use both Salesforce CRM and Microsoft Teams for their sales and customer service workforces, the companies said, and the integration will allow those teams to search, view and share Salesforce records directly within Teams.

Once bitter rivals, Salesforce and Microsoft announced a strategic partnership in 2014 to connect Salesforce’s CRM apps and platform to Microsoft Office and Windows.

"In a world where every company is becoming a digital company, we want to enable every customer and partner to build experiences on our leading platforms," Satya Nadella, CEO of Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft, said in a statement today. "By bringing together the power of Azure and Microsoft Teams with Salesforce, our aim is to help businesses harness the power of the Microsoft Cloud to better serve customers."

Salesforce will continue to partner with Microsoft rival Amazon Web Services, where it runs the vast majority of its pubic cloud workloads, according to a Salesforce spokesperson. In 2016, Salesforce chose AWS as its preferred public cloud infrastructure provider, expanding its use of AWS to its core services, including Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, App Cloud, Community Cloud and Analytics Cloud. Salesforce and AWS announced an expanded partnership last year designed to simplify how data and events are shared across Salesforce and AWS services, with new integrations connecting the Salesforce Lightning Platform with AWS PrivateLink, which provides private connectivity between virtual private clouds, AWS services and on-premises applications on the Amazon network, and Amazon Connect, AWS’ customer contact center product.

“We'll continue to partner with AWS and run on their public cloud to deliver global customer success,” a Salesforce spokesperson said.

Salesforce also announced a partnership with Google Cloud Platform in 2017 that tied together its CRM platform with G Suite, Google's productivity and team collaboration services.

Under the expanded relationship, Microsoft partners will be able to offer a more integrated ecosystem when Salesforce is involved, according to Allen Falcon, CEO of Cumulus Global, a Westborough, Mass.-based Microsoft partner.

Cumulus met today with a midsize nonprofit considering a move to Office 365.

“As they are strong Salesforce users, better integration with Teams is essential if they are going to make the move,” Falcon said. “This will benefit customers with more seamless integration. This will benefit partners as we will be able to expand our solutions with more options for integrating the collaboration power of Teams with the preferred sales and marketing tools for many SMB, midmarket and enterprise businesses.”

The expanded Microsoft-Salesforce pact “paves the way for better integration between the two technology stacks, and that can only mean good things for the end user,” said Ryan Duguid, chief of evangelism and advanced technology at Bellevue, Wash.-based Nintex, an independent software vendor and Microsoft partner that focuses on process management and automation.

“While I think the battle between these two tech titans will continue on many fronts in the coming years, it’s great to see them bury the [LinkedIn] hatchet just a little bit with these recent announcements,” said Duguid, whose firm is also a Salesforce partner. “At the end of the day, both players dominate in their respective fields and, as a result, most customers and partners have to live with Salesforce for CRM and Microsoft for productivity.”