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Gartner CRM Quadrant
This Magic Quadrant evaluates 16 CRM CEC vendors to help application leaders find the solution that best meets their current and long-term needs.
Microsoft
Microsoft is a Leader in this Magic Quadrant. It offers CEC capabilities via its Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service, Power Virtual Agents, Power Automate, and Dynamics 365 Customer Insights applications. Microsoft has added hundreds of new features and enhancements to its CEC offering over the past year, including the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Voice offering (for which general availability is planned for 3Q21). Microsoft offers its service worldwide, mostly to enterprises. In response to COVID-19, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service was made available free of charge for up to six months for COVID-19-related implementations; the vendor also offered FastTrack support, discounted pricing and extensions of certain offers. Organizations should consider Microsoft for multichannel support, a case/ticketing system for customer service, and for internal or external service teams. They should also consider it if they are expanding a Microsoft technology footprint.
Strengths
Overall viability: Microsoft competes strongly in the CEC market, aided by strong year-over-year revenue growth in 2020. This growth was fueled in part by increased adoption of its CEC software in response to COVID-19 and the complementarity of cloud offerings, such as Microsoft Power BI, Office 365 and Azure, and collaboration products, such as Microsoft Teams.
Product strategy and vision: Microsoft’s strategy emphasizes key application capabilities with Power Platform, Dataverse (a unified data model previously called the Common Data Service), and AI capabilities such as those of Azure Cognitive Services and the Microsoft Bot Framework.
Platform capabilities: Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 CEC offering builds on the same codebase as the Power Platform (Power BI, Power Apps and Power Automate), a low-code platform that underpins all Dynamics products and Microsoft-related systems. The platform is well-suited to citizen development.
Cautions
Learning curve: Users of Gartner’s client inquiry service and Peer Insights reviewers have expressed concerns that deeper training and support are required in order to maximize the benefits of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service’s broad feature set. However, Gartner finds that new customers of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service are often unaware of the available implementation resources, such as FastTrack for Dynamics 365.
Support team synergies: Users of Gartner’s client inquiry service have reported mixed results when working with Microsoft’s support services. They indicate lower levels of user satisfaction with the resolution of support requests involving Microsoft Azure and Dynamics.
Varied partner-led implementation experience: More than 8,000 partners provide Power Apps and/or Dynamics 365 services, but they vary widely in expertise and scale. Users of Gartner’s client inquiry service have reported mixed implementation experiences and that professional services are of variable quality. Prospective customers should undertake a thorough review before selecting a Dynamics 365 partner and keep abreast of Microsoft’s improvements to its partner training and certifications for Dynamics 365 Customer Service.
Zendesk
Zendesk is a Leader in this Magic Quadrant. Its Zendesk Support application is part of the larger Zendesk Suite (also known as Zendesk for Service), which combines a customer communication hub with the engagement orchestration features that constitute the vendor’s CEC offering. With 170,000 customers, Zendesk has the largest customer base of the vendors in this Magic Quadrant. The vendor works globally, often with midsize customers, but increasingly also with large enterprises. The past year has brought notable pricing improvements from Zendesk in the form of prebuilt packages inclusive of omnichannel support, as well as new add-on options. Zendesk is known for high user adoption rates, an easy-to-use interface and SaaS-only deployment focused on the customer experience. Zendesk does not offer industry-specific solutions. It is suitable for organizations that do not require industry-specific customizations.
Strengths
Overall usability: Users of Gartner’s client inquiry service and Peer Insights reviewers appreciate the overall usability of Zendesk’s offering — they have praised its ease of use, customization and administration. Zendesk customers derive benefit from the fast time to value and agility that it delivers, which enable them to serve customers better.
Innovation: Zendesk innovates rapidly. In 2020, it launched key features in areas such as automated conversation orchestration across channels, with a mix of native and third-party bots and workforce management (through a partnership with Tymeshift). A notable roadmap item is Zendesk Integration Services, which is currently in preview for partners.
COVID-19 response: Zendesk has received praise from Gartner clients for its partnership with them and for the customer experience it has offered during the pandemic. The vendor’s response to the pandemic has included licensing relief, faster availability of digital customer service capabilities, and the release of a remote support bundle and the Zendesk Vaccine Management Solution (in partnership with TCS). Zendesk’s response illustrates its Ability to Execute.
Cautions
Support for larger enterprise customers: Zendesk has made progress toward meeting the needs of larger enterprise customers, and is still developing its solution. However, Larger enterprise users of Gartner’s client inquiry service and prospective Zendesk customers with whom Gartner has had contact have expressed concerns about Zendesk’s ability to support complex business processes and integration needs.
Product strategy for UI complexity: Zendesk’s CEC offering has been architected to ensure customers see fast initial time to value and find innovations easy to use. The vendor has a growing number of customers, with more than 500 users balancing the trade-offs of migrating to a more intuitive UI. However, larger customer service centers managing significant numbers of advisors and/or with intricate UI requirements are finding Zendesk’s offering less intuitive and, in certain cases, limited.
Vertical product strategy: Zendesk’s vertical product strategy is limited, compared with the product strategies of other Leaders in this Magic Quadrant. This is a consideration for customers looking for solutions with embedded functionality that reflects industry best practices, especially for highly regulated industries.
SugarCRM
SugarCRM is a Niche Player in this Magic Quadrant. Its primary CEC solution, Sugar Serve, was introduced in mid-2019 as a stand-alone offering (it was formerly part of the original Sugar Enterprise offering). The vendor has a presence in over 120 countries, but about half its Sugar Serve customers are from the Americas and one-quarter from EMEA. SugarCRM continues to strengthen its ecosystem portfolio with integrations with the likes of Amazon, Genesys and Twilio. Notable COVID-19 responses by SugarCRM have included accelerated migration of customers from on-premises solutions to SugarCloud. Midsize support organizations that are looking for a capable customer engagement solution, or that are already using, or planning to deploy, sales automation, should consider SugarCRM.
Strengths
Ease of implementation: SugarCRM’s solution is easily configured and customized. No special training or proprietary scripting languages are needed to achieve results.
Focus on integration: SugarCRM focuses on the ability to integrate with contact center platforms and legacy contact center environment technology. It now offers integration platform as a service (iPaaS) capabilities with hundreds of connectors. It has also launched SugarLive, a new integration with Amazon Connect voice, chat and text messaging.
Customer support: Users of Gartner’s client inquiry service have shown consistent satisfaction with SugarCRM and its dedication to customers postdeployment.
Cautions
Limited visibility: Only a small percentage of Gartner clients have shortlisted SugarCRM (for Sugar Serve) in a competitive situation. The vendor’s CEC solution has limited visibility in the market, in contrast to its Sugar Sell solution.
Innovation: In the past year, SugarCRM’s releases have focused on improvements to its core product set, and fewer cutting-edge technologies, compared with the Leaders in this Magic Quadrant. Consequently, its built-in native digital engagement channels, for example, remain limited, as do its AI-based predictive analytics, although enhancements are on its short-term roadmap.
Application marketplace: SugarCRM’s application marketplace, though growing, offers few CEC add-ons, extensions and third-party solutions that could enrich Sugar Serve. This limits the ability to derive more value from its solution.
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