ServiceNow vs Salesforce: What’s the Right Choice?

‘Customer experience’ is critical for any company’s growth. It is the deciding factor for any organization’s ultimate success. The advent of cloud-based CRM technology has enabled businesses to perform more performance-oriented tasks in order to improve the experience of both existing and potential customers. CRM has evolved into an important business enabler that supports an organization’s marketing, sales, and accounting departments. CRM is being actively adopted by industries; if you are not using one, read the ServiceNow vs Salesforce comparison and select the best one for your business.

According to a statement released by Statista, “The global customer relationship management (CRM) software market is forecast to grow to 49.6 billion U.S. dollars in size in 2025. This is a projected increase of almost four billion U.S. dollars from 2020, at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 1.7 percent.” 

Both Salesforce and ServiceNow are well-known CRM platforms, and rightfully so. ServiceNow and Salesforce are market leaders in their respective fields. Salesforce is an industry leader in customer relationship management, sales, marketing, service, and getting a 360-degree view of a client. While ServiceNow is a globally recognized provider of IT service management software (ITSM). Despite its focus on IT processes, ServiceNow excels at tracking and optimizing employee and customer workflows as well. As a result, these two approaches share many similarities.  

However, considering each user’s needs are distinct, it is crucial that you must choose the alternative that maximizes profits and serves your business eventually. If you are looking to get the most out of your CRM processes, you will need to consider several factors to choose the right solutions that offer ease in deployment, integrations, and better user experience.  

In this article, we will do a detailed comparison of these two CRM platforms to help you make the right choice for your business.  

About Salesforce 

Salesforce is one of the leading cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) platforms we have today. According to Future Market Insights, “The salesforce services market expanded at a CAGR of 12.2% from 2014 to 2021”. The same report has disclosed a forecast report claiming that “Salesforce services demand is expected to progress at an impressive CAGR of 14.4% from 2022 to 2029. This projected growth rate of the salesforce services market is estimated to net US$ 33.5 billion by 2029.”  

Salesforce CRM platform specializes in connecting customers and brands via sales, support, marketing, and other tools across multiple channels. Its adaptability and extensive add-on network for sales, marketing, customer service, platform as a service, and other features have attracted businesses to it. Additionally, Salesforce manages the storage of customer and sales-related data. This makes customer-related firms’ day-to-day operations easier. Furthermore, it provides an opportunity to enhance a customer’s relationship, which is beneficial for the organization’s growth.  

With Salesforce CRM you get real-time customer data all in one place. Value-added insights that are based on data-oriented reports and dashboards to help your sales team. The core feature of Salesforce CRM is handling contacts and accounts, it gives users the ability to store contact and conversation information in one place. What is more, this CRM tool added functionalities for project management, revenue, lead targets, and reporting.   

Services Offered by Salesforce?   

1. Sales Cloud Services 

Salesforce offers its Sales Cloud and Salesforce CPQ to boost productivity and fill the pipeline with quality leads. The platform makes it possible regardless of the users’ choice of software, or speed limitations. Sales Services from Salesforce enable your sales team to close and manage proposals that are more prompt and less cluttered. It is used by any business, regardless of its size, because of its multiplatform support. Salesforce products are used by everyone from a start-up to a big organizations to improve customer experience. 

• The Salesforce Sales Cloud allows users to manage opportunities and contacts on any device, desktop or mobile, at any time.  
• While Salesforce CPQ (or Configure, Price, Quote) streamlines the ordering, billing, and contracting processes. You may create accurate and simple quotes using CPQ.

2. Customer Services

Salesforce CRM’s solutions for customer services may help you improve your customer service from a self-service portal to a customer help desk portal. With a self-service portal, different types of inquiries can be invited to the desk portal employing service solutions, and customer support can be professionally managed. These services can be provided in two different ways. 

• Service Cloud – This is a platform for customer service and support personnel. It helps you to serve your clients with faster and more intelligent support. 
• Field Service Lightning – It connects the whole workforce to provide faster, more productive, and intelligent onsite service.   

3. Salesforce Marketing Cloud Services 

• Through Salesforce Marketing Cloud’s tailored and cross-channel customer journeys, the marketing cloud makes the most of every consumer engagement. This results in great consumer experiences across web, mobile, email, social media, and advertising. 
• Data Management Platform (DMP) from Salesforce stores and activates your data across all digital channels to deliver a superior customer experience. 
• Pardot is an automation tool for marketing that lets you perform things like email marketing, tracking leads, and more.   
• Marketing Cloud, Salesforce data management platform, and Pardot work together to optimize client interaction through multiple channels. They also use advertising and social media to improve the customer’s experience in a unique way.   

4. Salesforce Collaboration Cloud 

Salesforce has recently released Collaboration Cloud with Chatter. With real-time update feeds, the Salesforce Chatter service helps users to interact more efficiently by following other accounts, documents, and information that is important to them.  

Users can create and set up groups and profiles to improve cooperation across numerous business systems, and the Org-wide security and sharing approach ensures that users can only see the information to which they have access. 

5. Custom Cloud 

Custom Cloud is a fundamental shift for salesforce.com. As a PaaS platform, Salesforce provides more than just a CRM platform. It can be used to build virtually any application. But the question arises here why do we need to build the next application on the Force.com platform? So, the answer is that Enterprise application development with traditional software has become too complex, slow, and too expensive. But the application development on the Force.com platform is much faster, less expensive, and produces higher quality applications than building on traditional on-device platforms. Because of cloud computing, building applications on the Salesforce platform is 5 times faster and costs less, according to an industry expert. Some of the advantages of utilizing it are as follows: 

• Allows for a quicker time to value 
• It does not necessitate any upfront capital expenditures. 
• It lowers operational costs. 
• It needed fewer technical resources than other integration methods 

6. Salesforce Marketing Cloud 

Every firm engages in a variety of marketing efforts in order to promote itself and grow its business. 

Several marketing activities fall under the heading of content management, such as content marketing, data analytics, content creation, personalization of the web, customer impact, email, mobile, and social media operations. Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud is one of the top digital marketing platforms for enhancing any company’s marketing tactics. It enables businesses to send tailored mass emails to a variety of potential consumers with a single click. 

It also aids in the resolution of consumer complaints with any product. Through social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and others, businesses can improve communication with unique communities and interact with customers.  

7. Analytics Cloud by Salesforce 

Customers can use the analytics cloud service to get a business intelligence platform. It enables clients to work with large amounts of data with ease. Including graphs, charts, and other pictorial representations, also improves data visualization. We can also use the analytics cloud service in conjunction with Salesforce’s services. 

8. Salesforce Commerce Cloud  

Salesforce Commerce Cloud is a service provided by Salesforce. Customer service and experience are at the heart of the Salesforce commerce cloud solution. It enables businesses to provide their customers with the finest services and experiences possible, whether online or in-store. It combines client information to improve the customer experience. Its goal is to provide businesses with the finest, most positive, and most engaging customer experience possible. 

9. App Cloud Salesforce 

It’s possible to think of it as an ecosystem for creating, discovering, and running custom applications. Salesforce App cloud is a platform for developing custom Salesforce apps. It comes with a variety of development tools for creating custom apps like Force.com, Heroku, AppExchange, Thunder, and Salesforce Sandbox. 

10. Community Cloud by Salesforce 

Employees, consumers, and sales or business partners can all communicate via the community cloud service. Customers can also share real-time data and photos. It enables businesses to interact with customers directly, improve partner success, and boost employee productivity. 

Businesses may provide each user with a unique experience thanks to the community cloud. Customers can locate groups to help them solve difficulties or get answers to their questions quickly. 

• IoT Cloud by Salesforce 
• Through various devices, websites, applications, sensors, and other means, the Internet of Things (IoT) can generate a tremendous amount of data. 
• This data can be received by the IoT Cloud platform, which allows us to begin working on it in order to provide real-time responses. 
• The IoT cloud service acts as a storage and processing platform for IoT data. 

Salesforce Features

1. Managing Communications

This characteristic determines the buyer’s sort of preferences. It uses the history of client interactions to generalize the tendencies. This feature encompasses all the data management activities. 

2. Better Interactions

This feature is backed up by the marketing team, whose members oversee managing a variety of campaigns to resolve various sales and contact alerts. Responding to these alerts is primarily intended to increase interactions with the consumer. 

3. Sales Collaboration

Following the resolution of client issues, a contract is signed in accordance with the customer’s wishes, and the company then responds to the authorities. It is a supportive effort to ensure that the customer relationship includes every distinct semantic feature of the work. It also motivates people to act. 

4. Product Management

The agreements cover things like endorsements and are based on the product’s details, which can change according to location and experience. With the help of transaction tracking and recognition, all data is carefully examined. The transaction has now ended.    

5. Managing Performance

The major goal of the performance management feature is to make changes to improve the sales presentation. It also guarantees that a measure is delivered successfully and tracks the success of answers.  

About ServiceNow   

As a cloud-based platform, ServiceNow offers technical management software as a service (SaaS). Its specialties include management services in the IT business and IT operations. ServiceNow can help users manage their projects, teams, and customers with the support of a variety of applications and plugins. ServiceNow improves employee, user, and customer experiences by offering a variety of IT, customer support, security, software, and other services. The primary objective of this ServiceNow CRM is client infrastructure management. 

ServiceNow has several features that make it suitable for use in large and medium-sized businesses with a variety of business objectives. The platform is a cloud-based software development and security system that offers smarter solutions. 

ServiceNow is an IT Service Management application that adheres to the principle of clean and easy configuration and a faster deployment process.  

1. IT Service Management

Configuration and deployment of IT Service Management solutions are simple. Additionally, they can be scaled to meet business needs. ITSM offers solutions like analytics, problem, and incident management, change and deployment, assets and cost management, survey, assessment, report generation, and so on. 

2. IT Operations Management

ITOM solutions transform IT operations into proactive business partners. It gives visibility into end-to-end business services by understanding the relationship between end-to-end business services and the underlying IT resources. Automating IT operations and remediation procedures. ServiceNow’s ITOM offers solutions like cloud and event management, and mapping services, as well as enhances agility in operations. Cloud users can take advantage of self-service capabilities that keep services up-to-date and engage in a multi-cloud strategy.  

3. IT Business Management  

IT Business Management solutions from ServiceNow help with demand and resource management, finance, test management, and application portfolio management. These tools give you a clear picture of your project and application portfolios. They gain financial intelligence, which aids in deciding where to invest to best support the company objectives.  

4. Security

The security solutions by ServiceNow are integrated by a security orchestration, automation, and response engine, which prioritizes incidents based on their potential impact. These solutions are based on intelligent workflows and well-thought processes that provide security analytics for operations, compliance configurations, reactions to security incidents, threat detection, and so on.  

5. Customer Service

Client services enabled by ServiceNow include operations like resolving issues, field service, and case management, as well as performance-based analytics, automating visual workflows, and voicing customer issues, among others. These solutions collaborate with other departments to quickly identify and handle problems. It lowers costs while also improving client happiness.  

6. HR Service 

ServiceNow has built an integrated area of applications to give a consumer-like service experience. Employees can get a variety of services in one place, from basic information to more complicated procedures like onboarding. Some of the choices include an Employee Service Center, Case and Knowledge Management, and Enterprise Onboarding and Transitions.   

7. ServiceNow Platform

ServiceNow is a single platform that lets you automate any aspect of your business. The Now Platform, which uses a single data model, supports all ServiceNow products. 

The deployment environment is straightforward to use. On the ServiceNow platform, developers may utilize its unique and revolutionary quick development tools to create apps, while business users can construct low-code solutions. 

8. Application Deployment

All ServiceNow applications are built on the ServiceNow Platform. Developers of all levels may boost their productivity by lowering time-to-market and delivery using the ServiceNow platform.

9. Nonstop Cloud Services

The ServiceNow cloud is a multi-tenant infrastructure cloud with unique application designs and databases for each customer. This distinguishes one client’s data from that of other clients. At all times, all instances are active. They are never taken down or taken down for any reason XYZ. It is secure and scalable. 

Features of ServiceNow   

1. Program Authentication

Automated authentication trials are used to allow consumers to follow their requests while increasing the functionality and reducing the risks associated with fresh applications. It also aids in the exclusion of different test files, which are an essential necessity, and increases the maximum number of rollbacks.    

2. Scripting 

Several tests are carried out to reflect user activities that are initiated by a form. It is then sent to be validated. A form is submitted after the field values’ authentication processes are completed. Complex JavaScript actions can be carried out with the help of a separate backend scripting application.    

3. No need for integration

It is one of the most essential tools for solo work. It is not simply a collection of various platforms. It also has a variety of other integrations that work on both the desktop and mobile versions of the software. As a result, the service’s applications have been thoroughly tested, verified, and given out with no errors or malfunctions.  

ServiceNow vs Salesforce, Which is Better?

Let us ponder over a few more points to understand which CRM platform is better among the two.    

Why Salesforce? 

Salesforce is a cloud-based relationship management software that aids in client activity tracking. Business organizations that manage several divisions can choose Salesforce based on its suitability. It is available on a variety of platforms, including the Web, Android, and iPhone. In terms of data input and access, sales courses are more widespread than ServiceNow. Accessibility management and audit trials are only available in Salesforce; whereas this capability is not available in ServiceNow.   

Why ServiceNow? 

On the other hand, ServiceNow is an IT platform that facilitates the development of applications and the democratic expansion of systematic procedures. This platform is useful to organize events with ordering queues, and it entails customization and application development to eliminate the queues. Windows, web support and video training are all supported platforms in ServiceNow. ServiceNow is ideally suited to the development of customer support apps.   

Moreover, in terms of pricing Salesforce’s pricing starts at $75 per month, while ServiceNow’s pricing starts at $100 per month. Also, where ServiceNow allows for a limited number of integrations, Salesforce allows several integrations.  

Final Thoughts   

Salesforce and ServiceNow are two separate CRMs (Customer Relationship Management). In terms of functionality and development, these two systems are both different and comparable. They have options available for a variety of consumers. The decision between Salesforce and ServiceNow is entirely based on your company’s requirements. They are both amazing in terms of support and services, but they are not the same. So this article provides ServiceNow vs Salesforce, to help you make a better decision. 

Having said so much about ServiceNow and Salesforce, it can be said that Salesforce and ServiceNow are both excellent choices, but it primarily depends on your business goals and requirements which CRM software is best suited for you. 

And that is where our experts at Webuters can help you. We provide the best CRM solutions that not only facilitate your growth but are also affordable while perfectly aligning with your business’s infrastructure.