Zoho Desk:The user-friendly alternative to Salesforce

Relying on the obvious solution to meet your growing business needs, but you're not happy with the results? It maybe time to make a change. Compare Salesforce Service Cloud and Zoho Desk to make the right choice for both your customers and employees.

Sign Up For Free

Does Salesforce have all that you need?

While Salesforce Service Cloud has long been a popular help desk solution, boasting a wide variety of features, businesses continue to switch to other platforms. Given the complexity in terms of implementation, usability, and expense of Service Cloud the tendency to look for an alternative is unsurprising.

Here's what Zoho Desk offers your business:

Effortless integration

Faster deployment

Transparent pricing

Free migration

Simplified onboarding

15%

increase in first contact resolution.

50%

faster response time.

14%

increase in CSAT score.

48%

reduction in customer churn rate.

* Metrics reported by our customers through an internal survey.

Expand All

What's the price difference?

Number of users: 25

Zoho Desk Enterprise
Salesforce Service Cloud Enterprise

Save $2750 or up to 73% in savings by switching to the best help desk software.

Feature comparison

You want a solution that meets the demands of your customers, as well as your business needs. When comparing it with Salesforce, you are looking for a solution that offers robust features and reasonable pricing to help you provide efficient and effective solutions to your customers. Let's take a look at how Salesforce Service Cloud Enterprise and Zoho Desk Enterprise compare in specific categories.

Expand All
Omnichannel support

Salesforce Service Cloud offers limited channels you can support your customers on. In order to provide support via messaging apps like WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger you are required to subscribe to add-ons.

Zoho Desk helps you provide a complete omnichannel experience to your customers with built-in email, live chat, telephony, social media, web forms, and instant messaging. You can view interactions from all your channels in one place, or from the dedicated modules for live chat, instant messaging, and social media, meaning your agents are better equipped to offer instant and personalized responses.

Features
Zoho Desk
Salesforce Service Cloud
E-mail
Live Chat$
Twitter
Whatsapp$
Line$
WeChat$
Zoho Desk
Salesforce Service Cloud

E-mail

Telephony

$

Live Chat

Twitter

WhatsApp

$

Line

$

WeChat

$

Agent productivity

Both Service Cloud and Zoho Desk allow agents to view tickets based on priority, status, and due time. In both apps, you can display tickets in list, kanban, or table view. While both offer features to increase agent productivity, Service Cloud does not provide an in-house app for remote desktop access and the essential functionality of splitting tickets.

Zoho Desk provides a built-in remote access app that helps agents access a customer's screen with the click of a button. Keeping in mind the needs of agents, Desk is designed to be user-friendly and accessible to all with its new UI, User Preferences, and Accessibility Controls. To make ticket management a seamless task we have all the required features such as splitting tickets, cloning ticket, adding resolutions as KB articles, snippets for faster responses and more built-in.

Features
Zoho Desk
Salesforce Service Cloud
Quick Ticket View
(Peek View)
Work Modes
Table View
Snippets for Faster Response
Add resolutions to Knowledge Base$
Split Tickets$
Clone Ticket
Night mode
Zoho Desk
Salesforce Service Cloud

Quick Ticket View
(Peek View)

Work Modes

Table View

Snippets for Faster Response

Add resolutions to Knowledge Base

$

Split Tickets

$

Clone Ticket

Accessibility Controls

Night mode

Self-service

Service Cloud restricts its knowledge base access to read only mode, which means in order to manage and create articles for KB, it requires you to purchase add-ons. It provides a help center with bare minimum features restricting your ability to serve your customers effectively. Moreover, community support and community metrics are also available as add-ons.

With Zoho Desk, you can customize your help center to reflect your brand ideology, support customers globally with the multilingual knowledge base, reduce agent workloads with Zia and Guided Conversations, and help customers help each other with community support.

Features
Zoho Desk
Salesforce Service Cloud
Knowledge Base (Read Write)$
Guided Conversations$
Knowledge base dashboards$
Community$
Zoho Desk
Salesforce Service Cloud

Knowledge Base (Read Write)

Guided Conversations

$

Knowledge base dashboards

$

Community

$

A.I.

Salesforce Service Cloud provides anomaly notifications in its Enterprise edition to keep managers updated about the rise in incoming tickets. But other essential features such as sentiment analysis, Auto tagging of tickets, and reply assistant are provided as add-ons.

All A.I. features come built-in with Zoho Desk. Zia by Zoho Desk can answer customers' frequently asked questions, so your agents can focus on bigger issues. Agents can tailor their service according to the customer's mood with the help of Zia's Sentiment Analysis. Plus, simplify the response process with Zia's reply assistant.

Features
Zoho Desk
Salesforce Service Cloud
Reply Assistant$
Sentiment Predictions$
Ticket Auto-Tagging$
Anomaly Notifications
KB Conversation Assistant
Zoho Desk
Salesforce Service Cloud

Reply Assistant

$

Sentiment Predictions

$

Ticket Auto-Tagging

$

Anomaly Notifications

KB Conversation Assistant

Automation

Although Service Cloud and Desk's automation offerings are similar, the way they operate is quite different. In order to set up notifications, agents must follow a long procedure to create workflows in Service Cloud. With Zoho Desk, you can easily set up notifications by turning on the toggle, and enable built-in, customizable time tracking options. In Salesforce, you have to depend on third-party integrations to track the time spent by agents on each case. On top of that, you need another add-on to sync the time entry reports to Service Cloud.

Features
Zoho Desk
Salesforce Service Cloud
Direct ticket ownership assignment
Manual time tracking$
Automatic time tracking$
Activity time tracking$
Assign tickets to teams
Zoho Desk
Salesforce Service Cloud

Direct ticket ownership assignment

Manual time tracking

$

Automatic time tracking

$

Activity time tracking

$

Assign tickets to teams

Customization

Salesforce Service Cloud and Zoho Desk offer similar customization features. With the customization features offered by both the apps, you can add custom fields and customize the page, ticket, and form layouts. Along with this, you also get to customize your help desk by adding department-specific layouts, and capture information in each of your departments and teams under different modules, like Tickets and Contacts. Customization also allows you to map your company’s domain to your help desk software, and support your customers in their language.

Features
Zoho Desk
Salesforce Service Cloud
Custom email templates
Custom tabs
Custom views
Custom forms and layouts
Custom fields
Custom ticket status & status grouping
Field dependencies
Zoho Desk
Salesforce Service Cloud

Custom email templates

Custom tabs

Custom views

Custom forms and layouts

Custom ticket status & status grouping

Field dependencies

Analytics

Salesforce Service Cloud's analytical tools can drastically cut into your budget. To delve deeper into the survey responses to analyze the results, and to analyze your AI performance you need two different add-ons.

Zoho Desk gives you all the insights you need, from business performance to customer satisfaction scores, in one centralized location. Generate reports and dashboards with the click of a button. Stay on top of your data with auto-sync. With Zoho Desk, you're always equipped to discover insights that help you improve and grow.

Features
Zoho Desk
Salesforce Service Cloud
Standard reports
Prepopulated reports
Custom reports and dashboards
SLA dashboards$
Customer Happiness Dashboard$
Knowledge Base Dashboard$
AI Dashboard$
Zoho Desk
Salesforce Service Cloud

Standard reports

Prepopulated reports

Custom reports and dashboards

SLA dashboards

$

Customer Happiness Dashboard

$

Knowledge Base Dashboard

$

AI Dashboard

$

Pricing comparison

/user/month billed monthly /user/month billed annually
/user/month billed monthly /user/month billed annually
Free$0 -
Standard$14
Professional$23 49
Enterprise$40 99
Free
Starter$25
Professional$80 80
Enterprise$165 165
Zoho Desk
Salesforce Service Cloud

Free

Free

$ 00

-

Standard

Starter

$ 14 75

25

Professional

Professional

$ 23 49

$80 80

Enterprise

Enterprise

$ 40 99

$165 165

Zoho Desk - Highly rated by critics and users alike

Featured in Gartner's Magic Quadrant for CRM CEC, 2023
Crozdesk Customer service champion, 2023
FrontrunnersTop customer service software, 2024
G2 Enterprise leader, 2024
Capterra Shortlist, 2024

The simplicity of Zoho Desk's UI has really helped my digital transformation team to reduce the number of hours spent, from 5 to only 2.5 or 3 hours, in training and onboarding the new agents/users of the help desk technology.

Kushagra SahniChief of Staff, Centilytics

The average response time for agents before Zoho Desk was 7 hours, but with the process in place, the agents are now responding to each ticket within 3 hours.

Jim FrancisSystems Manager, Land Title Guarantee Company

We're able to more effectively respond to our customer needs using Zoho Desk. It gives you a big picture of everything you need because it has great reporting capabilities and keeps track of customers who reach out to us via different channels. Zoho Desk's functionality is much better than Salesforce as we're able to easily merge tickets together and track who is working on which ticket.

Alex Tolbert CEO, Bernard Health

Switch to Zoho Desk effortlessly

on demand webinars

On-demand webinars

Learn to connect with customers and strengthen your support operations with our informative how-to webinars.

Learn more
hassle free migration

Hassle-free migration

We provide you with all the assistance you need to migrate your data seamlessly.

Learn more
24 7 support

24/7 support

Our documented and on-demand support helps you get fast and comprehensive answers to all your questions.

Learn more

Make the switch to Zoho Desk today!

Frequently asked questions about Salesforce alternatives

Expand All
What are the best alternatives to Salesforce Service Cloud?

There are multiple players in the market like, Freshdesk, and Zendesk, but Zoho Desk offers a robust feature set at a competitive price making it the most reliable and feature-rich alternative to Salesforce Service Cloud.

Are Salesforce Service Cloud alternatives expensive?

Comparatively speaking, they're not expensive at all. Consider Zoho Desk. You'll notice that you get all the features offered by Salesforce and more for a reasonable price compared to the Salesforce price of $165 per user month, billed annually.

Moreover, your dependency on third-party integrations for basic services and features is drastically reduced with Zoho Desk. Like many other Desk users, you'll find that Zoho Desk is easy to implement and highly adaptable to your needs, leading to enhanced employee and customer satisfaction. Salesforce has a complex setup process, and the implementation and training costs will only add to the growing snowball of expenditures.

What does it cost to migrate to a Salesforce Service Cloud competitor?

Zoho Desk has a hassle-free migration process. You can migrate from Salesforce Service Cloud to Zoho Desk for free on your own or get assistance from our dedicated team every step of the way.

How do I evaluate alternatives to Salesforce?

A Salesforce Service Cloud alternative should not only offer a robust feature set at a reasonable price, but should also be adaptable, scalable, customizable, and easy to use. It should also be easy to implement with a minimal learning curve.

Check out Zoho Desk, a user-friendly alternative to Salesforce Service Cloud.

Compare other help desk solutions
with Zoho Desk

All prices shown here are in USD. The names and logos for Zoho are trademarks of Zoho Corp. All other trademarks, brand names, or product names
belong to their respective holders. Comparison information as of 29.08.2023