Last Updated on December 11, 2023 by Ewen Finser
If you are trying to decide if Salesforce or monday.com Sales CRM is better for your business, you’ve come to the right place!
But first…
Here’s My Bottom Line Up Front Summary: The main difference between monday.com vs Salesforce is that monday.com focuses on CRM and team collaboration, while Salesforce offers a wider range of enterprise services such as analytics, e-commerce, and customer service. Salesforce stands out as a better platform for businesses that need a wider range of services, but maybe not if you need just a clean functional CRM.
monday.com is better for companies that need CRM and team collaboration features. It’s also more affordable (see pricing plans) than Salesforce. It’s also a much more flexible interface that is easier to learn, maintain and use, making company adoption and easier sell than taking the “Salesforce pill”.
Main Differences Between monday.com vs Salesforce
The main differences between monday.com vs Salesforce are:
- monday.com is more visual and easier to use, making it perfect for small businesses that are not tech-savvy, whereas Salesforce is more complex and suited for larger businesses.
- Monday.com is cheaper and has more straightforward pricing, whereas Salesforce is more expensive with complicated pricing.
- Salesforce is more feature-rich with extensive product offerings, whereas monday.com is more focused on CRM and lacks features in other areas.
- monday.com offers better customer support with a quick response time, whereas Salesforce offers more options for customer service including telephone and email.
- Salesforce offers seamless integration capabilities, whereas you may encounter some difficulties integrating other tools with monday.com.
Make tasks satisfying to finish! monday.com is quickly disrupting the old guard with a sleek interface, hundreds of integrations, and dozens of workviews for visually imagining and tracking your projects. More than just project management.
About 91% of companies with at least 10 employees use CRM tools. These tools give companies a way to manage and track customer data, interactions, and sales. Many CRM tools exist on the market, but two of the most popular are monday.com vs Salesforce.
Both platforms aim to scale customer relationships with features that automate workflows and help sales reps close more deals. While they share many similarities, such as cloud-based deployment and a focus on sales, some differences set them apart.
The search for the perfect CRM involves an extensive analysis of what that CRM offers and how it aligns with an organization’s unique needs. This article takes a closer look at monday.com and Salesforce, analyzes their differences, looks at some of their similarities, and provides guidance on which platform best suits your business.
monday.com Overview
monday.com is a cloud-based platform that helps teams manage their work with automated workflows.
It provides a flexible and transparent way for teams to collaborate and get more done. We can think of monday.com as a visual task manager with built-in communication tools.
It’s more of a work OS than a CRM tool. monday.com has modules for managing tasks, projects, calendars, contacts, and files. Launched in 2014, monday.com is a relatively new entrant in the business management tools space. Its growth to become a top-rated platform is because of its extensive feature set and focus on creating a better work experience for teams.
monday.com boasts more than 127,000 customers who believe and rely on its capabilities to help manage their work. The customers are from various industries, including marketing, advertising, consulting, software development, and manufacturing.
Once you set up your monday.com account, you can create boards (similar to a spreadsheet), which you can use to track tasks, projects, and goals. The conversational panel featured on each row of cards allows team members to leave comments and chat with one another easily.
No doubt, integrations are crucial for any business. monday.com integrates with many applications, including Asana, Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, and Slack. If you have already invested in any of these or other applications, monday.com’s open API can easily integrate with them.
monday.com Features
Below are features and solutions that make monday.com an attractive management tool for businesses:
Marketing and Creative Management
The Monday Marketer offers insights teams need to manage their creative work. It includes an automated campaign planning tool that helps teams with ideas and tasks, briefs and reviews, asset management, and approvals. Its marketing strategy tool ensures businesses get the visibility they need into their creative work, performance data, and customer lifetime value.
Customizable CRM
CRM is NOW a monday.com core offering (it didn’t used to be), and it’s customizable for businesses of all sizes. It allows business owners to get closer to their customers by offering email templates, syncing the emails, managing activity logs, tracking deals and opportunities, and more. The CRM dashboard provides a visual overview of your team goals, active deals, and pipeline progress.
Software Development and Management
The software development and management module helps teams manage their software development lifecycle. It offers roadmap planning with backlog features, sprint management, and task board features. The Kanban view helps track the progress of tasks and manage dependencies while providing transparency into task development.
Project Management
Project management is crucial for businesses and is one of the areas in which monday.com excels. By centralizing all your project tasks in one place, you can easily assign and reassign tasks, set deadlines, track progress, measure and optimize results. It fosters a collaborative environment by bridging communication silos and offering a transparent overview of project tasks and statuses.
Inventory Tracking and Management
The inventory tracking and management module allow businesses to manage their stock, assets, and orders. It helps streamline receiving and processing inventory, manages supplier and customer data, and offers a simple interface for purchasing orders. Business owners cab track inventory with their phones by scanning using QR codes or NFC tags.
monday.com Pros
- Features a modern UI
- Advanced automation features
- Comes with numerous templates
- Fairly priced
- Highly customized
- Comes with a mobile and desktop app
- Fast loading UI
monday.com Cons
- Limited free trial offer
- Limited customization
Make tasks satisfying to finish! monday.com is quickly disrupting the old guard with a sleek interface, hundreds of integrations, and dozens of workviews for visually imagining and tracking your projects. More than just project management.
Salesforce Overview
Salesforce is the world’s leading CRM software with about 19.5% market share if data from Statista is anything to go by. It stands out as the most popular CRM software with over 150,000 customers. As a cloud-based CRM, it offers a wide range of features for sales, customer service, marketing, and other business areas.
As an all-inclusive solution, it tailors its services based on need and industry. Small businesses, for example, may not need all the features that Salesforce offers. It also provides a wide range of pricing options to suit businesses of all sizes.
While most reviews picture Salesforce as a solution that best fits the needs of a large company, it can still be of great value to a small business. It offers lead management, contact management, opportunity management, and customer service features.
Salesforce offers a great degree of automation, crucial for any business. With the help of Salesforce’s marketing automation features, companies can nurture leads and increase their conversion rates. It also allows for streamlined processes such as automatic contact creation and lead assignment. Automation through Salesforce also helps you track your ROI on various campaigns.
Salesforce Features
Below are features that make Salesforce one of the most popular CRM software in the market:
Contact Management
Salesforce’s contact management feature helps you keep track of all your leads and customers. It assures a 360-degree view of all customer interactions by consolidating data from various sources such as email, social media, phone calls, and website visits.
Its cloud-based capabilities make it easy to access customer data from any device or location. You can share your insights with your team and get real-time updates on customer interactions.
Opportunity Management
The opportunity management feature helps you track and close sales deals. It offers a visual overview of all your sales opportunities and information on each sales cycle stage. You can also forecast your sales pipeline, track customer interactions, and measure the success of your campaigns.
Lead Management
Convert leads into opportunities and customers by using Salesforce’s lead management feature. It helps you identify and track leads, qualify them, and score them. This feature allows you to route and assign leads to the right sales reps. You can also measure the success of your lead generation campaigns.
Reporting and Dashboards
Get a complete view of your business performance with Salesforce’s reporting and dashboard features. It offers over 100 out-of-the-box reports and lets you customize reports to suit your needs. The customer analytics software within Salesforce offers insights into customer behavior. You can use this data to improve your marketing and sales efforts.
Territory Management
Use Salesforce’s territory management feature to organize and manage your sales reps. You can create territories based on product lines, customer segments, or other criteria. This feature also allows you to track the progress of each sales rep and forecast their revenue. You can also assign a single rule to all your reps or customize rules for each rep.
Salesforce Pros
- Accessible round the clock
- Extensive product offering
- Extensive functionality
- Extensive customization
- Seamless integration with Salesforce apps
Salesforce Cons
- Steeper learning curve
- Complicated pricing
- Java script code slows down the UI
- It’s possible to over customize
monday.com vs Salesforce: Head-to-Head Comparison
The different feature sets of monday.com and Salesforce can be confusing for businesses trying to decide which CRM to choose. To make an informed decision, let’s compare the two CRMs head-to-head.
1. Installation and Set-up
monday.com is a cloud-based application accessible through a web browser on your PC. It works well with Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox. However, you can also download and install the monday.com app from the Windows or macOS app store. The process is seamless and takes minutes to set up.
Salesforce is a cloud-based CRM that you can access with a web browser or Salesforce desktop app from any device. Installing the software is slightly more complicated than monday.com, but with a bit of help from their customer service, you should be up and running in no time.
Verdict: monday.com is easier to install and set up than Salesforce.
2. Ease of Use
The idea behind CRM and project management tools is to make your life easier by automating tedious and time-consuming tasks. monday.com is fairly easy to use, providing you with a simple and intuitive user interface. The features are easy to find, and the menus are straightforward.
Salesforce is also an easy-to-use CRM. However, it can be challenging to learn all the features and options in one go. Salesforce offers plenty of online resources, such as training modules, webinars, and how-to guides. As with any software, it will take some time to get used to it, but you’ll be up and running in no time.
Verdict: Both platforms are relatively easy to use.
3. User Interface
monday.com’s user interface is modern and sleek. The colors are bright, and the fonts are big, making it easy to read. The layout is intuitive and straightforward, with all the features neatly organized into menus.
Salesforce also has a modern user interface. It allows you to personalize the look and feel of the application to match your company branding. Salesforce allows you to configure your user interface settings to suit your preferences. It’s also fast with vast and powerful search capabilities.
Verdict: monday.com has a sleeker and more modern user interface than Salesforce.
4. Pricing
When choosing a CRM, price is an important consideration. Both monday.com and Salesforce offer a range of pricing plans to suit businesses of all sizes.
monday.com Pricing Plans (CRM Modules)
Monday.com offers four pricing levels in general and their new CRM pricing is fairly standard to this model.
The plans vary depending on the number of accounts required. You can choose to pay either monthly or yearly. The yearly plan will save you about 18% on the monthly price.
- monday.com’s trial period is 14 days.
- Basic CRM: $10/seat/month
- Standard CRM: $10/seat/month
- Pro CRM: $24/seat/month
- Enterprise CRM: (Contact sales for customized pricing)
The most popular plan is the standard plan, as it offers all the features necessary to run a business. monday.com also provides an individual plan that’s free forever. Visit the monday.com pricing page for detailed information on all the plans.
Salesforce Pricing
Salesforce pricing can be very confusing. It tailors pricing based on the needs of your business and the number of users you have. Below is a simplified view of Salesforce pricing.
- Salesforce Sales Cloud: Salesforce sales cloud costs starts from $25/user/month
- Salesforce Service Cloud: Salesforce service cloud pricing starts from 25/user/month
- Salesforce Marketing Cloud: Starts from $400/user/month
- Salesforce Commerce Cloud: Contact support
- Pardot pricing: starts from $1250/user/month
- Salesforce Anywhere: starts from $100/user/month
Salesforce also offers many other services, such as a development platform that can be very costly.
Verdict: monday.com is more affordable than Salesforce, with the cheapest plan starting at $8/month. Visit the Salesforce pricing page for more detailed information.
5. Customer Support
Customer support is an essential factor when choosing a CRM. monday.com offers live support through its live chat button available whenever you are on the platform. You can also book tickets and solve issues through pre-arranged webinars. The support team is friendly and helpful, with a quick response time.
Salesforce offers customer support through telephone, email, and chat. Users report excellent customer service with timely responses. It provides details on where to find local offices, especially for people not living in the United States.
Verdict: Both platforms offer fantastic support, but Salesforce has more options and better response times.
6. Integrations
Integrations are a crucial part of any CRM. They allow you to connect to other applications and platforms to manage your data. monday.com integrates with various applications, including Google Drive, Slack, and Shopify. As a bonus, monday.com’s Zapier integration allows you to connect to over 1,500 applications.
Salesforce integrates with many applications, including Google Drive, Slack, Stripe and Shopify. It also has its app marketplace, where you can find integrations for everything from accounting to human resources. Seamless integration is one of Salesforce’s key selling points.
Verdict: Salesforce has better and seamless integration capabilities than monday.com.
7. Product Offerings and Features
Salesforce and monday.com’s core offering is CRM. However, they offer other services outside of CRM.
monday.com’s other services include marketing and creative management, sales management, project and task management, operations and HR management, and customer service management.
Salesforce offers a wide range of services outside of CRM. It classifies its product offerings based on need, industry, and business size. Other services outside of CRM include software development, analytics, e-commerce, and customer service. You can use Salesforce’s guided product tour to see all the benefits it offers.
Verdict: Salesforce has an extensive feature set with more products outside its core offering.
monday.com and Salesforce Alternatives
If neither monday.com nor Salesforce fits your needs, consider the following tools:
- Zoho CRM
- Sugar CRM
- Zendesk
- Sage
- Oracle
- Click up
- Bitrix24
- Asana
- Smartsheet
- Trello
FAQs
Question: Is monday.com a competitor to Salesforce?
Answer: Monday.com and Salesforce compete in the CRM, project management and task management, and team collaboration spaces. Both tools offer a wide range of features that make them viable alternatives for businesses of all sizes.
Question: What is the difference between Monday.com and Salesforce?
Answer: The main difference between Monday.com and Salesforce lies in the product offering. Salesforce offers a wider range of services such as analytics, e-commerce, and customer service. Monday.com focuses on CRM and team collaboration. Monday.com is also more affordable than Salesforce, with the cheapest plan starting at $8/month.
Question: Is Salesforce better than monday.com?
Answer: Salesforce is a better platform than Monday.com for businesses that need a wider range of services. Its extensive feature set and integrations make it a powerful tool for managing data. However, Monday.com is better for companies that need CRM and team collaboration features. It is also more affordable than Salesforce.
Conclusion: Salesforce or monday.com
Make tasks satisfying to finish! monday.com is quickly disrupting the old guard with a sleek interface, hundreds of integrations, and dozens of workviews for visually imagining and tracking your projects. More than just project management.
monday.com and Salesforce are two of the most popular CRM platforms on the market. When choosing between the two, consider your needs and budget.
After an extensive look into both monday.com and Salesforce, it is clear that Salesforce offers more services and features than monday.com as a sales CRM ecosystem.
Agile Remote Team? If you need CRM and team collaboration features, then monday.com is clearly the better choice.
Large Sales Organization? If you are a large enterprise with deep sales cycles and interconnected departments, Salesforce is the better long term large scale CRM option.
Further Reading on Sales CRM Platforms
Still not sure? Check out our ecosystem of direct comparisons for monday.com and Salesforce to see what the competition is up to.
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