ServiceNow vs Salesforce: A Comparison of Two Powerhouse Platforms

Table of Contents

An Overview of Salesforce and ServiceNow

In the world of cloud-based customer platforms, two names claim the top spot: Salesforce and ServiceNow. Salesforce outshines as the customer relationship management platform, whereas ServiceNow is an emerging platform that optimizes internal operations.

What is Salesforce?

Salesforce is a prominent cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) platform. It is an all-rounder platform where you get services to manage and optimize workflow, irrespective of your business size.

Thus, startups like Twilio and giant enterprises like Google used Salesforce to manage and optimize their customer-based workflow.

It would be fair to say that Salesforce begins and ends for customers. It is a customer-centric platform that improves an enterprise’s and its customer relationships. Salesforce offers support to mobile and website applications. It prioritizes lead, opportunity, marketing, and sales areas.

What is ServiceNow?

ServiceNow is an emerging talk-of-the-town IT Service Management (ITSM) platform. It is designed to serve IT operations and manage back-end IT services. However, it is not limited to that; it provides HR and customer management services.

ServiceNow uses Machine Learning to automate routine tasks and enhance operational efficiency by eliminating manual processes. It is used to set up systems that define and manage structured IT services; in other terms, the bread and butter of ServiceNow are IT operations.

Also, ITSM can boost by up to 60% using ServiceNow. Let’s find out what else benefits ServiceNow and Salesforce provide to your business; delve into features of CRM platforms.

Features of Salesforce and ServiceNow

The feature-focused analysis of ServiceNow vs Salesforce showcases how unparalleled and powerful these two platforms can contribute to your business.

Salesforce Features

Salesforce’s robust and versatile features make it an excellent business solution and a preferable choice for numerous business owners.

Opportunity Management

This feature helps your sales team to manage and track potential deals throughout their sale cycle. It lets you record and monitor every opportunity’s details, including close date, stage, amount, expected revenue, and probability.

For Instance:
If a new client has shown interest in your business, you can create an opportunity using this software solution.

Sales Forecasting

As the name suggests, it helps your sales team to forecast customer and sales opportunities with potential insights. Salesforce provides multiple sales forecasts, such as product, territory, opportunity revenue, and overlay split. As a result, it helps you understand what information you require to forecast your sales strategies. Salesforce Sales Cloud plays a major role in empowering the sales team of an organization with all these incredible features.

For Instance:
Using past or historical data, Salesforce can create the forecast revenue for the upcoming month. Also, it allows your management to allocate resources effectively and set realistic targets.

Contact and Account Management

In this centralized platform, you can store and manage customer information, such as name, address, phone number, email, and other contact history. With contact and account management, your sales team can track all your customer interactions. Additionally, Salesforce account management enables you to maintain consistency with the accounts.

For Instance:
You can easily access a customer’s account details, past purchases, and interactions, providing personalized communication and dynamic solutions.

Email Integration

With this feature, you can seamlessly integrate emails and streamline the interaction process with your customer through emails. You can send, receive, and track emails directly within Salesforce, ensuring the interaction reaches the target audience and all information is easily accessible.

For Instance:
Your sales team can create or send follow-up emails to possibilities directly from Salesforce.

Lead Management

This Salesforce feature helps to convert leads into sales by capturing, tracking, and managing them. The automated workflow process eliminates the requirement of follow up activities manually. Also, it assists your team in prioritizing leads based on business measures.

For Instance:
When potential customers fill up the contact form on a website, Salesforce crafts it as a lead record. It helps businesses to increase and convert possible leads into lead conversion.

ServiceNow Features

ServiceNow’s popularity soars because of its pioneering features that redefine innovation and efficiency. The following are ServiceNow’s primary features:

IT Service Management

SerivceNow’s IT Service Management (ITSM) is a dynamic and comprehensive solution that allows you to manage IT-based services and activities. It is a tool that helps your technical team track the issues, assign them to a predefined person, and follow up on the process until it is fixed.

For Instance:
Consider it as your IT department team, which ensures that your computer, hardware, and software operate smoothly. From resolving minor bugs and glitches to significant technical challenges, ITSM covers it all.

Workflow Automation

This ServiceNow feature ensures smooth daily routine tasks effectively. Workflow automation allows tasks to be automated, decreasing manual efforts and ensuring consistent, efficient processes.

For Instance:
It is like someone who takes care of everything about employees, from welcoming them to providing salary on time or solving any queries. The workflow automation reduces errors and saves your team time to focus on essential tasks.

Analytical Reporting

Analytical reporting is your data storyteller, who presents you with insightful data. It takes your data and lets you visualize your operations, customer behavior, and sales trends through dynamic charts and graphs.

For Instance:
Think of it as an expert who provides you with data insights, business patterns, and sales opportunities. Analytical reporting gives you a clear picture of what your business is doing and how to improve and make informed decisions.

IT Operations Management

An essential feature of ServiceNow is IT operations management. It helps to simplify the complexity of IT service delivery and management. With its suite of tools, your team can efficiently manage incidents, problems, changes, and configurations.

For Instance:
Think of it as an operational conductor that coordinates networks, applications, and servers. The conductor spots the issues before they become a big concern, ensuring smooth technical operations.

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Customer Service Management

This feature helps to enhance customer experiences by streamlining support processes. Customer service management offers case management, allowing support professionals to quickly solve customer queries and issues, enhancing customer interactions with your organization.

For Instance:
Having a system that addresses the issue to your team, resolving and navigating issues automatically, and ensuring personalized responses. Customer service management empowers you with information to respond faster and boost brand loyalty.

Similarities: Salesforce vs ServiceNow

Before jumping into the differences of ServiceNow vs Salesforce, let’s understand how and in what ways Salesforce and ServiceNow are similar:

• Both are CRM-based platforms, making operating hybrid working and handling international clients easier.
• Salesforce and ServiceNow offer workflow automation capabilities to streamline operations and boost efficiency.
• Both provide user-friendly interfaces and mobile accessibility.
• If Salesforce offers easy integration with third-party apps, ServiceNow does the same but with limited apps.
• Through development and configuration, ServiceNow and Salesforce enable customization to meet specific business requirements.

Comparison Table: ServiceNow vs Salesforce

Here is a glimpse of how different ServiceNow and Salesforce are to businesses and their services.

8 Differences: ServiceNow vs Salesforce

With its robust features and advantages, ServiceNow and Salesforce have diverse purposes. Following is the in-depth comparison of Salesforce vs ServiceNow.

Performance

Both Salesforce and ServiceNow provide outstanding performance but differ in domains. ServiceNow focuses on IT service management and automation, streamlining complex workflows. The average ServiceNow page load time is 1.5 seconds and an average of 99.9% uptime, minimizing downtime.

On the other hand, Salesforce is a popular customer relationship management (CRM) solution. The average Salesforce page load time is 2.5 seconds, and customers experience 99.9% uptime, providing faster and more efficient performance.

Implementation

ServiceNow and Salesforce have different approaches when it comes to implementation. ServiceNow is specially designed for IT service management, but it can be used for others, such as human resources management and project management. Additionally, ServiceNow is available only in the cloud.

On the contrary, Salesforce is crafted for various businesses but is mainly used for CRM. Salesforce can be a bit expensive to implement as it is implemented on-premises or in the cloud. But if you are looking for a platform with multiple departments, Salesforce is the go-to choice. In fact, it is easier to determine the Salesforce implementation cost compared to ServiceNow.

Usability

Both are quite different in terms of usability. ServiceNow is more for IT professionals and intuitive for users familiar with IT service management software. It prioritizes delivering tools for technical operations and automation processes.

On the other hand, Salesforce is more for CRM users. It focuses on marketing, sales, and many other different types of business. However, comparing them, Salesforce is an easier-to-use, scalable, customizable, intuitive user interface and supports a large community.

Integration

In terms of integration, Salesforce is the story’s star. However, integration in ServiceNow is a comparatively complex and a more limited process. As a result, you need to rely on third-party tools for integration, which might boost your business expense.

In contradistinction, Salesforce has in-built features and pre-existing integrations, such as Salesforce Connector, which makes it easier for businesses to integrate. Also, it provides Salesforce AppExchange, a marketplace where you can find third-party integration solutions.

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Customer Support

Providing quality customer support is every business’s ultimate goal. Both Salesforce and ServiceNow have their different ways of providing customer support. ServiceNow offers Customer Service Management that automates IT tasks to streamline customer experience. Also, the platform supports customers through 24/7 phone, live chat, email, and FAQs.

On the other hand, Salesforce provides a customer support solution, “Service Cloud.” It resolves customer inquiries with its case management system and offers multi-channels like live chat, email, social media, and 24/7 phone support. Small businesses should choose ServiceNow for internal support, and large-scale enterprises must go for Salesforce.

Security

It is crucial to secure your business from malware and data vulnerability. Both ServiceNow and Salesforce offer excellent ways to secure platforms; however, their methods are pretty diverse. ServiceNow follows a multi-tenant architecture; it uses role-based access control and performs regular scanning for vulnerabilities.

Whereas, Salesforce encrypts all data, offers two-factor authentication as an additional layer of security, and real-time alerts to track user activity and changes. Also, in Salesforce security modules, data is stored in three structures: objects, fields, and records.

Pricing

In ServiceNow, ITSM service costs approximately $70 per user and $100 per user for ITSM professionals. You need to contact their representative or visit their official website to get a quote and know different pricing plans.

Salesforce’s basic pricing plan, such as Service and Sales Cloud, starts from $25/per month. As you opt for the more upgraded version, Salesforce provides more customizable and adds higher support levels, costing around $1000/per month.

Future Scope

To determine which CRM platform is better, it is essential to know the future prospects of it. ServiceNow is growing business operations with Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and customizable workflows; hence, it will likely grow in upcoming years. The global market of ServiceNow is likely to reach $12.2 billion in 2025.

On the other side, Salesforce is a prominent CRM platform that will keep expanding and rising in the upcoming years. Also, Salesforce will continue to dominate the cloud computing space with its robust features. According to Statista, by 2025, the global market of the CRM platform is expected to reach $57 billion.

So, whether you choose ServiceNow or Salesforce, you will get fruitful results as the possibilities of future demand will remain high.

When to Use Salesforce or ServiceNow

It is challenging to choose ServiceNow vs Salesforce as both are excellent and have their strengths and uniqueness. So, which one is ideal for you? Let’s understand with the below table when to use what.

Salesforce vs ServiceNow: Which One is Better for Your Business?

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Which is better, Salesforce or ServiceNow?

Both are excellent, Salesforce is a notable choice for customer relationship management (CRM) platform, and ServiceNow is feasible for IT service management (ITSM), hence choose as per your business requirement.

Is ServiceNow similar to Salesforce?

ServiceNow and Salesforce are cloud-based platforms, but both serve different purposes. ServiceNow focuses on streamlining IT operations, and Salesforce emphasizes improving customer services.

Salesforce vs ServiceNow, which is easy to learn?

Salesforce is easier to learn than ServiceNow because of its user-friendly interfaces and comprehensive training resources.

Which is better for a career: ServiceNow or Salesforce?

Both have brilliant futures in terms of careers. However, If you want to work in a general-purpose CRM role, Salesforce is a good option. And if you want to work in an IT service management role, ServiceNow is for you.

What are the benefits of ServiceNow Salesforce integration?

The following are the advantages of ServiceNow Salesforce integration:

• It streamlines the process by managing IT services and customer data
• It boosts efficiency by automating workflows
• By integrating, you can provide consistent services to customers
• It eliminates data silos and keeps it updated.