Salesforce vs Freshsales

Overview: Salesforce vs. Freshsales (and folk)

Salesforce and Freshsales are two powerful CRM platforms designed to streamline customer relationship management and drive sales. Salesforce is a comprehensive, highly customizable solution built for large organizations that need advanced tools across sales, marketing, and customer service.

Freshsales, by contrast, focuses on AI-driven insights, sales automation, and integrated communication tools, making it ideal for teams seeking a data-focused approach to sales management.

In this blog post, we'll explore their key features to help you determine which CRM aligns best with your business needs—or if folk CRM might offer a more balanced alternative specifically designed for medium-sized sales teams of 20-50 people with user-friendly contact management and customization options.

👉🏼 Try folk now to compare pipelines and migrate contacts from Salesforce or Freshsales

What is Salesforce?

Salesforce is a robust CRM platform for large enterprises, offering tools for sales, marketing, service, and analytics, with extensive scalability.

Key features of Salesforce

• Comprehensive ecosystem: A unified platform offering CRM, marketing automation, customer service, and custom app development, suitable for the varied needs of large enterprises.
• Customization and scalability: Salesforce is highly customizable and scalable, allowing large organizations to tailor the platform to complex workflows and manage significant growth.
• Artificial intelligence (AI) integration: Salesforce Einstein offers AI-driven analytics and automation, providing insights that help large businesses optimize their strategies.
• Extensive integration capabilities: With Salesforce's AppExchange, large companies can integrate the platform with a wide range of third-party applications, ensuring seamless operation across different business systems.
• Enterprise-grade security and compliance: Salesforce provides robust security measures and compliance features, critical for large organizations handling sensitive customer data.

What is Freshsales?

Freshsales is a CRM platform by Freshworks designed to help businesses streamline their sales processes with AI-powered tools and automation. It provides features like lead scoring, deal tracking, email and call management, and workflow automation to enhance efficiency and drive conversions. Freshsales also integrates communication and sales in one place, offering tools for personalized outreach and detailed insights to improve sales strategies.

Key features of Freshsales

• AI-powered insights: Freshsales leverages AI to provide recommendations, predict deal outcomes, and offer actionable insights to improve sales strategies.
• Lead scoring: Automatically prioritizes leads based on their engagement and likelihood to convert, helping sales teams focus on high-value opportunities.
• Deal tracking: Provides a visual sales pipeline to track deals through various stages and monitor progress in real time.
• Email and call management: Integrates email and phone communication, allowing users to manage interactions directly from the platform.
• Workflow automation: Automates repetitive tasks like sending follow-up emails or updating deal statuses, reducing manual work and improving efficiency.

Salesforce vs. Freshsales: Feature Comparison

Let's break down the key features of two CRM software solutions and take a closer look at their sales automation, email marketing tools, and contact management.

1. Sales pipeline management

While Salesforce provides a more data-driven approach with its AI capabilities, Freshsales focuses on simplicity and ease of use, making it ideal for teams that prioritize straightforward sales workflows. However, both platforms can be overly complex or overly simplistic for medium-sized sales teams of 20-50 people who need a balance of features and flexibility. folk CRM offers the perfect middle ground, providing powerful pipeline management that's neither overwhelming nor limiting. Ultimately, the choice between Salesforce and Freshsales depends on whether your organization values comprehensive data analytics or streamlined, user-friendly interfaces.
Salesforce's pipeline management feature, known as Pipeline Inspection, provides a comprehensive view of sales opportunities by consolidating key metrics, deal changes, and AI-powered insights into a single interface. This allows sales teams to track progress and identify potential bottlenecks effectively. Freshsales offers a visual sales pipeline that helps you track deals through various stages in real time. Its drag-and-drop functionality allows for easy movement of deals between stages, offering a clear overview of progress. Freshsales also integrates tools like lead scoring and AI insights to enhance deal management by identifying priorities and predicting outcomes.

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2. Ease of use

Salesforce, while powerful, has a steeper learning curve due to its extensive features, making it less intuitive for beginners and challenging for medium-sized sales teams to implement quickly. Freshsales, on the other hand, is designed with simplicity in mind, offering a more user-friendly interface that allows teams to get started quickly without extensive training. However, for sales teams of 20-50 people, folk CRM strikes the optimal balance between functionality and usability, offering intuitive design without sacrificing the advanced features these growing teams need.

3. Contact enrichment

Salesforce's contact enrichment feature leverages tools such as the Data Cloud to automatically enhance and update contact records in real time, drawing from verified data sources like LinkedIn and InsideView to provide real-time updates.

4. Outreach

Salesforce's outreach solution, powered by Einstein AI, offers advanced lead engagement insights. Freshsales provides a centralized approach with email, phone, and chat tools, focusing on sales communication but may lack the depth of dedicated marketing platforms.

5. Automation

Salesforce offers robust automation with workflow rules, flow builders, and AI through Einstein AI. Freshsales automates tasks like lead assignment and follow-up emails, enhancing workflow efficiency, though advanced setups may require time and familiarity.

6. Integration

Salesforce integrates with a wide range of third-party applications through its AppExchange marketplace, allowing users to connect tools for marketing automation, customer service, analytics, project management, and finance. Freshsales integrates with tools like Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, and Mailchimp, as well as Freshworks products such as Freshdesk and Freshchat, to streamline workflows. These integrations support email, calendar, marketing, and customer support, enhancing the platform's functionality.

7. Artificial Intelligence

Salesforce CRM integrates AI through its Einstein platform, offering predictive analytics and intelligent recommendations. Freshsales' Freddy AI provides predictive analytics and lead scoring, enhancing decision-making, though familiarity with AI workflows is beneficial.

Price and plans comparison

Let's take a closer look at the price and plans of both Salesforce and Freshsales.

Salesforce prices

Salesforce has a few price plans for you to choose from, depending on the size of your business and features you're after.

• Starter suite: $25/user/month.
• Pro suite: $80/user/month.
• Enterprise plan: $165/user/month.
• Unlimited plan: $330/user/month.
• Einstein 1 Sales: $500/user/month.

Freshsales prices

Through Freshworks, Freshsales provides a few price plans including the option to have a Freshsales Suite.

• Growth: Starts from $9/user/month.
• Pro: Starts from $39/user/month.
• Enterprise: Starts from $59/user/month.

Introducing folk CRM: the best alternative to Salesforce and Freshsales

Looking for an affordable alternative? We recommend folk. folk CRM is a multiple award-winning CRM platform specifically designed to meet the needs of medium-sized sales teams of 20-50 people, offering the perfect balance between enterprise-level features and user-friendly simplicity. Unlike Salesforce's complexity or Freshsales' limitations, folk CRM provides an intuitive, plug-and-play system that growing sales teams can implement immediately without extensive training or overwhelming features.

Key features

• Contact management: Bring all your contacts into one place seamlessly, from social media platforms such as LinkedIn, Instagram and X to multiple inboxes including Gmail and Outlook.
• Notes and reminders: Attach notes directly to a contact's profile in folk, and access them on the go. And assign reminders so you know exactly when to follow-up.
• Sales pipeline dashboard: Manage your entire sales cycle and leads with a highly customizable sales pipeline dashboard that can be used in Kanban-board view or listicle.
• Ease of use and customization: Easily customize the pipelines, dashboards, automation, email sequences, so that you can use it across your sales cycle and pipeline management – and other business functions such as recruitment, marketing, and more.
• Social media integration: Import people and companies from LinkedIn, Sales Navigator, Instagram, and X within a click thanks to folk's Google Chrome extension.
• Contact sync from Gmail and Outlook: Full email sync enabling users to manage all communications directly from the CRM.
• Find email addresses in a click: Contact enrichment powered by Apollo, and Dropcontact so you can fill in missing data points with 1-click.
• Email sequences: Send email sequences with reminders if your leads don't reply to your first emails. It includes an AI integration allowing you to personalize email at scale.

Price and plans

folk has a 14-day free trial. After that, there are affordable monthly or annual subscription plans. The annual subscription plan is as follows.

• Standard: $20 per user, per month.
• Premium: $40 per user, per month.
• Custom: Starts from $80 per user, per month.

Salesforce vs. Freshsales: What's the verdict?

When it comes to Salesforce and Freshsales, it's clear that each CRM has its strengths—Salesforce excels in comprehensive features and scalability for large enterprises, while Freshsales offers user-friendly tools tailored for small to medium-sized businesses. However, for medium-sized sales teams of 20-50 people seeking a more personalized approach to relationship management, folk CRM provides the superior alternative to these traditional CRM options, perfectly blending ease of use with the advanced customization features that growing sales teams require.

👉🏼 Try folk now to manage contact-based reminders and email sequences when switching from Salesforce or Freshsales

자주 묻는 질문

Is Salesforce or Freshsales better for sales teams?

Salesforce suits large enterprises needing deep customization, analytics, and scale. Freshsales fits SMBs seeking simple pipelines with AI assistance. Medium teams (20–50) often need a balanced tool that is powerful yet easy to use, such as folk CRM.

Is Freshsales cheaper than Salesforce?

Yes. Freshsales: from $9/user/mo (Pro $39, Enterprise $59). Salesforce: from $25/user/mo (Pro $80, Enterprise $165, Unlimited $330, Einstein 1 Sales $500). Prices can vary by billing term and region.

Is Salesforce harder to use than Freshsales?

Generally yes. Salesforce offers broader capability and heavy customization but a steeper learning curve. Freshsales is simpler to implement. Teams of 20–50 often prefer a balance of power and speed, such as folk CRM.

How should a 20–50 person team choose a CRM?

Prioritize an intuitive pipeline, quick onboarding, Gmail/Outlook sync, automation, clear pricing, and key integrations. Use trials, assess admin effort, and confirm enrichment and sequences. Consider folk for this profile.