Bitrix24 vs. Salesforce

In the CRM world, the following joke is becoming increasingly popular: “If you are currently a customer of the Salesforce CRM system, it’s likely that you will soon switch to Bitrix24.”And of course, there’s a grain of truth in every jokes, this one most especially. Many new Bitrix24 customers have switched from the North American CRM technologies’ proponent. Butlet’s compare both services’ characteristics in order to draw conclusions independently from figures or individual statements.

For this fight: in the right corner, we have an experienced fighter from the 1990s, a market heavyweight with multimillion assets—Salesforce! In the left corner, we have a quick and slick bully, who has gained worldwide fame in the past six years and is not going to stop anytime soon—Bitrix24. Fight!

From the very beginning, Salesforce established its rules on the market, the SaaS-modelled provision of services being one of the main rules. Nothing has changed today: this CRM is available in the cloud and is an exclusive property of the developer company. Everyone knows that one requires a constant Internet connection to work. Nowadays, this certainly shouldn’t bean issue at all. However, when Internet connection gets lost one runs into problems. All your business is actually located on the server of another company. Although there are severe requirements to the information protection, you still have to worry about the security of your data in any cloud.

Here we have the first right hook: Bitrix24 also uses the cloud storage, but has a self-hosted solution as well. All CRM can be deployed on your server, allowing you to customize it as much as you want. Any application, can be written as such a version to best meet your business’ needs. The use of the cloud version requires from customers to pay, as they do elsewhere, for certain periods of time, while the self-hosted version is yours forever. According to experts, it is this particular feature of Bitrix24 that actively draws customers over from other CRMs. Since this version is not located somewhere else, but on the server of the self-hosted version owner, the data safety is highly increased! In addition, such systems will work offline even in case of failures on the line. At the very least, when you detect an unauthorized access, nothing prevents you from doing the most common thing—pulling the Internet cable out of the device.

In the course of the CRM evolution, it became clear that the best possible way to evaluate the services of the system was to calculate the cost per account in a certain period of time. It is the best possible way for the service provider rather than for the customer. Accordingly, the more employees a company has, the more substantial the amounts for CRM are. They understand it perfectly well in Salesforce, so they will readily ask you to pay $25 a month per account for the simplest version (SalesforceIQ CRM Starter) up to $300 for the most “feature-packed” one (Lightning Unlimited). Try to calculate for yourself how much this system will cost you.

We in Bitrix24 have a radically different approach to the payment issues. The system is absolutely free for twelve and less employees. This is an almost perfect option for small businesses. The Plus package will cost you $39 per month for less than twenty-four employees. If you have more people, the solution is very simple: $99 in the Standard package or $199 in the Professional package for an unlimited number of workflow participants! Such a blow from Bitrix24 is surely below the belt. But the audience around the ring, who are the customers, are very satisfied.

The Salesforce fighter goes into an aggressive assault here. He makes a series of strikes, trained over many years of its existence and based on the developed solution base. Users are offered a ready-made integration with a variety of business systems. ExactTarget Fuel, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Data Cloud, Heroku, JIRA, Zendesk, and many other tried-and-tested integrations do drive its rival under the ropes... But Bitrix24 does not fall down and responds with a signature uppercut—an open API.

What shall you do if Salesforce did not make it to your business system yet or you did not cooperate with any of them at all? According to the idea of ​​the company, this solution will be customized for you individually, which will take a lot of time and significantly increase the price. Bitrix24 initially chose the open code path, which allows you to add any module, integrating this CRM with other programs relatively easily. The database of such solutions is constantly updated with new developments, and the Marketplace—with useful applications. To this end, Bitrix recommends its partners to its customers, which makes the relationship between the customer and the integrator as close as possible. The cost of the whole process is significantly cheaper than in other CRMs.

At this stage, the fight becomes tied, as both candidates for the championship have lots to show. Again, thanks to many years of experience, Salesforce has acquired a huge community of followers who are open to communication with one another. One can find a huge amount of articles on the Internet, various forums where newcomers often seek advice, and terabytes of video tutorials. Don’t forget that Bitrix24 is much younger. But thanks to the partner system, the community is growing as rapidly as the CRM itself is improving. A competitive playing field between the partners encourages them to constantly generate new ideas and create useful content, fight for every customer, and meet the market requirements as much as they can. The Bitrix Company constantly holds events for partners, thus expanding the community around the world and creating a reliable network of like-minded people.

Here, Bitrix24 immediately seizes the initiative in the ring. Many of those who are familiar with Bitrix24 will agree that this is not just a CRM system. It will help, as Salesforce and many others will, coordinating the work of the sales department, learning more about the customers, and establishing a close connection with them. But in addition, Bitrix24 users get simple and effective tools for working with projects, extensive accounting and reporting capabilities, as well as a great variety of tools to promote their business and customer relations. It proved to be a very effective solution to put a Live Stream and a chat between employees in the CRM. You can create individual and group chats here, share files, or store information on a disk with different access levels. The Bitrix Company promises to supplement the impressive list of options in the nearest future. This gives the full right to the young fighter to knock out his venerable opponent.

To avoid fatalities... oh, sorry, instead of a conclusion, we’d like to unexpectedly quote Winx Club: “If you challenge a stronger opponent in a fight, you will pay hard for it.” The Bitrix Company started a complicated game in the CRM market more than six years ago. One should not get involved without the understanding that their product must not only be as good as its rival’s (including Salesforce), but has to be better. It is a well-known fact that Bitrix24 is now popular, affordable, and promising. But one can only guess what advantages in terms of pricing and functionality Bitrix24 users will get in the near future. If our alleged fight were held in reality, it would be reasonable to place a bet on the young fighter.