Functional differences, integration options, and implementation costs of Bitrix24 and Salesforce - a practical comparison for business
According to statistics, fewer than 50% of CRM implementation projects have been successful.
But a properly implemented CRM helps increase ROI, returning on average $8.71 for every $1 invested*.
Difficulties arise not only at the implementation stage, but even at the selection stage.
Meanwhile, the cost of a mistake — when a company has invested in a CRM but does not use it — can run into millions of dollars. In this article we review the reasons for adopting and re-adopting a CRM that we have encountered, and break down two popular CRMs by the parameters named as important by KT.Team clients from e-commerce, logistics and development. We hope this article helps someone make the right choice.
The situation of a newcomer to the market, a small business, or a startup. To manage effectively, you need to see reporting and the history of customer relationships. Once you can see it, you can automate business processes and sell more.
The company has grown significantly or changed its business direction, and the existing solution can no longer handle that load. Sometimes the reason for reimplementation is that customer tracking and production control processes are stitched together, which makes effective management difficult. Companies that use a custom-built CRM solution often find that at some stage it is easier to replace it than to adapt it to new tasks.
There is a need to store all data on your own servers, and the previous CRM system did not allow this. Changes in legislation or special security requirements may make it necessary to switch to a different CRM. In that case the company stops storing data in the cloud and installs the CRM on its own servers.
We asked our clients — who include mid-sized and large businesses in e-commerce, logistics and real estate development — to list, in order of importance, the criteria by which they choose a CRM system.
Configuration flexibility: how independently the customer can support and operate the system
User-friendliness. These are the criteria by which we will compare Bitrix24 and Salesforce.
Of course, both systems fully possess typical CRM functionality.
Both services cover companies' needs for tracking customers, sales and marketing activity (including work with social networks).
For example, some customers believe that Salesforce better reflects the logic of B2B processes, while Bitrix24 more strongly supports the processes of companies working with end consumers.
Of course, missing functionality can be added by developing the modules yourself or commissioning a contractor to build them.
But for a clean analysis, here we compare specifically the out-of-the-box features.
. This CRM features well-developed functions: direct data import/export, customer interaction history, access control, notifications, comments, time management, resource management, staff performance monitoring, task delegation, and adding guest users.
. Beyond standard features, this CRM has well-developed functions: flexible field configuration in the client card, a "Contact + Company" report with filters, fast updates by ID, the ability to set relationships between contacts, lead capture, source tracking, distributing clients among employees, callback requests, targeting, customer self-service, and queue management.
Bitrix24. The on-premise version of Bitrix24 lets you distribute the system load yourself and add new servers.
In the cloud version, distribution happens without the involvement of the site owners. In the Bitrix24 app marketplace
the Market, you can download apps and ready-made CRMs for specific industries.
Paid apps are billed by subscription. Salesforce.
Salesforce's architecture allows millions of users to work simultaneously. The CRM is renowned for flexible configuration and a wealth of third-party integrations. The service has an official app store, App Exchange, where you can download paid and free apps, letting you assemble an almost custom CRM tailored to the company's needs.
Clients and developers note the rather peculiar code in which the Bitrix24 CRM is written.
Knowing PHP alone is not enough to run and fine-tune the software for your own needs on your own.
But the market for specialists offering this kind of service at very affordable prices is also very broad. Salesforce. Salesforce is a low-code platform with an intuitive graphical interface.
This lets you configure almost any processes, reports, dashboards and kanban boards without a developer or with minimal developer involvement.
Integration with external applications is possible via Mule ESB, which is part of the Salesforce ecosystem.
. Bitrix24 clients quite often complain about a cluttered interface and an abundance of small text. The real problem is the many unused functions in the menu. At our company we use Bitrix24 for both sales and recruiting, as well as for setting and tracking development tasks. From our own experience, we can agree with the point about the cluttered interface.
Bitrix24 CRM is available in English, German, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, Polish, CIS, Ukrainian, Turkish, Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Malay, Thai and Hindi. It is worth noting, however, that this refers to the basic features. Some of the functionality and reference materials are available only in the main languages, such as English and CIS (after all, CIS is the home of Bitrix24).
. The interface of
looks intuitive and is easy to configure. Although platform users also need to undergo training to work most effectively with the service's capabilities.
, in addition to English, is translated into French, German, Italian, Japanese, Spanish, Swedish, Korean, and Chinese - all system features and modules are available in these languages. The user interface and some functions are available in 31 languages, including Arabic, Turkish, Bulgarian, Norwegian, and so on. The interface can be customized for each user, which is especially convenient in multilingual organizations.
is made up of the cost of licenses and the cost of the servers that will host the CRM.
The monthly fee starts at $399 and includes, in addition to the features listed above, Multiple branches, Scalability, and Enterprise pack. Disk space - 3 TB.
. At
a flexible pricing grid based on paying for specific functionality per user. The minimum price per user starts from $25 per month (the small business plan). Products within
are paid for separately: for example, the top version of Sales and Service Cloud costs $325 per user. 24/7 technical support in
is included only in the most expensive plan, with a subscription fee of $300 per user.
The service includes a CRM system that clearly displays sales and consolidates the history of customer communication and the progress of every deal.
Built-in integrations with popular messengers and social networks are provided.
You can connect telephony and various payment and delivery services.
All plans except the free one include the option to create an online store. Salesforce.
The service includes a CRM system for effective customer relationship management, centered on Sales Cloud.
Here reports are generated, sales funnels are built, and lead generation capabilities are connected.
Additional capabilities are available in Marketing, Service, and Experience Cloud.
The company initially aimed to provide clients with full IT outsourcing and handles this task well.
We want to launch a sales site with automated customer management.
We communicate and sell across all major messengers, so we will need ready-made integrations with these apps.
No resources to develop unique scenarios — a templated solution is needed. Tip:
It is worth looking at ready-made online stores, as well as CRMs with ready-made industry presets from
. Mid-sized business. We want to increase repeat sales, gather the entire communication history into a single client card, and connect analytics. We will also need automated control of the sales department. For this, the ability to easily change dashboard settings is important. Tip: ask about the capabilities of
Einstein, which is based on artificial intelligence. The system analyzes all data from the customer card as well as information streams from social networks, self-learns and predicts future customer behavior. Large business. We want to set and monitor the sales department's goals, including personal tasks for individual employees. Our product prices change frequently, and it is important to update them quickly and error-free, including when a price is composed of the cost of several products and/or services.
Besides sales, we provide delivery, assembly and installation services. The CRM must be integrated with these services and must reflect the special logic of our order-processing and reporting scenario. Tip: tasks with many modules should always be estimated using
. Among this company's clients there are more large businesses, which is no surprise for the world's #1 CRM. Precise configuration lets you pick the right set of modules. Moreover,
it is also a development environment where you can write the apps you need.
Difference #1: data storage. While Salesforce was originally built as a cloud service available by subscription,
there is an on-premise solution to install on the client's servers, with the option to extend it for specific tasks by in-house staff or hired specialists. Difference #2: geography. Although both companies have long operated on the global market, it is worth paying attention to the country of origin and the presence of offices in other regions. For effective sales and marketing management, it is important to be able to natively connect local telephony, messengers and social networks, delivery services, or document management.
A company already operating in the region has these options by default. Of course, any integration can also be developed separately, but that increases implementation costs. Bitrix24 is a CIS company from Kaliningrad, with its headquarters there as well. It operates worldwide, and its interface is translated into dozens of languages. Its servers are located in the US, Germany, CIS, Belarus, and other countries. Along with Google Drive and PayPal, it was included in Techradar's top 5 free business apps in the world.
- an American company headquartered in San Francisco with offices in 25 countries. Its servers are located in the US and the UK, where it has its own data center for storing data of customers from Europe, as well as in Germany and Japan. It holds top positions in the global CRM market and ranked first in 2012 according to Gartner. Difference No. 3: built-in customization capabilities. Salesforce options let you choose tools for solving a specific task, which eliminates the need for additional customization.
For example, the world's dominant CRM lets you pick a suitable industry solution (in financial, medical or other services), connect an analytics module that can spot weak points in sales chains, or build your own app. It is a flexible, all-encompassing platform where you can assemble the exact set of functions to run a business of almost any configuration. In 2020
also added the option to download ready-made presets from its marketplace. There are solutions for developers, dental clinics, repair services, wholesale trade and many other types of business. Choosing a CRM with preset configurations significantly reduces implementation costs and helps small and medium businesses save substantially. But under no circumstances should you install an industry solution you like on top of one already installed — this will cause the loss of all previous settings.
Switching from one CRM to another is not uncommon.
In autumn 2022 KT.Team delivered such a project, so we can give a rough estimate of similar cases in terms of time and financial costs.
The international logistics company FM Logistic, with a branch in
in CIS faced the need to migrate as quickly as possible to
due to the fact that
stopped working with clients from CIS. In the first stage we created a comprehensive technical specification, for which we analyzed every process implemented with Salesforce and all the data that had to be migrated. We had to act very fast, since the service could be cut off at any moment, which would mean losing all of the client's data. The task was complicated by the fact that the client uses a shared Salesforce for all divisions.
We had to work with the system without data - the company did not want to disclose sensitive information from all of its regional offices. Based on the analysis, we: identified the key entities (contacts, companies, leads, deals) - the field structure, relationships, and data types; selected which Bitrix24 modules the client needed; and worked out how to replace Salesforce functionality that is not available in Bitrix24 but was used by the client. Result 1.
The client's operations did not stop for a single day, because developing and testing processes in Bitrix24 did not affect the live CRM. Result 2. The KT.Team team migrated the data stored in Salesforce, preserving its structure and interrelations. The data was received in .xls and .csv formats, entered into the system, and the new processes were checked for functionality. Deployment took
, data migration, and building the logic in the new system took about 80 working hours. The first users started working with the system MVP less than a month after the project began.
When making the final CRM decision, weigh not only cost and fit to your tasks but other factors as well, such as the availability of built-in integrations on the local market, support cost and the ability to customize on your own. If it is essential for the company to store data on its own servers, maintain the CRM in-house and customize it for current tasks, these options are offered by
. If a large company needs a standard turnkey service with flexible functionality made up of various modules, it makes sense to take a closer look at
.com/news/press-releases/2021/04/26/
-named-1-crm-provider-for-eighth-consecutive-year/; 2020 RB.RU https://rb.ru/news/crm-in-russia/
