Functional differences, integration capabilities, 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.
You need to keep track of customers and sales.
The situation of a newcomer to the market, a small business or a startup.
To manage effectively, you need visibility into reporting and the history of customer relationships. And once you have it, you can automate business processes and sell more. 2.
The implemented CRM can no longer cope with the tasks at hand.
The company has grown significantly or shifted its line of business, and the existing solution can no longer handle the load.
Sometimes the reason for re-implementation is that customer accounting and production control processes are "stitched" together, which hinders effective management. Companies using a custom-built CRM often find that at a certain point it is easier to replace it than to adapt it to new tasks. 3.
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.
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).
But there are nuances. Some clients feel Salesforce handles B2B process logic better, while Bitrix24 is more geared toward companies working with end consumers.
We have highlighted the most notable differences in functionality. Of course, missing functionality can be added by developing modules yourself or commissioning their development from a contractor.
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.
This matters for the smooth operation of high-traffic portals. In the cloud version, load distribution happens without the site owners' involvement. In the Bitrix24 app store,
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 of specialists offering such services at quite affordable prices is also very broad. Salesforce. Salesforce is a low-code platform with a clear 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.
We'll reply within 30 minutes and send relevant cases, diagrams, or analyses tailored to your context.
. 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.
, besides English, is translated into French, German, Italian, Japanese, Spanish, Swedish, Korean, and Chinese — in these languages all system functions and modules are available. The user interface and some functions are available in 31 languages, including Arabic, Turkish, Bulgarian, Norwegian, etc. The interface can be customized per 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.
Its monthly fee starts at $399 and includes, in addition to the functions listed above, Multiple branches, Scalability and the Enterprise pack. Storage is 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 be developed additionally, but that raises the implementation cost. Bitrix24 is a CIS company originally from Kaliningrad, where its head office is located. It operates worldwide, with the interface translated into dozens of languages. Servers are located in the USA, Germany, CIS, Belarus and other countries. Together with Google Drive and PayPal, it ranked among the world's top 5 free business apps according to Techradar.
is an American company headquartered in San Francisco with offices in 25 countries. Its servers are located in the USA, the UK, where it runs its own data center for storing European customer data, as well as in Germany and Japan. It holds top positions on the global CRM market and ranked first in 2012 according to Gartner. Difference #3: built-in configuration options. Salesforce lets you select tools to solve a specific task precisely, which removes the need for extra 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 our analysis, we: locked down the key entities (contacts, companies, leads, deals) — the set of fields, their relationships and data types; selected which Bitrix24 modules the client needed; worked out how to replace the Salesforce functionality that Bitrix24 lacks and that the client had been using. 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/
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