Freshdesk vs Salesforce Marketing Cloud comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Freshdesk and Salesforce Marketing Cloud based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Freshworks, Qualtrics, ServiceNow and others in Customer Experience Management.
To learn more, read our detailed Customer Experience Management Report (Updated: March 2024).
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"It's easy to use and integrates with other tools. We can embed Jira into it, link Jira tickets with Freshdesk tickets, and use it for our knowledge base.""It is quite easy to program custom apps and integrate them.""Freshdesk has allowed us to measure and track the response and resolution time of tickets which has been reduced from seven to eight hours down to 30 minutes to one hour.""The most valuable features of Freshdesk are the automation of tickets to assign them to different agents, and the managing of documents is easy.""The user experience on the platform itself is fantastic. The UI is clean and uncluttered, so it's easy to find any information about your customer or the issue at hand. You can find out the person responsible for that particular issue, what the problem is, who the stakeholders are, and how to resolve it. There are lots of tools that will help you do that as well.""I like that it's very user-friendly. The way they designed this application, any layperson can just do some drag and drop actions and use it. It's not that difficult. It's also easy to implement. The most important thing is, you don't need to go to this application to create a ticket. You just send out an email, and the ticket is created automatically. I have never seen a feature like this before.""The UI is easy to use.""Their knowledge base is phenomenal. The way that it learns from our users is awesome, and responses are really awesome as well. It does a pretty good job of picking up what's needed. The knowledge bases are great."

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"We use Marketing Cloud for marketing campaigns and engaging customers. It is a business-focused application for a specific area of business, which is acquiring customers.""The most valuable feature of Salesforce Marketing Cloud is the ability to sell the products we have made to customers. Overall the solution is very useful for business.""The solution is user-friendly.""The ability to automate processes is one of the most valuable features of Salesforce. This sets it part from other systems. We use the journey builder to design a fully automated journey.""It is a stable solution...It is a scalable solution...I rate the technical support a ten out of ten.""The most valuable feature of Salesforce Marketing Cloud is the seamless conversion of lead to opportunity, in relation to orders is good. That seamless connection is beneficial and simple.""Offers many great features and is intuitive.""It makes it easy for a business to use any module based on their preference."

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Cons
"While it's good for a small number of tickets, definitely in the future, we will require something more powerful.""There are a few things we have asked for, like a forward button. When a ticket comes in, we forward it, but it doesn't sync up with the forward. That is the one they have to rework. The other is when we forward the ticket, it doesn't go all, or certain things don't go with it. We have told them about it, and they are working on it. It would be better if they gave us a more standard reporting template. Although they already have some, many aren't usable. It would be easier if we had more templates to work with.""If Freshdesk had forms in it so that I could go to the portal and fill out a service request, that would improve it immensely and make it more valuable for enterprise customers, but that's not a current functionality. You can't have a certain catalog of any type. You can't be like, "Hey, I want to just go submit a ticket," and then type in. You can't prompt them to ask anything. It is just a blank form.""The reporting, analysis modules and insights capabilities for this solution could be improved.""Freshdesk could improve its capabilities. It's missing the article formatting, and the overall look and feel make it not easy to use. The administration instructions on how to manage the automation, capability, and integration with third parties, such as chat or bots, are very important in these types of solutions.""We have many cases where a ticket comes in, and it ends up having multiple team members working on it. It would be really nice to be able to assign a single ticket to multiple people, rather than having to create the parent-child hierarchy that they have set up. It generates a proliferation of tickets that I really don't want to have. Having to jump from a parent to one child and then to another child makes it harder for me to be able to see the entire case from end to end. A simple example is our new hire process or our termination process. We have people who leave. We also have people who come on board. We have got multiple people participating and doing things related to the leaving or onboarding process. Currently, I have to go to different tickets to be able to see whether all tasks are really done or not. If I could assign lots of people to one ticket, it would be really nice.""For integrations, we need to write code that communicates with their system in order to enable certain functionality in the system. This is a lot of work for their customers.""The dashboards are useful but could be so much better. As a product manager, and data scientist, we couldn't use the dashboard for analytics and had to move the data in Power BI."

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"We need a development environment for Marketing Cloud. Currently, there is no development environment for this solution. Other Salesforce products, such as Sales and Service Cloud, have a development environment in which the developers can do some things and then post them in production. Currently, everything happens in the production for Marketing Cloud. There is only one environment, and the developers and the end-users have to work in the same environment, which seems to be challenging. If Salesforce can bring a developer environment for Marketing Cloud, it will be good.""The general setup and understanding of how to use it can be improved. There should be easier self-service for setting up dashboards. Currently, we have someone setting them up for us. I wish it was easier.""In a future release, adding end-user personalization would be a benefit.""In a future release it would be great to have the ability to connect the data from social media and email marketing and have it in one dashboard.""We'd like to see more integrations with third-party products.""The solution can be difficult to set up for non-technical individuals.""The pricing is a bit high.""They can perhaps simplify the dashboards. In my opinion as an end-user, reports could also be simplified, but it also depends on how your company is set up. It depends on how the processes are set up within your company natively. It is linked to the way you do business. So, it varies."

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Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "It was definitely not expensive. It was two grand or maybe three grand total for a year. It has just straight and simple standard licensing fees. There is no additional fee."
  • "The price could be better, but it's okay. Compared to ServiceNow and JIRA, Freshworks offers a competitive price. There are also additional licensing costs because you need Microsoft Outlook. Each new email account costs around $15 to $19."
  • "The best system plan is enterprise. It costs basically 79 Euros per agent per month when it's billed annually and 95 Euros per agent per month when it's billed monthly."
  • "We use a licensing model only so we pay for the number of agents we have configured in the system only."
  • "Freshdesk was the best solution with the best price. It was cost efficient and included all the features that we needed."
  • "We use a combination of Freshdesk, Freshservice, and Freshchat. We use the whole suite. Weirdly enough, we pay more for Freshdesk than we do for Freshservice. I would rate it a three out of five in terms of pricing. You can get different bundles, and you can always move to different plans that are standard. Freshservice can go anywhere from $19 up to $120 per agent, per month. There is such a wide range, and it is very customizable to your needs."
  • "It is costly."
  • "The pricing is pretty manageable and acceptable."
  • More Freshdesk Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "Its licensing is on an annual basis. Customers are okay with its licensing cost, and they don't find it expensive."
  • "We did a yearly license. We negotiated and got a great deal. I don't think we would have gotten far with the regular price, but they negotiated, so it was worth that."
  • "The licensing cost for the solution is on a yearly basis."
  • "Salesforce has different versions of the solution and some are more suitable for smaller clients. However, Salesforce is expensive."
  • "The solution is paid for monthly."
  • "It is a license per user."
  • "My company pays to use this solution."
  • "This solution is priced in the medium to high price range."
  • More Salesforce Marketing Cloud Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:Freshdesk significantly improved our customer issue resolution process. We can now easily record and track all customer requests, ensuring that no tickets are lost.
    Top Answer:I would like to see improvements in the account management aspect, having a customer portal for better visibility into my subscription, invoices, and trouble tickets. Additionally, more flexibility in… more »
    Top Answer:I use Freshdesk to manage IT support tickets for our team of 15 IT professionals across multiple countries. It has been effective in ticket management, and we find the price-to-functionality ratio… more »
    Top Answer:Salesforce Marketing Cloud's integrations are seamless since it is a native application. It helps us with B2B and B2C send-outs and can handle large columns.
    Top Answer:The price is expensive. When comparing available products, such as those on Amazon, it's evident that AWS components are significantly cheaper. This is especially true since our systems run on the AWS… more »
    Top Answer:Salesforce Marketing Cloud is expensive. The email functionality should be more modern and user-friendly.
    Ranking
    Views
    236
    Comparisons
    130
    Reviews
    10
    Average Words per Review
    629
    Rating
    8.1
    1st
    out of 34 in Social CRM
    Views
    414
    Comparisons
    285
    Reviews
    35
    Average Words per Review
    368
    Rating
    8.3
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    ExactTarget
    Learn More
    Salesforce
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    Overview

    Freshdesk is a cloud-based customer support solution that provides organizations with the features necessary to effectively streamline their support processes. This includes powerful multichannel capability, integrated game mechanics, smart automations, and more.

    The solution is designed to automate agent workflows and resolve routine questions using AI and bots. Freshdesk allows managers to prioritize, categorize, and assign tickets to their agents, making it easy for them to collaborate and quickly respond to customers. 

    Freshdesk Features and Benefits

    Some of the solution's top features and benefits include:

    • Simplified ticketing: With Freshdesk, you can easily prioritize, manage, and assign trackable tickets. The management system ensures that multiple agents don’t work on the same ticket by accident. You can easily set deadlines for ticket resolution based on specific categories and create custom statuses that suit your workflow to identify what stage a ticket is in.
    • Automation: Automatically assign tickets to agents and groups based on keywords and requests and set up automated repeated actions and provide quick, consistent responses to common questions using pre-formatted replies. In addition, you can choose to prevent the reopening of tickets when customers reply with a thank you.
    • Improved collaboration: Share tickets with other teams while retaining full visibility into the progress being made on the issue. Related tickets can be linked together to better keep track of the big picture. Tickets can also be split into smaller child tickets and assigned to multiple agents to help resolve complex, multi-stage issues.
    • Build up your knowledge base: Create effective support documentation by enabling agents to convert their ticket replies into knowledge base articles, while they reply.
    • Metrics and reporting: See how different agents and groups are performing by viewing various help desk metrics and improve performance by identifying problems based on insights.

      With Freshdesk’s reporting tools, you can schedule the periodic delivery of out-of-the-box and custom reports to your inbox. The solution’s customer satisfaction reports provide you with feedback on how your customers rate your support.
    • Forum moderation: Set up moderation workflows to ensure that forum posts that violate your guidelines are not immediately published. Critical issues raised in the community are automatically converted into tickets to ensure they get the required response.

    • Integration: Freshdesk’s open API can be used to integrate the solution with multiple  third-party systems. 
    • Comprehensive security: Freshdesk’s security features allow you to:

      • Set custom access permissions for agents.
      • Perform comprehensive audits of networks and systems.
      • Secure your own support domain or vanity URL with custom SSL certificates.
      • Whitelist IP ranges and restrict login access outside of work, or link IP whitelisting to a VPN.
      • Set up SSO scripts for credential authentication.

    Reviews from Real Users

    Freshdesk stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Two major ones are its effective ticketing system and its intuitive interface.

    Deepak B., an application manager, writes, “Freshdesk has allowed us to measure and track the response and resolution time of tickets which has been reduced from seven to eight hours down to 30 minutes to one hour. This information is valuable for board meetings.”

    Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a comprehensive marketing automation platform that enables businesses to create personalized and targeted marketing campaigns across multiple channels. 

    With its robust set of tools and features, marketers can easily manage and automate their email marketing, social media advertising, mobile messaging, and customer journey mapping. 

    The platform offers advanced segmentation capabilities, allowing marketers to segment their audience based on various criteria and deliver tailored messages to each segment. 

    Additionally, Salesforce Marketing Cloud provides powerful analytics and reporting features, enabling marketers to track the performance of their campaigns and make data-driven decisions. 

    With its user-friendly interface and seamless integration with other Salesforce products, Marketing Cloud offers a seamless and efficient marketing automation solution for businesses of all sizes.

    Sample Customers
    Honda, 3M, Hugo Boss, Petronas, Sony Pictures, The Atlantic, goodreads, Clear Channel Radio, Penn University of Pennsylvania, unicef, Kuoni, Movember
    American Express, Financial Conduct Authority, KPN, Merck KGaA, Peterborough City Council, The Chapar, ADP, Financial Times, Stanley Black & Decker, SureFlap, Western Union, Philips
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Computer Software Company21%
    Retailer21%
    Comms Service Provider11%
    Financial Services Firm11%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company23%
    Media Company7%
    Comms Service Provider6%
    Real Estate/Law Firm6%
    REVIEWERS
    Computer Software Company44%
    Financial Services Firm12%
    Marketing Services Firm8%
    Hospitality Company4%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Educational Organization46%
    Computer Software Company11%
    Financial Services Firm7%
    Manufacturing Company4%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business59%
    Midsize Enterprise14%
    Large Enterprise28%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business28%
    Midsize Enterprise16%
    Large Enterprise56%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business29%
    Midsize Enterprise25%
    Large Enterprise46%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business13%
    Midsize Enterprise52%
    Large Enterprise35%
    Buyer's Guide
    Customer Experience Management
    March 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about Freshworks, Qualtrics, ServiceNow and others in Customer Experience Management. Updated: March 2024.
    765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    Freshdesk is ranked 1st in Customer Experience Management with 27 reviews while Salesforce Marketing Cloud is ranked 1st in Social CRM with 49 reviews. Freshdesk is rated 8.4, while Salesforce Marketing Cloud is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Freshdesk writes "Incredibly user-friendly, flexible, and affordable". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Salesforce Marketing Cloud writes "Easy to deploy, stable, and scalable". Freshdesk is most compared with JIRA Service Management, ServiceNow, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, BMC Helix ITSM and ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus, whereas Salesforce Marketing Cloud is most compared with Marketo, Oracle Eloqua, HubSpot Marketing Hub, Amazon Pinpoint and SAP Marketing Cloud.

    We monitor all Customer Experience Management reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.