With improvements to email integration and a new marketing campaign, SaaS productivity vendor Zoho is aiming its sights openly at Salesforce.com, the dominant Web-based CRM today.
The “Zwitch to Zoho” name might be cheesy marketing, but the cheaper subscription price is no joke. If you want more than 5 users, Salesforce.com will cost you $65/user/month. As of today, Zoho is offering an unlimited use CRM subscription for just $12.
If you’re thinking “you get what you pay for” right about now, you’d be correct.
Even the Salesforce.com edition limited to 5 users (for $9/month per person) includes support for Gmail, Outlook and Lotus Notes. The new additions and pricing plan for Zoho CRM include close integration with Zoho Mail, but using either Outlook or Gmail will cost you an extra $3/user/month. In other words, to get the full functionality of Salesforce.com, it’ll be more than four thousand a year, not the barely more three that Zoho is touting.
Even if you won’t get quite the 80% savings that Zoho is proclaiming, its new CRM is still significantly less expensive than Salesforce.com, Sugar CRM Professional, or many others out there. And especially in today’s IT world, money talks.
