As a Customer Relationship Management Consultant who provides software solutions using ACT!, Sage CRM and SalesLogix, I compete with Salesforce.com. While I think their solution can be a good fit for company’s with limited capital, those that lack a network infrastructure or IT support or have disparate workers, what I find disappointing is they disparage the competition rather than focusing on their strengths. I have heard many of the negative and/or erroneous statements they make from prospects as well as read the competitive emails they send to prospects. Call me old school, but that’s not the way I sell.
So how and why does ACT! 2010 software compete with Salesforce.com?
Pricing
First let’s look at the Salesforce.com editions that compete with ACT!
Contact Manager Edition – priced at $9 per person per month. Supports a maximum of 2 users. Provides contact and lead management, and integration with Outlook / Google Mail.
Group Edition – priced at $35 per person per month. Supports a maximum of 5 users. Provides same capabilities as Contact Manager plus opportunity management, Google Ad Words integration and basic case
management.
Professional Edition – Priced at $65 per person per month. No limit on the number users. Similar capabilities to Group Edition plus extended marketing and customer service capabilities, as well as analytical dashboards.
ACT by Sage 2010 – Priced at $199 per person with optional annual ACT! Platinum Care subscription for free annual upgrades at $59 per person. Limited to 10 users. Has same features as the Premium and Corporate editions except for the following licenses or features: no ACT! for Web license, Dashboard views by team, enhanced remote synchronization services, activity reports by user, secured contacts, notes, history and opportunities and no field level, group and company record security.
ACT by Sage 2010 Premium – Priced at $369 per person with optional annual ACT! Platinum Care subscription for free annual upgrades at $114 per person. Generally limited to 30 users. Has same features as the Corporate editions except for the lack of ACT! for Web licenses.
ACT by Sage 2010 Corporate - The SQL Express edition is priced at $399 per person with optional annual ACT! Platinum Care subscription for free annual upgrades at $114 per person and is generally limited to 30 users. The SQL Server 2008 edition is priced at $479 per person with optional annual ACT! Platinum Care subscription for free annual upgrades at $164 per person and is scalable to 100′s of users. The Corporate edition is our most scalable solution.
Feature Comparison
- ACT! provides considerable ease-of-use advantages over Salesforce.com when it comes to accomplishing simple tasks such as:
• Lookups
• Searches
• Working with groups
• Mail merges
• Personalization
• Contextual right-clicks
• Pick lists and data quality
• Duplicate checking
• Offline
- Salesforce.com costs 2.5 times more than ACT! after 3 years 1
- Despite what they say, software must be installed on your computer to use Salesforce.com with Microsoft Word or Outlook
- Sending a letter in Salesforce.com takes 17 clicks – in ACT! 2010 it’s a 2 click process
- Salesforce.com Professional offers limited email broadcasting – only 500 per day per user. With ACT! E-Marketing, you can send up to 100,000 per day 2
- ACT! offers complete full online and offline access to data
- ACT! can be installed on a PC, Network, Web, Terminal and/or Citrix Server for whatever type of access you prefer
- Recent Keystroke Level Modeling (KLM)* testing carried out under lab conditions has revealed that it takes 37% longer on average to complete a range of common user tasks in Salesforce.com compared to ACT! 2010
REMEMBER: Usability drives user adoption and ultimately determines the overall success of a CRM project - Contact Manager Edition Weaknesses
• Limited to 2 users
• No offline option
• No dashboards, email marketing, list management or opportunity management - Group Edition Weaknesses
• Limited to 5 users
• No offline option
• No email marketing or list management
• Significant upgrade cost to add a 6th user or more since you have to upgrade to the Professional Edition. Essentially, you’ll go from $35 per user per month to the $65.00 per user per month—that’s an 86% increase. - Professional Edition Weaknesses
• Significant higher Total Cost of Ownership over the lifetime of the system
• Offline access is significant extra cost.
• Storage allocation is very low for the price
Salesforce.com Gotcha’s
According to research conducted by Sage Software, storage allocations are very storage is extremely expensive ($3000 per additional GB of storage space) and is not available as an option in the Contact Manager Editions.
Offline access is not available in lower editions and is only available at a significant extra cost in the Professional Edition.
The Master Subscription Agreement with Salesforce.com controls customer data access – that’s your data they’re holding!
Here are some other observations:
- Without express, prior approval from a senior Salesforce.com executive, all subscriptions must be paid in advance for a minimum of 1 year generally, and the average contract term is now 2 or 3 years.
- They reserve the right to modify its fees and charges and introduce new charges at any time.
- Companies are deemed to have accepted Salesforce.com’s terms and conditions when they click on the ‘I agree’ button during sign up to a trial subscription.
- Your contract is automatically renew for the same period again unless the customer expressly notifies Salesforce.com of its intention to discontinue the service.
- If a you don’t cancel in time, it will be liable for the full cost of the renewed contract.
- Salesforce.com subscriptions number cannot be reduced in number until the expiry of the contract period.
- Salesforce.com reserves the right to block a customer’s access to their data in the event of a commercial dispute.
- Outside of any dispute, it is generally difficult to get customer data out of Salesforce.com in any meaningful format unless you have the Professional or Enterprise Editions.
- Apart from the very largest organizations, Salesforce.com customers do not benefit from any service level agreement in relation to the availability of their application. They have no recourse in the event of service outages.
In conclusion:
ACT! is easy to use and provides a simple pricing structure so there are no nasty surprises down the line. Before signing up with Salesforce.com, know what you’re committing to and get it in writing. ACT! customers benefit from a low total cost of ownership with most paying the equivalent of between $20 and $30 per user per month over the lifetime of the solution. I am happy to speak with you about how CRM and specifically ACT! can help your business. Just click here to contact me.
1 Comparison based on 20 users of ACT! 2010 Corporate with annual ACT! Platinum Care software maintenance with $3,000 of implementation services versus Salesforce.com Professional edition as of 8/26/2009.
2 ACT! E-Marketing powered by Swiftpage is a monthly subscription service. I am a Swiftpage Gold Drip Marketing consultant and help businesses turn their ACT! database in to a money making machine with this software solution. Monthly pricing is available for review by clicking here.
{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
Good comments,
The funnies thing is we can still offer 45 a month a user and even 10 a month a user a month with Act! for Web… But its the tin car sales tricks that the client falls for. I have used Sales force and found it the worse software you can use, I call it a web response forms, and 10 clicks of serperation to do a tasks. They do have Speed over Act! for Web because Act tried too much in the Web version. Ajax will solve this. Come on Act! web developers, you have had that issue for since .net 2. (2007)
If Web is your thing, and you really need certain functions,make sure you get a good ACC, as we can get a few more tricks out the product.
Hey,
thanks Reece I do totally agree with you. I have used Salesforce and it is so difficult to navigate through and understand how it applies to collective and intelligent workflow. Not only the scrolling kills me, its the layouts, design of the fields and lack of flexibility. Get this, saleforce say they can do MASS mail merging. They cannot! If you read the instructions on how to do it, you must export all your emails and field data and use outlook. Such a Joke.
ACT! have been the leaders for 22 years and will remain that way. Salesforce can only try harder with their marketing tactics such as free car give-a-ways… you should have seen them at CeBIT. ALL they did was collect email addresses so they could market to people. They gave NO business advice and did not even talk about their product.
Cheers,
Dominic
Act Today
John,
Thank you for your concise yet informative article. I appreciate your level-headed approach to this matter. This is an excellent example of the spirit of many of our fellow ACT! Certified Cconsultants.
I would add: ACT!, at no extra charge, COMES WITH offline access!
Dave
I think you are guilty of doing what you claim SFDC does – providing innacurate information about competitors/
Just a couple of innacuracies – not all but the most glaring of them
You dont need software loaded on your PC to capture Outlook emails. That is certainly one but not the only option.
MANY, probably MOST clients pay their subscriptions other than annually. SFDC is very flexible to accomodate the client’s needs. eg They have allowed us to swap licenses as our needs changed mid contract.
You can get your data out of SFDC ANY TIME yourself if you want it. You can also have a weekly export service set up for you. I’d love to see an ordinary ACT! user export their Activity History, Notes, Groups themselves! Horrible!
And another comment from a similarly ill informed ACT! devotee, SFDC CAN do Mass Mail Merge and its easy and done entirely within SFDC. No Excel, Outlook required.
You can compare license costs but you havent taken into account your infrastructure costs. Gartner and others have proven that Salesforce.com is cheaper over the long term
If you are going to write an article such as this, then get your facts right. Otherwise it just serves as a forum for other similarly ill informed people to propogate their innacurate information as well
Just one question, if ACT! is so much better than Salesforce.com, then why are people dumping it in droves and moving to the superior product – Salesforce.com!
Allow me to elaborate on several statements that I think are incorrect:
Fact: If you want Outlook integration with Salesforce.com, you must download and install the Salesforce.com Force.com Outlook Connector
Fact: You can’t reduce your number of subscriptions mid-contract. Look at the Salesforce.com Master Subscription Agreement for all of the terms and conditions that Salesforce.com imposes on you. It says customers pay in advance, and MOST customers pay annually in advance
Fact: You CAN’T get your data out of SFDC ANY TIME yourself if you want it. Unless you have the Enterprise Edition, you have to pay extra for the weekly export service BUT even then Salesforce.com uses case sensitive, 15 character serial identifiers that make it very difficult to use any common database tools. When you finish your contract, you will get your data back in 45 / 50 .csv flat files (unless you have the Professional or Enterprise edition) – basically, your data in its most basic format with Notes truncated. With ACT! you always own your database. If you stop using ACT!, you still have a database, not a rat’s nest of csv files
Fact: Salesforce.com’s mail merge capability require you to generate a report list, then export to Excel, then carry out the merge using Word. According to Salesforce’s own documentation this is a 14 step process. Compared to ACT!, I think this is utterly useless.
Gartner has stated that Salesforce.com is the most expensive SFA CRM solution in the market. The infrastructure costs of ACT! are minimal, and we conclusively prove that Salesforce.com is 2x / 3x more expensive compared to ACT over the lifetime of the application. PLUS what about all of Salesforce’s hidden costs such as Storage and Offline Access
Fact: Between 15% and 20% of Salesforce.com customer are dumping Salesforce.com every year because of the high cost and restrictions of the solution.
Each of you had some great points to add for and against ACT! 2010 vs Salesforce.com, from Julie who is a salesforce.com advocate to the rest of you for your input as well.
I’d like to thank everyone for taking the time to chirp in.
We’d be very interested in comments from ACT! and SF users, too.
You did not add the cost of your new server to run ACT nor the price of your MSP to maintain it monthly.You did not add the cost of Paying IT/MSP to come out and install it on server/client PC nor the cost of any additional support.You did not add the cost of downtime when a client PC has a bad drive and needs act re installed when they can just move the the next PC and open their web browser .
- Flawed and Biased review
@Ray – ACT! doesn’t requite a dedicated server in a majority of installations, nor is an MSP or anyone else required to maintain it monthly. The lifecycle of ACT! is typically 2-3 years. If you take the cost of the installations and upgrades, ACT! still has a lower TCO than salesforce.com over the same time period.
Many ACT! users also have ACT! for Web, which allows them to do the same thing if PC dies. The only difference is when the salesforce cloud goes down everyone looses. When a server with ACT! on it goes down, one can just access ACT! for Web in cloud.
Neither salesforce.com or ACT! is the best CRM out there becuase there isn’t one. The best CRM is the one the ideally matches the needs of the client, whatever that may be.
Thank you for your comments.
{ 1 trackback }