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Nutshell is super user-friendly and intuitive

I would highly recommend Nutshell

Easy to use and... wait for it ... 100% buy in!

Nutshell is both simple and powerful

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A comprehensive CRM comparison

Nutshell vs. Salesforce

Choosing the right CRM is crucial for your business. Nutshell seamlessly blends power with simplicity, making it a great alternative to Salesforce. Nutshell’s standout features include:

  • An affordable pricing model so you spend up to 95% less without compromising on functionality
  • Seamless integration with G Suite, Microsoft 365, Zapier, and more, plus built-in solutions to send quotes, identify website visitors, generate leads, and more
  • Industry-leading pipeline automation tools with multiple views for improved pipeline management, including a drop-and-drop board and an interactive map
  • Providing free world-class customer support
  • In-app Nutshell Marketing and Engagement suites with email and SMS marketing, web chat, 1:1 SMS messaging, and more
nutshell vs salesforce crm comparison

What is Salesforce?

Salesforce is a CRM that offers multiple suites with several applications and plugins available through its app market. Salesforce began in 1999, when technology was hard to manage, expensive, and difficult to pitch. Salesforce was novel in that it was among the first few companies to provide software as a service (SaaS).

The problem with Salesforce is that it’s incredibly expensive. Sure, they’ve got a decent web application offering and some ridiculously complicated features. But if you’re not familiar with their platform, it can be hard to learn, and can even take as long as a year to start getting your money’s worth.

What is Nutshell?

Nutshell is an award-winning CRM platform that helps B2B sales, marketing, and customer teams work together to close more deals and retain more customers.

Powerful enough to support any element of your business and simple enough to implement without a paid admin or IT department, Nutshell is favored among businesses from a wide variety of industries and sizes due to its ease of use, flexible set up, and available features.

Furthermore, Nutshell Sales’ features often outshine the competitors in terms of both usability and comprehensiveness, according to customer reviews. Plus, we have a full Marketing Suite and Engagement Suite, with some of our marketing and engagement tools included with your Nutshell Sales license.

Here at Nutshell, we’re dedicated to helping businesses grow their revenue and solve the most critical challenge of sales and marketing software: motivating teams to use it. We’re passionate about our customers’ success, and we love finding new ways to take the frustrations out of selling, marketing, and managing.

Nutshell not only seamlessly syncs with all of Google Workspace (download our Chrome extension), but we also sync seamlessly with all of Microsoft 365 (download our Outlook extension).

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Salesforce Pros

As far as CRM software goes, Salesforce offers its users a comprehensive platform. Its detailed interface offers multiple dashboards to track information such as:

  • Calendars
  • Emails and conversations
  • Notes
  • Reports
  • Data collection

It also offers integration with some other platforms and provides templates for processes like email marketing.

customer's text response sharing what they like about Salesforce Sales Cloud

Salesforce Cons

To track all that information, though, you first have to enter it. When you do that in Salesforce, it becomes time-consuming and tedious since there’s no easy way to merge your existing data with it. Over time, this can cause you to miss out on important information, skewing your results dramatically.

What Salesforce Customers Hate

As is the pitfall of many extensive CRM platforms, Salesforce’s comprehensive information access leads it to be one of the more complex programs to understand. It also requires a lot of hands-on administration, meaning you may take some hits to your team’s productivity levels and efficiency. When you need a platform that works as fast as you do, consider looking at Salesforce alternatives instead.

customer's review sharing what they dislike about Salesforce sales cloud

Nutshell: A Great Salesforce Alternative

From the first moment you work with Nutshell, you’ll see why people make the switch. Our interface is much more modern, enhancing user-friendliness so you can get right down to business.

  • Affordable and transparent pricing: Get exceptional value with straightforward pricing and no hidden fees, making Nutshell a budget-friendly solution for growing businesses.
  • Award-winning customer support: Get dedicated assistance whenever you need it with our empathetic, human-based customer support team, available via email and live chat, regardless of your plan size.
  • Intuitive automation: Streamline your sales processes with easy-to-use automation tools for email, lead generation, and sales support, freeing up your team to focus on growth and easily measure campaign success.
  • Easy to use: Users find Nutshell easy to set up, navigate, and work with, making it accessible to both sales professionals and non-sales individuals.
  • Automated personal email sequences: Triggered by pipeline stage for personalized communication, remembering to follow up for you.
  • More seamless integrations: Connect Nutshell with your favorite tools like Google, Microsoft, Slack, and QuickBooks to streamline workflows and manage everything in one place.
Headshots of Nutshell's customer support specialists.

Constructing a Better Nutshell Experience

We listen to and anticipate the needs of our customers to provide a user-friendly and affordable CRM filled with valuable features.

We regularly add new features and update our software to provide superior service, including:

  • App Marketplace to connect your CRM data with the apps you already use
  • Scheduler to simplify meeting planning and appointments
  • Email marketing through our Nutshell Marketing suite to help you strengthen relationships with customers and prospects
  • SMS marketing, available with a Marketing Pro subscription, to engage more effectively with leads and customers
  • Web chat through our Nutshell Engagement suite to let website visitors seamlessly initiate a chat with your team while visiting your website
  • 1:1 SMS when you sign up for Engagement Pro to easily interact with leads and customers via text message
  • Nutshell IQ add-on to automatically track website visitors, generate leads, and find people at the companies you already work with
  • Nutshell Quotes add-on to swiftly deliver professional quotes directly from your CRM
  • And many more

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“”

When we were evaluating CRMs, the one deciding factor between Nutshell and Salesforce came down to spin up time and price. Nutshell wins on both counts (by a huge margin). Salesforce was 10 times as much per month for what we wanted.

Jason C. Arrow Container Corp

Nutshell vs. Salesforce comparison

As a well-known customer relationship management (CRM) platform, Salesforce is likely on your radar even if you haven’t used it. But is it really worth all its hype? Salesforce alternative Nutshell offers a more modern, user-focused interface, superior customization options, and improved implementation measures.

CRM is Nutshell’s flagship feature that is available in our Sales Suite. Our Sales Suite has 5 plan tiers to help you choose the best plan for your budget and required features.

Below, we’re comparing our most comprehensive Sales plan (Sales Enterprise) to Salesforce’s most comparable plan.

See how Salesforce pulls a bait and switch with their pricing model. Check out the real price of Salesforce.

What you’ll spend in the first year for an Enterprise CRM with Marketing

Annual license cost for a 10-person team Pricing gathered from Hubpost.com and Salesforce.com

Email sequences & campaigns

Implementation costs Source: BacancyTechnology.com

Full-time admin salary Source: Talent.com

Live phone and chat support Source: Salesforce.com

Fully functional mobile app Source: G2.com

Data storage

One-click dialing and call recording

Year 1 Total Let’s assume the average of the optional fees and one level of overage for 6 months of the year.

Year 2 and Beyond Totals This assumes you don’t grow as a company and add more records…

a blue and orange logo for HubSpot on a white background

$18,000

($150/user/month)

$55,000/year

($3,600/mo for 5 Marketing Seats for up to 50,000 contacts – Includes 10,000 contacts – $400/month more for up to  50,000 contacts) + $7,000 one-time mandatory Marketing Hub onboarding

 

$3,500

(one-time mandatory Sales Hub onboarding fee)

$6,000-$38,400/year

(available, but not required)

$0

$0

$1,100/month

for going over 1 million total records

$50/month for 1,000 minutes

(12,000 minute limit)

$105,600

$95,100

a blue cloud with the word Salesforce on it - the Salesforce logo

$19,800

($165/user/month)

$19,800/year

(for up to 50,000 contacts – Starts at $1,250/mo for 10,000 contacts – $100 for every additional 10,000 contacts) – Want SMS? That’s $4,200/mo

 

$75,000 – $200,000

(depends on number of users, levels of customizations and more)

$96,687/year

(if you’re lucky)

$5,940/year

(30% of software license)

$3,000

($25/user/month of software license)

$1,500/year

for every 500MB after the first 10GB ($125/month)

$3,600+/year

($30/month/user and  an additional $15/month for every 1,000 minutes logged)

 

$284,452

$146,952

Even more power on Sales Business & Sales Enterprise

  • Sales Business: Includes everything in Sales Pro, plus: AI capabilities, higher limits, Audit log, Changelog and more.
  • Sales Enterprise: Includes everything in Sales Business, plus: higher limits, Read-only SQL access, Enterprise SSO and Enterprise directory sync

To compare all of Nutshell’s Sales plans, go to our pricing page and click “compare all plans”.

Learn more about our Salesforce alternative

When making CRM comparisons with Salesforce, Nutshell should be on your radar. That’s because we offer:

  • More platform integrations: While our software does integrate with the Google suite, it also works well with many other platforms, like Microsoft and Slack.
  • Better interface: Start using Nutshell to your benefit immediately with our easy-to-understand interface, onboarding support, and ongoing customer care.
  • Advanced customization: Make Nutshell work for you. Customize marketing plans, create personalized reports, and tailor our software to meet your brand’s unique needs.
  • More features: Simplify your day-to-day by utilizing our fully integrated Marketing and Engagement suites, our Scheduling tool, our Quoting tool, and our Prospecting tool, all in the same app.
Automated Sales Email Drip Sequence

Easy to Export your Data from Salesforce and Import into Nutshell

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Try our Salesforce alternative

In the world of Salesforce comparisons, Nutshell strives to reign supreme through our powerful and intuitive CRM. Our goal is to help you streamline your processes so you can get more done and take your sales to the next level. Try us out for free and let us prove to you that we’re the platform you’ve been searching for.

Start your
14-day free trial today!

No credit card required
Thank you! Your submission has been received!
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A perfect system that meets all our requirements; Flexible and easy to customize.

Vimmi

We see Nutshell as a “team member” in growing our company.

Dirk E. Global CIF, LLC

I have used Act, Goldmine and Salesforce in the past, and I have found that Nutshell was the easiest to get started with and to set up custom fields. I would recommend Nutshell to others that are interested in an easy to learn and navigate CRM.

Craig C. Thermal-Tec

We have built an amazing sales process in Nutshell that has led to us having around a 30% close rate for all our leads.

Mathew W. SafetySync

When you get into super complex integrations or scale your organization huge, look at Salesforce. For basically everyone else, Nutshell is phenomenal.

Max R. GoBirdDog.com

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