Choosing between two top CRM solutions feels a lot like rolling the dice and hoping the odds are ever in your favor. It’s a hefty investment, and you don’t want to end up with the short end of the stick. Like a titan clash between Godzilla and King Kong, Pega vs. Salesforce Sales Cloud is one for the ages. We’ve put together a detailed analysis that gives Salesforce Sales Cloud the win!

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Article Roadmap

• Feature Comparisons
  • Account and Contact Management
  • Customer Communications Management
  • Dashboards and Reports
  • Document Management
  • Lead and Opportunity Management
  • Customization
  • Quote, Order and Contact Management
  • Sales Performance Management
  • Social Engagement
  • Team Collaboration
• Other Considerations
• Product Overviews
• Next Steps

Key Features Comparison

Objectively comparing two fantastic CRMs is a tough job, but someone’s gotta do it. Our analysts have tallied up ten key features to evaluate Pega vs. Salesforce Sales Cloud. Let’s dive in!

Account and Contact Management

Pega CRM offers a unified view of key information, including company profile, account details, associated opportunities, engagement and more. Users can organize information using account hierarchy, interactive organizational tree charts, territorial tree structures and rules. Send emails, schedule meetings using the vCalendar and present upsell opportunities using AI recommendations.

Salesforce Sales Cloud uses business and person account fields to manage details. Associate contacts with accounts and opportunities to see an overall picture of contact deals and view activity history, key contacts, communication and internal discussions. Users can customize account hierarchies and organizational charts and visualize and manage territorial hierarchies.

Winner: Deeper contact insights, interactive organizational tree charts and AI-powered recommendations give Pega the edge.

Customer Communications Management

Pega CRM provides an email wizard, templates and integration with Gmail and Microsoft Outlook to schedule and send emails. It also fully supports built-in telephony, omnichannel messaging, Pega Call, and call recording with Avaya ACM.

Salesforce’s Lightning Dialer add-on supports custom voicemails, prerecorded messages, built-in caller, call logs, reminders, scheduling, and personal and public tags. Users can respond to emails and associate emails with CRM records and templates, integrate with email providers and track email statuses.

Winner: Salesforce’s email status tracking and additional call features with the Lightning Dialer push it to the top spot.

Dashboards and Reports

Pega CRM’s customizable homepage dashboard allow users to drag and drop widgets and publish and share dashboards with their team, although they cannot be exported. Generate sales reports using pre-built templates, preview and edit reports and export reports to PDF or Excel format.

Salesforce provides an API dashboard, activity reports, call analysis and multiple charts and visualizations to track progress. Users can customize standard reports or build them from scratch using the drag-and-drop builder and export data into XLS or CSV files. Create customizable dashboards, share reports or dashboards, receive updated results and embed visualizations into third-party dashboards.

Winner: The API dashboard and drag-and-drop builder puts Salesforce Sales Cloud firmly in the top spot.

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Document Management

Pega supports content management interoperability, web storage and repositories to store content. It enables the internal sharing of files and attachments to contacts and leads. Users can search for content using the content title, abstract, body content and tags.

Salesforce’s document module allows users to create, upload and manage document records and file types. Users can convert documents into an optimized web format and share and attach files internally and externally. The version history list shows all past versions, downloads and updates.

Winner: External file sharing and document version history without integration ultimately give Salesforce Sales Cloud the W.

Lead and Opportunity Management

Pega’s AI and decision-making capabilities provide lead scores, next steps and automated lead routing. It supports self-learning models to generate a dynamic lead score that responds to changes. Manage and source leads from multiple sources, including bulk import, web forms, campaigns, manual entry and social media.

Sales managers can track and view a timeline of all interactions with prospects demarcated with colors and filters. Create and filter leads using specified fields, predict win-probability and display opportunities via a Kanban board.

Salesforce Sales Cloud allows users to distribute and score leads using pre-defined rules and factors. Sales reps can track information on leads with the activity timeline. Generate leads from your website with the Web-To-Lead feature.

It categorizes opportunities into multiple sales pipelines and allows users to track deal stages and associated activities, win probabilities and update reminders.

Winner: Pega’s AI-powered capabilities take the cake this round.

Customization

Pega’s low-code platform allows users to create custom apps using visual models and Agile methodologies. It also supports custom branding, fields and dynamic layouts. Users can build customized views filtered by name, amount and close date.

Salesforce Sales Cloud supports the creation of custom lightning apps for departments and teams. Users can modify loading page colors, logos and emails to match company branding. It provides custom fields, layouts, modules and filters to meet unique data requirements.

Winner: The custom objects feature pushes Salesforce Sales Cloud up the ranks.

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Quote, Order and Contract Management

Pega partially supports contract management, invoice management and order generation with help from third-party applications and its CPQ system.

Salesforce Sales Cloud supports contract creation and management. It allows users to segment and create orders, generate quotes and set up payment schedules.

Winner: Salesforce’s in-house prowess makes it the clear winner.

Sales Performance Management

Pega uses AI-based insights to evaluate performance based on sales reps’ actions. Managers can access real-time coaching tips for underperformers, set individual and team objectives and view detailed team insights with drill-downs across the sales hierarchy. It also supports gamification leaderboards, sales forecasting and goal setting.

Salesforce Sales Cloud enables users to define, track and measure goals and individual target quotas. Users can set up and analyze the performance of direct mail, advertising, email and telemarketing campaigns. It also provides real-time leaderboards, collaborative forecasts and customized goals.

Winner: AI insights and coaching tips boost Pega to number one.

Social Engagement

Pega uses pattern extraction and machine learning models to track keywords on social media for new product releases or competitor products. Users can integrate Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn to link leads and opportunities, create posts and respond to comments.

Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud integration supports social listening for keywords, crisis indicators and competitor issues. Its integration with social media sites allows users to engage with prospects via posts and comments.

Winner: Pega’s in-built keyword tracking wins it the gold medal.

Team Collaboration

Pega’s internal integration with Pulse allows users to tag each other in contacts, leads and opportunities, collaborate privately or publicly in chats and share comments, files and links with other users. Geotagging allows users to track and guide reps in the field.

Salesforce Community allows users to mention groups and individuals in posts and comments, collaborate amongst groups and share attachments with the Chatter tool. It supports personal and public tagging on records and integration with Google Maps for geotagging.

Winner: Pega’s internal geotagging bumps it into the top spot.

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Other Considerations

Picking the right software solely on features is so 2000 and late. Like a well-balanced diet, it takes micros, macros and everything in between to ensure everything runs smoothly. Here are a few factors to remember before you make your final decision.

User Experience: Salesforce is well-known for its user experience optimization. Notably, its easy accessibility, quick updates and clean interface. However, Pega’s low-code layering structure focuses on case management and can better meet unique requirements.

Deployment: Both platforms are SaaS-based. However, Pega can be deployed on-premise via a user’s or third-party cloud.

Integrations: Pega CRM and Salesforce Sales Cloud support open APIs, business intelligence integration and data import and export. Added communication and scheduling tools integration gives Salesforce that extra oomph.

Customer Support: 24/7 technical support and a community help platform are available for both products. Salesforce also provides support via chat.

Product Overviews

Pega CRM

Pega CRM is a cloud-based platform created by Pegasystems to provide end-to-end automation and improve engagement throughout the customer lifecycle. The Customer Decision Hub drives next steps using predictive analytics, AI and intelligent data. Users can customize their experience with low-code layers to automate workflows and sales processes and eliminate silos.

Salesforce Sales Cloud

Salesforce Sales Cloud is a cloud-based solution designed to optimize sales processes using centralized data, interaction tracking and automation. It gives managers real-time insights into team activities to provide more accurate sales forecasts. Users can customize the experience to fit their business needs, create workflows, track and score leads and generate reports.

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Next Steps

After 10 grueling rounds, it was all square so we had to go to the judges’ scores. Salesforce Sales Cloud narrowly edged out the win in our Pega vs. Salesforce match-up with better scores for essential features and wins in integrations and accessibility.

Just remember, everyone’s business needs are different, and what’s good for the goose may not be good for the gander. Make an educated decision by determining how each system stacks up to your business needs with our in-depth comparison report.

Which features in our Salesforce vs. Pega comparison are the most helpful for your business? Let us know in the comments!

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