With hundreds of vendors, the CRM market is ultra-competitive.
Salesforce is the most prominent provider, occupying 22.9 percent of the space – according to IDC.
Yet, there is a big gap between Salesforce and its rivals.
Indeed, Microsoft is its closest competitor, working with four times fewer CRM clients.
Such a statistic showcases just how competitive the battle for the remaining 77.9 percent of the market is – especially with sector-specific players now gaining ground in the space.
Nevertheless, many big names are hoping to create a chasing pack, innovate fast, and disrupt the status quo.
Prominent market analyst Nucleus Research has kept tabs on 14 of the chasing pack – in addition to Salesforce - evaluating them on the usability and functionality of their platforms.
In doing so as part of its "CRM Technology Value Matrix 2023", Nucleus Research isolated its five leading offerings, with Salesforce missing the cut.
CRM Leaders
Leaders occupy the top-right quadrant of the chart above. In the assessment, these vendors performed above average in their usability and functionality. This year’s leaders include:
- Zoho
- Oracle
- Microsoft
- SugarCRM
- Creatio
Zoho
Zoho achieved the highest score for usability in this year’s report, with Nucleus praising the platform’s private cloud architecture, speedy deployment options, and unified data model. The latter enables more robust integrations and increased interoperability across the entire Zoho ecosystem, third-party applications, and custom services. Meanwhile, the platform’s out-of-box customizability, intuitive UI, and CRM Analytics mobile app are additional strengths. The analyst concludes by noting that Zoho is now a “feasible option for organizations of all sizes” – despite a long history of deployments in SMBs.
Oracle
Oracle leads the CRM space in its functionality, according to Nucleus. Its modular design is critical here, allowing the vendor to handle "all customer-facing processes" – from sales to service, eCommerce to marketing, data management to analytics. Moreover, it lays the foundations for value-add processes, including lead-to-cash and revenue management. Oracle also benefits from its expansive third-party and enterprise data network – with Nucleus noting how its customers often laud the vendor's extensibility. The customer may also partner with Oracle on ERP, BI, supply chain, resource management, and more – with many embracing the full-suite approach.
Microsoft
Microsoft has pulled its CRM and ERP solutions closer, enabling a more holistic view of business performance and improved decision-making. These CRM applications cover marketing, sales, customer service, commerce, customer insights, and field service. By running AI and its market-leading BI solution – according to Gartner - across these, Microsoft strives to serve up real-time data to its clients. Businesses may harness these insights to enhance marketing campaigns and customer relationships. Now, the tech pioneer hopes to make it easier for non-technical users to build such a strategy to strengthen decision-making and manage digital commerce experiences – and Nucleus seemingly approves of such an approach.
SugarCRM
SugarCRM embeds data analytics and integration capabilities across its service, sales, and marketing CRM solutions suite. In doing so, the vendor successfully reduces roadblocks, bolsters usability, and offers a more holistic view of each customer, according to Nucleus. Moreover, with this integration-first approach, users can choose from over 240 extensions to complete industry-specific tasks. The analyst also applauds the flexibility of SugarCRM's pricing, as businesses can choose from several subscription plans – alongside deployment models. Indeed, clients may select a cloud, on-premise, or hybrid solution.
Creatio
Creatio has gained market momentum with a single platform for process automation and data management. The combination aims to drive operational efficiency by streamlining business workflows. Moreover, the platform is highly customizable, with no-code capabilities that Nucleus lauds. These allow businesses to build a platform that meets their unique requirements more simply. Finally, Creatio impresses with its lead management features, customer journey analytics, and speed of innovation. The latter helped it to release additional composable CRM components, a new UI, and an updated no-code designer in the past 12 months alone.
CRM Facilitators
Facilitators sit in the bottom-right quadrant. In the study, these vendors performed above average in their usability but lagged leaders in functionality. This year’s facilitators include: