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Pega CRM vs Salesforce Sales Cloud comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 19, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Pega CRM
Ranking in CRM
21st
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
CRM Customer Engagement Centers (6th)
Salesforce Sales Cloud
Ranking in CRM
1st
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
118
Ranking in other categories
Opportunity Management (1st), Sales Force Automation (1st), Conversation Intelligence Software (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the CRM category, the mindshare of Pega CRM is 0.8%, down from 1.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Salesforce Sales Cloud is 2.1%, down from 9.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
CRM Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Salesforce Sales Cloud2.1%
Pega CRM0.8%
Other97.1%
CRM
 

Q&A Highlights

it_user735081 - PeerSpot reviewer
Works at a energy/utilities company with 10,001+ employees
Oct 03, 2017
 

Featured Reviews

Srinivas Ganisetti - PeerSpot reviewer
AVP/Sr Analyst Apps at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
Case management feature is valuable but the pricing is expensive
I would like to suggest the solution but it really depends on your specific requirements, your business use cases and future plans. There is a significant investment involved in this solution and therefore it is very crucial to reevaluate your future necessity including automation potential and modernization plans. I would suggest that you select any kind of solution and explore alternatives of similar functionalities at a lower cost. This might help you to achieve more with less. In my experience, I would rate it between seven to eight because it offers robust capabilities. But please be aware that other BPM tools are emerging with similar features at a lower cost. Pega CRM is perceived as bulk care compared to order tools, as many of its capabilities are potentially underutilized. I would rate it 7 out of 10.
Jonny Katz - PeerSpot reviewer
VP of Business Operations at PeerSpot
Uses data-driven insights to improve workflows and highlights a need for simpler automation tools
Salesforce Sales Cloud can be improved in several areas. First, the UI is an area for enhancement. Even though they've launched Lightning, it's clunky at times with page load speeds. It also needs to be made extremely more user-friendly. For new people using Salesforce Sales Cloud, there is a steep learning curve. Additionally, giving non-admins the ability to make changes on the fly is something that I feel is necessary. Currently with Salesforce Sales Cloud, you need to have a consultant. It's hard to build the flows or workflows. Making it easier for that end-user who's not so technically minded to help themselves is essential. I choose seven out of ten because I think you need a consultant or a consulting company to help you build it out. Certain changes should be made much easier and more user-friendly where an admin can do it. The automation processes need to be much simpler. If you're looking at other tools out there, for example SalesLoft or HubSpot, it's much easier to build those workflows and do automation.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"Pega offers a clear parent-child case relationship that's easily created and maintained. Dependencies can be configured, where reaching a specific stage in a parent case automatically triggers a child task in a child case, while the parent case remains on hold until a certain condition is met before moving forward. This configuration allows multiple users to work on cases in parallel. Many of these settings are readily available within Pega case settings. Overall, Pega's case management is unparalleled compared to other options."
"We can effortlessly manage the data within it, and it offers ease of use and high flexibility to present the data across various vendors."
"Great flexibility and its locking mechanism enable multiple users to work on the same case seamlessly."
"It also reduces the duration per call, and it ensures a first time resolution of the issue."
"The solution is very easy to use."
"The case management feature is really valuable."
"One of the most valuable features of Pega CRM for our team's productivity is its ease of setup, thanks to its configuration-driven approach."
"The product's deployment phase was easy."
"The biggest benefit of the Salesforce Sales Cloud is a centralized point, a centralized source of truth for customer-related information; you centralize all the information in a single database, and that's the biggest benefit."
"This product is lightweight."
"There are many extremely useful features."
"It is a very good tool. There are a lot of interesting features. It is one of the best solutions."
"Salesforce is such a widespread software in terms of what it can do and its scope. Theoretically, you can run a whole company off of it. There are many valuable features, such as reporting and analytics. You can customize almost the whole environment is what appeals to so many companies the most."
"The most valuable features of the solution are reporting and dashboards."
"The most valuable feature of Salesforce Sales Cloud is for teams the ability to do marketing on our page and to manage their marketing leads. You are able to close a deal and do the renewal. For the life cycle management for customer management, we use Salesforce Sales Cloud. The performance of the solution is good."
"This solution offers a good user experience. It is easy to learn and use, even for those who are using it for the first time."
 

Cons

"The UI is lagging and needs to be improved."
"The disadvantage of the tool stems from the fact that it does not allow users to make database-level modifications."
"The UI should be improved."
"The solution has room for improvement around decisional and real-time data analysis."
"For many of the clients, they have a separate system or separate layer of UI and a separate layer of the business rules engine, which Pega has taken care of in the recent releases."
"It would be beneficial to enhance the pricing and support implementation options as they are currently quite expensive."
"Price is always a concern for many organizations. They often think Pega is expensive, and sometimes they don't fully understand the pricing model."
"They should enable the data-driven streaming feature inside it."
"It's a very broad tool."
"My age-old complaint with Salesforce Sales Cloud is that it has to be refreshed because it's a cloud-based system. If you make any updates, you have to refresh and save because you're fundamentally looking at what's running in the cloud. It can be slow since you constantly refresh and save the screen. If you were running a local application, like a local CRM system, as you input anything, it would be more seamless."
"There could be an option to change the price list without creating a new quote."
"Salesforce could improve its response speed. Compared to AWS, it is slower, which could be a hindrance."
"One consistent comment about the product internally is that it has a steep learning curve, especially for some sales executives. Simplifying the interface would be a big leap forward. Like a chatbot, fewer clicks and more direct AI interaction could help. A simplified interface with AI support would make things much easier. We need an AI feature like ChatGPT that helps us to hold conversations."
"CI/CD is the biggest room for improvement. Deployment between environments and configuration."
"The developer console might be enhanced."
"As a presale team leader, I see a need to better understand the platform because our current knowledge is limited. This makes it difficult to explore possible extensions of its use. We also want more detailed information on commercial opportunities included in the tool. It needs to include better documentation on the functions it offers."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We have numerous uses of the solution in our organisation. Almost 72 applications are integrated with Pega CRM, and some of them are shutting down for various reasons including the high licensing costs. There is a strong focus in the market and offices on cost reduction."
"It is expensive."
"The pricing is on the higher side."
"It is a premium product, so it is not the cheapest solution. I think if it's implemented well, and you're getting the soft cost benefits, the efficiencies, it's justified. But not if you're looking at just apples for apples as a subscription, without the complexity that you can achieve. It can deal with complex business requirements. Some other CRMs can't. But you certainly pay, so it's a premium-charged solution. It's one of the more expensive ones."
"The price of the Salesforce Sales Cloud is expensive. We pay monthly for the solution but we are billed quarterly."
"Being license based, the license varies by type. The pricing is considered average."
"The tool's pricing is based on the number of users. It has a different pricing for 0-100 and another for 100-500 users."
"It's expensive, storage being the most costly aspect."
"The price of the product is very high. I rate the product price a ten on a scale of one to ten, where one means low price, and ten means expensive."
"Implementation and add-ons may be additional costs."
"In terms of investment value and return of the investment, Salesforce right now is pretty good on the Western markets where the price of the employees is pretty high."
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Answers from the Community

it_user735081 - PeerSpot reviewer
Works at a energy/utilities company with 10,001+ employees
Oct 3, 2017
Oct 3, 2017
My advice is to compare the full investment of the CRM implementation - software, cloud and services - as from a general perspective, all top level "costs" are generally comparable. It is the cost-to-value ratio that you will want to focus upon. Also, you’ll want to assess whether you will be looking to deploy AI or not, as some vendors’ offerings are not quite as real and ready-to-deploy as ot...
See 2 answers
it_user70698 - PeerSpot reviewer
Works at a tech consulting company
Oct 3, 2017
Hi thanks for your request. Each of the ERP CRM listed above has certain functionalities in common and comparing the cost between them will completely depends upon the need. Overall Salesforce and SAP CRM has CRM functionality and it is Tier 1 CRM product. Pega is not a CRM product and it specializes in BPM ( Business Process Management). Please email me and I can discuss over the phone with you for further details.
it_user747921 - PeerSpot reviewer
Vice President, CRM Product Marketing at Pegasystems
Oct 3, 2017
My advice is to compare the full investment of the CRM implementation - software, cloud and services - as from a general perspective, all top level "costs" are generally comparable. It is the cost-to-value ratio that you will want to focus upon. Also, you’ll want to assess whether you will be looking to deploy AI or not, as some vendors’ offerings are not quite as real and ready-to-deploy as others. Note that I am biased, as I am with Pega, running their CRM practice. With this said -- in terms of unbiased independent reviews, Gartner's latest Magic Quadrant for the CRM Customer Engagement Center for 2017, cites “Reference customers gave Pegasystems' overall package the best cost-to-value rating of any solution assessed for vendors in the Leaders quadrant.” A free copy of Gartner's report may be downloaded here: https://www.pega.com/gartner-crm-cec-2017 Best of luck in your research. Just let me know if I can be of any further assistance. Regards, Jeff Nicholson
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
26%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Educational Organization
7%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Computer Software Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Performing Arts
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise8
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business55
Midsize Enterprise26
Large Enterprise40
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Pega CRM?
The product's deployment phase was easy.
What needs improvement with Pega CRM?
The disadvantage of the tool stems from the fact that it does not allow users to make database-level modifications. In Siebel CRM, you have complete control over your database, you can do any datab...
What is your primary use case for Pega CRM?
Pega CRM uses a layer cake architecture. Basically, the tool is a convenient application to use even if you are not a technical person, like a business analyst. I use the solution for the CRM modul...
What do you like most about Salesforce Sales Cloud?
The features of Sales Cloud most useful for testing and running email campaigns are highly valuable.
What needs improvement with Salesforce Sales Cloud?
Salesforce Sales Cloud can be improved in several areas. First, the UI is an area for enhancement. Even though they've launched Lightning, it's clunky at times with page load speeds. It also needs ...
What is your primary use case for Salesforce Sales Cloud?
Salesforce Sales Cloud serves as our primary tool for our sales team and reviews team to document and keep all our information in one place as a source of truth. We use it to manage our business pr...
 

Also Known As

Chordiant
Sales Cloud, SFDC, Salesforce
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

The State of Maine, Aegis, Aegon, AIG Japan, ING
Coca-Cola Enterprises, Kuoni Global Travel Services, Financial Times, Just Eat, Jobsite, H.R. Owen, PlayerLayer, O2, DMGT, Philips, Xtreme.ie, Business Stream, Remote Asset Management, Dialogue Group
Find out what your peers are saying about Pega CRM vs. Salesforce Sales Cloud and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
881,346 professionals have used our research since 2012.