Salesforce vs Zoho CRM for small business

The case for

• Enterprise edition ships custom objects, sandboxes and a large partner app ecosystem, so complicated sales processes rarely hit a hard product ceiling.
• Indian tenants can be provisioned on the Hyderabad region, which gives regulated buyers a clear answer on where customer data sits.
• Agentforce is unmetered on the Agentforce 1 Sales tier at 550 dollars per user, so heavy AI use has a fixed seat price.

The catch

• Enterprise lists at 175 dollars per user per month and Unlimited at 350, and both are billed annually with no monthly option.
• Order forms usually carry an annual uplift clause, and the standard renewal uplift moved from 5 percent to 9 percent in December 2023.
• Standard terms rarely allow cutting licensed user counts at renewal, so seats bought for headcount that never arrived keep billing.
• Agentforce actions bill at about 10 cents each through Flex Credits sold as 100,000 credit packs for 500 dollars, on top of seats.

The case for

• Zoho is headquartered in Chennai and bills in rupees with a GST invoice, so the 18 percent is claimable as input credit.
• The free edition covers three users permanently rather than as a trial, which is enough to run a small pipeline before paying.
• Published rupee pricing runs 800 rupees per user for Standard and 2,400 for Enterprise, well under dollar priced CRMs at similar tiers.

The catch

• Mass email is capped per day by edition at 250 on Standard, 500 on Professional, 1,000 on Enterprise and 2,000 on Ultimate.
• Raising that mass email cap tops out at 2,500 a day per organisation and requires writing to sales for a paid increase.
• API usage is metered as credits per edition rather than plain call counts, and running out means buying extra credits through support.
• Listed prices exclude 18 percent GST, so the real Standard seat cost is 944 rupees per user per month rather than 800.