Desk.com (discontinued) vs. Salesforce Service Cloud

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Desk.com (discontinued)
Score 8.3 out of 10
N/A
Desk.com was a helpdesk, ticketing, and customer support product offered by Salesforce, and oriented towards the needs of small businesses. It is no longer sold and support has been discontinued. Salesforce recommends its modern Service Cloud as a replacement.N/A
Salesforce Service Cloud
Score 8.7 out of 10
N/A
Service Cloud is a customer service platform that helps businesses manage and resolve customer inquiries and issues. It provides tools for case management, knowledge base, omni-channel support, automation, and analytics, enabling companies to deliver exceptional customer service experiences.
$25
per month
Pricing
Desk.com (discontinued)Salesforce Service Cloud
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Starter Suite
$25
per month
Professional
$80
per month
Enterprise
$165
per month per user
Unlimited
$165
per month per user
Unlimited+
$165
per month per user
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Desk.com (discontinued)Salesforce Service Cloud
Free Trial
YesYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Desk.com (discontinued)Salesforce Service Cloud
Considered Both Products
Desk.com (discontinued)
Chose Desk.com (discontinued)
Desk.com is comparable, on a smaller scale. We went with Desk.com because it provided the functionality we needed and was more affordable.
Salesforce Service Cloud
Chose Salesforce Service Cloud
Desk.com was our previous foray into customer support, and it was functional and worked quite well. It was not exactly the most intuitive to update, but it got the job done and was reliable.

Freshdesk was our primary next decision, and we would have gone with them except we were …
Chose Salesforce Service Cloud
Service Cloud is a step up from Desk mainly because of its reporting, but if you can integrate other Salesforce products together, I'd recommend looking at its other solutions and looking at its own integrated CRM case closer. Service Cloud isn't the perfect solution, but it …
Chose Salesforce Service Cloud
We chose Service Cloud because of its deep, native integration with Salesforce, unified billing, and for the fact that we didn't have to learn or train on an entirely new platform. These other products were excellent, but for us it was more time and cost effective to use …
Chose Salesforce Service Cloud
Salesforce has increased their traction in the SMB space for service with the acquisition of Desk.com. It provides a good entry level solution for customer service and knowledge for less complex organizations. Additionally, it gets them up and running quicker. Without Desk.com, …
Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
Desk.com (discontinued)Salesforce Service Cloud
Incident and problem management
Comparison of Incident and problem management features of Product A and Product B
Desk.com (discontinued)
-
Ratings
Salesforce Service Cloud
8.8
77 Ratings
10% above category average
Organize and prioritize service tickets00 Ratings9.175 Ratings
Expert directory00 Ratings8.553 Ratings
Subscription-based notifications00 Ratings8.963 Ratings
ITSM collaboration and documentation00 Ratings8.360 Ratings
Ticket creation and submission00 Ratings9.375 Ratings
Ticket response00 Ratings8.974 Ratings
Self Help Community
Comparison of Self Help Community features of Product A and Product B
Desk.com (discontinued)
-
Ratings
Salesforce Service Cloud
8.9
72 Ratings
14% above category average
External knowledge base00 Ratings8.863 Ratings
Internal knowledge base00 Ratings8.970 Ratings
Multi-Channel Help
Comparison of Multi-Channel Help features of Product A and Product B
Desk.com (discontinued)
-
Ratings
Salesforce Service Cloud
8.8
77 Ratings
13% above category average
Customer portal00 Ratings8.554 Ratings
IVR00 Ratings8.634 Ratings
Social integration00 Ratings8.747 Ratings
Email support00 Ratings9.276 Ratings
Help Desk CRM integration00 Ratings9.066 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Desk.com (discontinued)Salesforce Service Cloud
Small Businesses
Agiloft Service Desk (discontinued)
Agiloft Service Desk (discontinued)
Score 9.0 out of 10
Agiloft Service Desk (discontinued)
Agiloft Service Desk (discontinued)
Score 9.0 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Agiloft Service Desk (discontinued)
Agiloft Service Desk (discontinued)
Score 9.0 out of 10
Agiloft Service Desk (discontinued)
Agiloft Service Desk (discontinued)
Score 9.0 out of 10
Enterprises
Front
Front
Score 8.8 out of 10
Front
Front
Score 8.8 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Desk.com (discontinued)Salesforce Service Cloud
Likelihood to Recommend
8.2
(38 ratings)
8.9
(83 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
8.4
(14 ratings)
7.4
(8 ratings)
Usability
8.3
(19 ratings)
8.0
(12 ratings)
Availability
1.0
(2 ratings)
9.5
(28 ratings)
Performance
10.0
(1 ratings)
8.6
(7 ratings)
Support Rating
8.2
(21 ratings)
7.0
(20 ratings)
In-Person Training
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
Online Training
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
Implementation Rating
10.0
(1 ratings)
7.0
(1 ratings)
Ease of integration
-
(0 ratings)
5.0
(1 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
User Testimonials
Desk.com (discontinued)Salesforce Service Cloud
Likelihood to Recommend
Discontinued Products
Once I had to search the logs to find cases and data on a particular keyword, but I was not able to do so as there was no search tool available, nor was there a sort or filter tool. I was totally frustrated as I had to skim through the data to complete my task manually.
Read full review
Salesforce
It is a helpful tool, but it can be a bit cumbersome to manage. It is also a bit expensive, but we already use CRM for Salesforce and it is convenient to be able to immediately tag contacts and accounts when the tickets come into the system and tie them directly to the account. I do know an integration with Jira is possible (we use Jira internally for our engineering team to escalate issues) but it is not configured right now so managing the connection between support tickets and Jira tickets is manual and hard to keep up with
Read full review
Pros
Discontinued Products
  • Desk.com automatically tracks analytics on all cases coming in and going out.
  • Desk.com helps prevent multiple people from working on the same case. However, it does allow us to assign the case to someone else if we feel that person is more qualified to address the case.
  • Desk.com has very few bugs or server issues that we've seen. This helps prevent any delays in communicating with our customers.
Read full review
Salesforce
  • Allows us to make changes quickly and with relative ease
  • Can be flexible enough to use among several teams who do very different work
  • Salesforce in general provides SO much training that anyone on the team can skill up and help maintain the system
Read full review
Cons
Discontinued Products
  • Internal knowledge tools are clunky and annoying to access, outside the regular workflow of everyday staff
  • Arbitrary and confusing limitations in business rules and custom fields
  • Arbitrary and confusing limitations in case handling - for example, if you begin a case as a phone call you CANNOT email the customer from the case. As though no one working at Desk has ever sent a follow-up email...?
  • Not very good for B2B, mid-to-large businesses. Difficult to set business rules based on company information (for example, service level/tier) and nearly impossible to track key stakeholders and get clear insight into the relationship at a high level
  • Reporting tools are clunky, slow, and just all-around pretty useless
Read full review
Salesforce
  • There is a slight scope for error, but sometimes it has a heavy impact. So this can be improved.
  • Costing is high.
  • Maintenance is more.
  • Expertise is required for implementation.
  • The number of communication messages have some limit per organisation account.
Read full review
Likelihood to Renew
Discontinued Products
We will be very likely to renew our contract with Desk.com. It is easy to use, and provides us with everything we need to keep our customers and employees happy. They have also been very helpful in catering the application to our specific and unique needs, including working across brands and adding specific content for our products
Read full review
Salesforce
Professional edition works best for a small company with lower call volumes and is very useful but as you grow exponetially I think it has limited ability to do all the things we want to - SLA management, defect, release management to name a few. Reports and dashboards being available in real time.
Read full review
Usability
Discontinued Products
Desk.com and Salesforce Service Cloud's usability is seamless to get up and running, administer, and scale across the organization. It allows us to get up and running in days rather than weeks and has transformed our customer support teams globally into efficient, world-class teams. The best practices that the Salesforce and Desk.com teams provide are also very valuable, as we have the right case studies and tips to implement right away in our organization.
Read full review
Salesforce
I had Salesforce experience prior to using Service Cloud which made it a little easier to learn and navigate, but overall my team (some who had no Salesforce experience) caught on very quickly and found Service Cloud to be easy to use.
Read full review
Reliability and Availability
Discontinued Products
We've never had a problem with Desk.com's availability.
Read full review
Salesforce
Salesforce's Trust Center clearly communicates occasional issues to anyone who subscribes, down to an organization's cloud instance. Bundled sandboxes ease updates, and seasonal upgrades are seamless, scheduled well in advance with plenty of information about what's coming. Support agents have noticed intermittent Omni-Channel disconnects due to internet connections, and these are clearly notified.
Read full review
Performance
Discontinued Products
Fast, responsive, gorgeous, and fun. It's always run like a thoroughbred for me.
Read full review
Salesforce
The Salesforce Service Cloud generally has very good performance, however the overall new Lightning user experience can bring that down. For example, if you have too many tabs open, then it can take a while for the Lightning UI to load. This UI is probably not well equipped to handle loading of all of that information at once, but Users tend to leave their tabs open all day long. It can also be fickle depending on which browser you use, what extensions you have installed, and whether you've cleared your cache. This can be the downfall with any software as a service though, not just Salesforce
Read full review
Support Rating
Discontinued Products
Their support leaves much to be desired. They do not respond quickly and do not follow up with feature requests. There is also a lack of on-demand or live training available for the teams to use as they learn a new tool. Because there is so much customization, a lot of questions do come up regularly.
Read full review
Salesforce
Salesforce offers support, although it generally gets routed to overseas support teams first, and once they are unable to help, it gets escalated up the chain to higher tiers. Frequently, the answer back from support is that there is no native solution, and we either have to turn to the AppExchange for some solution provided by another developer, or custom build our own solution.
Read full review
In-Person Training
Discontinued Products
No answers on this topic
Salesforce
Our in-person training was provided by our implementation partner and it was quite good. This was in part because we were already working with them and so it naturally leant itself to a good training relationship. And because they were building our customizations and configuring things, they could then provide training on those things naturally.
Read full review
Online Training
Discontinued Products
No answers on this topic
Salesforce
Trailheads are great but it was often unclear what actually applied to our organization. This made it difficult to get a whole lot out of it. Part of it is that because the basic Salesforce features didn't quite work for us, we had to add customizations, which then nullified a lot of the training.
Read full review
Implementation Rating
Discontinued Products
As I stated earlier, implementation of Desk.com went more smoothly than most. The resources in the "Support Center" are fantastic, and I never ran into anything that left me stumped, angry, or disappointed.
Read full review
Salesforce
I would go through an implementation very differently knowing what I know now. It was difficult coming from systems we liked in post-sales service and having to adapt to the clunky and underwhelming feature set in Salesforce. I would trim back our expectations
Read full review
Alternatives Considered
Discontinued Products
Overall, it performs a lot better than all three combined, with a lot fewer glitches and a lot more user-friendly and user experience efficiency. Any new link that needs to be done, takes a lot less time to execute on desk compared to the three others. Simply advanced when it comes to execution this platform is.
Read full review
Salesforce
Salesforce service cloud is more configurable than Zendesk and Freshdesk. It has its own inbuilt AI chatbot also which further improves service agent efficiency. Salesforce is more integration agnostic and has pre-built connectors with multiple 3rd party systems. However, in terms of pricing it is priced at a premium compared to the other solutions
Read full review
Scalability
Discontinued Products
No answers on this topic
Salesforce
The product has scaled up with our company growth just fine. No issues here other than slowness in clicking around and running reports
Read full review
Return on Investment
Discontinued Products
  • Better customer service and employee efficiency when dealing with cases
  • It's so universal, meaning that everyone can use it and it's easy to understand.
  • The only negative impact is that our IT department who is assigned tickets has responded to customers instead of to the local reps and we have to ensure they know to change the email if it's assigned to them.
Read full review
Salesforce
  • Because this is a cloud service, the security, implementation framework and feature list is very mature and you don't have to develop these during implementation.
  • The larger the implementation programme the better the licensing arrangements
  • Free developer toolkit for proof of concepts or showcasing features
  • Limited to annual subscription model
Read full review
ScreenShots

Desk.com (discontinued) Screenshots

Screenshot of Desk.com ConsoleScreenshot of Desk.com Issue ScreenScreenshot of Desk.com Reporting and Analytics

Salesforce Service Cloud Screenshots

Screenshot of Workflows and OrchestrationScreenshot of Service CatalogScreenshot of Contact Center