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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    HCL Notes

    Score3.5 out of 10
    N/ANotes from HCL (formerly from IBM, acquired by HCL in late 2018) is a collaboration platform based on the Lotus platform.N/A

    Salesforce Agentforce Service

    Score8.5 out of 10
    N/AService 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
    HCL NotesSalesforce Agentforce Service
    Editions & Modules
    No answers on this topic
    Starter Suite
    $25
    per month
    Pro Suite
    $100
    per month per user
    Enterprise
    $165
    per month per user
    Unlimited
    $330
    per month per user
    Agentforce 1
    $550
    per month per user
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    HCL NotesSalesforce Agentforce Service
    Free Trial
    NoYes
    Free/Freemium Version
    NoYes
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    NoNo
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
    Additional Details——
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    HCL NotesSalesforce Agentforce Service
    Considered Both Products
    HCLSoftware
    No answer on this topic
    Salesforce
    No answer on this topic
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    No answers on this topic
    91%
    Would buy again
    52 Answers
    Delivers good value for the price
    No answers on this topic
    88%
    Delivers good value for the price
    43 Answers
    Happy with the feature set
    No answers on this topic
    93%
    Happy with the feature set
    53 Answers
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    No answers on this topic
    88%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    36 Answers
    Implementation went as expected
    No answers on this topic
    87%
    Implementation went as expected
    39 Answers
    Features
    HCL NotesSalesforce Agentforce Service
    Project Management
    Comparison of Project Management features of HCL Notes and Salesforce Agentforce Service
    Feature
    HCL Notes
    6.9
    10 Ratings
    11% below category average
    Salesforce Agentforce Service
    -
    Ratings
    Task Management7.09 Ratings00 Ratings
    Gantt Charts6.03 Ratings00 Ratings
    Scheduling8.09 Ratings00 Ratings
    Workflow Automation5.06 Ratings00 Ratings
    Mobile Access8.010 Ratings00 Ratings
    Search6.09 Ratings00 Ratings
    Visual planning tools8.03 Ratings00 Ratings
    Communication
    Comparison of Communication features of HCL Notes and Salesforce Agentforce Service
    Feature
    HCL Notes
    9.2
    10 Ratings
    14% above category average
    Salesforce Agentforce Service
    -
    Ratings
    Chat6.010 Ratings00 Ratings
    Notifications9.010 Ratings00 Ratings
    Discussions9.57 Ratings00 Ratings
    Surveys9.14 Ratings00 Ratings
    Internal knowledgebase10.06 Ratings00 Ratings
    Integrates with GoToMeeting10.03 Ratings00 Ratings
    Integrates with Gmail and Google Hangouts10.02 Ratings00 Ratings
    Integrates with Outlook10.05 Ratings00 Ratings
    File Sharing & Management
    Comparison of File Sharing & Management features of HCL Notes and Salesforce Agentforce Service
    Feature
    HCL Notes
    7.6
    9 Ratings
    6% below category average
    Salesforce Agentforce Service
    -
    Ratings
    Versioning9.04 Ratings00 Ratings
    Video files6.05 Ratings00 Ratings
    Audio files6.05 Ratings00 Ratings
    Document collaboration8.08 Ratings00 Ratings
    Access control6.08 Ratings00 Ratings
    Advanced security features8.08 Ratings00 Ratings
    Integrates with Google Drive10.02 Ratings00 Ratings
    Device sync8.05 Ratings00 Ratings
    Incident and problem management
    Comparison of Incident and problem management features of HCL Notes and Salesforce Agentforce Service
    Feature
    HCL Notes
    -
    Ratings
    Salesforce Agentforce Service
    8.0
    81 Ratings
    2% below category average
    Organize and prioritize service tickets00 Ratings8.279 Ratings
    Expert directory00 Ratings7.857 Ratings
    Subscription-based notifications00 Ratings8.267 Ratings
    ITSM collaboration and documentation00 Ratings6.962 Ratings
    Ticket creation and submission00 Ratings8.779 Ratings
    Ticket response00 Ratings7.978 Ratings
    Self Help Community
    Comparison of Self Help Community features of HCL Notes and Salesforce Agentforce Service
    Feature
    HCL Notes
    -
    Ratings
    Salesforce Agentforce Service
    8.7
    76 Ratings
    8% above category average
    External knowledge base00 Ratings8.567 Ratings
    Internal knowledge base00 Ratings8.874 Ratings
    Multi-Channel Help
    Comparison of Multi-Channel Help features of HCL Notes and Salesforce Agentforce Service
    Feature
    HCL Notes
    -
    Ratings
    Salesforce Agentforce Service
    7.9
    81 Ratings
    1% below category average
    Customer portal00 Ratings7.858 Ratings
    IVR00 Ratings8.037 Ratings
    Social integration00 Ratings7.451 Ratings
    Email support00 Ratings8.880 Ratings
    Help Desk CRM integration00 Ratings7.870 Ratings
    Best Alternatives
    HCL NotesSalesforce Agentforce Service
    Small Businesses
    Flock
    Score9.5 out of 10
    Help Scout
    Score9.3 out of 10
    Medium-sized Companies
    Troop Messenger
    Score9.8 out of 10
    LiveAgent
    Score8.8 out of 10
    Enterprises
    Cisco Business Edition 7000 (discontinued)
    Score9 out of 10
    Front
    Score9.2 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    HCL NotesSalesforce Agentforce Service
    Likelihood to Recommend
    7.0
    (16 ratings)
    8.7
    (100 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    1.7
    (5 ratings)
    6.2
    (8 ratings)
    Usability
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    8.2
    (22 ratings)
    Availability
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    8.4
    (45 ratings)
    Performance
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    8.6
    (7 ratings)
    Support Rating
    9.0
    (2 ratings)
    7.0
    (20 ratings)
    In-Person Training
    -
    (0 ratings)
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    Online Training
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    Implementation Rating
    9.0
    (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
    HCL NotesSalesforce Agentforce Service
    Likelihood to Recommend
    HCLSoftware
    I often work with teams from other country and regions, hence HCL Notes is a very useful platform for internal company management operations. It standardized organisational work standards in most of the offices worldwide. HCL Notes also enables chat with other team around the world that I find very helpful when initiating conversation or just want to have a quick update rather than sending emails and waiting for replies. However, HCL Notes is not very efficient in web browsing and user still need to use other internet service providers.
    Incentivized
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    Salesforce
    I think Service Cloud is best suited for medium to large operations that require both proactive and reactive service. It’s a great fit for post-sales support. However, I wouldn’t recommend it for very small companies because it can be quite costly, and many of the features may go unused. Salesforce also performs best when you have a capable team managing it, so it’s important to consider your organization’s size and readiness before starting. Once you do, I recommend exploring other parts of the Salesforce ecosystem—Service Cloud works even better when integrated with Sales Cloud, since it allows better visibility across teams.
    Incentivized
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    Pros
    HCLSoftware
    • It has a really strong and robust database that's extremely scalable and holds up well to thousands of users and many different environments.
    • It has a really good enterprise-grade framework for development custom database applications
    • All of the custom database applications along with the email all have a nice uniform look and feel so their easy-to-use.
    • I really like how it's developed and supported on every client OS (Windows, OSX, Linux)! The competitors definitely do NOT offer this (M$).
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Salesforce
    • Email to case is an interesting piece of it. The threading is very strong, sometimes too strong, but it does very well at handling the incoming emails.
    • The omnichannel routing, using skill-based routing is really effective.
    • Pathing. So making the workflow and helping the team understand what it is that they're trying to do, what they have to accomplish, those step-by-step pieces. That's really helpful.
    Incentivized
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    Cons
    HCLSoftware
    • Notes' backwards compatibility sometimes gets in the way. Menus are cluttered with extraneous, outdated options and features that modern users will never use, and Preferences are often difficult to navigate for those coming from Gmail or Outlook. We have greatly simplified this via Policies, but users still find it daunting to go through all the options that are available.
    • The IBM Notes client for Windows & Mac is essentially the Eclipse Java development platform...so it is HUGE. Performance initially was very slow but IBM has done a good job of speeding things up. As IBM moves more toward cloud-delivered applications, this will not be as much of a problem.
    • Notes and Domino can be complex to manage for administrators who are more accustomed to ActiveDirectory, Group Policy, etc. Editing a notes.ini file to add a feature, or working with XML files by hand to create a SmartUpgrade kit can be daunting to those coming from more modern administrative roles.
    • Some users claim to "hate" Notes mail. While I have heard this less and less over the past 10 years, we have had 3rd party software offer plugins to Outlook and it's rare to see any for Notes.
    • The client update process should be automated more. I would like to see the Notes client update quietly and quickly more like an Adobe software update. If an update fails it should automatically try again without prompting the user over and over.
    • Notes multiple language spell checking is a downloaded add-on Java-based resource that has to be deployed in a convoluted way that is difficult for users to grasp. Therefore any foreign language spell check updates must be done individually per Notes client by IT, which is unfortunate. I would prefer to see that be a "live download" update option for users to get directly from IBM (don't make me download it and put it on my network).
    Read full review
    Salesforce
    • We had a principle initially to try and use Omni as much as we can from the user experience perspective, but have found that fairly restrictive. It was very difficult to actually get the right customer experience and customer engagement going. So we're actually on a journey at the moment to replace all of our Omni with Lightning web components that gives us that flexibility. That's probably one area where we've had some challenges in terms of how we've used the product out of the box.
    Incentivized
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    Likelihood to Renew
    HCLSoftware
    I've been in IT business and as a Programmer/Developer for 20+ years with too many programming languages experiences/back ground (C/C++/Visual Basic/Basic Program/Unix/COBOL/Java). Also with 18+ years with Lotus Notes/IBM Domino, I am still and always think Lotus Notes is the best RAD platform available!. When the time where resource is very limited and the expectation is very high and the turn around is too short, IBM Domino/Notes is the platform to use and it's the only choice available.
    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
    HCLSoftware
    Easy to use for the user, most of the apps we developed, there is not much need for user training. Most of the times, we just do a demo to the users group and they can pick up from there.
    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.
    Incentivized
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    Reliability and Availability
    HCLSoftware
    No answers on this topic
    Salesforce
    Working on an application that caters to customer needs requires a platform that acts as a mediator between the actual person and the client. This mediator handles the customer and resolves many of their doubts, helps them map through the entire process, and automates the processes. Such a platform is Salesforce Service Cloud. For queries that cannot be serviced by the platform, it creates a separate ServiceNow ticket for us, and it is assigned.
    Incentivized
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    Performance
    HCLSoftware
    No answers on this topic
    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
    Incentivized
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    Support Rating
    HCLSoftware
    I've been using the production for a very long time and very happy with it. Also, all the online resources and forums for notes is very friendly and easy/quick for getting help. I found out that compared to Microsoft or Oracle or any other platforms, IBM Notes online forum is the best I have seen.
    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
    HCLSoftware
    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.
    Incentivized
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    Online Training
    HCLSoftware
    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.
    Incentivized
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    Implementation Rating
    HCLSoftware
    Implementation is easy and smooth if the requirement is well gathered/documented. Notes is a RAD platform, all projects in Notes is simple in the implementation step.
    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
    Incentivized
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    Alternatives Considered
    HCLSoftware
    Outlook has been considered for years as a replacement platform. Pricing and support staff made it prohibitive. Our long-time use of Microsoft Office productivity suite naturally led us to consider the adoption of Office365. A recent investigation told us that Azure Cloud services propel an O365 solution to the forefront. Early adopters in international divisions have paved the way for Azure and O365.
    Incentivized
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    Salesforce
    We selected this product because we already had some competencies in Salesforce. We own a Salesforce partner with expertise in this area, and on top of that, Salesforce purchased it — it was originally called Velocity. When Salesforce decided to acquire it, that finalized the decision for us.
    Incentivized
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    Scalability
    HCLSoftware
    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
    Incentivized
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    Return on Investment
    HCLSoftware
    • Over the years, we have lost countless hours of productivity from the thousands of crashes we have experienced.
    • One benefit of IBM Notes is that it is very simple to train a new user on. Many people prefer and are familiar with Google tools, but those that use IBM Notes have very little trouble acclimating themselves.
    Incentivized
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    Salesforce
    • We have cut our service team in half over the past 5 years due to the efficiency of the tool
    • The amount of direct inquiries to our technical team is less than 10% compared to the number support tickets that get entered in the system for them to work in a more organized manner
    • Responses are 100% more timely because tickets can be responded to by any individual in the queue or on the team, as opposed to direct emails to just one person
    Incentivized
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    ScreenShots

    Salesforce Agentforce Service Screenshots

    Screenshot of Workflows and OrchestrationScreenshot of Service CatalogScreenshot of Contact Center