Salesforce Experience Cloud vs. Zendesk Guide

For well-suited, this product is great for your external clientele groups that you would not necessarily want to have a high user fee rate for. So basically general public or a group that will be authorized to come in and just do a few things here and there, but you don't necessarily want them access to all of your systems and your data points for groups that it would not be a great use for. I'd say probably your high level internal staff, they're going to be using a lot of the backend functionality automations, evaluating data, managing data, and doing custom inputs. That's just not what's intended for.

Incentivized

In our company, we host our benefit articles based on country on our Zendesk Guide. However, these articles should not be seen by employees that are outside their respective article country. For example, an employee that is based in Thailand shouldn't be seeing Malaysia benefits article as employees might compared benefits. With Zendesk Guide, the system allow us to set the configuration of the article so it is only visible Thailand-based employees, and for Malaysia article, only Malaysia-based employees

Incentivized

• Easy to use, just like Salesforce's other products. Many users can sit down and figure it out in no time, and with a little training become power users.
• Fast and secure - Salesforce is a leader in the cloud world so you get consistently fast results and security that is top notch in the industry.
• Accessible from anywhere - if you use cloud CMS already this is a no-brainer, but for those that do in-house CMS still, this is a major difference. Mobile access from anywhere on the planet without a VPN is something you just can't do without the cloud.

Incentivized

• They give us ability to control the whole frontend of the Communities by giving us access to manipulate HTML (in HBS file), CSS and JS
• They give handlebars templating engine in backend which helps us to show various listing rendered through server side without having need to implement client side rendering of the listing and features.
• They provide us dynamic content fields, which can be useful for mapping categories or storing category and topic IDs so we don't need to hard code IDs in Sandbox and Production separately.

Incentivized

• Unlike other CMS platforms like Wordpress and Adobe Experience Manager, Salesforce does not provide a fully featured editor with a drag-and-drop design tool.
• Our content creators and marketing team often struggle with permissions and how to distribute content across different experience cloud sites.
• Also, there is no side-to-side comparison view for content editors to update the content easily.

Incentivized

• Formatting according to our brand guidelines can be tricky
• Reporting metrics are lacking
• The user interface can be confusing
• Their support team takes a long time to respond
• They have comments open on their KB articles, but almost noone responds, which is frustrating.

Incentivized

Renewal exercise is already underway. Platform is to ubiquitous to not leverage, especially at a Fortune 50 firm

Incentivized

Strengths: - Intuitive for Salesforce Users – If you’re already working within the Salesforce ecosystem, the Salesforce CMS is easy to navigate, with a clean UI, drag-and-drop content management, and reusable assets for quick updates. - Seamless Integration – Since it connects natively with Experience Cloud, Marketing Cloud, and CRM, it allows for efficient multi-channel content distribution without needing extra third-party tools. - AI-Powered Personalization – The ability to deliver dynamic content based on user profiles and engagement data is a huge plus, making content delivery more relevant and impactful. Challenges: - Learning Curve for New Users – If you're not already familiar with Salesforce, the interface can feel overwhelming, requiring training to fully leverage all features. - Limited Customization & Workflow Automation – While it works well for structured content, advanced approval workflows and deep editorial customization are limited compared to enterprise CMS platforms like Adobe Experience Manager. - Media & Design Limitations – Salesforce CMS is not as robust for managing rich media-heavy content, which can be frustrating for teams needing more flexibility in multimedia presentation.

Incentivized

Again, since we provide and recommend solutions, I can't speak to every client's individual experience, but can offer general reflections as to keep their collaborations private, that they are satisfied with the experience. We hear a lot about how this system helps to encourage collaborations between their own business partners, customers, and internal members, and enables quality integrations with other products that help drive revenue.

Incentivized

Although support from Salesforce itself can be quite unresponsive sometimes, the community hub is incredibly helpful. The large user base of Salesforce products contribute to troubleshooting and the forums are a powerful tool for finding solutions and possible bugs and response times can be quite fast compared to your regular support channels.

Incentivized

The support is good but can sometime be frustrating to get a quick answer. We end up being sent articles that don't answer the question and then we have to go back and try again

Incentivized

Salesforce Experience Cloud was selected due to its tight integration with our existing Salesforce CRM platform. Customization of the portal was much, much simpler compared to Sharepoint - especially with role-based security parameters that are ultimately inherited based on attributes within the Salesforce CRM platform. Salesforce Experience Cloud was a natural fit for this customer-facing purpose.

Incentivized

It is an attribute of Zendesk that allows for easy over the phone communication between agents and customers. It is more personal and allows for better productivity. Phone support from anywhere with reliable internet connection which is essential to call center communication whether in the office or in the home of the agent.

Incentivized

• Time savings for our customer success team - no need to continually follow up on tickets as customers have access to see status themselves
• In the future, it will also allow us to create more impactful knowledge articles that will increase self-service over ticket creation

Incentivized

• We used it for multiple customer so we can say ROI of Zendesk Guide is very competitive.
• Zendesk meet[s] most of the business objective[s], which suits [a]s best product among its competitor.
• I highly recommend to use Zendesk for knowledge base and tickets and agents.

Incentivized