Salesforce Service Cloud vs. ServiceNow Customer Service Management

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Salesforce Service Cloud
Score 8.6 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
ServiceNow Customer Service Management
Score 8.3 out of 10
N/A
Built on the Now Platform, ServiceNow offers their Customer Service Management solution through the Standard and Professional Customer Service Management bundles. Both include agent workspace, knowledge management, survey and assessment module, and the community module, oriented in this edition to support customers rather than internal employees. The Professional bundle also includes performance analytics, predictive intelligence, and related tools to support customer support agents improvement…N/A
Pricing
Salesforce Service CloudServiceNow Customer Service Management
Editions & Modules
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
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Salesforce Service CloudServiceNow Customer Service Management
Free Trial
YesNo
Free/Freemium Version
YesNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Salesforce Service CloudServiceNow Customer Service Management
Considered Both Products
Salesforce Service Cloud
Chose Salesforce Service Cloud
I evaluated ServiceNow also, but we didn’t see much customization kind of thing compared to Salesforce Service Cloud. And yeah, that’s it — I didn’t evaluate many other products because I’ve been working on this one for the last 14 years. I just evaluated a few things in that. …
Chose Salesforce Service Cloud
ServiceNow, it's not related to each other.
Chose Salesforce Service Cloud
Evaluated ServiceNow. Evaluated Zendesk. We selected it primarily because we already had the Salesforce ecosystem and we didn't want to bring in another vendor. For us it was important to make sure that our data is only in so many different systems and so many different cloud …
Chose Salesforce Service Cloud
I wasn't involved with the selection of this tool, but I used ServiceNow at a previous employer and preferred the ease of use and workflow of ServiceNow. Both offer customized templates, which is great, but ServiceNow was simpler to design and change. Salesforce has more time …
ServiceNow Customer Service Management

No answer on this topic

Features
Salesforce Service CloudServiceNow Customer Service Management
Incident and problem management
Comparison of Incident and problem management features of Product A and Product B
Salesforce Service Cloud
8.4
81 Ratings
2% above category average
ServiceNow Customer Service Management
9.2
10 Ratings
11% above category average
Organize and prioritize service tickets8.879 Ratings9.010 Ratings
Expert directory8.157 Ratings8.78 Ratings
Subscription-based notifications8.567 Ratings9.09 Ratings
ITSM collaboration and documentation7.762 Ratings9.39 Ratings
Ticket creation and submission9.079 Ratings9.810 Ratings
Ticket response8.578 Ratings9.310 Ratings
Self Help Community
Comparison of Self Help Community features of Product A and Product B
Salesforce Service Cloud
8.7
76 Ratings
8% above category average
ServiceNow Customer Service Management
9.5
9 Ratings
17% above category average
External knowledge base8.567 Ratings9.58 Ratings
Internal knowledge base8.874 Ratings9.59 Ratings
Multi-Channel Help
Comparison of Multi-Channel Help features of Product A and Product B
Salesforce Service Cloud
8.3
81 Ratings
4% above category average
ServiceNow Customer Service Management
9.3
10 Ratings
15% above category average
Customer portal7.958 Ratings9.08 Ratings
IVR8.337 Ratings9.77 Ratings
Social integration8.051 Ratings8.88 Ratings
Email support9.080 Ratings9.89 Ratings
Help Desk CRM integration8.370 Ratings9.59 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Salesforce Service CloudServiceNow Customer Service Management
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
SysAid
SysAid
Score 8.9 out of 10
SysAid
SysAid
Score 8.9 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Salesforce Service CloudServiceNow Customer Service Management
Likelihood to Recommend
8.7
(100 ratings)
9.0
(9 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
6.5
(8 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Usability
8.2
(22 ratings)
8.5
(5 ratings)
Availability
8.7
(45 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
8.6
(7 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
7.0
(20 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
In-Person Training
10.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Online Training
9.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
7.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
5.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
8.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
8.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Salesforce Service CloudServiceNow Customer Service Management
Likelihood to Recommend
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.
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ServiceNow
It is well suited for medium to large companies that manage different teams and need to communicate constantly and track progress in a timely manner. It is less suited for small enterprises as it will overwhelm users with the features and functionalities embedded.
Read full review
Pros
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.
Read full review
ServiceNow
  • We manage internal tickets through ServiceNow Customer Service Management. We raise tickets with IT and other team
  • We manage our datapipe customers through ServiceNow Customer Service Management and it efficiently manages our customer interactions
  • ServiceNow Customer Service Management helps us manage projects and tasks and keep a log of all our migration customers
Read full review
Cons
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.
Read full review
ServiceNow
  • Adding in additional chat features would be nice
  • Viewing where you stand in priority
  • Having a way to automate more of the processes
Read full review
Likelihood to Renew
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
ServiceNow
No answers on this topic
Usability
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
ServiceNow
Bottom line is that it does what you need it to do. We've been using Service Now as a ticket managing tool for a few years now. There's really not much it can't do when it comes to recording interactions. It has been nice using inventory tracking for software licenses and hardware as well.
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Reliability and Availability
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.
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ServiceNow
No answers on this topic
Performance
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
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ServiceNow
No answers on this topic
Support Rating
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.
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ServiceNow
Support has been very good. Any time there has been a real issue, the team has responded very quickly and identified the issue without a lot of repetitive questions that I've seen from other services. There is a great external community and internal knowledge base that covers pretty much anything you need.
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In-Person Training
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
ServiceNow
No answers on this topic
Online Training
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.
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ServiceNow
No answers on this topic
Implementation Rating
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
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ServiceNow
No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
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.
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ServiceNow
Atlassian Jira lacks certain features and process which was delivered by ServiceNow Customer Service Management. Also, flexibility to customise was a point to select ServiceNow Customer Service Management tool. Cost which was high than Atlassian Jira compensated as it improved overall customer satisfaction and reduced resolution time by taking help of Knowledge base integration
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Scalability
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
ServiceNow
No answers on this topic
Return on Investment
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
Read full review
ServiceNow
  • The negative impact for my team is the delay in team completing tickets but not a system issue.
  • A positive impact for my team is we can easily view the status of tickets and the follow-up emails are beneficial to maintain records of tickets.
  • Negative impact is that there is no user job aid or helpful tools for new users.
Read full review
ScreenShots

Salesforce Service Cloud Screenshots

Screenshot of Workflows and OrchestrationScreenshot of Service CatalogScreenshot of Contact Center