Portal customization helps you match the CRM software with your Website. You can add logos or even matching themes.

• Salesforce allows only five portal customizations at a time whereas there is no limit in Zendesk. 

Winner: Zendesk

A community or forum is an online meeting place where people can discuss their knowledge, share videos, or even talk to each other online. This helps you in building a community that enables long-term clients.

• Both Zendesk and Salesforce allow you to create a community. Though, Salesforce has an advantage over here as it allows you to create an employee forum too.

Winner: Salesforce 

• Zendesk allows you to create a company-wide knowledge base that can be easily used by your customers and employees. It allows you to manage, update, edit, and publish content in the knowledge base as per your choice. The analytics provided by Zendesk is a bit hard to configure. 
• Salesforce provides a knowledge base in the form of articles, videos, guides, and tutorials. Salesforce provides easy configuration of metrics. 

Winner: Salesforce

• Salesforce provides you with more features compared to Zendesk. Salesforce’s additional features are real-time agent coaching, instant message session metrics, multilingual support, and many more.

Winner: Salesforce

• Zendesk: It can be integrated with several other software such as Shopify, google analytics, high rise, magneto, and many more.
• Salesforce: Integration of Salesforce live chat is limited and can only be integrated with the help of its marketplace. 

Winner: Zendesk

The helpdesk should have a wide array of language support options that can help customers globally.

• Zendesk provides 40 different language support, whereas Salesforce provides only 27 multi-language support. 

Winner: Zendesk

• Only Zendesk can be integrated with Twitter and easily turn tweets into tickets. There is no option available for Salesforce and Twitter integration. 

Winner: Zendesk

• Both Zendesk and Salesforce can integrate with Facebook and convert messenger messages into tickets. They can also convert Facebook comments under your posts to tickets.

Winner: Both

• Zendesk can only be integrated with Instagram direct, whereas SalesForce can convert comments and DMs into tickets. 

Winner: Salesforce

• Just like Instagram only Salesforce can integrate with Youtube and convert comments into tickets. 

Winner: Salesforce

This feature automatically triggers an action when a ticket reaches a specific time limit. Enabling you to answer every ticket and ensures that no ticket is left unattended

• Both Zendesk and Salesforce allow you to automate your ticket resolution through time trigger but in salesforce, your agents need to save the record to allow the automation to work. 

Winner: Zendesk

This feature of the helpdesk allows you to attend to high-priority tickets first. Thus helping you give more attention to a high-priority ticket than a low-priority ticket.

• Both of the software offer this feature but the set-up of time escalation of Salesforce is a bit lengthy. 

Winner: Zendesk

Bot article recommendation feature enables you to quickly solve your customers’ queries with the help of knowledge base articles. When a customer asks for a query that can be solved through these articles then bots automatically send them the recommendation.

• Both Zendesk and Salesforce have a bot article recommendation feature.

Winner: Both

Task management allows you to create a task or reminder for your clients. It can be integrated with the calendar and when the task is completed then it gets recorded into your system.

• Only Salesforce has this feature which assists you to provide personalized service to your clients.

Winner: Salesforce

Chat reports give you an overview of your chats and agent activity. With the help of this data, you can easily make plans and strategize your work

• Zendesk: It offers the following chat metrics: Chat Stats, Satisfaction Rating, Chat timing, Agents report, etc.
• Salesforce: The reports which can be given by Salesforce are: Flag Lowered(agent), Flag Lowered(supervisor), Chat Request Assigned, etc. 

Winner: Salesforce

Support reports are the reports used to monitor the status of your customer support request.

• Zendesk: Reports that Zendesk provides are: Efficiency, Agents Updates, Unsolved tickets, Re-open Tickets, etc.
• Salesforce: It provides custom reports as per your choice. Some of the reports which can be pre-selected are Tickets booked in a single day, Tickets resolved with the help of a knowledge base, Re-opened Tickets, etc.

Winner: Salesforce

These reports allow companies to allocate resources efficiently for future growth and manage their cash flow. 

• Only Salesforce can provide forecast reports which can help you manage your sales beforehand. 

Winner: Salesforce