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Salesforce Service Cloud vs ServiceNow comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 1, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
6.5
Salesforce Service Cloud achieves 135% ROI by enhancing efficiency, productivity, and service business, despite implementation costs.
Sentiment score
6.6
ServiceNow enhances efficiency and cost savings, providing ROI within a year, despite initial costs and adoption challenges.
Salesforce Service Cloud requires significant maintenance effort to see ROI.
They have removed the costs associated with on-prem infrastructure, including data center costs, power costs, and physical server costs.
The return on investment is good when implementing for ourselves and for other clients.
Manually, there are huge numbers that come up because these integrated tools help organizations make the right decisions with all the information in one place, while manual methods lack visibility.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
5.6
Salesforce Service Cloud is praised for helpful support and community, despite some critiques on initial response and proactiveness.
Sentiment score
6.9
ServiceNow support is praised for responsiveness and resources but experiences mixed reviews due to delays and inconsistencies.
Unless you have premium support, assistance is restricted.
Salesforce directly does not give you the support, and it is through the partner that you have to go, leading to some time delays.
The support is exemplary and deserves a perfect rating.
Obtaining support for maintenance is the current challenge because they don't have a presence in the local market.
I have contacted them four to five times over the past two years, and they have been quite helpful.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
8.1
Salesforce Service Cloud offers exceptional scalability for enterprise growth, handling increased users and transactions seamlessly across industries.
Sentiment score
7.4
ServiceNow is scalable and effective for global operations, though performance issues and pricing concerns exist for some users.
Salesforce Service Cloud is the most advanced in scalability, rating around nine to ten.
Nobody can compete with Salesforce Service Cloud's scalability.
There are no limitations or performance issues with ServiceNow; it is cloud-based, so it is highly scalable and performs well.
It is capable of vertical scaling with no issues.
I rate the scalability of ServiceNow as an eight on a scale of one to ten.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.9
Salesforce Service Cloud is highly stable, reliable, quickly resolves issues, and is positively rated across industries for dependability.
Sentiment score
7.7
ServiceNow is widely praised for its stability and reliability, with efficient support and minimal downtime, making it dependable.
We rarely encounter stability issues with Salesforce Service Cloud, although when they occur, they cause significant disruption.
It is cloud-based, so it is highly scalable and performs well.
I haven't faced any issues with stability; I've rarely seen any downtime.
ServiceNow is stable enough.
 

Room For Improvement

Salesforce Service Cloud requires improvements in email integration, UI/UX, reporting, analytics, and cost efficiency for better user experience.
ServiceNow needs to enhance user interface, licensing, support, integration, and analytics to improve user experience and satisfaction.
Salesforce Service Cloud should focus on simplification.
Configuring Flows in Salesforce Service Cloud is very difficult.
The pricing of Salesforce Service Cloud is expensive compared to other solutions like our current SAP CRM, which is much cheaper.
It makes no sense in my opinion, and they should offer the team at the front to help customize the product to fit each company's needs, as every company has different demands and forms of submitting a request that need adjustment over time.
There is a need for bug or error tracking in ServiceNow.
Their customer support could make it a great solution, not just product support but also their relationship with partners and training initiatives in different regions.
 

Setup Cost

Salesforce Service Cloud is seen as costly but negotiable, with user-based pricing offering potential ROI through strategic use.
ServiceNow is costly with complex licensing, requiring negotiation and flexibility, especially burdensome for small and regional businesses.
The approximate licensing costs for Salesforce Service Cloud are around three hundred dollars a year per user.
Salesforce Service Cloud is expensive.
ServiceNow's pricing can be justified if more functionality is required.
ServiceNow does come with a price.
ServiceNow is expensive for all regions.
 

Valuable Features

Salesforce Service Cloud is praised for customization, integration, automation, user-friendliness, scalability, and features enhancing productivity and visibility.
ServiceNow offers flexible customization, fast development, and strong integration, enhancing efficiency across IT, HR, and finance with robust reporting.
Salesforce Service Cloud improved our organization with its mobile capabilities.
Salesforce Service Cloud offers pre-built packages that are best in class.
Usability is one of the strongest characteristics of Salesforce Service Cloud.
ServiceNow provides a wide range of functionality, covering all the necessary modules, unlike Jira which is primarily for IT.
Automation capabilities are impressive, bolstered by a vast repository of out-of-the-box connectors and plugins that facilitate integration with various applications worldwide.
The features of ServiceNow that I find most valuable include its ability to easily access ticket details if you know the ticket number, monitor the timeline of when the ticket was created, and see the current status.
 

Categories and Ranking

Salesforce Service Cloud
Ranking in Help Desk Software
4th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
55
Ranking in other categories
CRM Customer Engagement Centers (2nd), Knowledge Management Software (3rd), IT Alerting and Incident Management (6th)
ServiceNow
Ranking in Help Desk Software
1st
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
223
Ranking in other categories
IT Asset Management (1st), IT Service Management (ITSM) (1st), Rapid Application Development Software (2nd), No-Code Development Platforms (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Help Desk Software category, the mindshare of Salesforce Service Cloud is 2.4%, up from 1.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of ServiceNow is 21.2%, down from 26.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Help Desk Software
 

Featured Reviews

MARIA PILAR CANDA - PeerSpot reviewer
Improved customer service and post-sales support saves time
The solution could be more affordable as it's quite expensive for some organizations, particularly middle-sized companies. Additionally, finding technical talent for improving the solution is challenging. Configuring Flows in Salesforce Service Cloud is very difficult. There are very few technical people in the market capable of implementing all the flows that clients need at this moment. It's primarily a matter of talent limitation, and flow is the technical mechanism of Salesforce Service Cloud for process automation. In general, while they have the knowledge and help solve problems, finding the right person to address specific issues is very challenging.
Nikhil Gohil - PeerSpot reviewer
Enables effective incident management and seamless workflow automation with valuable mobile accessibility
I haven't thought deeply about improvements for ServiceNow or what might be missing right now. There are so many modules and features in ServiceNow that I haven't explored them all, so it's hard to say what might be missing or should be improved. I suggest making the cost more affordable for smaller companies.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Performing Arts
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
Computer Software Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Government
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Salesforce Service Cloud?
The approximate licensing costs for Salesforce Service Cloud are around three hundred dollars a year per user.
What needs improvement with Salesforce Service Cloud?
The solution could be more affordable as it's quite expensive for some organizations, particularly middle-sized companies. Additionally, finding technical talent for improving the solution is chall...
What is your primary use case for Salesforce Service Cloud?
We have many clients with Salesforce Service Cloud and numerous use cases. The main use is in the sales area rather than the marketing area. We utilize it for customer service and customer post-sal...
Which solution is better for developing non-ITSM applications: OutSystems or Service Now?
The short answer is that OutSystems is far better for 2 main reasons. Firstly, with Service Now you are locked into that platform for good. The business model is to lock in and then keep pumping th...
Would you choose ServiceNow over Microsoft PowerApps?
Hi Netanya, I will choose ServiceNow because ServiceNow is a very good tool compared to Microsoft PowerApp. Because ServiceNow has a very strong module (Performance Analysis) reporting which will ...
What do you like most about ServiceNow?
The solution has a user-friendly interface.
 

Also Known As

Service Cloud
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Stanley Black & Decker, Coca-Cola, Activision, Wells Fargo, Spotify, Aldo, Philips, The Red Cross, Blue Shield of California, Sprouts Farmers Market, Direct Energy Solar, Inspirato, Kiva
AAA, AstraZeneca, Becton, Dickinson and Company, Broadcom, Christus Health, Epicor, Equinix, GE Capital, Intuit, KPMG, Loyola Marymount University, OshKosh, Quantas, RedHat, Royal Bank of Scotland, Swiss Re, U.S. Department of Energy, Safeway, Yale University, and Zillow    
Find out what your peers are saying about Salesforce Service Cloud vs. ServiceNow and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
865,164 professionals have used our research since 2012.