Oracle CX and Salesforce Sales Cloud are some of the most powerful CRM solutions in the market. But which is better for your business? The Salesforce vs. Oracle debate can get as heated and divisive as deciding whether cereal or milk should come first, but we’re here to clear the air with our data-based comparison.

Compare Salesforce CRM and Oracle CX Against Your Needs

While both are considered industry titans and top-notch CRM options, Salesforce has the upper hand. Its out-of-the-box support for several modules and flexible data source connectivity are a few reasons it came out on top in our analysis. Read on for a feature-by-feature breakdown.

Use the links below to jump to the features we evaluated in this Salesforce vs. Oracle comparison:

• Product Overviews
• Head-To-Head Comparison
  • Accounts and Contacts Management
  • Customer Communication Management
  • Dashboard and Reports
  • Document Management
  • Leads Management
  • Opportunities/Deals Management
  • Product Management
  • Quotes, Orders and Contracts Management
  • Sales Performance Management
  • Workflows and Process Automation
• Other Factors
  • Team Collaboration
  • Customizations
  • Integration and Extensibility
  • Mobile Support
  • Training
• Next Steps

Product Overviews

Salesforce Sales Cloud

Salesforce is one of the top brand names for sales-based CRM. The platform ranked as the number one CRM provider for the 10th consecutive year in 2023. There are plenty of reasons beyond its wide-ranging popularity to employ Salesforce for customer relationship management. It offers SaaS deployment that allows users to access the system anytime, anywhere.

As one of Salesforce’s core products, Sales Cloud delivers a 360-degree view of customer information and interactions for optimized engagement. Its notable functionalities include lead management, opportunity management, team collaboration, and dashboard and reporting modules.

Salesforce also has a host of product-specific integrations and extensions, like Service Cloud and Marketing Cloud. This makes it easier to expand your business software usage into other interoperable platforms.

That being said, it’s not all roses in the world of Salesforce. According to our survey of CRM buyers, four percent of the 500 companies interviewed were downsizing their CRM – most of them from Salesforce to something less over-featured and over-priced. We compared many alternatives to Salesforce to help those users move on to a new solution.

Oracle CX Sales Cloud

Oracle markets its Experience Cloud of sales and marketing solutions (Oracle CX Sales Cloud) as an all-in-one platform that combines social media, call center, mobile and in-store contact points. It focuses on customer satisfaction and social relationship management, helping you improve client communication through various channels.

Oracle CX Cloud Suite enables leading organizations to deliver great customer experiences throughout the customer’s journey, from the prospecting stage to post-purchase and beyond. It lets you effectively engage with clients across physical and digital channels, dramatically improving customer retention, up-selling and brand advocacy. Beyond generic CRM capabilities, the solution helps users streamline and sustain customer relationships.

With a slightly lower price tag than Salesforce, Oracle could be a perfect fit for your business (and your budget!) but it is less comprehensive than the industry giant.

For more CRM comparisons, check out the in-depth reports in our CRM resource repository.

Below, we get into how Oracle vs. Salesforce match up when we compare their key features. You can check also out our free Jumpstart Platform to compare and score products against your requirements list for a more detailed analysis.

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Head-To-Head Comparison

Let’s compare Salesforce CRM and Oracle Sales Cloud head-to-head.

Accounts and Contacts Management

Salesforce Sales Cloud offers a comprehensive view of clients, including key contacts, activity history and internal account discussions. Users can link related accounts to a parent account, create territories and assign salespeople to them.

With Oracle CX, salespeople can create accounts through web services and file-based import. The platform excels at contact and territory management and lets you review contacts in table and hierarchy views.

Oracle CX outperforms Salesforce in AI-based sales recommendations. It helps sales reps go after opportunities with the highest win probabilities and provides the next-best actions. The platform is also better at contact mapping, contact recommendation, and email verification and suggestions. Neither solution supports group appointment scheduling.

Winner: Our analysts rated Oracle as the winner due to its superior contact management capabilities.

Customer Communication Management

Salesforce Sales Cloud provides call reminders, scheduling and tagging features. It integrates with popular email clients and offers email templates and mass email capabilities. The Lightning Dialer add-on supports automated voicemails with a built-in dialer and call monitoring features.

While it doesn’t offer automated voicemails and a built-in caller, Oracle CX integrates with third-party apps to deliver call recording, logging and SMS scheduling functionalities. The solution doesn’t have AI to analyze emails and also lacks call tagging and reminders. Both platforms need integrations or additional features to manage SMS communication.

You can get a comprehensive study of this module and other features using our Jumpstart Platform.

Winner: With robust and flexible communication modules, Salesforce earned a higher rating.

Dashboards and Reports

Standard activity reports in Salesforce Sales Cloud provide a rundown of tasks and appointments according to the selected date range and activity status. Detailed reports on opportunities, leads, campaigns, products and assets help analyze critical sales and performance metrics.

It lets teams perform drill-down actions at multiple sales stages and deals. Users can customize reports and build dashboards through the drag-and-drop interface.

Oracle CX offers pre-built reports to measure activity metrics. Integration with Oracle BI allows sales reps to create interactive dashboards. Like its counterpart, it also provides drag-and-drop functionality to build customizable reports and dashboards. You can generate role-based reports for sales managers and executives.

Salesforce Sales Cloud earned a perfect rating of 100 for 14 out of 15 features in this module, including call analytics, charts and visualizations, user homepage, and dashboard and report sharing. Oracle CX, on the other hand, doesn’t fully support functionalities like API usage dashboards, charts and email reports.

Winner: With built-in customizations and high-ranking reporting features, Salesforce takes the cake in this round.

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Document Management

With Einstein Search, Salesforce users can enter common words to access relevant information. You can create, upload and manage document records and file types. A version history list lets you see current and past versions of all uploaded files. You can also convert Microsoft PowerPoint and Word files into web-based versions for online viewing.

Oracle CX and Salesforce Sales Cloud rank similarly for most of this module’s capabilities, according to our Jumpstart Platform data. Oracle provides advanced global search and work area search capabilities. Integration with Oracle Documents Cloud Service enables users to access content from any location with role-based access. You can share files and attachments using links. However, the solution doesn’t support document conversion.

Winner: Salesforce wins thanks to its document repository and conversion capabilities.

Lead Management

Oracle CX has AI functionalities that offer salespeople recommendations about which leads to tackle first and next-best actions. It automatically assigns sales reps leads based on geography, lead score and department. Oracle provides card scanner capabilities and lets you capture lead information from website visits and social media interactions.

Salesforce Sales Cloud enables users to automatically route leads to relevant sales reps. The platform is better at lead scoring and lets you choose factors like demographics, industry and company size to score incoming leads.

While Salesforce is good at capturing leads from various sources, it’s inadequate at capturing prospects from LinkedIn. Oracle, on the other hand, integrates with LinkedIn Sales Navigator and allows you to identify and communicate with leads on LinkedIn.

Winner: Oracle ranks better due to its lead capture and AI capabilities.

Opportunity Management

SSalesforce Sales Cloud lets teams create new opportunities and track sales stages, CRM leads and other associated activities. It provides real-time updates to monitor open opportunities that need action. Users can view opportunities using a Kanban board that displays a visual record summary.

With Oracle CX, users can create and sort opportunities. It’s better at AI in opportunity management, provides sales reps with next-best actions and determines how often to reach out to clients post-sales. You can create task templates, action items and fields for every sales stage.

However, Oracle lacks journey designer features and doesn’t support sales pipelines as well as Salesforce does.

Winner: Once again, our analysts have rated Salesforce higher than Oracle here.

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Product Management

Salesforce Sales Cloud offers a base catalog of all goods and services. Users can customize products and add prices and discounts to opportunities. Set up product families and organize products with associated price lists with a price book.

In Oracle CX, you can create product catalogs and list products along with their descriptions. You can also create, edit, import and make a product group hierarchy.

The platform needs additional modules to customize products and portals, hinting it’s not as tailored as Salesforce. You need to integrate with Oracle Commerce to make customized stores and design storefront pages.

Winner: In the Oracle vs. Salesforce debate, the latter wins this round due to its customizability.

Quotes, Orders and Contracts Management

Salesforce consistently outperforms Oracle in this module as well with its robust automatic order creation and contract management capabilities. You can create and associate contracts with sales orders and track order modifications in the Order history list. The system helps you generate quotes from opportunities and lets you determine a product delivery schedule based on payments.

Oracle CX needs additional features for 8 out of the 9 functionalities listed in this module, according to our Jumpstart Platform. It lacks contract creation and many order management capabilities, which means it’s not the best choice for companies with a large number of orders.

However, the solution has dynamic contract management capabilities and allows you to manage sales, procurement and various contracts. You can attach scanned contract copies and view updates to sections, clauses and contract documents in the contract amendment summary.

Winner: Salesforce wins by a large margin with its order creation, contract management and quote generation features.

Sales Performance Management

Salesforce Sales Cloud lets you define, track and measure work. It allows you to set up sales target quotes and add them to individual user records. You can set up sales campaigns such as advertising, telemarketing, emails, conferences and others. The solution forecasts sales revenue and provides real-time dashboards that track sales rep performance.

Oracle CX Sales offers AI-based sales insights and compensation dashboards that let managers incentivize top performers with rewards and encourage healthy competition. The platform helps define sales goals and measure individual and team performance based on sales objectives. You can also view current, past and future sales forecasts to make informed decisions.

Winner: While the race was close, Oracle ended up edging ahead of Salesforce in this round.

Workflows and Process Automation

Salesforce allows users to automate standard internal processes and set validation rules to prevent inaccurate data from entering the system. With add-ons like Process Builder and Flow Builder, users can set up automated approval procedures. You can also automate sales processes and create workflow rules to follow up before contracts expire.

You can configure approval rules in Oracle CX. The rules control how workflows are assigned and completed based on specific conditions. Use predefined workflow templates and configure actions such as tasks, email notifications and outbound messages using object workflows.

Winner: Salesforce again claims the win, thanks to its out-of-the-box workflow functionalities.

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Other Factors

Team Collaboration

Salesforce facilitates internal collaboration through private and group chats. Chatter helps mention groups and people in posts and comments. It also lets users share files and post content with options to like and comment. Salesforce Classic users can use the tag feature to add personal or public tags.

Oracle CX provides a social dashboard that facilitates communication with teammates, peers and managers via private or collaborative group messages. It helps share files, comment and post announcements with real-time notifications. It also lets users @mention other members in notes and timelines.

Winner: Our analysts rated Oracle as the winner in this category for its GeoTagging support. Salesforce provides this feature only with third-party integrations.

Customizations

With Salesforce, you can create and customize apps for specific departments and teams. You can customize reports, dashboards, templates and mobile features. It also supports custom fields, filters and layouts.

With Oracle Enterprise Performance Reporting Cloud, users can create custom apps. Like its counterpart, it also lets you customize layouts, views, fields and the navigation panel.

Winner: In this Salesforce vs. Oracle duel, Salesforce wins with its out-of-the-box capabilities.

Integration and Extensibility

Salesforce’s Data Import Wizard enables data imports for accounts, contacts, leads, campaign members and more in CSV formats. The Lightning Platform provides data APIs that allow you to build custom development tools. It offers integrations with QuickBooks, Power BI, Oracle BI, TalkDesk, PandaDoc, Mailchimp, G-Suite, Office 365 and more.

Oracle CX Sales offers RESTful APIs that help integrate with external systems. You can import data directly from a file or an application. It integrates with tools like RingCentral, Oracle Business Intelligence Cloud Service, Mailchimp, Slack, G Suite, DocuSign, Office 365 and more.

Winner: Due to more out-of-the-box native integrations, Salesforce wins over Oracle in this round.

Mobile Support

Salesforce offers apps for iOS and Android devices. You can manage leads, coordinate with teams, create tasks and update information on the go. The mobile app provides offline access and automatically syncs pending changes to the system. Salesforce Lightning offers a responsive web-based platform that’s consistent across many devices.

Oracle CX Sales Mobile provides sales reps with real-time access to accounts, contacts, leads, opportunities, calendars and customer interactions. The mobile app is available for both iOS and Android devices. You have the option to choose between automatic and manual offline data synchronization. Oracle also offers a responsive platform that ensures the best display of analytics, whether on a laptop, tablet or phone.

Zoho CRM’s Mobile app. Source

Winner: In this Oracle CRM vs. Salesforce comparison, both tie and rank 100 for all mobile support features on our Jumpstart Platform.

Training

Salesforce Sales Cloud offers tests, certificates and credentials. It also provides free online training and training material for API basics, advanced customer journeys, advanced territory management and more. Users can get started with the product using in-product help and suggestions.

Oracle CX provides comprehensive training materials, certifications, in-product suggestions and how-to videos. However, it doesn’t offer free live training.

Winner: Salesforce takes the cake due to its detailed training resources.

Next Steps

Despite Salesforce’s victory in our side-by-side comparison, no single CRM solution is a perfect fit for every business. Many small and mid-sized businesses may find that Salesforce is too sprawling and expensive for their needs, and others may not like Oracle’s interface.

Keep an open mind and focus on matching your needs to the CRM solution that best meets them rather than relying on brand names or market clout.

To ensure you find the perfect CRM for your business, check out this requirements template to start off on the right foot in your search. Once you’ve identified your needs, you can compare industry leaders with this comprehensive CRM comparison. Then, you can narrow your shortlist based on this CRM pricing guide and get a feel for the system by requesting a free trial or demo. Good luck with your software search!

Do you have any further questions about Oracle vs. Salesforce? Which platform do you prefer, and what aspects of the solution appeal to you? Let us know in the comments!

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