Zendesk offers a better out-of-the-box product with a modern design, a simple dashboard, and clean interfaces, making it quick to onboard and easy to roll out. Salesforce can be more complicated and may require more involvement from dev teams, but it features a wider range of business cloud products for scaling enterprises with complex needs. Zendesk is a customer service-first platform that can function as a CRM, while Salesforce was first a CRM that also has a service product. Salesforce has more dynamic use cases for scaling enterprises, but Zendesk isn't far behind. Zendesk's reporting module skews more toward issue-related metrics, while Salesforce's reporting options are broader. Both platforms have automation tools, but Salesforce's are more sophisticated and require higher pricing tiers to access. Salesforce has a bigger app marketplace, but both integrate with Zapier. Zendesk is the better overall value for its price, offering many features like custom roles, advanced knowledge management, sandbox capabilities, custom integrations, advanced support, and Advanced AI access at a lower monthly cost than Salesforce.