Why choose Khoros vs. Salesforce?

“We looked at a number of other social platforms while we evaluated Khoros, and we felt the service levels, user experience, platform stability, and cost were the best balance for our organization.”

— Head of Marketing Technology, Springer Nature

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When it comes to Salesforce alternatives,
Khoros is the clear winner

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What’s the difference between Khoros and Salesforce?

There’ll always be feature differences between two products, but the biggest difference between Khoros and Salesforce comes down to our DNA. Salesforce was built to facilitate customer transactions, and Khoros was built to help brands create meaningful relationships with their customers.

While Salesforce is the undisputed leader when it comes to CRM, digital customer engagement is all that we do — which is why we’re the best at it.   

Customers who switched to Khoros for digital care, social media marketing, or online communities gain best-in-class digital engagement solutions, while keeping interactions in sync with Salesforce CRM. That’s because our two industry-leading solutions easily integrate to give your customers the best experience possible and to empower your teams with the most customer insight possible.

Hear stories about brands who switched to Khoros

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Top reasons brands choose Khoros over Salesforce

Whether you’re looking for a digital customer service, social media management, or online community solution, there are overarching reasons brands choose Khoros

#1 Because they gain a strategic partner, not just a technology vendor

  • Our customers have on-demand access to expertise and support via the Khoros Strategic Services team, and we uniquely offer one-to-one product coaching complimentary for every customer to ensure your teams work as efficiently and effectively as possible.
  • Khoros customer success managers are incentivized on your satisfaction instead of how much you spend, so you have a partner focused on getting you the most from your investment no matter what you invest.
  • That’s why Khoros was the only vendor to score a 5 out of 5 for both services and support in the 2019 Forrester Wave: Social Suites, and why we ranked #1 out of 14 vendors for, “puts their clients’ interest first instead of their own” in the 2020 SoftwareReviews CX Index.

“Customer support is where Khoros most shines. Q&A sessions, coaching sessions, ticket support, etc. are all fantastic.”

— Digital Marketing (Social), Automobile Club of Southern California

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#2 Because they need a solution they can grow with, not just the basics

  • With other solutions, brands may often find they need to migrate when they outgrow the workflows, configurability, or scalability. Unlike other solutions, the Khoros platform is purpose-built to scale with you as your business grows and evolves.
  • Designed to handle large volumes of data and complex workflows, the platform is highly configurable to meet your needs. On top of this, we work with some of the world’s largest global brands and have dedicated support and services teams with the expertise needed to help solve your challenges in an ever-changing digital environment.

“The Khoros platform does things right and enables companies to provide a quality experience that follows industry best practices. With customization, the platform can be tweaked to support just about anything you might need which makes this a good starter platform as well as something that you can develop on for the long-term.”

— Community Manager, Shopify

Key differences by solution

Social media marketing

  • Fast implementation, quick time to value

    Our enablement team is tried and true and can get your instance up and running in a matter of weeks. We have years of expertise with proven best practices from hundreds of unique customers.

    Enterprise workflows and capabilities

    Khoros is purpose-built for enterprise customers, from workflow capabilities through to analytics. All of our innovation is focused on solving the needs of large, complex, and/or growing customers.

    Easy to use and configure

    We have an easier to use, more quickly configurable platform - which is why we ranked as the #1 solution who helps social marketers innovate versus being a roadblock to innovation (SoftwareReviews CX Index 2020).

    Single view of paid and organic performance

    Khoros offers free visibility, planning and reporting across paid and organic efforts so that our customers experience better results by aligning teams, goals, and content in a single platform.

    Social strategy expertise

    Unique to Khoros, our Strategic Services team are experts in both social strategy and the Khoros platform. From organic and paid content strategy, brand love, reporting, trend tracking, moderation, to crisis and community management, this team can be full service or a special ops extension of your in-house crew.

     

    “Khoros provides a simple yet in-depth solution to manage and engage with followers, as well as share and moderate content.”

    — Social Manager, AMD

    Learn more about Khoros Marketing

  • Category creators and leaders

    We pioneered asynchronous messaging workflows and operational management in digital care. We hold 6 patents in digital customer service and are uniquely considered by Forrester to be a Digital-First Customer Service solution — a designation most Khoros alternatives did not receive.

    Broad coverage of channels that matter

    While other platforms only offer select mainstream social channels, we enable engagement across all the channels that matter. Your customers can engage with you across the primary social and modern, asynchronous web chat — all in the same agent interface.

    Easiest user interface

    Our agent UI is focused on all the features you need (and nothing you don’t), so you can have shorter onboarding and happier team members who are able to realize the full value of the solutions sooner. All channels — across social, messaging, and chat — are accessed from the same agent interface.

    Connection to community

    Only Khoros customers are able to combine best-in-class social care and Modern Chat with the industry’s leading community platform to manage all interactions from a single, easy-to-use agent interface.

    "Having a secure, branded messaging strategy is very important for Sprint. Adding messaging to our platform in order to bring customers’ personal data into support conversations makes the customer feel more secure, and it makes our legal team feel more secure as well.”

    — Senior Social Media Strategist, Sprint

    “[Khoros] uniquely couples social engagement with community content. Users can measure agent performance to align with traditional contact center metrics, which is a convenient feature.”

    — Forrester Digital-First Customer Service New Wave

    Learn more about Khoros Care

  • The most expertise

    Khoros has been a leader in brand communities for 20 years with a robust platform to build unique experiences and create powerful, engaged networks that answer questions, build knowledge, and share ideas.

    Advanced rank and reputation engine to encourage participation

    Rankings and badges are easy to provide, but not very effective on their own. Khoros gamification is sophisticated enough to encourage specific types of engagement, reward valuable contributors, and encourage actions that drive business outcomes.

    Unmatched benchmarks, analytics, and support

    Benchmarks from hundreds of successful enterprise communities, guidance from free product coaching and a variety of experts, and connection to over 70,000 digital professionals in our Atlas community help our customers stay at the cutting edge of their industries.

    Connection to Care

    Our unique connection to our Khoros Care solution unlocks enhanced moderation and analysis tools like moderation queues, shared inbox, dashboards, real-time analytics, and a unified support queue for social and community in one place.

    “They are a leader in this space. No other platform can come close to the ability to securely scale and power massive communities/page views. If you are running a consumer-grade or enterprise-grade community with millions of views a month — you need to be sure you have a platform that will deliver.”

    — Business Owner Community & Knowledge, Cloudera

    "There isn't even another competitor that can come close to Khoros for an enterprise-grade external community. Salesforce talks a good game but you would need to hire developers to get the base level capability Khoros has taken over a decade to perfect."

    — Community Specialist, Manufacturing brand

    Learn more about Khoros Communities

Khoros is the solution most preferred by customers

“We wanted a Community platform with consistent enterprise-level abilities as well as a history that showcased staying power and could support a long-term partnership. That’s why we chose Khoros."

— Director of Communities, Qlik

“For the past decade, TELUS’s top priority has been putting customers first. With Khoros, we can meet our goals every day.”

— Senior Strategy Manager, TELUS

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