Salesforce or Jira? — A Service Desk Showdown

Posted by
Maxim Orlovsky

April 16, 2020

With the majority of businesses working from home due to the COVID-19 pandemic, having a reliable asset, employee, and customer management system was never such a necessity as it is right now. If you are one of those business owners that are in search of such a tool you probably have heard about Jira Service Desk and Salesforce Service Cloud.

If you can’t decide which one is for you, we have good news then as we will be covering the two today. As per tradition, we will cover the features, the differences, the pricing options, and other details. Thus, sit tight, grab a cup of coffee or tea cause we are about to get started!

Tool Overview

As usual, we will start our analysis of Salesforce vs Jira at a general overview of both tools. This will allow us to avoid any confusion in the future, as well as it will give you a good idea of what they are all about and what kind of developments you can expect in the future.

Jira Service Desk

Jira is no stranger to the world of service desks. It has been on the market since 2013 and over the years, evolved into a robust project management/issue tracking tool that is praised by many well-known companies. The core benefits the system brings to the table is that it can easily be integrated with other Atlassian products. Moreover, the tool can be further customized with the use of the included marketplace meaning you aren’t exactly confined to a set amount of functions.

Salesforce Service Cloud

Similarly to Jira Service Desk, Salesforce Service Cloud has also been on the market for quite some time. However, unlike Jira, Salesforce Service Cloud was designed as a customer relationship management tool. This is also reflected in the feature-set as most of them are tailored in a way that lets you deliver smart, fast, and personalized service. Just as its competitor, Service Cloud can also connect to other Salesforce products to increase the capability of the system.

Features

And now it is time we cover the features of each tool. As some of you might already know, we don’t cover every function as it takes way too much time but rather focus on the most important ones.

Jira Service Desk

Jira is no stranger to unique and powerful functions. In fact, it is one of the most densely packed systems on the market but for this review, we will stick to just three. Specifically speaking, the CSAT reporting tool, the Federated Knowledge Base system, and the Root Cause Analysis module. Let’s take a look at each separately.

Root Cause Analysis — One of the best features Jira has is the ability to pinpoint the core issue through granularity. Essentially, what you can do is link incidents to problems and work from there to identify what caused the issue in the first place. This will not only save you a lot of time but will make remote management much more effective.

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Federated Knowledge Base — As the name suggests, this function allows you and your staff to search for a private knowledge base using keywords. Nothing special at glance but here’s the thing. The system will pull data from specified sources, or even more specifically, from your historical data, from your requests, from public articles, among other things. This again, will save you a lot of time and will make remote work more streamlined.

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CSAT reporting — It is hard to gauge your performance when most of your staff is working from afar. However, CSAT reporting can make a difference as it will allow you to see how things are going and what kind of aspect of your business is in dire need of retooling. The system collects data from across your entire organization too, meaning you are not limited to just your customers.

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Salesforce Service Cloud

Just as we did with Jira Service Desk, we will point out just three features and talk about each separately. The features themselves are Agent Workspace, Telephony Integration, and Service Analytics respectively. Each has a lot to offer so without any further ado.

Agent Workspace — We mentioned this feature in our previous look at Salesforce Service Cloud but for those of you who are uninitiated, this system gives your agents a swiss-army knife of ready-to-use templates, keyboard shortcuts, macro stuff, among other things. Moreover, this feature also provides a deep overview of your customers from all angles.

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Telephony Integration — If you are working with telephony, then you will be pleased to learn that Salesforce supports every popular CTI system. Furthermore, this system doesn’t just support telephony but enhances it through instant log notes, dedicated management tools, and more. This will work wonders for agents that get a lot of calls as remembering everything is pretty much impossible.

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Service Analytics — And last but not least, we have service analytics. This is a powerful feature that will help you create smart managers, efficient agents, and more importantly, happier customers. With this system, you will know exactly what is wrong with your current service and what exactly needs to be done. The tool scans your entire organization and tries to pick-up all the data it can get to devise you a detailed report. Very impressive stuff.

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Technical Details

And now for tech details of our Salesforce vs Jira review. There’s not much we can discuss here but exclude it we cannot so here’s how the two tools look on a technical level.

Jira Service Desk

Salesforce Service Cloud

So as you can see, Jira Service Desk is the more technically refined system. It not only supports more languages but has three deployment methods. On the bright side, the device support is shared, just as the scalability rate. If unsure which one is for you, our next section might prove to be useful.

Pricing

And the last part of our review/analysis is pricing of Salesforce vs Jira. This is the most important factor in any tool and will play the most significant role in determining which of the two systems is the better choice. We will stick to our shtick and pick the recommended price plans as these are the most balanced. Here’s how the two compare:

Pricing Table

So as you can see, Salesforce is both more expensive and more expansive. The amount of features you get is not only big but the features themselves are of a superb tier. Yet, on the flip side, Jira Service Desk is significantly cheaper. You also get a ton of good things, including stuff such as SLA management and automation, among other things. We will let you be the judge on this one.

Bottom Line

We could continue forever comparing the systems. They are so well-made and so big that it would take us weeks to fully explore them. Yet, judging them on a surface level, it is clear that there is no winner. Each is well made and deserves the spotlight, thus instead of recommending you a single system, we advise that you give both a shot.

Indeed, each has a free demo and what better way to see if it fits, than to actually try and fit it. But if you already know what kind of tool you want to use and need help migrating your data to it, consider dropping us a message. We can help you with help desk migrations easily.