Clareti often gets asked to explain what Zoho One is and whether it makes sense for a client to adopt it. We will try to explain as succinctly as possible how Zoho One fits into the overall Zoho application suite.

Until a few years ago when you wanted to try out Zoho you had to take out a trial of an individual application and then once subscribed you added another subscription and so on until had multiple subscriptions. There was no loyalty to the overall breadth of applications that Zoho offered as you could pick and choose and pay for each separately.

In 2017 Zoho had the idea to offer a subscription that covered ALL their applications at a fixed price of around £1/day/employee. Many thought them crazy for doing this as it was around the same price as a Zoho CRM subscription. Zoho’s motivation was to encourage adoption of many of their applications within an organisation, allowing easy integration between them and encouraging clients to try new (included) Zoho applications in place of (paid for) third party ones. This strategy (in the true sense of the word) worked and today Clareti generally recommends that clients use this approach except when they are larger organisations (more on this later).

On the face of it then it would seem to be a ‘no-brainer’ to use Zoho One instead of CRM or Desk or Projects as standalone applications. The key difference however is that in order to get the cost advantage the Zoho One offers a client must subscribe for every EMPLOYEE rather than just  purchase user licences in the traditional way.

Now for organisations where most staff need a licence to one or (often) many of the Zoho applications it makes absolute sense to take the Zoho One approach but for larger organisations where maybe only 10% of staff need a subscription to CRM or Desk for instance it doesn’t make financial sense to subscribe to Zoho One. Zoho appreciate this and continue to offer both in the marketplace as well as other suite apps such as CRM Plus which is a traditional subscription model. 'They also offer Zoho One to large enterprises but at an increased price if large numbers of people require access to a wide range of Zoho Applications.'

So is Zoho One an amazing offer for mid-sized and smaller companies?

Of course it is and Clareti can help with the adoption of the most important applications once we’ve discussed an implementation with you. Just a word of advice, do not try to do all the applications at once and there is generally a natural order in which they should be deployed dependent on the type of organisation you are.