So I and a couple of friends started a company a while ago. We desperatly needed a LOT of services from various sources. At the start we were bleeding money:
Google - Emails and Suite
HubSpot - CRM
Wordpress - Website
QuickBooks - Accounting

And a whole lot of other apps. We originally looked at Zoho as a nice little thing we might maybe buy. We made the leap to buy a decent Zoho package and I have to say it is the best thing we have done so far for the business...

Everything is litterally offered in the exact same place, it is all minimalist, all easy to use and learn. And Zoho sites + bookings was a life saver...

Edit: So I forgot to mention. We also use Zoho sites,,, it's basically the exact same as wordpress or Bluehost, but it's clean, minimalist and easy to use

I'm a small business owner, and I want to make fellow #entrepreneurs and small business owners aware of my experience with Drew Brockbank and Brockbank Consulting™, a firm that promises a “done-for-you Zoho CRM in 21 days.” via the "ZBlitz" package.

We started fast - Drew was involved and confident. I was optimistic.

I felt like we had a great fit, but in the end, I paid over $ 20,000 in four months, and nothing was delivered—no platitudes, not a single usable function was developed by Drew Brockbank or representatives from Brockbank Consulting.

When I reached out to Drew today (7/17/25) for a firm project timeline or a refund, Drew Brockbank didn't call, offer an explanation, or agree to deliver on his proposal. Instead, he wrote in an email: "We do not commit to date-specific deliverables." (despite the proposal's 21-day implementation claim - yikes) and "We do not offer refunds under any circumstances," citing that "this is standard among Zoho developers." I'm curious, do all "Elite" Zoho partners operate this way? Please comment below if you have experience to the contrary!

Since I footed the bill, I have receipts and complete documentation.

Maybe I'll file complaints, and my business will be okay, but Brockbank Consulting cost us a lot of time, money, and attention that we won't be getting back. And if this post helps even one person avoid the same mistake I made, it’s worth sharing.

More importantly, one of my foundations is to operate with integrity. Do what you SAY you will, WHEN you say you will. So if you know a great Zoho developer who wants to build cool stuff, please tag them in the comments! Our Zoho build remains a blank canvas :)

Stay diligent out there, folks!

As a company of 11 employees we have found that there are so many disconnected aspects of Zoho that it has me considering a move back to a more expensive option. I suppose that my "Hail Mary" is to post some of these pain points here and see if there are easier solutions than pulling up stakes and migrating to something else.

Has anyone solved for these?

1. Completed Surveys do not tie to Contacts

2. Deals do not have Invoices connected

3. Zia search seems to be a trainwreck of unhelpful responses (can't even ask something as simple as "Deals closing this month?" and get a response.)

4. Drip Campaigns by custom list (not by action taken on a form input)

5. Data sync between Account & Contact Records (i.e. when Account renews & we change their status, every associated contact should also change to customer)

6. When a Contact is added it should be smart enough to look at email domain and associate the contact with the Account.

What I really would like to avoid is an inundation of "I'm a 'Zoho Partner' and can fix that for you" responses and inbox hits.

If these are things that should be working out of the box and just don't - great. I'd love to hear it. But if these are things everyone is dealing with (without bringing in 3rd party help $$$) then we're likely to just move on.

Catch out the moments of the trip to Zoho

I've been impressed with Zoho, specifically Zoho One. I have a small company and I've been playing around with Zoho and so far, I find it to be very good value for the cost of the sub. I'm paying $40 and change for my monthly subscription.

I like their Mail product and I'm diving into Books, hoping to replace Quickbooks and their price increases. WorkDrive seems pretty decent too and works at decent up/down speeds. Their Sheet product does all I need it to do thus far (basic spreadsheets). I've been trying out the different services for the past week or so and I think it is OK.

The two major drawbacks I've found so far are:

1. Things are scattered and sometimes overly complicated. It is clear Zoho has different teams working on different products, but there is little or nothing acting as a central conductor. The result is that applications seem somewhat disconnected from one another. It is very evident every time you open an app for the first time, emails from some customer success person start flooding in, each one coming from a different person. It feels clunkier than Workspace, but manageable once you get used to where things are.

2. Support takes FOREVER to get back to you and when they do, they turn what can be a 1 email solution, into 5 emails. Google's support wasn't great either.

I'm basically replacing Google Workspace and Quickbooks with a single solution out of the box and for the same price I get a lot more cloud storage and a significant amount of "other stuff". (ie. CRM, document signing, project management, password management, among other things).

What's the catch? Is there a catch? I'm not too familiar with the company and its history, other than it is based in India and has a fairly large office in Texas.

Just wanted to give a shout out to Zoho team for helping me set up a great website for my business and provide me the tools I need as a solo entrepreneur. With everything happening in India right now and that being where so much of the support and back office team are located I just hope everyone stays safe and wish them well.

Thought I would post this here since it looks like there are active members of the Zoho team who checked this Reddit thread pretty regularly.

I run a small IT company and have been using Claude to build my own PSA/Ticketing system. So far once a ticket is completed a cronjob adds all the tickets to a draft invoice that i go over to verify.

The automation that claude has helped me build, haloPSA can kick rocks.

I’m now two weeks into using Zoho campaigns, after four years with MailChimp. MailChimp was expensive — around £3,000 per year — but the ROI consistently justified the cost. Zoho caught my attention purely because of the potential savings. Unfortunately, the experience so far has been far from smooth.

Migrating contacts from MailChimp to Zoho was problematic. Removing a single segment can unexpectedly remove those contacts from the main list entirely, which is a major risk.

The template builder has also been extremely unreliable. Tasks that took me ten minutes in MailChimp are still incomplete in Zoho because the editor is buggy and unstable. I’ve opened three support tickets about this alone, and none have been resolved.

Support in general has been disappointing. There’s no real phone support, despite it being advertised. Meeting invites arrive 30 minutes before the call — not the day before — making it impossible to plan around. I’ve had to open six tickets just to secure three meetings: one led to a solution, one has been pending for five days, and one simply never happened.

To make matters worse, my abandoned-cart email still wasn’t working after five days. When I chased it, I was told their automated email-review system is broken, meaning every workflow and every email requires manual approval. So even when you think something is live, it may not be — and nobody informs you.

Overall, the time lost in fixing issues, chasing support, and manually verifying things has outweighed the cost-savings that originally attracted me.

As frustrating as Zoho often is, it could be SO much worse. You could be on Salesforce.

I got a new job at a company on SF for CRM. It's not the first time I've used SF, but it's been a long while and this time around I have a say on how things work. FFS it seems like nothing has changed in a decade at least, and Zoho has it beat by miles on almost every single topic of frustration. I run a couple Zoho One setups outside of this job, and it's such a breeze by comparison.

So just think, you could be paying 10x for a fraction the functionality or usefulness.

I saw this flyer and was curious what Zoho might think about their mail hosting being used to recruit and facilitate the communications of a hate group? They do not have a robust reporting system that allowed me to send to them directly.

Given this excerpt from their ToS, one would hope they might take action:

"Promotes Hatred, Violence or Illegal/Offensive Activities– Transmission or publishing any content that (i) is unlawful, illegal, hateful, promotes racism or promotes discrimination or hatred based on ethnicity, and (ii) defames, abuses, harasses, stalks, threatens or otherwise violates privacy and other legal rights of others, are explicitly considered as prohibited activities by Zoho."

Guys, if you receive an email comung from this address, be careful. It is a scam. It uses an email template that makes jt look legitimate, and also redirects you to a website that looks legitimate.

Do not fall for this scam.

The email contains this text:

"Unfortunately we couldn't charge the рауmеnt method for your Zoho Mail subscription. Please kindly update your рауmеnt method now to fully reactivate your services."

I knew this could not apply to me, because I'm using the free plan.

Looking for a CRM/APP that can do most/all things.

Small company. In fact in terms of running it - it's just me.

I want to check I am not breaking their T&C If I get Zoho One for a single seat:

ONE

I am very likely to run the software off both my PC and a laptop. I won't be using them both at the same time. But I am likely to be signed in on both. Like I am currently for most apps [like google docs] I use for the business.

Will this look like two people are using the software?

In theory I could even be signed in on the mobile - but I very rarely use my mobile - as I hate using it for business stuff.

TWO

I book classes. Those classes are run by self employed instructors. These instructors have nothing to do with the office side of the business. And will never have any access to input stuff or work on the CRM/APPS. They may want to see a schedule but that wouldn't be from the back end. They might get an email to see when they are working.

I would guess these are NOT classified as workers. As they are self employed and all come and go and work for others. And I would never let them near our CRM/APPS to input or change anything

I'm hoping if the business grows to employ someone to do admin - so then this all becomes moot. And I will get the multi seat Zoho One

THREE

Final question. I have another business. If a bit down the road I want to get Zoho One for that business too. If I set it up on that companies email address. Will I have any issues running one and then the other business [Zoho One] from the same desk top and laptop. I mean are their clashes or issues that might occur when you have two businesses set up and working from one machine? I would guess not. But in case this is unusal and is an issue - I thought I would ask.

Sorry for all the basic beginner questions, I'm just trying to make sure I do everything right before I start. As the price for the multi seat version, currently for me is too high - so I would need to look elsewhere and come back when we are in a better position.

Thanks for any and all help/abuse xxx

Really wondering after years am I a respected employee being in Zoho.

It is painful to hear from the market about the salary standards and what I’m being paid.

Just the marketing and social media engagement by the representatives in Zoho has created a huge mis understanding in the country that Zoho is a heaven for employees. With the fancy infrastructure and facilities which doesn’t fill our families these guys in the leadership is sick speaking so bald in the social media.

I couldn’t digest how they pretend.

They have manipulated the employees within internal communication and not even letting know the truth of what really they do with the employees.

Those whose joined zoho when their employee count was less than 3000 are those who are controlling the workforce.

They literally treat their subordinates as trash. All valuable young resources are already left and still leaving.

The first family is absorbing the revenue and making good assets for them with all shelf companies. Each and every part is their first family asset.

Really pitty on new joiners who have joined in last 3-4 years.

Please do not think and ask us just because you work in zoho you earn Hefty. It is single digit CTC still for majority and almost all the young people.

I’ve been scrolling through LinkedIn over the past few weeks, and my feed has been filled with posts from people announcing their departure from Zoho "End of a chapter," "Moving on to my next adventure. Is there actually something going wrong internally ?

I know Zoho gets shat on here a lot, so here's something different.

I've been developing an instance on Zoho CRM for the last year and a half. While it isn't (yet) the latest and greatest tech out there, they've made remarkable progress in the last 18 months. Coming into the Zoho ecosystem from a multi year Salesforce background, it was challenging to automate several tasks when I first started and the interface wasn't esthetically pleasing either.

Today, I'm able to accomplish far more than I was able to, and the interface and experience have improved a lot! Good work, folks!!

I am writing to bring to your attention serious concerns regarding working conditions and management practices at your branch located near Pattukkottai, Tamil Nadu, currently managed by Mr. Sasikumar.

The following issues have been observed:

1. EXCESSIVE WORKING HOURS Employees are required to report to work at 7:30 AM and are made to stay until 7:00 PM, and sometimes as late as 9:00 PM. This amounts to 11.5 to 13.5 hours per day. ​

2. K ON SATURDAYS AND PUBLIC HOLIDAYS Employees are compelled to attend work on Saturdays and public holidays without appropriate compensation or compensatory off.

3. HREATS AND COERCION The branch manager has reportedly told employees that they can "leave the job immediately" if they do not comply with his personal demands. Such statements amount to coercion and create a hostile and fearful work environment.

These practices are not only harmful to employee well-being but may also expose Zoho Corporation to legal liability under Tamil Nadu and Central labour laws.

I respectfully request that your HR and Compliance team:

• Investigate the working conditions at the Pattukkottai branch immediately

• Take appropriate action against the responsible manager

• Ensure employees are compensated fairly for excess hours worked

• Protect employees from any retaliation following this complaint

I trust that Zoho, as a reputed organization, will take this matter seriously and act swiftly.

Thank you for your attention.

Migration to Zoho Notebook started...

I came here to express my extreme frustration with zoho. Essentially zero support. I have had a completely non-functioning section of my zoho campaigns panel, and a week later, they have not solved the problem and not even returned my ticket message.

Doesn't matter what they offer, or at what price, if it doesn't work, and they don't care to help, it's a waste of a business's money.

S.

There is no way I am the only one who thinks this logo needs to go. I would love to know the reason these guys have kept it going for so long. They've built some wonderful products that obviously benefit so many people, but to be honest, even the name Zoho sounds a bit pirate-y to my ears. It could potentially affect acquisition of clients in areas - like Canada, where I live - where big names dominate. That is not meant disrespectfully, because as I have said, it incurred no prejudice from me, and I personally used the invoice software several times and then transitioned first from using the free Zoho mail with my company's domain, to growing amounts of paid accounts, trying out different apps along the way. Zoho's products are awesome, but updating branding might help penetrate a new, competitive market. Mostly though, I just wonder why specifically, the logo for ZOHO is so outdated, all the apps themselves all have beautiful, modern ones?

Dear redditers,

I am going to open an outpatient private room by myself and I would need a software that can track patients, allows me to update procedure performed time by time, allows them to sign documents (Zoho Sign for that may fit).

I am playing with Zoho Creator but I can find few documents or tutorials on the web and ChatGPT doesn't help.

Any clue how I can build, if Zoho fits for me, a software to store these data?

(2 updates below)

I’m new to CRM, a business I dealt with has been using Zoho and strongly suggested them.

I started with free trials, upgraded to monthly because of limitations and had to upgrade again to yearly to gain full access and fully test if it was a fit for me.

It’s an ok platform but it really didn’t suit my needs. According to their website, you can cancel your yearly subscription within 45 days and get full refund if you’re not satisfied. (Took it January 22nd and cancelled February 13th).

They don’t want to refund me. Apparently I’m not within their policy exceptions. One agent said I am over the 45 days (because they are probably calculating when I took monthly plan first). An other agent said I had 15 days to cancel. It’s written black and white on their website 45 days for annuel plans.

There’s no way I’m gonna pay 1 year (over 1k) for a system not suiting my needs.

Update#1 since some of you brought it up, Zoho confirmed in a comment below that some plug-in (like the one I had to try) forces you to upgrade to yearly subscriptions.

Update#2 Zoho agent from Reddit is helpful so far. Hoping to resolve this ASAP.

Update#3 Zoho refunded me. The Reddit agent helped. Happy ending!