Contrasting Salesforce (NYSE:CRM) and Consensus Cloud Solutions (NASDAQ:CCSI)

Salesforce (NYSE:CRM) and Consensus Cloud Solutions (NASDAQ:CCSI) are both technology companies, but which is the better investment? We will contrast the two businesses based on the strength of their analyst recommendations, earnings, risk, dividends, profitability, institutional ownership and valuation.

Profitability

This table compares Salesforce and Consensus Cloud Solutions’ net margins, return on equity and return on assets.

	Net Margins	Return on Equity	Return on Assets
Salesforce	21.99%	24.90%	11.27%
Consensus Cloud Solutions	26.69%	502.63%	13.83%

Institutional & Insider Ownership

80.4% of Salesforce shares are held by institutional investors. Comparatively, 93.9% of Consensus Cloud Solutions shares are held by institutional investors. 3.5% of Salesforce shares are held by insiders. Comparatively, 3.6% of Consensus Cloud Solutions shares are held by insiders. Strong institutional ownership is an indication that hedge funds, large money managers and endowments believe a company will outperform the market over the long term.

Valuation & Earnings

This table compares Salesforce and Consensus Cloud Solutions”s gross revenue, earnings per share (EPS) and valuation.

	Gross Revenue	Price/Sales Ratio	Net Income	Earnings Per Share	Price/Earnings Ratio
Salesforce	$41.52 billion	4.93	$7.46 billion	$10.97	22.68
Consensus Cloud Solutions	$354.67 million	1.94	$84.53 million	$4.94	7.59

Salesforce has higher revenue and earnings than Consensus Cloud Solutions. Consensus Cloud Solutions is trading at a lower price-to-earnings ratio than Salesforce, indicating that it is currently the more affordable of the two stocks.

Analyst Ratings

This is a summary of recent ratings and recommmendations for Salesforce and Consensus Cloud Solutions, as reported by MarketBeat.

	Sell Ratings	Hold Ratings	Buy Ratings	Strong Buy Ratings	Rating Score
Salesforce	3	13	32	3	2.69
Consensus Cloud Solutions	0	1	3	0	2.75

Salesforce currently has a consensus price target of $278.98, suggesting a potential upside of 12.13%. Consensus Cloud Solutions has a consensus price target of $41.67, suggesting a potential upside of 11.20%. Given Salesforce’s higher possible upside, analysts plainly believe Salesforce is more favorable than Consensus Cloud Solutions.

Volatility & Risk

Salesforce has a beta of 1.26, meaning that its share price is 26% more volatile than the S&P 500. Comparatively, Consensus Cloud Solutions has a beta of 1.58, meaning that its share price is 58% more volatile than the S&P 500.

Summary

Salesforce beats Consensus Cloud Solutions on 8 of the 15 factors compared between the two stocks.

About Salesforce

Salesforce, Inc. provides Customer Relationship Management (CRM) technology that brings companies and customers together worldwide. The company's service includes sales to store data, monitor leads and progress, forecast opportunities, gain insights through analytics and artificial intelligence, and deliver quotes, contracts, and invoices; and service that enables companies to deliver trusted and highly personalized customer support at scale. In addition, its platform offering comprise a flexible platform that enables companies of various sizes, locations, and industries to build business workflow and apps with customer; online learning platform that allows anyone to learn in-demand Salesforce skills; and Slack, an intelligent productivity platform. The company's marketing services enables companies to plan, personalize, automate, and optimize customer marketing journey, connecting interaction, and connected products; and commerce services, which empowers shopping experience across various customer touchpoint, such as mobile, web, social, and stores and provides click-to-code tools that offers customers to build and deploy solutions. Further, its analytics offering includes Tableau, an end-to-end analytics solution for range of enterprise use cases and intelligent analytics with AI models, spot trends, predict outcomes, creates summaries, timely recommendations, and take action from any device; and integration service including MuleSoft, which provides building blocks to deliver end-to-end and connected experiences. Additionally, the company provides data cloud, a hyperscale data engine native to Salesforce; vertical services to meet the needs of customers in industries, such as financial services, healthcare and life sciences, manufacturing and automotive and government; and offers salesforce starter for small and medium-sized businesses. Salesforce, Inc. was incorporated in 1999 and is headquartered in San Francisco, California.

About Consensus Cloud Solutions

Consensus Cloud Solutions, Inc., together with its subsidiaries, provides information delivery services with a software-as-a-service platform worldwide. The company offers eFax Corporate, a digital cloud-fax technology; Unite, a single platform that allows the user to choose between various protocols to send and receive healthcare information and can integrate into an existing electronic health record system or stand-alone if no EHR is present. It also offers jsign, an electronic and digital signature solution; Conductor, an interface engine and interoperability platform that provides integration technology; Clarity that transforms unstructured documents into structured actionable data; and eFax, an online faxing solution, as well as other products under the MyFax, MetroFax, Sfax, and SRfax brands. In addition, the company provides ECFax, an Corporate eFax. It serves healthcare, government, financial services, law, and education sectors. Consensus Cloud Solutions, Inc. was incorporated in 2021 and is headquartered in Los Angeles, California.