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

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

Analyst Recommendations

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

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

Consensus Cloud Solutions presently has a consensus target price of $41.67, suggesting a potential upside of 16.10%. Salesforce has a consensus target price of $278.40, suggesting a potential upside of 14.67%. Given Consensus Cloud Solutions’ stronger consensus rating and higher possible upside, equities analysts clearly believe Consensus Cloud Solutions is more favorable than Salesforce.

Insider and Institutional Ownership

93.9% of Consensus Cloud Solutions shares are owned by institutional investors. Comparatively, 80.4% of Salesforce shares are owned by institutional investors. 3.6% of Consensus Cloud Solutions shares are owned by company insiders. Comparatively, 3.5% of Salesforce shares are owned by company insiders. Strong institutional ownership is an indication that endowments, large money managers and hedge funds believe a stock is poised for long-term growth.

Profitability

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

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

Risk and Volatility

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

Earnings & Valuation

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

	Gross Revenue	Price/Sales Ratio	Net Income	Earnings Per Share	Price/Earnings Ratio
Consensus Cloud Solutions	$349.70 million	1.88	$84.53 million	$4.94	7.27
Salesforce	$41.52 billion	4.81	$7.46 billion	$10.97	22.13

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.

Summary

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

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.

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.