Ultimate Salesforce Review 2024

No comments
Last Reviewed:

Hi there, and welcome to SelectHub’s ultimate Salesforce review.

We’re here to give you a detailed tour and our honest, unbiased opinions about Salesforce.

If you’re more of a binge watcher than a bookworm, good news! We’ve recorded a whole video series about it. Check out the first video of our Salesforce review below.

Part one of SelectHub’s video series on our Salesforce review. Also available: Salesforce pricing and Salesforce alternatives.

Since you’re already here, you know that Salesforce is the granddaddy of CRMs. Now you’re doing your homework and trying to figure out if you really need to drop a small fortune (or large fortune) on it and how it stacks up against the likes of Pipedrive, Zoho, SugarCRM and others.

This Salesforce review is here to guide you like a lighthouse in a foggy harbor. Let’s go!

Table of Contents

What Does Salesforce Do?

Salesforce needs no introduction but I’ll give it one anyway.

Synonymous with CRM software (to the point that its stock ticker symbol is “CRM”), Salesforce is the 800-pound gorilla in the customer relationship management space. Its software connects your teams with your partners, customers and prospects through products like Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud and more. They’ve also acquired additional tech over the years to round out their offering, including Tableau, Trailhead and, most recently, Slack.

Salesforce Customer 360

Salesforce says its products offer a 360 view of your customers with best-in-class apps for every phase of your customer’s journey, from lead to loyalty. Get the full scoop on their products page.

Using Salesforce, companies can track customer activity, manage sales and marketing pipeline, target their audiences, collaborate internally, market to customers and more.

Salesforce helps users to:

  • Track leads coming from campaigns, take action on insights, and score and route leads.
  • Access customer data like contacts and communication history.
  • View a detailed timeline of customer activity and track the deal stage.
  • Create and track quotes and orders.
  • Forecast sales and revenue based on key performance indicators.
  • Create workflows to automate business processes that involve manual tasks like creating custom proposals.

For the sake of this Salesforce review, we’ll focus on core CRM capabilities so we can compare apples to apples with other CRMs. We won’t cover topics like Salesforce Ventures, solutions around Sustainability or Learning or acquired brands like Tableau, Mulesoft and Slack, as those deserve their own dedicated deep dives and comparisons.

Get a Free Demo for Salesforce

Overview of Salesforce Reviews

Overall, Salesforce earns a Great user satisfaction rating, and 86% of users would recommend Salesforce. (User reviews data aggregated by SelectHub from 25,000+ reviews across five well-known software review sites.)

Based on data collected from those Salesforce reviews, we’ve curated the following pros & cons:

Pros Cons
User-friendly: The software is easy to use and doesn't require technical knowledge, making it easy to adapt. Many users also found its AI capabilities very intuitive. Cost: Most reviewers noted the pricing to be on the higher side, especially for small businesses.
Highly Customizable: The platform offers endless customization opportunities, and the level of personalization helps easily manage tasks. Clunky and Slow: The software is slow to load at times, takes time to install and is heavy on the network. Reviewers suggest not running it on mobile network connectivity to avoid poor speed.
Tracking: The software has robust features to track opportunities, leads, sales, clients, invoices, campaigns, contracts and more. Interface: The UI and interactiveness of the application is outdated and needs an upgrade. Many reviews mentioned that it’s difficult to navigate the system and requires a lot of training.
Accurate Data and Analytics: The system offers a catalog for data and analytics and categorizes tasks using performance metrics. Weak Automation: The marketing automation feature doesn't allow users to generate suggestions and implement organizational conversations, leading to difficult functionality.
Communication Tools: Automatic call recording and records of emails and calls improve customer communication. The software also streamlines communication through integrations with several apps. Too Many Features: The system offers several features that aren’t always useful. Many users found some additional features complex and unnecessary for their needs.

Summary

As an undeniable powerhouse in the CRM space, Salesforce’s tracking, AI capabilities and data analytics enable optimal performance. Salesforce reviews also say that the high level of customization, integrations and communication tools make it an asset for businesses of all sizes.

While the software is user-friendly according to some, reviews specifically say its interface is outdated and needs an upgrade. Weak automation and an overload of features can make it difficult to navigate, according to users. Other common complaints are that it’s priced on the higher side, takes time to load and requires a significant amount of training.

Get a Free Demo for Salesforce

In-depth Salesforce Review

Salesforce is certainly popular. But popularity doesn’t make a product the perfect fit for your company. Dig in to see whether Salesforce is the best CRM for your needs.

Who Is Salesforce Best Suited For?

“Any industry, any size, every advantage.” That’s what Salesforce claims on its Solutions page.

The proof is in the pudding: they provide a directory packed with pages and pages of case studies and recognizable logos for virtually every industry.

Salesforce Industry Solutions

Industries Salesforce features on its Industry Solutions page. No surprise they have dozens of examples of logos, big and small, from successful customers in practically every vertical.

Usually when a company says they’re great for all industries, you can roll your eyes. But Salesforce has the receipts to back it up. There are analogs for successful implementations in virtually every space.

So sure, Salesforce is popular — but the burning question remains. Is it the right choice for you?

Here are scenarios in which Salesforce is best suited.

You’ve outgrown your previous CRM

Simpler CRMs, homebaked solutions and, God forbid, spreadsheets have a short half-life. Salesforce is good for organizations growing quickly. If you want something future-proof and to make sure you aren’t switching again in a few years, you can’t go wrong with Salesforce.

Your leadership team has Salesforce experience

Going with Salesforce is easier if your leadership has experience with it and knows what a good implementation looks like. Many senior managers, VPs and above will say they can’t do their job effectively without Salesforce, as they’re used to its reports and workflows. It might even be difficult to recruit senior talent without Salesforce.

You need a single source of truth

Salesforce is a system of record that can integrate well with the rest of your tech stack. If you’ve outgrown your first CRM — or worse, the spreadsheets and on-prem databases you’re currently using — you can be sure that its AppExchange has everything you need to make Salesforce your source of truth.

You have complex, enterprise use cases

Salesforce isn’t limited to enterprises (they would argue they’re just as strong for small businesses), but they can certainly handle robust use cases. Order flows kicking off international procurement, automation of contract approvals and executive reports, the many-headed hydra of CPQ.

If your organization requires — or may one day require — anything beyond “simple” CRM features, chances are you need the robustness Salesforce brings.

You can afford a proper implementation

Set aside the fact the software itself is expensive — are you also prepared to pay five, six or seven figures for an implementation partner?
How about six-figure salaries for the dedicated Salesforce admins, developers and project managers you’ll need to maintain and improve the platform?

Or increased headcount to your operations and revenue enablement teams — such as sales enablement, marketing enablement, and customer success enablement — to train people and keep things running smoothly?

You’re prepared to drink the Kool-Aid

To get the most out of Salesforce, you’d be wise to immerse yourself in everything Salesforce. TrailBlazer training, community participation, Dreamforce attendance, the whole shebang. They provide a lot because there is a lot. If you’re ready to drink the Kool-Aid, it can have a massive impact on how you run your business efficiently and you can learn a lot from others.

Is Salesforce for You?

Get a Free Demo for Salesforce

Who Is Salesforce NOT Suited For?

Salesforce has been around long enough for most buyers to have formed opinions. Detractors will say it’s expensive and difficult to use. However, these criticisms are often the results of bad implementations, not necessarily the technology, so we’ll do our best to separate the two.

Here are scenarios in which Salesforce may not be a perfect fit:

Price-sensitive buyers

The main complaint about Salesforce is that it’s expensive. Let’s break that down into when it becomes pricey and who that may impact most.

  • Annual payments are the norm. In most cases Salesforce requires you to pay the annual cost of your plan upfront, so if you can’t afford that, it may be an issue.
  • Everyone needs access. Considering pretty much everyone in your company needs CRM access, not just salespeople, the per user model adds up fast and balloons as your company scales. That’s the nature of the beast. Marketers need Salesforce for campaigns, customer success teams need it for customer interactions, executives need it for reporting and visibility, and so on.
  • Add-ons add up fast. If you need to purchase additional products to get the most out of the software, costs will grow quickly. For example, Tableau for reporting. On the flip side, if you aren’t getting something from Salesforce, you’ll likely have to purchase it elsewhere and may not save in the long run.
  • There’s no free forever plan. Testing a platform and scaling up from its free plan can be a helpful form of product-led growth. However, Salesforce has no free forever plan. Its lowest-priced plan, Essentials, includes a 14-day free trial, while all other plans offer a 30-day trial. No Free plan and limited trials impact very small businesses and small businesses most.
  • No free 24×7 support. Businesses with advanced customization needs or those that require specific knowledge around something like APEX coding will likely need to employ dedicated Salesforce developers.
  • It takes a village to operate Salesforce successfully. Not only do you have to think about costs of Salesforce’s software, you should also factor in the headcount you’ll need to implement and manage it properly. Not only will you likely need dedicated teams of Salesforce admins and operations folks, but you’ll want to consider enablement teams and learning and development functions so it has proper ownership and guardrails in place that prevent it from falling apart.

Businesses requiring self-hosted solutions

Salesforce doesn’t provide self-hosting options. It offers only cloud deployment and the public cloud deployment model.

Companies needing a lot of customer support

Salesforce has gotten a bad rap for its customer support over the years. But maybe you won’t need it that often if you’ve got expertise in house and the right implementation partners.

Organizations with no dedicated enablement and operations teams

If your company doesn’t have dedicated enablement, you may be in for a rough time. Given its complexity, Salesforce’s UI isn’t intuitive on a good day and items can move around every release (up to 3 times per year).

There’s a seemingly endless learning curve. Plus, for companies with inexperienced sales teams — for example, an army of business development reps fresh out of college — you’ll need to make sure there are people to train new hires and police it or you’ll be dealing with garbage data before you know it.

Companies with old-school management mindsets

For Salesforce to be successful, it can’t be optional. It needs to be a way of life. If you have old-school sales managers who are used to building relationships and running deal cycles by gut rather than by data or sellers with big egos who don’t follow processes, you’re in for a rough time. You need to be comfortable telling your team “If it’s not in Salesforce, it didn’t happen” and that might mean a serious culture change.

Businesses needing something quick and dirty

If you’re in scrappy start-up mode and you’re trying to survive and land your first customers, you don’t need Salesforce. You need product-market fit. You need your first dollars. It’s easy to get ahead of yourself, but a good way to burn time and money is by implementing a complex CRM too soon. Of course, you also don’t want to wait too long, so as soon as you’ve got product market fit and your first few sellers, then you can dive in.

Compare Salesforce to the Top Competitors

Top Salesforce Features

Beyond table stakes features every CRM offers, our Salesforce review found the following differentiating capabilities.

Salesforce Features

  • Salesforce provides users real-time sales data via customizable reports for all kinds of scenarios, like sales pipeline, win-loss, historical views and more.
  • Salesforce provides mobile apps for iOS and Android with offline capabilities.
  • Salesforce can integrate with social networks like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.
  • Salesforce offers an app marketplace, AppExchange, to integrate with 2,700+ apps.
  • Salesforce offers real-time collaboration applications, like Chatter and Slack, that allow collaborating with other users, forming groups, posting polls to a group for feedback, sharing assets, offering personalized recommendations and more.

Get a Free Demo for Salesforce

Features Not Supported by Salesforce

Salesforce is so configurable there’s not much it’s lacking when you take into account all the integrations and out-of-the-box features. That said, there are some drawbacks.

  • Multiple users can’t create recurring tasks and assign them to others. Sometimes, there’s a need for secondary owners of accounts and opportunities to add recurring tasks and assign them to their management or project team.
  • Phone validation can be wonky. It’s required to add a country code dropdown to the phone field to add validations depending on the country. The country code should be applied to the phone number entered based on the country selected.
  • Salesforce Lightning sync doesn’t work for tasks. Currently, it only works for calendars and contacts.
  • WhatsApp integration isn’t available for Salesforce Sales Cloud.
  • Dynamic forms aren’t available for mobile. When reps are out selling, they should be able to see fields show up dynamically on their phones based on their selection.
  • No undo email send feature. Currently, when sending an email from Salesforce to a lead/opportunity/customer, it doesn’t allow undoing and editing again before resending.

Compare Salesforce to the Top Competitors

Salesforce Pricing: How Much Does It Cost?

How long is a piece of string? Same idea for how much Salesforce costs.

Every plan has per-user-per-month pricing, generally billed annually. However, terms may vary, as some Salesforce licensing also offers monthly or multi-year payment options.

The base subscription per user is as follows:

  • Essentials: $25/user/month (billed annually)
  • Professional: $75/user/month (billed annually)
  • Enterprise: $150/user/month (billed annually)
  • Unlimited: $300/user/month (billed annually)

Additionally, there are add-ons that carry extra subscription costs.

Salesforce add-ons Pricing
CPQ & Billing

Get the necessary tools to quickly configure, price and quote complex solutions.

Starting at $75/user/month (billed annually)
Revenue Intelligence

Purpose-built analytics and actionable insights across all customer interactions to deliver revenue growth.

Starting at $200/user/month
Sales Cloud Einstein

Empower everyone with built-in AI to increase productivity, and scale.

Starting at $50/user/month (billed annually)
Einstein Conversation Insights

Empower everyone with built-in AI to increase productivity, and scale.

$50/user/month (billed annually)
Einstein Relationship Insights

Automatically search the web, news, internal and external documents to discover new leads.

$50/user/month (starter) or $150/user/month (growth)
Marketing Cloud Account Engagement

Connect your marketing automation, sales and service data to act on predictive insights.

Starting at $1250/user/month - up to 10,000 contacts (billed annually)
Sales Emails and Alerts

Sell smarter with Sales Emails and Alerts — essentially marketing automation for sales.

Starting at $50/user/month (billed annually)
Partner Relationship Management

Simplify every step of your channel sales process, from onboarding to selling.

$25/member/month or $10/login/month (billed annually)
External Apps

Integrate external systems and expose data to drive your business forward, faster.

$35/member/month or $15/login/month (billed annually)
Sales Engagement

Tools to help your sales reps reach the best leads, convert more, and boost productivity.

$75/user/month (billed annually)
Sales Dialer for Essentials

Automatic call logging, voicemail drop and call lists to connect with leads and contacts faster.

$2/100 minutes/month (billed annually)
Sales Dialer

Same as Sales Dialer for Essentials with more functionality, including multiple phone numbers, personal voicemail, pre-recorded messages, local presence, call bridging, call recording and more.

Starting at $5/user/month (billed annually)
Social Intelligence

Enhanced account-based listening and social selling.

$25/user/month (billed annually)
Inbox

Bring email, calendar and CRM together in one seamless experience.

$25/user/month (billed annually)
Sales Enablement

Give your sales reps the right content and coaching at the right time through in-app onboarding and guidance.

$25/user/month (billed annually)
Quip Advanced

Real-time CRM data and built-in collaboration inside Salesforce itself.

$100/user/month (billed annually)
Salesforce Maps

Visualize your Salesforce data on interactive maps.

Starting at $75/user/month (billed annually)
Salesforce Maps LiveTracking

Capture miles in drive trip records when drivers have Salesforce Maps Live Tracking turned on.

$25/user/month (billed annually)
Salesforce Maps Territory Planning

Design optimal territories for sales and service teams. Compare scenarios that help you close gaps in sales and service coverage.

$75/user/month (billed annually)
Sales + Service Cloud

Sales Cloud is geared towards sales reps and sales managers. Service Cloud is geared towards service agents and service managers. They’re two of Salesforce’s main “clouds”. By purchasing them together you’ll get the pricing seen here

  • Essentials: $25/user/month (billed annually)
  • Professional: $100/user/month (billed annually)
  • Enterprise $175/user/month (billed annually)
  • Unlimited: $325/user/month (billed annually)

Get a Free Salesforce Price Quote For Your Specific Needs

Salesforce also offers Success Plans and Professional Services for support and expert guidance, namely: Standard Success, Premier Success, and Signature Success. Standard Success is included in all licenses, but Premier Success and Signature Success plans are only available at additional costs.

Here’s a high-level overview of pros and cons at each of the subscription tiers.

Essentials Pros & Cons

The Essentials plan offers entry-level process automation for sales teams. All the features provided in Essentials, like account management, contact management, lead management and opportunity management are also offered in all other plans.

The Essential plan has basic CRM functionality for startups or small businesses not looking for extensive customizations and integrations, and it lacks features like lead registration and forecasting but includes basic features like a calendar and inbox, making it suitable for a team of up to 10 members.

Professional Pros & Cons

The Professional plan offers all the functionality of Essentials, plus additional features like lead registration and pipeline/forecast management. It also offers three campaigns per opportunity, two customizable profiles and layouts per organization, and two roles per organization.

This plan is suitable for small and mid-sized businesses requiring features like collaborative forecasting and user profiles. However, some features like customizable profiles, roles and permissions are limited in numbers compared to the Enterprise plan.

Enterprise Pros & Cons

The Enterprise plan offers features like advanced reporting, opportunity splits and sales console apps. It also provides unlimited customizable profiles, page layouts, roles and permissions.

This plan is suitable for large companies. Apparently, the Enterprise plan is their most popular license edition.

Unlimited Pros & Cons

The Unlimited plan has no limit on features and customizations. Apart from the features in Enterprise, the unlimited plan also offers opportunity scoring and features like sandbox and work queues, which are available for purchase separately in the Enterprise plan.

The Unlimited plan is suitable for large companies seeking unlimited enterprise-grade features and 24/7 support, sales insights and sales engagement. Additionally, the Unlimited edition offers work queues and supports unlimited roles, customizable profiles and layouts like the Enterprise plan.

In summary: the total cost of your Salesforce agreement will be the sum of your subscription plan (i.e., which “Cloud(s)” you opt for at which tier) + subscription fees for add-ons + the cost of support and service packages. The best-suited plan depends on your individual business requirements and budget. Get a free demo here and dive deeper with their team.

Understanding Salesforce Pricing

Salesforce Pricing Tip: Power of Us
Salesforce has a Power of Us Program that gives eligible nonprofits and educational institutions access to ten donated subscriptions of its premium Sales and Service Cloud Enterprise Edition at no cost and deep discounts on additional solutions. Eligible stakeholders include charitable, non-government, educational or social change organizations and public or private nonprofit primary, secondary, and higher education organizations and institutions.

The Power of Us Program includes:

  • 10 Enterprise Edition CRM Lightning subscriptions at no cost, subject to geographic restrictions
  • Discounts on additional subscriptions, products, and services
  • Discounts on Salesforce training
  • Discounts on Salesforce events
  • Access to nonprofit- and education-specific groups, events and webinars
  • Discounts on the price of certain Non-SFDC applications available on the Salesforce AppExchange.

To be eligible for the Power of Us Program, your organization must create an active Salesforce trial and comply with various policies.

Get a Free Salesforce Price Quote For Your Specific Needs

Salesforce Alternatives: How Do They Stack Up?

Salesforce virtually created the CRM category and continues to lead the way in market share, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t competition.

Here are the top seven Salesforce alternatives and how they stack up.

SelectHub Top Picks for Salesforce

SugarCRM

SugarCRM has a few advantages over Salesforce. First, it offers on-premise deployment with enterprise-grade features, whereas Salesforce Sales Cloud doesn’t offer anything on-premise.

Second, all SugarCRM editions come with built-in features for marketing teams, including lead routing, drip campaigns, web forms, email marketing, newsletters, landing page builders and more. Most of the marketing tools that Salesforce offers are through its Marketing Cloud and add-ons (Pardot, Social Studio, ExactTarget and so on), which come at an additional cost.

Third, Sugar has better file storage. Its Essentials plan provides 7 GB of storage, its Advanced plan has 15 GB and its Premier plan has 30 GB. All Salesforce editions come with 1 GB of data storage and 11 GB for files, and they’ll charge for additional storage per organization.

On the flip side, Salesforce has a much more robust ecosystem with 2,700+ add-ons developed on the Salesforce platform. SugarCRM only has 250+ add-ons.

Salesforce Sales Cloud also provides a native sales dialer to reach out to customers and prospects by clicking on their numbers in Salesforce. The Sales Dialer offers an outbound calling product with the option to add inbound calling functionality, whereas SugarCRM only provides a predictive dialer through a third-party vendor.

For a more thorough rundown, see how Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics 365 and SugarCRM stack up against each other in our three-way comparison.

Oracle CX Sales

Oracle CX Sales has a few advantages over Salesforce. Mainly, they provide out-of-the-box connectors for all components of their suite. Salesforce Sales Cloud users need to purchase third-party integrations and build their own connectors. Oracle also has some neat extras, like providing a card scanner to scan business cards using the CX Sales mobile app.

The main advantage of Salesforce over Oracle is that Salesforce Sales Cloud comes with more features out of the box. It provides built-in capabilities to set up sales campaigns, whereas Oracle Sales needs to integrate with Oracle Responsys for creating sales campaigns.

Salesforce provides built-in features to generate quotes from opportunities, whereas Oracle Sales needs to integrate with Oracle CPQ. Salesforce also has built-in lead scoring, which you can’t get with Oracle Sales apart from integrating with Oracle Eloqua. All those Oracle products come at additional costs. Of course, Salesforce has additional products for the above scenarios, too, but those are for more advanced functionality.

For a deeper dive, check out our head-to-head comparison of Salesforce Sales Cloud vs. Oracle CX.

SAP Sales Cloud

Like Oracle and unlike Salesforce, SAP’s CRM offers on-premise deployment. SAP Sales Cloud also gives users full access in offline mode, whereas Salesforce Sales Cloud doesn’t provide full access in offline mode.

A few areas where Salesforce comes out on top vs. SAP are its artificial intelligence capabilities, email functionality and its knowledge base.

Salesforce Einstein can automate routine tasks and is more advanced than AI from SAP. SAP Sales Cloud has an underlying SAP HANA database that uses machine-learning to automate tasks. However, SAP lags in terms of the availability of these capabilities in a CRM.

Regarding email, Salesforce allows monitoring the performance of sent emails using any email application to capture interactions with customers via campaigns. SAP also tracks interactions from emails, but you’ll need to input a lot of parameters manually for tracking purposes.

Lastly, Salesforce Knowledge offers a knowledge base to create and manage content. The knowledge base has role-based access and allows users to create and search articles, provide step-by-step tutorials, foster forums for interaction and more.

By comparison, SAP Knowledge Base only allows the interaction center agents to search for documents, cases and solutions and email them or send them to customers via chat.

Looking for more? Our Salesforce vs. SAP article has you covered.

HubSpot

Ever since HubSpot introduced its CRM — a natural extension from its marketing automation software — it has competed heavily on price. In fact, HubSpot’s free CRM is a foot in the door for people just getting started. Beyond that, HubSpot’s Sales Hub includes its more robust CRM functionality, live chat, landing page creation, customer service ticketing and more.

Overall, HubSpot is likely more suitable for small businesses, medium businesses and freelancers than Salesforce. Also, its user interface is simpler and more intuitive than Salesforce’s.

Even though HubSpot’s App marketplace offers 500+ third-party integrations, that pales in comparison to the 2,700+ apps in Salesforce’s AppExchange.

While quantity doesn’t equal quality, consider that Salesforce Sales Cloud is more customizable per unique business requirements and includes custom coding access to customize the platform.

Salesforce also offers advanced predictive analytics with Tableau, augmented by the intelligence of Einstein AI, which HubSpot doesn’t, making it a better choice for larger enterprises.

Pipedrive

Pipedrive packs in CRM value and has the following advantages over Salesforce:

  • Unlimited storage on all plans.
  • An AI-powered sales assistant on all plans.
  • Its Inbox on all the plans.

By comparison, Salesforce Sales Cloud has all of these features but for additional costs.

Conversely, Salesforce has the following advantages over Pipedrive.

  • Salesforce’s Einstein AI is more advanced and provides intelligent recommendations based on actual customer and sales data. In contrast, Pipedrive’s insights are based on past sales performance as opposed to Salesforce’s more proactive recommendations.
  • Salesforce can also integrate natively with SAP and Oracle. Pipedrive doesn’t provide these as native integrations.
  • Finally, Salesforce offers Chatter, an enterprise collaboration solution that allows employees to connect, collaborate and share files and data in real time. Pipedrive lacks enterprise collaboration capabilities and integrates with software like Microsoft Teams to facilitate collaboration.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM

Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM has the following advantages over Salesforce:

  • It provides AI capabilities that come packaged with the CRM, while Salesforce Sales Cloud offers Einstein AI at an add-on cost.
  • Microsoft Dynamics 365 can also be connected with Dynamics 365 Business Central without needing connectors; however, Salesforce requires connectors to integrate with ERP software like SAP and Oracle.
  • Lastly, Microsoft Dynamics 365 offers cloud and on-premise deployment options, whereas Salesforce was only designed and built for the cloud.

Salesforce’s biggest edge over Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM is the number of third-party apps available on AppExchange. Microsoft Dynamics 365 supports fewer integrations. A prime example: Salesforce natively integrates with Gmail, while Microsoft requires a third-party middleware to connect with Gmail.

Zoho CRM

Zoho CRM offers a lot of the same core functionality as Salesforce and a few cool extras, including a built-in email parser and a built-in card scanner.

On the flip side, Salesforce Sales Cloud offers built-in capabilities to create organization charts to keep track of contacts. Zoho, in contrast, needs to integrate with the Organization Charts Extension for creating charts, which comes at an additional cost.

Also, Salesforce Sales Cloud provides a built-in report to calculate win/loss percentages of opportunities. Zoho CRM can integrate with the Zoho Analytics connector to create a win/loss report, which also costs extra.

Get the full picture with our granular look at Zoho, Salesforce and Act!

Compare Salesforce to the Top Competitors

Salesforce Reviews: Themes From Users

The benefits mentioned most in Salesforce reviews by its own users include the following:

  • Customization: Salesforce provides one of the most configurable platforms out there. In addition to being able to customize its standard programs, organizations can develop, run and optimize their own apps in order to perform a variety of tasks. Salesforce App Cloud exists as a single ecosystem for creating and running all the personalized applications an organization needs.
  • Cloud-based access: Salesforce provides entirely cloud-based access, meaning no hardware purchases, no software installation, no locally stored files and accessibility from any device.
  • Salesforce AppExchange: AppExchange is the largest app marketplace in the cloud-based business software industry, providing 2,700+ pre-built applications that can handle pretty much any use case you have in mind.
  • Artificial intelligence: Salesforce’s AI is actually intelligent. It helps predict how customer purchase behavior might shift over time, opportunities that are most likely to lead to a purchase, customer churn identifiers and more.
  • Reporting and analytics: Salesforce’s customizable reports, self-serve dashboards and advanced BI tools can provide all roles with access to real-time data and analysis. It’s possible to set up customized dashboards for every individual. Many managers and executives who are used to using Salesforce find it hard to switch away, as they’re used to using its reporting to operate.
  • Mobile capabilities: Salesforce offers a mobile app for Android and iOS devices that allows users to work offline.
  • More than a CRM: Salesforce is much more than a sales tool. From sales to service, marketing to commerce, analytics to integration, there’s a Salesforce product that meets any use case in virtually any industry — if you’re able to afford it.

Salesforce Pros and Cons

Conversely, here are some of the cons mentioned in many Salesforce reviews:

  • Salesforce is expensive, no doubt about it. When you add up the core products, the add-ons, the integrations, the professional services — not to mention the headcount you’ll need to support it — it may be prohibitively expensive. If you’re ok with a Ford Focus instead of a Ferrari, you may want to look at the competition.
  • Salesforce only has cloud deployment, which may be an issue for businesses that need to manage infrastructure and security of their CRM on-premise. All of Salesforce’s main competitors — Microsoft, Oracle, SAP and others — provide multiple deployment options, as well as different cloud deployment models, like a private cloud, public cloud or hybrid cloud.
  • Salesforce’s implementation process is complicated and usually requires the assistance of implementation experts. Small teams may find hiring an expert to operate and maintain the system challenging.
  • Salesforce customer support has a poor reputation. The standard customer success plan included in all licenses provides basic online self-help resources and online case submission only. 24×7 support only comes with higher plans at an additional cost.

Get a Free Salesforce Price Quote For Your Specific Needs

Final Salesforce Review & Score

SelectHub’s overall analyst score for its Salesforce review is 90.

Salesforce is a market leader in the CRM category.

It’s a way of life. A worldview. A borderline religion.

You don’t dip your toes or dabble lightly. You adopt it and raise it like a child. It’s part of your DNA. You won’t change CRMs often, nor do you want to. And they know this. Once they have your customer data, changing will be painful—financially, technically, and operationally. You won’t go wrong choosing Salesforce, but you can go wrong with implementation, so be careful.

Bottom line: Salesforce offers a highly customizable platform and 2,700+ integration-ready applications. It’s packed with comprehensive features for account and contact management, lead management, opportunity management, activity management, pipeline and forecast management, process automation, sales collaboration, territory management, data management, and more.

Additionally, pre-configured reports and dashboards are available to offer insights into the sales team’s performance and keep track of progress toward business goals. Practically any feature you can dream up for a CRM platform is available in one way or another — though it’ll cost you. Just about the only thing it doesn’t do is on-premise deployment, which may be a drawback for businesses with those needs.

Ultimately, if a friend said, “Hey, I’m thinking about using Salesforce for my CRM” here’s what I would say…
Salesforce is the New York Yankees of CRMs. It has the most fans and the most haters. It’s among the most expensive, too, with the greatest market share and best brand recognition.

But just like the old saying “No one ever got fired for buying IBM”, you could say the same about purchasing Salesforce as your CRM. That said, I assume lots of people have been fired over bad Salesforce implementations. So even though it’s the most well-known name in the CRM space, make sure you’re ready to take on the commitment and implement it correctly.

Get a Free Demo for Salesforce

What’s Next?

Still haven’t decided on the right CRM? Behold these resources.

About the Author

About Devon Hennig: Devon is SelectHub’s sultan of software selection. He most recently served as VP of Marketing for Docebo (Nasdaq: DCBO), and, prior to that, he was VP of Demand Generation at Vendasta, the leading provider of white-label products and services for resellers. His passion is helping companies find the right solutions for their tech stack.

Devon HennigUltimate Salesforce Review 2024

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *