Salesforce App Cloud Reviews

Pros
"Accidental Admin" is a concept that Salesforce uses to emphasize how anyone can pick up and learn to configure Salesforce as an admin. The configuration style (clicks, not code) leads to a low skill floor needed to start using Salesforce. Advanced users, developers, etc. have the flexibility to customize the system to a high degree as well.

Cons
The neglect. Salesforce regularly neglects key pieces of core CRM functionality, some for more than 10 years, while either ignoring the cries for help by its userbase, or promising to fix it - only to let 10 years go by with no update. Just browse around on the success.salesforce.com Idea Exchange and you'll see what I mean. I get that Salesforce puts emphasis on the fact that the system is highly configurable by a dedicated developer, but when key features and functionality are either half-implemented or abandoned altogether in favor of more money-making initiatives (like their half-baked AI platform), it gets to be extremely concerning and offputting. Sometimes they combine the two and continue to sell a half-baked product, which has already been abandoned and they KNOW it. Want an example? Try to find any documentation on Salesforce Inbox. At my company, we have been fighting with Salesforce support for MONTHS trying to get any semblance of an answer about how we can use Inbox or where we can find documentation, or if we can even pay a professional services team to help us. Finally after months, they have made it clear that Salesforce Inbox is abandonware. Yet they are still promoting and selling it. That is shady and corrupt.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 7/10

Pros
Salesforce is the backbone of our company. It is tied into everything and used by every team. It is incredibly customizable and it seems they have a way to do almost anything you need. We use it for Sales, Support, Marketing, and product feature usage. We have it hooked into other apps and other saas products. This is the product that will scale with your business and can support a company at any stage of growth. There are a ton of integrations out of the box (on their salesforce exchange) and their APIs allow savvy developers to build custom integrations that aren't available.

Cons
When the company initially implemented it, they tried to "wing it" and it was a complete mess. You really need someone who knows what they are doing to setup, administer, and maintain the software. It is also expensive. We got grandfathered into some great pricing, but if we weren't, we're not sure we would be able to continue to use SFDC as we grow. SFDC also loves to gobble up other apps and brand them with the SFDC name. So they have become a jack of all trades - however, some of the things you can't do are surprising (just go check out their community page for all of the list of enhancements that haven't been implemented). For example, we use cases for our help desk, but there is a lot of functionality missing compared to a best in breed help desk software like ZenDesk. Support is terrible here by the way. They really push you toward self-service or community based service. You're lucky if you ever get a response.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 6/10

Pros
The best thing about the force.com platform is that it's flexible. It comes with a set of standard objects such as Accounts, Contacts, Cases, Contracts, Orders, and many others. It is very easy to add new objects that can be tailored for your business use case. Originally designed mainly as a Sales tool, Salesforce now has a Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Analytics, and other modules that can be added on easily to provide a full enterprise infrastructure. Adding automation to user tasks via workflow rules and process builder can be done without coding. Adding triggers via Apex Code is also fairly easy for developers, since Apex is an easy language to learn.

Cons
Out of the box, Salesforce is not a very efficient tool. To prevent users from having to manually enter every piece of data to sync up objects, customization of some sort is really required. Some types of data syncing or data entry can be done with declarative tools such as workflow rules or process builder. Other things that require more complicated logic do require trigger code written by someone who understands development. The platform comes with built-in limitations on file storage, data storage, number of fields you can have on an object, number of lines of custom code you can add to the platform, and quite a few others. Platform limits of certain types can be increased, but you will definitely pay for the privilege. If you want more automated or customized functionality and don't have a developer on staff, you will have to relay on plug-in products from the Salesforce App Exchange to provide the functionality you are looking for. While some of these products are free, many of them aren't and have licensing fees per user. The cost of paying for Salesforce licenses along with licenses for one or more plug-in apps can get quite spendy.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 8/10

Pros
Force.com platform (Lightning) is very powerful development platform on the browser. It can be used to build applications for any industry. The pricing is on per user per month basis. Many tools like Validation rules, Workflows, process builder are available for business users. These tools allow business users to build apps on the platform with fairly complex logic. For additional functionality, developers are needed. Developers can build more advanced features using Apex, Visualforce and Lightning Communities. Trailhead and developer account are free resources available to build expertise on the product. Excellent community of customers/partners is available to support queries.

Cons
Like any complex software there is a steep learning curve. Hiring developers in the US on the platform can be expensive. The license pricing may also be expensive for small businesses.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

Pros
You can add your own custom fields and organize them how you want.

Cons
Difficult to find the proper path from lead to opportunity to account. Contacts can be saved on accounts, but aren't automatically applied to opportunities forcing me several clicks to simply add a new person first to the account and then back to the opportunity to see the contact. Changes to your payment plan to reduce accounts are very difficult forcing you to request changes 3 months in advance for them to take effect. However, they have no problem increasing the plan same-day when we need to add new accounts.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 5/10

Pros
Salesforce is the most robust CRM in the market, a point that isn't debatable in my view. For an enterprise organization with complex needs, Salesforce is hard to beat. The sheer number of native integrations is a huge advantage over any other solution. The reporting you get with Salesforce is remarkable.

Cons
It's so robust, it can be overwhelming for those without Salesforce expertise, or a dedicated CRM manager in-house. The permissions are flat out hard. This is more of a con for a small business than a mid-sized to enterprise business with more internal resources. Expect to pay huge hourly rates for a consultant if you don't hire in-house.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 8/10

Pros
Customization and a broad feature set make Salesforce a real asset for our business. We have been able to integrate many other essential products, write custom code, build workflows, customize fields and objects and do pretty much everything that we have wanted to do.

Cons
The main con of Salesforce is that, for a company with "sales" in the name, they do very little to help you with actual sales practices out of the box. They don't have great sales funnel, marketing or other templates. Of course, all of this is definitely possible, but it requires previous experience and iteration upon iteration to get it right.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 9/10

Pros
Ability to generate custom objects, processes, and communication across a wide range of departments makes SalesForce the ideal tool for any size company. The plus is the cloud location allowing customers and employees access around the globe.

Cons
The pricing and add on fees for certain functionality can quickly explode the budget set by your company for this solution. Be sure to think about all functions you might need and negotiate with your SalesForce contact to obtain the best pricing possible. Bundling can be powerful!

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

Pros
No hardware purchase cost and no hardware maintenance cost, big plus Very easy to use and learn for business user and developers Pre-packaged components and widgets speedup the development effort and timelines. Minimal coding for application development Effective cloud platform for small and large enterprise End to end life-cycle management from website(site.com) to data management Very good documentation for user and developers. Awesome effort from Salesforce team by conducting webinar on new features and components

Cons
Nothing to complain as Salesforce improved lot with the new releases, however search results are still clumsy.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

Pros
Salesforce is a very powerful CRM system that can handle almost anything and with hundreds of apps to add functionality, you can find pre-built solutions to most business processes. For nonprofits, the nonprofit success pack is a great starter kit and you can't beat the price - free for up to 10 users.

Cons
Because of the plethora of features, it can be hard to navigate and figure things out without help. I wouldn't recommend someone not comfortable with technology and CRMs to think they can set it up themselves with no assistance.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 8/10

Pros
Salesforce is enormously powerful and flexible, able to adapt to most any businesses type or stage.

Cons
You must have a Salesforce Certified developer to get the most out of the platform - that means code development, testing and documentation. This skill set comes at a price and up for enterprise level development resources. We built a customized version of Opportunities with a developer. Leadership was not well equipped to understand this approach (versus a subscription app).

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 8/10

Pros
These products are used far and wide, I know, but I still did not have a good experience with any Salesforce products.

Cons
I am not one to complain much, but I literally never had a good day of using any Salesforce product. Every Salesforce product I have used has been a pain to deal with. As a marketer/communications person, I found each product to be cumbersome and not easy to use at all. I would have a headache every single day trying to figure out where and how the functionality worked. I spent many hours on the phone with customer service and felt like they definitely did not want to help me understand their product.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 2/10

Pros
SalesForce has a lot of options that allow you to keep track of every step of a sale. There are actually more options than you will probably use but for the most part it is very easy software to use. Along the way there are question marks next to most "fields" that explain in further detail.

Cons
With so many options, it is easy to get confused along the way. Each company is able to customize what they want their team to have access to. While at first this seems like a great idea, it can cause confusion, both when dealing with support as well as with what 'fields' are actually mandatory vs not.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 8/10

Pros
Lots of features, easy to use once it is set up, plenty of options for add-ons and integrations with other systems

Cons
Additional features can be pricey, customer service is terrible, they'll charge you for everything additional

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 8/10

Pros
It's hard to think of what Salesforce can't do. I honestly can do, or can be made to do, virtually anything you can think of to enable a sales department. I see a future where there is only Salesforce in its vertical.

Cons
Because of its robust functionality, there can be quite a learning curve for inexperienced admins. The average user, though, won't have a problem. But even as an admin, learning its bells and whistles just takes a little time and is completely worth it.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

Pros
Lots of resources to help you get started with this platform. All of the prebuilt components are documented well in the Salesforce documentation, and it is extremely easy to get started with developing. Trailhead is extremely helpful in introducing the concepts that are important to developing for the Lightning Platform, so it is not hard to know where to go next in your learning journey. The other benefit is that it is extremely popular and there is a lack of qualified developers, so the barrier to entry through learning about the Lightning Platform is lower than it is with other technologies.

Cons
There is a relatively steep learning curve because it is VERY opinionated. In addition to learning the Lightning framework, there are many other pieces that you will be required to learn. Apex and SLDS are two examples of that. You won't be proficient in Lightning Platform development unless you have all of the pieces.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

Pros
I like the ability to be able to track our volunteer hours from the day they started. Its awesome because volunteers can reach out to us and retrieve that information. The most amazing thing I like about sales force is the ability to run reports through specific filters to allow me to extract the information that I need. I like the fact that I am able to reach out to a customer service rep who is able to walk me step by step of what I need and how to work through salesforce

Rating breakdown

Pros
Having always loved the functionality of Salesforce but not enjoying the readability of Salesforce, Lightning breathed some new life into the product. Lightning brings your reps closer to having that amazing sales experience and improving quality. It makes it so easy to understand where your assets are located and how best to interact with them. Salesforce has always had a strong hold on the marketplace in terms of functionality, and now they are finally taking over in terms of flexibility.

Cons
Like Salesforce Classic, Lightning is still built on the same platform that can at times be confusing and complex to setup.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 9/10

Pros
There's a ton of information available...it's everywhere. Your company can integrate its system with Salesforce pretty well. It's easy to do and the breadth of information available is excellent.

Cons
It's slow. Difficult to navigate. The user interface definitely needs an upgrade. The same set of information can be found multiple times and you have no idea what's right.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 3/10

Pros
Relation Edge, a partner of Saleforce, helped me greatly at a Saleforce Base Camp back in April, 2017. The girl there was helpful and really knew her stuff. But that's just it, you have to know your stuff or else you are in trouble.

Cons
Waste of time setting anything and everything up-- especially for one user. No email from campaign. This is a huge issue in the SF community.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 2/10

Pros
it’s a good way to keep track of your prospects and make sure no leads are falling through the cracks because you’re able to set tasks/follow ups for each lead.

Cons
I feel like there’s a lot of additional features that I don’t know how to utilize and think it can be more user friendly. I’ve never gotten the hang out generating reports. I usually end of ending an error message or I end up generating a list that is lacking specific content that I wanted.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 8/10

Pros
The ease of standing up well functioning apps is phenomenal. I can spin something up with a decent amount of features in no time.

Cons
Hard to say. When I was a newbie, I did not like all of the different governor limits around everything. As I became more experienced, I grew to understand and actually (gasp) like them! It is a bad thing if the page queries the Database 101 times in a loop!

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

Pros
The platform allows our systems to talk to each other and integrate information. This creates more meaning metrics and allows us to run reports with combined data from different systems.

Cons
We would like the ability to change the color of the graphs, so that we can have consistency across our reports, but there is a limitation and the colors often change and we can't alter the colors. There is also a file size limitation, so we are not able to upload certain files for sharing.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 8/10

Pros
Once you are used to the Salesforce platform it is easy to navigate around and switch between screens. Easy to set up custom objects and fields where required to enhance standard functionality.

Cons
Reporting is terrible. Data can be accessed but the output formats when manually running and scheduling reports is non-workable. Restrictions in the ability to add products form multiple pricebooks to one order.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 8/10

Pros
Its not bad for what you get. Allows for a decent amount of customization. You can get it fairly close to setup on how you want to use it. Can access your information from anywhere due to it being in the cloud. Does have a lot of modules that can further customize the interface, but some of them do get rather pricey.

Cons
Is it a subscription based model. so you'll have to look elsewhere if you want a one time up front payment. Interface can be slow to load at times depending on your internet speed. Support is generally ok, but sometimes responses can be 24-48 hours.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 6/10