Salesforce Platform Reviews

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.

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.

Email, chat and logs platform in one place, you can chat with your customer, sent emails and reply, attach files in the logs (cases), this software have embedded the ScreenMeet software and works great, you can have remote connection.

In the start some bugs and errors, they were fixed couple months after. Chat: no timer added yet, you don't know how long is the current chat. If you have 2 chats, they are open in 2 tabs, if one customer close the chat, you don't know it until open the tab, should be great if there is an alarm or sound.

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.

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...

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It's the best CRM out there. So long as you have a salesforce guru on your team, anything can be built or accomplished.

It can be glitchy and slow. I know it's processing a ton of information, but it is very frustrating writing a bunch of notes out, going to save, then it doesn't do so and having to start over.

A lot more user friendly and a much better UI than Salesforce Classic. It came out with a lot less features than classic, but in the past few months and years they have dedicated a lot of resources to improving Lightning to not only compare to Classic, but I think it now has even more features.

There is a learning curve to getting Lightning up and running. I would definitely recommend spending some time in the SF trailheads to get the ins and outs of Lightning before you switch from classic or sign up to start.

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.

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.

While the initial switch from classic was a little rough from a users standpoint, now I couldn't go back to use classic. It is so much more intuitive and is a nice and sleek experience.

It was an adjustment during the initial switch from classic and it took a little while for the entire Sales team to feel comfortable in using lightning regularly.

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

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.

Salesforce is the go-to CRM and market leader for a reason: solid lead and pipeline management. I like the integration with outlook and the depth of reporting features.

It takes some time to learn how to use it. Also the settings around standard lead fields and different lead views are confusing to me.

It's great how robust the system is. It really helped us implement better support and sales processes within the business

Setup is extremely difficult, which is why they recommend you use a third party partner which is extremely expensive.

"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.

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...

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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.

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...

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The search feature is good, it pulls everything associated with what you are looking for.

Sometimes there are serious delays. The program will need to reset and what ever you just did does not save. The email link does not carry over the information from the email. It will log the email with the title but will not transfer the body of the email into Lightening. Not sure if this is specific to my job's version or not. Certain aspects of the program convert back to the original Salesforce Classic look

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.

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.

The component-based development, instead of Classic's page-based ideals, are a breath of fresh air and a sign that Salesforce is looking forward to the future. Having the ease of creating a component and being able to reuse it everywhere in your environment is a great feeling. The components all follow the same style (if done correctly) and don't affect the loading speeds of each individual page, it just works.

The Lightning experience is definitely not complete, which is understandable as it is a work in progress, but the worst of all is the *initial* loading time. Just after logging in, the wait time is considerably higher than Classic's and is very annoying to sit around while it loads with the latest update's mascot watching your frustration.

We previously used Microsoft CRM and recently implemented Salesforce Lightning Experience. The features and support community we have found within Salesforce have been incredible and continually impressive. CRM was able to get us through the early stages of our business, but Salesforce Lightning Experience will make the difference across each of our growing teams as we continue in the growth phase of our organization. I love that any question I have about Salesforce has likely already been asked and answered by either a Salesforce expert, or a member of the Salesforce user community.

With the vastness of customizable features within the application, it can be a confusing transition to Salesforce. There is a large amount of information and training materials that are made available online, but that isn't always enough.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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

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

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.

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.

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

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).

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

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

Lightning view took Salesforce to a whole other Level. It is cleaner and sharper and over all a better easier way to navigate through the platform.

At first it was really hard to use because I was not used to it. I had been using the classic view for so long that this just didn't fit the way I worked. Once I was forced to use lighting and got used to it. I don't know why I was punishing myself using the other view

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.

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.

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

No cons were added to this review