You’ve seen similar articles before, so I’m just going to touch on a few salient points. And it’s more about what Salesforce.com doesn’t do, rather than an actual comparison of Salesforce.com versus Microsoft Dynamics CRM.
Like all journalists, I have vowed that my sources have the right to remain anonymous, especially since I just gathered tidbits from here and there.
Anyway, here’s a short list of things that Salesforce.com does not provide and does provide:
- Consolidated information is a single screen without extensive scrolling.
- Social collaboration, presence management, click-to-communicate
- Deployment options – online, on premise, or a hybrid mix
- What-if analyses, projections based on potential business scenarios
- Company owned data centers
- Service Level Agreements that guarantee 99.9% uptime
- Low subscription and add-on fees
- Reasonably priced online backups
The above can be summarized into critical categories: Total Cost of Ownership, Choice, Collaboration, Business Intelligence, User Interface, and Performance.
Admittedly, it’s been a while since I’ve used Saleforce.com. I switched to Microsoft Dynamics CRM several years ago. As a non-technical user, I found Salesforce.com difficult to navigate. I needed assistance creating marketing and customer reports. That has not been the case with Microsoft Dynamics CRM where I find the navigation to be intuitive and reports of all kinds easy to create.
As an aside I’ve also used Siebel and that was a bear, too.
For more reading, I recommend our white papers:
and
Your questions and critiques are welcome. What has been your user experience with Salesforce.com? What has been your user experience with Microsoft Dynamics CRM? What other CRM systems have you used and how have they worked out for you?
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By Marcia Nita Doron, Microsoft Dynamics GP & CRM Partner serving Massachusetts (MA) & beyond.
This article is deceptive marketing propaganda. Just look at the title that claims to offer a comparison of the products but then follows up with a list of weak and lazy bullet points. The fact that author then comes back around to say she would need to do more research just to defend her bullet points is laughable.
I think this is probably the most in-depth, most objective review I've come across:
Thanks, Michael. That is totally true. Microsoft's deep pockets and willingness to invest in data centers has indeed made them a major player, if not the number one player in the cloud.
A little late to the party here, but regarding MS datacenters, Microsoft is now one of the major worldwide players in this space. 16+ regional datacenters, each costing over a billion to build, and Msft has gone all in on Azure and the public cloud. Just wanted to comment on that one point.
Thanks for your comments, Bill. I'd have to do more research to reply in depth to the points you raised. Suffice it to say that I'm very glad to hear that you've had a long and satisfied experience with Salesforce. In the end, that's what counts.
With all due respect, many of these bullet points are deceptive at best or false at worst.
Salesforce page layouts can display as many fields and related lists or as few as the user requires.
Salesforce has native social collaboration (Chatter). But your users need to adopt the concept at all before they'll adopt it on any platform.
Who cares about premise installations anymore? Even MS is finally arriving at the cloud party like 15 years later.
Salesforce has forecasting tools. But I will trust that Microsoft is better if you say so.
I'd like to see the evidence that MS owns its data centers or isn't just leasing space at Rackspace or Amazon. Data centers have become commoditized and in the end every independent guy will be bought up by Amazon and others as capacity increases.
As a 5 year Salesforce customer, the only downtime has been the regularly scheduled service release updates overnight on Saturday/Sunday. It's well communicated in advance and lasts for less than an hour three times per year and at a time when no users are likely to be on anyway. That's more than anyone can say for any MS application.
Salesforce is free for non profits up to 10 users and greatly reduced over 10 users.
There are great Salesforce backup apps. MS has never been in the backup business and have always referred customers to Symantec and others for those solutions.