Just like Coca-cola and Pepsi in the market of carbonated soft drinks, Microsoft Dynamics and Salesforce have been the most famous representatives of the solutions for the customer relationship management industry for almost two decades. However, we are not going to answer the question of whether one of these CRM solutions is better than the other. What we want is to tell you more about these powerful tools and let you pick the one that fits your business best.
What are Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics?
Salesforce is a CRM platform that offers an array of marketing, commerce, sales, and other tools to empower companies’ relationships with customers. The Salesforce CRM platform was officially launched in 2000 and, since then, the company has been introducing new solutions within the platform to meet their customers’ needs across different industries.
Microsoft Dynamics is a set of CRM and ERP solutions aimed to enable and improve key company’s business activities. The first version of the CRM platform was introduced by Microsoft in 2003. The platform was known as “Microsoft Business Solutions Customer Relationship Management 1.0” at that time. MS Dynamics suite is now focused on various aspects of business and offers numerous products to its customers.
|
Salesforce |
Microsoft Dynamics 365 |
|
| Starting Price |
$25 per user / month |
$50 per user / month |
| Free Trial |
Yes – no credit card needed |
Yes – no credit card needed |
| Ease of Use |
Difficult |
Difficult |
| Contact Management |
Yes |
Yes |
| Email Marketing |
Yes |
Yes |
| Lead Management |
Yes |
Yes |
| Built-in Automation |
Yes |
Yes |
| Sales Forecasting |
Yes |
Yes |
| E-Commerce Integrations |
As an add-on or third-party plugins |
As an add-on |
| Reporting |
Yes |
Yes |
| Customer Support |
Yes |
Yes |
Microsoft CRM vs Salesforce: Features
Salesforce Features
Salesforce is a cloud-based solution consisting of individual modules. Business owners can choose which one of these modules to implement for their particular case or if they need to take them all. These modules offer basic Salesforce functionality as well as specific features and capabilities tailored to the needs of businesses across various industries. Let’s have a look at each module separately.
Sales Cloud
Sales Cloud is one of the Salesforce cloud-based applications designed to automate sales processes and operations across the organization. Sales Cloud features include all of the basic features of a CRM and specific sales tools for sales forecasting, sales cycle automation, and more. Sales managers and executives use this module to efficiently manage sales operations, close more deals, and get meaningful and powerful insights into their company’s financial performance.
Service Cloud
Service Cloud is a cloud-based service platform that helps organizations establish and maintain stronger relationships with their customers and partners. Sales Cloud provides various tools aimed to increase engagement with customers such as customer support solutions, business process automation tools, call center management, and more. The platform can be integrated with different channels used for customer engagement such as chatbots, social media, your website, or application allowing your customer service team to provide support for your clients across all of the channels they use.
Service Cloud also improves communication inside the organization. For instance, the platform extension for field service helps to assign workers to the right projects and prioritize these tasks if necessary. It also allows managing safety protocols and accessing any data needed for field workers remotely by using any mobile device.
Marketing Cloud
Marketing Cloud is a cloud-based application aimed to power your marketing teams with the latest digital marketing tools. The platform includes everything from marketing automation and digital advertising to powerful email marketing and data management solutions. With the help of Marketing Cloud, marketers can create personalized email marketing campaigns, advertising, get insights into customer behavior, as well as segment and analyze customer data.
Commerce Cloud
Commerce Cloud is the ultimate Salesforce solution for online retail business. The platform features different modules such as B2C Commerce, B2B Commerce, Order Management addressing various challenges met by ecommerce. Check out our complete Commerce Cloud overview to learn more.
Besides the above-mentioned modules, Salesforce offers many other solutions tailored to specific business needs. For instance, Community Cloud can be used to create communities within a platform for getting clients’ feedback, training, providing customer support, etc. Salesforce Einstein introduces Artificial Intelligence aimed to eliminate the need to manually analyze customer’s data collected by the platform. These and other solutions can be simply added to the basic Salesforce functionality. Third-party solutions to integrate with the Salesforce platform can be found via the Salesforce AppExchange marketplace.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Features
Microsoft Dynamics platform also includes individual modules tailored to various business needs. These modules can be added to the basic Dynamics functionality when you need them. There are eight modules in total:
- Finance aimed to simplify financial operations across the organization.
- Operations is used to automate and streamline various operations and tasks across all departments.
- Sales was created for sales automation and aimed to improve the performance of the sales teams.
- Customer Service helps customer support teams to resolve customer’s issues more efficiently and faster.
- Field Service solution created to connect field service workers and their managers.
- Marketing tool for creating compelling and high-performing marketing campaigns.
- Commerce module aimed to simplify the online retail processes and operations.
- Human Resources is used for finding new talents and keeping existing employees satisfied with their working environment.
Check out our MS Dynamics module overview for more details.
There are many other Microsoft solutions available for integration with the basic CRM platform. For instance, you can connect your MS Dynamics with Power Apps, a suite of applications and services aimed to help developers build custom business applications. Office 365 is one of the most popular solutions by Microsoft that features all of the tools a business needs. The company also has its own app marketplace called Microsoft AppSource where you can find third-party solutions to integrate with the CRM, thus getting new functionality tailored to your specific needs.
You can check out our latest MS Dynamics overview to get deeper into the platform’s functionality.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 vs Salesforce: Pros & Cons
Pros of Microsoft Dynamics 365
Cost Flexible
Microsoft Dynamics 365 offers pricing plans that are suitable for businesses of all sizes and types and can be easily customized and expanded. Therefore, you can simply get the basic plan and expand the services based on your business requirements.
All you need to do is to pay a fixed fee for any of the Microsoft Dynamics modules and get additional modules at a discount price. This way, you can only add the modules that your business need. And you can also remove any of the modules that you don’t require any more.
Seamless Integration
Microsoft Dynamics 365 offers a great opportunity to expand the functionality of the app by integrating your CRM into other apps and services, including other Microsoft services such as Office 365. There is a range of app integrations available on the AppSource marketplace.
BI Features
Using the business intelligence features, you can gain important insights from your business data. Business Intelligence (BI) features help you enhance your reporting system and can help you make data-driven decisions. Integrating your CRM with business intelligence BI can help your team in a range of activities, including sales, marketing, customer service to even fraud protection.
Cons of Microsoft Dynamics 365
Additional Cost for Data Storage
Initially, you may not consider the cloud storage space, but it can accumulate over time, which can affect your overall expenses. Every Microsoft Dynamics 365 license comes with only 10GB of cloud storage space, with some additional space of 5GB when you reach 20 users (on the Enterprise plan). It may certainly not be enough for some businesses, and you may have to buy additional storage that can cost you around $10 for every additional GB per month.
Navigation and Interface
Microsoft Dynamics 365 offers a range of features, but the UI can be quite complex and doesn’t allow you to seamlessly navigate between them. Due to the complex design, Salesforce is slightly better when compared with Microsoft Dynamics 365 in terms of UX and UI.
Expensive Plans
The cost of the basic plan of Microsoft Dynamics 365 can be a bit expensive compared to Salesforce. To implement Dynamics 365, you have to spend at least $50 per month (for every user). This type of pricing can sound a bit expensive for smaller businesses, or for those who are just about to start their CRM journey.
Pros of Salesforce
Customizable
One of the biggest advantages of the Salesforce CRM is the customisable user interface. You can easily adjust the Salesforce interface to create workflows, work areas, forms, data fields and validations, etc, without having a CRM specialist in your team. However, for more technical customizations with complex workflows, you might need a Salesforce specialist – and this is where OMI experts can help!
Salesforce AppExchange also allows you to integrate your CRM with a range of third-party apps to extend the Salesforce functionality according to your business requirements.
Compatibility
Salesforce is a highly flexible and customisable platform with cross platform capabilities. Salesforce works perfectly irrespective of the device, OS, or web browser that your team member uses. Salesforce offers mobile applications for both Android and iOS that allow you to stay updated on the go.
Simplified Interface
Salesforce is known to have a friendly user interface with a sleek design and simplified layout. The simplified interface makes a range of Salesforce features quite easy to use with a smooth user experience. The user-friendly dashboards help new users to adopt the platform quickly, reducing training time dramatically while bettering their productivity.
Cons of Salesforce
Customization Cost
Salesforce platform configuration can be free of cost, but you might still necessitate a CRM specialist or a CRM customization service. It is because Salesforce developers can help you modify the Salesforce CRM platform for deeper and more complex workflows to make it more suitable for your business. It’s important to consider the potential expense that may incur while implementing custom features that are important for your business processes and growth.
Complex Technical Support
Salesforce users often had some poor feedback on customer support. Since the Salesforce help desk may have delayed response, it makes it difficult to build good relationships with a specific account manager who understands your company, your customers, and your business model.
Complex for Small Business
With the given complexity of customization, implementation and the need for a CRM specialist, Salesforce may not be suitable for smaller businesses with limited budgets or businesses that don’t work with a dedicated sales team. For such a business, many basic CRM platforms are available in the market that is cheaper, quick to implement, and ready to use in no time.
Salesforce & Microsoft Dynamics CRMs: Points of Interest
- Cloud-based solution
In comparison to on-premise software cloud-based solutions are more cost-effective and accessible. Cloud deployment eliminates the need to buy additional hardware, hire in-house dev teams. Besides, it can be accessed via any mobile device that has an internet connection. - Simple customization
Salesforce introduces simple customization capabilities to let you make your workspace as convenient and tailored to your needs as possible. From custom templates and dashboard within a few clicks to more precise code customization. - Easy to integrate with the existing IT infrastructure
Salesforce CRM can be integrated with numerous third-party systems which makes it easy to introduce to the company’s existing IT environment. For basic functionalities, no additional technical support is required. - Quick start
Salesforce is based in a cloud which means that you can start managing your business using this CRM soon after you get your subscription. This is a great advantage for companies that want to start their business quickly or enterprises that can not stop their business processes while migrating to a different platform.
- Accessible for small business
With the help of MS Dynamics, small businesses can streamline their key processes and drive their business growth. A variety of solutions offered within MS Dynamics allows small businesses to pick only features that they really need and can afford. - Seamless integration with numerous MS products
Microsoft has a great variety of products tailored to specific needs that can be easily integrated with MS Dynamics. Since all of these solutions are designed by the same company, they all deliver a similar user experience, meaning that it will be easier for MS Dynamics users to use other MS products. - Available on-premise
Even though the cloud solution has its own benefits, it is good when you have an option to settle an on-premise version. Unlike cloud-based MS Dynamics, on-premise software provides full access to its features that are also available even when you do not have internet access. - Extensive pricing model
Microsoft offers an extensive pricing model that allows companies of all sizes and industries to pick the option that fits their needs best. You can pay for a specific app, or pick one of the ready-to-use plans packed with various solutions.
What Are the Benefits of Using CRM?
No matter which of the two solutions you choose, introducing a CRM platform to your current business environment is one of the best decisions a company can make. The following benefits leveraged by business with the CRM on board apply both to Salesforce and MS Dynamics:
- Flexibility
- Scalability
- Cost-Effective
- Improved Performance
- Valuable Insights
- Data-Driven Decision-Making
What to Choose: Salesforce or Microsoft Dynamics?
It is up to you to choose which of the two leading CRM platforms fits your company best. Both solutions offer similar functionalities and are willing to meet various constantly changing market and business requirements. If you want to learn more about Salesforce and MS Dynamics solutions, reach out to the OMI specialists. Our team will be happy to provide you with more details about each CRM and help you pick the right one to cover your business needs and goals.