Alternative to Salesforce A system written around your process
CRM
What Salesforce is
Salesforce is the most widely used CRM in the world, with Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud and Commerce Cloud. Apex and the Lightning platform let you change almost anything in it, and that same flexibility is what makes it complex and expensive to implement. It dominates enterprise and increasingly reaches mid-sized companies.
Five limits of Salesforce
Not faults, boundaries - these are the places where clients most often run into the edge of the product.
Licence costs
Enterprise Edition runs about €165 per user per month. A team of 20 is roughly €39,000 a year in licences alone, before anyone builds anything.
Implementation and administration complexity
Salesforce needs a dedicated administrator - a certified Salesforce Admin costs €2,800-4,200 a month - and without one the system becomes disordered and hard to use quickly.
Apex governor limits
Apex code runs under hard limits: 100 SOQL queries per transaction, 150 DML operations, 10 seconds of CPU. Complex logic does not fit comfortably inside that.
Locked to the platform
Business logic written in Apex, Flow configuration and data in Salesforce's shape are practically impossible to move elsewhere without rewriting from scratch.
Lightning is slow
Lightning Experience takes three to eight seconds to move between screens. A salesperson loses minutes a day to that, every day.
Salesforce against a system written from scratch
| Feature | Salesforce | Custom |
|---|---|---|
| Licence cost, 20 people a year | About €39,000 | None - it is your system |
| Freedom in business logic | Apex, under governor limits | Any language, no artificial ceilings |
| Interface speed | Lightning: 3-8s per screen | Under a second |
| Administration | Needs a certified admin | A plain admin panel, no specialist required |
| Data migration | Locked in by Apex and SOQL | Standard technologies, straightforward to move |
| Integrations | AppExchange, paid, plus the API | Any integration, at no additional cost |
Total cost of ownership over three years
A subscription looks cheap by the month. After three years the bill often reads differently, so we add it all up.
| Item | Salesforce | Custom |
|---|---|---|
| Licence / hosting (year) | €39,000 | €1,100 |
| Build | €18,500 | €16,500 |
| Customisation and development (year) | €14,000 | €5,600 |
| Maintenance and support (year) | €33,500 | €4,200 |
| Total (3 years) | €105,000 | €27,000 |
Figures are quoted in euro, converted from Polish złoty at a fixed rate of 4.30 PLN to 1 EUR and rounded. Contracts are settled in either currency.
When moving pays off
Companies of 20 to 100 people paying for Salesforce Enterprise and using 20 to 30% of what it does. Licences plus a full-time Salesforce administrator can take a serious share of the IT budget.
Salesforce licences cost more than €23,000 a year
Your team uses less than 30% of what Salesforce offers
Apex governor limits block logic you actually need
You would rather not depend on a single vendor for the whole system
The speed of Lightning is a daily irritation for the sales team
Frequently asked questions
Is replacing Salesforce with a custom system worth it?
With 20 or more people, Salesforce licences (€39,000+ a year) plus administration (€35,000+ a year) quickly exceed the cost of running a CRM built for you. The return typically arrives in 12 to 18 months.
How do we get our data out of Salesforce?
Through Data Loader or the Bulk API. The hard part is the business logic written in Apex and Flow: it has to be read, understood and rewritten, which takes two to four months.
Will a custom CRM be as secure as Salesforce?
Yes. It can implement the same standards - encryption, role-based access, audit trail, two-factor authentication. The difference is that those have to be designed in deliberately and audited on a schedule.
Need an alternative to Salesforce?
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