What is Salesforce?
Salesforce opened in 1999 and pioneered Software as a Service by bringing Customer Relationship Management software to the cloud. Today it sells a family of products on one platform, and what a team receives depends on its chosen products, licenses and configuration.
Sales Cloud automatically captures emails, events and other engagement activity in the CRM and associates it with leads, contacts, accounts and opportunities, which Salesforce calls a single source of truth. It tracks deals across channels, uses AI to prioritize leads, and builds forecasts in real time. Other products cover customer service, marketing, commerce and data, and the Salesforce Platform lets customers build and customize Agentforce and Customer 360. Salesforce also connects its products to Slack.
Salesforce publishes edition descriptions for Sales Cloud on its pricing page, and invites companies to enter their specific needs to receive custom pricing. Plan record ownership, duplicates, permissions, migration and reporting definitions before assuming a feature is included.
Key capabilities
- Sales records Leads, contacts, accounts and opportunities in Sales Cloud.
- Engagement capture Emails and events recorded against CRM records.
- Forecasting Real-time forecasts and AI lead prioritization.
- Platform The Salesforce Platform for Agentforce and Customer 360 customization.
- Related applications Service, marketing, commerce, data and Slack under separate product terms.
Where Salesforce fits
- Customer records Leads, accounts, contacts and opportunities are managed in one CRM, and Starter Suite covers nurturing leads and closing deals.
- Activity capture Calls, emails and meetings are captured, alongside live buyer signals and 30 years of account history.
- Forecasting Forecasts are grounded in deal reality, so a revenue leader can check whether the team will make its number.
- Sales agents Autonomous agents can research prospects, prepare deals and monitor accounts around the clock.
- Work where you work Account insights and deal updates are available inside Slack, Teams, ChatGPT and Claude under enterprise guardrails.
- Sales performance Real-time earnings, quota tracking and SPIFFs support seller motivation and coaching.
- Partners and revenue Partner Cloud tracks co-sold deals and MDF claims, and Revenue Cloud connects quoting, contracts and billing workflows.
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Alternatives to Salesforce
Atomic CRMOpen-source CRM from Marmelab built with React, shadcn-admin-kit and Supabase. It covers contacts, companies, deals, notes and tasks, with inbound email capture, SSO, a mobile web app, a REST API and an MCP server.
Comp AI CRMOpen-source, single-tenant CRM from Comp AI built on Next.js, NestJS, Postgres and the eve agent framework. It reads Gmail or Outlook, enriches records from cited evidence and runs agents you describe in one sentence.
EspoCRMEspoCRM is an AGPLv3 CRM with accounts, leads, opportunities, cases, email and campaigns, an Entity Manager for custom entities and a REST API. It runs on PHP with MySQL, MariaDB or PostgreSQL, via Docker, or in EspoCRM Cloud.