Microsoft Dynamics 365 or Salesforce

The most important source of a competitive advantage is the one that can survive technology-fuelled disruption. CRM is about more than technology—it’s about customers. When choosing a Customer Engagement solution for your organization, the options are more and more focused on two choices - Microsoft Dynamics 365 or Salesforce. Both are mature solutions and recognized market and feature leaders.Below are the reasons why Microsoft Dynamics 365 clearly wins out over Salesforce.

Business Drivers

• Get most out of your employees and office investments - Employees in office are used to using Microsoft products and is part of life. As a Microsoft product, Dynamics gives you much more synergy with Office and other Microsoft technologies than Sales force could ever achieve. It delivers unmatched productivity due to Microsoft office integration.

Dynamics 365 CRM, for instance, can be seamlessly integrated with Office 365 to allow you to work right from within apps such as Outlook, SharePoint, and Yammer.

People are more comfortable with what they already know.  Getting everyone in your company on board to use CRM can be a challenge, but having something easy to use can be a distinct advantage.

• How important is Analytics? - BI and Analytics is the future of CRM. Microsoft Dynamics 365 offers you customizable dashboards, powerful reports, and support for Power BI for Office 365. It delivers comprehensive business information and user-friendly visualizations. When it comes to data visualization, Dynamics has a decisive edge over Salesforce. It inherits security and data privileges, supports charts, lists and iFrame panels and taps into real-time data.  Salesforce, in contrast, often needs to be manually refreshed and requires users to go to specialized pages to find their dashboards.Salesforce Analytics Cloud, a business intelligence software powered by Wave, leverages cloud and mobile technology to deliver more powerful and secure data, faster. Although it lacks data integration tools, there are various third-party solutions available on AppExchange. It further lacks extensibility and requires you to learn a proprietary language that can incur additional costs to rack up the monthly subscription.

Power BI is head and shoulders above anything Salesforce offers today. This bodes well for Dynamics because BI is destined to become the most important feature of CRM.

However, Dynamics CRM integrates with Microsoft Power BI that facilitates agile data analysis through self-service business intelligence analytics managed in the cloud for collaboration and sharing. It is a simple, all-in-one analytics solution to extract and transform functions, analyze capabilities and powerful data visualizations.

• Total Cost of Ownership - Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM provides more value for less cost. One of the major cost is per user licensing. The cost per user for Dynamics 365 CRM is less than the cost of Salesforce CRM. With Dynamics CRM, you get more features at a more reasonable price- a better value. The enterprise edition of Dynamics CRM is approx. $ 115 per user/month while Salesforce is $ 150 per user/month.
  • Microsoft Pricing: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/pricing
  • com Pricing: https://www.salesforce.com/in/editions-pricing/sales-cloud/

• Hidden Costs - There can be hidden cost that you may not foresee up front. Many of the features that are add-ons with Salesforce are either built in or available at a lower cost with Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM. Example, additional Storage costs can also be very high with Salesforce. (For example, 1 gigabyte of storage costs around $250 with Salesforce, while the same amount of storage with Dynamics CRM would cost around $10.

When comparing these two products, make sure that you compare all the benefits, not just the costs. Example developer resource availability and cost. Microsoft solution offers better total cost of ownership (TCO).

• Complete Package - Microsoft’s strategy with Dynamics 365 umbrella is a more futuristic and complete package. Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 has powerful ERP integration capabilities, making Dynamics 365 ideal for companies looking for a platform that will enable them to flow data easily between the back and front office and track the customer experience from start to finish. Acquisition and social media integrations like LinkedIn has made the story even stronger.

So, if companies are looking at complete and futuristic platform package with the Dynamics 365 ERP-CRM integration, Microsoft has a leg up in the Salesforce arena, where Salesforce has dominated in CRM but hasn’t grabbed a foothold in the ERP space.

Technical Drivers

Apart from technical reasons like Dynamics 365 CRM integrates and works well with apps such as Office, Outlook, SharePoint, and Yammer and the technical resource availability for Dynamics CRM and related technologies there are some more areas that needs to be looked at.

Data Ownership and Accessibility - Salesforce and Microsoft have different policies when it comes to the data residing in your CRM system.  Depending on the plan, Salesforce charges extra for api access or backups of your data.  While with Microsoft the data in your CRM system is yours to do with as you please. Backups of your Microsoft CRM data are available upon request and api access to your data is included with your subscription.

Development Flexibility - Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM employs universal programming languages (such as HTML, .Net, JavaScript etc.) which are more widely available. While Salesforce uses its own programming language (Apex). Companies usually don’t want to rely and depend on a particular programming language specific to one software.

Easy Integration – Developing integration with 3^rd party software is easy with the use of languages like Microsoft .Net, WebServices, REST API etc.

Power BI is head and shoulders above anything Salesforce offers today. This bodes well for Dynamics because BI is destined to become the most important feature of CRM.

Choice of Deployment - With Dynamics 365 CRM, you pick where and how to deploy it whereas Salesforce is only available through the cloud, and this one-dimensionality can greatly limit its use cases. With the power of choice in deployment, Microsoft Dynamics CRM allows you to implement in the cloud, on-premises, or have your solution privately hosted.

Your business is unique and circumstances change over time. Having the option to change could save you considerable time and expense.

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