Microsoft Dynamics and Salesforce are both leading business application suites that contain a variety of useful business tools. And while the two platforms offer solution portfolios aimed at different business audiences and use cases, they overlap in their emphasis on advanced features and customer relationship management features.
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If your organization is looking for a CRM solution, Microsoft Dynamics and Salesforce are two of the best options on the market. But which one is best for your organization? To guide you through the decision-making process, this product comparison guide looks at the core features of each CRM, its pros and cons, and what it costs to get started with Microsoft Dynamics vs. Salesforce software.
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What is Microsoft Dynamics?
Microsoft Dynamics is a suite of intelligent business applications that improves the operational efficiency of companies. Dynamics solutions focus on making businesses more agile and cost efficient, especially with corporate resource planning and customer relationship management solutions. The CRM tools improve sales productivity and marketing effectiveness using business intelligence, campaign management, and social insights on-premises, in the cloud, or in a hybrid setup.
What is Sales Force?
Sales team is a company that builds cloud-based software to help businesses discover and engage with more prospects, close more deals, and provide better customer service. The Customer 360 CRM solution is designed to help sales, commerce, marketing, IT teams, and other departments build relationships not only with customers, but with employees as well. In addition to traditional CRM, Salesforce is also commonly used for app development and big data analytics through Tableau.
Microsoft Dynamics vs. Salesforce: Comparison Chart
| Microsoft Dynamics | Sales team | |
|---|---|---|
| Sales forecasts | Yes | Yes |
| Head of management | Yes | Yes |
| Sales performance management | no | Yes |
| Report | Yes | Yes |
| Ecommerce integrations | Third-party add-on or plug-ins | Addition |
| Stake | On-premises, in the cloud or hybrid | Cloud |
| Prices | Starts at $50 | Starts at $25 |
Microsoft Dynamics vs. Salesforce: Feature Comparison
Sales and marketing
Microsoft Dynamics uses a connected sales and marketing solution to increase sales and engagement for its customers, regardless of who they are funnel stage. It achieves this using unified data, productivity and collaboration tools.
Dynamics users can visualize customer data and use artificial intelligence to inform their decisions. Users can personalize and predict customer intent, accelerate sales and marketing, automate the sales process, increase productivity, and empower and coach teams in real time.
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Salesforce approaches sales and marketing through two products: Sales cloud and Marketing cloud. Sales Cloud optimizes efficiency and reduces costs using data, intelligence, and automation. It helps its clients achieve their goals with opportunity management, sales automation, and forecast management.
Marketing Cloud empowers its users to win customers and make more efficient engagements through data-first digital marketing. Users can automate engagement across channels, use intelligent insights to optimize marketing performance, and personalize moments using real-time data from Salesforce Genie Customer Cloud.
Customer service
Microsoft Dynamics delivers exceptional customer journeys through an intelligent contact center solution that enables users to personalize customer experiences, increase agent effectiveness, and optimize service operations. It strengthens customer engagement by delivering omnichannel service, resolving customer issues faster, improving case management, and advancing field service management.
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On the other hand, Salesforce offers Service Cloud, a single platform for its users to maximize return on investment and improve efficiency from the contact center to the field. Through features like automation and case management, Service Cloud scales every process and personalizes every engagement with artificial intelligence.
Trade
Microsoft Dynamics digital trading solutions enable users to provide a unique trading experience and customize it to meet the changing purchasing needs of their customers. More specific, Dynamics 365 makes it possible to connect the physical and digital shopping channels that customers use to make shopping seamless. It also adds intelligence to sales and retail data, improves flexibility for better customization, and streamlines trading operations.
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Salesforce offers Commerce Cloud to maximize business revenue through flexible tools and automation. The intelligent recommendations are generated through AI and are especially useful for increasing conversions. Commerce Cloud products include B2B Commerce, Order Management to save costs and drive growth, Commerce Marketplace, and Payments.
Integrations
Both solutions offer their customers extensive integration options. However, Microsoft Dynamics’ ability to efficiently integrate management software across an organization’s departments, divisions, and locations makes it a popular choice for large and growing organizations. Moreover, one of the notable integrations of Microsoft Dynamics is its complete integration with the Microsoft Office suite.
As for Salesforce, it is latest integrations include Tableau and Slack to enhance real-time visualizations and collaboration, respectively. These integrations in particular take Salesforce one step closer to meeting the needs of its users through a single tech stack. The Tableau integration gives users instant access to customer analytics and visualizations to ensure they make the right decisions much faster; the Slack integration aims to simplify processes and collaboration to reduce organizational silos between teams.
Advantages and disadvantages of Microsoft Dynamics
Advantages
- Integrations with Microsoft products make it a seamless solution for teams already subscribed to other Microsoft products.
- The low-code platform makes Dynamics easy to use and configure.
- Customization is easy using .NET, HTML, and Java.
- Dynamics is highly scalable to meet user needs whether scaling up or down.
- Dynamics is fully compliant with GDPR and other regulations because it uses high-level security standards of the Azure platform.
cons
- The minimum subscription fees are higher than Salesforce.
- There are no sales performance management, partner management, or time tracking features.
Salesforce Pros and Cons
Advantages
- Customers not only enjoy a product, but an entire ecosystem of solutions.
- Salesforce includes plans suitable for small businesses and startups.
- The automation and AI-infused solutions enable companies to generate more granular, data-driven insights.
- Salesforce offers extensive out-of-the-box functionality.
cons
- It’s easy for users to over-customize their Salesforce solutions, making them unnecessarily complex and ineffective for core business functions.
- There is no local server deployment available as Salesforce is completely cloud based.
Pricing for Microsoft Dynamics and Salesforce
Microsoft Dynamics covers a wide range of business areas and has an individual price for each of these areas. The cheapest solution package starts at $50 per user per month. For more information about Microsoft Dynamics pricing breakdown for different solutions and industries, you can visit the pricing page.
Similarly, Salesforce pricing is based on both products and add-ons. When you choose an edition, you get a bundle of some of the most popular Salesforce features in one package. Add-ons give users the ability to customize their CRM solutions to deliver the desired product. The cheapest Salesforce product package starts at $25 per user per month. To discover Salesforce pricing page to determine which product or solution best fits your needs.
Which is better: Salesforce or Microsoft Dynamics?
These two top CRM products are well-developed solutions in their own right, but are even more sophisticated when you consider the myriad of third-party integrations each offers. In other words, they’re both great solutions with enterprise-level features.
Microsoft Dynamics may be the better choice if you are a larger, established company or if you already use Microsoft Office and other products in the Microsoft ecosystem. Microsoft Dynamics instances are deployed using third-party resale and consulting partners. The dedicated focus on your specific implementation makes Dynamics a top consideration for many of the largest and most complex enterprises.
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Salesforce serves businesses of all sizes and is particularly beneficial to customers who want to make the most of extensive integrations, an ecosystem beyond CRM, advanced automation, and/or AI capabilities. In addition, it may be more attractive to smaller and younger companies due to its lower starting price.
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