Salesforce vs Microsoft Dynamics 365: in-depth comparison & selection tips
July 16, 2024
- While Salesforce is classified as a traditional CRM platform, Dynamics 365 combines CRM and ERP capabilities.
- Given their advanced capabilities and pricing models, both platforms are considered enterprise-oriented CRM solutions. In the meantime, Salesforce and Microsoft offer entry-level plans that can be a good fit for SMBs.
- Salesforce is an exclusively cloud-based, highly scalable SaaS platform. MS Dynamics, on the other hand, offers both cloud and on-premises deployment, but the latter option provides more limited functionality.
- Users can access both Salesforce and Dynamics 365 via a web browser or respective mobile apps. Salesforce offers a single app that covers all of its mobile capabilities, while Dynamics 365 provides separate mobile apps for different products, with each app replicating its web browser counterpart.
As a certified Salesforce Partner and Microsoft Solutions Partner, Itransition provides businesses across industries with comprehensive CRM services to streamline the implementation of both Salesforce and Dynamics 365.
Salesforce vs Dynamics 365 by CRM functionality
Key products for marketing
Salesforce Marketing Cloud
- Cross-Channel Personalization
lets companies personalize web content, ad campaigns, and in-app interactions in real time according to customers’ browsing behavior and historical data.
- Email Marketing, Mobile & Advertising
facilitates the creation of web and in-app customer journeys through a drag-and-drop interface. It also allows for journey personalization with content or multichannel messages (emails, in-app push messaging, etc.) generated and delivered through the right channel according to customer data.
- Marketing Analytics
offers pre-built connectors to integrate your CRM system with different advertising channels or platforms and track marketing campaign performance. It also provides media plan improvement recommendations powered by Einstein, Salesforce’s embedded artificial intelligence engine, to fine-tune budget allocation.
- Customer Loyalty
helps businesses create B2B or B2C loyalty programs, establish loyalty tiers and related benefits, register loyalty program members, and reward them with personalized promotions based on member data.
- B2B Marketing Automation
leverages AI to automate lead management, including lead segmentation at the point of capture, lead grading to identify the best ones to nurture, and lead engagement via triggered messages, surveys, and other actions.
Dynamics 365 Marketing
- Customer Insights Data
is a data platform providing a holistic view of your clients. The solution integrates transactional, behavioral, and demographic data from selected sources into unified customer profiles, groups clients into segments based on their attributes, and provides insights and forecasts, including customer sentiment and customer lifetime value.
- Customer Insights Journeys
previously known as Dynamics 365 Marketing, includes advanced capabilities powered by Copilot, Microsoft’s integrated AI assistant, to adjust customer journeys in real time based on customer data, engaging each client with tailored content, messages, and recommendations through the most suitable channel (email, push notifications, etc.).
Key products for sales
Salesforce Sales Cloud
- Revenue Lifecycle Management
enables your organization to generate quotes for configured products through CPQ tools, deliver a unified shopping experience across apps and websites via shopping cart syncing, speed up invoice generation and other billing operations, and facilitate payment collection with automated payment notifications.
- Sales Engagement
offers multiple features to enhance your engagement strategies, including lead ranking and prioritization, automated email follow-ups, and virtual buyer assistants embedded into your website.
- Sales Team Productivity
helps your sales reps track sales pipeline progress via real-time deal alerts, perform account planning with pre-built templates, and monitor accounts and opportunities through sales dashboards.
- Sales Analytics
includes analytical capabilities to forecast sales based on historical data, spot opportunities to boost sales in new segments, track sales team and individual sales rep performance, and identify the best next actions to close a deal.
- Salesforce automation
provides your sales teams with intuitive drag-and-drop tools to set up automated sales activities and workflows, including account and opportunity management, quoting, and contract management.
Dynamics 365 Sales
- Sales
enables your agents to track sales tasks and customer activities, define sequences of sales actions for their team, prioritize leads and opportunities based on AI-powered scoring models, and monitor KPIs via charts and dashboards. Additionally, the product features sales forecasting capabilities to predict revenue and track performance against set goals.
- Copilot for Sales
provides extensive AI-based functionality to generate content like opportunity summaries, email drafts, or meeting preparation notes, get recommendations on the best sales actions and answers to customers' questions, and analyze customer conversations, sales KPIs, and competitors. Copilot can also assist sales teams to update customer and opportunity records and sync data between deal rooms in Teams and your CRM.
- Sales Insights
is an add-on offering data analytics capabilities like conversation intelligence, predictive lead and opportunity scoring, and future revenue prediction, along with the identification of colleagues who can introduce your sales reps to leads or contacts.
- Microsoft Relationship Sales
combines Dynamics 365 Sales with LinkedIn Sales Navigator. This solution helps you identify potential customers on LinkedIn and mutual connections that can introduce you, understand customers’ interests based on viewing behavior to deliver personalized content, and define the next best sales action to engage them.
Key products for customer service
Salesforce Service Cloud
- Agent & Mobile Worker Productivity
enables your company to distribute support cases among available service agents and provide them with customer data and knowledge articles suggested by Einstein to speed up case resolution.
- Einstein Bots
are advanced multi-channel chatbots that can assist customers in a variety of scenarios, such as resetting passwords and offering order status updates or information on store locations and opening hours.
- Intelligent Service Operations
includes AI-powered data analytics and customer feedback features to monitor and assess your support workflows, including conversation mining to identify common support cases, dashboards for service KPI tracking, and survey tools that can adjust questions based on responses.
- Contact Center
helps you communicate with clients via embedded telephony and live chat and messaging to provide multi-channel assistance. It also enables your organization to easily set up self-service help centers and create customer communities for peer-to-peer knowledge sharing.
- Field Service
offers comprehensive functionality to plan your on-site service operations, including a mobile app for knowledge search, a dispatch management console, a service scheduling engine, and a real-time asset tracking tool.
Dynamics 365 Service
- Customer Service
relies on Copilot’s case management capabilities to route cases to the best-suited agents and provide the latter with AI-generated customer response drafts or knowledge article recommendations. The product also includes automation and self-service features like customer support chatbots, interactive voice responses, prebuilt flows, and community portals to assist customers while minimizing manual workloads. Furthermore, your service agents can access advanced analytics capabilities to monitor KPIs, identify emerging case trends, predict case volumes, and assess customer sentiment and engagement.
- Field Service
streamlines on-site processes via automated service notifications and self-service appointment scheduling for customers. At the same time, your technicians can access work orders and other relevant information via the mobile app or generate work orders and customer email responses with AI.
- Remote Assist
enables your service agents to provide customers and partners with real-time assistance through mixed-reality video calls, access service-related documentation, record call details for future reference, and monitor asset condition via photos and videos.
Other noteworthy CRM products
- Commerce Cloud
provides organizations with specialized tools to support their online business. They can use this product to create digital storefronts via built-in templates, enhance your online store with AI to deliver a personalized customer experience, automate order management tasks like order summary creation, and monitor sales performance via analytical dashboards.
- Industry-oriented Clouds
extend the functionality of generic Salesforce products like Sales Cloud with industry-specific capabilities. For instance, Manufacturing Cloud adds sales contract management and warranty lifecycle management features, while Financial Services Cloud includes tools to streamline insurance policy administration and lending operations.
- Community Cloud
helps companies create online communities and portals that enable customers to access information or services, ensure effective coordination and data sharing with business partners, and facilitate collaboration among employees.
- Commerce
offers a comprehensive set of features to enhance ecommerce operations. Businesses can build digital storefronts via drag-and-drop content authoring and equip them with AI-powered features like product recommendation engines and context-aware search to personalize each buying experience, or embed advanced chatbots to answer customer questions 24/7.
Considerations
Overall CRM capabilities
With their broad and partially overlapping selection of products and features, Salesforce and MS Dynamics can easily be listed among the most comprehensive platforms in the CRM market. Their standard capabilities can also be complemented with free and paid extension packages available on the respective app marketplaces, Salesforce AppExchange and Microsoft AppSource. To get a better idea of the platforms’ functional scope, take advantage of their 30-day free trials.
AI-powered functionality
Both platforms feature smart automation and advanced analytics capabilities powered by their respective AI engines, which make them stand out from other competitors. Their range of AI-powered CRM tools is ever-expanding, and likely inspired by each other's innovations. In April 2024, for instance, Salesforce launched Einstein Copilot, a conversational assistant, while Dynamics 365 introduced new AI-based features for Field Service.
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Salesforce vs Dynamics 365 by non-CRM functionality
Since Salesforce focuses on customer-oriented processes, adopters requiring broader business function coverage can take two paths:
- Salesforce integration
with third-party or custom ERP systems, HR management systems, accounting software, and other solutions (further details in the following section on integration capabilities).
- AppExchange applications
including add-ons and full-fledged solutions, developed on top of the Salesforce Platform (Salesforce’s PaaS service) and available on Salesforce’s marketplace. For instance, Certinia is a Salesforce-based software solution offering ERP functionality like supply chain management and finance and accounting.
As an ensemble of products featuring CRM and ERP capabilities, MS Dynamics can help businesses manage a wider range of corporate functions:
- Supply Chain Management
offers AI-powered automation and analytics features to optimize multiple processes across the value chain, including demand planning, procurement and sourcing, manufacturing operations, order fulfillment, asset management, and warehouse management.
- Human Resources
enables HR specialists to centralize employee data into unified profiles, automate administrative tasks, track employee performance, and define leave programs, compensation plans, or benefits packages. At the same time, employees can access key HR functions via self-service tools.
- Finance
includes financial management and accounting tools to monitor business performance, forecast cash flows, facilitate budgeting, and automate invoicing and payment execution or collection.
- Project Operations
is a project management solution to facilitate budgeting and quoting based on accurate cost estimates, create project task plans and status reports, optimize resource allocation, and foster collaboration and information sharing across team members.
Considerations
Customer-focused capabilities
Overall functional scope
Salesforce vs Dynamics 365 by customization possibilities
- Declarative tools
enable different types of no-code customizations to create Custom Objects, Layouts, Lightning record pages, Flows, and Approval processes.
- Lightning Platform
is a suite of services and developer tools (LWC, Aura, Apex) for building custom applications, integrations, and functionality.
- AppExchange
offers a plethora of easy-to-install, point-and-click extension packages to expand and modify standard Salesforce functionality.
- WYSIWYG designers & expression-based languages
are low-code/no-code tools to customize elements like field settings, business processes, and visualization components.
- Azure PaaS
is a cloud-based environment providing a development framework and ready-made features to customize Dynamics 365 applications.
Considerations
Salesforce vs Dynamics 365 by integration capabilities
- AppExchange
offers a broad range of off-the-shelf integrations with third-party tools.
- MuleSoft
is an integration platform enabling users to create custom APIs and access a library of pre-built connectors with numerous applications and services, including SAP, NetSuite, Workday, AWS, LinkedIn, and Gmail.
- Data Cloud
is a data integration platform capable of ingesting streams of data from multiple sources in real-time via out-of-the-box connectors. It’s commonly used to fuel Salesforce’s AI and data analytics tools.
- Salesforce Connect
enables users to view, search, and modify data stored outside your Salesforce org (for instance, on your ERP system) by accessing this data in real time through web service callouts instead of copying it into the org.
- Accounting Subledger
is a product that consolidates financial data between Salesforce and your accounting software to easily track received, paid, and allocated funds.
- Microsoft Dataverse
is a cloud-based data storage that integrates data across Microsoft products like Dynamics 365, Power Apps, Power Automate, Power BI, and Outlook.
- Microsoft Power Platform & Azure
provide various services to facilitate integration with external applications, including Power Automate (for low-code/no-code integration), Azure Logic Apps (more advanced integration capabilities), and Azure API Management (to manage APIs across hybrid and multicloud environments).
- AppSource
provides ready-to-use integrations with third-party products.
Considerations
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Salesforce vs Dynamics 365 by pricing
- Multiple tiered plans for each Cloud
- Prices available on the Salesforce website
- Billed annually, except for specific starter plans (monthly or annually)
- 30-day free trial
- Multiple plans for each product (Marketing, Sales, Service, etc.)
- Full licensing guide available on the Microsoft website
- Billed monthly
- 30-day free trial
Considerations
Pricing complexities
Price ranges
Bundles & discounts
Our CRM services
- Business needs elicitation and CRM strategy definition
- Audit of your software ecosystem and existing CRM solutions, if any
- Software conceptualization and tech stack selection
- Data governance and management consultancy
- CRM platform selection and license optimization
- Project planning and budgeting
- Custom development or platform configuration and customization supervision
- CRM migration planning and backup strategy creation
- User training and onboarding
- CRM architecture design
- Front-end and back-end CRM development or CRM platform customization, configuration, and workflow setup
- CRM integration with your software ecosystem
- End-to-end QA and testing
- CRM deployment to the target environment
- CRM data migration from your legacy CRM to the new one
- CRM maintenance and troubleshooting
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