Salesforce vs Microsoft: What is the Best Platform for Business App Development

Why are entrepreneurs and executives of large enterprises demanding more functionality, more scalability, more mobility today? Businesses can’t grow without nurturing customers, and consumer expectations have changed dramatically in recent times. People expect seamless customer support along with smooth purchase experience via their preferred means of communication – mobile phones. But beyond the direct connection with your clients, mobile applications are vastly extending software capabilities.

When searching for the development platform, entrepreneurs choose either the simplest one to deal with or the platform that gives access to the very best ecosystem. Salesforce & Microsoft are leading players in the platform-ecosystem world, offering serious assets for entrepreneurs and developers alike. Both are aiming to be a comprehensive solution to serve the growing business needs: from CRM technology offerings to robust cloud app development tools to AI-based products. 

The two tech giants are archrivals with a long story of struggling for the business software market leadership. Microsoft dominated the enterprise app market for a long time, but Salesforce reshaped it with cloud offerings, changing the game for older software providers. The company built a billion-dollar empire from CRM following the main idea: deliver software round the clock to people over the cloud. It took Microsoft pretty much time and billions of investments to enter the SaaS market where Salesforce was a king. The fierce competition on various cloud fronts required constant improvements from all players. 

So, let’s figure out which platform is a better choice not only from the technology perspective but as an environment to build a high-growth business.

The main Salesforce developer instrument is Force.com or Lightning Platform that accelerates app creation and makes it more efficient. The PaaS platform incorporates the tools – from low code to code – Heroku, SalesforceDX, App Builder, Lightning Flow – dramatically speeding up the building process while allowing for high-level customization and configuration.

Low code tools provide many benefits and open up an enormous opportunity to get non-technical employees involved in the application development process. At the same time, coders get the flexibility to customize complex data integrations, logic, UI via hand-programming.

Gartner recognized the importance of low-coding when it released a Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Low-Code Application Platforms in 2019. Salesforce tops the Leaders quadrant, showing persistent growth and innovation. Microsoft was in the Challengers quadrant in 2018 and jumped to the Leaders only in 2019.

PowerApps’s biggest strength is its compatibility with a wide range of Microsoft products & Office applications. However, there are very few options to tweak code. The product is perfect for building some simple apps such as contact lists or mobile surveying applications. But it’s not the best choice if you demand heavy customization of a project. 

Lightning’s “design once, use anywhere” approach for desktop and mobile interfaces accelerate business processes, allowing end-users to easily interact with applications. Point-and-click features can be used to not only just build business logic but also access developer-built code. Advanced users and programmers can customize workflows and integrate it with external sources using Apex language. Yet newcomers will require the training to build highly customized applications.

For experienced coders, Salesforce offers a powerful but more technically challenging development tool Heroku, which supports popular programming languages: Ruby, Java, PHP, Node, etc. Heroku is a cloud service platform that takes care of hardware, operating systems, servers, allowing developers to concentrate on creating software rather than infrastructure. Focused on building consumer-facing apps, Heroku enables simple application development and deployment as well. 

The PaaS provider recognizes the demands for traditional development methods to address the business requirements for more complex solutions. Catering to conventional developers,  Salesforce launched a cutting-edge environment, which is committed to providing the needed support and tools. SalesforceDX boosts developer productivity with modern life-cycle management tools that enable true version control, improved team collaboration, and agile development. Combining features from Force.com and Heroku Flow, all functionality is pulled into one place additionally enhanced with continuous integration capabilities. Note, that DX primarily targets the conventional developers with strong coding skills and knowledge of open programming languages like Node or Java.

• Salesforce Command-Line Interface (CLI) helps in retrieving metadata, creating a project, exporting & importing data, and manipulating scratch orgs. This tool makes it much easier and more pleasant to develop custom solutions.
• Scratch orgs are lightweight environments for development and testing that you can launch on-demand. They are essentially mini developer orgs that allow working upon a different piece of work independently. This is the killer feature in enabling more traditional dev workflow and version control as a source of truth. You can use these orgs as a temporary environment to make changes and destroy them with a single script when done. It helps build your app consistently over and over again, which is great for team collaboration and test automation.
• Version Control System (VCS) is a mechanism for keeping track of your code. VCS serves as a backup in case you need to roll back to previous versions of your software and supports collaboration with your team.
• Continuous Integration (CI)-enabling features: automated deployments off of GitHub repositories allows keeping track of any changes in your code and traceback code snippets to a specific point of time. Integration with Heroku Flow that supports orgs as a target environment means you can build out a deployment pipeline that can make changes from your VCS and promote them between environments.

Installing Visual Studio Code, a lightweight open-source editor for engineering and debugging cloud applications is necessary if you want to leverage features like SalesforceDX. VS Code with the Salesforce supported extensions like Apex, Visualforce, Aura Components, Apex Interactive Debugger, Apex Replay Debugger make interacting with SFDX commands hassle-free.

All these tools and features along with Heroku pipelines and CI play a crucial role in making the developer tasks easier, deployment faster, project management painless.

is a cloud computing service that provides resources a business needs to run all or part of operations virtually, including storage, networking, analytics, engineering, deploying, and managing cloud-designed apps. You have the option of scaling resources according to business requirements.

In the .NET environment, you can create custom layouts, design your theme, and handle all the user experience via hand programming. Also, you need to have a sound code knowledge to design interfaces that scale across multiple devices on .NET. 

On the other hand, Salesforce’s overriding proposition is that it provides tons of capabilities out of the box, enabling endless customization without coding. First configure, then customize using declarative tools and extensions as per requirements. Its Lightning Design System allows creating layouts and user interfaces rapidly by dragging and dropping ready-to-use components. Applications built with Lightning automatically scale for mobile & desktop screen sizes. Tools for data analytics and reporting can be either created and embedded without code. This approach requires less developer force because non-technical users and admins can cope with this.

Another Salesforce’s significant asset is the educational network Trailhead. A gamified, free learning platform allows users to acquire the skills needed to be anything from an advanced user to an Administrator or a Developer. Whether you are a beginner or advanced, there are thousands of paths everyone can find the one to benefit from. Trailhead appeals to developers and business users like no other platform. There are even modules and trails guiding .NET developers to pick up Apex language. Beyond the educational content, you can put the acquired skills to the practice on Trailhead Playground for hands-on experience. Starting as a novice you can grow to a qualified developer.

Salesforce discovered that their consumers didn’t need software, but the solutions tailored to their specific needs. When custom software development was a costly way of growing business, the vendor built the business model on the partnership to address this issue. The cloud software provider cooperates with hundreds of independent software vendors, integrators, and consultants who support the technology and drive innovation for all of the users. 

Salesforce operates the largest enterprise app marketplace, AppExchange. By opening up the platform to third-party vendors, the number of software complete solutions, applications, add-ons rose sharply. Currently, it offers over 5,000 apps paid and free of charge for clients to extend the functionality. The company applies rigorous approval processes, so be sure the apps are security-tested and peer-reviewed. Additionally, there is a large section of certified consulting partners who can help you with the development and listing of your own application on the leading marketplace.

Finally, the Trailblazer Community provides an environment for customers and partners to get answers and feedback on a product and share ideas. Altogether, Salesforce supports a growing ecosystem of technology partners, consultants, and customers that solve vital business problems.

Microsoft is a new player to SaaS and PaaS markets, but we should admit that it evolves by leaps and bounds in this direction. Facing the market leader, the company chose to pursue the way that has proved to be successful. PowerApps, Microsoft Learn, and AppSource are still in the early days and lack the functionality and capabilities of Salesforce mature products. Their great advantage is in seamless integration with all the Microsoft tools and services. Known to many programs like Excel, SharePoint, Skype, Word, Outlook are now linked together and easily accessed via any of Microsoft cloud products. Although Salesforce does integrate with the same Office apps, it cannot touch the seamlessness of Microsoft integration. However, this is a drop in the ocean compared to what Salesforce offers.   

Partner relationships, self-service training, advanced development tools, and enterprise value form a robust ecosystem for entrepreneurs, startups, and organizations that want to evolve quickly and strategically. Salesforce technology and services are centered around customer needs. Following their Clicks over Code concept, the vendor created an easy to use platform focused on the latest technologies that cover the needs of both business users and professional coders. Leveraging the tremendous opportunities of platform-ecosystem, you can build not just an enterprise application but a high-growth business. 

Whether you need technical advice or a certified consultation on your product roadmap, you can always get in touch with Salesforce partners like ApexTech. We understand the business challenges you face and can help you build a solution that combines the best of strategy and technology.