What do you think is the disadvantage of Salesforce, if any?

Hi Avnish,

Disadvantages of salesforce are:

• Overly simple user interface that is quickly outgrown by experienced users.
• Lots of screen refreshes and scrolling up and down; the transition between multiple screens to process transactions can deliver a tedious experience.
• Marketing management functionality is extremely limited. SFDC points to partner applications for this purpose. This involves additional costs and vendor management.
• Customization toolkits can be cumbersome to use, even to many seasoned administrators.
• Dashboards may not reflect the application security for specific users without significant administration effort.
• No Service Level Agreement provided in standard contract.
• Data center reliability has been questioned and several major interruptions in service have been widely publicized.

Hi,

As a developer point of view -

Disadvantages :-

• Apex is a proprietary language. Other than the force.com Eclipse plugin, there's little to no tooling available such as refactoring, code analysis, etc.
• Apex was modeled on Java 5, which is considered to be lagging behind other languages, and without tooling (see #1), can be quite cumbersome.
• Deployment is still fairly manual with lots of gotchas and manual steps. This situation is slowly improving over time, but you'll be disappointed if you're used to having automated deployments.
• Apex lacks packages/namespaces. All of your classes, interfaces, etc. live in one folder on the server. This makes code much less organized and class/interface names necessarily long to avoid name clashes and to provide context. This is one of my biggest complaints, and I would not freely choose to build on force.com for this reason alone.
• The "force.com IDE", aka force.com eclipse plugin, is incredibly slow. Saving any file, whether it be a class file, text file, etc., usually takes at least 5 seconds and sometimes up to 30 seconds depending on how many objects, data types, class files, etc. are in your org. Saving is also a blocking action, requiring not only compilation, but a full sync of your local project with the server. Orders of magnitude slower than Java or .NET.
• The online developer community does not seem very healthy. I've noticed lots of forum posts go unanswered or unsolved. I think this may have something to do with the forum software salesforce.com uses, which seems to suck pretty hard.
• The data access DSL in Apex leaves a lot to be desired. It's not even remotely competitive with the likes of (N)Hibernate, JPA, etc.
• Developing an app on Apex/VisualForce is an exercise in governor limits engineering. Easily half of programmer time is spent trying to optimize to avoid the numerous governor limits and other gotchas like visualforce view state limits. It could be argued that if you write efficient code to begin with you won't have this problem, which is true to an extent. However there are many times that you have valid reasons to make more than x queries in a session, or loop through more than x records, etc.
• The save->compile->run cycle is extremely slow, esp. when it involves zipping and uploading the entire static resource bundle just to do something like test a minor CSS or javascript change.
  In general, the pain of a young, fledgling platform without the benefits of it being open source. You have no way to validate and/or fix bugs in the platform. They say to post it to their IdeaExchange.

Pros of Salesforce:

Customizable dashboard. When you log in, the tool’s dashboard gives you a huge range of report widgets, allowing you to have a bird’s-eye perspective of how your company is performing. Your sales reps can check out real-time summaries of customer data and other relevant statistics.

Easy-to-navigate software. The software is also easy to navigate. A simple navigation bar exists at the top of the window. The tabs are separated into various categories, such as Home, Accounts, Contacts, Leads, Opportunities, Campaigns, Forecasts Files, among others.

Social capabilities. The tool’s social media function and news feed operate very much like Facebook, thus making it very familiar as well as easy to use for users. You can quickly browse the news feed and immediately post status updates, share links, and upload files right from the dashboard.

Hope this helps.

Hi
In its annual report, Salesforce claimed the revenue of $13.3 billion for the fiscal year 2019, which exceeds the revenue made in 2018 by almost $4 billion, and makes Salesforce an uncontested leader of the CRM market.
Despite its numerous advantages and indisputable leadership, the Salesforce system still has a couple of drawbacks for users that hinder its absolute success. So, let’s enumerate major Salesforce problems and see how to decrease their negative effect.
Salesforce problems
Salesforce issues of major customer concern
Based on our Salesforce consulting practice, we see that customers most often face the following Salesforce problems:
Expensiveness and implicit costs.
Customization can easily get off track.
Limited deployment options.
Steep learning curve and user adoption issues.
Let's explore them in detail.
1. Salesforce is expensive and has implicit costs.
Some Salesforce customers complain that the system is heavy on the pocket. A considerable growth of Salesforce expenses may result from the data and storage limits. Although the free storage capacity increased tenfold in 2019 (and now constitutes 10 GB of data storage and 10 GB of file storage per org), it’s still may be insufficient for an organization, which has a huge customer base and stores vast amounts of customer data along with sales and marketing materials, like contracts, proposals, presentations, demos, etc. To solve the problem of data and file storage limits, Salesforce customers purchase external databases and DMSs (like SharePoint).
Another problem is the extra cost of Salesforce support. The basic support envisaged by the free Standard support plan is rather limited. It includes Level 1 support from a Salesforce technical team and access to a number of free self-service resources, like Trailhead, Trailblazer Community, etc. Obviously, to address the Salesforce support needs (like, ongoing CRM administration and constant system monitoring) in full, the company will either have to purchase a more advanced support plan (like Premier, or Premier+) from Salesforce or resort to third-party support services.
Solution: Consider your potential investments from the start. If Salesforce seems too expensive even before making a purchase, you’d better opt for another CRM.
2. Salesforce customization can easily get off track in terms of the scope and budget.
No doubt, Salesforce is an extremely powerful platform. Yet, to feel this power, one may have to build in numerous complementary components. In essence, this work may soon remind setting up a Lego house – one may start with small blocks and then spend a long time choosing additional fancy blocks to create a ‘perfect’ solution that fully satisfies one’s needs. However, with the customization capabilities so ample, it’s easy to go beyond the reasonable limits and make the solution too complex for users.
Solution: Dividing custom features into groups, like “Essential”, “Useful” and “Nice-to-have” and delivering them in order of importance will save your Salesforce solution from excessive customization, and keep the customization costs under control.
3. Salesforce offers limited deployment options.
All primary Salesforce competitors, such as Microsoft Dynamics 365, Oracle CRM, SAP CRM and others, provide multiple deployment options to their customers (e.g., on-premises, cloud or hybrid solutions) as well as different cloud deployment models, like a private cloud, public cloud or hybrid cloud. Salesforce, has only the cloud deployment option and the public cloud deployment model, which may be an issue for companies that want to manage the infrastructure and security of their CRM themselves.
Solution: In case you need to be responsible for the security, performance, and maintenance of your CRM system, for example, due to strict industry regulations, the only solution is not to use Salesforce.
4. Steep learning curve and user adoption issues.
To master Salesforce features (like quote, proposal, contract management and other functionality), users should complete introductory training, which may be rather lengthy. The training duration depends on the number of custom-built features to master in addition to default CRM functionality. Still, a couple of weeks is the bare minimum for efficient user training, which combines self-learning and instructor-led sessions.
However, even with all the required training sessions passed, there’s no guarantee that users will regularly use the system. If Salesforce CRM isn’t configured with user convenience as a priority, user adoption will still be low. For instance, filling in hundreds of ‘required’ fields with customers’ and prospects’ data can be very tedious for sales reps and impact the adoption of Salesforce CRM.
Solution: To speed up user training, it can be accompanied by release notes on custom-built functionality and ongoing assistance of an in-house Salesforce administrator or an outsourced Salesforce services provider.
And to curb the user adoption issues, making CRM convenient and user-friendly with customization is a must. For instance, if there are a lot of required fields that don’t allow sales reps to save records without being filled in, their number should be reduced. It’s also possible to decrease sales reps’ manual efforts by enabling automated field updates (e.g., when the opportunity stage changes to “Closed won”, the date automatically appears in the “Opportunity close date” custom field).
On a final note
Though Salesforce has several issues to take into account before the acquisition, you can decrease their negative effect resorting to Salesforce consulting and support services.
https://www.scnsoft.com/blog/5-salesforce-problems

Well, no platform is perfect, right? Even with Salesforce, there can be a few hitches. For some folks, it's the cost - depending on your business size and needs, it can get a bit pricey. And while it's great that it's so customizable, that can also make it complex to set up and manage. And some people find the reporting tools a bit limiting too. But remember, it's all about what works for your business. And despite these points, lots of folks still find Salesforce super valuable!

There are many disadvantages of Salesforce:

• Expensive.
• You have to pay for add-ons to get the most out of the software.
• Configuration and setup is complex and time-consuming.
• Cluttered interface makes navigation and simple tasks unnecessarily complex.
• The learning curve never seems to end.
• Customer support has a poor reputation.
• Dependence on the internet

Despite these potential disadvantages, Salesforce remains one of the most popular and widely adopted CRM platforms globally. Many organizations find the benefits it offers in terms of streamlined sales, marketing, and customer service processes to outweigh the drawbacks.