CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

My organization (non-profit in the education reform sector) is re-building its website, and at the same time starting from scratch with a CRM system. Our developer is recommending Drupal for our new site, and CiviCRM seems the likeliest solution for our CRM needs (contact/affiliation management, fundraising, communications tracking).

I've seen the reasons why CiviCRM is a better solution than Salesforce - will anyone make the other case? What can I get with Salesforce that CiviCRM doesn't have?

Many thanks.

One key thing to consider is that Salesforce is offered as a 'fully managed service' (SAAS acronym commonly used here). CiviCRM is software which you or your developer / consultant will need to host OR find a good host for (there are lots of options out there, some better than others and generally you get what you pay for). Due diligence is needed to make sure the hosting location is adequately redundant, secure, provides sufficient CPU utilization and bandwidth, etc.

Since I can't resist the other side of the argument, I'll just reinforce that CiviCRM and Drupal play really nicely together and give you lots of options for integrating your 'backoffice' functions with your 'interactive' website.

If you haven't browsed the free online book - Understanding CiviCRM - check it out for a good overview of the 'possibilities' :-)
http://en.flossmanuals.net/civicrm

I'm a Salesforce administrator for a nonprofit in my day job, looking at CiviCRM for a volunteer project. I've only just gotten started with CiviCRM, so please forgive and correct me if I mis-cite or underestimate its capabilities.

Salesforce is much more powerful than CiviCRM in many ways, but especially in terms of ease, extent, and granularity of customization, particularly regarding custom data; reporting; integration with a wider variety of tools (MS Outlook, MS Office, mobile devices) that you may already be using; integration with third party tools for things like surveying, bulk e-mail (CiviMail seems good, but managing your own deliverability isn't very viable in 2010), data management outside of the UI.

That said, my initial impression is that CiviCRM's out-of-the-box setup for some of the most common nonprofit tasks is much more straightforward. The out-of-the-box integration with Drupal users and groups is way ahead of Salesforce and any CMS, except maybe Plone. Getting Salesforce and Drupal to work together is a job for a professional Drupal developer with a strong understanding of working with database APIs. Amazing things can be done with Salesforce's API, but not through point-and-click. 

Salesforce costs can mount up if you have needs beyond the ten donated licenses - many third-party developers donate or deeply discount their tools to nonprofits, but far from all. For my day job, the expense of customizing CiviCRM for our needs would have been significant and not sustainable or easily extensible in the way that Salesforce is. However, for this project for my religious community, we need access to the data, beyond a Drupal-driven profile listing, by many more than 10 people at a time, and the $360/user/year for additional users isn't a feasible expense, and our data model can fit within the CiviCRM framework, I think.

Hope that helps.

Quote from: thomast on March 26, 2010, 09:02:37 pm

Salesforce is much more powerful than CiviCRM in many ways, but especially in terms of ease, extent, and granularity of customization, particularly regarding custom data; reporting;

Could you elaborate is easier to extend and customise on the custom datas ?

FYI, there is a service provider civismtp, that takes care of delivering the msgs.

In Salesforce, I can not only create custom fields on the existing data structures, but create an entire new data structure that relates to either a current or other custom data object. Take for example, a press clipping database. In Salesforce, I can create a Custom Object with date of publication, title, link to the clipping, selection list of organizational programs to indicate what the article pertained to, and relationships to the reporter's contact record, media outlet's organization record, and the press campaign that garnered the mention. These records will then show up in the UI as a "related list" on both the contact and the outlet records. I can then create reports that show press clippings grouped by author, publication, organizational project, or what have you. Not a whit of programming is required to accomplish this task.

Salesforce not only lets you indicate whether fields are required, but has a very robust data validation engine that can help ensure data quality (is my grant period end date after the grant period start date?; I don't want to require email, phone or postal address individually, but I want to ensure that any new contact has at least one of those filled.)

CiviSMTP looks very interesting, but costs (very reasonably) - most nonprofits use Vertical Response with Salesforce and get 10k emails/month for free. It also looks like CiviSMTP is good about reactive maintenance of their service's delivery, but may not have the infrastructure to proactively pursue whitelisting with major ISPs, develop relationships with mail administrators to streamline deliverability problem resolution, etc.

What I missed mentioning before is that due to Salesforce's complexity, getting it set up by a non-technical person is not really feasible, but because it's a sign-up-and-get-it web service, many nonprofits try to bootstrap their Salesforce implementation, with mixed-to-poor results. There are several orgs in my local NP Salesforce user group who got it primarily because it was free and have major data and usability problems because they didn't understand what they were getting in to. My organization was fortunate to have the resources to hire an outside consultant to set us up and provide initial training, and then I took a 4-day administrators' course which enables me to keep things going, and provide new functionality as programs grow and change. Salesforce's free is just like CiviCRM's - like kittens. Only with Salesforce, you're getting Persian kittens that require deluxe cat food and breed-specific vets, whereas CiviCRM's kittens are a bit more forgiving in the level of care under which they can still thrive.

With regard to Press Releases as an example of custom data that SalesForce handles better than CiviCRM.

I don't think a Press Release belongs in a CRM. It's better off in a CMS that is designed to do the things with content that CMSes are good at, including repurposing it in various ways, letting it be tagged with terms used across the site, and put into content RSS feeds.

The nice thing about CiviCRM is that a Press Release can be created in Drupal and the relationships with contacts in CiviCRM can be managed via a CCK all through a UI interface.

I do think that integration with popular email clients is important for a CRM and not (yet) provided properly by CiviCRM.

While Salesforce has extensive integration with other services through its app exchange, CiviCRM has probably more extensive integration with more tools through Drupal. When appropriate in social media contexts, 3rd party tool users are linked to Drupal accounts which are linked to CiviCRM contacts.

I was reminded today by email about a comparison matrix I started long ago that might be useful here: http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRM/Competitive+Analysis+Matrix