This brief but accurate article would hopefully give you guidance to easily evaluate and select the best platform your company needs.

After you finish reading this article in which we compare NetSuite and Salesforce from an ecosystem, platform, and application perspective, you will have everything you need to wisely choose between either of them. 

Before we start the evaluation between NetSuite and Salesforce, there are some answers you need to have: do you want the best of breed financial management platform? Best of breed CRM? Integrated?

Having these questions in mind during your reading would make it easier for you to decide which platform to choose at the end of it. 

This short but precise analysis would help you determine which platform fits your company profile to increase its market competition and facilitate the management of it all.

Join us in our journey through this Salesforce comparison!

NetSuite vs Salesforce: ERP Comparison

The Salesforce platform provides a series of ERP and PSA products available on the FinancialForce application. It is important to highlight that, unlike it may appear from its marketing perspective, FinancialForce is not a division of Salesforce or a Salesforce product.

Unit4 and Salesforce integration and investment in the FinancialForce platform around 2009 started the beginning of the history between the two companies.

Unit4’s successful strategy was to use the growing social approval of Salesforce CRM while realizing its Force ecosystem.

FinancialForce’s market strategy is strongly based on the Salesforce established platform almost 85% of FinanlcialForce’s users are CRM customers of Salesforce. 

The following features of NetSuite are built on the SuiteCloud platform using a single codebase and database: supply chain (SCM), eCommerce, professional service automation (PSA), and human capital management (HCM).

These could easily be the main goal of NetSuite: to create a business application that can cover every process any regular company could have while boosting its productivity and saving cost. 

NetSuite target companies are every small to medium size organizations (with an average of 500 employees) that could take advantage of its cloud-based ERP platform solution.

Some of the companies that NetSuite declares as part of its 50.000 users of its accounting software are from a diverse spectrum of industries: software, manufacturing, non-profits, wholesale distribution, retail and eCommerce, and professional services, among others. 

To start disassembling this whole tangled article, let’s compare Salesforce vs NetSuite and see which one comes off best.

The most common CRM application used around the business world is, most definitely, Salesforce CRM.

If your company is looking for a sturdy CRM platform with robust accounting software and an ecosystem of service providers Saleforce.com should be on your target shooting.

Having said that, NetSuite CRM is better than Salesforce for small businesses that are seeking to operate their entire enterprise in a single platform that integrates and connects the whole information as a single database in the cloud. On the contrary, complex companies that run sales and marketing the traditional way, would not have their needs covered using only NetSuite CRM.

NetSuite single cloud is great for small startups, but once the companies grow to a certain size and complexity it is easy to feel the need for a sturdier accounting package and NetSuite would most definitely fulfill the demand.

There are very few ERP applications, if there are any at all, that can escalate as NetSuite does without the need of re-platforming, re-deploying, or re-tooling. That is a really great differentiator that allows NetSuite to stand out between the platform and service offers.

On the other hand, larger companies with traditional marketing, sales, and support teams looking to meet their needs with the best CRM solution available may not accomplish it with a NetSuite platform.

In short, the platform that works best for many sales and support companies thanks to its wide feature set, precise UI, and a greater number of users is definitely Salesforce. However, both NetSuite and SalesForce could cover your company’s needs. There is no right or wrong answer to the question of which CRM would fit your company better, it all depends on your preferences and goals. 

Both NetSuite and Salesforce would support complex functioning and offer extended features using connectors with the benefit of being able to connect applications, easy and fast, to automate business processes. 

NetSuite vs Salesforce: Features

To easily check some of the featuring options on each platform, read below.

Some of FinancialForce’s Product Offering Includes Accounting & Finance, Spend Management, Revenue Management, Inventory Management, Resource Management, Project Management, Collaboration & Engagement, Time and Expense, Revenue Recognition, HR Management, and Benefits.

Some of NetSuite’s Product Offering are Financial Management, OneWorld – Multi-Company, Multi-Language, Multi-Currency (Globalization), Advanced Procurement, Fixed Assets, Multibook Accounting Software, Revenue Recognition Management, Recurring/Subscription Billing, Advanced Software, Contract Renewals, Advanced Inventory, Warehouse Management System (WMS), Demand Planning, Grid Order Management, Advanced Order Management, Manufacturing WIP & Routing, Work Orders & Assemblies, Project Management, Job Costing, Resource Allocation, SuitePeople (HCM) and e-commerce, among others.

NetSuite vs Salesforce: Pricing

In this section, we will present you with the economic aspect of each option.

Both NetSuite and Salesforce’s monthly fee could vary depending on each company’s needs, and the number of users. 

NetSuite ERP base license costs around $1000 per month with access costs of $99 per user, per month.

The cost of NetSuite depends entirely on the number of users, needs, add-ons, contract length, and more.

This means that the price differs from company to company. The NetSuite license operates as a subscription model and can be renewed annually or over longer intervals. 

On the other hand, Salesforce can cost from $25 per user per month to over $300 — their cost per month depends on the requirements and scale of each company.

Pros and cons

To practically compare Salesforce and NetSuite we are going to list here some of the pros and cons of each one and to give a fair outcome about its quality and user appreciation.  

NetSuite’s differentiation in the market is an intuitive interface, the capability of accessing the CRM functionality from a mobile, practical eCommerce connector, and precise forecasting capabilities. 

That said, the impossibility of built-in messaging between the collaboration team and native integration with the most common social media and basic programs (Facebook, Twitter, G Suite, Office 365) is perceived as a major drawback from the user perspective.

NetSuite CRM provides easy and real-time access to reliable information about future customers and opportunities.

While Salesforce cloud allows you to view the activity history of potential clients, customer interaction, and internal account discussions. Besides, it also allows you to glance at the insights of their social media (Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn)  

As we were mentioning, some of the most appreciated qualities of Salesforce is its artificial intelligent – driven insights, user-friendly personalization, performance tracking, and accurate predictive forecasting.

Anyway, the lack of on-premise solution, pre-built email templates, and the impossibility of native connection for emails with Outlook and Gmail draw it back.

Salesforce successfully integrates Gmail and Outlook to sync an email inbox, mobile phone, and calendars with the platform.

Salesforce cloud keeps every company’s user updated about different projects, topics, social media @mentions while providing access from any smartphone.

Force platform is much bigger in terms of software and amount of users than NetSuite’s. This difference could be explained by looking at the number of companies that use Salesforce CRM in comparison with the much smaller number of users of NetSuite ERP software.

In addition to that, Salesforce targets itself as the best CRM and Marketing Automation platform while NetSuite aims to provide a solid platform for Financials, CRM, Supply Chain, HCM, eCommerce, and more. And last but not least, Salesforce was six times bigger than NetSuite before the later acquired Oracle.

However, the NetSuite platform (SuiteCloud) is thick and functional, capable of running the operations of some of the biggest organizations in the business world. 

For more NetSuite pros and cons you can check out our extensive guide.

So… which ERP is the best?

After this analysis, this comparison could have turned out to be a draw because NetSuite CRM is a fair option in some aspects in which it stood out, such as marketing automation, mobile access, dashboards and reporting, partner management, and web forms.

In comparison, some of the features proved to be the better, such as contacts and lead management, artificial intelligence capabilities, charts and visualization, email integrations, collaboration, quotes, document management, orders, invoices, and sales performance management.

To unify and add the benefits that Salesforce and NetSuite offered, it would be wise to integrate them both. 

The integration between Salesforce and NetSuite creates a united bridge between the two most successful and better-ranked cloud-native platforms. Meaning that when your company grows and evolves, you may not be restricted to a specific amount of information and features that are shared between the two platforms, nor will you need a third party to rebuild an integration. 

This mentioned integration enhances a fluid dialogue between sales and finance departments and enables businesses that already had a relationship with Salesforce to sustain it on time. 

With the increasingly frequent use of the cloud-based application from more and more demanding companies the pressure these two platforms bear rebound on a rise of the need of simplifying, unifying and developing a plug–and–play connector that enhance the best qualities of both Salesforce and NetSuite.