Salesforce vs Microsoft Dynamics 365: in-depth comparison & selection tips

October 15, 2026
Nikolai Denizhenko

by Nikolai Denizhenko , 

Head of Salesforce Practice,

Sergey Korolev

Sergey Korolev , 

Head of Microsoft CRM Practice

To choose between Dynamics 365 and Salesforce, companies should assess which CRM best fits their business goals. While both offer robust features and scalability, Salesforce is a CRM-first platform, whereas Dynamics 365 combines CRM and ERP capabilities and integrates smoothly with other Microsoft apps.

A quick verdict

  • While Salesforce is classified as a traditional CRM platform providing tools for managing marketing, sales, and customer service processes, Dynamics 365 offers unified CRM and ERP capabilities within a single platform.
  • Given their advanced capabilities and pricing models, both platforms are considered enterprise-oriented CRM solutions. However, 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, can be deployed both in the cloud and on-premises, although the on-premises option offers more limited functionality.
  • Both Salesforce and Dynamics 365 offer mobile access to users 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.

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Salesforce vs Microsoft Dynamics 365: in-depth comparison & selection tips

Salesforce vs Dynamics 365 by CRM functionality

Both Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM offerings include multiple products addressing core aspects of customer relationship management that can be licensed separately or used as a unified, integrated ecosystem. These further branch into smaller products with thematic groups of features.

Key products for marketing

Salesforce Marketing Cloud

  • Cross-Channel Personalization allows companies to personalize web content, ad campaigns, and in-app interactions in real time according to customers’ browsing behavior and historical data, delivering hyper-targeted customer experiences across all touchpoints.
  • Email Marketing, Mobile & Advertising facilitates the creation of web and in-app customer journeys through a drag-and-drop interface. It also supports journey personalization with tailored content, including multichannel messages such as emails and in-app push messaging, generated and delivered through the right channel based on customer preference data.
  • Marketing Analytics offers pre-built connectors to integrate the CRM system with different advertising channels or platforms and track marketing campaign performance. It also provides media plan improvement recommendations powered by Einstein AI, 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.
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Dynamics 365 Customer Insights (formerly Dynamics 365 Marketing)

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  • Customer Insights Data is a data platform providing a holistic view of the company’s 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 forecast and insights, such as customer sentiment and lifetime value.
  • Customer Insights Journeys includes advanced capabilities powered by Copilot, Microsoft’s integrated AI assistant, to adjust customer journeys in real time using granular customer data. This ensures high-relevance engagement through tailored content, messages, and recommendations delivered over the most suitable channel.

Key products for sales

Salesforce Sales Cloud

  • Revenue Cloud (formerly Salesforce CPQ) enables the 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 engagement strategies, including lead ranking and prioritization, automated email follow-ups, and virtual buyer assistants embedded into the website.
  • Sales Team Productivity helps 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 sales teams with intuitive drag-and-drop tools to set up sales activities and workflow automation, including account and opportunity management, quoting, and contract management.
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Dynamics 365 Sales

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  • Sales enables 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 customizable dashboards and charts. 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 CRM software.
  • 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 sales reps to leads or contacts.
  • Microsoft Relationship Sales combines Dynamics 365 Sales with LinkedIn Sales Navigator. This solution helps identify potential customers on LinkedIn and mutual connections that can introduce the company, 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 automatically distributes support cases among available service agents and suggests relevant knowledge articles to field workers and customer-service reps to reduce time-to-resolution for complex customer inquiries.
  • 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 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 communicate with clients via embedded telephony and live chat and messaging to provide multi-channel assistance. It also enables the organization to easily set up self-service help centers with searchable knowledge bases and create customer communities for peer-to-peer knowledge sharing.
  • Field Service offers comprehensive functionality to plan 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.
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Dynamics 365 Service

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  • 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, 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, 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 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 their 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 solutions extend the functionality of generic Salesforce products like Sales Cloud with useful capabilities for different verticals. 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.
  • Experience Cloud (formerly Salesforce 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 modules 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 Marketplace. 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 like HubSpot or Zoho. Their range of AI-powered CRM tools is ever-expanding and likely inspired by each other's innovations. Salesforce’s agentic platform, Agentforce, allows businesses to configure and build AI agents that analyze real-time business data, answer questions, generate content, and complete tasks across sales, service and marketing workflows with limited human intervention. In contrast, Dynamics 365’s offer combines Copilot, an AI-powered assistant, with pre-built AI agents that can analyze data across the CRM and other Microsoft apps, provide next-best action recommendations, automate tasks, and support sales and customer service workflows.

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Salesforce vs Dynamics 365 by non-CRM functionality

Non-CRM functionality represents one of the core differentiators between Salesforce and Dynamics 365. While Salesforce offers more specialized products for customer relationship management, MS Dynamics’ capabilities extend beyond the functional scope of a typical CRM system.

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

If your software ecosystem already includes an ERP solution, you can consider expanding your toolkit with a more specialized, customer-oriented platform like Salesforce.

Overall functional scope

Thanks to its combined ERP/CRM functionality, MS Dynamics can be a good option for organizations aiming to manage and harmonize a range of key business processes through a unified system.

Salesforce vs Dynamics 365 by customization capabilities

Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics 365 can be customized to better align their functionality with your business requirements. Both platforms offer multiple tools to facilitate this task.

  • 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 and Dynamics 365 are comparable in terms of customization potential, thanks to their extensive range of customizable elements and user-friendly, no-code options for modification of their out-of-the-box functionality.

Salesforce vs Dynamics 365 by integration capabilities

Salesforce and MS Dynamics adopters can set up CRM integration with other corporate systems or third-party apps and services to enable ongoing data exchange and ensure full visibility into their customer-oriented operations. Here are some tools these vendors provide to streamline the integration process.

  • 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 360 (formerly 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 like Tableau.
  • Salesforce Connect enables users to view, search, and modify data stored outside the Salesforce org (for instance, on the 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 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, Sharepoint, 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

While Salesforce is often considered one of the most flexible CRM platforms due to a large number of third-party apps and integrations available through AppExchange, Dynamics is the preferred choice for companies requiring native interoperability with products from the Microsoft ecosystem, such as Microsoft Teams, Outlook, and Azure.

Since Dynamics 365 already encompasses ERP capabilities, organizations adopting Microsoft’s platform won’t need to connect it to an external ERP system.

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Salesforce vs Dynamics 365 by pricing

Salesforce and MS Dynamics follow relatively similar pricing and licensing models, with some key differences.

  • Multiple tiered plans for each product
  • 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

Despite being fully disclosed, the licensing systems of both Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics 365 are quite confusing due to their numerous plans, separate products or add-ons, and respective costs.

Therefore, companies need to carefully review each plan and the feature set it unlocks and then request detailed quotes from both providers. Furthermore, they should consider relying on a team of CRM consultants for license optimization assistance.

Price ranges

Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics 365 offer different pricing structures, with Salesforce licensing costs typically varying more widely than in Microsoft. Salesforce provides accessible entry-level plans, though advanced AI functionality often requires additional costs. For instance, Sales Cloud ranges from $25/user/month for a starter suite up to $550/user/month for a complete Sales CRM with built-in AI capabilities. Dynamics 365 Sales, on the other hand, starts at $65/user/month for the core functionality and tops out at $150/user/month for advanced sales intelligence, automation, and agentic insights. This makes Salesforce more attractive for SMBs and Dynamics – more cost-effective for large enterprises.

Bundles & discounts

Both Salesforce and MS Dynamics offer specific options for companies to optimize their licensing costs. For example, Salesforce Starter Suite combines core marketing, sales, and service functionality at a reasonable price, making it ideal for small businesses. As for MS Dynamics, its pricing system includes a discount mechanism based on “qualifying apps”. If you purchase a “base license” for a product offering core business functionality, you can bundle other licenses for related products at a discounted price. Dynamics adopters can also optimize costs with cheaper Team Members licenses, aimed at users within their teams requiring only basic functionality for simple tasks.

CRM services we offer

CRM services we offer

CRM consulting

  • 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 implementation

  • 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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Choosing the right CRM solution for your business

Explaining the popularity of Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics 365 is pretty easy. After all, both platforms boast extensive feature sets, multiple customization and integration options, and advanced AI functionality. What’s not as simple is selecting the best tool for your requirements. The choice between Salesforce and Dynamics 365 depends on whether you need a specialized CRM system or a unified CRM and ERP solution. Evaluating your workflows and existing software ecosystem lays the foundation for a successful CRM implementation.

Given the complexity of this choice, consulting an experienced partner can help. With over a decade of CRM expertise, Itransition offers expert guidance and industry insights to ensure you choose the CRM solution that aligns with your business requirements.