Should You Choose Salesforce as Your CRM in 2026?
There’s no doubt that Salesforce remains the most powerful and widely adopted CRM platform on the market today. More than two decades after its founding, it continues to power sales, service, and marketing at some of the world’s largest organizations, and still sets the benchmark for what enterprise CRM can – and arguably should – look like. But for buyers today, the question is less about whether Salesforce is capable and more about whether that capability is actually necessary.
The CRM landscape has matured significantly. What was once a narrow category dominated by a small group of vendors all those years ago has become crowded with lighter-weight platforms and more specialized tools that promise faster time to value, simpler implementation, and lower ongoing overhead. At the same time, budgets are under larger scrutiny, and artificial intelligence is raising expectations around what CRM systems should automate by default.
Against that backdrop, Salesforce remains a safe – and often excellent – choice for companies that need scale, governance, and long-term extensibility. But it may no longer be the obvious starting point for every team evaluating their CRM options. For some companies, Salesforce’s greatest strength – its depth and flexibility – is also what makes it the wrong fit for some at this stage.
To explore this further, we spoke with some industry experts to examine who Salesforce serves best in 2026, where it begins to feel like overkill, and why the real CRM decision today may be less about choosing the “best” platform and more about choosing the right level of complexity.
Who Salesforce Is Really Built for Today
When Salesforce talks about its future, the messaging is increasingly shaped around scale – not just in terms of customer size, but also data volume, automation, AI, and so on. While Salesforce is still used across companies of all sizes, some would argue that the company’s product direction has become far more clearly aligned with enterprise needs.
Matt Pieper, who has worked in the Salesforce ecosystem for more than 15 years, believes that shift is now difficult to ignore.
“At the end of the day, right now, Salesforce is building for the enterprise,” he said. “If you think Fortune 500, even Fortune 1000, those large teams that have dollars to spend, have teams, and can lean on consultants – that’s really where it feels like Salesforce is building for today.”
Matt is careful to stress that the platform is still capable of delivering value across the market, but capability and intent are not the same thing.
He said: “I still think Salesforce is an extremely valuable tool for every single layer of the market. I even have a client right now, very small, starting off on Foundations, and I think it was the right choice.
“But if you look at the product vision, how communication is being rolled out, and what’s being prioritized – things like Data Cloud or Agentforce – those are extremely upmarket compared to traditional low-entry CRM.”
From pricing models to feature rollouts, Matt argues that Salesforce’s ‘ideal’ customer increasingly looks like a large enterprise with dedicated technical resources rather than a lean team choosing its first CRM. Based on this, Salesforce likely only works well when organizations are realistic about their size, needs, and level of investment.
“If you ask who their ideal customer is, in my mind it still looks like the partner and the enterprise community,” Matt explained. “You have to take that step back and ask, ‘Am I a 20-person company building for a 20-person company, or am I a thousand-person company with hundreds of millions in ARR?’ Those are drastically different things that require drastically different builds.
From outside the Salesforce ecosystem, that same conclusion is often reached far more bluntly.
Henrik Becker, CEO of Certified HubSpot Platinum Partner, RevHops, argues that Salesforce’s complexity has reached a point where it should only be chosen intentionally and not by default.
“Salesforce is inherently, at this point, very complex,” he said. “The reason to choose Salesforce, in my opinion, is if you know that you’re going to need that complexity.
“If you have people on board that are good with Salesforce, that can handle that complexity, are skilled in its use, then you can put together something that is very, very customizable and fitted to your use case,” he explained. “And in most cases, that use case is a larger company – different countries, specific workflows, difficult integrations.”
Henrik believes that for the vast majority of companies – even those operating internationally – Salesforce might not be the most practical starting point.
While that may be true for some, it doesn’t mean that Salesforce can’t work for smaller organizations. Data from the latest SF Ben Salesforce Salary Survey Results shows that 27% of respondents actually work in companies made up of 200-999 people, which was the largest share.
Taken together, these perspectives suggest a consistent pattern. Salesforce continues to perform particularly well in complex, well-resourced environments, while for companies choosing a CRM for the first time, those same strengths may shape how suitable it feels at an earlier stage.
When Salesforce’s Power Turns Into Operational Weight
One of Salesforce’s biggest differentiators has always been flexibility. Over time, however, that flexibility has expanded into a platform that now includes event-driven architecture, AI-driven tooling, and a number of different features all under the same umbrella.
According to Matt, this expansion has made Salesforce more powerful than ever, but also harder to approach without a clear focus.
“Fifteen or sixteen years ago, Salesforce was a small platform – you could wrap your hands around it and say, ‘This is Salesforce,’” he said. “Today, it’s a massively sprawling platform. There are a lot of incredible tools, but there’s also a lot of entropy.”
That sprawl creates a practical challenge for smaller teams, particularly those without dedicated specialists.
“When you have that many tools available, you’re not going to understand all of them, and you’re not going to be able to use all of them,” Matt explained. “We [Salesforce professionals] need to start picking a very small niche to leverage, rather than trying to learn everything.”
On the other hand, Salesforce MVP Silvia Denaro shared a more measured view of the platform’s perceived complexity, particularly given how much Salesforce has evolved.
“Salesforce doesn’t have to be complex, especially to start,” she said. “I don’t come from a computer science background, yet I’ve built a career in Salesforce. Years ago, you needed Apex for complex solutions. Now, with Flow, a lot of what developers used to do can be done with point-and-click.”
Where problems often arise, Silvia argues, is often in how Salesforce is applied rather than any issues with the platform itself.
She said: “I start seeing issues when Salesforce is used for purposes it wasn’t built for – like trying to turn it into a finance system or a project management tool. A good implementation is documented, uses out-of-the-box functionality, and doesn’t try to force Salesforce to be something it’s not.”
In essence, a certain level of discipline is needed – otherwise, Salesforce’s power can quietly create friction, increase costs unnecessarily, and slow down outcomes.
Free Suite, AI, and the Limits of Accessibility
I wrote last November that the newly introduced Free Suite appeared to signal a renewed focus on smaller businesses, offering a low-risk entry point into the platform. But Matt and Henrik suggest it also highlights a deeper tension around what Salesforce chooses to make accessible by default. Matt points to security and visibility as a clear example.
“Salesforce talks a lot about trust and security being core values,” he said. “But then you look at things like event monitoring, and suddenly that’s only available if you pay a significant premium.”
The result, he argues, is a mismatch between messaging and reality.
“You’re telling customers that security is critical, but you’re also saying, ‘You don’t get the tools to monitor your own environment unless you can afford them.’ That’s a hard message to square.”
On top of this, a key issue with offerings like Free Suite is that it misses one of Salesforce’s biggest selling points: customization. Without this, Matt argues that customers don’t really gain much value from a platform like Free Suite unless you’re prepared to scale up quickly.
Matt said: “For me, the power of Salesforce has always been customization. That’s what everyone talks about – to the point where we sometimes over-customize simply because we can. In a way, the small suite forces you into that mindset, because you don’t have access to the same tools you get on an enterprise plan. At the same time, that creates a lot of frustration, because you can’t use the tools everyone else is using.
“That’s always been my issue with the gap between enterprise and professional. Yes, it can get you part of the way there, but you’re handcuffed. You hit a barrier very quickly, and suddenly you’re paying more.
“If Salesforce is going to push into the small suite, the question has to be: what are we giving away for free, and why? Can we offer enterprise-level customization – things like configurable fields and automations – since that’s where the real power of the platform is? Or do we say this is a true base-level entry, like HubSpot, and if you want advanced features, you pay for them?”
Henrik sees a similar issue in how AI is being positioned across CRM platforms, but he is skeptical of AI-first narratives when usability remains a challenge.
He said: “I think AI is being oversold right now on platforms,” he said. “If your core functionality is still hard to use, and users aren’t adopting the platform, then AI isn’t going to fix that. Usability has to come first. AI should support usability, not replace it.”
In that sense, Free Suite may succeed as an introduction to Salesforce’s interface, but not necessarily as a tool that reflects the platform’s real value for first-time CRM buyers.
However, Silvia was quick to remind me that in the nonprofit space, Salesforce’s value proposition can still be compelling.
“From a nonprofit point of view, the ten free licenses you get can give you a Rolls-Royce, a Ferrari, with very minimal or no spend,” she said. “That obviously comes with challenges around customization, but the value at the start is incredible.”
She also highlights Salesforce’s ecosystem as a big differentiator that compounds over time.
“The community is crucial,” Silvia said. “Trailhead, user groups, conferences – there’s almost always someone who has an answer to the problem you’re facing.”
When Salesforce Is the Right Choice and Works Exceptionally Well
For all the caution around complexity, all three experts suggest that Salesforce is chosen intentionally and implemented with the right expectations, and it remains one of the most capable CRM platforms available.
Matt stresses that Salesforce’s reputation for power is well earned, provided that companies resist the temptation to overbuild too early.
“I still think Salesforce is an extremely valuable tool for every single layer of the market,” he said. “The key is having realistic expectations about what you’re building and why.”
In Matt’s view, success on Salesforce is less about using every feature available and more about focus.
“Don’t buy every feature. Don’t use everything under the sun,” he explained. “Be an expert in what you’ve built, get value from that, and then iterate on top of it.”
That approach, he argues, allows organizations to benefit from Salesforce’s flexibility without being overwhelmed by it, particularly as they grow.
“If you hire correctly, invest properly at the start, and don’t under-resource the platform, Salesforce can work extremely well,” Matt said.
Even Henrik, who is more skeptical of Salesforce as a first CRM for most companies, agrees that the platform excels in the right conditions.
“If you have people on board who are good with Salesforce, who can handle that complexity and are skilled in its use, then you can build something very customizable and very closely fitted to your use case,” he said.
Silvia points to areas where Salesforce’s strengths are often understated as well, saying: “Anything related to sales pipeline and sales process is, in my opinion, unbeatable. And Experience Cloud is incredibly powerful. It allows you to open up exactly what you want to customers or partners, without needing a deep technical background.”
She also emphasizes the role of the AppExchange.
“Whatever use case you have, it’s probably already there,” she said. “And if it’s not, it probably means Salesforce wasn’t built for that.”
In other words, Salesforce’s strengths tend to show up most clearly in the right conditions. When complexity is genuinely needed, properly resourced, and thoughtfully governed, the platform can support it at scale in ways few others currently do.
Final Thoughts
Salesforce remains one of the most capable CRM platforms on the market. For large, complex organizations with the resources to support it, it continues to be a strong and often logical choice.
But in 2026, choosing a CRM is less about buying the most powerful platform available and more about aligning technology with reality. As both Matt, Henrik, and Silvia make clear, Salesforce works best when complexity is intentional, well-resourced, and immediately necessary.
For many companies evaluating CRM for the first time, the better decision may be to start with a system that prioritizes usability, adoption, and speed to value and only introduce complexity when it becomes unavoidable.
