Salesforce offers many different editions of their solution: Essentials, Professional, Enterprise & Unlimited. Each edition comes at a different per user cost and each edition offers different functionality. Obviously, the more costly the edition, the more functionality you’ll receive.
If you’re currently in the market for Salesforce, one of the questions you may be asking yourself, “which Salesforce Edition is right for my organization?” While Salesforce offers different “Clouds” for each department, this blog is focusing on the “Sales Cloud”. The vast majority of organizations purchase the Professional or Enterprise Edition of Salesforce and that works great for them. While there are quite a few differences, we want to point out the main advantages of the Enterprise version as compared to the Professional and how it could impact your organization. The below items are features which are included out-of-the-box with the Enterprise edition. These items are either not available with Professional, limited in the numbers available, or only available at an additional cost:
- Advanced Reporting: The features of Advanced Reporting include history tracking, bucketing, joined reports and cross filters.
- Custom Profiles, Page Layouts, Roles & Permissions: These features allow the administrator to set different levels of user(s)’ object and field-level access within the system. It also affects the record-level access through role hierarchy and sharing rules. Should an organization value the need to hide certain data from various users, these features will come in very handy. While the Professional edition allows up to 2 of each, the Enterprise comes with unlimited options.
- Record Types: Record Types allow administrators to set up different page layouts, picklists, and processes for various users. The Professional edition allows up to 3 Record Types per object, while the Enterprise edition offers unlimited options.
- Process Builder: The Process Builder allows the administrator to automate any business process within the Salesforce platform. The Professional edition allows up to 5 processes per org, while the Enterprise offers unlimited options.
- Workflows & Approvals: Workflows allow the administrator to automate items based on certain criteria being met such as, automatically creating a task, updating a field or sending out an email notification. This is only offered in the Enterprise & Unlimited edition.
- Web Services API: APIs allow you to connect your Salesforce org with any other systems and platforms your organization may be leveraging such as an ERP, Accounting or Marketing system. Many options are available on the Salesforce AppExchange which can be leveraged. Many of these work with the Professional edition. However, some do not. If you find that you may need a custom integration with Salesforce and one of your backend systems, it’s very likely you will need to leverage the API capabilities within Salesforce. APIs are only available in the Enterprise and Unlimited editions.
- Sandboxes & Data Storage: With the Professional edition you receive 10 Developer Sandboxes, 20 MB of Data Storage per user and 612 MB of File Storage per user. With the Enterprise edition, you receive 1 Partial Sandbox, 25 Developer Sandboxes, 20 MB of Data Storage per user and 2 GB of File Storage per user.
While there are a few other features you may receive by leveraging the Enterprise edition, the ones outlined above are typically the most vital. Should you find that any of the above features be very valuable to your organization as you launch on Salesforce, then the Enterprise edition would be right for you!