Most "switching" stories in our corpus are about churn — buyers leaving one tool for another. CRM is the exception. Buyers complain about Salesforce more specifically and more often than almost anything else they run, rate it a middling 7.1, and then renew. To understand the category you have to explain the paradox, not the rating: why a tool this grumbled-about is the one buyers will not rip out.
Why the gravity holds
Movement in this category happens at the edges, not the core. The forces that hold a Salesforce instance in place are structural; the ones that pull buyers out are real but narrow — and they act mostly on the mid-market, not the enterprise.
Forces that hold them in
- System of record — every workflow and report wired through it
- The 360° view across phone, online, and in-store that buyers bought it for
- Deep integrations and a decade of customization no one wants to rebuild
- Switching cost measured in years of migration and retraining
Forces pulling them out
- Cost — the single most-cited complaint, license plus add-ons
- Customization tax — bespoke instances that need admins or consultants
- Integration gaps that fragment the very 360° view it promised
- Simpler all-in-one rivals winning the mid-market from below
The hold-in forces are structural; the pull-out forces mostly reach the mid-market, not the enterprise core.
How buyers rate the field
The numbers are close and consistently lukewarm — but the volume behind Salesforce's score is the real signal: no other CRM in our corpus is rated by anywhere near as many buyers.
| Vendor | Avg rating | What buyers say |
|---|---|---|
| 7.5 | Wins on ease of use and all-in-one simplicity; customization and two-way integrations are the ceilings. | |
| 7.1 | The most-rated CRM in our corpus; robust and flexible, but cost and customization overhead drag the score. | |
| 8 | Mid-market favorite for automation-led CRM; rates high on a notably smaller sample. |
Force #1 — why nobody leaves
The gravity The system of record
Buyers describe Salesforce less as a tool than as the place the business lives. They value the comprehensive, 360-degree view of the customer across channels — orders placed by phone, online, and in-store in one record — and the flexibility to fold lead generation, marketing, and service into one system. "Reliable, robust enterprise tool" is the phrase that recurs.
Once a decade of workflows, reports, and integrations are wired through it, leaving isn't a purchase decision — it's a multi-year migration that retrains the whole revenue org. The rating can be middling and the renewal still near-automatic.
Force #2 — the price of staying
The customization tax Flexibility, billed back
The same flexibility buyers praise is what they pay for. Salesforce's customization means every instance is a bespoke build: buyers describe how "becoming a Salesforce administrator is difficult," how custom nuances grow so deep they can't even benchmark against peers, and how the admin overhead is a standing cost. Cost is the single most-cited complaint in the category.
The sharpest frustration isn't the core CRM — it's the surrounding clouds. Buyers describe attached products like Pardot straining at scale and Experience Cloud and Commerce Cloud that "don't align well," turning the promised single view back into a fragmented one.
Force #3 — the climb from below
The challenger HubSpot moves upmarket
HubSpot wins the comparison buyers make most: easier to use, faster to onboard, an all-in-one that lets marketers run CRM, email, and reporting without a specialist. It pulls mid-market teams up from spreadsheets and point tools, and rates higher than Salesforce for it.
But buyers name the ceilings as they scale — lead scoring that feels "clunky," limited two-way integration, pricing that climbs as features expand. The result is a well-worn path: start on HubSpot for simplicity, then "graduate" to Salesforce when the complexity arrives anyway.
The counter-current: the exits that do happen
Movement is real, but it's at the seams. Down-market, mid-market teams shed overweight Salesforce instances for HubSpot or ActiveCampaign to escape the admin tax. Up-market, fast-growing teams outgrow HubSpot's ceilings and graduate to Salesforce. The net is a category that churns at the edges and holds firm in the middle — the enterprise core, wired through Salesforce for a decade, simply doesn't move.
Force #4 — the alternative never gets tested
The unrun trial Nobody test-drives the system of record
Buyers describe CRM evaluations that run on a requirements document, a selection committee and a commercial term. No buyer in these interviews describes a sandbox, a proof of concept, a pilot, or a test migration — not one instance of a vendor demonstrating the product on the buyer's own data before the contract was signed.
That absence only means something because of what sits next to it. The same corpus is full of proofs of concept in neighbouring categories — CDP, ESP, personalization, commerce — including a distributor who chose a commerce platform only after a proof of concept showed it could carry their SKU volume. Buyers plainly know how to test software. They do not test this one.
The clearest case is a dealership group with an explicit piloting doctrine, who piloted a CDP in two stores and a credit-application tool across several more. They chose their replacement CRM on a commercial deal offering several years free. Even the buyer who pilots everything did not pilot the CRM.
Which closes the loop on the other three forces. A CRM decision is settled on paper, against an incumbent the team has a decade of lived experience with — so the challenger is judged on a demo and a requirements grid while the incumbent is judged on everything it has already survived. That is not a fair fight, and it is not meant to be one: the system of record is too entangled to stand up on a sample of your own data, which is the same entanglement that makes leaving expensive. The gravity and the unrun trial are the same fact seen from the buying side.
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Get my read →What this means for your renewal
For most buyers the realistic question isn't "switch CRM" — the interviews make clear how rare and expensive that is — it's how to stop the platform from taxing you. The loudest complaints aren't about the core CRM at all; they're about cost, runaway customization, and the surrounding clouds buyers bolt on and then resent. Rein in the customization that needs a consultant to maintain, right-size seats and add-ons against what you actually use, and treat each adjacent "Cloud" as its own build-or-buy decision rather than an automatic yes. The leverage in this category isn't the switch you'll probably never make — it's the discipline on everything you attach to the CRM you're keeping. For the operational side of that discipline — adoption, data hygiene, and getting your data AI-ready — see what CRM buyers wish they'd known.
Common questions
Why don't companies leave Salesforce even when they're unhappy?
Gravity. It's the system of record, wired into every workflow and integration, and switching cost is measured in years. Buyers rate it a middling 7.1/10 and still renew — the complaints are about cost and complexity, not a failure that would justify the rip-and-replace.
Salesforce vs. HubSpot — how do buyers choose?
By scale and complexity. HubSpot (7.5/10) wins on ease of use, onboarding, and all-in-one simplicity, pulling mid-market teams up. Salesforce (7.1/10) wins on depth, customization, and enterprise integration. Buyers commonly start on HubSpot and 'graduate' to Salesforce as they outgrow it.
What do buyers complain about most with Salesforce?
Cost and customization complexity. Its flexibility means every instance is a bespoke build that needs admins or consultants to run. Buyers describe high overhead, costly add-ons like Pardot and Marketing Cloud, and integration gaps that fragment the very 360-degree view they bought it for.
Which CRMs do buyers rate highest?
In Alium's corpus through September 2026: HubSpot 7.5/10 leads the most-discussed platforms, Salesforce sits at 7.1/10 (on far more ratings than any other CRM); mid-market favorite ActiveCampaign rates higher on a smaller sample.
Do buyers test-drive a CRM before they buy it?
Not in these interviews. Buyers describe CRM evaluations that run on a requirements document, a selection committee and a commercial term — no sandbox, no proof of concept, no pilot, no test migration. The same buyers do run proofs of concept in neighbouring categories: CDP, ESP, personalization and commerce. One distributor chose a commerce platform only after a proof of concept showed it could carry their SKU volume. So the pattern is specific to the system of record rather than a general reluctance to test software, and it means a CRM switch is decided on paper, against an incumbent the team has years of lived experience with.
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