We wrote to a CEO about leaving Salesforce. His answer was the best version of the objection we have heard.
He already knew Salesforce was expensive. He knew cheaper CRMs existed. What stopped him was the move itself. Years of customer data to carry over. Integrations like Marketo that took years to get right. His own team’s time. Unless all three stayed small, the saving was not worth it.
He is right. And most pages about leaving Salesforce, ours included until this week, spend their time proving the one thing he already agreed with. This post does the opposite. It puts numbers on the part he was worried about.
First, why a cheaper CRM is the wrong answer#
Take the CEO’s three worries and ask what a cheap CRM does to each.
Your data. A cheap CRM will take your records. It will not take the rules and automations that fill those records. So the data arrives, and everything that made it useful stays behind.
Your integrations. A cheap CRM has fewer ways to connect to other systems. The Marketo link gets rebuilt with less to build on, and often with a per-call limit on top.
Your team’s time. A cheap CRM has no one to do the work your Salesforce admin did. That work does not disappear. It lands on your own people.
So a cheaper CRM makes all three costs bigger. The CEO’s instinct not to go there was sound.
Creatio is a different thing. It is a process platform with a CRM built on it. The workflow engine, the no-code builder, unlimited API calls, and sales, marketing and service on one shared database all come with the licence. Salesforce sells most of those as add-ons. That is what makes the three costs smaller on Creatio instead of bigger. Your operations team rebuilds workflows in a visual designer, not a developer in code. Integrations have proper tooling and no call budget. One platform replaces two or three Salesforce clouds, so you migrate once and run one system afterwards.
The saving is what gets you in the door. It is not the reason to move.
The saving, in numbers#
For 100 users, Creatio Enterprise with the Sales module costs $108,000 a year.
The same 100 users on Salesforce Enterprise, the edition most existing customers renew on, start at $210,000 a year. With the usual add-ons, meaning CPQ, Service Cloud, Premier Success at 30 percent of the licence, sandboxes and extra API capacity, most land between $250,000 and $400,000. New Salesforce contracts are now sold as Core at $195, Advanced at $395 and Max at $550 per user per month, so a new buyer starts even higher.
Call the gap $142,000 to $292,000 a year. Over a three-year contract, that is roughly $430,000 to $900,000. That is the budget the switch has to fit inside. The full pricing breakdown is here.
Now the four things that have to fit inside it.
Cost 1: moving your data#
Your data is the asset. For a finance team that tracks customer behaviour quarter by quarter, it is the base for every report.
What moves well. Records, the links between them, who owns what, dropdown values, attachments and activity history. We move them, count them, and show you the rows that did not match.
What does not move. Logic. Apex code, Flows, validation rules, and the workarounds built around them over the years. These are rebuilt, not copied. This is where the real cost of data migration sits, because a field is only useful if a process fills it.
What it costs. For a 50 to 250-user company on mostly standard objects, data work is about a quarter of the project. The price depends on how many custom objects you have and how much logic sits on them. It does not depend much on record count. Fifteen years of records on five standard objects is a smaller job than three years on twenty custom ones. The playbook has the full breakdown.
Cost 2: integrations like Marketo#
Each integration is its own small project. That is why the number of integrations predicts migration cost better than the number of users does.
Marketo is a good example. It syncs leads both ways, tracks campaign membership and scores, and usually took a year of tuning that nobody wants to repeat. Creatio can connect to it over REST. The proof is simple: a lead crosses from one system to the other and back, on real data.
The real question is how many integrations like it you have. On a typical list, about a third are replaced by things Creatio does natively, such as document generation, approvals and a knowledge base. Another third have a ready-made connector. The last third need custom work, and that is where the cost is. Count yours before anyone quotes you. The subscriptions you cancel in the first two thirds are often worth more than the licence saving.
Cost 3: your team’s time#
This cost never shows up on an invoice. It is the one that most often sinks the project. In hours:
- A 21-day proof. Your ops lead gives about one working day in total, spread over three weeks. A Salesforce admin spends two to four hours opening sandbox access.
- A full migration. One operations owner for about a day a week. One administrator close to full-time. Sales and support managers for a kickoff, a round of testing, and a sign-off before go-live. IT and security for one review and SSO setup in the first month.
- After go-live. A business analyst or power user runs the platform. No certified administrator needed, which saves money against Salesforce, but it is not zero.
Getting people to actually use the new system is your job, not the partner’s. If nobody owns that, the project fails no matter how good the platform is.
Cost 4: paying for two systems#
Salesforce does not refund the rest of your contract. From the day your Creatio tenant is set up until your Salesforce renewal date, you pay for both.
A migration takes three to five months for a 50 to 250-user company, and six to nine months for 250 to 1,000 users. So the plan works backwards from your renewal date. Either the cutover lands before it, or you pay for Salesforce for another full term.
This is the cost most often missing from a payback calculation. It is the first one a CFO will find.
What if support is on Salesforce too?#
The same CEO asked a second question. They ran support on Salesforce as well. Did we have a support tool?
This changes the math more than anything above. Salesforce charges for each cloud as a separate seat. Sales Cloud and Service Cloud cost the same per user, $175 on the Enterprise edition existing customers hold and $195 on the current Core edition. Someone who does both pays for both.
On Creatio you pay for the platform seat once per person. Service is a $15 module on top. It includes case management, SLA timers, email-to-case, a knowledge base and a customer portal. Two Salesforce products become one platform. That means one migration instead of two, one set of integrations, and one administrator. The saving gets bigger and the switching cost gets smaller at the same time.
One caveat. Service Cloud’s console and its Omni-Channel routing are mature. If your support team depends on either, check it against Creatio before you sign anything.
A worked example#
A 100-seat company, 70 in sales and 30 in support. Both clouds on the Salesforce Enterprise edition they signed a few years ago, with Premier Success and one partial-copy sandbox.
Salesforce, year one: $210,000 in seats plus $105,000 for Premier Success and the sandbox. Three years with the usual 8 percent annual uplift: a little over $1,000,000.
Creatio Enterprise with Sales and Service on the same seats: $324,000 over three years, held flat by the contract.
The gap is about $700,000. Against it: a migration quoted against scope, which for a company this shape with four or five integrations and a handful of custom objects sits well inside that figure. Two quarters of paying for both systems. An ops owner one day a week and an admin for five months.
Whether that adds up to a clear yes or a narrow one depends on your integration list and your renewal date. That is why no vendor publishes one answer for everyone, and why we would rather you ran the numbers than trusted ours.
How to get a real number instead of a benchmark#
A benchmark tells you the order of magnitude. It does not give you a number you would sign.
The only way we know to get that is to run a small piece of the migration on your real system. One object with its full history, checked record by record. One workflow rebuilt. One integration, Marketo if that is the one you worry about, moving live data both ways. Three weeks, fixed price. If it is clearly not going to work by the end of week one, you get the balance back. If the day-21 demo does not show what you asked for, you pay half.
What you get at the end is a scoping document: a fixed price for the full migration, a timeline against your renewal date, and your team’s hours by role. That document is the other side of the equation, with your numbers in it.
The 21-day POC is how we produce it. The CFO brief explains how to read it. The security page is for the team that has to approve it.
The CEO was right twice. A cheaper CRM is not worth the move. And no move is worth making unless its cost, time and effort are known up front. Our case does not rest on price. It rests on the second point: those three costs are smaller on a process platform than on a CRM, and you can measure them before you commit.