Salesforce has been a global leader in CRM solutions for many years. No wonder Salesforce is currently used by more than 100,000 customers of all sizes and industries.

However, as you can imagine, there is complexity with size. Salesforce products have many great features that can help your team right away. However, most Salesforce customers often need to customize the platform to meet their specific needs and processes. One of the easiest ways to do this is to enhance functionality with third-party applications, making Salesforce a one-stop shop for multiple business processes.

Where to find Salesforce Apps – AppExchange

To find the perfect software for their business needs, Salesforce customers should visit AppExchange, the world’s leading enterprise marketplace, launched by Salesforce in 2006. AppExchange offers more than 5,000 apps installed approximately 8 million times to help customers help Salesforce expand into any industry. In addition to the app on AppExchange, you will also find components, screw solutions, lightning data, flow solutions, and certified advisors.

If you haven’t used AppExchange before, read the Ultimate Guide to Salesforce AppExchange below for everything you need. If so, let’s move on.

Having so many Salesforce apps to look at in each business category leads to another problem: how to differentiate between apps and choose the best one for your organization? All these solutions are not equally created. For starters, you can filter apps by cost (free or paid) and ratings (1-5 stars based on customer feedback), but another factor is whether the app is native or not.

What is a Salesforce Native App?

You may have heard or seen the term in marketing materials from Independent Software Vendors (highly skilled Salesforce partners) promoting their applications. However, there is still a lot of confusion about which applications are Salesforce native and which applications only have a “native connector” that enables Salesforce integration. Unfortunately, some software vendors describe their applications as native when they are only partially built on the Salesforce platform.

So, let’s first explain what the native Salesforce app means.

Native Salesforce applications have the following distinguishing features:

Based on Salesforce technology

Native applications built using the Salesforce Lightning platform. Sometimes you may not even realize whether a feature belongs to the app or to Salesforce itself. Typically, native applications do not use any code other than Visualforce, Apex, or Lightning components.

Hosted in Salesforce.

Native applications do not require separate integration with Salesforce via APIs. Instead, you get hassle-free CRM support off the shelf. Native applications cannot run without Salesforce.

Protected data.

All data from native applications is in the Salesforce instance, so you don’t have to worry about extra security.

Use only Salesforce.

Native applications work with standard and custom objects to interact with Salesforce and other applications.

No additional proprietary API

Applications that use the native API cannot use all Salesforce development tools. If a native application has its API, the integration possibilities are limited.

These features allow you to treat native applications as part of your Salesforce organization and not an external software. And so, we created Inspire Planner, our native Salesforce project management application.

Five reasons why native Salesforce apps are better.

Salesforce native applications are typically the safer choice if you want more reliability, seamless integration, and better data security, as these solutions align with Salesforce best practices.

Let us take a look at the top five advantages of native solutions over other applications.

Flexibility and Personalization

Five Reasons Why Salesforce Native Apps are Better.

Because native applications are based on Salesforce, they offer great flexibility to easily adapt the application to the needs of the organization. For example, if you want to add additional custom fields, workflow rules, or triggers to your native Salesforce project management application, it is a simple process through the basic Salesforce configuration.

In addition, the user experience of a native application is usually like that of the Salesforce platform, with a similar style of the user interface, list views, labels, and more. Your users do not have to spend a lot of time learning how to use the new application.

Overall, the flexibility and customization of native Salesforce applications facilitate successful internal adoption of new software across the organization.

Security

As a Salesforce customer, you can rest assured that all applications published on AppExchange support the highest level of security and industry best practices. These apps undergo a rigorous AppExchange security assessment, which takes approximately 4-6 weeks, and tests the apps themselves and how they protect customer data.

The native applications reside in Salesforce, as well as your data, which automatically ensures the security standards of the world’s leading CRM platform. Native. Unless of course you are exporting, downloading, or sharing your data. Native application data conforms to your existing security settings and provisioning rules in Salesforce.

However, most applications are not 100% native. In such cases, your data will be transferred outside of Salesforce and stored on third-party servers. Your current security policies may not apply, leaving your data more vulnerable to external threats. You also need to manage multiple security policies and procedures.

Salesforce uses some of the most advanced security measures. This is a big reason why Salesforce is so popular, especially with companies in industries where customer data is critical, such as healthcare and financial services. And since most Fortune 100 companies trust their Salesforce data, you have come to the right company.

Realizing the growing importance of data security, Salesforce has a dedicated website where you can learn more about Salesforce security, find expert best practices, additional training, and resources, and read security advice for Salesforce customers.

Real-Time and Accurate Data

Native Salesforce solutions provide seamless real-time data management. Whatever activity you choose to do in your application, you can rest assured that all your data is accurate, up-to-date, and perfectly synced with Salesforce.

This is important when working with reports and dashboards. Data quality is crucial to get the right information. With native applications, your reports and dashboards are highly customizable, it takes less time to access and extract your data to generate reports, and you can rely on the accuracy of the results.

Some non-native applications may transfer your data using batch API calls, such as once per hour. While this helps to stay within the daily API call limit, it does mean that there will be delays in data transfers and consequently inaccuracy reports.

Focus on Salesforce and Automated Upgrades

If your team uses Salesforce, wouldn’t you want your software vendor to be an experienced Salesforce expert too? Exactly. While non-native apps can focus on supporting several larger CRM systems, native apps are built specifically for Salesforce, considering all the ins and outs of the world’s leading CRM solution and how best to use it. used.

You probably know that Salesforce is consistently ranked among the innovative companies in the world by Forbes. Salesforce has topped this list every year since Forbes started creating these rankings in 2011. Salesforce maintains a culture of continuous innovation, and it shows through three major platform updates per year: Spring, Summer, and Winter.

Native apps are automatically compatible with new Salesforce implementations, giving their customers the best experience with the latest innovative features. With non-native apps, you must wait for software vendors to update their apps after each major release. In the worst-case scenario, you may even encounter the problem that some of your previous customizations stop working correctly after adding or closing Salesforce features.

Reliability, Performance, and Scalability

Salesforce has been delivering exceptional reliability for years thanks to 99.9+% uptime of its infrastructure. The company also offers a public website where it provides transparent real-time information about system performance and security. All native applications in Salesforce use the same technology infrastructure. That is why they are ready to go as soon as Salesforce is up and running and you can expect incredible reliability. Native applications also generally show excellent performance as data processing is performed on the same platform without having to share data with third-party servers.

If your business is growing well and you need to seriously increase application usage (e.g., more users, more data generated, more projects created, etc.), native applications offer the same scalability as Salesforce powered by its infrastructure. In addition, native applications do not affect the daily Salesforce API limits.

After considering these five reasons, you may think choosing a native Salesforce app for your organization is a breeze. Native applications provide flexibility, security, and reliability, delivered by Salesforce experts.

Conclusion

However, things in life are not black and white. There are many leading and highly rated non-native apps in AppExchange such as Cirrus Insight, FormAssembly, DocuSign, Conga Composer, PowerDialer, and many more. Even our Salesforce Inspire Planner project management app built completely natively does not have a native badge in AppExchange. The only reason is that the Inspire Planner uses an external Heroku-based portal (and Heroku is part of the Salesforce platform) where users can share their projects and collaborate with external partners and customers.

Summery & Results

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