Salesforce or Dynamics 365? The full comparison

Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics 365 are the only two platforms Gartner placed in the Leaders quadrant of its 2026 CRM sales report. Both handle the fundamentals well: accounts, contacts, opportunities, forecasting, automation. The real difference is not the feature list. It is where each one came from, how it is licensed, and what happens as the company grows.

Worth saying up front: we are a Salesforce partner. That is why this comparison leans on published list prices and sources cited one by one rather than opinion. Where Dynamics has the advantage — and it does on several concrete points — we say so.

All prices are list, per user per month billed annually, checked on September 8, 2026 on the official Salesforce and Microsoft pages. None include volume discounts, which exist and are negotiated on both sides.

Where each one comes from

Salesforce launched in 1999 as a cloud CRM and has never been anything else. Everything added since — Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Commerce, Data Cloud, Agentforce — grew around that core, on one data model and one automation engine. It is a CRM platform that expanded sideways.

Dynamics 365 is the evolution of Microsoft's business applications line. Its technical foundation is Dataverse and Power Platform, the same base that runs Power Apps and Power Automate. That explains its two defining traits. The first is integration with the rest of the Microsoft stack: Outlook, Teams, Excel, Power BI and Entra ID are not integrations, they are the house. The second is that Microsoft does have an ERP — Business Central for mid-market and Finance & Operations for large enterprises — in the same product family and on the same data foundation. Salesforce has no ERP, and that is a structural difference rather than a missing feature.

That heritage also shapes how each one is licensed, which is where the biggest money differences show up.

At a glance

• Sales entry price
  SF: US$ 25D365: US$ 65
• Mid tier
  SF: US$ 195 (Core)D365: US$ 105 (Enterprise)
• Top tier
  SF: US$ 550 (Max)D365: US$ 150 (Premium)
• Extra app per user
  SF: no list attachD365: US$ 20
• ERP from same vendor
  SF: noD365: yes
• CRM share (IDC 2025)
  SF: 20.0 %D365: 4.0 %

List prices, edition by edition

Salesforce reorganised its editions on September 3, 2026. Core, Advanced and Max replace Enterprise, Unlimited and Agentforce 1: Core goes from $175 to $195 and Advanced from $350 to $395, but all three now bundle what used to be sold separately — Slack, Tableau Next, the Premier Success plan and enterprise security — plus an annual allowance of Flex Credits. Customers already on an older edition keep their pricing, per the official announcement.

On the service side the gap narrows. Salesforce repeats the same editions and prices in Service Cloud: Starter $25, Pro $100, Core $195, Advanced $395 and Max $550. Dynamics 365 Customer Service charges $50 for Professional, $105 for Enterprise and $195 for Premium. If you are still deciding which module you actually need, we cover it in our Sales Cloud versus Service Cloud comparison.

The detail that changes the math: base and attach licenses

This is the most important licensing difference between the two platforms, and the one we most often see slip past an evaluation unnoticed.

Microsoft licenses per application, with one rule: every full-access user needs a base license, which is the most expensive of the ones they use. From there, each additional application for that same user is billed as an attach license, at $20 per user/month. A seller who also handles cases pays $105 for Sales Enterprise plus $20 for Customer Service, not $210.

Salesforce solves it differently depending on the tier. At the lower end the Suites come bundled: Starter Suite ($25) and Pro Suite ($100) include sales, service, marketing and commerce in a single license. At Core, Advanced and Max, licensing is per cloud: the Sales Cloud and Service Cloud pages each publish their own editions, and there is no published "additional app" list price equivalent to Microsoft's attach. For a user who needs both clouds at the top tier, the number comes from a quote.

Three scenarios with real numbers

Calculated on the list prices above, over 12 months, with no volume discounts and no implementation costs. They show the shape of the difference, not a budget.

The honest reading of that table is that on licenses alone Dynamics 365 is cheaper, and by a wide margin: 35 % to 46 % less across these three cases. Anyone telling you otherwise is not looking at list prices.

The complete reading is that licensing is rarely half the bill. A well-scoped Salesforce implementation lands between 1 and 2.5 times the annual license in year one — we break it down in our guide to Salesforce costs in LATAM — and a Dynamics implementation of equivalent scope is not meaningfully cheaper: modelling processes, migrating data, integrating and training is the same work either way. On top of that come AI credits, which both platforms charge by consumption and neither includes in the per-user price.

AI: Agentforce and Copilot, and how each one is billed

Both platforms moved from selling assistants to selling agents that execute work, and both meter that consumption their own way. Understanding the two meters is the only way to compare real cost.

Salesforce uses Flex Credits: $500 per 100,000 credits, or half a cent per credit. One Agentforce action consumes 20 credits, so $0.10. Core, Advanced and Max include an annual allowance per organisation: 500,000, 1,000,000 and 2,750,000 credits respectively. On Core and above there is also the Agentforce for Sales add-on from $125 per user/month. For the wider picture of the agent layer, see Agentforce in LATAM.

Microsoft uses Copilot Credits, purchased through Copilot Studio and requiring an Azure subscription: $200 per month for each pack of 25,000 credits, or eight tenths of a cent per credit, either pay-as-you-go or prepaid. Sales Premium includes 1,000 credits per user per month; on Sales Enterprise the agents work but the credits are bought separately.

The trap in that comparison is the units: Salesforce includes credits per organisation per year, Microsoft per user per month. With 20 users, the allowance in Salesforce Core is 500,000 credits a year for the whole company, while Dynamics Sales Premium gives 240,000 credits a year across those 20 users. At each vendor's own rates that works out to roughly $2,500 and $1,920 of included consumption. Same order of magnitude, distributed very differently: the Salesforce allowance can be consumed entirely by one automated process, while the Microsoft one runs out user by user.

Customization, integration and data

On customization, both go far, by different routes. Salesforce offers Flow for declarative automation, Apex for server-side code and Lightning Web Components for the interface, with a mature sandbox and deployment model. Dynamics 365 leans on Power Platform: Power Automate for flows, Power Apps for screens and .NET plug-ins when code is required. A team already building in the Microsoft ecosystem meets less friction in Dynamics; a team that needs the highest ceiling for complex commercial logic usually finds it in Salesforce.

On integration, Dynamics holds the clearest and least arguable advantage. If the company lives in Microsoft 365, the CRM shows up inside Outlook and Teams with no connectors, reporting lands in Power BI and identity is handled by Entra ID. Salesforce integrates well with all of that, but it integrates: those are connectors, not the same house.

On the third-party ecosystem, the balance flips. AppExchange states more than 7,000 apps and certified consulting firms and over 10 million installs. Microsoft's marketplace, AppSource, spans its whole product catalogue rather than Dynamics alone, so no directly comparable number exists; in practice, for a specific CRM requirement the odds of finding something already built are higher on AppExchange.

And there is the point already made: if you need an ERP from the same vendor alongside the CRM, Dynamics has one and Salesforce does not. That is a real argument, and it carries weight for companies that want one contract and one data model end to end.

What Gartner says and, more importantly, how it is measured

The Magic Quadrant for CRM Sales Platforms was published on August 6, 2026, authored by Adnan Zijadic, Guy Wood and Wendy Butler-Mafuz, and evaluated 13 vendors. Salesforce and Microsoft are the only two in the Leaders quadrant: Salesforce for the twentieth consecutive year, Microsoft for the sixteenth. The rest landed like this: Oracle, Zoho, HubSpot and Pega as Challengers; Creatio as a Visionary; and BUSINESSNEXT, SAP, Neocrm, monday.com, Vtiger and SugarAI as Niche Players.

Now the part that almost never gets explained: what the quadrant actually measures. Gartner positions each vendor on two axes using up to 15 weighted criteria.

The vertical axis, ability to execute, measures seven criteria: product or service, overall viability, sales execution and pricing, market responsiveness, marketing execution, customer experience and operations. The horizontal axis, completeness of vision, measures eight: market understanding, marketing strategy, sales strategy, offering strategy, business model, vertical or industry strategy, innovation and geographic strategy. The criteria are weighted, and the interactive version of the report lets a client change those weightings and generate their own quadrant.

Two practical conclusions follow. First, the vertical axis does not measure product quality: the product is one of seven criteria, sitting alongside the vendor's financial strength, sales force and operations. Second, Gartner says it plainly in its own methodology documentation: focusing on the Leaders quadrant is not always the best course of action, and a Niche Player may fit your needs better than a Leader. The quadrant is a starting point for building a shortlist, not a verdict.

Gartner and Magic Quadrant are trademarks of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings. Gartner publications consist of the opinions of Gartner's research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this publication.

How much each one weighs in the market

Per the IDC figures Salesforce published in April 2026, Salesforce closed 2025 with 20.0 % of the worldwide CRM market, its thirteenth consecutive year in first place. The reading of those same figures published by CX Foundation puts Oracle behind it at 4.1 %, Microsoft at 4.0 %, Adobe at 3.4 % and SAP at 3.1 %.

Read that number carefully. A global CRM share understates how much Dynamics actually weighs inside companies that are already Microsoft customers, where the decision often follows an enterprise agreement rather than a functional evaluation. What the gap does indicate is the size of the ecosystem around each platform: partners, certified professionals and solutions already built. In LATAM that difference shows up when you go looking for a team.

When each one makes sense

What we see in practice is that the decision is rarely settled on features, because both cover far more than most companies need. It is settled by three things: where the rest of your technology lives, how many applications each person will use, and how big a team you can actually hire to implement and maintain it. The third is the most underestimated, and the one that sinks the most projects — something we saw up close while compiling the most common mistakes in Sales Cloud implementations.

Frequently asked questions

Is Dynamics 365 cheaper than Salesforce?

On license list price, yes. Sales Enterprise costs $105 per user/month against $195 for Salesforce Core, and Sales Premium $150 against $550 for Max. The gap narrows once you add implementation, integrations, AI credits and the cost of hiring the team that will maintain it — comparable line items on both platforms.

What is an attach license and how much does it save?

It is the reduced price Microsoft charges for each additional Dynamics 365 application for a user who already holds a base license: $20 per user/month. A user who needs sales and service pays $105 plus $20 instead of two full licenses. It is the single mechanism that most lowers the bill when one person works across several modules.

Can you migrate from Dynamics 365 to Salesforce?

Yes, and it is a common project. Accounts, contacts, opportunities, cases and activity history all migrate. What does not migrate automatically is custom logic: Power Automate flows and .NET plug-ins have to be rebuilt in Flow and Apex. That rewrite is usually the longest part of the project, and it should be budgeted from the start.

Is the Gartner quadrant useful for deciding?

It is useful for building a shortlist, not for choosing. The ability-to-execute axis blends product with the vendor's financial viability, sales force and operations, so sitting higher does not mean a better product for your case. Gartner itself advises against limiting yourself to the Leaders quadrant.

The bottom line

Dynamics 365 is cheaper on licenses, integrates effortlessly with the rest of Microsoft and brings an ERP in the same family. Salesforce has the larger ecosystem, the deeper sales platform and the more developed agent layer. Gartner placed both in the Leaders quadrant in 2026, and that is exactly what it means: both are sound bets, and the choice depends on your context rather than a ranking.

Our recommendation, with the bias we declared at the start: if your company already runs on Microsoft and each person uses several applications, Dynamics has solid arguments that deserve to be taken seriously. If the commercial process is the engine of growth and you want a platform you will not outgrow in five years, a well-implemented Salesforce goes furthest. And in both cases, the quality of the implementation will matter more than the logo you pick.