Salesforce vs Sthan: an honest comparison for Indian real-estate developers.

Salesforce is the market-leading enterprise CRM, used across every industry. Its core sales product, Sales Cloud, is a general-purpose platform you configure to your process, extended by thousands of third-party apps on the AppExchange and by its Einstein AI layer ^↗. It is genuinely powerful and effectively has no upper limit on what a well-resourced team can build.

For real estate specifically, Salesforce does not ship a ready-made Indian product. You either customise Sales Cloud yourself — custom objects, page layouts, validation rules, flows — or you buy a real-estate solution built on Salesforce by an independent vendor. Either route is an implementation project, and neither includes RERA document generation or India-specific compliance, which is not part of the platform.

The practical read: Salesforce is for organisations that want maximum power and flexibility, span more than one business function, and have the admin capacity — in house or via a partner — to build and maintain it.

Sthan is a modern CRM purpose-built for Indian real-estate developers covering the full lead-to-possession lifecycle — lead capture, sales pipeline, the inventory grid, site visits, bookings, RERA document generation, a broker portal, and construction-linked collections — in one workspace, with no configuration project required to make it real-estate-shaped.

It publishes its prices — ₹8,000 per active project per month, or ₹25,000 per month flat for unlimited projects — charges per project rather than per user, and completes onboarding within 24 hours. The reasoning is in the pricing and ROI transparency guide.

Let's be straight: for an Indian developer, Salesforce is generally the more expensive route. Sales Cloud is priced per user per month across editions, billed annually and quoted in US dollars ^↗, and most real-estate deployments add the cost of an implementation partner to configure it. That bill rises with every rep and seasonal closer you add.

We are deliberately not quoting a single Salesforce figure here, because the real number depends on edition, add-ons, and implementation — and we would rather you verify it with Salesforce than trust a headline price. The structural point holds regardless: it is per user, in dollars, plus a build.

Sthan charges per active project, not per user, at published rupee prices, with a 7-day free trial and the real-estate workflow bundled in — so the whole sales team, brokers included, is covered without the cost scaling on headcount. The full per-user-versus-per-project breakdown is in the pricing and ROI guide.

Salesforce is a genuinely formidable product, and for the right organisation it is the better call:

• Customisation ceiling. Custom objects, flows, validation rules and Apex code mean you can model almost any process, however unusual — far beyond what a focused vertical tool exposes.
• The AppExchange ecosystem. Thousands of third-party apps for finance, marketing, analytics and more ^↗— valuable if you want one platform across the whole business.
• Enterprise scale and AI. Built for large, multi-team, multi-region organisations, with the Einstein AI layer and mature reporting and governance.
• Ecosystem and talent. A huge global base of certified admins, developers and consulting partners — easy to staff and extend.

If you are a large enterprise with the appetite and capacity to build, Salesforce is a serious, honest choice.

• Zero configuration required. Sthan is real-estate-shaped out of the box; Salesforce for real estate is a customisation or third-party project before it fits how an Indian developer sells.
• RERA-ready. Sthan generates RERA documents as part of the workflow; RERA and India-specific compliance are not part of Salesforce and would be a custom build.
• Built for the Indian model. Construction-linked collections, the inventory grid, the Indian lead portals, rupee-and-lakh notation, GST-compliant invoicing, and a broker portal — present by default, not assembled.
• Predictable per-project pricing. A flat rupee figure that doesn't rise with headcount, versus a per-user dollar model plus implementation cost.
• Faster setup, no partner needed. Onboarding within 24 hours, against an enterprise platform that typically needs an admin or implementation partner to stand up.

Sthan trades Salesforce's open-ended ceiling for an Indian-real-estate tool that works on day one.

On generic CRM fundamentals, both are solid: contact and lead management, pipeline stages, task and follow-up tracking, email, reporting dashboards, and a mobile app are table stakes both cover. If all you need is a basic sales pipeline and you're willing to treat real estate as just another set of records, either can do it. The divergence isn't whether they can store leads — it's whether the real-estate workflow, RERA, and pricing model come built in (Sthan) or are yours to assemble (Salesforce).

Decide on ceiling-versus-fit honestly:

• Pick Salesforce if you are a large enterprise spanning several business units, need deep customisation and the AppExchange ecosystem, have admin or partner capacity to build and maintain it, and are comfortable with per-user enterprise pricing.
• Pick Sthan if you are an Indian developer who wants RERA, bookings, inventory and collections working out of the box, with predictable per-project pricing and 24-hour setup — and you'd rather not run a customisation project to get there.

This is the classic vertical-versus-horizontal decision. The vertical vs horizontal CRM guide and the framework for evaluating a real estate CRM in India give you a buyer-first rubric to weigh configuration cost, RERA, and pricing model against each other.