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A Salesforce alternative for teams without a Salesforce admin

Salesforce is a platform, and a company running it properly is running something we cannot replace. This page is for the other case: the team that was sold it, never hired the admin it assumes, and now pays a consultant every time a field needs moving.

The short answer

Choose Salesforce if your business logic lives in custom objects and Flow, if you need forecasting, territories or the AppExchange, or if you have the operations people to run it well. Choose Roomie if your pipeline is a list of deals with stages, if changing anything means raising a ticket with someone outside your company, or if the data has to sit on your own servers.

Side by side

Where the two actually differ

Structural differences rather than feature checklists, because a feature list between a mature product and a young one is not a useful document.

Roomie
Salesforce
What it is
A workspace with a pipeline in it, beside chat, mail, tickets, support and the wiki.
A platform. The CRM is the starting point, and most of the value is in what gets built on it.
Who runs it
Whoever set up the workspace. There is no admin role to hire for.
An admin, usually, and a consultant for anything structural.
Customisation
Pipeline stages, custom fields, ticket types and workflows per project.
Effectively unlimited: objects, Flow, Apex, a full development platform.
Where the context lives
The deal, the client's email, the ticket and the chat about it are the same records.
In the platform, with the rest of the company's work in other tools.
Price shape
$2 per user per month (NPR 250) for the whole workspace, one tier.
Per user per month across editions, plus implementation.
Self-hosting
Yes. $2,000 per instance per year, carrying 50–100 people.
No. Cloud only.
Maturity
Young. Eight paying companies, around 200 people.
The largest CRM company in the world, with an implementation industry around it.

Salesforce details checked October 2026. Salesforce prices are from their own pricing page: Starter Suite $25 a user a month, Pro Suite $100, before implementation. Their pricing and packaging change, so check their site for current figures before deciding on cost alone.

No admin to hire

Changing something does not need a consultant

Most of what a small team wants from a CRM is a pipeline, a client list, somewhere the emails land and an invoice at the end. In Roomie those are configuration, not a project: stages are a setting, custom fields are a setting, and nobody has to book time with an implementation partner to rename a stage.

  • A CRM space per line of business, with its own stages and shared inbox
  • Custom fields and ticket types without a development environment
  • Quotes and invoices raised from the deal itself
One data model

The deal, the mail and the ticket as the same records

Salesforce knows what is in Salesforce. Roomie knows the deal, the email that moved it, the ticket the customer raised, the chat thread where it was argued about and what they were invoiced, because those were never stored apart. Search runs across all of it at once, and so does the AI.

  • Search across deals, mail, tickets, chat and the wiki in one go
  • An MCP server, so Claude or ChatGPT can operate the workspace
  • Five things no teammate can ever do, including sending email
Your servers

The option Salesforce does not offer

Salesforce is cloud only. Roomie can be installed on your own infrastructure, against your own database, pointed at your own model, licensed per instance rather than per seat at $2,000 a year. For a bank, a government department or a security company, this is usually the entire decision.

  • Your database and object storage, backed up and audited by you
  • Capacity added by running more nodes, never by per-seat licences
  • Installation, environment setup and monitoring from us
Being fair about it

When Salesforce is the better choice

  • It is a platform and we are not. Custom objects, Flow, Apex, an API for everything. If your company's processes are built in there, nothing we have comes close and nothing we plan to build will.
  • Forecasting, territories and quotas. Real sales operations machinery. We have a pipeline and a dashboard, and we would not dress that up.
  • The ecosystem. AppExchange, every integration you can name, and consultants in every city who already know your setup.
  • Procurement will prefer them. Security reviews, compliance certifications, references and three decades of balance sheet. If your buying process weighs those, it should, and we will not clear the bar.
Questions

Roomie compared with Salesforce, answered

Can Roomie replace Salesforce?

For most companies running Salesforce properly, no, and we are not going to pretend. Salesforce is a development platform with custom objects, Flow, Apex, territory management and an entire consulting industry around it. If your business logic lives in there, nothing we have touches it.

So who is this page for?

The team that was sold Salesforce and does not have the admin to run it. It is a common situation: a few dozen people, a pipeline that is really a list of deals with stages, a licence that assumed an operations hire nobody made, and a consultant's invoice every time something needs changing. If that is the shape of it, you are paying for a platform to run a spreadsheet.

What does Roomie give up?

Depth, and all of it. No custom objects, no Flow, no Apex, no territory or quota management, no forecasting, no AppExchange. What you get instead is that the pipeline sits in the same system as the email, the tickets, the chat and the wiki, so an AI teammate can act across the whole thing rather than one corner of it.

What about the cost difference?

Salesforce's own pricing page puts Starter Suite at $25 a user a month and Pro Suite at $100, before implementation. Roomie is $2 for the entire workspace, not just the CRM. But cost is the weakest reason to leave a system your company runs on, and if it is your only reason, stay.

Can we migrate off Salesforce?

Clients and companies, yes. Anything that depends on custom objects or automation does not come across, because we have nowhere to put it. Show us what your org looks like before you commit to a date, and we will tell you honestly whether the move is sensible.

What does your AI do that Agentforce does not?

Less, inside the CRM. More across the rest of the company, because the rest of the company is in the same product. A Sales teammate reads the pipeline, notices what has gone quiet and drafts the follow-up with the mail and the ticket in front of it. It cannot send to a client; that waits for a person, and it is not a setting you can turn off.

Can we self-host it?

Yes, and Salesforce cannot be self-hosted at all. The licence is per instance rather than per seat, at $2,000 a year for a box carrying 50–100 people. If the deciding requirement is that customer data never leaves your building, that is the whole comparison.

How big is Roomie?

Small, and we would rather say so. Eight companies pay for it today, around 200 people, across software, energy consulting, non-profits and consumer goods. Some run it on their own servers.

See it against your own work

Free for the first three people, with no trial clock. Or tell us what you run on Salesforce today and we will say plainly whether moving is worth it.

Start freeAsk us whether to switch

Also worth reading: pricing and self-hosting.