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 CRM purpose-built for Indian real-estate developers, covering the full lead-to-possession lifecycle in one workspace: marketing and capture from the property portals, AI intent scoring and routing, the sales pipeline, site visits with location check-in, a live tower-and-unit inventory grid, bookings and RERA documents, construction-linked collections, a channel-partner portal with commission payouts, and possession handover — with no configuration project required to make it real-estate-shaped.

It publishes its prices — ₹6,999 a month for 1–3 staff seats, ₹14,999 for 4–8 and ₹24,999 for 9+ — and charges for its own staff only. Brokers, channel partners and buyers get their own portal logins, unlimited and free on every plan, and every feature is in every plan. Onboarding is completed 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 staff seat, at published rupee prices — ₹6,999 a month for 1–3 of your own people, ₹14,999 for 4–8, ₹24,999 for 9+ — with a 7-day free trial and the real-estate workflow bundled in. The structural difference is what counts as a user, and it is easiest to see on the shape an Indian developer's team is usually in. Take a desk of five with twenty active channel partners feeding it — an illustration, not a survey. On a per-user platform that is twenty-five billed logins, four in five of them partners rather than your own team. On Sthan it is the ₹14,999 tier for the five, and the partners are free, because a partner login is never a seat. Onboarding the next twenty partners adds twenty billed users to one of those numbers and leaves the other exactly where it was. Compare only the staff column — a purely in-house desk where nobody outside the payroll ever logs in — and the result depends on the edition and discount you land, and we are not going to claim Sthan automatically wins there. The claim is about the channel, and in Indian real estate the channel is not an edge case. The full per-user-versus-per-staff-seat 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.

Start with the product, because "works out of the box" only means something if you can say what is in the box. This is what an Indian developer gets on day one, without an admin, a partner or a configuration project.

The product case

• The whole lifecycle, not the front halfMarketing, capture, qualification, pipeline, site visits, inventory, booking, collections and possession run in one workspace. Most CRMs stop at the booking; in Indian real estate the booking is roughly halfway.
• Tower and unit inventory as a first-class recordA live tower by floor by unit grid with available, held, booked, sold and blocked states, time-bound holds that expire on their own, price and cost sheets, and floor plans attached to the unit.
• Broker and partner payoutsChannel partners sign up, get approved and log in to their own portal. Commission is set per broker and accrues against the booking and its receipts, so a payout is a record you open rather than an argument you have.
• Construction-linked collectionsPayment schedules tied to construction milestones, with demand notes, tiered reminders, GST-compliant invoicing and an ageing view the accounts team works from.
• A native app for the people at the siteSthan Sales, the field sales app for iOS and Android, is coming soon — leads, site visits with location check-in, the inventory grid and call logging that cannot close without a next step. The same role rules that run on the web will run on the phone.
• WhatsApp-native, not WhatsApp-bolted-onClick-to-chat and missed-call capture create the lead. Two-way messaging on the WhatsApp Business API, with templates you control, carries the follow-ups and the payment reminders.
• RERA and the paper trailFiling reminders, allotment letters, demand notes, receipts and possession letters generated from the booking record, and an audit trail behind every status, booking, payment and ownership change.
• Marketing services bundled with the CRMOptional Growth Services run the Google and Meta campaigns that feed the pipeline, so the spend and the booking it produced sit in one system rather than two.

The commercial case

• 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 ^↗.
• Priced on your staff, not on every login. A published rupee figure set by how many of your own people log in, with brokers, channel partners and buyers unlimited and free — versus a per-user dollar model that bills every seat you create, 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. Every module behind these claims is named on the platform page, and the post-booking half is set out in the lead-to-possession automation guide.

On generic CRM fundamentals, both are solid: contact and lead management, pipeline stages, task and follow-up tracking, email and reporting dashboards are table stakes both cover. Mobile is the exception: the Salesforce mobile app is on one side ^↗, and on the other Sthan Sales, our field sales app for iOS and Android, is coming soon. 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 published seat-based pricing that never bills you for a broker or a buyer, 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.