5 reasons to hate Salesforce and 5 good alternatives

Reasons

1. The Cost. With the most simple (and thus completely restricted) package costing £36 per user for a year and the most expensive packages costing a whopping £2040 per user for a year you begin to question how well they sleep at night. Even in a small company with a couple of users and an average quality package you could find your annual bill costing thousands.
2. The Principle. Salesforce trys to cling to every bit of data it can and that results in duplicate records being created everywhere. There is a very good reason as to why the primary key system is used in databases and they seem to try to rewrite years of technological development. Ever tried programming for a system when there is no clear method of assigning one set of data to one entity? We have, and it's not fun.
3. The Software. Their Microsoft Office Connector still doesn't work with Excel 2010 (this article was written on 20/04/2011). You would think by charging that much for a user on a CRM system that they'd be able to afford programmers to write up to date supporting software.
4. Everything Costs. Added freebies? I don't think so, everything on Salesfore is designed for making accountants happy rather than customers.
5. The Cost. What? I've done this one? Well yes, I just think readers should take some time to look back at how stupidly expensive it is for what is pretty much a big database for idiots. If you feel cheated about this cop out reason, then have you every tried programming with the API? Next to paypal it's one of the slowest systems I have ever used.

The Alternatives

1. vTiger. Open source so it's pretty much free to run, and you can get a decent value subscription for support if you so wish.
2. FreeCRM. Free for up to 50 users. It's not at all expensive for a professional version anyway.
3. ZohoCRM. Free for up to 3 users, not too expensive after that either. And it looks pretty neat.
4. OpenCRM. One of the more expensive options I'll list here, still a lot cheaper than salesforce, obviously. It might look more expensive but remember this one is priced for a group of users, rather than an extra cost for every user.
5. Really Simple Systems. Free and enterprise editions, as you can tell by the name it's probably pretty easy to use too.