Salesforce API
Salesforce exposes one of the largest API surfaces in software: REST, SOAP, Bulk, Streaming, Pub/Sub, GraphQL, and Metadata. Production access needs Enterprise Edition or a paid add-on on Professional, plus daily call caps. Three releases a year and version retirements demand upkeep.
Frequently asked questions
Salesforce scores A on the API Report Card. Salesforce exposes one of the largest API surfaces in software: REST, SOAP, Bulk, Streaming, Pub/Sub, GraphQL, and Metadata. Production access needs Enterprise Edition or a paid add-on on Professional, plus daily call caps. Three releases a year and version retirements demand upkeep.
Salesforce has a workable official integration path. Most engineering teams can build against it directly. Open API: self-serve, documented, with SDKs
Salesforce, Inc. (NYSE: CRM) is the world's largest customer relationship management (CRM) software company and the dominant cloud-native enterprise application platform.
Vertical: misc (horizontal enterprise SaaS sold into every industry on earth). A typical Salesforce-customer enterprise stack: sales reps work Leads, Opportunities, Accounts, and Contacts in the Lightning Sales Console with Einstein/Agentforce drafting outreach and surfacing recommended actions; sales leadership runs forecasting, pipeline review, and Einstein Conversation Insights; marketing ops runs B2B demand generation in Pardot/MCAE (Engagement Studio, lead scoring/grading, forms, landing pages) or B2C cross-channel journeys in Marketing Cloud Engagement / Marketing Cloud Growth; service teams handle Cases via Omni-Channel routing across voice (Service Cloud Voice + Amazon Connect or partner CCaaS), chat, in-app messaging, SMS/WhatsApp, email-to-case, and social; field-service dispatchers route technicians via Field Service; commerce teams run storefronts on Commerce Cloud; partners and customers self-serve on Experience Cloud portals; admins and developers build custom objects, Flows, Apex triggers, Lightning Web Components, and AppExchange-published packages.
10/10. Salesforce holds 20.7% of the global CRM applications market per IDC, larger than Microsoft, Oracle, Adobe, and SAP combined, and has been the #1 CRM vendor worldwide for twelve consecutive years (IDC). It serves 150,000+ customer organizations and ~90% of the Fortune 500.
For 150,000+ enterprise customers Salesforce is the single most important system of record after the general ledger.
Founded March 1999 in a San Francisco apartment by Marc Benioff (ex-Oracle VP) with Parker Harris, Dave Moellenhoff, and Frank Dominguez. Pioneered the multi-tenant SaaS delivery model with the famous 'No Software' branding.
Daily API request limits, 24-hour caps based on edition + licenses; high-volume integrators routinely hit the ceiling and have to buy additional API call packs from Salesforce. Governor limits, per-transaction caps on SOQL queries (100), DML statements (150), DML rows (10,000), CPU time, heap size, and callouts apply to every Apex execution including triggers fired by Bulk API. Architecting around governor limits is a foundational Salesforce engineering skill. Full sourced list under Sources below.
Common alternatives include Microsoft Dynamics 365, HubSpot, Oracle CX (Fusion / NetSuite CRM), SAP Customer Experience (C/4HANA), Adobe Experience Cloud, ServiceNow Customer Workflows / CSM. Graded alternatives appear under "More from the report card" below.
Grades measure one thing: can a customer's engineering team get their own data out programmatically? We check six things (whether a real API exists, how access is gated, data coverage, auth quality, docs and developer experience, and stability) and roll them into a letter grade. Grades get re-verified, and they only move on evidence.