Salesforce App Cloud, which starts at $25 per user per month, is a cloud-based product within the Salesforce (Visit Site for Pricing at Salesforce.com)(Opens in a new window) platform designed to extend the company’s customer relationship management (CRM), sales, and marketing solution for businesses with a low-code development tool for building custom applications. Salesforce is a veteran in the space and has offered a low-code platform to its customers for years, gradually building new capabilities into the platform and expanding its code-less app building feature set. The result is the most feature-packed low-code platform we tested, offering a full-fledged app and component marketplace and a veritable arsenal of visual app development environments and tools for average business users and developers alike.

A key element in the business value of low-code app development is in its simplicity. Unfortunately, Salesforce’s tools are housed in a jam-packed interface cluttered with an overwhelming array of menus and feature options that can be confusing to navigate amidst all the other Salesforce applications. At the same time, the guided Salesforce Trailhead tutorials intended to walk you through the complex interface did not always correspond accurately to the App Cloud interface. Salesforce App Cloud is peerless in its selection of low-code tools and features, as well its mature AppExchange ecosystem that is unmatched in available pre-built apps, components, and templates. If you’re familiar with Salesforce and know your way around the overstuffed platform, Salesforce is arguably the most capable tool in this roundup. Nonetheless, the basic usability and training issues left the low-code stalwart behind Appian (Visit Site at Appian)(Opens in a new window) , our Editors’ Choice for enterprise business users, and Microsoft PowerApps (7.00 Per User Per Month at PowerApps)(Opens in a new window) , our low-code Editors’ Choice for power users and IT.

Pricing and Plans

Salesforce App Cloud starts at $25 per user per month for the Employee Apps Starter plan. This gives you custom app development with an allotment of 10 objects per user, point-and-click app development, an employee community, and access to other Salesforce services including account and contact management, task and event tracking, workflows and approvals, customizable dashboards and reports, read-only knowledge base access, native collaboration with Salesforce Chatter, and plenty more. The overwhelming wealth of features is apparent from the get-go.

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The Employee Apps Plus plan, which costs $100 per user per month, ups the allotment to 110 objects per user, giving every department in your organization access to the Lightning App Builder and the rest of the low-code suite. There’s also an additional $75 per user per month Expansion Pack that ups the quota to 2,000 objects per user. There is a custom-quoted App Cloud Unlimited plan as well, and all plans with come with a free 30-day trial. Salesforce App Cloud isn’t as expensive as the base plan for Appian ($75 per user per month), but both Salesforce and Appian have been undercut on pricing by low-code newcomers like Microsoft PowerApps ($7 per user per month) and Google App Maker (10.00 Per User Per Month at Google App Maker)(Opens in a new window) ($10 per user per month as part of G Suite Business).

Building a Low-Code Business App

Low-code platforms cater to two different types of business users: everyday workers who want to quickly and intuitively build apps to optimize specific business tasks and processes, and the developers and IT workers who want a faster and easier way to build simple apps. To test Salesforce App Cloud from the perspective of an average business user, we built a basic scheduling app. The goal was to create a working app with the ability to add a new event with a date, time, and participants, and save that event to a list or calendar view with the ability to invite users and send event notifications.

Salesforce knows its platform offers an intimidating laundry list of features and tools, so the company has devised a selection of guided tutorials called “trails” through Salesforce Trailhead(Opens in a new window), its interactive learning and training site for users, admins, and developers. The catch: because of the rate at which the platform has evolved, we discovered through our testing that some of the low-code trails—which walk you through the Lightning App Builder(Opens in a new window), Lightning Components, Lightning Pages, the Salesforce1 mobile app, and the Salesforce AppExchange(Opens in a new window)—don’t correspond to the current iteration of Salesforce App Cloud and leave you confused looking at an interface that doesn’t match up to the tutorial. This wasn’t always the case, but it made an already cluttered experience even more difficult to navigate and left both myself and even our developer-side tester lost at various points when trying to match up the tutorials with what we were seeing.

Tutorials aside, building an app in Salesforce App Cloud is relatively straightforward once you understand the company’s design philosophy, which is essentially making things reusable in as many places as possible. Think of it as SpaceX’s reusable rocket analogy applied to low-code app development.

When you open the App Cloud interface, all your low-code tools are laid out in the setup toolbar running down the left-hand side of the dashboard. In Salesforce there’s generally a drag-and-drop interface or a wizard for every process, particularly in the primary Platform Tools section. Unlike the more guided experiences of Microsoft PowerApps and Google App Maker, Salesforce puts all your low-code tools at your disposal right away. Going down the navigation list, you’ll see tools for Apps, Feature Settings, Objects and Fields, Process Automation, User Interface, Custom Code, Environments, and Integrations, each of which opens into its own drop-down menu with multiple tooling options. In this respect, Trailhead is at least useful in helping you figure out where to start.

While each individual part of the Salesforce experience gives you a guided experience, the overall app creation process is not nearly as cohesive as in all the other tools, and not nearly as straightforward for business users as in Appian and Google App Maker. Prompted by Trailhead, I clicked into the Lightning App Manager and hit the button to create a new Lightning App. Salesforce lets you customize the colors and branding of your app without going into a property editor, so I uploaded a logo for my PCMag Scheduling App along with a name and description, and decided what available pre-built items I wanted to appear in the app’s navigation menu (home, contacts, calendar, tasks, etc). You also designate what user profiles within your organization can view the app such as a standard user, marketing user, solution manager, system administrator, or other roles.

Once that was done, I navigated into the User Interface menu from the Lightning App Builder. From here I set up a Lightning Page, which helps you build an impressively responsive interface that resizes for desktops, tablets, and other mobile devices and also allows you to configure how many columns, sidebars, and other elements you want in your layout. Only PowerApps provided a similar degree of UI customization for different screen sizes. This brings you into the drag-and-drop builder, where you’re given a selection of pre-built Lightning Components on the left to drag into your app layout. Salesforce only gave me eight standard components to choose from, and since I was building a scheduling app I was looking for a basic form component to add events and a list or calendar element to display my events.

I couldn’t create custom components without setting up a domain, which overcomplicated matters compared to how easy it was to build app components in Appian and Google App Maker. Luckily, Salesforce has one thing the other tools don’t—its AppExchange marketplace of pre-built apps and components. Searching the store, I found and downloaded a calendar component and an events component. It took some refreshing before the downloaded components showed up, but after that I was able to drag them into my layout and configure, save, and activate a working app that I was then able to pull up. Overall, it was harder to find what I needed and took longer to build the basic app than in all the other tools. The Trailhead tutorials kept coming up as dead ends, and it was difficult to find what I was looking for in the interface. Only the thousands of apps and components in the AppExchange were this low-code platform’s saving grace.

The Developer Experience

To test Salesforce App Cloud from an IT perspective, our developer built a collaborative contact management app, called Crowd Control. The goal was to create a contact manager consisting of a contact list page, a contact detail page, and a new contact page with the ability to add photos and multiple notes for each contact. Developers also need the ability to update apps over time, so we also gauged success on the ability to simulate changes to the application by adding and changing fields in the app’s data model after the first iteration was completed.

Ultimately, creating the app was successful, but it was the most trying and time-consuming experience for our developer when compared to the other low-code tools we tested. The cluttered UI is the antithesis of App Maker, PowerApps, and Zoho Creator (Starts at $8 Per User Per Month, Billed Annually at Zoho Creator)(Opens in a new window) , with basic tasks buried under menus. Even the Trailhead demos avoided navigating the menus and resorted to searches using the Quick Find bar on the top left to navigate to specific features.

Salesforce App Cloud does have a couple unique visual interfaces that help it stand out. The Process Builder, which you’ll find in the Workflow Automation tab, gives you a drag-and-drop workflow interface that’s more modern and intuitive to use than Appian’s Process Modeler. For Crowd Control, we tested out setting up some automated actions for creating a new contact record and sending new contacts an email alert with follow-ups at specific scheduled times.

The Schema Builder is similarly impressive for helping organize your database in a drag-and-drop visual manner. Found under the Objects and Fields menu, it’s a far more intuitive way to manage objects than the Object Manager itself, which was not as polished as Zoho Creator or PowerApps, or even the rather Spartan, no-frills experience of Google App Maker. The Schema Builder gives you a list of your object on the left, organizing them in tables with attached elements like dates, summary reports, and rich text. More uniquely, the Schema Builder lets you move objects around and create relationship lines from one object to another to help visualize the app’s workflow and how one element relates to another.

In the Object Manager, adding a field to an entity—meaning the table in a database—required clicking through four pages of options. Entity properties were given faux Hungarian notation names by default. Hungarian notation names are a methodology for naming variables in software where code letters are used to identify the properties of a variable, like its type or scope. This is a confusing naming convention for anyone who’s not a developer.

Salesforce does however place more emphasis on security and entitlements (meaning the access management of who is allowed to see what data) than the other tools. The main left-hand navigation includes separate menus for both identity and security, giving you the ability to configure features such as single sign-on (SSO), certificate and key management, network access, password policies, and encryption, among dozens of other settings.

When updating the completed app, adding a new field to the database was doable but getting that field integrated into the pre-existing app was more difficult than in the other tools we reviewed. The same goes for changing an existing field; doable, but not as easy as in Microsoft PowerApps or any of the other tools.

Ultimately, this tool made our developer wish dearly for a good old general purpose integrated developer environment (IDE). Even the AppExchange, with its wealth of third-party apps and components, ended up giving us some install failures and redirects to the ‘developers web page’ to complete installation and then to the general Salesforce site with a prompt to ‘upgrade’ from version 1.6.5 to 1.6.5. That’s not a typo. Clicking the ‘Lightning Components’ resulted in duplicate component listings as well, resulting in multiple copies of the same component. The low-code process ended with a working Crowd Control app, but only after plenty of hassle.

From an IT and a general usability standpoint, our developer felt Salesforce should rethink their design, which feels cobbled together with features on top of features. The majority of the links and menus visible on screen at any given time were superfluous to the task at hand, a stark difference from the newly created and more streamlined experiences of PowerApps and App Maker. Both the Schema Builder and Process Builder would be far more effective if prominently displayed as part of a guided app building experience rather than buried in menus.

A Messy But Powerful Low-Code Platform

Salesforce App Cloud is a powerhouse low-code development platform that’s been around longer than most and has the comprehensive capabilities to prove it. There’s no arguing with the depth of low-code features, drag-and-drop interfaces, mobile-optimized customization, and bustling third-party app and component marketplace. For Salesforce customers familiar with the platform and who know their way around the jam-packed interface, it’s probably the most capable low-code tool you can buy.

The issue is with everyone else. For both average business users and IT workers looking for the path of least resistance to building good-looking business apps efficiently and without any coding, Salesforce’s cluttered UI, inconsistent training resources, and mish-mashed toolset are a steep barrier to entry. The platform feels like what it is—a veteran low-code offering that has grown organically over time, but without a consistent enough product vision to keep it streamlined.

Editors’ Choice Appian has been around as long as Salesforce, with Zoho Creator not far behind. Both of those tools are easier to navigate and build working apps fast, despite feature sets that don’t match what Salesforce offers. Ditto for Google App Maker and Editors’ Choice Microsoft PowerApps, the new kids on the block that had the benefit of watching a platform like Salesforce develop and cherry picking the best elements for a no-brainer guided app creation environment. Salesforce has so many redundant features in its low-code platform that sometimes the most innovative and useful tools end up buried. Some UI and feature set pruning would go a long way toward uncluttering the experience.