Five products at the core, one platform underneath.
Salesforce is a set of products on one platform. Sales, data, marketing, loyalty and service are the five most teams start with. Everything else here, from agents to integration, supports them.
Product names on this site follow Salesforce's own pages. Data 360 was formerly Data Cloud.
Start with these five.
Sales, data, marketing, loyalty and service are the products most teams build their Salesforce use around. Each one has its own page.
- 01SellSales CloudCRM for sales teams, with AI beside the seller.Leads, contacts, accounts and opportunities in one place, with activity captured automatically, forecasts that follow the deals, and agents that research, prepare and monitor.Pipeline and forecasting · Activity capture · Quotes and approvals · AI and agents
- 02UnifyData 360The data layer people and agents share.Brings data from Salesforce and other systems together, often without copying it, and gives it business meaning so teams and agents can act on it.Zero-copy access · Unified profiles · Segments and activation · Grounding for agents
- 03EngageMarketing CloudCampaigns, journeys and agents for marketers.The family of Salesforce marketing products: Marketing Cloud Next, Account Engagement and Marketing Cloud Engagement, built around one customer profile.Marketing Cloud Next · Segments and journeys · Campaign Agent · B2B and B2C
- 04RetainLoyalty ManagementProgrammes, offers and referrals that keep customers.Build and run loyalty programmes with members, points, tiers and vouchers, add personalised offers, and run referral campaigns for consumers or business partners.Points and tiers · Offers · Referrals · Partner programmes
- 05ServeService CloudCases, conversations and knowledge, with agents and people together.Customer service on one platform: case management, a console for reps, knowledge, a contact centre and AI agents that answer and hand over.Case management · Knowledge · Contact centre · AI agents
Also on the Salesforce platform
- AgentforceThe platform for building and running AI agents.
- Revenue CloudPricing, quotes, contracts, orders and billing.
- Field ServiceScheduling, dispatch and mobile work for site visits.
- Commerce CloudOnline, in-store and order management on one platform.
- SlackWhere people and agents work on Salesforce records.
- TableauAnalytics on the same data, with conversational answers.
- MuleSoftIntegration and APIs for Salesforce and everything around it.
Find the gap that bites most.
Pick the problem closest to yours. We will show which of the five usually comes first.
One platform under every product.
Salesforce describes its platform as shared layers that every product uses. Salesforce's own partner guide names four of them as systems.
- 01Context: Data 360
- Converts structured and unstructured data into the context that models and agents need, so answers rest on a trusted, unified source.
- 02Work: the applications
- Sales, Service, Marketing and Commerce, and the industry versions, where the daily workflows run. Salesforce says the aim is to move workflows from suggestions to execution.
- 03Agency: Agentforce
- The platform for building agents and the place to find partner agents, so work can be automated with actions the platform provides.
- 04Engagement: Slack
- Where agents sit inside conversations and workflows, so people and agents work together.
Underneath, Salesforce lists security, privacy and compliance controls, integration and automation through MuleSoft, analytics through Tableau, DevOps tools, and the Hyperforce infrastructure.
Salesforce works alongside the systems you run.
Salesforce does not replace an ERP. What each of its pages says about connecting to one is set out here, including what is not confirmed.
What Salesforce says about safety and residency.
From Salesforce's trust, security and Hyperforce pages.
- 01A trust layer for AI
- Salesforce says prompts and responses are not stored or used to train third-party models, personal details are masked before they reach a model, and generated content is scanned for toxicity. People see only the data their permissions allow.
- 02Shared responsibility
- Salesforce builds security into the platform, and customers configure their own org settings and access controls. Its security page recommends multi-factor authentication, restricting login IP ranges and moving to TLS 1.3.
- 03Choose your region
- On Hyperforce, Salesforce's public-cloud infrastructure, customers choose the region where data is stored and processed. Availability varies by product and country. Hyperforce has no extra charge, and a paid EU option adds stricter residency and in-region support.
- 04Compliance reports
- Salesforce says it maintains compliance certifications and attestations and points customers to its compliance and trust sites for the list. We do not name any here.
What a Salesforce project involves.
Salesforce's own services page describes four stages. The decisions below are the ones its pricing pages put to a customer.
- 01Get startedSet a plan, apply best practice and design a foundation that fits how the business operates.
- 02BuildCreate working solutions through testing, feedback and launch, with build, integration and data work.
- 03OptimiseKeep it performing: tuning, security, simplification and scaling.
- 04TransformAdopt AI and new capabilities with guardrails, skills and ways of working.
Decisions to settle before you buy
- Which edition, and how many users: most editions are priced per user, per month.
- Billing terms and support plan: Salesforce offers Standard (included), Premier and Signature plans.
- Add-ons: agent features, Revenue Cloud, partner management and digital channels are among those sold separately.
- How you will pay for AI and data: Flex Credits, conversations, per-user licences or profile-based pricing, and how you will monitor use.
Salesforce publishes material for 17 industries.
Each has its own page on salesforce.com. We link to them rather than describe them here.
AutomotiveCommunicationsConsumer goodsEducationEnergy and utilitiesConstruction and real estateFinancial servicesHealthcareLife sciencesManufacturingMediaNonprofitProfessional servicesPublic sectorRetailTechnologyTravel, transportation and hospitality
© 2026 Mawkish Technologies. This guide, its diagrams and illustrations are protected by copyright. You’re welcome to learn from it and to quote it with credit and a link. Reproducing it, by hand or through AI, and publishing it as your own is not allowed. Read our copyright notice
Straight answers.
What is the Salesforce platform, and how do the products fit together?
Salesforce's applications, such as Sales, Service, Marketing and Commerce, run on a shared platform. Data 360 is the data layer, Agentforce is the agent layer, and Slack, Tableau and MuleSoft add collaboration, analytics and integration. Salesforce describes its portfolio as sharing the same data and the same agent platform.
Which five products should we look at first?
Sales Cloud, Data 360, Marketing Cloud, Loyalty Management and Service Cloud are the products most teams build their Salesforce use around. The others, such as Agentforce, Revenue Cloud and MuleSoft, support them.
What is Agentforce, and how is it different from a chatbot?
Agentforce is Salesforce's platform for building, deploying and monitoring AI agents. A scripted chatbot follows a fixed path. An agent interprets a request, builds a plan and chooses from the tools it has, and it can also be started by a data change.
What is Data 360, and was it called Data Cloud?
Data 360 is Salesforce's data platform, formerly called Data Cloud. Some older pages and training still use the earlier name.
Do we have to copy our data into Salesforce?
Not always. Salesforce's zero-copy approach lets Data 360 query warehouse and lake data where it lives. Data can also be ingested when that suits the use case.
How does Salesforce keep AI safe?
Salesforce describes a trust layer that retrieves data securely under each user's permissions, does not store prompts or use them to train third-party models, masks personal details, and scans generated content. It also describes guardrails on agents and an audit trail. Its own pages differ slightly in how they list these features, so check the page for the one you rely on.
Can Salesforce work alongside our ERP?
Yes, in principle. MuleSoft publishes an SAP connector for SAP ECC and S/4HANA on-premises, and Salesforce says Manufacturing Cloud is designed to work alongside ERP systems. The pages we read do not confirm support for SAP's cloud editions, so check your edition with Salesforce or MuleSoft.
How is Salesforce priced?
By edition and number of users for the applications, with add-ons, and by consumption for AI and data. Salesforce's pricing pages list the decisions a customer makes. We do not quote prices because they change, and we link the official pages instead.
Where is our data stored?
On Hyperforce, Salesforce's public-cloud infrastructure, customers choose the region where data is stored and processed. Availability varies by product and country.
Checked against Salesforce’s own pages in November 2026.
Not sure where to start with Salesforce?
Tell us what you want it to do. We will help you work out which of the five comes first, and what can wait.
- Your goals and the systems involved
- Which of the five fits first
- A sensible first step
Salesforce, Agentforce, Data 360, Slack, Tableau, MuleSoft and other Salesforce product names are trademarks of Salesforce, Inc. Other names are the property of their owners. Screens shown are illustrations with sample data. Product descriptions follow Salesforce's own published material and can change, so check salesforce.com for current details.
We call our approach to Salesforce the Thread Test: advice that stays on your side of the table.