I can't speak as an actual Salesforce user, but I did do a Salesforce integration for my company a few years ago - integrating Salesforce into our backend syste

I can't speak as an actual Salesforce user, but I did do a Salesforce integration for my company a few years ago - integrating Salesforce into our backend systems. It was quite a painful process. The documentation is dense and somewhat difficult to follow - I ended up spending a lot of time reading forum posts to get a grip on how to use it. The API at the time was also SOAP/XML, with all the fun joy that comes with using that (although, in fairness, it looks like they now have a REST/JSON API too). The API limits are also draconian, resulting in all kinds of code nastiness to stay within the usage limits. In our case, because of how things are stored in Salesforce and how the API is constructed, it might take 5+ API calls to update various parts of a single Account. We ended up batching changes and sending them every hour or so, and just had to tell our sales folks that info in Salesforce may be delayed up to an hour. Not to mention, from a UX perspective, it feels like the 00s never ended. We later ended up switching to Zurmo with a very heavy amount of customization. It ended up making more business sense to bring it in house and pay someone to customize it for exactly what we needed than to sign another Salesforce contract.