As names go, Salesforce Unlimited Edition has a reasonably accurate one. Of course, nothing is completely “unlimited,” but its label is certainly more fitting than, say, Kashi’s “all-natural” products, DJ Khaled’s “We the Best” Music Group, and Hanson’s “Greatest Hits” album.
Unlimited, after all, serves as the only edition of Salesforce without feature limitations. Even compared to Salesforce Enterprise Edition, it offers significant benefits in terms of platform scope and functionality. But this power comes at a cost — Unlimited understandably has the heftiest price tag in the Salesforce suite of options.
So in this blog, we’ll walk you through the benefits Salesforce Unlimited Edition provides and identify the types of organizations it suits best. Is your company a better fit for Unlimited or Enterprise? The answers await you below.
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Salesforce Unlimited Edition features
If you’re thinking of switching from Enterprise to Unlimited, it helps to understand the concrete benefits this upgrade will provide you. And although Enterprise delivers wide-ranging CRM functionality, Unlimited trumps it in the following ways:
Platform scale and flexibility benefits
As mentioned above, Salesforce Unlimited Edition isn’t actually “unlimited.” Salesforce enforces broad platform limitations on all customers to ensure that one isn’t sapping an excessive amount of server resources, at the expense of others. Across the board, though, Unlimited allows a much higher range of freedom in customizing and expanding the platform:
- Custom objects - Your team can build 2,000 custom objects in Unlimited Edition, compared to 200 in Enterprise.
- Custom apps - Here the name fits the bill. No limit exists to the number of custom apps available in Unlimited. Enterprise restricts you to 260.
- Custom fields - Unlimited allows 800 custom fields per object. Enterprise offers 500 per object.
- Validation rules - With Unlimited, you can make 500 validation rules per object, compared to 100 per object in Enterprise.
- API calls - If you’re integrating Salesforce with multiple external systems, you’ll want to monitor the number of API calls your integrations perform in Salesforce to ensure you don’t hit limits. Salesforce Unlimited Edition provides 5 times more API calls per user than Enterprise, letting you connect Salesforce with a greater range of supplemental services.
Development lifecycle benefits
Though Enterprise allows customers 26 sandboxes in which to develop, only one of these is a partial sandbox — capable of storing a sample of your production data for testing. Unlimited, meanwhile, provides four times the number of sandboxes, including both a partial sandbox and a full one (a complete replica of your production instance). So Unlimited lets your organization manage an entire development lifecycle, where your teams can merge changes from numerous development environments into a single, organization-wide testing instance. Enterprise doesn’t natively provide this same power.
Customer support benefits
Unlimited Edition customers can also take advantage of Salesforce’s Premier Support services, which provide many benefits not available to Enterprise customers:
- 24/7 support
- Phone and chat support
- 1-hour response time for critical issues
- Development-based support
- Admin Assist — Access to Salesforce support resources to help you enhance your Salesforce instance by building fields, automations, reports, etc.
- Salesforce accelerators — pre-built packages you can plug into your Salesforce org to extend its functionality instantly and jump-start your adoption
- Invitations to helpful webinars on a range of Salesforce topics
- Access to Circles of Success — consultative, live discussions hosted by Salesforce experts to help you solve technological challenges like adoption issues
Who is Salesforce Unlimited Edition right for?
Though Enterprise Edition works for most sizes of companies, Salesforce Unlimited Edition better fits the needs of massive corporations and organizations with hundreds of users. Their far-reaching platform requirements and the sheer scope of their implementations make them ideal customers for the flexibility, development structure and consultative support that Unlimited Edition provides.
Many multinational companies don’t just use Salesforce — they rely on it as a critical information hub for their business. When it's that important to you, you can’t bear to worry about scale limitations or two-day support response times. And in those cases, Salesforce Unlimited Edition becomes your platform of choice.
Interested in other Salesforce editions? Check out our other blogs about Salesforce Essentials, Salesforce Professional Edition and Enterprise Edition.
