Competition

Competitors describe Salesforce, Inc.'s market in their own filings and calls. These verified passages and visual pages show where their strategies meet, using source documents preserved in Sources.

ServiceNow, Inc. (NOW)

The most direct threat to Salesforce's core franchise: ServiceNow has formally added a "CRM and Industry" product line (customer service, field service, sales, order management, CPQ) and its management explicitly positions its AI platform as the modern replacement for "legacy CRM." Its Now Assist agents collide head-on with Salesforce's Agentforce, and it pitches itself as the cross-functional "platform of platforms" that consolidates point-solution SaaS suites.

ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott, on the Q3 FY2025 call, frames prior CRM deployments as a "sprawling mess of instances and silos" and positions ServiceNow's AI platform — including a new AI-powered CPQ — as the tool that turns CRM into an "AI-first system of action." This is ServiceNow's stated case for reshaping the customer-experience market that Salesforce leads.

Enterprises invested a lot into legacy CRM deployments. For all that investment, they got a sprawling mess of instances and silos. They want a better way with AI. This applies to many legacy vendors, some more than others. Here's why ServiceNow is reshaping the customer experience market. Our AI experience turns CRM into an AI-first system of action that drives growth and customer loyalty. In sales, a new AI-powered CPQ solution accelerates quote generation, and this is going to free businesses to focus on relationships.

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On the Q4 FY2025 call, ServiceNow sizes the agentic-AI opportunity (an IDC estimate of 2.2 billion AI agents by 2030) and states outright that it intends to win "in IT, HR, CRM, app development, and beyond" — naming CRM as one of the workflow categories it is contesting.

IDC estimates there will be 2.2 billion AI agents in the world by 2030. Millions of those will be built on the ServiceNow platform. Whatever isn't built on our platform will be governed and secured by our AI control tower. ServiceNow is a build-or-buy winner. We'll win with the builders because they want ServiceNow for our data fabric, our agents, governance, and security. We'll win for buyers because they want best-of-breed AI native workflows and agents to reinvent their status quo in IT, HR, CRM, app development, and beyond.

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ServiceNow's FY2025 10-K now lists "Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Industry" as one of its four core product areas — the audited, on-the-record statement that its products reach into customer service, field service, sales and order management, the heart of Salesforce's Sales and Service Cloud.

Our products are grouped into four areas: Technology, Customer Relationship Management ("CRM") and Industry, Core Business, and Creator and Other. […] Our CRM and Industry products help organizations integrate front-end customer service functions with operations, field service resources, sales processes and order management, and provide workflows tailored for specific industries.

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Adobe Inc. (ADBE)

Adobe's Digital Experience business — Adobe Experience Platform, Real-Time CDP, Journey Optimizer and Marketo Engage — is the closest analog to Salesforce's Marketing Cloud and Data Cloud, competing for the same CMO and Chief Digital Officer budgets. Its AEP Agent Orchestrator and Brand Concierge push it into the same agentic-AI-for-marketing race as Salesforce's Agentforce.

On the Q1 FY2026 call, Adobe's Anil Chakravarthy claims category leadership in customer-experience management — "the leading customer data platform" serving 99 of the Fortune 100 — the same customer-data and marketing turf Salesforce contests with Data Cloud and Marketing Cloud.

Adobe pioneered the category of customer experience management. Enterprises around the world rely on our software to identify prospects, acquire new customers, engage and delight them with personalized experiences and grow customer lifetime value. We are the leading provider of content management systems for websites and mobile apps and the leading customer data platform that serves as the foundation in enterprises for digital customer engagement. We serve 99 of the Fortune 100 and are the digital platform of choice for Chief Marketing Officers and Chief Digital Officers for their ongoing campaigns and for major marketing moments like the Olympics

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Adobe's stated view of a shift "from the SaaS model to the agentic software model," built around its AEP Agent Orchestrator — the strategic pivot that puts Adobe in the same agentic-marketing contest as Salesforce's Agentforce, while it also chooses to interoperate with Microsoft and ServiceNow orchestrators.

We see this as a massive transformation from the SaaS model to the agentic software model. And as you saw at Summit, we announced the AEP Agent Orchestrator. And our view is, we build agents where we have core domain knowledge and we can really democratize the use of our applications to a wide variety of marketing and customer experience practitioners. We also want to work with agent orchestrators from Microsoft, ServiceNow, other partners because we believe that enterprises will ultimately build their own agents and have multiple ways of using agents.

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Adobe's FY2025 10-K describes its Experience Platform Agent Orchestrator — an agentic framework that plans multi-step actions and powers functional agents for "customer experience orchestration" on top of its customer-data platform, mapping directly onto Salesforce's Agentforce-plus-Data-Cloud architecture.

Adobe Experience Platform Agent Orchestrator is the technology underpinning Adobe's agentic framework, powering the ability to understand context, retrieve precise information, plan multi-step actions, drive intelligent automation, refine responses, and automate key workflows. Agent Orchestrator is designed to leverage rich data, content, and knowledge from Adobe Experience Platform to power functional agents for customer experience orchestration that accelerate tasks, make decisions, and act as a talent multiplier for customers focused on driving business growth through personalization at scale.

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Snowflake Inc. (SNOW)

Snowflake's AI Data Cloud competes with Salesforce's Data Cloud (and Tableau) to be the single governed store of enterprise data that AI agents run on. The relationship is coopetition — Snowflake has zero-copy data-sharing agreements with Salesforce — but its Cortex and Snowflake Intelligence agents increasingly reach into the same customer-data and agentic workloads Salesforce is chasing.

Snowflake management names Salesforce directly, describing zero-copy data-sharing agreements with it (and with ServiceNow, SAP and Workday) while positioning Snowflake as the "single pane of glass" data layer at the center of its customers' data — the coopetition that underlies Salesforce's own Data Cloud strategy.

We see these as a win-win. We have these agreements with ServiceNow, Salesforce, SAP with the recent partnership, as well as Workday. These products continue to drive our broader mission to be at the center of all of the data needs that our customers have, and they just make the process of data collaboration between the SaaS vendors and Snowflake Inc. much easier. And we are very happy with these agreements. What this means is that Snowflake Inc. will continue to be the place for our customers to get that single pane of glass view on everything that matters to them.

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Snowflake's FY2026 10-K scale markers for the AI-data market it contests: 13,328 total customers, 790 of the Forbes Global 2000, and a 125% net revenue retention rate — reference points against Salesforce's Data Cloud and analytics footprint.

As of January 31, 2026, we had 13,328 total customers, increasing from 10,996 customers as of January 31, 2025. As of January 31, 2026, our customers included 790 of the Forbes Global 2000, based on the 2025 Forbes Global 2000 list, and those customers contributed approximately 43% of our revenue for the fiscal year ended January 31, 2026. […] our net revenue retention rate, which was 125% as of January 31, 2026.

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Snowflake's CEO describes building "a little bit of a customer 360" — all of a customer's information in a single chatbot — on Snowflake data, an agentic use case that echoes the unified-customer-view idea at the center of Salesforce's Customer 360 positioning.

they're creating a little bit of a customer 360. All of the information that is relevant to a customer, available in a single chatbot. And I use this kind of functionality very frequently. Where if I'm going to have a meeting with a customer, I want to know everything about them that we know.

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Shopify Inc. (SHOP)

Shopify's commerce platform competes with Salesforce's Commerce Cloud, and its move upmarket into enterprise and B2B commerce takes it onto Salesforce's traditional large-brand turf. Its agentic-commerce stack (Catalog, Universal Cart, Checkout Kit) and the industry protocol it co-founded put it at the center of AI-driven shopping — a market Salesforce is also targeting.

On the Q1 FY2026 call, Shopify names Salesforce as one of the large platforms joining its Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) council for agentic commerce — Shopify's framing of who is aligning around the standard it co-developed, with Salesforce among them.

We are now seeing the biggest and most innovative companies across essentially the entire industry coming together around UCP to help push agentic commerce forward. And last month, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Salesforce and Stripe all joined the council, committing their expertise in Internet-scale transaction processing to build one universal protocol for commerce.

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Shopify describes its Commerce for Agents stack — Catalog, Universal Cart and Checkout Kit — built to let AI agents shop across merchant stores, the same agentic-commerce capability Salesforce is building into Commerce Cloud.

And that's why we built the Commerce for Agents tools that we introduced on our last call, Catalog, Universal Cart and Checkout Kit. These tools make it easier for agents to shop across merchant stores on a buyer's behalf. But here's the thing. Agentic commerce is so much more than just the last click. Think about it in three layers: product discovery, purchasing experience and the post-purchase journey.

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Shopify reports its B2B GMV up 98% year over year in Q3 FY2025 — evidence of its acceleration in the business-to-business commerce segment where it increasingly overlaps with Salesforce's B2B Commerce Cloud.

offline GMV increased 31% as we attract more retail-first brands globally. Our B2B GMV was up 98%, fueled by existing merchants embracing our offerings and our go-to market initiatives targeting more B2B specific verticals and merchants.

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Competition

ServiceNow, Inc. (NOW)

Adobe Inc. (ADBE)

Snowflake Inc. (SNOW)

Shopify Inc. (SHOP)

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