Going beyond the marketing material, what are the real differences between the Salesforce versions that affect the way a business uses Salesforce?
The primary differences are:
- Group edition is limited to 5 users lacks many features such as the API (custom pages, triggers and web service access), campaigns, products, dashboards, quotes, etc...
- Professional Edition has the above missing features but still has no access to the API.
- Enterprise Edition adds the API, increases your customization limits (custom objects, custom fields, etc...), and adds territory management and several other features
- Unlimited Edition adds full sandbox (testing environment) support, further increases your limits and gets you better support.
This link gets you a pretty good over-view of each editions primary features and prices: http://www.salesforce.com/crm/editions-pricing.jsp
My sincere advice to companies who say they can't afford enterprise addition is: if you can't afford or justify the price of EE, don't use Salesforce.
GE is pretty close to useless, especially for the price; PE starts getting more useful but is still very crippled compared to EE.
IMHO every client I've seen whose budget and feature needs are below that of EE should be using something else - usually some combination of contact management, reporting, service management, collaboration and task automation. Salesforce has some offerings in that realm, like Desk.com & Go.com, but there are many others out there.
I really wish Salesforce changed its outdated and confusing pricing model - I've met way too many clients who refuse to ever use Salesforce again because they used to be at a company that cheaped out on Group Edition and were disappointed.
I agree that EE is the best way to go, but it is far out of reach ( financially and/or psychologically) for many businesses.
I've used GE successfully for a number of clients and have found it a) very functional, if you set expectations correctly and b) a good way to introduce people to the value of SF, with the understanding that they may want to or have to upgrade in the future. PE is even better, of course.
But with a minmal cost for GE (and it can go up to 10 users), you can give them leads, accounts. contacts, highly customized opportunities and custom objects, even a campaign-like object. Plus the appExchange apps that do work (jitterbit data loader, Vertical Response for GE, GridBuddy, etc.). With PE you can get API access, for a price, plus most of the apps on the AppExchange.
And since the beauty of SF is in the deep functionality of the native mode, Apex and Visual Force are not always critical to a successful SF implementation
The secret to success with GE and PE is to be imaginative and to use what they can do to the max.