FedRAMP authorizes a cloud, not the CRM running on top of it
Salesforce’s FedRAMP authorization reaches Government Cloud Plus, rated up to FedRAMP High and DoD Impact Level 2, but explicitly excludes Sales Cloud, the product most buyers are actually comparing. Microsoft’s FedRAMP High Provisional Authorization to Operate covers Azure and Azure Government only; Dynamics 365 U.S. Government states that it meets FedRAMP without publishing which level. Neither company publishes a StateRAMP authorization for its sales product — Salesforce names only TX-RAMP, and Dynamics names nothing at all.
A HIPAA signature under different conditions
Salesforce’s HIPAA business associate agreement reaches its entry tiers, Pro Suite and Foundations, only once three named features are disabled first. Microsoft includes its HIPAA agreement with Dynamics with no tier requirement published at all. A HIPAA-covered buyer on a Salesforce entry tier trades away functionality to get the signature; the same buyer on Dynamics does not.
The application family that starts where Sales stops
Dynamics 365 Sales carries no accounting, inventory or manufacturing at all: those functions live in Business Central, priced separately at eighty US dollars per user per month for Essentials and one hundred ten US dollars per user per month for Premium, billed yearly. The published workaround for a team that owns only Dynamics 365 Sales is a native integration with Business Central through Dataverse — which means buying that second license, not unlocking a feature inside Sales. Salesforce’s equivalent gaps stay inside one family of add-ons instead: Sales Engagement at fifty US dollars per user monthly, Contracts at fifty, Revenue Cloud at one hundred fifty or two hundred, each layered onto the same Salesforce license rather than requiring a separate application.
One website price, one PDF that will not confirm it
Microsoft’s own website prices its entry tier, Sales Professional, at sixty-five US dollars per user per month billed yearly. Its own PDF licensing guide does not confirm that figure: the record shows inconsistent readings for the same tier, with no single number that can be confirmed from the document itself. Microsoft publishes both tables and reconciles neither, leaving a buyer to trust whichever document they opened first.
The same category of feature, gated at a different tier and a different price
Customization and automation stay “Limited” on Sales Professional and only open up from Sales Enterprise onward, priced at one hundred five US dollars per user per month billed yearly — a higher tier of the same Dynamics 365 Sales application, not a different product. Salesforce draws its own line at Enterprise too, priced at one hundred seventy-five US dollars per user monthly, the point past which several parallel sales processes and two thousand active flows become available instead of five. Both companies gate the same category of feature behind their second-from-entry tier, at two different prices for two different products.
Two ways to pay, two different deadlines
Salesforce sells against a purchase order with no dollar threshold at all, under Master Service Agreement clause 5.2, billed in advance and net-30 calendar days, with one and a half percent monthly interest on a late balance and suspension at thirty days, or ten days if paying by card; a W-9 goes only to AMER customers, and no ACH is published. Microsoft also bills net-30, but charges the card on file within ten days before falling back to wire transfer, offers a purchase order as an option, and reserves self-service “Buy now” for Sales Professional and Sales Enterprise while Sales Premium and Relationship Sales require contacting sales directly; neither an ACH option nor a W-9 is published for Dynamics.
A tax calculator that lives in a different application
Salesforce’s Master Service Agreement, clause 5.6, dated September 15, 2025, places any tax, levy or duty from any jurisdiction, US states included, on the customer, and invoices where the law requires it unless an exemption certificate is on file — naming no state and no rate. Dynamics 365 Sales carries the same silence: tax depends on the billing address and appears as a separate invoice line, with no state list, calculation basis or nexus statement published for that application. A Tax Calculation feature does exist inside the Dynamics 365 family, available for Finance and Supply Chain Management in the United States from version 10.0.21 onward — it simply is not a feature of Sales.
