According to Dharmesh Shah, who is the founder and CTO at HubSpot: “Brand is what people say about you after you’ve left the room.” This statement can be considered as 100% true as in today’s competitive world, every business is actively participating in a race to become a brand. And for becoming a brand you need to streamline and automate all your complex processes.
For achieving these goals, most of the businesses invest money in building or subscribing to unique software solutions. They either build custom software or they subscribe to a Saas product.
The choice between Saas Products and custom software solutions is quite challenging for the entrepreneurs. Let’s explore about these two in brief and have a look at five factors that can help you in choosing the best software solution that has the potential to evolve with the growth of your business.
Customized Software Solutions
Customized solutions are tailor-made to meet your specific business requirements. These solutions can be modified in accordance with the changes in the processes or operations of your organization.
SaaS Products
SaaS products are basically hosted on the cloud and are not necessarily fit to meet all your specific needs. The users can access these solutions through the internet and are not as flexible as customized solutions.
SaaS Products vs Custom Software: 5 Factors To Help You In Choosing The Appropriate Software For Your Business
- Degree Or Extent Of Customization
This is one of the major advantages of investing money in transforming app ideas into fully functional customized solutions. You can develop them in accordance to suit your specific individual needs. All the businesses have different requirements depending on their nature and goals. In such a scenario, tailor-made software solutions can be helpful.
On the other hand, it is very difficult in the case of SaaS solutions. You can’t add new fields, modify rules, and make them compatible to suit your business logic. But these solutions are useful as they generally offer solutions that your employees hadn’t thought of.
In the case of most of the businesses, it is a good idea, to begin with a SaaS product, and once you have utilized it to its fullest and you have a budget you can easily switch or upgrade to custom software solutions.
- Functionalities & Features
You can customize SaaS solutions but to a limited extent. They are capable to meet most of your needs, but not necessarily all. SaaS products may have many features that are of no use to you. Or they can lack some features that you actually require.
Whereas, custom solutions can be built especially to suit your specific business logic and requirements. These solutions can be modified, features can be added and removed in accordance with your specific requirements.
Read Also:- Guide to Build your First App with Flutter
- Effective Reporting & Analysis
The task of accessing reports in accordance with your specific requirements is challenging with SaaS products. You have access to very limited and standard reports and might not be able to find out the actual information you need.
On the contrary, customized solutions allow third-party tools to do reporting and therefore it becomes easier for the entrepreneurs and business managers to analyze the current situation of their company in a detailed manner.
- Difference In Training Provided With The Solutions
When you opt tailor-made solutions, your partner will be providing you with the in-depth training of the services as and when you require. There will be constant support and maintenance services from vendor’s end in case if you face any issue or difficulty with the custom solutions.
Whereas, in the case of SaaS products you get only online training and that too when you demand them. Most of the time this generic training doesn’t prove out to be helpful for organizations as every one of them have different employees and their efficiency levels also vary. Therefore, it is a good idea to get training so that you can use the software solution to its fullest.
- Variation In The Costs Associated With The Solutions
There is no doubt that the cost of developing customized solutions is much higher than the SaaS products. But this variance can be justified by the fact that the chances of custom solutions getting failed are much lower than the SaaS products.
This is the only reason why most of the organizations opt for building their own tailor-made solutions in spite of them being a bit costly. These solutions are beneficial to the entrepreneurs in the long-run.
In this way, custom solutions and SaaS products are both useful in their own way. Therefore, it is advisable for you to take the help of a professional consultant who can tell you about the advantages and disadvantages associated with SaaS solutions and customized software by keeping in mind the specific requirements of your business and can make you able to choose between these two so that to let your business evolve into a brand.
Author Bio:
Anubhuti Shrivastava is a content crafter at Arkenea, a custom software development company helping entrepreneurs and businesses build successful web and mobile apps. She is passionate about writing articles on topics related to design and the software development industry.
The post 5 Factors To Help You In Choosing Between SaaS Products & Custom Software appeared first on TechBuzzTalk.
