Salesforce App Cloud

Pros

"Accidental Admin" is a concept that Salesforce uses to emphasize how anyone can pick up and learn to configure Salesforce as an admin. The configuration style (clicks, not code) leads to a low skill floor needed to start using Salesforce. Advanced users, developers, etc. have the flexibility to customize the system to a high degree as well.

Cons

The neglect. Salesforce regularly neglects key pieces of core CRM functionality, some for more than 10 years, while either ignoring the cries for help by its userbase, or promising to fix it - only to let 10 years go by with no update. Just browse around on the success.salesforce.com Idea Exchange and you'll see what I mean. I get that Salesforce puts emphasis on the fact that the system is highly configurable by a dedicated developer, but when key features and functionality are either half-implemented or abandoned altogether in favor of more money-making initiatives (like their half-baked AI platform), it gets to be extremely concerning and offputting. Sometimes they combine the two and continue to sell a half-baked product, which has already been abandoned and they KNOW it.
Want an example? Try to find any documentation on Salesforce Inbox. At my company, we have been fighting with Salesforce support for MONTHS trying to get any semblance of an answer about how we can use Inbox or where we can find documentation, or if we can even pay a professional services team to help us. Finally after months, they have made it clear that Salesforce Inbox is abandonware. Yet they are still promoting and selling it. That is shady and corrupt.

Pros

The best thing about the force.com platform is that it's flexible. It comes with a set of standard objects such as Accounts, Contacts, Cases, Contracts, Orders, and many others. It is very easy to add new objects that can be tailored for your business use case. Originally designed mainly as a Sales tool, Salesforce now has a Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Analytics, and other modules that can be added on easily to provide a full enterprise infrastructure. Adding automation to user tasks via workflow rules and process builder can be done without coding. Adding triggers via Apex Code is also fairly easy for developers, since Apex is an easy language to learn.

Cons

Out of the box, Salesforce is not a very efficient tool. To prevent users from having to manually enter every piece of data to sync up objects, customization of some sort is really required. Some types of data syncing or data entry can be done with declarative tools such as workflow rules or process builder. Other things that require more complicated logic do require trigger code written by someone who understands development. The platform comes with built-in limitations on file storage, data storage, number of fields you can have on an object, number of lines of custom code you can add to the platform, and quite a few others. Platform limits of certain types can be increased, but you will definitely pay for the privilege. If you want more automated or customized functionality and don't have a developer on staff, you will have to relay on plug-in products from the Salesforce App Exchange to provide the functionality you are looking for. While some of these products are free, many of them aren't and have licensing fees per user. The cost of paying for Salesforce licenses along with licenses for one or more plug-in apps can get quite spendy.

Pros

Force.com platform (Lightning) is very powerful development platform on the browser. It can be used to build applications for any industry. The pricing is on per user per month basis.

Many tools like Validation rules, Workflows, process builder are available for business users. These tools allow business users to build apps on the platform with fairly complex logic. For additional functionality, developers are needed. Developers can build more advanced features using Apex, Visualforce and Lightning Communities.

Trailhead and developer account are free resources available to build expertise on the product.

Excellent community of customers/partners is available to support queries.

Cons

Like any complex software there is a steep learning curve. Hiring developers in the US on the platform can be expensive. The license pricing may also be expensive for small businesses.

Pros

The search feature is good, it pulls everything associated with what you are looking for.

Cons

Sometimes there are serious delays. The program will need to reset and what ever you just did does not save. The email link does not carry over the information from the email. It will log the email with the title but will not transfer the body of the email into Lightening. Not sure if this is specific to my job's version or not.

Certain aspects of the program convert back to the original Salesforce Classic look

Pros

Salesforce is the most robust CRM in the market, a point that isn't debatable in my view. For an enterprise organization with complex needs, Salesforce is hard to beat. The sheer number of native integrations is a huge advantage over any other solution. The reporting you get with Salesforce is remarkable.

Cons

It's so robust, it can be overwhelming for those without Salesforce expertise, or a dedicated CRM manager in-house. The permissions are flat out hard. This is more of a con for a small business than a mid-sized to enterprise business with more internal resources. Expect to pay huge hourly rates for a consultant if you don't hire in-house.