Custom Software vs Other Software: Which is better for Digital Transformation?

In the modern world of digitalization, it has always been known that software, especially enterprise software, will help companies move forward, save costs, and even sell more.

But you might be asking, why go ahead with custom software, and what makes the regular off-the-shelf software inferior compared to the custom software that we build?

Well, although both have their benefits, we like to think that all companies will eventually want to have their custom software, as every company has processes that are unique to them.

We will be outlining the pros and cons of what I think is the best way to approach digital transformation using software.

I will be providing examples for general industries such as construction, automotive, and cleaning.

If you have a specific industry that you would like me to dive deeper into, drop me a message, and I will be sure to look into it.

Now, let’s begin by defining what custom software is and what are some examples of custom software in the market.

The purpose of implementing software has multiple levels. The simplest reason will be to automate different processes. As long as you have a manual process in place, software can be there to remove that step.

For example, if you are still using manual payroll every month, you can build custom software to help you automatically generate pay slips and send them to every employee of your company with a click of a button.

That might not seem like much, but if you have a whole suite of processes that can be automated, the cost savings can potentially be very significant.

Now, what are the comparisons between software out there in the market vs custom software that is built by SleekDigital?

Designs

Software companies have been around for decades. There have been software companies that have written code and are still using the same set of codes from 20 years ago. Software companies that are using old-school code bases generally do not care about the designs and how they look. The designs will probably still look clunky and old school.

To be fair, the developers of the codes would rather maintain the code than make changes to it which might be breaking for the codes, even with just a design revamp.

SleekDigital has implemented modern design standards in all the projects. This comes from years of experience designing and developing software. It’s pretty tedious to consistently keep up with design trends.

However, the key is to make designs as easy to use and read for the users. With that, the designs of the software that is built can be timeless.

Designs often have a direct impact on the usership of every software product. Users will more likely come back to software that looks better than software that looks old and hard to use.

Speed and Tech

Common software in the market can be slow and not performant. Most enterprise software now is built with older tech that can risk the performance of the platform.

We at SleekDigital use modern technologies to make the performance of the software extremely fast and snappy. If you look through our portfolio or even our website, most of the websites will load instantly, and navigation will be instant.

This also applies to software where there is a database present. Even with pushing and pulling data from the database, the software can potentially be loaded instantly without any delays.

This comes from the combination of database location, server location, database stack, frontend/backend web stack, and best practices on all codes.

All-in-one-ness

If you have multiple SAAS products running, it might also be time for you to start considering building custom software for your company. The reason is that in SAAS, you don’t really own the data that is stored. Well, technically the data belongs to you, but it is residing in the SAAS companies' database.

Some companies don’t feel comfortable knowing that the data is stored in a third party. That’s why they set out to build custom software that performs roughly the same function as the SAAS.

In fact, because of the customization that is available in custom software, they might provide a better user experience or better usability than SAAS.

Customization

Apart from older ERPs that are super rigid and hard to customize, SAAS products are also tough to customize.

Being SAAS products are built for the general public or at least people in the same industry, the assumption that everyone operates in exactly the same way is there.

Older enterprise software also allows limited customization as they might not have the developers ready to make changes for you.

In addition to finding manpower for customization, ERP companies generally are super expensive to customize to your requirements.

You’d be better off rebuilding the software rather than adding in a couple of new features into the current enterprise software.

Mobile

Most software out in the market currently does not support mobile app usage. It’s always important to support mobile app development if you are using the software frequently.

In fact, mobile apps allow you to quickly perform tasks and get the information you need quickly without the need of logging into a website or keying in a URL.

Of course, there are alternatives to this. For example, it is common to have something called a PWA (progressive web app) that you can save a shortcut to your mobile phone to instantly open the URL, much like a mobile app.

This is a great alternative if you want a mobile app for your internal software. However, you might not be able to access native features such as GPS with ease.

Conclusion

The debate between off-the-shelf and custom software solutions has been there for ages. The battle is always about whether you are able to access the data that you need easily and whether or not the system can perform the tasks that you so require.

At SleekDigital, we always feel that custom software should be the way to go if you want to get the highest ROI for your business.

That said, SleekDigital is also looking into developing boilerplate solutions so that we can customize software at faster speeds.

After all, the key to successful software is to ship fast.