Professional Services Automation on Salesforce: Certinia vs Kantata vs Building Your Own

Certinia: A Native Salesforce PSA

Certinia is a Salesforce-native platform that does not require a third-party integration layer or middleware. It simply operates within the same Salesforce environment using the same data model, security architecture, and reporting that your teams are familiar with.

For a PSA for consulting firms working with Salesforce, it means that planning, scheduling, timesheet recording, billing, and accounting activities take place on the CRM, which the delivery and accounting teams are already familiar with. No need to access another system for these activities, nor to deal with any other data synchronization activity between different systems.

The trade-off is configuration over customization. Certinia provides a mature, established set of PSA capabilities. Organizations configure those capabilities to fit their workflows rather than designing the workflows from scratch. For firms that want faster time to value and are willing to adapt their processes to an established PSA model, that trade-off works in their favor.

Certinia: Best suited to firms prioritizing Salesforce-native operations, integrated financial processes, and faster adoption.

Kantata: A Specialized Services Platform

In any Certinia vs Kantata evaluation, the most important distinction is architectural. Kantata originated as a standalone platform and offers a Salesforce-native option, Kantata SX, but its design priorities differ from Certinia’s.

Kantata’s depth sits in resource management and operational forecasting. Utilization modeling, capacity planning across complex team structures, and margin visibility at the project and portfolio level are areas where Kantata has invested heavily. For organizations where resource decisions drive delivery performance and profitability, their operational depth is worth evaluating closely.

The Salesforce integration model also warrants scrutiny during evaluation. Organizations running Kantata alongside Salesforce rather than within it should understand how data flows between the two environments, where the system of record sits for key project and financial data, and what that means for reporting consistency across sales and delivery. Like Certinia, Kantata represents a buy approach. The organization adopts an established platform and works within its operational model rather than building one from scratch.

Kantata: Worth considering for organizations where sophisticated resource management and forecasting are central to the operating model.

Build Your Own: Developing PSA Capability on Salesforce

Building a custom PSA on Salesforce changes the fundamental question. Instead of asking which existing platform best fits the firm’s processes, the organization asks how the PSA should be designed around those processes.

This marks a distinction, especially for those companies whose processes cannot be mapped onto an out-of-the-box PSA package. A Salesforce PSA comparison between Certinia and Kantata may reveal that neither platform handles a specific workflow the way the business needs it to. In that case, building becomes a legitimate alternative rather than a last resort.

The control that comes with a custom build is real. Data structures, automation logic, user experience, integrations, and reporting are all designed to the firm’s exact specifications. But so is the ownership. The development, testing, documentation, support, and any further upgrades of the software are left for the organization to take care of. There is no vendor roadmap to fall back on and no support staff to turn to in case of problems.

For firms with the internal capability or an implementation partner to build and maintain a custom solution, ownership is manageable. For firms without it, the long-term cost of a custom build can outweigh the flexibility it provides.

Custom: Best suited to firms with genuinely differentiated delivery processes and the internal/partner capability to own the platform long term.