Salesforce Lightning Platform vs SuiteCloud
March 06, 2025 | Author: Michael Stromann
2★
Salesforce Lightning Platform is the proven cloud platform to automate and extend your business and deliver the social enterprise. Salesforce Lightning Platform is an extremely powerful, scalable and secure cloud platform, delivering a complete technology stack covering the ground from database and security to workflow and user interface. Build the social, mobile apps you need to power your Social Enterprise.
0★
SuiteCloud is a comprehensive offering of cloud development tools, applications and infrastructure that enables customers and software developers to maximize the benefits of cloud computing. SuiteCloud comprises a multi-tenant cloud platform that consists of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). The SuiteCloud Developer Tools are uniquely built on NetSuite's leading cloud business management suite.
See also:
Top 10 Public Cloud Platforms
Top 10 Public Cloud Platforms
The thing about Salesforce Lightning Platform and SuiteCloud is that they both exist in the mysterious realm of cloud-based development, which means nobody really knows where they are, but everyone insists they're absolutely essential. They allow businesses to build applications without necessarily knowing how to code, much like how one can operate a microwave without a physics degree. Both are multi-tenant, which sounds impressive but really just means that multiple users are crammed into the same digital space, much like a particularly well-organized intergalactic hitchhiker’s hostel. They automate things, integrate things and generally give people the illusion that their business is running itself—until, of course, something breaks.
Salesforce Lightning, arriving fashionably late in 2015, is an American-born platform designed mainly for those who enjoy obsessing over customer relationships, sales pipelines and generally making sure nobody forgets to buy things. It comes with Apex, a programming language that’s a bit like Java but somehow more confusing and a UI system called Lightning Components, presumably because “mildly frustrating but very customizable blocks” didn’t have the same marketing appeal. If you're already knee-deep in the Salesforce ecosystem, it’s fantastic. If you’re not, it’s like showing up at a fancy dress party only to realize everyone else is speaking in a dialect of business jargon you don’t understand.
SuiteCloud, on the other hand, has been around since 2007 and is also American, though now under the watchful, all-consuming gaze of Oracle. Unlike Lightning, which thrives in the sales world, SuiteCloud is far more interested in keeping an eye on financials, inventory and other things that make accountants feel warm and fuzzy inside. It speaks fluent SuiteScript (which is really just JavaScript in disguise) and connects seamlessly to NetSuite’s ERP, meaning businesses can manage their money, stock and general state of existential panic all in one place. It also has SuiteTalk, which sounds like a charming self-help podcast but is actually an API, allowing it to communicate with the outside world in a way that is both useful and slightly enigmatic.
See also: Top 10 Public Cloud Platforms
Salesforce Lightning, arriving fashionably late in 2015, is an American-born platform designed mainly for those who enjoy obsessing over customer relationships, sales pipelines and generally making sure nobody forgets to buy things. It comes with Apex, a programming language that’s a bit like Java but somehow more confusing and a UI system called Lightning Components, presumably because “mildly frustrating but very customizable blocks” didn’t have the same marketing appeal. If you're already knee-deep in the Salesforce ecosystem, it’s fantastic. If you’re not, it’s like showing up at a fancy dress party only to realize everyone else is speaking in a dialect of business jargon you don’t understand.
SuiteCloud, on the other hand, has been around since 2007 and is also American, though now under the watchful, all-consuming gaze of Oracle. Unlike Lightning, which thrives in the sales world, SuiteCloud is far more interested in keeping an eye on financials, inventory and other things that make accountants feel warm and fuzzy inside. It speaks fluent SuiteScript (which is really just JavaScript in disguise) and connects seamlessly to NetSuite’s ERP, meaning businesses can manage their money, stock and general state of existential panic all in one place. It also has SuiteTalk, which sounds like a charming self-help podcast but is actually an API, allowing it to communicate with the outside world in a way that is both useful and slightly enigmatic.
See also: Top 10 Public Cloud Platforms