You do not need a turf war. You need three answers. Agentforce when the work and the permissions live in Salesforce. A custom stack (ADK, CrewAI, OpenAI Agents, MCP) when they do not. Hybrid when you have both — that is most mid-market orgs we see.
If a partner quotes a fixed Agentforce price before these, walk. Context first. Platform second.
Question 1
Agentforce
Salesforce console, Experience Cloud, Slack-if-Salesforce-is-the-source.
Custom stack
Slack-first field teams, WhatsApp, a portal that is not Experience Cloud, or no CRM login at all.
Question 2
Agentforce
The org. Knowledge, cases, opportunities, Data Cloud grounding that already respects sharing.
Custom stack
ERP, warehouse, product DB, or documents Salesforce would only see as a middleman.
Question 3
Agentforce
You want Salesforce procurement, Trust Layer, and inherited profiles. Security is tired.
Custom stack
You need BYOM, MCP connectors, A2A between runtimes, or an audit trail Salesforce will not emit.
Agentforce consumption and a custom platform TCO usually land closer than the sales decks imply. You are choosing who owns identity, audit, and the connector layer — not which logo is cheaper in month one.
The 2025 failure mode was a custom connector per tool. MCP standardizes that. It does not give you auth, least privilege, or an audit trail. Those sit on top. Point-to-point still makes sense for one system and one agent. The moment a second runtime appears, point-to-point is debt.
MCP
Standard tool and data connectors. Inventory them. Scope them. Log them. Then A2A if agents must call other agents.
One-off APIs
Fine for a single Agentforce action into one system. Fragile the day CrewAI or ADK needs the same object.
Usually context, not the model: messy Knowledge, no Data Cloud or equivalent grounding, sharing rules the agent cannot inherit, and no plan for transcript review after go-live. See data readiness and the pilot-to-production guide.
Not on a three-year TCO. Custom means you own hosting, evals, and connectors. Agentforce means you own consumption and Salesforce’s constraints. We price the control plane, not the logo.
Yes. That is the usual answer. Agentforce for CRM-native work. Custom agents plus MCP and A2A for everything that is not. Agent Fabric when Salesforce agents need a control plane.
Or we will tell you this is not an agent problem yet.
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