As a matter of fact, Salesforce has flirted with Headless for years across Heroku, Commerce Cloud, and parts of Marketing Cloud. But just because you surface an API for a particular function…doesn’t mean that you’ve achieved a full Headless platform.

Headless requires the ability to replace the full User Interface that a company ships, in other words: you can build your own interface without much friction.

Defining “Headless”

To have a cogent discussion on this, we really need to define what headless means. Headless means we have a software architecture where the front-end (the head) is completely decoupled from the back-end logic and data storage (the body). What that means is we’re going to use a set of APIs to interact with the database, the business logic layer, and so forth to build our own UI.

Headless, at its very basic definition, just means you can use a piece of software however you like, with whatever UI you want. A lot of headless software out there has its own webapp that you can log into, its own curated experience, but then you can extend it into your own.

Examples in the Wild

This has been long tail for omni-channel delivery. For instance, headless CMS (Content Mangement System). You have headless CMS vendors out there, and you’ve probably visited a website powered by them: example of theseare Contentful, Sanity, and to an extent Drupal.

From an OMS (Order Management System) driving e-commerce, you have your headless commerce examples such as Salesforce. Then you have Shopify, which is the shining headless commerce examle.

All headless means, at its very basic definition, is that you’re building a bunch of back-in connective tissue and your front end, allowing you to build that own experience.

The Misconception: “No UI” vs. “Your UI”

Headless, from an architecture standpoint means that, yes, you’re returning text in a backend API, but that doesn’t mean that it’s a backend text-driven user interface and experience. Every single webapp or mobile app that you use today receives text from the backend to the fronted to consume, and the frontend is sending text to the backend service(s).

What a headless experience means is that you build your own User Interface (UI).

Don’t think of headless as, “Oh, well, headless isn’t for me because I’m just driving a text-based experience.” Think of headless as the ability to build your own experience for interacting with Salesforce.

Whether that is through a CLI experience, whether that is a ChatGPT or Claude experience, whether that’s an agent you’ve built, or you’ve built your own frontend web app to accommodate a different experience…that is the “head.”

Headless just means you can use the same APIs, the backend that other companies use in their frontend web apps, but with less opinionation. You’re not forced into a cookie-cutter experience that everyone else is using.

You can extend your own, whether that’s in a mobile app, a webapp, Slack app, or even a CLI if you’re feeling spunky.

A History of Headless at Salesforce

Salesforce has flirted with headless since Salesforce1 came out around 2013, driving a unified mobile experience, extended with Heroku, allowing you to connect your Postgres database directly to Salesforce. To have a first-class citizen postgres database that you could build your own application off of.

This took out the long latency API calls, created a syncable database, and allowed you to interact with your database in your webapp or mobile app without the increased latency and building your own wrappers and SDKs. You could use your preferred ORM to interact with your database and forget that you were building against Saelsforce.

While that wasn’t necessarily headless, directly, it was a long step towards it.

Then look at Commerce Cloud. Commerce has always needed to be headless. No matter what tool you’re using, you want to build your own commerce experience, and you need to have a headless platform to build those experiences, to interact with the platform, and essentially white-label it without knowing that you’re using a particular OMS or CMS even.

Why Do We Need This? (The UI Problem)

The number one complaint that Salesforce has is its not-so-great UI and UX. Tabs on tabs, lots of text, many ways to click around. Now, part of that is on Salesforce, and part of that is on us builders. A lot of builders haven’t leaned into Screen Flows to drive custom experiences, dynamic forms to surface info only when needed, or offloading fields from an object onto another to reduce complexity.

We do have the ability to create our own LWCs (Lightning Web Components) that, while not the best in the world, can greatly extend the UI and experience and customize it for your company’s needs…not the masses.

While the push for headlesss architecture is to extend AI capabilities, specifically Agetns, there’s a huge advantage for those companies who want to build their own interfaces.

For example, you can pare down Salesforce to have just a few screens in a modern webapp (or SPA) and give users the Web 2.0 experience that they’re used to. This is incredibly useful for cases such as external SDRs that you want to push into a specific function, or say for finance that doesn’t need to know all the ins and outs of Salesforce.

The Technical Reality: Guardrails and Trade-offs

When we think of headless and who can truly harness this, it’s not going to be every company. It’s going to be the companies that are relatively tech-advanced or relatively bleeding-edge who can build and maintain their own experience.

Now, most people, when they’re hearing headless, are thinking, “OK, cool, I can use generative AI and Claude or OpenAI and easily drive an experience for my reps, whether that’s to quickly create a record or to query data.”

We already have these tools in the MCP, but even within these environments, you’ll still need to put guardrails in place.

Think about all the guardrails we have in Salesforce’s UI today, these aren’t necessarily UI issues. These are data protection issues.

You’re still going to have your validation rules. You’re still going to have flows checking for the accuracy of content. You’re still going to have automations that take your input and send it elsewhere. You’re still going to have to build your own client side validations.

You’re still going to have to build on the Salesforce platform with Flow and Apex to extend it. At this point, there’s no standalone ability to drive automations unless you’re in that Salesforce UI.

The trade-off? Traditionally, that means more API calls. That’s going to be against your API call usage. That headless experience is the same as integrating with Salesforce. You’re just using a different set of APIs that are better suited to these experiences.

The Path Forward

It’s clear that Salesforce is setting up their architecture to build revenue generating features for themselves in the future…predominately linking Salesforce and Slack together. This launch gives them a twofold advantage: ability to cater to customer demands but predominately to build their own Slack revenue features.

For customers you can embed these new experiences, say, within your ERP to take an action from a finance standpoint, but none of this is really new. We’ve had these abilities to do it. We’re just receiving better tooling with more guidance and a push from the Salesforce marketing teams.

Headless is exciting. It always has been, as a backend engineer myself, this is the world we live in. But for many builders on the Salesforce platform it’s a different way of thinking, and your builders and them people on your team aren’t likely to be able to take full advantage of them (yet).

Be very careful with this tooling. Talk with folks who understand this space, who have built these things, who are perphas engineers, and have built outside of Salesforce and used headless apps elsewhere.

There’s a lot of misinformation out there and listening to it can send you into a world of hurt.

That’s why Right Sized Tech exists, to blend product engineering experience with standard GTM abilities to take advantage of these features. To show you the possible, to build out proof of concepts to extend your platforms across other channels and verticals. We’ve built these experiences before without Salesforce’s headless APIs, and we’re excited to leverage the new endpoints to build something even greater.

So that being said, what are you excited to build?

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My Salesforce story, like many of yours, came from a rather interesting angle. Since I can remember, I've used a computer. My first computer was an Acer 286. I remember lightning traveling through our phone lines and wiping out our computer, and my father deciding he was done with proprietary tech and would start building our own bare metal machines.

I remember Windows 3.1, I remember installing Windows 95, and being blown away by Weezer's Buddy Holly at launch. I started coding in MS-DOS, editing bat files to resolve driver conflicts or to free up memory. I remember opening a new game at Christmas and being excited about the challenge of getting it to launch more than playing it itself.

In high school, I took independent study lessons in C++ and, with one of my best friends, built the school's attendance system. But I never wanted to be a software engineer (I wanted to be a studio audio engineer). The problem? The industry was trending downward, college programs were highly competitive, and it was an impossible industry to break into from Louisville, Kentucky.

September 11, 2001, happened, which drew me to enlist in the US Army, deferring my college plans. After balancing full-time work and completing my undergraduate degree, I pursued a Career in Finance and Economics instead of engineering.

You see, I never wanted to be in tech.

I still wanted to code and be interested in tech, but I didn’t want to do it full-time. I wanted to delve into economic theory and conduct research, study econometrics, and pursue a PhD. The problem was I wasn't that good at math.

When I left the Army, it wasn't a great time in the economy, and finance roles were challenging to get, so I took a job as a software engineer. Then I got my MBA from Ohio State, determined to finally break into finance through venture capital.

The Day Everything Changed

But then I got a job in venture capital, and I was excited to go out and learn about startups and help them scale. But my first day on the job, they told me, "Hey! You used to be an engineer, here's Salesforce."

"What the f*** is Salesforce?" I said.

They had implemented it as a carbon copy of a partner firm's org, with changes made here and there. It was a square peg in a round hole. The data model was flawed for the business; there was no training, and no clear vision. That's where I came in.

And that's when I discovered something surprising.

Salesforce wasn't just software; it was a platform where you could build things. Real things. I learned about the business and its goals, worked with the boss, a successful entrepreneur who had an exit, to apply the Socratic method, and learn how to ask the right questions.

We built an entire instance and reimplemented it, connecting Salesforce to Microsoft SQL Server to drive SSRS reports, and later connected to Tableau when it first emerged onto the scene.

I was pulled in multiple directions, from administering Salesforce to migrating our on-prem servers to Office 365, to implementing a new ERP, to rebuilding the entire networking infrastructure in that role. All while advising early-stage startups on their strategy.

I remember partnering with companies like AWS to integrate their services into our portfolio. I remember working with Lyft to introduce them to the Columbus market and make connections.

I was immersed in Apex and Eclipse while helping to write Ruby for the startups I was involved with. I remember Heroku launching, I remember being excited that when Salesforce1 came out, I could connect my Rails app directly to a Postgres database with Salesforce. I could build entire interfaces and applications that could update and read from Salesforce in an MVC context. My mind was blown.

This wasn't just a CRM. This was a community of builders, all figuring it out together. There were forums where people shared code snippets, conferences where the company's founders would sit down and talk with customers like equals, and a genuine sense that we were all building the future together. I noticed parallels between traditional development communities and this emerging SaaS one.

I was never supposed to be in tech, but the community lured me away from my economics dream.

Growing Up Together

Over the next decade, both Salesforce and I evolved in parallel ways.

I went from that first accidental role to leading teams of Salesforce professionals, IT professionals, and product engineers, teaching them about how each other worked. I rescued orgs, integrated acquisitions, and touched hundreds of orgs through my consulting travels.

I implemented Service Cloud, Sales Cloud, CPQ, Billing, Pardot, Mulesoft, and Tableau; you name it. I spoke at conferences, podcasts, and webinars, and met amazing people I never would have encountered otherwise.

Meanwhile, Salesforce evolved from that scrappy middle-market company into the enterprise giant it is today. They acquired companies, expanded into every corner of the business software market, and became the undisputed leader in CRM. Their Dreamforce conference grew from a few thousand attendees to over 170,000.

We were both becoming more sophisticated, more polished, more professional. And there was nothing wrong with that evolution. It was necessary, even admirable.

But something was happening to both of us along the way.

I was never supposed to be in tech, but I found myself leading a team that took a company public. I had stepped away from Salesforce for a minute to lead a team of Workday and NetSuite professionals, and picked up a scrappy IT team along the way.

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When the Party Changed

I look back at all the Dreamforces I went to before the pandemic and then the ones after with a bit of sadness.

Dreamforce used to be a party and a celebration. A wink and a nod that we all knew it was a sales and marketing event, but we knew that the community had tons of sessions that weren't designed to sell but to educate. Salesforce always had its major product launches, but they were woven subtly into the experience.

I remember seeing people stand in line for hours to get a stuffed animal from a keynote session. I remember having to book a ticket to Dreamforce within an hour of launch. My friends and I had text chains, a coworker ran down the hall to pull people out of meetings. Because we knew our favorite hotel would sell out within an hour.

I remember late-night conversations in hotel lobbies where strangers would become collaborators, where someone would sketch out a solution to your problem on a napkin, where the Salesforce employees felt like fellow travelers rather than corporate representatives.

The conference sprawled across downtown San Francisco: the Palace, the Hilton Union Square, the AMC next to Moscone, plus Moscone and a sprawl across the Marriott. Every corner of the city buzzed with Trailblazers wearing their lanyards like badges of honor*

After the pandemic, we saw Dreamforce shrink to just Moscone and Marriott. That greatly reduced the footprint and the number of sessions, so new product launches felt in your face. We saw this with Genie, then with Agentforce. The community sessions got squeezed out to make room for sales pitches.

Today, there are still tickets available to Dreamforce. That sentence would have been impossible to write five years ago. We dropped from 170k attendees to 45k, the buzz was gone.

You see, I was never supposed to be in tech, but at this point, I found myself as a commercial leader in startups. Managing a product team, but also the internal tooling across Salesforce, ERPs, HRIS, and billing. Somehow, I was a tech leader, yet also mired in the day-to-day operations of numerous other business processes.

What We've Both Become

I look at who I've become, and I'm proud of the journey. I've evolved from an introvert who stumbled into Salesforce to someone who can engage with anyone, walk into any organization, and help them transform their business. I've built a reputation, a network, a career I never expected.

Salesforce has grown too, into a platform that can handle the most complex enterprise workloads, that can integrate with anything, and that can scale to serve millions of users. They've become the backbone of modern business.

But we've both lost something in the process.

I've become polished, professional, strategic. I can give a presentation to C-suite executives and hold my own in any boardroom. But do I still have that sense of wonder I felt when I first connected a Rails app to Salesforce? Do I still get excited about the pure possibility of building something new?

Salesforce has become enterprise-focused, acquisition-heavy, and AI-obsessed. They can serve any Fortune 500 company and handle a wide range of use cases. But do they still remember what it felt like to be the scrappy underdog empowering small businesses and accidental admins?

I witnessed that loss of community in the Salesforce ecosystem. I watched as executives cared more about growing the bottom line and pleasing the analysts of The Street than their customers. I watched as a company that used to take a stand slipped into the shadows.

We've both been incredibly successful. But success has a way of changing you, sometimes in ways you don't notice until you look back.

You see, I was never supposed to be in tech, but it’s the path that has shaped me, perhaps as much as the army did.

The Next Generation

Here's what keeps me up at night: How will the next Matt Pieper find their way into this world?

When I stumbled into Salesforce, it was a platform where you could quickly build something meaningful, where the community welcomed newcomers, and where you could go from zero to hero in a matter of months. The barrier to entry was low, the community was supportive, and the company felt accessible.

Today's Salesforce ecosystem is undeniably more powerful, but it's also more complex, more corporate, more intimidating. The conferences are slicker but less intimate (yup, it was intimate at 170k people!). The platform is more capable, but it is also harder to learn. The community is larger but more fragmented.

The days of the solo admin should be over with such a large platform, but they are still prevalent. We should have defined ownership at this point, but we still watch as teams fight over who is responsible for the platform.

Will the next accidental techie, the next person who never planned to be in this industry, find the same sense of possibility and community that drew me in? Or will they encounter a mature, polished, enterprise-focused ecosystem that's forgotten how to be scrappy?

I have no regrets about my journey or Salesforce's evolution. We both had to grow up. But I wonder if, in becoming everything to everyone, we've lost something essential about what made us special in the first place.

You see, I was never supposed to be in tech. But maybe that's exactly why I belonged here; at least, in the version of here that used to exist. The version that welcomed accidental travelers and celebrated the joy of building something from nothing.

The question now is whether there's still room for people like that old version of me in the new version of this world we've built together.

Years later, I'd attend TDX and have the closest seats to Weezer that I've ever had. But sometimes I wonder if that teenage version of me, the one who got excited about installing Windows 95, would recognize the person I've become, or the industry I've helped create.

You see, I was never supposed to be in tech, but being in tech has now led me to become an entrepreneur all these years later. Now applying all those principles I learned from advising startups to my own business - a lifestyle business that I’m more than happy to have: Right Sized Tech.

What has your journey been? Where will it take you next?

*Well, not me, as a street photographer, I travel incognito. If I look like I’m a conference attendee, I’ve done something wrong.

There's not a week that goes by that someone asks me what they should do with Salesforce CPQ (Steelbrick aka CPQ) or which billing solution they should go with, or if they should go with Salesforce Revenue Cloud Advanced (fka RLM fka Revenue Cloud aka RCA).

The answer is that there's not a concrete go-to for everyone, or even a best practice. The answer is that it's usually the best one for your business.

There are tools that are considered "best in class" by many analysts, but they don't work for everyone.

There are tools that are overbuilt because they're built for specific use cases. Such as integrating into Commerce Cloud for a Fortune 100.

There are only 100 companies in the Fortune 100 and 3000 CPQ customers.

We're biased at Right Sized Tech; we focus on startups and SMBs, so we tend to lean towards products that work with minimal support. The teams we support are usually already stretched thin, so we want to avoid wasting time with workarounds or complex setups. Keep it simple is our mantra.

The criteria we use when selecting tools are:

• How easy/quick is it to implement? Time is money

• How easy is it to maintain?

• Which persona maintains it? Engineering, RevOps? What skill level

• Can it be used for PLG and Direct Sales?

• How complete is the API?

• How extensible/customizable is it?

• Can it handle billing?

• Can it handle usage?

• What is the integration landscape?

As an SMB/Midmarket organization, we focused on companies under 5k employees and with varying revenue. When we looked at the market for viable replacements, we identified the following companies:

• DealHub

• Logik (now part of ServiceNow)

• Nue.io

• Salesforce RCA

We considered including Sage Intacct and SuiteBilling, but determined that the average customer that Right Sized Tech serves will not fall into these categories.

We'll explore the high-level pros and cons of each below, and declare a winner. But we want to know what you think as well.

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Salesforce RCA

Salesforce Revenue Cloud Advanced (RCA), formerly known as Revenue Lifecycle Management (RLM), is billed as a revenue management platform built on Salesforce.

RCA is strongly coupled with Commerce Cloud, so it makes logical sense to choose if this is something you fully support. From a product engineer's perspective, it is challenging to onboard with Salesforce's APIs if you're not familiar with them - but this is nothing new, compared to other RESTful APIs in the industry. However, if you're an enterprise customer and not a startup or SMB, this is probably something you've likely solved for.

Salesforce is working closely with partners and others in the market to inform its roadmap and has built a billing solution alongside quoting. You can use all the standard automations that Salesforce has, as well as approvals.

The current issue with RCA is that it's shrouded in mystery. I feel like Nicolas Cage will appear in a film where his objective is to find the documentation for RCA. Even though it was rebranded at Dreamforce '24, it's still listed as Revenue Lifecycle Management, which is confusing.

RCA is quite complicated, and there isn't a readily available talent pool to bring on the client side, so you'll lean on a partner for most of the implementation and further maintenance. Which, from my experience, isn't much of a selling point in the SMB space.

The other interesting component is that while folks are grumbling in one-on-one conversations about it, the product is heavily lauded by those same folks in public. So, make sure to vet your partners to ensure that they have your best interests in mind, not those of a channel partner.

Salesforce Ben released an article in May 2025 that details RCA further in this article.

Logik

Acquired by ServiceNow, and ServiceNow has publicly stated:

A NOTE ON THE SERVICENOW ACQUISITION

Continued cooperation with Salesforce

Salesforce is a trusted partner of Logik.ai, and we remain dedicated to supporting our shared customers. Our standalone CPQ and advanced configurator will continue to seamlessly integrate with Salesforce CRM, Salesforce CPQ (Steelbrick), RLM/RCA, and Commerce Cloud. We plan to maintain our ISV partnership status and are actively growing our team of Salesforce developers and engineers to further strengthen and expand our integration with the Salesforce ecosystem.

While it is reassuring to see this, we must exercise caution as to whether Logik will continue to support Salesforce in the long run. Given the public antagonism towards ServiceNow's competitor, we cannot predict whether they'll use deplatforming as a threat, nor do we know what contractual terms are in place.

Like RCA, Logik has a strong integration with eCommerce, with a strong Shopify and Salesforce integration.

Logik has powerful tooling, and we recommend it as more of a configure and price platform that has quoting. The UI leaves something to be desired and reminds us of the clunky UI of the legacy enterprise software it sits upon.

While it's a strong offering, it's not one we would typically recommend if choosing to move off of Salesforce CPQ, as there are other products with more incentives to improve upon their Salesforce experience.

DealHub

DealHub has been around since 2014, one year before the acquisition of Steelbrick by Salesforce, and five years after Steelbrick entered the scene, and is a Series C company.

They have a wealth of experience in the space and have had time to build out their integrations. They are a cross-platform CPQ serving HubSpot, Salesforce, Dynamics, and Freshworks with integrations to DocuSign, Slack, and Gong.

They offer integrated billing but no out-of-the-box subscription management. This approach may work for many businesses or those that don't need to manage subscriptions, but it puts them at a disadvantage compared to most SaaS companies.

The API is strong and can be used headless, and the documentation is good, which makes this engineer smile. It's been a while since we've been hands-on with the product, so we're supplementing our experience with documentation and customer interviews.

DealHub offers contract management (CLM), configure price quote (CPQ), deal room, and billing solutions. This is great for companies that want a one-stop shop experience and drives efficiency, but it does leave a watered-down experience compared to point solutions.

Overall, a strong offering and a competitor to CPQ, with a solid customer base and talent available on the market.

Nue.io

Nue is the relative new kid on the block, founded in 2019 but largely in stealth mode until the last few years. Nue has raised a Series B at this point and brought on an experienced CEO, Mark Walker.

Nue was founded by a team that knows the quote to cash space by the back of their hand. Cheng Zou and Tina Kung spanned across Zuora, Neocrm, Oracle CPQ, and Salesforce CPQ in engineering and product roles. This team knew the space, the problems, and how they wanted to tackle them.

We view Nue's competitive advantage as the Everything Billing platform and hybrid data model. Because the product is built with billing in mind, you have a unified experience from setting up the product catalog to building a quote.

Nue has a hybrid data model, and I think it's a strong differentiation. It means you get the speed and performance of a RESTful API directly with Nue's API, but also access to all standard Salesforce automations and features. This allows product engineering and RevOps or Salesforce teams to work with the features that best suit them and work independently.

There is no need to hire a CPQ Architect or Specialist; you can redeploy members of your existing team and get everyone up to speed.

Nue's team is customer-obsessed in an era where most companies prioritize efficiency and revenue protection. They realize that satisfied customers are a multiplier for growth, and the product team takes feedback seriously.

One of the most unique features that Nue has is the ability to preview an invoice during the quoting process. This allows your reps and customers to know that the next invoice will be correct and there are no surprises. That's a boost in potential NPS for your company.

Nue is still early and doesn't have everything ironed out quite yet. For example, if you're looking for extensive product rules such as "add X when Y is selected," they may not be the best choice for you yet.

But there is a reason that OpenAI and Anthropic are customers.

The Winner

At Right Sized Tech, we believe that Nue is the right tool for a large swath of customers looking to replace CPQ now that it is end of sale. We believe it has the best product vision, low-pressure sales tactics, and a strong current offering.

As with any tool, it may not be the best tool for every company, and that's where we fit it. We can have a strategic conversation with you about the pros and cons of each product and whether it is the right sized tech for your business.

Right Size Your Tech