SalesForce, on the other hand, seems to be more a platform-as-a-service targeted at the user with aspects such as SOQL instead feeling like a bolt-on to give developers access to the data.
So while they fill the same business case, they approach it from a completely opposite perspective.
(Source: software engineer that had to work with SalesForce and other CRM tools extensively while working with data engineers; and that has worked with pre-dotNet ASP + MS Access)
Salesforce seems like a particularly bad solution, you end up with a small army of high priced, low skilled salesforce contractors and a heap of vendor lock in.
I loathe Workday. Performance reviews and taking time off have unneeded steps and comments in weird places. The flat and colorful UI looks nice but it’s hard to find stuff.
The nasty forms are always a result of internal politics and bad governance. One client that I worked with had 8 different ways to represent a physical location. Each operational director in the organization had a unique system, and nobody mapped them.
If you put a real development team on the platform and the leadership gets it, it's an amazing tool.
Which, as you might imagine, resulted in a huge number of multiple choice, similarly-named properties, with all options also being inscrutablely named.
Long story short: programmers are terrible at UX.
edit: And if that sounds easy, imagine how you would go about upgrading and patching and extending your access-like cloud platform twice a year without any significant breakage of any of your customers varied and extensive customisations, and without any significant downtime, and keep that up for 20 years. Thats the thing that Salesforce are good at, and not many people appreciate how difficult it is.