What are some good reasons to choose a custom-built site over SaaS platforms?

Whenever you want to develop a digital product, be it a website or an application, you have two options — go for custom software development services and build your product from scratch or opt for a ready-made product, sometimes referred to as SaaS or PaaS. What should you take into consideration when making this decision?

At first, opting for a ready-made solution seems reasonable — they are cheaper, almost ready to go, and come with the majority of the functions and features you probably need. However, there is more to that than it seems. We’ve made a list of five crucial elements to analyze when deciding between custom web design and development and ready-made solutions.

Customization

Sure, if you’ve just started, you may think that all you need to run your business can be found in the ready-made product. And for some time, that may be 100% true!

However, you have to realize that the market evolves quickly, and your company has to keep up. Today, you’re good, but what about a year or two from now? What if you decide that you need something more, and your current solution hinders your growth?

With a custom web development service, you are never limited by the platform, app, or website that you’re using. All you have to do is reach out to your web development company and ask them to implement the necessary changes. Be aware that with SaaS platforms, that’s not always possible or can be extremely complicated to do.

Scalability

This question is somewhat similar to the previous one. Suppose you want to open an online store. You decide to go with a ready-made e-commerce platform that comes with some limitations concerning the number of accounts, the amount of daily traffic, and even the number of products you have in your inventory. At some point, you just hit a wall and can’t continue to scale your business.

And keep in mind that in the online world, scalability is relatively easy. With good marketing and customer service, you can freely grow your company up to the international level. And believe us, you will have a fair number of obstacles and challenges along the way. You don’t need your software to be one of them.

Security

Of course, every SaaS platform comes with some built-in security measures. Are they always sufficient, though? In 2022, Adaptive Shield published a study concerning SaaS security. According to their findings, as much as 43% of surveyed organizations dealt with one or more security incidents because of a SaaS misconfiguration:

Source: Adaptive Shield; 2022 SaaS Security Survey Report

When we dig a bit deeper, we see that there are several concerns related to SaaS security. According to the mentioned report: “When organizations adopt SaaS applications, their top concerns regard a lack of visibility. Specifically, they are concerned with the lack of visibility into 3rd party application access to the core SaaS stack (56%) and SaaS security settings (54%).”

Adaptive Shield; 2022 SaaS Security Survey Report

And the fact is, with SaaS, you always give access to your assets and data to some third-party entities. The more apps and platforms you use, the more companies have access to your company’s data. With custom-built management systems, such a risk almost doesn’t exist, and you can add as many security measures as you want. The digital product you develop is in your hands and in your hands only.

Integrations

That’s another vital question to consider. Today, no digital product is a lone island. To achieve full functionality, you need to integrate your digital products with other tools that you use. For instance, your e-commerce platform should be integrated with the CRM system, and your ERP system should be combined with accounting software. Only this way can you benefit from the full potential of your digital products.

Today, the vast majority of apps and platforms use the API protocol to communicate with each other. While this solution is effective and quite flexible, it doesn’t mean it’s always sufficient. Professional custom software development companies understand that, and they will always ask you about the desired integrations before they write the first line of code. With custom software development, you can ensure that your new product or website will work perfectly with other tools and that you will be able to incorporate more of them in the future.

Personal data protection

That’s yet another vital issue. If you operate in the European Union, you have to stick to GDPR, although the majority of countries have their personal data protection regulations. If you need a product that will store and process the personal data of your customers/users, you have to:

1. Inform them about that (usually, companies use privacy policies and additional checkboxes to do so)
2. Make sure it fulfills all the requirements imposed by the relevant regulatory body

With custom-made products, that’s relatively easy. All you have to do is implement the necessary security measures. No matter what you choose, you must ensure that personal details about your customers (especially if we’re talking about sensitive data) are properly protected.

In all these five areas, custom web development service is usually better and more flexible than SaaS and ready-made products. However, you still need to consider other questions before you make the final decision.

Other things to consider

Undoubtedly, custom web design and development is more expensive compared to SaaS and PaaS solutions. That’s because you need to have a team of web developers who will code your product, tailor it to your requirements, and publish it online. All of that takes some time, which is another important factor to consider. When you opt for SaaS, you typically can start using a given platform/application within less than a week.

In contrast, building bespoke websites or custom content management systems takes weeks, if not months. It all depends on your expectations and requirements. In any case, custom software or web development takes more time.

Which option is best for you?

We hope this article helped you understand what custom software development services are and how they differ from SaaS products. There is no one-fits-all answer to which option is better, there is a whole list of factors to analyze, and the things we mentioned in this article constitute a good starting point for your research.

In general, we can say that if you are at the very beginning of your business journey, your budget is tight, and you simply want to start small, a SaaS or other ready-made solution is probably better. It will enable you to test your idea, gather your first customers, get your first reviews, and plan for the future. After some time, you can switch to a custom-built platform.

If you run a mature company and you want to get it right from day one, we definitely recommend custom web design and development. With this option, you can get precisely the product you want, and nothing hinders your growth, which is important for companies with a clearly specified vision for the future.

At Department of Web, we work with clients having different requirements concerning their presence online. It’s not like we’re going to force you to buy an expensive solution when you don’t really need it. Our goal is to provide you with a product that checks your boxes and enables your company to make the most of it.

That’s why we pay extra attention to the Discovery stage. During this part of the work, we try to understand your needs and analyze them through the lens of available tech solutions. When it’s justified, we use ready-made products like WordPress or Shopify.

Get in touch with our team, and let’s see what we can do together!