The primary difference is that they decided (like SAP and a few others) that rather than solving a particular vertical well they would produce a generic thing that could be used to tackle all business types, and then build an ecosystem of consultants and providers that sell and implement the product for them. So you have a thing that was originally for sales people now doing the loan application and credit approval workflow at banks[1] for example.

So the tradeoff is most b2b saas products which are special-purpose tend to be easier to deploy and more directly suitable for their purpose vs salesforce being a "do-everything but maybe not that well" solution.

[1] https://www.ncino.com/ have built an entire business out of getting salesforce to do this