Top 3 Advantages of Custom Software for Businesses
To survive and thrive in the market, utilizing every competitive advantage is essential for companies. Through custom software solutions, you gain many advantages over businesses that use shelf software or ready-made software.
Custom software is a tailor-made solution built around your business processes and specific needs. Sounds great, but as you may know, this software solution requires a large amount of investment.
In this short guide, we will talk about the top advantages of custom software, its disadvantages, and should you get one or not.
What are the advantages of custom software?
For business owners, the return of investments matters. You’ll find below the benefits of using custom software and whether it justifies the high amount of time and money that will be spent during software development.
Improves Productivity and Competitiveness
Firstly, custom software improves productivity. Improving productivity also improves competitiveness in the market because it enables companies to do more. Why?
As compared to commercial off the shelf software, where your company processes are built around the software, custom software is specifically built around your business needs, so it perfectly integrates and streamlines your business workflow.
Aside from seamless integration, each unique feature that you want can be built on your custom software solutions.
During the software development process of these features, your team will have the time to analyze and come up with a solution to improve the overall business flow and satisfy the company’s needs.
These developed features that you have created can help run and automate many work processes. In effect, increasing your business capacity while opening up more time for your team.
Better Scalability and Flexibility
Another advantage that you get from custom software as compared to off-the-shelf software is its scalability and flexibility.
Custom software can grow with your company. This eliminates the need to often migrate data to different and new software due to outgrowing the old software application.
Also, customized software gives you flexibility as it allows you to build and develop a unique software feature that you want your organization to have.
This enables you to offer a wider selection and a better custom solution to meet your clients’ requirements.
Unlike off-the-shelf software, custom software may help your business react to change quickly as you can create a new feature or integration to address the change. Since the market is ever-changing, you need to be very flexible to keep up with sudden changes and shifting trends.
Independence, Better Support, and Improved Security
When using off-the-shelf software, you are basically tied in their pace, leaving you waiting for new features that your company may need or want to use.
Off-the-shelf software is also prone to becoming obsolete that can lead to a long and sudden halt in business operations. You’re also dependent on their software maintenance, which affects the work pace of your organization.
With the independence you get from custom software, you don’t have to worry about your software becoming obsolete.
Instead, you can have a long term in-house team that can work on software support and maintenance.
Security is another major benefit of using custom software. When you use a developed off-the-shelf software, it may contain different vulnerabilities to cyber-attacks, especially when this off-the-shelf software has a centralized cloud database.
Are there disadvantages in custom software development?
Before you make the decision to make an investment in custom software development, you need to know the two major disadvantages of using custom solutions as compared to off-the-shelf solutions.
The first one is the high initial cost of development. The high investment costs of a custom app or software can range from $10,000 to $1,000,000. Factors that affect this are company needs, the way the software is supposed to work, and the cost of the software development company you are working with.
Another one of the major disadvantages is the long time needed for the development process of custom software or application. This long duration of development is expected since you are creating software from scratch. You’ll need to sit down and think of every minute detail, such as the core functions, aesthetic design, the size of the program, the user base, the integrations needed, and future developments.
We build custom software with modern solutions in mind for any business and sizes!
We build custom software with modern solutions in mind for any business and sizes!
Conclusion
Although custom software will have a high initial price tag and a lengthy period of development, the benefits of custom software that businesses can obtain outweigh the high initial cost in the long run.
So if you have the time and money, why not invest now and provide your company with improved productivity, competitiveness, scalability, flexibility, independence, and support.
If you’re looking for a partner software developer, Laneways Software & Digital can help build software solutions for you. Read more information or contact us.
Jerome Rault
Partner with a software development team one that's passionate about creating success
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