Conga Grid Alternatives: Why Teams Are Switching to Native Salesforce Grids

Written by

Peter Gascoyne

August 28, 2026

Looking for a Conga Grid alternative? Here is what to evaluate in a Salesforce grid solution, from native architecture to pricing and editability, plus how one Executive Search firm made the switch.

Summary

Grid solutions change how teams work with Salesforce data: spreadsheet-style views, inline editing, and multi-object visibility that standard list views cannot provide. Conga Grid is one of the longest-standing options on the AppExchange and it is a capable product. But teams do re-evaluate it, usually somewhere between renewal and a new project, and the reasons are consistent: cost against actual usage, feature overhead, and architecture. This post covers what to look for in an alternative, the questions worth putting to any vendor, and how one firm made the switch.

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Why Teams Look for an Alternative

The trigger is rarely a single failure. It is usually an accumulation of friction that becomes obvious at renewal:

Cost against usage: paying for a broad platform when the team uses the core grid and little else. Licence counts creep up as adoption spreads, and the annual number stops matching the value being drawn from it.
Architecture: solutions that are not native Lightning Web Components can create friction with Salesforce Flows and automation. That friction has a cost, usually paid in custom development or in workarounds an admin has to maintain.
Data residency: security and compliance teams increasingly ask a simple question, does record data leave the org during processing. Anything external needs review, documentation, and sign-off.
Admin agility: if every new view or column change needs a developer, the tool becomes a bottleneck rather than a shortcut.
Feature overhead: large suites carry capability that some teams will never switch on, but still have to navigate, train around, and pay for.

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What to Evaluate in a Salesforce Grid Solution

Native architecture: a native Lightning Web Component works with Salesforce Flows, automation, and the platform security model out of the box. Non-native components frequently need workarounds to achieve the same result.
Multi-object visibility: can you see and edit parent records alongside their related child records in one view, or are you limited to one object at a time? This is where most of the time saving comes from.
Editability: inline editing, mass updates, long text areas, multi-select picklists, and dependent picklists. Check the field types your team actually uses, not the headline list.
Admin configuration: can an admin build and adjust grids declaratively, without code, and without a support ticket?
Automation: can users trigger Flows from within the grid, so that actions happen in context rather than in a separate screen?
Pricing model: are you paying for the features you will use, and can you validate the fit before you commit?

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Questions Worth Asking Any Vendor

Whichever direction you go, these five questions separate the marketing from the fit:

Is the component fully native, and does record data ever leave the org during processing?
What happens to our existing grids and configuration when the package upgrades?
Can an admin configure everything we have described today, or does any of it need development?
What does a sandbox evaluation look like, and is it feature-limited or time-limited?
How do we get support, and what is a realistic response time when something breaks mid-quarter?

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How RavenApps Grids Compares

Grids by RavenApps is a 100% native Salesforce Lightning Web Component. In practice that means:

Full compatibility with Salesforce Flows and automation, including triggering Flows directly from grid row actions
Inline editing across records, covering mass updates, long text areas, multi-select picklists, and dependent picklists with row-level filtered options
Multi-object grids, so parent and related child records sit in a single view, with nested query support
Declarative admin configuration, so no custom development is required to build or change a view
Data that never leaves Salesforce, so your existing sharing rules, permissions, and encryption continue to apply
A free version to start with, and full-featured sandbox installs with no time limit so you can validate your use case before buying

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A Real Migration: Ridgeway Partners

Ridgeway Partners, a retained Executive Search firm specialising in board, CEO, and senior executive recruitment, moved from Conga Grid to RavenApps Grids. Their reasoning was specific rather than general: Conga delivered much of the required functionality but at a significantly higher price, it included features the firm did not need, and it was not a native Lightning Web Component, which caused friction whenever users leveraged Flows and other automation tools.

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Executive Search is a demanding test case. A single engagement can involve hundreds of prospects, each carrying company information, contact details, recruiting activity, search status, and assignment-specific fields spread across multiple Salesforce objects. Standard list views could not consolidate that into anything usable, so recruiters exported to Excel and reconciled by hand.

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After switching, Ridgeway consolidated candidate pipelines across related objects into single workspaces, curtailed Excel exports, aligned more tightly with Flows through the native architecture, and reported greater value at a lower cost than their previous grid solution.

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"One of the aspects we value most about RavenApps is the Partnership. As a smaller organisation, we appreciated working with a team that was responsive, accessible, and committed to understanding our business requirements."
BJ McLaughlin, Chief Operating Officer, Ridgeway Partners

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Making the Switch

Migrating grid solutions is less daunting than it sounds, largely because the configuration is declarative and your data does not move. A sensible sequence:

Install in a sandbox: free, full-featured, and no time limit, so you can prove the use case properly rather than in a restricted trial.
Rebuild your two or three most-used views first: these carry most of the daily value and will tell you quickly whether the fit is right.
Pilot with real users: give it to the team that lives in the data all day. They will find the gaps faster than any checklist.
Roll out and retire the old package: once views are rebuilt and users are comfortable, decommission the previous solution before the next renewal date.

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For context on the effort involved, Casas por Cristo replaced a legacy custom Visualforce component with Grids, and the entire setup across their trip management objects took around one hour, compared with the weeks of development work and significant expense a rebuild would have required.

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